Mitigating Stakeholder Marginalisation with the Relational Self

CITATION

Bondy, K., & Charles, A. (2018). Mitigating Stakeholder Marginalisation with the Relational Self. Journal of Business Ethics, 1–16.

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ABSTRACT
Stakeholder theory has been an incredibly powerful tool for understanding and improving organisations, and their relationship
with other actors in society. That these critical ideas are now accepted within mainstream business is due in no small
part to the influence of stakeholder theory. However, improvements to stakeholder engagement through stakeholder theory
have tended to help stakeholders who are already somewhat powerful within organisational settings, while those who are less
powerful continue to be marginalised and routinely ignored. In this paper, we argue that one possible obstacle preventing less
powerful stakeholders from speaking up and/or being heard by organisations is found at the ontological level, where we have
identified an ‘essentialist self’ underpinning the stakeholder concept. By deconstructing the stakeholder concept through how
it is defined, discussed and debated, and linking this back to the practical consequences of the theory for the least powerful
stakeholders, we are able to make three contributions. One, through our deconstruction, it is clear that at an ontological level,
stakeholder theory is underpinned by an implicit, and problematic, assumption of the ‘essentialist self’, where the organisation
is treated as the ‘natural, universal self’, and anyone not closely resembling this narrow (and unrealistic) view of self is treated
as ‘other’. Two, we build on the work of authors such as Wicks et al. (Bus Ethics Q 4(4):475–497, 1994), who highlight the
need for consideration of the self within stakeholder theory. We thus take our findings from contribution one and begin to build
a more holistic view of the self within the stakeholder concept, where each self is encouraged to recognise common selves
outside and inside the corporation. Third, we link the theoretical discussion to the practical by discussing some imperfect ways
in which a more holistic, enriched stakeholder concept might begin to help mitigate marginalisation for some stakeholders.


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