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This paper aims to examine the perceptions of salient stakeholders in Jordan concerning the importance of integrating sustainability education (SE) into the accounting curriculum.

This paper uses salient stakeholder theory as a lens and seeks to explore the possible integration of SE into the Jordanian tertiary accounting curriculum. A final sample of 702 salient stakeholders including university accounting educators, accounting students, industry accountants, government representatives and accounting association professional members were used to glean an insight of their views and the extent to which sustainability is present in accounting education.

Findings indicate that there is a strong belief by these salient stakeholders that there is significant importance for the integration of SE into the accounting curriculum in Jordanian universities. There is concern that the current curriculum does not meet the educational needs of future accountants and business executives from a sustainability perspective.

This study contributes to the research debate on the competencies crisis in accounting education by focusing on the lack of SE in the accounting curriculum. This study draws attention to the need of up-skilling and applied knowledge in this critical area. There are strong viewpoints from the salient stakeholders in this study. They emphasise that a progressive education solution is required and which integrates SE into the accounting curriculum.

The research is useful to accounting educators, professional accounting associations, industry, accounting students and the government. The salient stakeholders in Jordan wish to include SE within the accounting curriculum. This would lead to future accountants and business executives having stronger competencies to respond in a resilient and resourceful manner to changes in the way business is conducted, especially in an area where societal and environmental impacts are highly scrutinised.

This study provides evidence on how salient stakeholders of an emerging economy can influence, provide guidance and leadership in integrating SE in the accounting curriculum. Engaging actively and extensively with research studies such as this allows them to voice their opinions about the importance of sustainability and how their country can better engage in this increasingly important field.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how legitimacy is gained, maintained or repaired through direct action with salient stakeholders and/or through external reporting, by using a number of empirical case vignettes within a single case study organisation.

The study investigates a foreign affiliate of a large multinational organisation involved in an environmentally sensitive industry. Data collection included semi-structured interviews with 26 participants, organisational reports and participation in the organisation’s annual environmental management seminar and a stakeholder engagement meeting.

Four vignettes featuring environmental issues illustrate the complexity of organisational responses. Issue visibility, stakeholder salience and stakeholder interconnectedness influence a company’s action to manage legitimacy. In the short-term, environmental issues which affected salient stakeholders resulted in swift and direct action to protect pragmatic legitimacy, but external reporting did not feature in legitimacy management efforts. Highly visible issues to the public, regulators and the media, however, resulted in direct action together with external reporting to manage wider stakeholder perceptions. External reporting was used superficially, along with a broad suite of communication strategies, to gain legitimacy in the long-term decision about the company’s future in New Zealand.

This paper outlines how episodic encounters to manage strategic legitimacy with salient stakeholders in the short-term are theoretically distinct, but nonetheless linked to continual efforts to maintain institutional legitimacy. Case vignettes highlight how pragmatic legitimacy via dispositional legitimacy can be managed with direct action in the short-term to influence a limited range of salient stakeholders. The way external reporting features in legitimacy management is limited, although this has predominantly been the focus of prior research. Only where an environmental incident damages legitimacy to a larger number of stakeholders is external reporting also used to buttress community support.

The concept of legitimacy is comprehensively applied, linking the strategic and institutional arms of legitimacy and illustrating how episodic actions are taken to manage legitimacy in the short-term with continual efforts to manage legitimacy in the long-term. Stakeholder salience and networks are brought in as novel theoretical extensions to provide a deeper understanding of the interrelationships between these key concepts with a unique case study.

Encouraged by the State, the Brazilian public organizations practice sustainable procurement as one of the strategies to promote sustainable development. Performing them requires understanding to manage stakeholders. The purpose of this study is to identify and categorize the stakeholders of Brazilian public organizations’ sustainable procurement system.5

Preliminarily, the stakeholders were identified in the literature and by interviews with experts. Later, in a multi-case study, it was categorized by the model of stakeholder salience.

In general, governmental and intra-organizational stakeholders were classified as more salient. However, some stakeholders considered important by literature and experts have been categorized as less salient by organizations.

The proposed categorization is useful for the system comprehension and will serve as a basis for the development of future works, notably those who propose to understand or evaluate the sustainable public procurement (SPP). Additionally, this work aims to enlarge the knowledge and the better practices of SPP in a large emerging South American country, giving its contribution to the transition to more sustainable societies.

Managers often face a number of dilemmas with respect to their stakeholders: Who are the most salient ones? How many should they target? How to allocate attention/efforts among them? Based on stakeholders and market orientation research this paper aims to address these dilemmas.

The study is based on a survey of managers in a cross‐industry sample of 115 firms. The authors first identify a specific group of salient stakeholders – those providing the firm with revenues and financial support. The article then studies the conditions under which firms should adopt a key approach to stakeholders' management – a “generalist” stakeholder strategy, that is, deal with a larger number of revenue and funding producing stakeholder types, and/or more evenly spread attention/efforts among them.

The findings suggest that a generalist stakeholder strategy has a positive effect on firms' performance among resource‐rich firms and among firms who face dissimilar (“unrelated”) stakeholders. Also, degree of environmental volatility was not found to moderate the relationship between a generalist stakeholder strategy and firms' performance.

The study contributes to the marketing and stakeholder literatures by identifying and studying a group of important stakeholders beyond final consumers – those providing the firm with revenues and financial support, and by studying the conditions under which firms benefit from one key approach to stakeholders – a “generalist” stakeholder strategy. The study's limitations characterize most cross‐sectional survey research (e.g. single informants, subjective performance assessments). However, substantial efforts were made to ensure the validity and robustness of the findings.

The study offers managers insight into the organizational and environmental conditions under which firms should adopt a generalist stakeholder strategy.

This is one of the few papers that integrate into the marketing literature the study of stakeholders. Specifically, it introduces the concept of a generalist stakeholder strategy.

To study relationships between focal organisations and their stakeholders in a generic way, beyond the agency/transaction cost approach usually used in business research. The domain was political parties and their stakeholders.

Study participants were officials and activists in five major Irish political parties. They were asked to nominate their most important stakeholders, to rate these stakeholders on salience as represented by power, legitimacy and urgency and to describe extent and intensity of their party engagement with these stakeholders.

Stakeholders considered more important to the organisation receive higher levels of engagement from the parties than those stakeholders thought to be less critical. The results suggest that high levels of stakeholder engagement can yield beneficial electoral results for political parties. The importance of looking after “internal stakeholders” is also supported. The three attributes of power, legitimacy and urgency do not seem to describe completely the salience of stakeholders to all organisations in a generic sense. The adequacy of the three attributes is most supported in mainstream organisations with a focused pragmatic orientation toward “winning”. However, it appears that more ideologically oriented organisations may assign higher salience to stakeholders who fit their ideology, as opposed to those who possess power, legitimacy and urgency.

The ideological dimension of stakeholder salience which emerged in this study is worthy of further exploration, especially in its implications for actual stakeholder engagement and behaviour with respect to corporate social responsibility.

In the business arena – the study suggests that high levels of stakeholder engagement can yield beneficial results. It also demonstrates the importance of looking after internal stakeholders.

Discovery of dynamics between a focal organisation and its stakeholders in a more generic way than offered in traditional business research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate disaster accountability process, and it seeks to advocate for involvement of victims as salient stakeholders in the accountability process.

The authors adopt a case study of the 3rd June, 2015 flood disaster and fire that occurred in Accra, Ghana and draw mainly on interviews, as well as observations and a review of publicly available documents.

Several actors are involved in disaster management in Ghana. These actors play several roles as part of the disaster management process. Coordination is observed among some governmental actors. However, there is a little collaboration among these actors. There are, therefore, no clear accountability relationships between the actors. Moreover, the forms of accountability process are largely upward and internal. So, although we find the victims as salient stakeholders, their perspectives are not prioritised as part of the accountability process.

As a result of less engagement with victims in the accountability process, a central accountability concern, outcomes, namely, benefits for victims in terms of changes in their knowledge, status, attitudes, values, skills, behaviours or conditions were not promoted. Downward accountability should be encouraged to promote better outcomes.

Although some studies on accounting for disasters have been undertaken, there is none in our local context, and also this study has been able to uncover under-representation of victims in the accountability process using adaptive accountability lens.

Based on the principles of stakeholder theory, the purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between the information reported to stakeholders in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports and companies’ CSR reputation (CSRR).

The paper implements two regression models to test how reporting to stakeholders influences the CSRR of 84 companies included in the Spanish “MercoEmpresas Responsables” reputation index.

The results demonstrate that greater global reporting intensity to stakeholders does not necessarily mean a better CSRR. Contrarily, the reporting-reputation link depends on the intensity of reporting to specific stakeholders such as investors, regulators and the media. The findings are explained largely by the institutional, political and business characteristics of Spain after the Great Recession of 2007-2008.

The evidence reported in this paper confirms stakeholder theory as an adequate framework to understand corporate reporting to stakeholders and its relationship with CSRR. The findings suggest that stakeholder salience (i.e. power, legitimacy and urgency) is a key concept for understanding the reporting-reputation link better in future research.

In the light of the findings, companies willing to use reporting to stakeholders as a tool to improve CSRR should establish regular mechanisms for monitoring stakeholder power, legitimacy and urgency, provide complete information to investors in their CSR reports and minimize the amount of detail provided to regulators and the media in their CSR reports.

There is still little empirical evidence concerning how the information to stakeholders contained in CSR reports influences the processes by which CSRR is built or destroyed. This paper contributes to the previous literature by describing how the global intensity of reporting to stakeholders and the intensity of reporting to different stakeholder groups relate to CSRR.

Public sector entities face conflicting demands from stakeholders. The literature suggests identifying and prioritizing stakeholders can improve accountability. Thailand, an emerging economy, and currently under military rule, provides an interesting context to investigate stakeholder tensions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how and why the Thai Government bureaucrats prioritize their stakeholders.

The study draws on the managerial branch of stakeholder theory and stakeholder salience theory to examine the importance of various stakeholders and of the stakeholders’ salient attributes perceived by the Thai Government bureaucrats in discharging its accountability. The study uses a survey questionnaire mailed out to the central government departments in Thailand.

The study finds that single most important stakeholder is the Office of the Auditor-General. The public is perceived as the second. This is dissimilar to the western-centric accountability focus on the public, and challenges claims by the Thai military coup that it will bring democratic rule. “Legal power” supporting the stakeholders’ claims for government accountability is the most influential attribute in determining stakeholder importance and prioritizing attention for government bureaucrat’s discharge of its accountability.

Such findings increase understanding of the applicability of stakeholder theory and stakeholder salience theory in the context of military rule in emerging economy countries such as Thailand. This paper also provides suggestions of how stakeholders may shape their salience in order to gain priority. This also provides an immediate suggestion for reforms of the Thai regulatory frameworks in prioritizing stakeholders and promoting the government’s greater accountability.

While earlier literature has focused on the management tactics of unexpected events, this paper employs an inter‐organizational network perspective to the study of unexpected events in international projects. The paper aims to illustrate how a focal project's local stakeholder relationships are associated with the emergence and management of unexpected events in the context of international projects.

A qualitative, multiple case study of three international projects conducted in challenging institutional environments.

The findings of this paper reveal the different mechanisms through which the local stakeholder relationships affect the emergence and management of unexpected events in international projects. Owing to differences in the amount and quality of local stakeholder relationships, the management, nature and number of unexpected events that are encountered differ from project to project. The findings of this paper reveal a paradox – both the existence of and the lack of local stakeholder relationships with salient actors may generate unexpected events in international projects. Based on the findings, two types of unexpected events related to local stakeholder relationships were identified: unexpected events that were due to misunderstandings, and diverging practices, processes, values and norms of the focal project organization and the local stakeholders; and unexpected events that emerged due to the challenges in the establishment of direct and indirect relationships with salient external local stakeholders. Furthermore, the results demonstrate how local stakeholder relationships can be utilized in dealing with and managing the unexpected events that are encountered.

Stakeholders are a significant source of unexpected events. Limited research attention has been directed at how the local stakeholder relationships affect the project's behavior and interior processes. The research advances project stakeholder research and uncertainty management research both theoretically and empirically.

As the prioritization of family goals depends on the resolution of family conflict, this study's purpose is to explain how a dominant coalition (DC) of parental family members prioritizes their family economic and non-economic goals when faced with different types of family conflict.

A conceptual framework is developed drawing on a socio-cognitive approach to explain a family's goal formation process. This socio-cognitive approach extends the stakeholder salience underpinnings of family influence/essence theory. It shows that family conflict arises from the complex and novel social settings of a family business and that a DC prioritizes their family's goals by drawing on heuristic biases to resolve such family conflict.

A key finding of this study is the introduction of a distinct type of agency to family influence/essence research. Unlike the salient explanations, a family's goal formulation process is attributed to a DC's heuristic response in resolving their family business conflict.

Scholars have called for a greater need to investigate the social and cognitive underpinnings of a family's goal formation process. While the social settings of a family business are often explained in terms of family conflict, an understanding of the sources of such conflict and their resolution have received limited attention. This study opens new avenues to understanding the sources of such family conflict and the cognitive mechanisms needed to overcome them. This understanding is critical not only to the prioritization of a family's goals but also to the idea that “influence” defines the essence of a family business.