Marketing communication: principles and practice

Table 5.2
Primary influence of stakeholders
Stake
Shareholders,
Employers,
Dissident
Directors
Owners
shareholders
Equity share
Preferred debtors
Suppliers
Local government
Customers
Consumer lobby
Employees
Trade unions
Competitors
Exchange
External directors
Regulators
Trade associations
relationship
Licensors
Environmental
groups
Other influence
Formal control
Market forces
Legislation and
regulation
Source
: Based on Freeman, 1984

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Freeman (1984) shows that it is important to identify those people who
have a stake because they can be or are influenced by the policies and
strategies of the corporation. He proposes that a stakeholder analysis be part
of strategic management work, to identify who influences aims, objectives,
and strategies. Table 5.2 shows an example of an analysis that identifies the
dominant role and related influence of each stakeholder.
DO WE HAVE A STAKEHOLDER SOCIETY IN 
THE UK?
In the run-up to the 1997 general election in the UK, our major political
parties each talked of their preferred society, based on capitalist economics,
for the future. Each offered a vision of a relationship between corporate
governance and national policy.
The Liberal Democrat manifesto spoke of the need to deal with a divided
society, run-down public services, a fractured sense of community, and an
underperforming economy. The Lib-Dem vision was for a more prosperous,
fair and open society with the market economy delivering prosperity and
distributing economic benefits. But market mechanisms on their own would
not be able to ensure good services for everyone, or promote employment
opportunities, or tackle economic inequality, or protect the environment.
What they offered was a society in which every citizen shares rights and
responsibilities to the wider community, with power and opportunity widely
spread to avoid conformity and authoritarian centralized government. This
‘citizen’s society’ would require active government which invests in people,
promotes long-term prosperity and welfare, safeguards their security, and is
answerable to them for its actions. Citizenship means political inclusion –
writer Michael Ignatieff calls this the ‘civic’ model – a community of equal,
rights-bearing citizens, united in a patriotic attachment to a shared set of
political practices and values. 
The Conservative plan was more about ‘a people’s share’ of wealth created
in an enterprise economy. To give greater public (vs. private) ownership of
capital to the people, share ownership was to have been widened, with free
shares for employees, more portable pensions, and the establishment of
personal pension schemes for small firms.
Whereas the right’s vision is for a ‘shareholder’ society, (New) Labour’s
‘stakeholder society’ has at heart the interests of the many instead of the few
– one nation, with shared values and purpose. Merit overrides privilege, and
‘a government will govern in the interest of the many, the broad majority of
people who work hard, play by the rules, pay their dues and feel let down by
a political system that gives the breaks to the few, to an elite at the top
increasingly out of touch with the rest of us’ (from the 1997 Labour Party
manifesto document). The vision promotes equal worth for all, with fairness
and justice within strong communities. Ambition and compassion are to be