Business-NGO interactions in a multi-stakeholder context

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of the conditions under which Business– nongovernmental organization (NGO) interactions lead to improvements in corporate social responsibility (CSR), by assessing the role that the stakeholder context of the firm plays in the processes. As a case study it takes an interaction process between one NGO and one company with both collaborative and confrontational traits, spanning eight years and two issue fields, palm oil and soy, which are characterized by varying stakeholder contexts. The analysis demonstrates that the business–NGO interaction induced a change from a direct to an indirect corporate responsibility, and clarifies how inter-dependencies between the company and other stakeholders than the NGO influenced the interaction. The stakeholder inter-dependencies vary per issue field: In some issue fields, the stakeholder context allows for effective, collaborative interaction between business and NGO, while in another issue field, characterized by different stakeholder inter-dependencies, collaborative, constructive interaction between the same business and the same NGO is not feasible and, in addition, less effective in terms of CSR than confrontational interaction.