The Role Of Strategic Conversations With Stakeholders in The

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The Role of Strategic Conversations

with Stakeholders in the Formationof Corporate Social Responsibility

Strategy

Morgan P. MilesLinda S. Munilla

Jenny Darroch

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the role of strategic

conversations in corporate social responsibility (CSR)

strategy formation. The authors suggest that explicitly

engaging stakeholders in the CSR strategy-making pro-

cess, through the mechanism of strategic conversations,

will minimize future stakeholder concerns and enhance

CSR strategy making. In addition, suggestions for future

research are offered to enable a better understanding of

effective strategic conversation processes in CSR strategy

making and the resulting performance outcomes.

KEY WORDS: boundary spanning employees, corpo-

rate social responsibility strategy, stakeholders, strategic

conversations

‘‘The stakeholders in a firm are individuals and

constituencies that contribute, either voluntarilyor involuntarily, to its wealth-creating capacity

and activities, and who are therefore its potential

beneficiaries and/or risk bearers’’ (Post et al.,

2002: 8).

In order to improve competitive positioning, many

corporations worldwide have, over the past few

decades, redesigned corporate policies to include

some type of guidelines for appropriate responses to

corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues. As part

of this transformation, some attention has been

focused on the inclusion of corporate stakeholders inthe development of strategies related to social con-

cerns. This philosophy is partly based on the premise

that companies that ‘‘create and implement sustain-

ability plans not only benefit their bottom line, they

benefit the air we breathe, the water we drink, and

our standard of living’’ (Alcan, 2005). It is good

business then to actively engage all stakeholders –

investors (current and future), customers, suppliers,

pro-environmental/special interest groups, employ-

ees, community members, etc. – in the development

of sustainable strategies that reflect both economic

and socially responsible outcomes (see Maignamet al. (2005) for an excellent illustration of relevant

corporate stakeholders).

Corporate social responsibility

The basic belief that ‘‘...organizations are account-

able to a larger society’’ (Kerin et al., 2003: 22) has

evolved into debate about the accountability of

Morgan P. Miles is professor of marketing at Georgia Southern

University. His research interests include the interface between

marketing, ethics, and corporate entrepreneurship. He has

been a Senior Research Associate for the Judge Institute of

Management, Cambridge University, a visiting Professor of

Marketing, at the University of Stockholm, a visiting pro-

fessor of entrepreneurship at the University of Otago, and

most recently a visiting professor of entrepreneurship at

Massey University.

Linda S. Munilla is professor of marketing, Georgia Southern

University. Her research interests include marketing and environmental ethics.

Jenny Darroch is an assistant professor of marketing at the Peter

Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management

at Claremont Graduate University. Her current research

focuses on the interface between marketing and entrepreneur-

ship, in particular the comparison between market driven and

driving markets firm behavior. Earlier research looked at the

antecedents of innovation within firms. Prior to joining

Claremont Graduate University, Jenny was the Director of

Entrepreneurship and Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the

University of Otago in New Zealand.

Journal of Business Ethics (2006) 69:195–205 Ó Springer 2006

DOI 10.1007/s10551-006-9085-6



corporations to a myriad of special interest stake-

holders. Much of the discussion is centered on

whether CSR should take priority over a company’s

obligation to make money for its stockholders, or

vice versa (Bakan and Burke, 2005). For exampleMintzberg et al. (2002: 67) suggest that

‘‘In the past 15 years, we in North America have

experienced a glorification of self-interest perhaps

unequalled since the 1930s. It is as if, in denying

much of the social progress made since then, we

have reverted to an earlier and darker age. Greed

has been raised to some sort of high calling;

corporations have been urged to ignore broader

social responsibilities in favor of narrow share-

holder value...’’

The above quote illustrates the extent to which a

firm’s social responsibility behavior has been a pop-

ular subject in recent decades. Social responsibility can

be viewed as running the gamut from a purely

stockholder perspective, such as that advocated by

Friedman (1962), where the sole focus is on a firm’s

responsibility to its equity holders, to a perspective

that suggests that firms have an obligation to all

stakeholders, not just its equity holders (see for

example Polonsky, 1995; Post et al., 2002; Mintzberg

et al., 2002). Munilla and Miles (2005) propose thata corporation’s commitment may follow a Social

Responsibility Continuum that ranges from a compliance

perspective (corporations meet legal and ethical

requirements but do not expend stockholder monies

for non-economic priorities), to a strategic perspective

(corporations change their business models to in-

clude CSR strategies that create economic returns

for stockholders), to a forced perspective (corporations

are pressured by various entities to go beyond

compliance or strategic interests and expend re-

sources that may not, in the long-term, be in the bestinterest of the stockholders).

But wherever companies fall on the CSR spec-

trum, most would agree that a concerted effort must

be made to align strategies to take full advantage of

CSR business opportunities while also including

stakeholders in the strategy-making process. This

paper explores the use of strategic conversations in

the formation of CSR strategies from a conceptual

perspective and suggests that explicitly including

conversations with diverse stakeholder groups in the

CSR strategy-making process will, through the

mechanism of strategic conversations, maximize

stakeholder engagement and organizational sustain-

ability.

Strategic conversations

Strategic conversations are multi-directional multi-

dimensional communication mechanisms for better

shaping and integrating the strategic intent of top

management with both the firm’s capabilities and the

competitive realities the organization encounters. For

strategic conversations to be effective in strategy

making, communications must explicitly involve

both talking and reflective listening by all participants.Typically, strategic conversations have been used to

create open channels of unfiltered information

between top managers and ground level marketing,

technology, and sales force boundary-spanning

employees (BSEs) (for a discussion of BSEs see

Bezrukova et al., 2003). These conversations help the

BSEs to understand the strategic intent of top

management while simultaneously enabling execu-

tive-level managers to gain a richer and more honest

understanding of both the possible future the firm

faces and the ability of the firm to align itself with its

desired future.In the past few years, one facet of organizational

planning has evolved that includes ...‘‘the capability

of organizations to perceive what is going on in their

business environments, to think through what this

means for them, and then to act upon this new

knowledge’’ (Van der Heijden et al., 2002: 2). Van

der Heijden et al. (2002) refer to this strategy as

adaptive organizational learning , a holistic, proactive

approach to the organizational management learning

process that is centered on scenario planning, the use

of positive and negative scenarios to examine a rangeof potential situational antecedents and their corre-

sponding consequences. As one approach to scenario

planning, strategic conversations evolve as ‘‘...people

come together to share and analyze information,

ideas and paradigms that are of strategic importance

to our organization’’ (Maricopa, 1999).

This philosophy of active stakeholder engagement

by management reflects structural changes in orga-

nizational communication models that evolved in

the l980s, as a strategic response to market and

196 Morgan P. Miles et al.



technology turbulence, resulting in a shift from a

hierarchical ‘functional’ approach to a flatter ‘cus-

tomer-driven’ structure for organizational commu-

nications (Raspberry and Lindsay, l994: 52). In

addition, the rapid and widespread adoption of e-mail and the Internet for intra and inter organi-

zational communications made it possible for all

stakeholders to have a voice in organizational issues.

These changes altered the communication flow

within organizations – which traditionally flowed

downward – to one which also allows stakeholders

and BSEs to directly communicate with top exec-

utives. Figure 1 illustrates an example of a hierar-

chical model designed to include all stakeholders in

the communication process. It illustrates that for

effective strategy making to occur, there should be achannel for honest, unfiltered information to flow

from the BSEs who directly interact with stake-

holders and technology and strategy making top

executives. For strategic conversations to be most

effective, all levels of an organization must, at a

minimum, be aware of stakeholder concerns. Hastak

et al. (2001) suggest that consumer survey research

techniques should be explicitly integrated into pol-

icy-making processes. Strategic conversations enrich

this communication process to include direct, open

ended, bi-directional dialogue between management

and other relevant stakeholders.

Figure 1 adapts Kotler and Keller’s (2006) per-

spective of a market orientated firm to illustrate the

role of various ‘‘actors,’’ that is, those involved instrategic conversations who inform the firm about

the CSR issues of importance. Customer needs

should be the focus of the organization’s strategy

formation efforts. BSEs that actually interact with

customers, technologies, suppliers, competitors,

regulators, and other external stakeholders are next

in importance to the strategy formation process.

BSEs tend to have the most informed perspective of

opportunities and capabilities, and a firm might

actually be able to exploit these opportunities (for

more on the opportunity discovery, assessment, andexploitation process see Shane and Venkataraman,

2000). In addition, BSEs tend to be most aware of

the value drivers for their specific target markets and

the concerns of relevant stakeholders. This deep

understanding of the competitive environment and

the target market mandates that BSEs have influence

on the organization’s strategic conversations.

Liedtka and Rosenblum (1996: 147) discussed the

metaphor of strategic conversations ‘‘as a way of

thinking about how organizations address (its)

unfiltered information flows

TOP

MANAGEMENT

MIDDLE

MANAGEMENT

BOUNDARYSPANNING

EMPLOYEES

STAKE HOLDERS

Figure 1. Parties to strategic conversations. Adapted from Kotler and Keller (2006).

The Role of Strategic Conversations with Stakeholders 197





discovered and realized through alternate commu-

nication channels that bypass business level man-

agement and allow for a direct reflective dialogue to

be established between top management and BSEs.

This myopic, management-centric perspective of strategy making suggests that what is good for

executives is good for the firm and what is good for

the firm must be good for its stakeholders. This type

of outlook effectively limits meaningful conversa-

tions with BSEs and stakeholders, thus resulting in a

strategy that may be unpopular, unwise, and, over

time, one that may prove unsustainable. For exam-

ple, Atkinson et al. (1997) note that managers should

explicitly integrate stakeholders’ preferences and

needs into the organization’s performance manage-

ment system in order to enhance organizationalperformance. Similarly, Polonsky and colleagues

(Polonsky, 1995; Polonsky et al., 2002) argue for the

inclusion of stakeholders in the strategic marketing

processes. Likewise, Post et al. (2002) suggest that

comprehensive stakeholder management is abso-

lutely essential for any strategy to be effective and

sustainable since stakeholders contribute to the

organization’s resource base, shape the structure of

the industry in which the firm operates, and create

the social/political arena in which the organization

exists.

Illustrations of stakeholder engagement

Strategic conversations can help bridge critical gaps

in perceptions through issue-oriented, fact-based

open conflict between top management (who are

responsible for developing intended strategies and

the strategic vision for the organization), BSEs (who

tend to create emergent strategies), and relevant

stakeholders (Eisenhardt et al., 1997). For example,

Chesley and Wenger (1999: 55) report on the suc-cessful transformation of strategy making through

the use of sometimes high conflict strategic con-

versations at the U.S.’s National Reconnaissance

Office, a once ‘‘super-secret spy organization.’’ This

suggests that even the most highly classified intelli-

gence arm of the U.S. Government can actually

leverage strategic conversations to transform itself

into a more strategically relevant organization.

Strategic conversations are dynamic and recursive

in nature, resulting in an increase in both the

quantity and quality of information and technology

transfers between the various stakeholders of the

firm, BSEs, and top management. For example, in

the late 1990s, DuPont considered developing a

titanium dioxide mine adjacent to the OkefenokeeNational Wildlife Refuge in Georgia. However,

DuPont quickly realized that a large-scale mining

operation next to an environmentally fragile

wilderness area would likely result in strong oppo-

sition. To understand the nature and impact of this

decision, DuPont organized stakeholder meetings

with national and local environmental groups, pro-

business economic development groups, and regu-

lators (DuPont Postpones ...., 1997). Ultimately, and

following open and continual strategic conversations

with these highly diverse stakeholder groups,DuPont decided that it was in its best interest to

abandon the strip-mining project (Sissell, 1999).

While regulators did not mandate DuPont to make

this decision, the strategic conversations between

DuPont and its stakeholders ultimately shaped

DuPont’s subsequent strategy and resulted in a better

strategy making process. This is an illustration of

strategic conversations effectively shaping strategy

formation and impacting CSR and DuPont’s con-

cept of strategy.

Recent changes in technology have resulted in

the Internet emerging as a forum for CSR-typestrategic conversations. For example, the Business

Alliance for Local Living Economics, a cooperative

of organizations and individuals involved in CSR

issues, has used the Internet’s World Cafe web site

forum to facilitate honest, open conversations

between diverse groups of stakeholders in a virtual

and, subsequently, physical context (see http://

www.livingeconomies.org and http://www.the

worldcafe.com). For example, in Atlanta the World

Cafe has helped in the formation of a forum of

business leaders, scholars, and government decisionmakers who have an interest in promoting the

environmentally sustainable and economically just

development of Atlanta. Another example is HP,

which in its 2006 corporate Citizenship Report states,

‘‘Stakeholder engagement is an important part of our

global citizens activity,’’ and that ‘‘HP is integrating

stakeholder engagement into our core business

practices’’ (accessed 3-28-06, http://www.hp.com/

hpinfo/globalcitizenship/gcreport/publicengage/

stakeholder.html). HP worked with SustainAbility, a




stakeholder consultancy firm, in 2005 to train

employees who deal with external stakeholders and

additional training is planned in 2006.

The emergence of global CSR communication

consulting firms such as SustainAbility, have gener-ated innovative methods for more direct engage-

ment with stakeholders: ‘‘It is unusual for any of our

projects to not involve stakeholder analysis or engage

of some sort...’’ (http://www.sustainability.com,

accessed 3-06-06). Companies can even sign up for

the Center for Sustainable Community Develop-

ment’s ‘‘Online Stakeholder Workshops’’ that will

provide direction for fostering stakeholder relation-

ships (http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/cli/online_work-

shop.htm, accessed 3-8-06).

In addition, strategic conversations between topmanagement, BSEs, and stakeholders can be an

instrumental component of a firm’s decision to adopt

international environmental and social accountabil-

ity standards and its subsequent implementation of

the standards (see Miles et al., 1997 for additional

information on ISO14000 environmental standards

and Miles and Munilla, 2004 for additional infor-

mation on SA8000 social accountability standards).

Both ISO14000 and SA8000 certification processes

mandate significant inputs from stakeholders and

offer an opportunity to initiate and engage in fruitful

strategic conversations between many variousstakeholder groups. For example, the ISO14000

environmental management system certification

process includes the establishment of an environ-

mental management system that must acknowledge

the organization’s relevant stakeholders. ISO14000

forces the organization to assess its supply chain to

ensure that its vendors are in compliance with

ISO14000 standards (see Miles et al., 1997). Like-

wise, SA8000 social accountability certification

requires input from workers, local suppliers, and

other stakeholders (see Miles and Munilla, 2004).Both of these CSR certification frameworks man-

date that the organization engage its external stake-

holders in some form of strategic conversations.

Related work with Ericsson (see Covin and

Miles, forthcoming) suggests that Ericsson’s pro-

grams, designed to encourage corporate entrepre-

neurship, enhanced open strategic discussions

between the developers of environmentally benefi-

cial technology, top management, and stakeholders

(see Darroch et al., 2005). For Ericsson, this com-

munication channel provided top management with

‘‘un-filtered’’ information from the BSEs who were

creating technology that had the potential to be

highly valuable to Ericsson and its stakeholders in the

environmentally sustainable ‘‘intelligent car’’ and‘‘intelligent house’’ Projects. This type of open and

honest, conflict-based communication between

employees who span the boundaries between the

firm and its technology, customers, regulators,

partners, competitors, and other stakeholders, is

critically important to how those within the orga-

nization perceive the future of the organization and

the impact of new technologies upon that future.

Strategic conversations tend to by-pass business unit

middle-managers who typically serve as information

and value gatekeepers for top management. Inaddition, strategic conversations seemed to help

minimize turf protection and dysfunctional organi-

zational behaviors. Thus, strategic conversations

provided multiple advantages to Ericsson. These

findings are supported by Eisenhardt et al. (1997)

who argue that strategy making benefits from open,

fact-based conflicts driven by honest, unfiltered

information.

At Skandia, honest, open strategic conversations

have become embedded into the strategy making

process (Skandia is a global insurance and financial

services firm, headquartered in Stockholm). Skan-dia leverages its internal innovation program to

foster the open interaction between strategy mak-

ing top management and strategy implementing

BSEs who operate at different levels of the orga-

nization (see Covin and Miles, forthcoming).

These multi-level conversations provide honest,

unfiltered input to top management from the

employees, who actually work with customers,

technologies, and vendors. As a consequence, top

management has a more realistic understanding of

the firm, its capabilities, opportunities, and socialresponsibilities.

What is common at both Ericsson and Skandia is

that strategic conversations are valuable in the

strategy formulation process since they are a mech-

anism that allows top managers, other managers,

BSEs, and sometimes other internal and external

stakeholders the opportunity to directly exchange

knowledge about specific resources, the business in

general, and the environment in which the business

operates.




The role of strategic conversations in closing

gaps

Strategic conversations are critical to a firm’s ability to

compete in an emerging and constantly changingfuture because they help shape mental models of top

management, BSEs, and stakeholders by the transfer

of honest and unfiltered information. Markides (1997:

13) stated that a ‘‘prerequisite to strategic innovation is

an honest, fundamental questioning of the mental

models or industry recipes that seem to govern the

behavior of any individual or organization.’’ The

realization that there may be a wide variance of mental

models and values among and between top manage-

ment, BSEs, and stakeholders is the first step in

encouraging strategic conversations. For example,Bronn and Bronn (2003: 291) suggest that

‘‘Organizations are undergoing dramatic changes

as stakeholder groups exert an ever-increasing

influence on the place and responsibilities of

organizations in society. Important drivers in this

process include the environmental movement,

the search for total quality management, and the

concept of sustainable development, ethics and

organizational learning. Because the various

stakeholders can view these complex issues quite

differently from the organization, it is importantthat those working with communications (and

strategy, our words) are able to understand the

underlying complexities of stakeholder relation-

ships.’’

Based on an understanding of strategic CSR man-

agement, the authors propose two primary gaps

between the perceptions of an organization’s top

management, BSEs, and stakeholders. In addition,

we argue that strategic conversations can be used

effectively to close or at least minimize either or

both of these gaps.These two gaps are

1. The Performance/Capability Gap – The gap

between Top Management’s perception of

the firm’s CSR current performance and its

capabilities, BSEs’ perception of the firm’s

CSR current performance and its capabili-

ties, and stakeholders’ perception of the

firm’s current CSR performance and its

capabilities.

2. The Futures Gap – The gap between Top

Management’s perception of Future and the

firm’s role in that future, BSEs’ perception of

Future and the firm’s role in that future, and

stakeholders’ perception of the Future andthe firm’s role in that future.

These gaps extend Bronn and Bronn’s (2003)

framework of the gaps in congruency and accuracy

between an organization’s stakeholders’ and man-

agement’s perceptions of its own and each others’

point of view on organizational issues. The Perfor-

mance/Capability Gap is defined as the differences

between the perceptions of a firm’s current CSR

performance and its CSR capabilities as viewed by

various stakeholders: the corporation’s executives,

BSEs, and stakeholders. Often top management is soinsulated from the reality of the firm’s operations

that it fails to understand the fundamental strengths

and weaknesses of the firm, its customers, suppliers,

and competitors and is myopic with respect to many

of the issues of paramount importance to external

stakeholders. By contrast, BSEs tend to have the

deepest understanding of the firm’s capabilities, but

this understanding is almost always very narrow in

scope and only relevant to their specific area(s) of

operations. Strategic conversations among BSEs and

between BSEs and top management allow the deepbut narrow understandings of the abilities of differ-

ent business areas to be aggregated into a corporate

profile of capabilities.

In this paper, the Futures Gap is defined as the

differences between (a) the vision of the ‘‘most

probable’’ future; (b) the vision of an ‘‘ideal’’ future;

and (c) the various visions, held by management,

BSEs, and stakeholders, of the firm’s role in the

creation of these futures. The Futures Gap can be

conceptualized as the distance between what the

firm’s executives, BSEs, and stakeholders value. For

example, BP (British Petroleum) recently re-invented itself as an energy company that is deeply

concerned about long-term environmental and

economic sustainability. While some of BP’s more

environmentally oriented stakeholders envision BP

as a leader in the commercialization of alternative

energy, BP’s executives may see a somewhat

different short-term future, with the world’s econ-

omy and BP remaining highly dependent upon coal,

oil, and other carbon based sources of energy.




The authors suggest that the role of strategic

conversations is to reduce the magnitude of the

Performance/Capability gaps (thus providing a

common ground upon which to base subsequent

discussions) and to help bridge the Futures Gap toallow the entire organization to transform itself to

better (1) recognize, create, and discover attractive

economic opportunities; (2) be able to realistically

evaluate economic opportunities with respect to the

firm’s strategic intent and capabilities; and (3) be able

to profitability exploit economic opportunities (see

Shane and Venkataraman, 2000). Strategic conver-

sations can effectively minimize these gaps in

understanding between strategy making top man-

agement, middle management, strategy implement-

ing BSEs, and stakeholders by making tacitknowledge held by top management, other man-

agement, BSEs, and stakeholders explicit and,

therefore, useful in the strategy formation and real-

ization process. In fact, the authors argue that sharing

tacit knowledge is an essential first step in the stra-

tegic conversation process. Further, transforming

tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge is a critical

second step for managers to take as they formally

capture strategic conversations and integrate the

essence of those conversations into strategy. There-

fore, integral to strategic conversations is the facili-

tation of the flow of tacit knowledge and the transfer of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge in and

around an organization (see Nonaka and Takeuchi,

1995 and Darroch, 2003 for a discussion of

techniques that facilitate knowledge transfer within

organizations). Table I summarizes these steps of

effective strategic conversations.While a plethora of research on strategy forma-

tion/making exists (for summaries see Mintzberg

and Lampel, 1999 and Eisenhardt and Sull, 2001),

very little research on how top management actually

participates with stakeholders in honest and open

conversations that centers on fact-based conflict and

that foster deep strategic thinking has been con-

ducted (see Liedtka, 1998). Out of these conversa-

tions between top management, BSEs, and

stakeholders emerges a description of a more com-

monly desired future (bridging the Futures Gap).This desired future may or may not be aligned with

current strategy, but the Futures Gap can be bridged

through this form of dynamic emergent strategy

making. Top management rationalizes these emer-

gent strategies, which are often combined with in-

tended strategy, to either reinforce or shape the

future concept of strategy (see Burgelman, 1983).

Conclusion and research implications

Managers are increasingly cognizant of the role their organizations play in the wider social community.

TABLE I

The steps of effective strategic conversations

Stepa Outcomes

1. Questioning and understanding the mental models

and concerns of top management, BSEs, and relevant

stakeholders

A richer understanding of the preferred

strategic intent of the various participants

2. Sharing tacit knowledge among and betweenorganizational and stakeholder groups

Enhancing the organization’s knowledge base,creating a shared understanding of the firm’s history,

capabilities, performance, and future

3. Transforming relevant tacit knowledge into explicit

knowledge

Codifying the firm’s knowledge base

4. Using this shared explicit knowledge to evaluate

intended and emergent strategies in the process

of strategic rationalization

A forced ‘‘reality check,’’ to determine

whether there really is a ‘‘shared understanding’’

of the firm’s history, capabilities, performance, and future

5. Strategy formation Enhanced competitive standing as an outcome of more

informed and relevant strategy making

aAdapted from von Krogh and Roos (1995), Liedtka and Rosenblum (1996), Liedtka (1998), Bronn and Bronn (2003).




Increasingly, we are exposed to multiple examples of

firms that manage to demonstrate a pluralistic

mindset – for example, Johnson & Johnson and

Procter & Gamble, along with other member

companies of the Global Environmental Manage-ment Initiative (GEMI), demonstrate their ability to

provide superior returns to shareholders while

maintaining a strong CSR profile (GEMI, 2004).

In the current paper, we propose that traditional

models of strategic decision making are not likely to

support the effective adoption of CSR principles

that align the interests of stakeholders, top managers,

and BSEs. By adopting an inside-out perspective to

strategic decision making in which managers believe

that what is good for managers must be good for the

firm and what is good for the firm is also good for stakeholders is unlikely to advance a CSR position.

Managers need to be adept at including the

perspectives of both BSEs and stakeholders early in

the strategy making process, thereby adopting an

outside-in approach to strategy formation.

We propose the use of strategic conversations as

one way of enabling BSEs to link the organization

with its wider community. We have also explained

why the use of strategic conversations may minimize

both the performance/capability and futures gaps

caused by different perceptions held by managers,

BSEs, and stakeholders. While managers need notagree with every divergent perspective that might

arise during a strategic conversation process, we

suggest that the strategy making – strategy realization

process would be greatly enhanced by an under-

standing of the concerns and preferences of diverse

stakeholder groups through a public and open stra-

tegic conversation process.

We hope that this area will attract considerable

research attention. Accordingly, we propose a range

of possible research topics. More specifically, we

suggest data could be collected to empirically test theconceptual frameworks discussed in this paper. For

example, we suggest that firms holding effective

strategic conversations between managers, BSEs, and

stakeholders should experience smaller gaps in per-

ceptions of the corporations’ mission and values, key

issues, brands and current and future performance

than firms which do not hold strategic conversations.

In addition, the impact of strategic conversations on

corporate reputation and, ultimately, performance

would enhance an understanding of the conse-

quences of effective strategic conversations. For

example, we propose that firms holding effective

strategic conversations will be perceived as more

socially responsible, innovative and enjoy stronger

brands than firms which do not. The impact of technology on strategic conversations would be an-

other research area that would be of great value to

both scholars and managers.

We also suggest research programs that examine

each step of effective strategic conversations pro-

cesses, as proposed in Table I. For example, how are

mental models extracted and questioned? How is

tacit knowledge shared between managers, BSEs,

and stakeholders? How is tacit knowledge converted

into explicit knowledge and then evaluated? How

do strategic conversations inform strategy formation?In summary, we believe that the most effective

processes, outcomes, and overall value of strategic

conversations in the CSR strategy making and

strategy realization areas are yet to be fully under-

stood by scholars or managers.

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Morgen P. Miles and Linda S. MunillaGeorgia Southern University,

8154, Georgia Southern,

Statesboro, GA, 30460,

U.S.A.

E-mail: [email protected]

Jenny Darroch

Peter Drucker and Masatoshi Ito,

Graduate school of management,

1021, North Darimouth Ave,

Claremont, CA, 91711,

U.S.A.




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