Today’s firms face threats and opportunities arising from a variety ofstakeholders, including shareholders, bondholders, employees, customers, suppliers, joint-venture partners, regulatory agencies, communities, governments, labor unions, advocacy groups, and the natural environment. Stakeholder management involves implementing organizational policies and practices that take into account the goals and concerns of relevant stakeholders, in a manner that is consistent with the firm’s enterprise-level strategy and profitmaking purpose. A key question in stakeholder management is ‘‘who and what really counts.’’ Well-established prioritization criteria are the stakeholders’ relative amounts of power, legitimacy, and urgency. Yet, despite the view that stakeholder management is important for value creation, managers lack a clear guidance about what an overarching stakeholder management strategy looks like. Consequently, the purpose of this article is to offer a comprehensive picture of stakeholder management that goes beyond the firm’s dyadic relations with particular stakeholders to consider stakeholder portfolios. To do this, we present two typologies capturing the choices top managers use to align stakeholder management with the firm’s strategy, and provide multiple examples of how specific multinationals are achieving this alignment. The concept of strategy-stakeholder management alignment is clearly captured in research on sustainability by Dung Nguyen and Stanley Slater when they state: ‘‘Commitments to the environmental and social bottom lines cannot simply be altruistic endeavors. If that were the case, superior financial performance would never be realized. Consequently, the firm must seek opportunities to apply the principles of environmental and socialresponsibility in such a way that the firm is more effective at satisfying the needs of its customers or more efficient in the way that it conducts its business.’’ Three firms that clearly exemplify this strategystakeholder management alignment are IBM, Unilever, and Federal Express.
