What then of Chevron and Shell? In our opening chapter, we discussed the struggles of these two massive and influential global oil companies to engage in meaningful, useful, and impactful CR. While each was trying to do right by its desire simultaneously to help itself and the world around it, both companies found themselves buffeted by the uncertain storms of increasingly influential and competing stakeholder demands and actions. These stakeholder reactions derailed company efforts, literally in the case of Shell, at being socially responsible. In other words, the actions taken by these companies in Barendrecht and the Yadana Valley resonated far beyond – their success in creating value for the company, as well as for the world at large, turned out to be contingent on the thoughts, feelings, and actions of important stakeholders.

In this book, we have made the case for why all companies, large and small, local and global, must ground their CR strategies in a sound and thorough understanding of their impact on two key stakeholder groups: consumers and employees. In making our case, we have drawn on academic research in this domain to proffer an individual stakeholder perspective on CR, providing a sense for when, why, and how stakeholders respond to a company's initiatives. In particular, we have presented a stakeholder psychology model of CR, which underscores the need for three psychological levers – Understanding, Usefulness, and Unity – to work in unison in order for CR to create maximal stakeholder value. The power behind these levers is, in turn, impacted by several stakeholder- and company-specific features, which amplify or dampen the extent to which they create CR value for both the stakeholder and the company.