Stakeholder Inclusion and Accounting for Stakeholders

Stakeholder inclusion in organizational decision making, and the resulting issue of value creation, is one of the thorny problems that stakeholder theory has sought to address. Yet progress has been slow, we suggest, because present accounting theory and practice does not address the decision-making needs of all stakeholders who are at risk due to the activities of organizations. In this paper we develop an intentionally transdisciplinary theory of value creation stakeholder accounting (VCSA) based on stakeholder risk-sharing as a superior rationale for stakeholder inclusion. We introduce value creation stakeholder partnerships (VCSPs) as a promising mechanism for the implementation of VCSA. VCSA is derived from a fusion of accounting, value creation/entrepreneurship, and stakeholder theory, and the VCSP mechanism emerges from distinguishing proprietary-convention (partnership) from entity-convention (corporate) accounting. Using this framing we summarize and situate the articles in this Special Issue on Stakeholder Accounting.