Stakeholder salience: The empirical role of stakeholder multiplicity, stakeholder proximity, and social capital in SMEs

The stakeholder salience model is integral to understanding the entrepreneurial process. However, despite its contribution to stakeholder research, existing research on the model has stagnated, offering limited theoretical refinement and insufficient empirical attention to the relational, proximal, and interdependent nature of stakeholder interactions. Building on calls to develop the model’s explanatory richness, we examine how stakeholder multiplicity, stakeholder proximity, and structural social capital shape entrepreneurs’ perceptions of stakeholder salience in small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs). Using survey data from technology-enabled SMEs in Canada and Nigeria, we find that higher levels of stakeholder multiplicity, proximity, and social capital are associated with stronger perceptions of stakeholder salience. However, these relationships varied between the two country contexts, a difference we interpret through the lens of environmental dynamism. By integrating relational and network-based mechanisms into the stakeholder salience model, we enrich stakeholder theory by demonstrating that stakeholder salience relies on SMEs’ embeddedness in broader stakeholder networks.