Boomerang politics: How transnational stakeholders impact multinational corporations in the context of globalization

Stakeholder theory faces two closely related challenges in the light of globalization. On the one hand, globalization has not only led many firms to explore and expand into different parts of the world, it has also created possibilities for non-traditional stakeholders to ‘knock on the doors’ of firms and make their concerns heard. On the other hand, the context of the multitude and complexity of novel stakeholder relationships that were not usually considered in stakeholder mappings renders the issue of corporate responsibility even more ‘political’ than stakeholder relationships have always been. However, exactly how such non-traditional stakeholders knock on the firms’ doors has insufficiently been explored in stakeholder theorizing. Stakeholder theory appears to have difficulty in explaining the potential leverage that stakeholder groups without a clear and direct stake in a firm may exert over that particular firm. We propose to speak of ‘boomerang politics’ as a general and overarching term in order to advance stakeholder theory in the light of the challenges from globalization by exploring how non-traditional stakeholders knock on firms’ doors.