Literature Review - Stakeholder Theory

Motivation:

Practical Motivation

• Climate change has the potential to have huge consequences for the governments, customers, and the general population.
• Organisations are the principal source of carbon emissions (reference). Organisations have the greatest potential for making the necessary changes to reduce carbon emissions (reference).
• Organisations have a moral responsibility to consider the impact that they have on their various stakeholders (reference).
• Stakeholders are increasingly putting pressure on organisations to manage their carbon emissions.

Theoretical Motivation

• Previous Stakeholder theory research has focussed on voluntary disclosure (e.g., reference)
• Previous research has not considered the pressure of stakeholders to establish challenging targets (reference, or the fact that no references can be found yet).

Literature Review and Hypothesis Development

Base theory - Stakeholder Theory

Seminal Articles 

• Stakeholders versus Shareholders (reference)
• Managerial branch of Stakeholder Theory (reference)

Theoretical Constructs and operational proxies

• Voluntary Reduction Target (Dependent Variable)
• Target disclosed in CDP

Stakeholder Power (Independent Variable)

• Relative size within industry? Relative power according to Porter's forces of customer versus supplier?
• Choose an industry that high powered and low powered firms can be identified.

Sizeor national concern for climate change(moderating variable)

Relationships between proxies

• Low powered firms will be more likely to respond to the pressure of their powerful stakeholders.
• Suppliers to powerful firms (such as Adidas, Nike, Apple) will be more likely to adopt challenging emissions targets when their customer declares a commitment to sustainability.

Attachment:- Assignment Files.rar