The vocabulary of stakeholder theory has passed into the vernacular of organisations, although few using the term fully understand its theoretical background. Maylor (2010) defines a stakeholder as ‘any party with an interest in the project process or outcome’. This definition is flawed as it implies that stakeholders are only evident in the context of a project, that is, within a process of work with a defined beginning and end. In fact, stakeholders are a constant factor in business as usual. Different stakeholder groups may place conflicting demands on a venture (Kuster et al., 2015). The responses of stakeholders are complex because they often respond not just to the issue but also to the responses of other stakeholders. Proposals made to stakeholders therefore need to be politically feasible (Eden and Ackerman, 2021). In the author’s experience, stakeholders are a powerful force beyond projects. Indeed, they may form a constant factor in the work environment that is not always supportive to the work of organisations and may even go as far as to mean them harm. We might call these stakeholders the Van Helsings – those ready and willing not just to hold said stakes, but to plunge them deep into our metaphorical hearts. It would be academically stimulating to extend Stoker’s (1897) metaphor to include further characters from classic literature if word count were unrestricted.
Lowe (2013) offers a superior definition of stakeholders which encompasses work beyond projects. According to Lowe, a stakeholder is any organisation, group or individual that is involved in, affected by (or considers itself to be affected by), has a vested interest in, or can influence change in, a system, an enterprise (programme, project, activity, change or risk), or an organisation and its sphere of operation. The term includes shareholders, users, and decision-makers. Lowe thus extends the concept beyond those directly involved in a project to encompass customers, members, and any individual or group with an opinion on the subject in question. Originally called ‘stock-holders’, ideas of the stakeholder have their origins in the 1930s, yet the contemporary understanding of the stakeholder as any party with a financial or emotional investment in the economic, political, social, legal, cultural, and ecological environment of the firm is commonly attributed to R.E. Freeman’s (2010) ‘State of The Art’ (Bonnafous-Boucher and Rendtorff, 2016). There is usually more than one stakeholder, and they can be grouped together into categories that help managers to attribute actions, using groupings such as internal, external, sponsors, or delivery partners.
Project management literature (Kloppenborg, 2009; Kuster et al., 2015) suggests that to ensure a focus on the actors most influential to our success, it is necessary to categorize them into types such as internal and external, and to rank them according to their needs, interests and power, providing each with a numerical value denoting how interactions with stakeholders should be prioritised. Shelley (2012) suggested that a useful way to understand organisational culture is to categorise stakeholders as the inhabitants of a metaphorical zoo. He attributed a figurative animal denoting a type of stakeholder to all 26 letters of the alphabet. Whilst this idea has some merit as an allegorical organising tool, the effectiveness of Shelley’s theory is limited by his insistence to fully utilise the English alphabet in his characterisations. Using terms such as ‘X-breed’ and ‘Nematode’ to describe colleagues is, at best, confusing and, at worst, insulting.
Senior leaders are expected to manage stakeholders, yet frequently it falls to subject matter exerts to manage stakeholder relationships at function level (Payne and Ballantyne, 2002). Media intensiveness and internet literacy provide opportunities for consumers to scrutinise organisations informally, producing a ‘culture of conscience’ in which corporate social responsibility is inextricably linked to reputation (Chun, 2005; Overman, 2014). Internet connectivity has extended the stakeholder power of consumers, with social media providing an influential voice that was previously restricted to traditional media sources. There may therefore be unknown stakeholders that emerge only once work has started to become digitally socialised, such as when images portraying littered plastic packaging that features the brand logo of an organisation are shared to virality.
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