Zombies and Originals: How Cultural Theory Informs Stakeholder Management

• Author: Elise Perrault
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/basr.12041
• Published date: 01 December 2014
• Date: 01 December 2014

Zombies and Originals: How

Cultural Theory Informs

Stakeholder Management

ELISE PERRAULT

ABSTRACT

The question of stakeholder salience has recently resur-

faced in the suggestion that the ethical foundations of

corporate cultures result in stakeholder cultures that

largely explain how firms allocate resources among

stakeholders. The present article seeks to complement

this novel approach to understanding stakeholder man-

agement by adding insights from the multilevel influ-

ences that create the corporate culture in the first place,

and ultimately affect managers in their stakeholder deci-

sions. This article draws on cultural theory to examine

how the individuals who compose firms present group

and grid solidarity that results in cultural biases in the

corporate culture. These cultural biases—individualism,

hierarchy, fatalism, and egalitarianism—are then paired

with the stakeholder cultures they enable, and infer-

ences are extracted concerning the salience managers

are likely to accord to various classes of stakeholders as

a result. Future research and managerial implications

stemming from this new view on stakeholder manage-

ment conclude this article.

Elise Perrault is an Assistant Professor of Management at the College of Charleston, Charles-

ton, SC. E-mail: perraulte@cofc.edu.

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Business and Society Review 119:4 447–471

© 2014 Center for Business Ethics at Bentley University. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.,

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INTRODUCTION

Recently, the stakeholder literature has accorded renewed

attention to the vexing problem of stakeholder salience.

That is, since stakeholder theory was set forth three

decades ago (Freeman 1984), a long-standing question remains in

who and what should, and in fact does, obtain priority in man-

agers’ agenda (e.g., Jones and Felps 2013; Tashman and Raelin

2013). A first attempt at answering this question suggested that

stakeholders with more power, legitimacy, and urgency would

gain priority in managers’ agenda (Agle et al. 1999; Mitchell et al.

1997). Stakeholder scholars further noted that the legitimacy and

urgency of stakeholders’ claims also affect managerial responsive-

ness (David et al. 2007; Eesley and Lenox 2006; Neville et al.

2011), as well as the perceived status of stakeholder groups

(Crawford et al. 2011).

While it is possible to observe how firms’ responses correlate

with various stakeholder characteristics, what lacks from these

accounts is an understanding of the ways in which firms inter-

nally perceive and interpret stakeholder characteristics, shaping

their responses. In this vein, Bundy et al. (2013) proposed that

managers are more responsive to stakeholder issues that resonate

with their firm’s cognitive structures in terms of organization

identity and strategic frames. This idea is consistent with previous

efforts to categorize stakeholder cultures as emanating from the

firm’s beliefs, values, and practices in regard to stakeholder rela-

tionships, altogether forming “collective cognitive structures” that

constitute the interpretive frame within which managers choose to

engage with their various stakeholder groups (Berman et al. 1999;

Greenley et al. 2004; Jones et al. 2007).

This promising yet narrow stream of literature suggests that

stakeholder cultures influence the data that are collected from the

firm’s environment and the ways in which these data are ana-

lyzed, implying that firms’ stakeholder cultures somewhat prede-

termine the routines that shape managers’ interactions with

stakeholders (Berman et al. 1999; Greenley et al. 2004). However,

if the concept of stakeholder culture is to be useful to the ques-

tion of how managers accord attention to various stakeholder

groups beyond supporting descriptive accounts, we must gain a

deeper understanding of how these stakeholder cultures arise and

448 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW