Stakeholder profile definition and salience measurement with fuzzy logic and visual analytics applied to corporate social responsibility case study

Several stakeholder categorisation frameworks have been proposed in the literature. Although the triple intersecting circles representation -of power, urgency and legitimacy - is the most used, it has the limitation of any categorisation technique: a stakeholder can only belong to a predefined category and there can be no indication of a personalised profile that had not been identified a priori. To solve these issues, we propose a new framework based on fuzzy logic and visual analytics, which is capable of precisely assessing stakeholders' importance by indicating the exact degree of membership to a particular interest group. As an illustrative case study, this framework has been applied to construct and visualise the profile of key extractive sector stakeholders and measure their salience in a corporate social responsibility context. Results indicate that management and community have the highest salience. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.