Stakeholder Relationships Management: Effects on Strategy Definition in Social Enterprises - Some Evidences from a Fair Trade Organization in Naples

Abstract:     
Managing relationships with all the stakeholders is a central issues in Social Enterprises' management; these enterprises, operating across the faded boundary between for profit and not for profit sectors, overcome having scarce resources trough relationships with other organizations in order to reach success in the society.

In our paper we have studied the capability of this class of enterprises to create and sustain relationships under the Stakeholder Theory's concepts and principles of linking enterprise's survival to its management ability of considering those actors that affects or are affected by enterprise actions in their decision making processes. Our empirical studies has focused on the social network, defined trough a snowballing process (degree = 3), insisting on a Social Cooperative in Naples with two world shops and one wholesale warehouse.

Each node in the Social Cooperative's egonetwork has been tested for two classical measures of Social Network Analysis (Wasserman and Faust, 1994; Scott, 1991): centrality and proximity. These tests have been later used to compare actors and to analyze if more central or more homophilous actors, those who share similar interests, are better able to influence the social cooperative.

Our paper highlights that homophily can better explain stakeholders' effects on the outcomes of strategic decision making processes.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 28

Keywords: Stakeholder Management, Social Enterprises, Social Network Analysis, Strategy Definition, Fair Trade Organization, Snowballing Sampling, Egonetwork

JEL Classification: L31, M19

working papers series