Bringing Managers Back into Stakeholder Theory: The Role of Practical Wisdom and Moral Agency

Extant literature presents two perspectives on how managers balance competing stakeholder interests. One points to norm-based and organization-specific general approaches, another to managers’ own perceptions and motives. Utilizing a strategy-as-practice lens and relying on mixed-methods, we inductively investigate the interplay between organizations’ general approaches to stakeholder management and managers’ situation-specific balancing. Based on data from Dutch nonprofits, we develop a theoretical model highlighting practical wisdom and moral agency as central for explaining this interplay. We contribute to the stakeholder literature by challenging the view of managers as mere conduits of organizational approaches and revealing new mechanisms of variation and change.