Business Stakeholder Engagement

Activity Three: Business Stakeholder Engagement (instructions to students)

Seminar Objectives

Students will:

• Explore examples of where business relationships with stakeholders to examine the importance of Power, Legitimacy and Urgency.
• Critically appraise engagement with stakeholders through examining business partnership examples.
• Understand and appraise the Business Stakeholder Engagement Practices of their future potential employers.

Preparation

Students must read Crane & Matten, Chapter 5, page 201 (Managing Stakeholder Relations at bottom of page onwards) to page 210 before attending the Block Three.

Particular attention should be given to p.202 on understanding Mitchell et al.’s (1997) key relationship attributes and p.206-207 section on “problems with stakeholder collaboration”).

The Mitchell et al. (1997) article is also on this week’s directed reading (available on Bb) and it is strongly recommended that student’s read the article before attending the Block Three.

Tip:         Try skim reading the paper’s headings first. Check out the references, tables and figures. Now read only the first and last sentence of each paragraph.  Finally fully read the Abstract followed by the Conclusions.  Before reading anything else … do you now have a rough idea of the paper and its contents?  (This technique is used by many PhD students to rapidly assimilate the ‘gist’ of a paper, so that they know whether to read it in detail.)

You then need to go to the following websites and explore and research four examples of business relationships with stakeholders which we will be discussing in class.

1. “The Children’s Safe Drinking Water Initiative” is an initiative of Procter & Gamble and the US Center for Disease Control to develop low-cost water purification sachets (a video demonstration is available via the Pur Packet link).
   http://www.csdw.org/csdw/home.shtml

1. “One Laptop Per Child”, is an initiative aiming to provide each child with a rugged, open-source-software-using, internet-accessing, laptop.
   http://laptop.org/en/ 

1. “TechSoup” helps NGOs meet their technology needs by providing free information, resources and support. Microsoft is a partner.
   http://www.techsoup.org

1. Kidsmart is the collaborative effort between IBM and its client companies to provide community investment; in this case by making computers installed with educational software available to pre-school children.
   http://www.kidsmartearlylearning.org/ 

You are then to identify a company that you would like to work for (for example, Tui Travel Plc, DHL, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Google etc.) when you graduate. This should be your “dream job” (aspire for success!).

You are to research:

1. What stakeholder engagement they currently engaged in,

1. And then, identify areas they are not currently engaged in.

Outline

This activity is aiming to develop your awareness of business ethical partnerships and stakeholder engagement, and in particular to engage you in thinking about the stakeholder’s who your possible future employer may be interested in.  Any interviewer of you for a graduate position will expect you to be fully aware of the company’s engagement activities with stakeholder groups (if the company has any).  Are you currently prepared to answer those questions in a job interview? Companies are often very proud of their stakeholder engagement activities and expect candidates to be knowledgeable of them; if you can’t and another candidate can, that could cost you your “dream job”. Therefore an aim of this seminar is for you to engage in some job-related ethical research which may be extremely useful.