Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder engagement is an emerging approach for thinking about and acting on the complex interplay of relationships and responsibilities of business in society. It focuses on engaging all stakeholders caught up in a shared problem domain in an interactive dialogic learning process so that the messy, interdependent problem can be understood jointly and addressed cooperatively. It is an extension or, some would argue, a transformation of the theory and practice of stakeholder management and the stakeholder theory of the firm. Both stakeholder management and stakeholder engagement arise from R. Edward Freeman's 1984 classic definition of stakeholders as any individual or group who can affect or are affected by the achievement of the organization's purposes or by their unintended consequences. The stakeholder concept dramatically expands the ...