A Theory of Stakeholder Enabling: Giving Voice to an Emerging Postmodern Praxis of Organizational Discourse

Searching for New Forms of Legitimacy Through Corporate Responsibility Rhetoric

“…Few articles have approached this topic from an empirical perspective, providing a classification of strategies which lead to corporate legitimacy (Meyer and Scott, 1983). Ultimately, this article contributes to the emerging view of corporations as interconnected conversations (Calton and Kurland, 1996) for which new communicative approaches are necessary to build corporate legitimacy. This communicative approach defines how firms are starting to relate to their stakeholders on the basis of dialog and to publicly justify their societal contributions.…”

Building an Inclusive Diversity Culture: Principles, Processes and Practice

“…Reciprocal recognition is an important foundation on which mutual trust can be developed through ongoing relationship work (Calton and Kurland, 1996). It is apparent that there are relational frameworks in which trust may develop more easily than in others.…”

Corporate Legitimacy as Deliberation: A Communicative Framework

“…According to Swanson, a communicative approach to moral conflicts could offer conceptual background for the exchange of value-based information between a corporation and its societal environment (Swanson, 1999). In a similar vein, Calton and Payne deliver a communicative definition of a stakeholder network, describing it as ''an interactive field of discourse'' (Calton and Payne, 2003) which they place in the context of the emerging view of organizations as interconnected conversations (e.g., Calton and Kurland, 1996;Deetz, 1995;Kuhn and Ashcraft, 2003;Wicks and Freeman, 1998). If normative conflicts can no longer be solved by referring to a shared background of values and traditions, communication becomes the sole source of peaceful interaction and mutual recognition (cf.…”