Stakeholder theory: A process‐ontological perspective

Advocates of stakeholder theory have long known that grasping its key insights requires a specific worldview that is, unfortunately, still not prevalent within the community of strategic management scholars. We argue that this worldview encompasses a process ontology that is radically different from the substance‐ontological outlook typical of the mainstream approaches to strategic management. The unquestioned commitment of strategic management scholarship to a substance ontology leads to the viewing of corporations as macro‐entities comprising aggregations of discrete autonomous actors each relying on individual choice and instrumental rationality. In contrast, within a process‐ontological worldview, corporations and their stakeholders are seen to be sustained and attenuated through social practices and relationships involving interlocking chains of coping actions taken in everyday interactions. We show that adopting a process‐ontological worldview presents a much‐needed step that may help strategic management scholars reach a better understanding of how stakeholder theory deals with three problems of today's capitalism, those value creation and trade, ethics of capitalism, and managerial mindsets. On this basis, we discuss how to process ontology may lead stakeholder theory to further refine its understanding of business strategy, corporate social responsibility, and the common ground between the firm and stakeholders.