By Sinziana Dorobantu, Abhishek Gupte, and Sam Yuqing Li
Edward Elgar Publishing | February 2022
https://doi.org/10.4337/9781839105340.00011
Dorobantu, S., Gupte, A., & Li, S. Y. 2022. Stakeholder governance: aligning stakeholder interests on complex sustainability issues. Handbook on the Business of Sustainability: The Organization, Implementation, and Practice of Sustainable
Growth. G. George, M. Haas, H. Joshi, A. McGahan & P. Tracey (eds.). Edward
Elgar Publishing. pp. 63-83.
Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022
Academic research on sustainability has grown at an impressive pace over the past three decades. Scholars have offered important insights into the drivers of firms' adoption of sustainability policies and practices, while also highlighting some of the factors that impede adoption in firms around the world. Our brief review of this research reveals an important emerging theme: while firm-level efforts to become more sustainable are increasing and welcome by many of their stakeholders, the impact of these efforts is limited. Firms tend to adopt sustainability policies and practices when the interests of (most of) their stakeholders are aligned. Increased recognition of "win-win" situations has driven most sustainability initiatives in different industries. Yet, stakeholder interests are rarely aligned on very complex sustainability issues. Thus, when facing such complex issues, firm-level efforts to address them are largely symbolic or limited in scope, and so is their impact. We argue that stakeholder governance - formal and informal rules and norms that allow firms and their stakeholders to align incentives through jointly designed rules to coordinate, monitor, and sanction behavior - is necessary to address complex issues. We suggest that future research seeks to understand the emergence and the effectiveness of various types of stakeholder governance.
Abhishek Gupte is an Assistant Professor in the Organisational Behaviour Area at the Indian School of Business (ISB). His research interests include occupations, knowledge work & expertise, and technological change. He is broadly interested in exploring how professionals and expert workers think about the changing nature of work they do and the tools they use. He is specifically interested in studying how occupational members attempt to reorganise around technologies such as artificial intelligence and what that means for their skill and expertise.
Abhishek received his PhD in Management and Organisations from New York University. He holds a MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta and an undergraduate degree in Engineering from Gujarat University. Prior to joining academia, Professor Gupte worked with the International Finance Corporation (the private sector arm of the World Bank) in various emerging and developed markets such as India, US, Singapore and Myanmar (Burma), primarily in making equity and debt investments in companies providing low-income financial services. He also briefly worked in Credit Suisse’s investment team in India.
