Business Ethics and Ethics of Care

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility is increasingly being analysed through the stakeholder approach. However, great contradictions appear as soon as the number of stakeholders increases. The firm is then confronted with the dilemma of managing these stakeholders. Recent models have proposed a classification of stakeholder demands according to power, legitimacy and urgency. Indeed, these three criteria enable us to define demand groups and create lists of priorities in the classification of demands, but the problem is far from being resolved. The present article aims at analysing the problem of managing responsibility through stakeholders. It pays special attention to the classification which could result from an ethical mode of action based upon the ethics of care. As such, we shall argue that such a mode of action considerably inverses the usual order of classification.