Stakeholder theory is beginning to have a greater reach in the academic literature on business. The purpose of this chapter is to examine how it has been applied in the four major business disciplines – finance, accounting, management, and marketing (economics was addressed earlier, in Chapter 1, and strategic management in Chapter 4). This chapter suggests that researchers have selected those portions of the theory that are most applicable to the questions they are trying to answer. Integration of stakeholder concepts with the theories of their own discipline has occurred; however, this integration has not, unfortunately, contributed much to the core stakeholder literature. In other words, stakeholder theory has informed the business disciplines, but the disciplines have done little to inform stakeholder theory. Perhaps another way to say this is that stakeholder theorists have not paid adequate attention to the disciplines. We offer the ideas in this chapter as a beginning to bridging this disciplinary gap. There are opportunities for scholars in all the business disciplines to advance both stakeholder theory and practice.

In the next section we shall briefly discuss the emergence of the primary business disciplines. We shall also explain how we have defined the content of each discipline for the purposes of this analysis. Each of the four disciplines has a subsequent section devoted to it.