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In this article, the authors investigate the applicability and usefulness of three alternative perspectives on corporate issues management: issue life cycle theory, legitimacy theory, and stakeholder theory. Each perspective makes certain assumptions about the nature of issues management activities and certain general predictions about corporate social responsiveness. The authors test the relative applicability of the three theories through a case study of the issues management activities of four large forestry companies in Finland and Canada The authors conclude that all three perspectives have value but differ in the level of analysis and time frame to which they apply.
In this article, we present the results of a study of the social responsiveness ' of four large forestry companies. The primary purpose of the study is to explore the applicability and explanatory power of three alternative views of the evolution of issues management activity: issue life cycle theory, legitimacy theory, and stakeholder theory. Although the three perspectives are not precisely competing, each leads to a different general prediction regarding the likelihood and evolution of a corporate response in the face of a social issue. In this article, these general predictions are compared to the actual outcome in four case studies, and the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of each perspective are discussed.
We feel that this article contributes to the literature on issues management in three ways. First, we test and compare the applicability and explanatory power of three different perspectives on corporate issues management. The comparison allows us to evaluate the potential usefulness of each theory and, conversely, to highlight the limitations of each perspective. Second, we explore the applicability of the three perspectives at an international level. Our empirical work provides a complex realworld test of three important and often-used frameworks. Although the study only examines four companies, this comparison allows us to better understand the applicability of existing theory to non-American companies. Third, based on the cases, we are able to begin to develop a framework that encompasses the three perspectives and explains their interdependence. Because the three perspectives are not mutually exclusive, the idea that they interact and limit each other (or apply to different domains) is intuitively appealing. Our empirical work supports this idea, and, in the latter part of the...