Firm responses to secondary stakeholder action

In this paper, we explore the conditions under which secondary stakeholder groups are likely to elicit positive firm responses. To this end, we build upon and advance Mitchell, Agle, and Wood's (1997) stakeholder saliency and identification framework by defining saliency in terms of actions, not perceptions, and by proposing that power, legitimacy, and urgency arise out of the nature of stakeholder–request–firm triplets. To test this framework, we build a unique dataset of over 600 secondary stakeholder actions within the United States, all concerning environmental issues over the period 1971–2003.