From Stake to Right: Rightholder Theory

• In Event: Theory Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5

Abstract

In management and organization scholarship, rightholders are often rendered invisible or treated as optional. Whether the affected are workers, communities, displaced peoples, or ecosystems, even well-intentioned engagement is filtered through frameworks that preserve the power of corporate discretion and academic authority because the language of engagement is about power. This systemic non-recognition and unaccountability ensures that legitimate rights-based claims rarely disrupt business-as-usual. This paper develops Rightholder Theory as a fundamental challenge to the managerial logic underpinning stakeholder thinking. Where traditional approaches treat stakeholders as interests to manage, Rightholder Theory asserts that individuals, groups, and communities — especially those whose issues, identities, spaces, and engagement with nature remain unrecognized — are right-bearing actors with claims that exist independent of corporate power and impose structural obligations on institutions. The paper identifies the meta-theoretical fault line, a convergence of foundational assumptions across the field’s dominant theories that functions as an exclusion stabilizer, and contributes the concepts of institutional responsibility, value justice, rightholder standing, and epistemic integrity. It concludes that paradigm shift requires both substantive transformation (replacing managerial discretion with institutional responsibility, value creation with value justice, and interest balancing with rights recognition) and epistemic transformation of how scholarship examines its own theoretical foundations.

Author

• Rashedur Chowdhury, University of Essex