A Metaphoric Approach to Stakeholder Theory – Exploration Identifying Reasons for the Disclosure of Environmental Information: a Research Note

A number of theoretical perspectives have been developed across time to provide an understanding of the reasons for management’s decision to report information to stakeholders. For example, some stakeholder research is normative identifying how it is believed management should act towards stakeholders, whilst other stakeholder research is positive, seeking to explain and predict how management will react towards particular stakeholders. Each of these perspectives of “stakeholder theory” and aids to interpretation provide a partial, though often a complementary, explanation of the motivation for management to respond to stakeholder expectations or needs. The presence of these various theoretical perspectives has resulted in confusion as each provides only a part of the explanation for the motivation of firms to report information to stakeholders. In this study it was argued that a mixture of reasons drawn from the various theoretical perspectives influence the decision by management to report information to stakeholders.