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Stakeholders, Identity and Reputation 57

more detailed discussions of strategic and organizational issues around corporate
communications practice in the remainder of the book.

Stakeholders and strategic management

The chapter starts by outlining how stakeholder management is now central to the
corporate strategies, operations and communications of many, if not all, contempo-
rary organizations. Organizations, it seems, have increasingly realized that now more
than ever they need to attend to a whole range of stakeholder groups successfully for
their own as well as for society’s sake, and in order to avoid certain stakeholder
groups causing a stir or raising issues that are potentially damaging to their reputa-
tions.This chapter is about this centrality of stakeholder management to the strate-
gic management of the organization, and the role of corporate communications
within it.The nature of stakeholder management is outlined together with its impact
on the ways in which organizations are run.
A stakeholder model of strategic management, as was already suggested in
Chapter 2, requires a broader and management oriented communications function
in comparison to the craft and tactical approaches that have gone before. Corporate
communications has arisen as this strategic management function and is equipped
with the relevant concepts and tools for gaining acceptance of the organization and
its operations with important stakeholder groups.The central concepts of corporate
identity and reputation management are presented as one important way in which
corporate communications, and the practitioners working within it, can guide orga-
nizations in their dealings with various stakeholders and harness the strategic inter-
ests of the organization at large.

3.2 Understanding stakeholder management
and corporate communications

The previous chapter briefly mentioned how a broader stakeholder conception of
the environment permeated the business world in the early 1990s.This stakeholder
perspective is the result of a powerful restructuring trend that swayed through the
business world in the 1980s and 1990s, and effectively established the view that every
organization is dependent upon a number of stake-holding constituents instead of
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just a rather select group of financial investors or customers alone. Heightened compe-
tition, greater societal claims for ‘corporate citizenship’, and pressures from the side
of governments and the international community continue to suggest to corpora-
tions that the stakeholder perspective is the preferred option, if not the standard, for
doing business in the first decade of the new millennium and beyond.A raft of stake-
holder initiatives and schemes at the industry, national and transnational levels has
arisen to this effect – including Green Papers of the European Union (Promoting
a European Framework for Corporate Social Responsibility 2001, Partnership for
a New Organization of Work 1997), UK Business and Society Report 2002
(Department of Trade and Industry 2002), UN World Summit for Sustainable
Development ( Johannesburg 2002), UN Global Compact (2004), the Global