Stakeholder theory has much to say about strategic management. The stakeholder perspective offers an alternative that can enhance the economic perspectives of modern strategic management. We have already argued in Chapter 1 that the idea of stakeholder theory is consistent with strategy theories such as Michael Porter's industrial economics and Oliver Williamson's transactions cost theory. The body of work that we have called “stakeholder theory” was developed during approximately the same time frame as the economic approaches that are more mainstream today.

Although the stakeholder approach to strategic management has influenced thinking in the field, there are numerous interpretations of it, the results of which are that it sometimes still struggles for acceptance among mainstream strategic management scholars. For example, Michael Hitt (2005), a widely acknowledged expert in the field, reviewed the development of the strategic management discipline and highlighted important areas for future research and discussion. His review suggested that the most important theoretical perspectives include industrial organization economics, corporate strategy and diversification, transaction cost economics, evolutionary economics, resource dependence, and the behavioral theory of the firm. Within these perspectives, he mentioned dozens of individual topics such as agency theory, corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, international strategy, and the resource-based view. Not once did he mention the stakeholder perspective, although he did refer to the closely related concept of network strategies (Dyer and Singh 1998; Gulati and Singh 1998; Ireland, Hitt, and Vaidyanath 2002).