Exploring stakeholder engagement: a Corporate Citizenship approach

The role corporations should play in society in terms of their social engagement and ethical responsibilities has been increasingly questioned in recent times (Aßländer & Curbach, 2014; Buchholtz & Carroll, 2009; Leisinger, 2009). Stakeholders’ expectations are reconfiguring the rationale and the dynamics of business-society relations (Logsdon & Wood, 2002; Matten & Crane, 2005) since corporations are now recognizing that it is their duty to fulfil obligations to society rather than to just government (Stokes, 2002). This imbues firms with an ethical ethos that leads to corporation social responsiveness (Fukukawa, Balmer, & Gray, 2007) to include stakeholders in processes and structures related to strategic management to better respond to expectations (Palazzo & Basu, 2007; Vallaster, Lindgreen, & Maon, 2012). Therefore, beyond their engagement as responsible players in respect to the law, corporations are claimed to act as if they were metaphorically citizens in that their commitments to society resemble those of citizens (Moon, Crane, & Matten, 2005). Citizenship emphasizes participation in the public good by fostering community ties (Crane, Matten, & Moon, 2004; Wood, Logsdon, Lewellyn, & Davenport, 2006), and honest and respectful engagement of stakeholders as a vital part a viable firm’s strategy (Noland & Phillips, 2010) informed by the ongoing exchange between business and society jointly shaping purposes, rights, and duties (Bhattacharya, Korschun, &Sen, 2009). In that sense stakeholder engagement (SE) has been understood as a mutually beneficial and just scheme of cooperation which takes the form of a moral partnership of equals (Phillips, 1997) based on collaborative work for the sake of the common good (Sison & Fontrodona, 2012). In this working paper we dig into the existing controversial conceptualizations of SE, which according to dominant perspectives is torn between moral and strategic motives.