Stakeholder Theory. A European Perspective

Citation

Mesure, H. (2007), "Stakeholder Theory. A European Perspective", Society and Business Review, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 137-138. https://doi.org/10.1108/sbr.2007.2.1.137.5

This collective book, edited by M. Bonnafous‐Boucher and Yvon Pesqueux who are two leading French scholars in the fields of the business and society and governance, is the fruit of a two years research seminar that took place in Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers de Paris and was supported by the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations a dominant state financial institution in French context.

Two considerations are at the origin of this book. Firstly, most of the academicals or professional references about “stakeholders” are American. Secondly, despite the fact that this notion is widely used, its theoretical background is often ignored. Therefore, the “aim of this book is to comment on the American theoretical foundations of the notion of corporate social responsibility, and, more specifically, the concept of stakeholder as well as an attempt to define an European Perspective” (Preface). The aim is reached thanks to ten chapters. Through those chapters, stakeholder theory is studied at the light of the governance, culturalist perspective, liberal political philosophy, Levinas' humanism and as a learning partnership. The stakeholders' notion is also used to reshape the human resource management, the social rating and to contest the primacy that is given to measurement in the CSR movement. Beyond their specificities, those contributions share two convictions. The first one is that the organizations are more and more challenging the institutions and that the organizations, specially the multinational enterprises, are “central” in our society. This conviction opens the door to the second one. The corporate social responsibility, the governance or the stakeholder theory are also an interrogation on the nature and the aim of the organizations and, deeper, on the real social and political issues at stake throughout those managerial and academicals movements.

This book can be recommended for those that know those managerial and academicals movements and who are searching for new approaches that contrast with the American mean stream.