Stakeholders and Strategic Management: The Misappropriation of Discourse

Stakeholder theory has become increasingly intertwined with the strategic management discourse. Stakeholder approaches to strategic management have been presented as capable of delivering enhanced business performance and social responsibility, though empirical studies of such capability are rare and their results inconclusive, and the debate goes on. Critics of stakeholder theory dismiss it as little more than a pipe dream arguing that, within the context of capitalist modes of production and the strategic management logic of action, stakeholding will not provide a means to radical or even reformist change. This paper critically examines the relationship between stakeholder theory and strategic management. It focuses on the ways in which stakeholder theory is represented in popular strategic management texts and examines the intertextual relations between this material and managerial practice using Critical Discourse Analysis. The paper reveals how stakeholding can become a crude means of manipulation which provides a surface gloss to managerial decisionmaking but leaves fundamental inequalities unchanged. Further, it is argued that the concept may heighten these inequalities, especially within organizations, by providing managers with more sophisticated and rhetorically powerful means of organizational domination. Critical Management Studies Conference, 14-16 July 1999 Strategy Stream.