Stakeholder Marketing and the Organizational Field: The Role of Institutional Capital and Ideological Framing

Abstract

This article adopts an institutional-based perspective to stakeholder marketing. This perspective directs attention to an organizational field level of analysis in which an organization's environment is punctuated by trigger events that prompt the assemblage of a particular mix of stakeholders. A thematic, interpretive, and longitudinal analysis of more than 2000 articles from 45 years of grocery retail trade journals reveals that the ensuing stakeholder dynamics that constitute an organizational field serve to afford or deny the marketer vital cultural, social, and economic capital. In turn, the capital possessed by or denied to the marketer influences the ideological frame the marketer may use in coming to terms with how to interact with stakeholders. Importantly, the authors find that strategic and institutional factors interpenetrate, presenting important implications for how stakeholder marketing should be understood.