Stakeholder analysis - scope of application in business study

Stakeholder analysis has a broad scope of applications. To use it, you first have to understand what is stakeholder. It is essentially a party that has a vested interest in your company's certain initiative or business activity (or even function). In a stakeholder analysis, thus, you need to identify the stakeholders involved, what are their expectations, their power, their interests and their preferred modes of communication, etc. You also need to pay attention to how they are related to each other as they are not independent groups of people.

Stakeholder analysis are used in the following ways:

1. To explore a problem-context, for example, to facilitate the construction of a rich picture of a problem situation.
2. To conduct an ethical analysis, see, for example, Spinello (1997).
3. To surface the strategic assumptions underlying a strategy, see Mason and Mitroff (1981).
4. To evaluate the performance of a business or a business function, see for example Sirgy (2002). (re: http://www.springerlink.com/content/4f21hkl91mbp2mem/.)

There is also a debate in corporate governance on shareholder-oriented corporate governance vs stakeholder-oriented corporate governance.

Due to it broad scope of application in business study, stakeholder analysis is very often a useful analytical approach in business assignment works and dissertation works. Therefore, it is worthwhile to study it at some length.

References

1. Mason, R.O. and Mitroff, I.I. (1981) Challenging Strategic Planning Assumptions, Wiley, New York.
2. On rich picture building: http://systems.open.ac.uk/materials/T552/
3. On stakeholder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder
4. On stakeholder analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_analysis
5. Spinello, R.A. (1997) Case Studies in Information and Computer Ethics, Prentice Hall.