mba education and stakeholder theory

Teppo

Yesterday’s WSJ has a short article about how several business schools are revamping their curriculum to make it more interdisciplinary – see here. This quote caught my eye (it is referring to changes being made at Yale):

Instead of the traditional compartmentalized courses, students this fall will learn the basics from the viewpoint of a company’s external stakeholders and internal constituents. These “organizational perspectives” courses will include customer, competitor, investor, employee, innovator, the state and society, the ” operations engine,” and the sourcing and managing of funds.

It is interesting to see the ‘stakeholder’ language making its way into business school education.

I have always struggled with the “theory” part of stakeholder theory. What exactly is the theory and its claims? My best reading of this literature is that it presently is a hodgepodge of competing claims about the role that suppliers, society, government, the environment (external constituents), and, employees and managers (internal constituents) should play in organizational behavior. I suppose everyone has their favorite stakeholder they would like to pitch. But, is that the theory? What else is there?