Teaching Issues-Driven Stakeholder Theory

Magnus Frostenson

ORDER ARTICLE PERMISSIONS/REPRINTS/OFFPRINTS

To order inspection copies, and/or permissions to include this article in textbooks, edited volumes, course booklets, online/digital course packs, etc., and/or to order multiple individual hard copies for classroom use, please use the appropriate form available on the Order Forms page or alternatively, contact the Publishing Editor, Peter Neilson, pneilson@neilsonjournals.com directly.

Teaching Issues-Driven Stakeholder Theory

Magnus Frostenson

Örebro University School of Business, Sweden

Volume 12: 2015 Special Issue, pp. 43-52: ABSTRACT

Teaching stakeholder theory may be difficult because of the constant calls for real-life relevance and application. The article argues that one way of overcoming the difficulty is to focus more on stakeholder issues than on stakeholders as actors. In education, materiality analyses, like the ones often present in sustainability reports, are probably a better way of approaching stakeholder theory than actor-centered approaches that end up in the identification of foreseeable groups of stakeholders. Focusing on specific stakeholder issues also gives better possibilities to identify relationships and dependencies between stakeholders, which is of high relevance to managerial decision-making.