NETWORKS OF INFLUENCE: IMPLEMENTING POLITICALLY SUSTAINABLE MULTINATIONAL STAKEHOLDER STRATEGIES

In a bid to gain stakeholder support for their operations, multinational firms operating in politically uncertain environments often inappropriately apply a rational financial approach to a sociopolitical problem. I present an alternative sociopolitical approach to gaining stakeholder support. Drawing from network theory I outline three mechanisms of change in the relations between stakeholders and foreign firms. First, network ties serve as prisms that enable third parties to cognitively ascribe characteristics of known stakeholders to an unknown foreign firm with whom that known stakeholder associates, thus “who” the firm initially associates with, the substance of this association, and differential value of firm initiated and stakeholder initiated relations, impacts subsequent firm-stakeholder relations. Second, as ties are conduits for information about actors in the network, ties to stakeholders that maximize the volume, diversity and richness of information afforded the firm enable the firm to impro...