The purpose of Part III is to develop some of the implications of the stakeholder approach to Strategic management for the Corporation as we know it today. I showed in Part I that a stakeholder approach to Strategic management was one way to make the Corporation more responsive to its external environment, and I set out a basic framework for analyzing the stakeholders in the corporation. In Part III explained how the stakeholder concept could be used to construct processes for Strategic management, and in particular, I showed how direction setting, Strategic programming and implementation and control can be enriched by adding a sensitivity to stakeholders. Part III examines more structural issues, insofar as structural issues are those which relate to managerial work at the Strategic level. The stakeholder approach dictates some changes for the traditional functions and roles of managers, and hence, for the traditional ways of coordinating the work of the corporation.

Chapter 7, “Conflict at the Board Level,” examines some of the conflicts which arise within the board of directors. The work of the board must be rethought on two levels. The first level involves dealing with a host of new stakeholders, and the second involves rethinking how the board deals with stockholders and groups of stockholders. Thus, regardless of the enterprise strategy of the firm, the stakeholder approach can be used to better manage the traditional relationship with owners.