Stakeholder theory
[4] Concepts similar to modern stakeholder theory can be traced back to longstanding philosophical views about the nature of civil society itself and the relations between individuals.
[5] In Miles v Sydney Meat-Preserving Co Ltd (1912), which saw the rejection of a shareholder's legal right to a dividend, Australian chief justice Samuel Griffith observed that: The law does not require the members of a company to divest themselves, in its management, of all altruistic motives, or to maintain the character of the company as a soulless and bowelless thing, or to exact the last farthing in its commercial dealings, or forbid them to carry on its operations in a way which they think conducive to the best interests of the community as a whole.
R. Edward Freeman had an article on Stakeholder theory in the California Management Review in early 1983, but makes no reference to Mitroff's work, attributing the development of the concept to internal discussion in the Stanford Research Institute.
An anticipation of such concepts, as part of Corporate Social Responsibility, appears in a publication that appeared in 1968 by the Italian economist Giancarlo Pallavicini, creator of "the decomposition method of the parameters" to calculate the results are not directly economic activity of enterprise, regarding ethical issues, moral, social, cultural and environmental.
[16] More recent scholarly works on the topic of stakeholder theory that exemplify research and theorizing in this area include Donaldson and Preston (1995),[15] Mitchell, Agle, and Wood (1997),[17] Friedman and Miles (2002),[18] and Phillips (2003).
[19] Thomas Donaldson and Lee E. Preston argue that the theory has three distinct but mutually supportive aspects, descriptive, instrumental, and normative:[20] Since the publication of this article in 1995, it has served as a foundational reference for researchers in the field, having been cited over 1,100 times.
[28] In Europe, the rise of stakeholder regimes has arisen from the shift of higher education from a government-run bureaucracy to modern systems in which the government's role involves more monitoring than direct control.
[29] Economist and university professor Danuše Nerudová, a candidate in the 2023 Czech presidential election, is a proponent of stakeholder capitalism where "questions of sustainability and global politics, as well as the development of domestic societies" will have increased relevance for company and state decision making.
Researcher Benjamin Tallis has examined whether a move from neoliberalism to stakeholder capitalism, "which implies a different role for the state as well as a focus on creating more cohesive and resilient societies", could affect public optimism in the Czech Republic.
