WHERE DO STAKEHOLDERS COME FROM?

Stakeholders self-identify with a firm when they believe they affect and are themselves affected by the actions of a firm. When a firm is already operating and engaging in actions that are more or less consistent with its business model, stakeholders can evalu-ate whether they are affected or whether they affect the firm. However, how do stake-holders self-identify in the earliest stages of an entrepreneurial endeavor when a firm has yet to exist and the outcomes of products and services and their effects on stake-holders are unknown? In these early, uncertain stages, human cooperation is needed for new ideas, language to describe these ideas, products and services, and entrepre-neurial endeavors emerge. Using the theory of common ground helps scholars examine how everyday human conversations, cooperation, and social interactions can motivate a subset of individuals to self-identify as stakeholders in relation to ideas, language, future products and services, and even the endeavor before outcomes can be known. These endeavors, the negotiated construction of language and mutual coherence, exist because of an emerging stakeholder collective identity. Finally, the paper proposes that how an endeavor is organized is the manifestation of the unique path-dependent pro-cesses the stakeholders have gone through.

Automated summary

Stakeholders self-identify with a firm when they believe they affect and are themselves affected by the actions of a firm. However, how do stakeholders self-identify in the earliest stages of an entrepreneurial endeavor when a firm has yet to exist and the outcomes of products and services and their effects on stakeholders are unknown? Using the theory of common ground helps scholars examine how everyday human conversations, cooperation, and social interactions can motivate individuals to self-identify as stakeholders even before outcomes can be known. The paper proposes that how an endeavor is organized is the manifestation of the unique path-dependent processes the stakeholders have gone through.