Stakeholder Governance and Inequality: A Theory of Reciprocal Exchange

Inequality emerges from the uneven sharing of endowments across society, highlighting the distributional role of firms. The stakeholder governance literature advances effective value allocation and fairness of exchange relationships, but limited attention is paid to societal distributional consequences of stakeholder governance. Despite its normative promise, stakeholder governance scholarship lacks nuanced mechanisms for how firm–stakeholder exchanges create stakeholder advantage or disadvantage, with implications for societal inequality. We argue that this gap in our understanding stems from insufficient attention to the capacity of non-economic resources to impact the growing asymmetries in the power of stakeholders within their economic fields. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and field, we theorise how capital redistribution, relative capital weightings and convertibility of multiple forms of capital in a firm’s nexus of stakeholder relationships can lead to stakeholder advantage or disadvantage. We argue that the inadequate provision of capitals by firms for their stakeholders, with limited value or convertibility of those capitals in stakeholders’ fields, can undermine the power of and create disadvantage for stakeholders as well as contribute to broader patterns of inequality. Our theory offers a practical analytic tool for identifying and mitigating disadvantage in stakeholder-oriented organisations.