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Previous literature on sustainable supply chain management has largely adopted an instrumental view of stakeholder management and has focused on understanding the effect of powerful stakeholders who have a more decisive influence on an organization's supply chain decisions. Social enterprises have emerged as organizations that often aim to create impact by integrating marginalized stakeholders into their operations and supply chains. This study examines the trade-offs that social enterprises experience due to their moral stance toward stakeholder engagement, evidenced in their commitment to serving marginalized stakeholders, as well as the responses adopted to these trade-offs.

The study follows a theory elaboration approach through a multiple case study design. The authors draw on insights from stakeholder theory and use the empirical insights to expand current constructs and relationships in a novel empirical context. Based on an in-depth analysis of primary and secondary qualitative data on ten social enterprises, the authors examine how these organizations integrate marginalized stakeholders into various roles in their operations.

When integrating marginalized customers, suppliers and employees, social enterprises face affordability, reliability and efficiency trade-offs. Each trade-off represents conflicts between the organization's needs and the needs of marginalized stakeholders. In response to these trade-offs, social enterprises choose to internalize the costs through slack creation or vertical integration or externalize the costs to stakeholders. The ability to externalize is contingent on the growth orientation of the organization and the presence of like-minded B2B (Business-to-Business) customers. These responses reflect whether organizations accept the trade-offs at the expense of one or more stakeholders or if they avoid the trade-offs and find mutually beneficial solutions.

Building on the empirical insights, the authors elaborate on stakeholder theory with a focus on the integration of marginalized stakeholders by emphasizing a moral justification for stakeholder engagement, identifying the nature of the underlying trade-offs which can arise when various stakeholder needs are in conflict and examining the contingencies affecting organizational responses to these trade-offs.

Stakeholder capitalism has been proposed as an alternative way of thinking about business purpose and value creation. However, stakeholder capitalism can only work as an alternative model of business if all stakeholders and their interests are visible to and taken seriously by managers. The purpose of this paper is to untangle the challenges that invisible, marginalized and powerless stakeholders pose for theorizing about stakeholder capitalism.

This paper is conceptual. The authors first briefly outline the promise of stakeholder capitalism for addressing pressing questions about value creation and stakeholder welfare. The authors then conceptualize stakeholder invisibility as the outcome of a particular stakeholder being both powerless and marginal through the prism of moral intensity theory and one of its elements: proximity. This study discusses the ways in which managers can make invisible stakeholders more visible in their decision-making.

For managers truly to manage for stakeholders, as anticipated by stakeholder capitalism, all stakeholders and stakeholder interests must be visible to them. This study analyzes why sometimes they are not, how they can be made more visible and why stakeholder visibility matters for stakeholder capitalism. This study proffers three principles for business practice: ethical commitments to reduce stakeholder invisibility, analyses of business strategies to surface the contributions of marginalized and invisible stakeholders and taking rights seriously.

This study provides a new perspective on stakeholder capitalism by linking the challenge in operationalizing it to the problems of stakeholder invisibility and marginality.

Can marginalized stakeholders whose issues with the firm are unaddressed because of their resource and legitimacy constraints (low salience) increase their salience by capitalizing on certain inherent properties of their stakeholder environment? The purpose of this paper is to examine this question using a real life case of the Coca-Cola controversy in Kerala, India, where a group of local aboriginals succeeded against all odds in shutting down a Coca-Cola plant which was allegedly polluting their water resources. The analysis of the longitudinal data collected in this case supported the hypotheses that the ability of marginalized stakeholders to increase their salience by influencing other stakeholders depends both on the attributes of other stakeholders (favorable, unfavorable and indifferent), and the triadic relationships among them. The triadic relationships among stakeholders show a tendency toward balance, and become particularly relevant when the marginalized stakeholder’s issues are perceived to have low legitimacy due to their normative nature (which makes them difficult to be translated into economic terms). The findings offer important insights to both marginalized stakeholders and firms, on proactively managing their stakeholder environments.

The authors use a single case: the controversy surrounding Coca-Cola in Kerala, India, and conduct a longitudinal study examining both qualitative and quantitative data.

The findings indicate that marginalized stakeholders can capitalize on certain inherent properties of their stakeholder networks and increase their salience to influence the focal firm. Specifically, the authors find that stakeholder salience is a function of both the dyadic relationships between stakeholders, and the triadic relationships among them. These triadic relationships tend to a state of balance over time. The authors also find that when the stakeholder issue is normative in nature the triadic relationships are more important in increasing stakeholder salience.

The authors conduct an original case study research, with primary qualitative data collected by the authors. The authors also develop a quantitative model to examine this data to arrive at the findings. Therefore the authors contribute both theoretically and empirically to stakeholder salience literature.

The transformative potential of CSR is a far-reaching question. It has been analysed through the lens of the inclusion of stakeholders concerned by social and environmental issues in political CSR fora such as multi-stakeholder initiatives or, on the contrary, their exclusion from these processes. This paper aims to highlight the transformation or status quo produced by political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) initiatives, the extent of transformation being a function of the degree of inclusiveness, or conversely of exclusion, of these initiatives. From a promise of inclusion to the inability of corporate-society fora to act on the actual levers of marginalisation, PCSR scholars have developed contrasted views on these initiatives.

This led us to elaborate a hypothesis that such initiatives intrinsically act as levers in the recurring marginalisation of directly affected stakeholders. Drawing on an empirical study of the CSR discourses of mining industry stakeholders – both corporations and civil society – involved in an informal multi-stakeholder initiative, this paper discusses the disconnect between its representatives and the needs of the directly affected stakeholders.

To explore this disconnect, the authors draw on the voices and causes framework developed by Boltanski et al. (1984), which provided us with a relational system involving victims, guilty parties, complainants and judges.

Accordingly, the authors highlight a set of three interrelated marginalisation mechanisms (i.e. the capture of the role of the judge by PCSR initiatives, the side-lining of victims’ needs by complainants, the intertwining of the guilty party and the judge), which empirically support the lack-of-inclusiveness hypothesis.

This chapter describes public agriculture services’ business goals, purpose, and strategy. It reinforces agriculture organizations’ fundamental bureaucratic administrative culture (Tier 1). The authors describe the influence that political appointees as leaders may play in shaping public sector cultures. The bureaucratic culture of agriculture is deconstructed, and each of the five layers is described in detail. Additionally, the authors explain why behavior is the dominant layer and the most critical starting point for understanding agriculture cultures. The public service culture (Tier 2) brings an essential element of leveling, access, and equity to the larger context. It brings the focus back to service to the people and community rather than performance. It also gives greater emphasis to the role of safety and well-being. The chapter lays out the landscape of external influencing cultures (Tier 3) in agriculture. Finally, the potential value and challenges of developing internal knowledge, learning, and collaboration (KLC) cultures (Tier 4) are explored.

Developing ‘patient‐centred’ health services has become a goal in many countries but little work has been done to identify what research is needed to support the development of such services within mental health. The aim of this study was to consult all relevant stakeholder groups to establish research priorities for developing ‘patient‐centred’ mental health services in the UK. More than 1,000 stakeholders were consulted, including service users, carers and mental health professionals. The consultation identified 12 thematic areas requiring further research. These should be prioritised if services are to become more centred on the needs and aspirations of the people who use them.

Informed by the critical perspective of dialogic accounting theory, the purpose of this paper is to explore the use of evaluation as a means of enhancing accountability to beneficiaries within nonprofit organisations (NPOs). As a stakeholder group frequently marginalised by traditional accounting practices, the participation of beneficiaries within a NPO’s accountability structure is presented as a means of increasing social justice.

The research design used case studies involving two NPOs, examining documents and conducting interviews across three stakeholder groups, within each organisation.

Findings reveal that when viewed on beneficiaries’ terms, accountability to beneficiaries, through participative evaluation, needs to consider the particular timeframe of beneficiary engagement within each organisation. This temporal element positions downwards accountability to beneficiaries within NPOs as multi-modal.

The research poses a limit to statistical generalisability outside of the specific research context. However, the research prioritises theoretical generalisation to social forms and meanings, and as such provides insights for literature.

In acknowledging that beneficiaries have accountability needs dependent upon their timeframe of participation, NPOs can better target their downwards accountability structures. This research also has practical implications in its attempt to action two of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.

This paper makes a contribution to the limited research into nonprofit accountability towards beneficiaries. Dialogic accounting theory is enacted to explore how accountability can be practised on beneficiaries’ terms.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an explanatory process model of stakeholder management. The model shows how and why path dependence is manifested in stakeholder management issues.

The paper integrates stakeholder theory with key ideas from path dependence literature. The resulting propositions are examined in the context of a longitudinal case study of the United Airlines and US Airways abandoned merger in 2000‐2001

The paper's analysis demonstrates that initial conditions are accentuated by the sequence of actions, offering a plausible explanation for process outcomes.

On the practical side, the paper provides a problem‐solving tool for stakeholder management to analyze the stakeholder linkages during strategic initiatives.

The paper addresses an important research gap, exploring how stakeholder‐related path dependencies influence the process of conflict escalation.

This impact pathways paper proposes that operations and supply chain management (OSCM) can help to ensure that the transition from a high-carbon to low-carbon fashion industry takes place in a just, inclusive and fair way. By immersion in fashion brands, suppliers and workers' realities across multiple supply chains, the authors identify challenges and issues related to just transitions, whilst proposing research pathways to inspire future OSCM research and collaboration using innovative and creative methods to answer complex questions related to just transition.

The research the authors introduce used a multi-level field research approach to investigate multiple fashion supply chains in transition.

The authors uncovered that in the pursuit of lowering carbon emissions, fast-fashion giants work with industrial associations to create top-down governance tools, leading to severe problems in supply chain data and paradoxical demands. These demands are cascaded onto the workers in these supply chains. The goals and tools dictated by the fashion giants exclude workers, whilst the physiological and psychological effects on the workers are routinely ignored. These issues impede a just transition to a low-carbon fashion industry.

The authors introduce concepts largely missing from OSCM literature and ensure representation of the most marginalised group, supply chain workers, in a novel setting in a call for research in this emerging area.

Given the complexity of inclusive business (IB) to combine social contribution and business sustainability, companies make strategic choices. One multinational corporation (MNC) avoided interconnections with villagers and used only market-based relations with stimulants and incentives in the market. Another one delegated management completely to local partners, succeeding in stimulating the poor’s self-initiated economic activities. MNCs seem to have difficulties in handling institutional interconnections. In such cases, market-based relations or delegating management to the local partners were found to be highly effective for covering missing capabilities. One foreign NGO, despite its well-developed institutional interconnections with the locals, is struggling to develop markets for its social enterprises. In contrast, one local trust successfully cooperated with many local partners, appealing to local institutions (values and beliefs). Also, poor farmers felt the social contributions of two local companies by being incorporated into the companies’ supply chains backed by their corporate social responsibility (CSR) orientations and activities. Hence, both foreign and domestic organizations seem to succeed in IB by embedding their projects to their original institutions and developing diverse mechanisms to compensate for missing capabilities. One exception is a local company which successfully coordinated MNCs’ CSR activities, local communities, and governments. However, its success is owing to governmental regulation for CSR contribution. In general, though restricted by institutional backgrounds and business orientations, each case tried to create a fit between business models and its contingencies, achieve scale (at the level of communities, nations, or the global market) and business sustainability, and generate socioeconomic effects.