The problem of imposing risk and the procedural dimension of stakeholder management

• Published date: 01 September 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/basr.12182
• Date: 01 September 2019
• Author: Marc A. Cohen

Bus Soc Rev. 2019;124:413–427.

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413

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/basr

DOI: 10.1111/basr.12182

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The problem of imposing risk and the procedural

dimension of stakeholder management

Marc A.Cohen1,2

© 2019 W. Michael Hoffman Center for Business Ethics at Bentley University. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden,

MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

1Department of Management,Seattle

University, Seattle, Washington

2Department of Philosophy,Seattle

University, Seattle, Washington

Correspondence

Marc A. Cohen, Department of

Management, Seattle University, Seattle,

WA 98122.

Email: cohenm@seattleu.edu

Abstract

The case Caprica Energy and Its Choices concerns a fic-

tionalized energy corporation choosing between three po-

tential drilling sites. According to the published Teaching

Note, the case is an exercise in the stakeholder approach

to business: it requires balancing profit considerations with

potential harm to those who live near those drilling sites.

Though unintended, the case raises a further question not

addressed in the case or in the Teaching Note: what gives

Caprica Energy the right to impose risk on members of the

communities surrounding its drilling sites? The first section

of the present article argues that, in such cases, manage-

ment can only justify imposing risk on the local community

by securing those stakeholders' consent. The second section

outlines the implications for stakeholder theory and stake-

holder management. The third section outlines one con-

nection between this material and recent literature on the

imposition of risk and moral theory; that section offers an

account of what make this particular instance of imposing

risk morally problematic, with reference to the directedness

of the imposition.