Volume 12, 2015
Teaching Business Ethics and Stakeholder Theory
Magnus Frostenson
Pages 43-52
Teaching Issues-Driven Stakeholder Theory
Teaching stakeholder theory may be difficult because of the constant calls for real-life relevance and application. The article argues that one way of overcoming the difficulty is to focus more on stakeholder issues than on stakeholders as actors. In education, materiality analyses, like the ones often present in sustainability reports, are probably a better way of approaching stakeholder theory than actor-centered approaches that end up in the identification of foreseeable groups of
stakeholders. Focusing on specific stakeholder issues also gives better possibilities to identify relationships and dependencies between stakeholders, which is of high relevance to managerial decision-making.