Zusammenfassung
The old saying ascribed to Sir Isaac Newton that seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants addresses a fundamental principle of scientific progress. It is by exchanging ideas and by further elaborating already existing ideas that science can be advanced. Freeman did not start from scratch, and in the German-language literature, the stakeholder approach also proceeded through connecting ideas to existing concepts. This article outlines some of the basic differences, which influenced the integration of Freeman's stakeholder ideas into the German contexts of practice and theory. In Germany, a stakeholder orientation was primarily adopted by companies due to government regulations, often with a more confrontational tendency. Based on different historical and religious backgrounds, the stakeholder orientation of US companies developed more out of the companies themselves, whose ethics were already more tightly intertwined with the business sphere than in Germany. Both contextual differences, the main background and the company experiences, also influenced academic reception in the German-language business administration literature.
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Stakeholder Theory Between General and Contextual Approaches - a German View
Korreferat zum Eeitrag von R Edward Freeman
1. IntroductionManagement theory authors have earned an infamous reputation for working on an endless output of concepts that progress through a life cycle of introduction, growth, maturity, decline, and cessation. In the literature about management fads, "Business Reengineering" or "Lean Management" are discussed as potentially on the decline (see Williams 2004; Collins 2000; Abrahamson/Fairchild 1999). The stakeholder approach, however, defies this trend and is still alive and kicking, even though it is older than these theories. Acceptance in academia and corporate practice has grown steadily. The stakeholder literature has become voluminous, Tony Blair and other politicians proclaim the goal of a stakeholder economy, and organisations as diverse as the World Bank and The Green 9 (nine of the largest European environmental organisations/networks) are pushing towards (more or less) balanced multi-stakeholder involvements.It might be argued that the socio-cultural, political, and economic context that ultimately needs and rewards a stakeholder strategy has only fully developed since the 199Os. When Freeman wrote his initial book on the stakeholder approach in 1984, the Zeitgeist of "Reaganomics" and "Thatcherism" favoured more a narrow-minded pursuit of profit (see Hansen/Bode 1999: 397f.). Still, in this context, Freeman popularised the idea that companies have a responsibility to their stakeholders and that values are a fundamental part of daily business. Meanwhile, the structural problems of morally unsatisfying market results are well ...Siehe den Gesamtinhalt dieses Dokumentes
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