NETWORK PERSPECTIVE ON STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT: FACILITATING ENTREPRENEURS IN THE DISCOVERY OF OPPORTUNITIES

W. Vandekerckhove and N. A. Dentchev ()
Additional contact information
N. A. Dentchev: -

Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: The problem of opportunity discovery is central in the entrepreneurial activity. Cognitive limitations determine the search and the analysis of information, and as a consequence constrain the identification for opportunities. Moreover, typical personal characteristics – locus of control, need for independence, and need for achievement – suggest that entrepreneurs would take a central position in their stakeholder environments and as a consequence fail to adapt the complexity of stakeholder relationships in their entrepreneurial activity. We approach this problem from a network perspective on stakeholder management. We propose a heuristic of stakeholder analysis, which requires two mappings of the entrepreneurial constituents. The first mapping focuses on current interactions between the entrepreneur and his/her stakeholders, while the second focuses on a specific issue and the stakeholders that constitute it. In effect, such a stakeholder analysis requires entrepreneurs to use the complexity of stakeholder relations in order to breach their cognitive limitations and thus facilitate them in the discovery of new opportunities. This has clear implications for the ethics and the activity of entrepreneurs, as we will argue.

Keywords: business ethics; entrepreneurship; network perspective; opportunity identification; stakeholder management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2005-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-net
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://wps-feb.ugent.be/Papers/wp_05_295.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rug:rugwps:05/295

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nathalie Verhaeghe ().