The purpose of this paper is to enter the conversation about stakeholder theory with the goal of clarifying certain foundational issues. I want to show, along with Boatright, that there is no stakeholder paradox, and that the principle on which such a paradox is built, the Separation Thesis, is nicely self-serving to business and ethics academics. If we give up such a thesis we find there is no stakeholder theory but that stakeholder theory becomes a genre that is quite rich. (...) It becomes one of many ways to blend together the central concepts of business with those of ethics. Rather than take each concept of business singly or the whole of “business” together and hold it to the light of ethical standards, we can use the stakeholder concept to create more fine-grained analyses that combine business and ethics; or more simply, we can tell many more, and more interesting, stories about business. (shrink)

Abstract:Phillips and Margolis argue that moral philosophy is a poor basis for business ethics, but their narrow view of moral philosophy would exclude Aristotle, for one. They criticize me for assimilating states and organizations in using the Rawlsian device, but they put too much faith in Rawls’s distinction between states and voluntary organizations and pay too little attention to the continuities between them. Their plea for a conceptually autonomous ethics for organizations I interpret as reasonable and largely compatible with my (...) own stated opinion. (shrink)

Every political theorist will need this book . . . . It is more 'important' than 90% of the work published in philosophy."--Joel Feinberg, University of Arizona.

Following on from work on stakeholder identification, this paper constructs a typology of stakeholder theories based on the extent to which serving the interests of non-shareholders relative to those of shareholders is accepted as a responsibility of companies. A typology based on the division of stakeholder theories into normative, descriptive, and instrumental is rejected on the grounds that the latter two designations refer to second order theories rather than divisions within stakeholder theory and the first is a designation which, for (...) the purposes of business ethics, applies to all stakeholder theories. The crucial distinction between stockholder and stakeholder theory is argued to be their respective rejection and acceptance of role-specific responsibilities toward non-shareholders that are `ultimate objective fulfilling''. From this starting point, a typology is constructed using a division of stakeholder theories into those which do and do not give priority to the interests of shareholders over those of non-shareholders, do and do not posit perfect duties towards non-shareholders as well as shareholders, do and do not accept accountability to non-shareholders as well as shareholders. (shrink)

Definitions of what it is to be a stakeholder are divided into "claimant" definitions requiring some sort of claim on the services of a business, "influencer" definitions requiring only a capacity to influence the workings of the business, and "combinatory" definitions allowing for either or both of these requirements. It is argued that for the purposes of business ethics, stakeholding has to be about improving the moral conduct of businesses by directing them at serving more than just the interests of (...) owners. On that basis, influencer definitions are eliminated on the grounds that they only concern morally neutral strategic considerations and combinatory definitions on the grounds that the combining of ethical and strategic considerations they promise can be less confusingly achieved through an exclusively claimant definition. It is concluded that for the purposes of business ethics, stakeholders are claimants towards whom businesses owe perfect or imperfect moral duties beyond those generally owed to people at large. (shrink)