12th Sustainability Webinar
Sustainability, Stakeholder Governance and New Theories of the Firm
The stakeholder approach to the theory of the firm and its economic, financial, and social sustainability has introduced a new interpretive key to economic theory. This has been clear in the debate between more orthodox theories of the firm, for example in financial economics and new institutionalism, and the stakeholder approach to strategic management initiated by Freeman in 1984. Stakeholder engagement has been seen both as a way to increase stakeholder participation and to increase the distributive and procedural fairness of the organizational model in its interaction with different patrons, but also as a way to increase the effectiveness of interactions beyond contractual relationships, moving beyond the traditional exclusive focus on maximizing stakeholder value. On the other hand, a similar debate has developed in the narrower reality of third sector organizations (nonprofits, cooperatives, and social enterprises). While third sector organizations can be considered socially responsible "by design" (e.g., because of multi-stakeholder governance in most third sector models) a lively debate has developed about the degree, extent, exact modalities, and impacts of engagement. For example, customer and employee involvement in organizational governance is required in most social enterprise models (as regulated by specific laws), but the exact modalities of involvement may not be the same in either cases and are often not specific by law or custom, requiring that models of involvement are either left unspecified or delegated to the statutory provisions of individual organizations. For these reasons, the study of governance of third sector organizations is receiving increasing attention not only from economists, but also from a broad spectrum of scholars working in contiguous and related disciplines.
This webinar addresses the notion of stakeholder engagement from a variety of perspectives, focusing in particular on worker involvement and control (contribution by David Ellerman), reinterpretation of stakeholder theory in light of social systems theory in sociology (contribution by Vladislav Valentinov), and finally on inclusive governance and community (presentation by Silvia Sacchetti).
Date: 6 June 2022
Time: 3:00 pm CEST | 9:00 am EDT | 9:00 pm CST Asia
Webinar ID: 854 7179 5473
Webinar Secretariat: sustainability.webinar@mdpi.com