The stakeholder concept and public relations: tracking the parallel evolution of two literatures

Contemporary organisations rely on a wide range of publics or stakeholder groups in order to achieve their corporate objectives. The specific publics involved vary from organisation to organisation and situation to situation but typically include customers/clients, end users, shareholders/investors, employees, suppliers, governments, pressure groups, local communities and the media. Unresolved conflicts between organisations and any one or a number of these publics can seriously compromise the achieve ment of marketing and other corporate objectives. This paper examines the evolution of two separate bodies of literature which are essentially concerned with the same issues, but are framed by different academic and professional disciplines. It seems to be the case that management and marketing researchers often fail to take into account parallel literature from the discipline of public relations — even when purporting to offer an interdisciplinary approach. Equally, the public relations literature frequently fails to speak the language of business and defines such key business activities as marketing too narrowly.