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Every so often, there is an academic event of sufficient importance that it warrants special coverage in a scholarly journal. In the views of many prominent business and society scholars, the Toronto Conference, held at the University of Toronto in May 1993, sponsored by Max B. E. Clarkson, Director of the Centre for Corporate Social Performance and Ethics and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canadian government), was such an event. Researchers and teachers in business and society have long sought a paradigm or integrating framework to guide research and integrate course offerings in the field. The guiding assumption of the Toronto Conference was that if stakeholder theory was examined in depth from several perspectives, in the context of a highly focused mini-conference, its emergence as a widely accepted paradigm for the field might be accelerated substantially. As the responses of several participants indicate, that assumption appears to have been a valid one. The essays and comments included in this section of Business & Society (the Journal of the International Association for Business and Society) constitute the proceedings of the conference from the reflective points of view of the participants.
After an introduction by Max Clarkson, Mark Starik responds to the question: What is a "stakeholder"? Then several participants--Phil Cochran, Tom Jones, Donna Wood, Tom Donaldson and Lee Preston, and Michael Deck--focus on stakeholder theory as theory, including its descriptive/empirical, instrumental, and normative aspects. These contributions are followed by a group of essays on various implications of stakeholder theory provided by Steve Wartick, Len Brooks, Phil Cochran, Denis Collins, and Jim Weber. Jeanne Logsdon then offers a perspective on linking stakeholder theory to the measurement of corporate performance, another important theme in the business and society field. In the final essay, Archie Carroll assesses the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats inherent in stakeholder theory as currently understood.
Introduction by Max Clarkson
THE IDEA FOR A WORKSHOP ON STAKEHOLDER THEORY
On May 20-21, 1993, the Centre for Corporate Social Performance and Ethics of the Faculty of Management of the University of Toronto hosted an invitational workshop on "The Stakeholder Theory of the Corporation and the Management of Ethics in the Workplace." This workshop was made possible by a grant in 1992 of $15,000...