WEF Stakeholder Capitalism

Stakeholder capitalism is a management approach where a company works toward a primary goal or mission that benefits all stakeholders. These stakeholders include customers, employees, suppliers, communities, shareholders and more and are central to business planning.

The stakeholder theory is a theory of organizational management and business ethics that accounts for multiple constituencies impacted by business entities like employees, suppliers, local communities, creditors, and others. It addresses morals and values in managing an organization, such as those related to corporate social responsibility, market economy, and social contract theory.

The stakeholder view of strategy integrates a resource-based view and a market-based view, and adds a socio-political level. One common version of stakeholder theory seeks to define the specific stakeholders of a company (the normative theory of stakeholder identification) and then examine the conditions under which managers treat these parties as stakeholders (the descriptive theory of stakeholder salience).

In fields such as law, management, and human resources, stakeholder theory succeeded in challenging the usual analysis frameworks, by suggesting that stakeholders' needs should be put at the beginning of any action. Some authors such as Geoffroy Murat tried to apply stakeholder's theory to irregular warfare.

Stakeholder theory has seen growing uptake in higher education in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. One influential definition defines a stakeholder in the context of higher education as anyone with a legitimate interest in education who thereby acquires a right to intervene. Studies of higher education first began to recognize students as stakeholders in 1975. External stakeholders may include employers. In Europe, the rise of stakeholder regimes has arisen from the shift of higher education from a government-run bureaucracy to modern systems in which the government's role involves more monitoring than direct control.