Stakeholder salience in corporate sustainability reports across regions

¶ … search for stakeholder "salience" via the review and searching through of corporate social/sustainability reports. Questions that will be answered will include who the stakeholders are in the article, the firm's corporate reputation, how the topic could apply to the personal or professional life of the author of this report, how it would apply to an organization that the author of this report has observed and what conclusions can be drawn about the ethical issues facing business leaders. While many stakeholders and corporate powerbrokers are outstanding and good people, there are some that are perhaps a bit rougher around the edges.

The article reviewed was not really specific to a single firm. Indeed, it actually centered on stakeholders on a very macroscopic level rather than drilling down to individual firms. After defining stakeholders and defining a bit of history of what has (and what has not) been included in stakeholder reports over the years, the report offers several major hypotheses. First, they assert that a company's focus on stakeholders is more prominent in a community manifestation in the United States that it is in non-American firms. The second hypothesis is that the tendency to protect employee safety vis-a-vis stakeholder and corporate focus is more prevalent in Europe than in other areas of the world. Finally, they assert that focus on the natural environment is a predilection of the corporate peoples of Asia and Europe more so than American firms. To answer the first two questions of the assignment, the stakeholders in question would be all of the people affected in any way by the actions or inactions of the firms that were analyzed. Since there were so many firms involved, then that would basically be everyone in Asia, Europe and the United States. The corporate reputation of the firms involved seems to vary by geographical region. Firms in the United States are seen as caring about community but perhaps less about employee safety and nature, at least as compared to other parts of the world. Europe seems to be more in tune with nature and employee safety while Asia seems to have its higher focus on nature (Weber & Marley, 2010).