Stakeholder

This note is about the notion of stakeholder, a concept that relates to the notions of actor, agent, being, actant, and others.

Definition

A community member in a relationship with another community member becomes a stakeholder. A stakeholder is an individual or a group that can benefit or suffer from an action of a change-making party.

in Business ethics: individuals and groups that can affect or be affected by the organization’s activities and achievements.

Deep Design Lab Take

A stakeholder is not only an entity that stands to experience harms (or wrongs) or benefit. It is also an entity (if we talk about living beings) that experiences the world partially. It is thus perceived harms that matter and that should count as much as the objective harms. Stakeholders might be wrong about things that harm them, for example, falling into ecological traps, but their perceptions matter to them and should count in assessments of justice. Also, evolved responses are likely to be useful in many/most cases.

Examples

An argument that nonhuman entities can have 'managerial standing', for example trees.

Starik, Mark. “Should Trees Have Managerial Standing? Toward Stakeholder Status for Non-Human Nature.” Journal of Business Ethics 14, no. 3 (1995): 207–17. https://doi.org/10/c47r5c.

In business, 'stakeholder theory'.

Freeman, R. Edward, Robert Phillips, and Rajendra Sisodia. “Tensions in Stakeholder Theory.” Business & Society 59, no. 2 (2020): 213–31. https://doi.org/10/gghmp2.

Eskerod, Pernille. “A Stakeholder Perspective: Origins and Core Concepts.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Business and Management. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10/hhsk.