Stakeholder Politics
Subtitle: Social Capital, Sustainable Development, and the Corporation
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9781351279727
Subjects: Social responsibility of business; Corporate governance; Social capital (Sociology); Social networks; Sustainable development; Social Support; Entreprises; Responsabilité sociale; Gouvernement d'entreprise; Capital social (Sociologie); Réseaux sociaux; Développement durable
Description: "The war is over. The largest corporations in the world are now committed to sustainability. But, behind the public relations gloss, corporate executives and managers are perplexed. The majority of them have a genuine desire to work in an ethical and sustainable manner. Yet, when they engage with their stakeholders for that purpose, they unexpectedly encounter a world of hardball politics full of hostile activists, self-interested elites and unpredictable attacks. Unfortunately, corporate management is too often unskilled in this rough-and-tumble world. While managers rely on facts and rational analysis, their self-appointed critics have mastered the arts of political discourse, issue framing and media manipulation. At the same time, as corporations extend their global reach, their third-world stakeholder communities are beset with a variety of poverty-maintaining and sustainability-thwarting conditions. In many parts of the world, communities suffer from entrenched divisions, exclusion from power, unpredictable violence and economic dependency. In order to both reduce reputational risk and to contribute to sustainable development, companies need the equivalent of roadmaps of the socio-political terrain in their stakeholder networks. This book moves on to next challenge of giving companies what they need now: namely, "how to" guides addressing the twin problems of firstly maintaining political legitimacy (talking the talk), and, secondly, promoting sustainable development (walking the walk). They need to learn how to both play stakeholder politics and collaborate with stakeholders towards sustainability goals. Most companies have already encountered or anticipated the barriers that this book addresses, and managers will recognize the dilemmas described. Stakeholder Politics is the first book to offer a method for classifying and dealing with these socio-political problems. The book presents a typology of stakeholder networks that will help managers and community leaders identify and improve the social capital patterns in their own networks. Once they know what patterns they have, they can move their networks towards those that foster sustainable community development. The author describes vivid cases in which managers and community stakeholders have already used the approach successfully. At the same time, managers get handy tools for predicting and avoiding community-level socio-political risk around stakeholder issues: most notably, the Stakeholder 360 which has been successfully used in Canada and Australia with large groups of managers learning about stakeholder engagement. The book has been written for an audience of both managers and academics. Those working in developing countries with difficult stakeholder issues will find it indispensable."--Provided by publisher
Table of contents: title: Chapter Introduction  -- Robert Boutilier; title: chapter 1 Why should corporations care about sustainable development?  -- Robert Boutilier; title: chapter 2 The global regulation of corporations: coming soon or already here?  -- Robert Boutilier; title: chapter 3 Sustainability performance measurement and stakeholder relationships  -- Robert Boutilier; title: chapter 4 Multilateral 'messes' and the three types of social capital  -- Robert Boutilier; title: chapter 5 Questions that measure social capital  -- Robert Boutilier; title: chapter 6 Collecting and analyzing social capital data  -- Robert Boutilier; title: chapter 7 Identifying barriers to sustainable development with the 3DSC framework  -- Robert Boutilier; title: chapter 8 Predicting protests in Peru  -- Robert Boutilier; title: chapter 9 Four years of stakeholder politics on Misima Island  -- Robert Boutilier; title: chapter 10 Mapping the network's values, priorities, and issues  -- Robert Boutilier; title: chapter 11 From social capital to inter-sectoral complementarity -- Robert Boutilier.