Stakeholder engagement through empowerment: The case of coffee farmers

Abstract

While most studies on stakeholder engagement focus on high‐power stakeholders
 (typically, employees), limited attention has been devoted to the engagement of low‐
 power stakeholders. These have been defined as vulnerable stakeholders for their
 low capacity to influence corporations. Our research is framed around the engagement
 of low‐power stakeholders in the coffee industry who are, paradoxically, critical
 resource providers for the major roasters. Through the case study of Lavazza—the
 leading Italian roaster—we investigate empowerment actions addressed to
 smallholder farmers located in Brazil, India, East Africa, Haiti, and the Dominican
 Republic. We contribute to the theoretical discussion around engagement and
 empowerment by developing a framework linking together areas of empowerment
 (defined in the literature) and specific empowerment actions (emerging from our
 interviews). Our insights shed light on how organizations can design empowerment
 strategies leading to more effective stakeholder engagement and how empowerment
 actions can contribute to turn low‐power stakeholders into active business partners.
 We demonstrate that moving from a traditional competitive view of corporate–
 stakeholder relationships to a stakeholder theory view based on a logic of cooperative
 partnerships reinforces the idea that stakeholder engagement and empowerment are
 both entangled with the value creation process.