Stakeholder Representation and Salience: A Discussion of "Who or What Really Counts" Based on the Analysis of Corporate Sustainability Reports

The purpose of this paper is to determine the stakeholder salience status, and to investigate whether stakeholder salience appears to be correlated with the degree to which companies give priority to competing stakeholder claims, as depicted in their sustainability reports. The study uses an interpretive content-based analysis of social and environmental disclosures made by companies, to investigate stakeholder salience. From a theoretical perspective, this paper is framed by two largely overlapping theories: stakeholder theory and stakeholder salience theory. Stakeholder theory is of particular use in providing a basic guidance to understand that companies try to refer to several stakeholder views when deciding what information to disclose. The paper draws largely on the stakeholder salience framework, which is seen as a "skeletal" theory that is "fleshed out" by an exploration of the stakeholder salience dimensions as shown in the companies' sustainability reports. The results provide evidence for the existence of a relationship between stakeholder salience, the amount of attributes possessed and the type of attributes held by the stakeholder. In particular, we find that many of the claims posed by definitive and dominant stakeholders are addressed by means of corporate sustainability reporting. Results also show that, on average, the stakeholders who possess power score highest on salience, followed by those who possess legitimacy, and only then by those who possess urgency.