ABSTRACT
Enterprises generate social benefit via active interaction with stakeholders. While many stakeholders manifest at the perimeter of the enterprise and its environment, others, such as the human ecology of the enterprise, are internal stakeholders. A single entity may simultaneously belong to several stakeholder segments, for example, an individual may be employed by an automobile manufacturer, may be a customer of the company in the sense that they are the driver of a vehicle produced by the company, and may hold shares of company stock. Decisions made and actions taken by the company will affect such stakeholders in multiple and generally unequal ways relative to the stakeholder segment considered. For example, a car manufacturer may introduce a new model or a significant innovation that does not impact employee salary, but may increase customer costs in the form of, e.g., purchase price or may cause increased depreciation in value of a car already owned by the individual that was produced by the company; and may also drive up share value. For the hypothetical individual described, they are affected in a financially neutral way as an employee, in a financially negative way as a consumer, and positively as a shareholder.
