MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

activist, regulatory and client/customer categories. Further division into
primary and secondary stakeholders would be possible using
Clarkson’s approach but this might involve some controversial value
judgments. For example, the union clearly could not survive without
members, activists and staff. Could it however survive without groups
of black or women members, or an Annual Delegate Conference? A
process of determining this could have the advantage of concentrating
on the core purposes and activities of the union but this might in the
end prove overly reductionist.
Starik (1994) suggests an approach borrowed from the issues
management and crisis management literature involving an analysis of
probability and impact. Those entities which have the highest
probability of interacting with an organization or those that would have
the greatest impact on, or the greatest impact from, an organization’s
activities would receive the most management attention. There is a
certain intuitive truth in this approach although, if trade union managers
truly exhibit principles of justice and fairness, one might expect them to
be attending to the interests of minorities in appropriate circumstances.
There are two further interesting points arising from considering
stakeholder categories. First, people can be in more than one
category. An activist is also a member; she may also be a member of a
women’s committee or of the National Executive Council. Brummer
(1991) addresses a similar point when he discusses whether the
‘general public’ is a stakeholder in a corporation. Whoever is not
directly affected by the conduct of corporate executives is, for that
action, a member of the general public, Brummer says. Therefore, the
class of individuals designated as members of the general public is a
shifting one. A person may be a member of the general public for one
corporate action while being a stakeholder for another. In other words,
a person’s classification as a stakeholder is related to the managerial
action being studied, not to the inherent role of the individual,
organization or group concerned. An approach such as this is useful in
operationalising the concept.
Secondly, representation of stakeholders in Ribbon shows relationships
only between stakeholders and Ribbon itself. In the real world, there
are interdependencies between stakeholders - to take one obvious
example, between senior managers and the activist committees to
which they are required to report. Rowley (1997) has used social
network analysis to construct a theory of stakeholder influences which
accommodates multiple, interdependent stakeholder demands and
predicts how organizations respond to the simultaneous influence of
multiple stakeholders. Whether this framework has utility in a trade
union is not yet clear but the principle of recognising stakeholder
interdependence is difficult to gainsay.
Another approach is that of Mitchell, Agle and Wood (1997) which
suggests that managers’ attention to stakeholders is determined by the
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