Sandra Waddock

Jörg Andriof

Bryan Husted

Sandra Sutherland Rahman

This book is the companion to "Unfolding Stakeholder Thinking: Theory, Responsibility and Engagement", which examined many emerging theoretical and normative issues and was released to acclaim in October 2002. "Unfolding Stakeholder Thinking 2" collects a series of essays by leading researchers worldwide to focus on the practice of stakeholder engagement in terms of relationship management, communication, reporting and performance. As stakeholder relationships and business in society have become increasingly central to the unfolding of stakeholder thinking, important new topics have begun to take centre stage in both the worlds of practice and academia. The first part of the book makes clear that simply engaging with stakeholders is insufficient to build successful stakeholder strategies. Companies, considered as the focal entity in a relationship, also need to actively communicate with stakeholders and manage their relationships. Dialogue is essential but can only be useful if companies listen to the messages that stakeholders are sending them. It is also essential to understand the role of power and influence in stakeholder engagement strategies especially if partnerships or collaborations emerge from the relationships that are engendered. The book examines a wide range of corporate–NGO collaborations to determine what makes them effective – and what makes them fail. Conflict management in stakeholder alliances is also discussed. The second part of the book addresses the critically important element of emerging schemes for the assessment, measurement and reporting of business in society and relationships involving stakeholders. A variety of current approaches to stakeholder assessment and reporting are discussed here including social auditing and sustainability reporting. The evolution of stakeholder thinking has led to a new view of the firm as an organism embedded in a complex web of relationships with other organisms. The role of management becomes immensely more challenging, when stakeholders are no longer seen as simply the objects of managerial action but rather as subjects with their own objectives and purposes. This book captures the complexity of managing relationships with stakeholders and will provide both practitioners and researchers with a wealth of information on the benefits and consequences of this practice.

Relationships, Communication, Reporting and Performance

Unfolding Stakeholder Thinking 2

Andreas Rasche

Building the Responsible Enterprise provides students and practitioners with a practical, yet academically rooted, introduction to the state-of-the-art in sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The book consists of four parts, highlighting different aspects of corporate responsibility. Part I discusses the context in which corporate responsibility occurs. Part II looks at three critical issues: the development of vision at the individual and organizational levels, the integration of values into the responsible enterprise, and the ways that these building blocks create added value for a firm. Part III highlights the actual management practices that enable enterprises to achieve excellence, focusing on the roles that stakeholder relationships play in improving performance. The book concludes with a conversation about responsible management in the global village, examining the emerging infrastructure in which enterprise finds itself today. Throughout the text, cases exemplify key concepts and highlight companies that are guiding us into tomorrow's business environment.

Where Vision and Values Add Value

Building the Responsible Enterprise

Based on the lives of 28 well-known management academics, this book describes what it means to be an intellectual shaman.

Intellectual Shamans

David M. Wasieleski

Paul Shrivastava

Management and the Sustainability Paradox is about how humans became disconnected from their ecological environment throughout evolutionary history. Begining with the premise that people have competing innate, natural drives linked to survival. Survival can be thought of in the context of long-term genetic propagation of a species, but at the same time, it involves overcoming of immediate adversities. Due to a diverse set of survival challenges facing our ancestors, natural selection often favored short-term solutions, which by consequence, muted the motivations associated with longer-range sustainability values. Managerial decisions and choices mostly adopt a moral calculus of costs versus benefits. Managers invoke economic and corporate growth to justify virtually any action. It is this moral calculus underlying corporate behavior that needs critical examination and reformation. At the heart of it lie deep moral questions that we examine in this book, with the goal of proposing ethical solutions to the paradox. Management and the Sustainability Paradox examines the issue that there appears to be an inherent paradox between what some businesses view as "a need for progress" and " a concern for sustainability". In business, we often see a collision between ideas of progress and sustainability which shapes corporate actions, and managerial decisions. Typical corporate views of progress involve the creation of wealth, jobs, innovative products, and social philanthropic projects. On the basis of these "progressive" actions they justify their inequitable distribution of surpluses by paying low wages and exploiting ecological resources. It is not difficult to see the antagonistic interplay between technological and social innovation with our values for social and environmental well-being and a dualism that needs to be overcome. This book is intended for a broad appeal to an academic and policy maker audience in the sustainability and management fields. The book will be of vital reading for managers seeking to reconnect our human chain with the natural environment in the cause of sustainable business.

Sandra Waddock

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