Stakeholder Management & The Value of Human-Centred Corporate Objectives

We appreciate the opportunity to revisit the conversation about corporate objectives by responding to Goranvoa and Ryan's (2021) paper, which focuses on the trends that impact shareholders and their relationship with firms. We structure our response to the authors in the following way: First, we argue that the governance challenges raised by Goranova and Ryan, in so far as they impact firms, make a case for stakeholder management. Second, we point out two shareholder-centric trends the authors fail to describe, which also support stakeholder management. In the third section, we respond directly to the authors' claim that competitive advantage is a more useful focus for the corporate objective by 1) noting that the authors utilize a strawman conceptualization of stakeholder theory in their argument, 2) detailing the existing strategy literature that connects competitive advantage and stakeholder relationships, and 3) arguing that competitive advantage is not sufficient, it needs to be augmented with a stakeholder focused cooperative advantage. Together, our response to the authors and the larger stakeholder perspective on corporate objectives offer a much-needed human-centric lens on how people coordinate their actions to create and trade value.