All the mentioned thoughts and principles of the stakeholder concept are
known as normative stakeholder theory in literature. Normative Stakeholder theory
contains theories of how managers or stakeholders should act and should view the
purpose of organization, based on some ethical principle (Friedman 2006). Another
approach to the stakeholder concept is the so called descriptive stakeholder theory.
This theory is concerned with how managers and stakeholders actually behave and
how they view their actions and roles. The instrumental stakeholder theory deals with
how managers should act if they want to flavor and work for their own interests. In
some literature the own interest is conceived as the interests of the organization,
which is usually to maximize profit or to maximize shareholder value. This means if
managers treat stakeholders in line with the stakeholder concept the organization will
be more successful in the long run. Donaldson and Preston (1995) have made this
three-way categorization of approaches to the stakeholder concept kind of famous.
2.1. The stakeholder concept – popular and trendy