Stakeholder Engagement for Corporate Sustainability: A Comparative Analysis of B2C and B2B Companies

Stakeholder engagement is vital for corporate sustainability for various reasons from securing legitimacy to spurring innovation. While stakeholder engagement is well established in academic discourse, recent studies have examined the effects of customer segments on this engagement for corporate sustainability. Initial empirical analyses indicated that business-to-consumer companies are more frequently scrutinized on their sustainability activities than business-to-business companies, and subsequently they are more likely to report on sustainability activities. Nevertheless, further approaches of stakeholder engagement, including stakeholder engagement tools, environmental management standards, and various activities, have not been investigated thus far. This paper compares various approaches of stakeholder engagement according to customer segment based on a 2012 empirical study of large German companies. The results show that customer segment has no major significant influence on stakeholder engagement, but rather value-oriented aspects of firms, including family-run operations and sustainability values in a company's business, make a difference to these activities. Copyright (c) 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment