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The aim of this paper is to explore the stakeholder exclusion practices of responsible leaders.

An interpretive multiple case analyses of seven responsibly led organisations was employed. Twenty-two qualitative interviews were undertaken to investigate and understand perceptions and practice of responsible leaders and their approach to stakeholder inclusion and exclusion.

The findings revealed new and surprising insights where responsible leaders compromised their espoused values of inclusivity through the application of a personal bias, resulting in the exclusion of certain stakeholders. This exclusivity practice focused on the informal evaluation of potential stakeholders’ values, and where they did not align with those of the responsible leader, these stakeholders were excluded from participation with the organisation. This resulted in the creation and continuity of a culture of shared moral purpose across the organisation.

This study focussed on responsible leader-led organisations, so the next stage of the research will include mainstream organisations (i.e. without explicit responsible leadership) to examine how personal values bias affects stakeholder selection in a wider setting.

The findings suggest that reflexive practice and critically appraising management methods in normative leadership approaches may lead to improvements in diversity management.

This paper presents original empirical data challenging current perceptions of responsible leader inclusivity practices and indicates areas of leadership development that may need to be addressed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how paradox emerges during a planned change initiative to improve and dramatically transform inter‐agency information sharing. Based on interviews with key decision makers, the authors interrogate the relationships among institutional contradictions, emergent dualities, the communicative management of related organizational stakeholder paradoxes, and the consequences of enacted solutions.

Interviews with government leaders serve as the data source. These decision makers are from justice agencies participating in planning an information‐sharing program to better protect citizens and their agencies' workforce.

The data suggests that Seo and Creed's institutional contradiction “isomorphism conflicting with divergent interests” gave rise to three interdependent dualities: stakeholder self‐interest/collective good, stakeholder inclusion/exclusion, and emergent stakeholder consensus/leader driven decision making. These dualities were implicated in the enactment of paradox and its management. No matter what strategy the managers used, the consequences themselves were paradoxical, rooted in the same dualities that were originally present.

The authors sought to trace the outcomes of how leaders managed the poles of dualities, and found evidence of unintended consequences that were intriguing in their own right and were linked to stakeholder considerations. The paper underscores the importance of communication in the representation of paradoxes and how they were managed, and the unintended consequences of the solutions.

Leaders' articulations of paradox can be tapped for improving change efforts.

Whereas, institutional contradictions have been examined in reference to emerging paradox, and while paradoxical solutions have been studied widely, little research has investigated how institutional contradictions become simultaneously embedded in the process and the outcomes of organizational change.

This case study aims to expect the following learning outcomes. A better understanding of the nature of a psychological contract being developed by employees in non-profit organizations, especially working in the areas of social development and the impact of this contract on employee commitment. Enhanced understanding of conflict of interest (personal versus public) in social development organizations and its implications. Identification of issues of task conflict versus interpersonal conflict and its impact on organizational functions. Identification of dynamics of exclusion of internal stakeholders from organizational strategic decision-making process along with its impact on organizational performance and sustainability. Devising a mechanism to avoid such conflicts in social development organizations, in particular, and organizations in general.

This case highlights five issues as follows: it identifies and discusses conflict of interest between privileged class possessing decision-making positions in the board of directors and implementers working at the grassroots level at ANMOL (a non-governmental organization working for poor girls education in Baluchistan-hub of China–Pakistan Economic Corridor); it discusses the basis for formulation of psychological contracts and impact of its violation on stakeholder’s commitment and motivation; it discusses the implications of difference of opinion of both stakeholders regarding organizational vision and possible drawbacks of converting task conflict into interpersonal conflict on individuals, organization and end-users; it explores implications of exclusion of key stakeholders from organizational decision-making and its impact on organizational smooth working and sustainability; and it suggests a mechanism to avoid conversion of task conflict into interpersonal conflict and smooth functioning of an organization. Hence, this case discusses theories of conflict of interest between top-leadership and workforce, psychological contract and implications of its breach on employee motivation and organizational sustainability in the context of social development organizations.

This case provides sufficient material to be discussed at master level courses (management sciences – master of business administration (MBA) level) such as human resource management (dynamics of psychological contract and conflict resolution), leadership and change management in social development organizations (social enterprises).

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 7: Management Science.

In this chapter, we update stakeholder salience research using the new lens of stakeholder work: the purposive processes of organization aimed at being aware of, identifying, understanding, prioritizing, and engaging stakeholders. Specifically, we focus on stakeholder prioritization work — primarily as represented by the stakeholder salience model — and discuss contributions, shortcomings, and possibilities for this literature. We suggest that future research focus on stakeholder inclusivity, the complexity of prioritization work within intra-corporate markets, the integration of stakeholder prioritization with other forms of stakeholder work, and the development of managerial tools for multiobjective decision making within the strategic management context.

This paper aims to explore, for the first time, community perceptions of the relationship between age and social exclusion in rural areas of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The paper builds on learning from a previous baseline cross‐border rural ageing study and draws its methodology from a broader ecological multi‐level approach. The research was conducted through focus groups with community stakeholders, which were undertaken in ten communities in different rural settings (village, near‐urban, island, dispersed, and remote) in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

In total, four interconnecting thematic areas emerged as important in determining exclusion or inclusion for older people living in rural areas: place, economic circumstances, social provision, and social connectedness. Within these themes, various tipping points emerged as important for pathways into and out of exclusion, most notably local systems of social support and the mindset of older people themselves in relation to participation.

This research lays the foundations for understanding the lived experiences of older people on the island of Ireland and the pathways for their inclusion and exclusion in diverse rural areas, as seen through the lens of community stakeholders.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to apply experimentalist framework to understand self-optimizing efforts within German manufacturing multinationals. Benefits and characteristic obstacles to diffusion are discussed. Mechanisms for combatting obstacles are outlined.

Qualitative case studies, interview-based research, processual and reflexive action theory are applied to the governance of manufacturing-based multinational enterprises.

Uncertainty is an ineradicable element in multinational companies (MNC) FDI operations. Self-optimizing systems, many with an experimentalist character, are a pervasive form of response to this uncertainty. Obstacles to the diffusion and effective operation of self-optimization are chronic and, indeed, endogenously generated. But as a result, so are superordinate efforts to undercut the continuous emergence of obstacles. MNC development is, thus, characterized by continuous self-recomposition.

Implication is that managers and management theorists should focus as much on the management of dynamic process and learning that results in the recomposition of institutional rules as they do on the constraining and enabling effects of those rules.

Superordinate mechanisms for the disruption of incipient insulation and exclusion are crucial for the implementation of successful experimentalist (learning) systems.

Transparency, stakeholder involvement in MNC governance processes has positive implications for learning, innovation and competitiveness.

This paper presents the application of experimentalist learning theory to MNC global governance.

Adverse situations negatively impact project stakeholders’ engagement. Past research has sporadically investigated adverse situations affecting stakeholder engagement but lacks a thorough empirical investigation. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

A web survey was designed to address the knowledge gap of the identification of the impactful adverse situations during multi-stakeholder engagement. The research yielded 144 completed responses from multi-stakeholders engaged in globally distributed ICT projects.

Exploratory factor analysis revealed eight factors that underpin 26 adverse situations. The top factors, ranked in terms of importance according to their Relative Importance Index (RII) are: dysfunctional conflicts, dearth of reasoning, glitches in project governance, clash of personalities.

This research reveals the factors that can impact engagement in the form of meaningful clusters and dimensions and opens-up a future research agenda toward causation and mitigation studies related to adversarial stakeholder engagement. The study focuses on globally distributed ICT projects and has not explored generalizability in other sectors.

This research enables project managers and stakeholder analysts to get an understanding on the importance of different dimensions of adverse situations in the way stakeholders think, act and emote.

Awareness on the potential adversarial stakeholder engagement helps in effectively managing the sustained stakeholder relationships and mental well-being of project stakeholders.

This research contributes to project management practice, as it reveals the underlying factors of adverse situations occurring during multi-stakeholders’ engagement, provides clarity on their components and ranks them in terms of importance for their overall effect on stakeholders’ engagement.

This paper aims to respond to recent calls to rethink the concept of managerial capture as it has been used to date to explore and explain the limited impacts of new forms of stakeholder engagement.

The paper explores the grounding of views of managerial capture in the Habermasian ideal of participative democracy. It then attempts to re‐conceive the understanding of capture by drawing on Foucault's account of disciplinary power and its constitutive effects on subjectivity.

Capture appears as a managerial mindset constituted by the pervasive demand for shareholder value. When stakeholder issues are considered within this frame they must be recast in ways that pose no moral or emotional challenge to the dominant logic of shareholder maximisation. This moral distancing or amoralisation can be traced to the accounting practices that make management visible to their superiors (board of directors or more senior levels of management) in terms of their utility. In seeking the recognition of their superiors, individual managers make themselves subjects of this deeper form of capture.

A less restricted lens for conducting future research in managerial capture is offered. While in practice stakeholder engagement fails to live up to the Habermasian ideal, it still holds some promise for delivering management accountability.

The paper shows that ideas of power and subjectivity are key to an understanding of environmental accountability and open the social and environmental accountability literature to a new set of interesting problematics.

This study aims to help develop “business principles for stakeholder capitalism” in two steps. First, the study defines internal logic of three theories of capitalism and two variants within each theory. Second, it examines approaches to integration into modern democratic capitalism. Treating the three theories as substitutes identifies relative strengths and weaknesses; complementarity and partial overlap approaches to integration study the institutional settings within which stakeholder capitalism operates. Empirical outcomes reflect competition between market and stakeholder businesses for participants, with institutional conditions determining the scope of collective action.

The approach aligns three typologies in a unique conceptual arrangement defining the three theories of capitalism: forms of capitalism, potential failures of each form and associated types of goods. The first method examines the internal logic of each theory of capitalism. The second draws on traditional narrative review of references documenting each theory of capitalism and variants together with modern Marxist anti-capitalism.

Three typologies align uniquely with the theories of capitalism, each having two variants. Both variants of stakeholder capitalism are compatible with compassionate capitalism, constitutional government or polycentric governance but not with self-interest capitalism, dictatorship or Marxism. A theory of modern democratic capitalism allocates roles for private, club and social goods with empirically variable mixes occurring across countries. Competition among different types of enterprises provides an empirical test for comparative advantages of stakeholder capitalism. Future research should consider approaches for testing the proposed conceptual scheme in practice concerning capacity to deal with grand challenges, wicked problems and black swan events.

Research approach is limited to logical examination of theories and literature documentation without direct empirical confirmation. The study does not address practical implications for managers and public officials or social implications concerning private incentives, stakeholder cooperation or collective action.

Originality lies in shifting terms of debate about stakeholder capitalism from advocacy of substitute theories to understanding of its relationship to market capitalism and collective action capitalism. Value lies in explaining desirability of theoretical integration of three types of capitalism into a comprehensive framework for modern democratic capitalism.