A more sustainable society through stakeholder salience: Furthering stakeholder theory by exploring identification and prioritization processes with a focus on intraorganizational perceptions in an SME

Stakeholder salience has emerged from the ambiguity of stakeholder theory and is intended to better describe the aspects of identification and prioritization of stakeholders. Despite the fact that 95% of businesses worldwide are SMEs and comprise 99.8% of all European enterprises, the stakeholder salience aspects of identification and prioritization, in relation to SMEs, are empirically underdeveloped and mainly focused on the owner/manager perspective. Therefore, this qualitative single-case study has explored the stakeholder salience aspects of identification and prioritization in order to better understand the intraorganizational perceptions of stakeholders, processes, and motivations, within a European SME. The findings revealed that intraorganizational perceptions focused on a narrow view of stakeholder identification, which contradicts the broad view advocated by researchers in relation to stakeholders and sustainable development. Furthermore, there is a need to develop broader intraorganizational understanding of stakeholders in terms of claims and processes if businesses are going to be able to create holistic strategies with a sustainable development focus