Revisiting the Shareholder Vs. Stakeholder Debate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Agency theory versus stakeholder theory underpins the debate on role of business in society. Agency theory proponents hold that firms should work towards maximisation of shareholder returns and stakeholder theory holds that a firm should also take other stakeholder interests into account. These typical arguments ignore the strategic stakeholder view of the firm which focuses on sustainable value creation. This paper examines the agency and stakeholder arguments from institutional investors' point of view i.e. from shareholders' perspective. Using some empirical research, it shows that in practice, institutional investors such as pension funds take stakeholder specific information of the firms into account while making investment decisions. Therefore, the argument of shareholder versus stakeholder is baseless considering capital markets integration of stakeholder relationships into firm valuations. The paper presents a dual argument - financial and political for strategic stakeholder theory. In the financial argument, since the value adding intangible factors such as human, intellectual and social capital depend upon crucial stakeholders, it is important to build good relations with these stakeholders. In the political argument, in a globalised world, shareholders themselves are indirect stakeholders (employees, communities and consumers) in the firms they invest in, hence, social and environmental factors are increasingly important in serving the dual interest of stakeholders who are merging in the pools of indirect shareholders through their pensions and other investments. Therefore, the academic dichotomy between strategic stakeholder management and shareholder expectations is artificial.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".