Democratic Stakeholder Representativeness

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

  • Sarah Margaretha Jastram
  • Zara Berberyan

Stakeholder theory has been advocating the inclusion of affected parties in organizational processes to increase the legitimacy and effectiveness of organizational governance. However, organizations can fail to achieve these objectives if there is no systematic link between stakeholders and their constituency. Based on democratic notions of representation, we argue that democratic stakeholder representativeness is an essential virtue of stakeholder governance processes. We conceptually derive authorization and accountability as normative elements of stakeholder representativeness and operationalize the construct by proposing empirical indicators of stakeholder representativeness as well as procedural guidance on their adoption in a practical governance context. By doing so, we contribute to the advancement of practical stakeholder governance as well as to the public management and organizational theory literature by specifying and operationalizing a construct that had previously been only vaguely defined.

Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Public Administration Research and Theory
Volume33
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)647-660
Number of pages14
ISSN1053-1858
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01.10.2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Public Management Research Association. All rights reserved.

DOI