How Stakeholders Engage Companies in DIalogue on Misconduct: A Configurational Perspective on Stakeholder Salience

This paper explores what stakeholder attributes or combinations of attributes are sufficient for stakeholder salience. We argue that configurational theorizing is opportune for such an investigation. Empirically, we use original data on complaints of misconduct directed against multinational enterprises between 2011 and 2018. Adopting a set-theoretic approach, we explore the stakeholder attributes or combinations of attributes for corporate engagement in dialogue on issue of misconduct. We find that different combinations of attributes are relevant for stakeholder salience, including combinations in which stakeholders do not possess high levels of power or urgency, showing that stakeholder salience neither relies solely on one single attribute nor depends solely on the accumulation of all attributes. The findings demonstrate the value of theorizing stakeholder salience as configurational in explaining the relationship between stakeholder attributes and stakeholder salience.