Business Ethics Quarterly 13 (1):25-41 (2003)
Abstract |
This paper is a preliminary attempt to better understand the concept of legitimacy in stakeholder theory. The normative componentof stakeholder theory plays a central role in the concept of legitimacy. Though the elaboration of legitimacy contained hereinapplies generally to all “normative cores” this paper relies on Phillips’s principle of stakeholder fairness and therefore begins with a brief description of this work. This is followed by a discussion of the importance of legitimacy to stakeholder theory as well as the general ambiguity of the term. A distinction is then drawn between normative and derivative legitimacy. Reference to this distinction helps distinguish between a relationship with the organization based on direct moral obligation and one based on the power to help or harm the organization. It is concluded that stakeholders who retain the ability to affect the organization are legitimate (derivatively), but that this legitimacy is derived from the moral obligation owed other (normative) stakeholders and that the two sorts of legitimacy are importantly different from one another. An example of the normative/derivative distinction at work in managerial decision making is elaborated upon and managerial and research implications are then suggested
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Keywords | Applied Philosophy Business and Professional Ethics Social Science |
Categories | (categorize this paper) |
ISBN(s) | 1052-150X |
DOI | 10.5840/beq20031312 |
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References found in this work BETA
Political Liberalism by John Rawls. [REVIEW]Philip Pettit - 1994 - Journal of Philosophy 91 (4):215-220.
The Politics of Stakeholder Theory: Some Future Directions.R. Edward Freeman - 1994 - Business Ethics Quarterly 4 (4):409-421.
The Theory of Social and Economic Organization.Max Weber, A. M. Henderson & Talcott Parsons - 1948 - Philosophical Review 57 (5):524-528.
View all 18 references / Add more references
Citations of this work BETA
Corporate Social Responsibility Theories: Mapping the Territory. [REVIEW]Elisabet Garriga & Domènec Melé - 2004 - Journal of Business Ethics 53 (1-2):51-71.
Investigating Stakeholder Theory and Social Capital: CSR in Large Firms and SMEs.Angeloantonio Russo & Francesco Perrini - 2010 - Journal of Business Ethics 91 (2):207-221.
Re-Imagining the Morality of Management: A Modern Virtue Ethics Approach.Geoff Moore - 2008 - Business Ethics Quarterly 18 (4):483-511.
Can Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives Improve Global Supply Chains? Improving Deliberative Capacity with a Stakeholder Orientation.Vivek Soundararajan, Jill A. Brown & Andrew C. Wicks - 2019 - Business Ethics Quarterly 29 (3):385-412.
View all 79 citations / Add more citations
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