[12.08.2008] Paper "Inside the Mind of Stakeholders –Are they Driving Corporate Sustainability?" examinines stakeholders’ agendas and their influence in the area of corporate sustainability management. It aims to identify concepts related to corporate sustainability that are applicable across a variety of stakeholders.

Key points include:

    * the importance stakeholders attach to corporate social and environmental performance CSEP (and individual dimensions) is clearly associated with disciplining mechanisms (monitoring, transmission and decision mechanisms)
    * advocacy and lobbying appear to be less effective transmission mechanism than quasi-regulation and engagement. This softer approach is associated with greater effects on the important value drivers and being less effective in inducing changes to business strategies and processes
    * innovation and brand/reputation are the primary levers stakeholders use to influence corporate behavior; companies’ license to operate is hardly threatened, also because the corporate sector defends it through corporate lobbying/PR and litigation
    * companies and most of their stakeholders follow the imperative of global markets and competitiveness- The stakeholders consider partnerships and engagement more effective – also because the corporate sector has learned considerably from past incidents, for example as Shell has done from Nigeria and Brent Spar
    * there were few players (out of the nine groups surveyed) that exert meaningful pressure on companies, apart from NGOs.

Paper was published in 2006 r. by International Institute for Management Development (IMD). Authors: O. Salzmann; U. Steger; A. Ionescu-Somers.

Inside the Mind of Stakeholders –Are they Driving Corporate Sustainability? (536kB, 48 p.)

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