IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/eurman/v34y2016i4p374-385.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Enterprise strategy concept, measurement, and validation: Integrating stakeholder engagement into the firm's strategic architecture

Author

Listed:
  • Vracheva, Veselina
  • Judge, William Q.
  • Madden, Timothy

Abstract

A firm's enterprise strategy is its overarching strategic orientation, addressing questions regarding its general purpose and the specific nature of its relationships with stakeholders along two dimensions: (a) scope, which represents the range of stakeholders the organization attempts to serve, and (b) type, which represents the general motivation behind stakeholder initiatives. The corporate social responsibility literature has played an important role in bringing a concern with stakeholder issues; however, this literature does not provide a systematic means of integrating these concerns into the firm's strategic architecture. Enterprise strategy offers a unifying construct, grounded in strategic considerations of both the social and economic demands placed on an organization. However, despite its conceptual importance to strategy and social issues, this construct is empirically underdeveloped. This study develops a reliable and valid measure of the enterprise strategy construct to advance the field's understanding of this increasingly important stream of research. Based on computer-aided text analyses of company letters to stakeholders, we systematically identify terminology that reflects the scope and type of a firm's espoused enterprise strategy. Overall, these data support four fundamental orientations of enterprise strategy: (1) narrow defensive, (2) narrow offensive, (3) broad defensive, and (4) broad offensive.

Suggested Citation

  • Vracheva, Veselina & Judge, William Q. & Madden, Timothy, 2016. "Enterprise strategy concept, measurement, and validation: Integrating stakeholder engagement into the firm's strategic architecture," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 34(4), pages 374-385.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:eurman:v:34:y:2016:i:4:p:374-385
    DOI: 10.1016/j.emj.2015.12.005
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263237315001292
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.emj.2015.12.005?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Isabelle Maignan & David A Ralston, 2002. "Corporate Social Responsibility in Europe and the U.S.: Insights from Businesses' Self-presentations," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 33(3), pages 497-514, September.
    2. Kristel Buysse & Alain Verbeke, 2003. "Proactive environmental strategies: a stakeholder management perspective," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(5), pages 453-470, May.
    3. Mahoney, Lois S. & Thorne, Linda & Cecil, Lianna & LaGore, William, 2013. "A research note on standalone corporate social responsibility reports: Signaling or greenwashing?," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 24(4), pages 350-359.
    4. Amable, Bruno, 2003. "The Diversity of Modern Capitalism," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199261147.
    5. Donal Crilly, 2013. "Recasting Enterprise Strategy: Towards Stakeholder Research That Matters to General Managers," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 50(8), pages 1427-1447, December.
    6. Whitley, Richard, 2007. "Business Systems and Organizational Capabilities: The Institutional Structuring of Competitive Competences," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199205189.
    7. Dubbink, G.W. & Graafland, J.J. & Liederkerke, L., 2008. "CSR: Transparency and the role of intermediate organisations," MPRA Paper 17892, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Donal Crilly & Pamela Sloan, 2012. "Enterprise logic: explaining corporate attention to stakeholders from the ‘inside‐out’," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(10), pages 1174-1193, October.
    9. Clarkson, Peter M. & Li, Yue & Richardson, Gordon D. & Vasvari, Florin P., 2008. "Revisiting the relation between environmental performance and environmental disclosure: An empirical analysis," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 33(4-5), pages 303-327.
    10. Rugman, Alan & Hodgetts, Richard, 2001. "The end of global strategy," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 333-343, August.
    11. Jay J. Janney & Steve Gove, 2011. "Reputation and Corporate Social Responsibility Aberrations, Trends, and Hypocrisy: Reactions to Firm Choices in the Stock Option Backdating Scandal," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 48(7), pages 1562-1585, November.
    12. Dror Etzion & Fabrizio Ferraro, 2010. "The Role of Analogy in the Institutionalization of Sustainability Reporting," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 21(5), pages 1092-1107, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pan, Xin & Chen, Xuanjin & Li, Xibao, 2019. "To fit in or stand out? How optimal distinctiveness in technological diversification affects firm performance," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 67-77.
    2. Finsterwalder, Jörg, 2018. "A 360-degree view of actor engagement in service co-creation," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 276-278.
    3. Patrick Röhm & Andreas Köhn & Andreas Kuckertz & Hermann S. Dehnen, 2018. "A world of difference? The impact of corporate venture capitalists’ investment motivation on startup valuation," Journal of Business Economics, Springer, vol. 88(3), pages 531-557, May.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Silvia Romero & Silvia Ruiz & Belen Fernandez‐Feijoo, 2019. "Sustainability reporting and stakeholder engagement in Spain: Different instruments, different quality," Business Strategy and the Environment, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 28(1), pages 221-232, January.
    2. Michelon, Giovanna & Pilonato, Silvia & Ricceri, Federica, 2015. "CSR reporting practices and the quality of disclosure: An empirical analysis," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 59-78.
    3. Samuel Drempetic & Christian Klein & Bernhard Zwergel, 2020. "The Influence of Firm Size on the ESG Score: Corporate Sustainability Ratings Under Review," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 167(2), pages 333-360, November.
    4. Domenico Sardanelli & Francesca Conte & Agostino Vollero & Alfonso Siano, 2021. "CSR signals: exploring their use in controversial industries," Italian Journal of Marketing, Springer, vol. 2021(3), pages 249-266, September.
    5. Xiaobei Liang & Xiaojuan Hu & Hu Meng, 2020. "Truly Sustainability or Hypocrisy: The Effects of Corporate Sustainable Orientation on Consumers’ Quality Perception and Trust Based on Evidence from China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(7), pages 1-20, March.
    6. Linda Thorne & Lois S. Mahoney & Kristen Gregory & Susan Convery, 2017. "A Comparison of Canadian and U.S. CSR Strategic Alliances, CSR Reporting, and CSR Performance: Insights into Implicit–Explicit CSR," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 143(1), pages 85-98, June.
    7. Yuanyuan Zhang & Zhe Ouyang, 2021. "Doing well by doing good: How corporate environmental responsibility influences corporate financial performance," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 28(1), pages 54-63, January.
    8. Loris Guery & Anne Stevenot & Geoffrey T. Wood & Chris Brewster, 2017. "The Impact of Private Equity on Employment: The Consequences of Fund Country of Origin—New Evidence from France," Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 56(4), pages 723-750, October.
    9. Hannah Charlotte Joos, 2019. "Influences on managerial perceptions of stakeholder salience: two decades of research in review," Management Review Quarterly, Springer, vol. 69(1), pages 3-37, February.
    10. Christopher Groening & Vamsi K. Kanuri, 2018. "Investor Reactions to Concurrent Positive and Negative Stakeholder News," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 149(4), pages 833-856, June.
    11. Ramona Zharfpeykan, 2021. "Representative account or greenwashing? Voluntary sustainability reports in Australia's mining/metals and financial services industries," Business Strategy and the Environment, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(4), pages 2209-2223, May.
    12. Ali Uyar & Simone Pizzi & Fabio Caputo & Cemil Kuzey & Abdullah S. Karaman, 2022. "Do shareholders reward or punish risky firms due to CSR reporting and assurance?," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(5), pages 1596-1620, July.
    13. Hannu Schadewitz & Mikael Niskala, 2010. "Communication via responsibility reporting and its effect on firm value in Finland," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 17(2), pages 96-106, March.
    14. Hans B. Christensen & Luzi Hail & Christian Leuz, 2021. "Mandatory CSR and sustainability reporting: economic analysis and literature review," Review of Accounting Studies, Springer, vol. 26(3), pages 1176-1248, September.
    15. Bouten, Lies & Everaert, Patricia, 2015. "Social and environmental reporting in Belgium: ‘Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés’," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 24-43.
    16. Mahoney, Lois S. & Thorne, Linda & Cecil, Lianna & LaGore, William, 2013. "A research note on standalone corporate social responsibility reports: Signaling or greenwashing?," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 24(4), pages 350-359.
    17. Eduardo Ortas & Igor Álvarez & Ainhoa Garayar, 2015. "The Environmental, Social, Governance, and Financial Performance Effects on Companies that Adopt the United Nations Global Compact," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 7(2), pages 1-25, February.
    18. Eugene Kang & Nguyen Bao Lam, 2023. "The impact of environmental disclosure on initial public offering underpricing: Sustainable development in Singapore," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 30(1), pages 119-133, January.
    19. Gun Jea Yu & Seung-Yoon Rhee, 2015. "Effect of R&D Collaboration with Research Organizations on Innovation: The Mediation Effect of Environmental Performance," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 7(9), pages 1-19, August.
    20. Giovanni Zampone & Giuseppe Sannino & Isabel‐María García‐Sánchez, 2023. "Exploring the moderating effects of corporate social responsibility performance under mimetic pressures. An international analysis," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 30(1), pages 53-65, January.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:eurman:v:34:y:2016:i:4:p:374-385. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/115/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.