Introduction

The stakeholder approach to the firm reframed the relationship between business and society in a fundamental way by explicitly recognising the embeddedness of the corporation into a network of stakeholder relationships. Stakeholder partnerships as a specific form of stakeholder engagement represent another developmental shift. As stakeholder relationships and business in society have become increasingly central to the unfolding of stakeholder thinking, important new topics have begun to take centre stage in both the worlds of practice and academics. The evolution of stakeholder thinking has led to a new view of the firm as an organism embedded in a complex web of relationships with other organisms. The broad view of stakeholder identification focuses on a stakeholder's ability to influence the firm's behaviour, direction, process or outcome, and focuses on the urgency, power and legitimacy of the stakeholder in question. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.