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Introduction
Organizations operate in complex environments involving a multitude of stakeholders. One of the key factors for successful public relations programs is the understanding of such environments. To do so, scholars and practitioners have developed a series of models and techniques to segment stakeholders and publics in order to understand who should be given attention (Bryson, 2004; Kim et al., 2008; Preble, 2005; Rawlins, 2006). Used together, these models allow for a well-informed understanding of stakeholder environments (Kim et al., 2008). However, such segmentation techniques also have one main limitation: they do not allow for assessing how stakeholders influence one another.
As pointed out by scholars in a variety of disciplines, we should go beyond a “dyadic” understanding of stakeholder-organization relationships in order to better understand how stakeholders influence one another (Rowley, 1997). In this regard, various scholars have investigated the ways in which stakeholders influence one another and how, in turn, such interdependence is likely to influence organizations and the way in which they respond to often conflicting stakeholder pressures (Frooman, 1999; Neville and Menguc, 2006; Rowley, 1997). Together, these contributions have highlighted the importance of understanding stakeholders’ reciprocal influences.
In this paper, we introduce stakeholder cross-impact analysis (SCIA) as a method that can be used to understand stakeholders’ likelihood of influencing one another as well as how stakeholders relate to issues. SCIA is based on cross-impact analysis (CIA), a method that was initially developed by T. Gordon and O. Helmer in 1966 as a technique for understanding the likelihood of a variety of events influencing one another (Gordon, 1994; Gordon and Hayward, 1968). Today, the technique is applied in a variety of subjects and contexts. Through an illustration, we explain how SCIA represents a useful tool that can be used at various levels of sophistication in order to capture stakeholders’ influence in terms of both the direction and the strength of the relationships. This technique can also be adopted to understand how issues influence one another and how stakeholders are related to such issues. We argue that SCIA can be used by public relations practitioners along with traditional segmentation techniques and that it represents a new and valuable way of understanding the complexity of organizations’ environments.
The paper is organized as...