Title: The measurement of stakeholder salience: a strategy for the exploration of stakeholder theories

Authors: Steven A. Samaras

Addresses: Department of Management, College of Business & Economics, Longwood University, 201 High Street, Farmville, Virginia 23901, USA

Abstract: Stakeholder theories, from the strategic management or ethics perspective, seem to be on hold due to the lack of a measure of stakeholder orientation to enable theory testing and/or comparative analysis. Managers and whole organisations must balance competing stakeholders, some of whom induce higher priority (salience) in the consideration of their wants, needs, claims, and demands. This paper introduces procedures that measure stakeholder salience, assign stakeholders to typology categories, and map stakeholder salience as suggested by Mitchell et al. (1997) in order for researchers and managers to identify important stakeholders and investigate why they matter. This effort extends their proposition that salience can be determined solely by three attributes of Power, Legitimacy, and Urgency with new measures that may be subject to more |fine-grained| empirical analysis. These measures are introduced and demonstrated through the results of a pilot study.

Keywords: stakeholder theory; stakeholder salience; stakeholder data analysis; stakeholder strategy; strategic management; ethics; priority.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDATS.2010.034060

International Journal of Data Analysis Techniques and Strategies, 2010 Vol.2 No.3, pp.285 - 306

Published online: 06 Jul 2010 *

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