D Communication Guide Dec. 2013 | Page 8

To understand the meaning of satisfaction, information, monitoring and management in connection to stakeholder management the Ladder of citizen participation of Arnstein (look at the picture) should be taken into consideration. Stakeholders can be “kept” on different involvement levels. Each level has a set of predefined actions and access rules. Each level can also be appropriate or inappropriate in regard to different branches and companies. The lowest levels of stakeholder involvement (or citizen participation) are commonly known as manipulation. They are becoming less acceptable with time and one could expect that applying such a stakeholder involvement strategy can fail the company as a whole. The reason is that when manipulating stakeholders a company risks on many levels. First and foremost with entering the digital era no dat a is out of reach. Companies have difficulties hiding their sins and practice has shown that admitting a sin instead has much better results on corporate image. Furthermore, manipulating stakeholders results in low trust levels. The reason is that stakeholders expect transparency and openness. Even if no wrongdoing has been found, stakeholders are likely to not trust a company which is accountable to anyone. The second stage of stakeholder involvement is known as informing or tokenism. A company implementing one of the three levels of an informing strategy regards stakeholders as “listeners”. Stakeholders are informed about the company’s intentions and policies but communication is one-sided. Thus, stakeholders do not have a say about policies and strategies. At the higher levels of tokenism some companies actually implemented the so called consultation or placation. Thus, stakeholders were made to believe that they were involved in decision making. It must however be clear that none of the 3 stakeholder policies that fall under information or tokenism count as stakeholder involvement. The reason is that consulting stakeholders in such cases is in connection to matters of low organizational importance (the color of the package of a product for example) and is easily dismissed if contradicting managerial decision making. Such stakeholder strategies were very popular and appropriate in the 20th century as stakeholders were not as powerful as they are nowadays. Today, both the free access to information and the possibility for stakeholderto-stakeholder communication has allowed for higher levels of stakeholder power. As was discussed on the previous pages, mapping stakeholders should catch such changes in stakeholder status and result in changes of stakeholder management tactics. It is however important to point out that in this case it is not about a single stakeholder group changing status but rather about external factors making the rethinking of general corporate stakeholder policies a necessity. 8