What to do when Stakeholders matter

TLDR

The article examines how managers can employ stakeholder identification and analysis techniques to align organizational actions with mandates, missions, and public value creation. It reviews a range of stakeholder techniques that facilitate participation, strategic idea generation, coalition building, and the implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of interventions. The authors argue that effective stakeholder analysis frames technically feasible and politically acceptable solutions that advance the common good, and they offer recommendations for research, education, and practice.

Abstract

This article focuses specifically on how and why managers might go about using stakeholder identification and analysis techniques in order to help their organizations meet their mandates, fulfill their missions and create public value. A range of stakeholder identification and analysis techniques is reviewed. The techniques cover: organizing participation; creating ideas for strategic interventions, including problem formulation and solution search; building a winning coalition around proposal development, review and adoption; and implementing, monitoring and evaluating strategic interventions. The article argues that wise use of stakeholder analyses can help frame issues that are solvable in ways that are technically feasible and politically acceptable and that advance the common good. The article concludes with a number of recommendations for management research, education and practice.