A Names-and-Faces Approach to Stakeholder Management: How Focusing on Stakeholders as Individuals Can Bring Ethics and Entrepreneurial Strategy Together

Abstract

Just as the ideas of stakeholder theory, stakeholder management, or stakeholder capitalism approach acceptance as a mainstream core idea in management theory, the authors want to suggest a somewhat radical rethinking of it. They believe that in almost all of its incarnations, stakeholder theory merely recapitulates some rather standard business assumptions. As a result, they believe that two problems are perpetuated—the separation of ethics and value creation and the overemphasis of stakeholder roles rather than relationships between stakeholders as real people with names and faces. In this article, the authors propose that by adopting a view of stakeholders as real people with names and faces, they can reinvigorate stakeholder research and focus their efforts on the neglected challenge of understanding how collections of idiosyncratic individuals can work together to create value in entrepreneurial firms in ways that benefit all those who are affected.