How does a firm resist stakeholder demands while maintaining these critical relationships? The stakeholder literature has largely skirted this question because it was argued that resisting stakeholders would be so costly that the firm must concede to avoid potentially catastrophic outcomes. Joining the nascent research reconsidering this position, we theorize that empirically-based resistance strategies allow firms to resist stakeholder demands without degrading relationships or provoking substantial conflict. We postulate that stakeholder demands flow from issues, whose salience is informed by the stakeholders’ shared values, as well as empirical evidence establishing the issue’s existence, magnitude, causes/effects, and remedies. This leads to our primary theoretical argument: firm resistance focused squarely on the empirical aspects of an issue weakens perceptions of issue salience, thereby minimizing resulting demands, without threatening the stakeholders’ shared values. We identify two novel empirically-based resistance strategies: validity disputing and validity promoting. Whereas both avoid addressing shareholders’ shared values, validity disputing acts on empirical evidence to weaken perceptions of issue salience as well as resulting demands, while validity promoting accepts an issue’s salience, but uses empirical evidence to advocate for the firm’s preferred remedy to the issue. Cumulatively, these strategies produce a lack of consensus among stakeholders regarding an issue’s existence, magnitude, causes/effects and/or remedies – without provoking the adversarial responses that resistance on stakeholders’ shared values would foster.
