A balancing act: Stakeholder enablement and empowerment towards multiple stakeholder engagement

Abstract

The increasing pluralistic business environment, where stakeholders continually challenge the treatise of organisational primacy, places more pressure on organisations to address and prioritise diverse stakeholder expectations. Stakeholders are central to the success of organisations, which necessitates engagement, transparency and responses to stakeholder concerns. Despite consensus in existing literature on the significance of stakeholder engagement, no common understanding on what it entails exists. Another gap is to approach stakeholder engagement from multiple stakeholder vantage points and to explore the role of the strategic communication professional in facilitating stakeholder engagement. The digital network revolution, among others, has brought about a “collaborative turn” that allows innovative and engaging opportunities to obtain valuable information from stakeholders through interactive conversations. These forces resulted in a paradigmatic shift in strategic communication where emergent processes and the rejection of linearity become prevalent. The role of the strategic communication professional is to facilitate a stakeholder engagement strategy that elicits dialogue, consultation and reciprocal relationships that are evolutionary and mutually defined. Based on this contextualisation, this paper proposes a theoretical, conceptual framework for multiple stakeholder engagement by drawing from the principles of polyphonic strategic communication. Depending on the controllability of voices, a polyphonic communication perspective for multiple stakeholder engagement allows interplay between a centralised strategic communication approach through stakeholder enablement and a more decentralised communication approach to elicit stakeholder empowerment. This paper serves as foundation for further empirical validation of the proposed multiple stakeholder engagement framework and emergent, multi-voiced approaches in strategic communication.