TY - JOUR
T1 - Building chains and directing flows
T2 - Strategies and tactics of mutual influence in stakeholder conflicts
AU - Zietsma, Charlene
AU - Winn, Monika I.
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2011 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2008/3
Y1 - 2008/3
N2 - This article aims to deepen the understanding of the processes and specific actions aimed at influencing and shaping business practices through dynamic stakeholder relationships. An inductive, longitudinal study of all players involved in a stakeholder conflict identified four clusters of influence tactics that were used by both secondary stakeholders and their target firms: issue raising, issue suppressing, positioning, and solution seeking. The stakeholders studied built elaborate influence chains and worked to direct influence flows. The study contributes to stakeholder theory by offering a refined understanding of both bilateral and mutual-influence tactics, expanding the theory's focus beyond bilateral relationships, and highlighting the use of dependence relationships among multiple embedded organizations to build influence over a specific target, and more generally, an organizational field. These findings are discussed in light of work on social movement organizations and institutional theory.
AB - This article aims to deepen the understanding of the processes and specific actions aimed at influencing and shaping business practices through dynamic stakeholder relationships. An inductive, longitudinal study of all players involved in a stakeholder conflict identified four clusters of influence tactics that were used by both secondary stakeholders and their target firms: issue raising, issue suppressing, positioning, and solution seeking. The stakeholders studied built elaborate influence chains and worked to direct influence flows. The study contributes to stakeholder theory by offering a refined understanding of both bilateral and mutual-influence tactics, expanding the theory's focus beyond bilateral relationships, and highlighting the use of dependence relationships among multiple embedded organizations to build influence over a specific target, and more generally, an organizational field. These findings are discussed in light of work on social movement organizations and institutional theory.
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U2 - 10.1177/0007650307306641
DO - 10.1177/0007650307306641
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:38849174499
VL - 47
SP - 68
EP - 101
JO - Business and Society
JF - Business and Society
SN - 0007-6503
IS - 1
ER -