The Politics of Stakeholder Influence in Corporate Environmental Governance

In this article I analyse how the multinational oil company Shell has responded to the increasing institutional pressures (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) related to corporate environmental governance. The corporate culture in Shell appears favourable (Hoffman, 2001) towards the adoption of corporate environmental governance practices. The Shell top management is to this end appearing sincere in the way they monitor (Meyer and Rowan, 1977) the progress in giving secondary stakeholders (Clarkson, 1995) access to environmental information and to environmental decision-making in Shell. Based on the Shell case I contribute in this article to descriptive stakeholder engagement theory by conceptualising a number of new internal influence strategies that engaged secondary stakeholders can use in their new face-to-face interactions with the corporations. These internal stakeholder influence strategies should be seen as adding to the list of external stakeholder influence strategies (e.g. Frooman, 1999) that secondary stakeholders can use in their traditional role of operating from the outside.