Paper Title
Leaders Taking Ownership of Stakeholder Relationships: Towards a Metamodern Perspective
Abstract
The stakeholder concept originally introduced by more than 30 years ago is still relevant to business leaders today
and has been subjected to an impressive array of developments, approaches and applications by various researchers. The paper
uses an interpretivistic research methodology which stems from an epistemological position which refers to the critical
application of analyses of various academic traditions to study the social world and sets out to makes two main contributions:
firstly, to provide a brief theoretical overview of modernism and postmodernism and introduce a new perspective namely
metamodernism; secondly the paper contextualises the origin and development of the stakeholder concept within a
metamodern paradigm highlighting the important and undeniable role of managers in stakeholder relationship management.
From this perspective it is posited that leaders should take ownership of stakeholder relationship strategies in their
organisations through active participation and communication to strive for an organisational culture which supports the
ideological concept of mutually beneficial stakeholder relationships. This should arguably be done from a metamodern
paradigm in which it is accepted that a paradigm oscillating between the principles of modernism and postmodernism would
ultimately ensure mutually beneficial and effective stakeholder relationship management.
Index Terms — Modernism, Postmodernism and Metamodernism, Stakeholder Relationships, Stakeholder Relationship
Management.