Editors’ Comment on Research Platforms: Global Stakeholder strategy special topic forum

• Date: 01 November 2013
• Author: Torben Pedersen,Stephen Tallman
• Published date: 01 November 2013
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.2042-5805.2013.01065.x

EDITORS’ COMMENT ON RESEARCH PLATFORMS:

GLOBAL STAKEHOLDER STRATEGY SPECIAL

TOPIC FORUM

STEPHEN TALLMAN1* and TORBEN PEDERSEN2,3

1Robins School of Business, University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia,

U.S.A.

2Department of Strategic Management and Globalization, Copenhagen

Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

3Department of Management and Technology, Bocconi University,

Bocconi, Italy

INTRODUCTION

The following two articles, ‘A research agenda for

global stakeholder strategy,’ an invited article by

Timothy Devinney, Anita McGahan, and Maurizio

Zollo and ‘Preferences, structure and influence: the

engineering of stakeholder consent,’ an article by

Witold Henisz, constitute a Special Topic Forum

addressing important issues related to conducting

scholarly research at the intersection of stakeholder

strategy and global strategy. As we stated in the

November 2012 issue, Global Strategy Journal

is publishing (mostly) invited ‘research platform

articles’ on an occasional basis. We have offered

a Point/Counterpoint model (Contractor, 2012;

Verbeke and Forootan, 2012) and a Perspectives

article (Doh and Lucea, 2013) in previous issues.

The special topic forum provides yet another

approach to our desire to ‘. . . open doorways to new

research paths . . . [with] . . . no plan to march

anyone down these paths, but only to suggest that

they exist and that they seem to offer interesting

possibilities’ (Tallman and Pedersen, 2012: 315).

THE THEME OF THIS SPECIAL

TOPIC FORUM

Stakeholder concepts are gaining rapid acceptance in

strategic management, as evidenced by the recent

launch of a Stakeholder Strategy Interest Group in

the Strategic Management Society. The importance

of stakeholders (other than debt holders and

shareowners) in the business organization, including

home and host country governments, local and

global customers, widely dispersed suppliers,

workers in many places, and so on, is not a new

concept in international strategy, but has not been

modeled formally under the ‘stakeholder theory’

umbrella until recently. Global Strategy Journal has

published articles related to these ideas in the launch

volume (Devinney, 2011; Boddewyn and Doh, 2011;

Rangan and Drummond, 2011) and subsequent

issues (Doh and Lucea, 2013). Our feeling is that the

time has come to explicitly recognize that concepts

from the stakeholder theory, corporate social respon-

sibility, nonmarket strategy, or social strategy litera-

tures should be applied to the study of global

strategies.

A fundamental aspect of the theory of multina-

tional firm strategy is that multinational firms must

operate in a triangular relationship with their home

and at least one host government, and that the desires

of these powerful, sovereign stakeholders (for that is

what they are) must be respected by the firm as it

Keywords: stakeholder theory; multinational; global strategy;

research platforms

*Correspondence to: Stephen Tallman, University of Rich-

mond, Robins School of Business, 1 Gateway Rd., Richmond,

VA23173, U.S.A. E-mail: stallman@richmond.edu

Global Strategy Journal

Global Strat. J., 3: 322–324 (2013)

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1111/j.2042-5805.2013.01065.x

Copyright © 2013 Strategic Management Society