The Importance of Understanding the Stakeholders in Industry Actions - a Corporate Social Responsibility Perspective

A great pressure has arisen lately in the business world by movements like "occupy Wall Street", or more concerning economic crises started in 2008. Due to this pressure, companies have to be more careful and act more responsibly. In the recent years, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been seen like a panacea of all stakeholders' problems, more and more reports of CSR being published on companies' website. However, it has been proven that just to claim actions of social responsibility, does not mean those companies are truly responsible. As expected, this behavior is penalized by a part of stakeholders. In this context, for each firm is important to know which are the most representative stakeholders, and how a certain situation could affect this scale. For explaining this fact, this paper analyzes the case of Brent Spar, pointing how an industrial giant like Shell, using a wrong CSR policy, could lose both money and image capital. In order to do that, in the first part is discussed the CSR from the perspective of stakeholder theory. Although it is present since 1950's in the United States of America and evolved all over the world like an all known concept, CSR does not have yet an universally accepted definition. Therefore, in this article was stated a definition for CSR from the stakeholder theory approach, in order to understand the Brent Spar actions and implications. In the second part of the paper are analyzed the steps taken by both sides, on one hand by Shell and on the other, by some of the stakeholders. The actions have been explained from the CSR paradigm perspective. Finally, it is proved why Brent Spar is a case of CSR failed, and how, by neglecting of some stakeholders categories, a company could pay important costs. Moreover, the paper demonstrates that the image of one company, from a specific area, could affect the all industry field. Therefore, a proper identification of key stakeholders, a good communication with those and flexibility in decision, could be the success factors for companies, and may lead to successful CSR. Correct CSR actions become an imperative in nowadays industrial scenario, being viewed as a change imposed by globalization and by the transnational nature of CSR.