Alkhafaji presents the fundamental concepts of corporate governance and suggests a new approach to the subject that focuses on the stakeholder. As Alkhafaji demonstrates, corporate governance has moved far from traditional concerns with purely business issues like growth and profitability and now includes public issues such as pollution, equal employment opportunities, insider trading, and criminal conduct. Using data from his own empirical studies, Alkhafaji argues that the conventional board model no longer functions as originally intended. He analyzes potential management reaction to alternative forms of governance bodies and concludes that the data suggest a stakeholder board would be best suited to current American conditions. Organized into five parts, each of which builds upon concepts discussed in the preceding chapters, the volume begins by discussing the concept of the company and the changing environment in which it operates. In the second section, Alkhafaji addresses corporate governance in specific terms and includes survey data showing management's reaction to traditional and nontraditional forms of corporate governance. Part three looks at corporate governance in the context of social responsibility, ethics, and business-government relations, while the following chapters discuss the ongoing restructuring of American business and its relation to corporate governance. The final section examines the role played by corporate governance in strategic management. Numerous tables, figures, and models support points made in the text.

Managing for Stakeholders: Survival, Reputation, and Success, the culmination of twenty years of research, interviews, and observations in the workplace, makes a major new contribution to management thinking and practice. Current ways of thinking about business and stakeholder management usually ask the Value Allocation Question: How should we distribute the burdens and benefits of corporate activities among stakeholders? Managing for Stakeholders, however, helps leaders develop a mindset that instead asks the Value Creation Question: How can we create as much value as possible for all of our stakeholders?Business is about how customers, suppliers, employees, financiers (stockholders, bondholders, banks, etc.), communities, the media, and managers interact and create value. World-renowned management scholar R. Edward Freeman and his coauthors outline ten concrete principles and seven practical techniques for managing stakeholder relationships in order to ensure a firm’s survival, reputation, and success. Managing for Stakeholders is a revolutionary book that will change not only how managers do business but also how they recognize and evaluate business opportunities that would otherwise be invisible.

In 1984, R. Edward Freeman published his landmark book, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, a work that set the agenda for what we now call stakeholder theory. In the intervening years, the literature on stakeholder theory has become vast and diverse. This book examines this body of research and assesses its relevance for our understanding of modern business. Beginning with a discussion of the origins and development of stakeholder theory, it shows how this corpus of theory has influenced a variety of different fields, including strategic management, finance, accounting, management, marketing, law, health care, public policy, and environment. It also features in-depth discussions of two important areas that stakeholder theory has helped to shape and define: business ethics and corporate social responsibility. The book concludes by arguing that we should re-frame capitalism in the terms of stakeholder theory so that we come to see business as creating value for stakeholders.

For the past two decades corporate governance reform in Europe has been guided by the ‘shareholder value’ model of the firm. That model has been discredited as one of the major causes of the financial and economic crisis. In a new book published by the ETUI an alternative approach to corporate governance is presented by members of the GOODCORP network of researchers and trade unionists. This new approach, entitled the Sustainable Company, draws on both traditional ‘stakeholder’ models of the firm and newer concerns with sustainability. The main elements of the Sustainable Company and the institutions needed to support it are presented. Key themes in the book are the need for worker ‘voice’ in corporate governance and for a binding legislative framework to promote sustainability. Individual chapters deal with the issues of worker involvement, employee shareholding, sustainability-oriented remuneration, international framework agreements, NGO-trade union relationships, reforming financial regulation and carbon taxes and emissions-trading schemes.

It has been widely recognized that corporate governance can play a key role in improving corporate performance. When implementing various governance mechanisms, however, corporations must address a fundamental question: should corporate governance focus on protecting the interests of only shareholders or should corporate governance expand its focus and consider the interests of other groups? While agency theory asserts that the exclusive focus of corporate governance is to ensure the interests of shareholders, stakeholder theory proposes that corporations should serve all groups or individuals who have a stake in the corporation. Like that of other industries, corporate governance of media industries has generally followed the agency model of maximizing shareholder wealth. But the weakness and failure of such a model in recent years suggest that it may be meaningful to approach the issue from an alternative, stakeholder perspective. Focusing on 75 publicly traded media companies continuously filed with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission between 2004 and 2007, this dissertation examined the effects of ownership structure, board structure, compensation structure, and takeover control on corporate performance. It found that stakeholder-oriented governance mechanisms, including reduced institutional ownership, increased insider ownership, enlarged board representativeness, increased board interlocks, fixed compensation for CEO and directors, and certain takeover controls like dual class shares and poison pills, were positively associated with media firms' performance. This dissertation thus suggested that corporate governance of media companies go beyond the pure shareholder-maximization goal and consider the interests of such stakeholders as employees, audience, and local communities because the stakeholder approach was not only socially desirable but also economically efficient. This dissertation theoretically contributed: (1) to the media management literatures through offering a systematic examination on the governance mechanisms of media companies; (2) to the stakeholder perspective through opening up a new and empirical line of inquiry; and (3) to the corporate governance research through challenging its traditional shareholder-maximizing paradigm. Moreover, this dissertation had important implications for media practitioners and regulators since it proposed and verified a number of better governance mechanisms that can be put into practice.

'Stakeholders' includes a discussion of the concept of 'the stakeholder' in fields such as management, corporate governance, accounting and finance, strategy, sociology, and politics, and in public policy debate. Practical examples are used to examine a range of stakeholders.