Stakeholders
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Asian Social Science
Vol. 8, No. 10: August 2012
Managing Stakeholders: An Integrative Perspective on the Source of Competitive Advantage
Minyu Wu' ' School of Business, Curtin Universify Sarawak, Sarawak, Malaysia Correspondence: Minyu Wu, School of Business, Curtin Universify Sarawak, CDT 250, 98009 Miri, Sarawak, Malaysia. Tel: 60-8-544-3844. E-mail: minyu.wu@curtin.edu.my Received: March 19, 2012 doi:10.5539/ass.v8nl0pl60 Abstract Despite the enormous amount of academic work contributed to research on competitive advantage, a comprehensive framework that includes both intemal and extemal atü-ibutes of the firm still remains undeveloped. This paper seeks to use a stakeholder perspective to examine the source of competitive advantage. Competitive advantage can be viewed as a firm's abilify to contribute more customer value than its competitors. It endeavors to drive the largest gap between the buyer's willingness-to-pay and the supplier's opportunify cost. If stakeholders can be categorized by their relative potential on threat and cooperation, strategies for managing stakeholders are used to maximize their cooperative potential and minimize their potential threat so as to capitalize on value creation. Keywords: competitive advantage, resource-based view, stakeholder theory 1. Introduction Stakeholder interactions have recently become a critical issue for managers, as they increasingly face complex, ambiguous, and changing sun-oundings. In the past few decades, following dramatic technological advancement and intemational political refonn, the world economy has experienced an historical change. ThatJcs to infonnation technology and economic globalization, we are moving into a 'post-capitalist sociefy' where knowledge also becomes 'the means of production' and the free market plays a role as the dominant mechanism of economic integration (Drucker, 1993). Today, managers encounter many challenges that are more complicated and more
Asian Social Science
Vol. 8, No. 10: August 2012
Managing Stakeholders: An Integrative Perspective on the Source of Competitive Advantage
Minyu Wu' ' School of Business, Curtin Universify Sarawak, Sarawak, Malaysia Correspondence: Minyu Wu, School of Business, Curtin Universify Sarawak, CDT 250, 98009 Miri, Sarawak, Malaysia. Tel: 60-8-544-3844. E-mail: minyu.wu@curtin.edu.my Received: March 19, 2012 doi:10.5539/ass.v8nl0pl60 Abstract Despite the enormous amount of academic work contributed to research on competitive advantage, a comprehensive framework that includes both intemal and extemal atü-ibutes of the firm still remains undeveloped. This paper seeks to use a stakeholder perspective to examine the source of competitive advantage. Competitive advantage can be viewed as a firm's abilify to contribute more customer value than its competitors. It endeavors to drive the largest gap between the buyer's willingness-to-pay and the supplier's opportunify cost. If stakeholders can be categorized by their relative potential on threat and cooperation, strategies for managing stakeholders are used to maximize their cooperative potential and minimize their potential threat so as to capitalize on value creation. Keywords: competitive advantage, resource-based view, stakeholder theory 1. Introduction Stakeholder interactions have recently become a critical issue for managers, as they increasingly face complex, ambiguous, and changing sun-oundings. In the past few decades, following dramatic technological advancement and intemational political refonn, the world economy has experienced an historical change. ThatJcs to infonnation technology and economic globalization, we are moving into a 'post-capitalist sociefy' where knowledge also becomes 'the means of production' and the free market plays a role as the dominant mechanism of economic integration (Drucker, 1993). Today, managers encounter many challenges that are more complicated and more