Although the use of stakeholder analysis to investigate corporate responsibilities has burgeoned over the past two decades, there has been relatively little work on how corporate responsibilities may change for firms with operations in developing countries. This article argues, from a critical theory perspective, that two sets of factors tend to come together to increase the responsibilities of corporations active in developing countries to a full range of stakeholder groups: (a) the different (economic, political, and sociocultural) circumstances under which corporations have to operate in developing countries and (b) several key normative principles, which typically do not come into play in the context of developed countries.The use of stakeholder analysis to investigate corporate responsibilities has burgeoned over the past two decades (Clarkson, 1998). A key aspect of this development has been the employment of different ethical traditions to elaborate different normative stakeholder theories. Where stakeholder theory has been slower to progress, however, has been in the appreciation that the application of such theories may be significantly conditioned by the contexts in which they are employed. This is particularly true with respect to corporations operating in developing economies. Although there have been limited but important efforts to investigate the ethics of international business over the past decade and a half (DeGeorge
Abstract:This article elaborates a normative Stakeholder Management Theory (SHMT) from a critical theory perspective. The paper argues that the normative theory elaborated by critical theorists such as Habermas exhibits important advantages over its rivals and that these advantages provide the basis for a theoretically more adequate version of SHMT. In the first section of the paper an account is given of normative theory from a critical theory perspective and its advantages over rival traditions. A key characteristic of the critical theory approach is expressed as a distinction between three different normative realms, viz., legitimacy, morality, and ethics. In the second section, the outlines of a theory of stakeholder management are provided. First, three basic tasks of a theoretically adequate treatment of the normative analysis of stakeholder management are identified. This is followed by a discussion of how a critical theory approach to SHMT is able to fulfill these three tasks.
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