1428: The Stakeholder Value Creation and Appropriation Model: A New Tool for Addressing Grand Challenges? (14129)

The stakeholder value creation and appropriation (VCA) model enables analysis of how the economic value created by a firm’s activities is shared among its immediate stakeholders—employees, customers, suppliers, government, and capital owners. A series of articles in the Strategic Management Journal has conceptualized and developed the approach as well as demonstrated its application in comparative case study analysis (Garcia-Castro and Aguilera, 2015; Lieberman, Garcia-Castro and Balasubramanian, 2017; Lieberman, Balasubramanian and Garcia-Castro, 2018; Kern and Gospel, 2020). The approach holds potential beyond the Strategy field by offering a way of investigating how firm-level decisions and practices create winners and losers. It enables Management scholars to link micro-level patterns of distribution to macro-level pressures and outcomes, which is of particular importance in a time of heightened inequality and distributional conflict. Inequality in and around organizations is one of the defining societal issues of our time and has been particularly laid bare during the Covid crisis and ensuing period of inflation (Suddaby, Bruton and Walsh, 2018; Amis, Mair and Munir, 2020; Bapuji, Ertug and Shaw, 2020; Munir, 2020). The suggestion of ‘greedflation’ – corporations driving inflation through excess profits – has brought distributional questions to the fore: are firms prioritizing returns to shareholders while resisting wage increases, thus leaving workers struggling to cope with the rising cost of living (Weber and Wasner, 2023; Inman, 2023)? The stakeholder VCA model is a new tool that helps Management scholars address questions such as this and contribute to solving societal grand challenges. Building on the success of the stakeholder VCA symposium at AOM 2021, this symposium will again bring together scholars who are experts in the approach with those who have an interest in it, take stock of developments in the area of work, and explore new applications and extensions of the model. The debate will place particular emphasis on how it can be used to help us unpack the complex relationship between organizations and wider distributional outcomes, and thus help to address grand challenges.