Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 18, 2007

Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting

The Role of the Mass Media As Stakeholders In Conferring Corporate Legitimacy

This contribution provides theoretical insights into a planned dissertation project which discusses the mass media as a stakeholder of a company, suggesting that a complex understanding of the mass media, their public-sphere function and their mode of operation is crucial for analyzing the media’s role in conferring corporate legitimacy. Terms such as ‘corporate citizen’ or ‘stakeholder democracy’ or the notion of corporations as civil or political actors imply a link to the public sphere, which in modern democracies is primarily constituted through the mass media. However, up to now, there has been hardly any discussion about the role of the mass media and the public sphere in the realm of stakeholder theory.