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When seeking to influence firm decision making, what types of influence strategies do stakeholders have available, and what determines which type the stakeholders choose to use? In this article I use resource dependence theory to investigate these two questions. I propose that the resource relationship (who is dependent on whom) determines which of the four types of strategies identified in this article will be used: direct withholding, direct usage, indirect withholding, or indirect usage.
Freeman's (1984) Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach brought stakeholder theory into the mainstream of management literature. As clearly expressed in the title of the book, one central purpose of stakeholder theory has been to enable managers to understand stakeholders and strategically manage them. As Freeman states, "The stakeholder approach is about groups and individuals who can affect the organization, and is about managerial behavior taken in response to those groups and individuals" (1984: 48). In developing such response strategies, it seems that we need to answer three general questions about stakeholders:
1. Who are they? (This question concerns their attributes.)
2. What do they want? (This question concerns their ends.)
3. How are they going to try to get it? (This question concerns their means.)
Here, I intend to suggest that although researchers have been addressing the first two questions, they have given the third question, regarding stakeholder means-or stakeholder influence strategies-only piecemeal attention. Nowhere in the literature have scholars made any systematic attempt to treat stakeholder influence strategies in the broadest sense-that is, as phenomena that can be categorized and built into a descriptive model. That is the objective of this article-to build a model of stakeholder influence strategies that will address this missing part of stakeholder theory and ultimately enable managers to better understand and manage stakeholder behavior.
Specifically, in this article I seek to investigate these two research questions regarding stakeholder influence strategies:
3a. What are the different types of influence strategies?
3b. What are the determinants of the choice of influence strategy?
In investigating these two questions, I merge stakeholder theory with resource dependence theory to propose that the types of influence strategies can be understood in terms of resources and that a determinant of the choice of strategies will be the type of resource relationship...