Stakeholder theory and care management: An inquiry into social enterprises

This work aims to introduce care management from the moral viewpoint of stakeholder theory. It considers stakeholder theory a useful methodology for managerial descriptions, narratives and theorising of business ethics, and the feminist thought, especially the moral grounding of care, a valuable normative core to earn productive remarks and insights into stakeholder research in modern capitalism. Care leads researchers to meaningful conceptualizations of the firm as a relational entity, both in itself and as part of the network of stakeholders within which it is involved, paving the way for organisational analysis deeply entangled in the subjective and interpersonal aspects of specific business context. Of major importance for advancing the understanding of care as virtue ethics affecting the managerial decision-making is the problem of bordering organisation-stakeholder relationships. To this purpose, a quantitative measuring on managerial practices of stakeholder involvement in a sample of small Italian social enterprises has been carried out. Findings reveal that a fully “care for the other” turns in favour of those stakeholders who are formally entitled to take part in the co-production of organisation’s activities through the formal involvement in the governance structures