In the past view years the concept of stakeholders has boomed a lot and
academics wrote a lot about the topic. But also non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), regulators, media, business and policymakers are thinking about the concept and are trying to implement it in some way or the other. Most contributions
are particularly about the normative principle. They promote the vision of the
company and the role of managers whose objective is mainly to maximize
shareholder value in order to be sustainable. However, this perspective seems to be
giving way to that business has more and broader responsibilities. Those are best
defined in terms of the stakeholder approach. Another reason why this topic is very
popular and contested among theorists is that there is quit an amount of contesting
literature around which is tried to be replaced and up dated. Along with the popularity
has come a profusion of different overlapping approaches to the stakeholder
concept. This has led to a confusing situation in this sector. In order to deal with this conceptual con fusion a number of classification schemes have been developed. The
most famous literature contribution which makes the distinction between normative
and strategic or analytical stakeholder theory was done by Donaldson and Preston in
1995. We will discuss this concept of stakeholders in more detail later on in our
paper.