Making the invisible visible: stakeholder capitalism and powerless stakeholders

Abstract

Purpose

Stakeholder capitalism has been proposed as an alternative way of thinking about business purpose and value creation. However, stakeholder capitalism can only work as an alternative model of business if all stakeholders and their interests are visible to and taken seriously by managers. The purpose of this paper is to untangle the challenges that invisible, marginalized and powerless stakeholders pose for theorizing about stakeholder capitalism.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper is conceptual. The authors first briefly outline the promise of stakeholder capitalism for addressing pressing questions about value creation and stakeholder welfare. The authors then conceptualize stakeholder invisibility as the outcome of a particular stakeholder being both powerless and marginal through the prism of moral intensity theory and one of its elements: proximity. This study discusses the ways in which managers can make invisible stakeholders more visible in their decision-making.

Findings

For managers truly to manage for stakeholders, as anticipated by stakeholder capitalism, all stakeholders and stakeholder interests must be visible to them. This study analyzes why sometimes they are not, how they can be made more visible and why stakeholder visibility matters for stakeholder capitalism. This study proffers three principles for business practice: ethical commitments to reduce stakeholder invisibility, analyses of business strategies to surface the contributions of marginalized and invisible stakeholders and taking rights seriously.

Originality/value

This study provides a new perspective on stakeholder capitalism by linking the challenge in operationalizing it to the problems of stakeholder invisibility and marginality.

Citation

Van Buren, H.J. and Schrempf-Stirling, J. (2025), "Making the invisible visible: stakeholder capitalism and powerless stakeholders", Corporate Governance, Vol. 25 No. 1, pp. 128-143. https://doi.org/10.1108/CG-03-2023-0114