Corporate stakeholder responsiveness

Nowadays, many firms are confronted with diverse and turbulent environments that are inhabited by equally diverse stakeholder groups with differing and sometimes oppositional interests. In such a world, firms must quickly pass through learning processes to not threaten their survival and to obtaining society’s license to operate. Marc Maurer proposes a new model of how such organizational-level learning is initiated and under which circumstances adaptive or radical learning processes shape a firm’s strategic, structural, and cultural orientation towards its strategically relevant stakeholders. The book uses literature on stakeholder management, organisational learning, and evolutionary theory as its theoretical lens in developing his corporate stake-holder responsiveness model. In order to evaluate the model, a comparative cross case study about the three Swiss telecommunication firms ORANGE, SUNRISE, and SWISSCOM is presented and analyzed by a fuzzy-set based approach for qualitative cross case analysis (FS/QCA). The main scientific contribution is fourfold: First, the book introduces a new and integrative model of how firms respond to the demands of their strategically relevant stakeholders. It also replaces Frederick‘s concept of corporate social responsiveness by corporate stakeholder responsiveness to better reflect firms‘ (re-)actions toward their stakeholders in business practice. Third, the existing typology for stakeholder oriented learning is extended to improve researcher‘s ability to capturing different learning outcomes. And lastly, the work represents one of the very first applica-tions of the FS/QCA method within the domain of stakeholder research. The contribution for business practice can be seen in the form of an instrument to categorize and analyze events that trigger stakeholder oriented learning processes. Besides, it is suggested that managers can use certain situations as 'windows of learning' via the proposed concepts of active and passive pressure exploitation. The strength of this book lies in its two-sided appeal to both academics and practitioners who share an interest in changing firms’ stakeholder orientations.