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Missing the Target: Normative Stakeholder Theory and the Corporate Governance Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

John Hendry
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Abstract:

After a decade of intensive debate, stakeholder ideas have come to exert a significant influence on academic management thinking, but normative stakeholder theory itself appears to be in considerable disarray. This paper attempts to untangle the confusion and to prepare the ground for a more productive approach to the normative stakeholder problem. The paper identifies three distinct kinds of normative stakeholder theory and three different levels of claim that can be made by such theories, and uses this classification to argue that stakeholder theorists have consistently pitched their sights either too high or too low to engage effectively with the rival shareholder theory. To the extent that they have their sights too high they have also undermined their own position by sacrificing credibility and introducing major problems of derivation.

Type
Corporate Governance
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , January 2001 , pp. 159 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2001

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