Unfolding Stakeholder Thinking 2

Relationships, Communication, Reporting and Performance

Jörg Andriof, Sandra Waddock, Bryan Husted, Sandra Sutherland Rahman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351281829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book is the companion to "Unfolding Stakeholder Thinking: Theory, Responsibility and Engagement", which examined many emerging theoretical and normative issues and was released to acclaim in October 2002. "Unfolding Stakeholder Thinking 2" collects a series of essays by leading researchers worldwide to focus on the practice of stakeholder engagement in terms of relationship management, communication, reporting and performance.

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 academia.

The first part of the book makes clear that simply engaging with stakeholders is insufficient to build successful stakeholder strategies. Companies, considered as the focal entity in a relationship, also need to actively communicate with stakeholders and manage their relationships. Dialogue is essential but can only be useful if companies listen to the messages that stakeholders are sending them. It is also essential to understand the role of power and influence in stakeholder engagement strategies especially if partnerships or collaborations emerge from the relationships that are engendered. The book examines a wide range of corporate–NGO collaborations to determine what makes them effective – and what makes them fail. Conflict management in stakeholder alliances is also discussed.

The second part of the book addresses the critically important element of emerging schemes for the assessment, measurement and reporting of business in society and relationships involving stakeholders. A variety of current approaches to stakeholder assessment and reporting are discussed here including social auditing and sustainability reporting.

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 role of management becomes immensely more challenging, when stakeholders are no longer seen as simply the objects of managerial action but rather as subjects with their own objectives and purposes. This book captures the complexity of managing relationships with stakeholders and will provide both practitioners and researchers with a wealth of information on the benefits and consequences of this practice.

Part 1
Stakeholder Communication and Relationship Management

1
Stakeholder Discourse and Critical-Frame Analysis

The case of child labour in Bangladesh

Sandra Sutherland Rahman
Framingham State College, USA

The fundamental assumption in stakeholder theory (Freeman 1984) is that there exists a relationship between the firm and the stakeholder that is based on some mutual interest. The mutual interest in this study is the employment of underage children. Bangladeshi factory owners/managers are targeted by their stakeholders for hiring children, and US importers are targeted by their stakeholders for buying clothing that children participated in making. In both cases the firms generally believe that children benefit from being employed because it enables them to sustain life through a comparatively more attractive means. The Bangladesh/US child labour discourse exploded with controversy because of strong stakeholder activism in the US that led to the removal of those children from their job in Bangladesh. The purpose of this chapter is to untangle the complex set of local and international stakeholder messages that define the stakeholder environment to which firms are asked to respond. More simply stated, this chapter defines the message sent from stakeholders to US importing and Bangladeshi manufacturing firms regarding their use of child labour.

This research accepts that management scans the business environment to consider stakeholder interests in its strategic planning process. The issue at the core of the stakeholder maps is the concern for children being employed by garment factories in Bangladesh that produce goods for the US consumer market. This concern has become one of the largest international trade issues of the past several decades. For this reason, it has been discussed in a variety of public forums around the world between interested stakeholders. Management is able to gather critical stakeholder sentiment from the identified discourses. There is limited evidence that stakeholders are directly contacting either the Bangladeshi manufacturer or the US importer. Therefore, it is assumed that most of their information permeates the environmental scanning process through public stakeholder discourse.

Stakeholder discourse in the public arenas is critical in this research because it involves the general consumer public. Garments being imported from Bangladesh are targeted towards men, women and children. It is recognised that the consumer ultimately decides whether or not to buy a garment that was imported from Bangladesh. Therefore, stakeholders often target opportunities that will affect public sentiment towards the use of child labour. It is critically important to the business firm to track and understand discourse that affects consumer demand.

The issue of children working under the age of 14 has been debated in economic and human rights literature for decades. All developed countries today that have passed through the stage of industrialisation seem to have passed through a transition period where children moved from the farm, to the factory and then into the schools. In earlier times the issue was primarily dealt with on a local or a national level. The critical difference today is that multinational firms are trading with nations that are in different stages of economic development and stakeholders are objecting to certain business practices. This makes the international discourse on child labour particularly rich to analyse and critically important for international management and international stakeholders to understand.

1.1 Methodology

To identify and analyse the content of stakeholder frames of the Bangladeshi supplier and the American buyer that are interested in their use of child labour, I began by drawing two comprehensive stakeholder maps (Freeman 1984). Details of the maps can be found in Rahman 2000. Critical-frame analysis (Rein and Gamson 1999) was applied to the two stakeholder maps that were drawn for the purpose of sorting the stakeholder discourse on the use of child labour by the US importing firms and the Bangladeshi manufacturing firms. The stakeholder-frame model was then used to name/identify the messages being expressed and the stakeholder-objective model was used to classify the stakeholder groups based on their operating objective for the purpose of analysis. More simply stated, this methodology records the stakeholder messages, identifies the content of the messages based on their ethical foundation, and compares the content based on the operating objectives of the stakeholder. Thus, the methodology allows for an objective domestic and cross-cultural comparison of a highly controversial stakeholder issue. The organisation of this analysis is shown in Table 1.1.

1.2 Who are the stakeholders?

According to the definition, ‘a stakeholder is any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of an organisation’s purpose’ (Freeman 1984). Therefore a map is the identification of such individuals or groups.

Table 1.1 Tools for analysis

Question	Tool	Author
1. Who are the stakeholders?	Stakeholder map	Freeman 1984
2. What is the content of the messages being sent to the firm?	Critical-frame analysis	Rein and Gamson 1999
3. How do stakeholders frame the content of their messages?	Stakeholder-frame model	Cavanagh et al. 1981
4. What is the operating objective of the stakeholder?	Stakeholder-objective model	Defined by the stakeholder
5. Which stakeholder frames are used within and between Bangladeshi manufacturers and US importer stakeholder environments?	Critical-frame analysis matrix	Rahman 2000, based on Rein and Gamson 1999 and Cavanagh et al. 1981

In order to identify the stakeholders of the Bangladeshi manufacturers, their interests in the firm, and how they attempt to influence firm behaviour, I conducted a thorough library search. From this effort, I was able to obtain a variety of written sources expressing a variety of opinions on the issue. I narrowed my stakeholder population to those stakeholders that actually expressed an opinion on (1) Bangladeshi manufacturers that are employing children; or (2) US importers that are sourcing from Bangladeshi factories employing children.

To obtain information on the Bangladeshi stakeholder environment, I visited the country to gather as many facts as possible. Since there are very few libraries in the country and the ones that exist are not equipped to offer a database of information, I chose to visit places to gather information and to elicit the assistance of a local student to gather information for me. I visited the BGMEA (Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers’ Exporters’ Association), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) office, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Save the Children, the Export Promotion Bureau, several factories, a sales agent in the garment industry and an economics professor at the University of Dhaka. At these locations I was able to obtain government, industry, nongovernment and academic reports, articles, publications and opinions. Through a local contact I collected local print media coverage of the discourse regarding child labour in the garment industry. Articles were in both the English and the Bengali newspapers. A colleague translated articles that were printed in Bengali. For details of the stakeholder map, see Rahman 2000.

1.3 What is the content of the messages being sent to the firm?

Critical-frame analysis is a methodology for sorting discourse. ‘Frames are coherent meaning-systems that provide a coherent story line for events and issues’ (Rein and Gamson 1999). In this research, the frame refers to the primary and secondary interests/demands that the stakeholder levies towards the firm. Critical-frame analysis is used: (1) to establish a coherent structure that works to clarify the streams of thought in a discussion; (2) to facilitate a general understanding of the arguments; and (3) to eventually promote agreement. This methodology is ideally suited to clarify the cross-cultural complexity of stakeholder interests in firm behaviour regarding the best interest of the child in Bangladeshi garment factories.

Critical-frame analysis requires the identification of sponsors of frames and the forums in which they are discussed. The sponsors are the proponents of the message and the forum is the place where they make their message known. The sponsors in this research are the stakeholders and the forum is primarily a government arena such as public hearings on child labour and congressional debates on the Child Labour Deterrence Act. Other forums such as the media and industry research publications are also included. The period of discourse analysis extends from the early 1980s to 1999 both in Bangladesh and in the US. The stakeholder discourse from these forums is identified as a particular frame. The frames are then studied to create an organised picture of the stakeholder discourse.

1.4 How do stakeholders frame the content of their messages?

1.4.1 Stakeholder-frame model

To apply critical-frame analysis methodology to this study, two models were used to establish an underlying structure to accommodate the stakeholder frames and to allow for comparative analysis. The first model, identified as the stakeholder-frame model, was selected on the assumption that decisions have an ethical base. It is based on the ethical model of Cavanagh et al. (1981) and organised by Hellriegel and Slocum (1996). The language of the ethical model of decision-making was modified to fit the language of this study (see Appendix A).

Up to two critical frames were identified for each stakeholder group. The primary frame represents the most common frame supported by members of the stakeholder group. The secondary frame represents the second most common frame supported by members of the same stakeholder group. The primary and secondary frames were determined under the guidelines of critical-frame analysis (Rein and Gamson 1999). Rein and Gamson, researchers at the forefront of critical-frame analysis, require the researcher to identify the frames. They believe that, since the researcher has the most intimate knowledge of the stakeholder’s language and intentions, he or she is in the best position to make a judgement as to which frame the stakeholder supports.

However, to add to the rigour of the frame identification, I conducted a reliability check. I chose one of my colleagues to identify a primary and a secondary frame that best represents the argument of each stakeholder. This colleague was selected because he is from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART 1: Stakeholder communication and relationship management
• PART 2: Stakeholder performance and reporting
• Bibliography
• List of abbreviations
• Author biographies
• Index