Network Approach and Stakeholder Management

Recent economic crises show that enterprises cannot be managed focusing only on economic values instead managers should acknowledge their own enterprises' responsibilities toward the society as a whole. Stakeholder Management Theory can help managers accomplishing this very same daunting task. This theory demands managers to reckon the reciprocal influences linking other social actors to the enterprise activities and to understand the relative effects. While most of the works in this theory has been geared towards defining, identifying and managing each single dyadic relationship some other scholar have highlighted the need to focus on the stakeholder network to correctly assess each stakeholder's role and to fully grasp the long term effects enterprise's action will have. In this paper after a review of the main topics in stakeholder management theory, we classify the various approach to Stakeholder Management Theory to identify relevant theoretical contributions and to highlight how the theoretical gap can be crossed using the tools of Social Network Analysis and embracing the network approach to stakeholder management.