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. It shifts attention away from managerial assumptions and practices centered on the workings of the focal firm and toward more system-based ways of thinking and doing within an issue or problem-based stakeholder network.

Both stakeholder management and stakeholder engagement can be derived from R. Edward Freeman’s ...