Marginalized Stakeholder Theory: A Normative Foundation for Decolonization

Whether they address issues of marginalization or study organizations in general, traditional management and business ethics scholars predominantly focus on firms’ engagement with powerful stakeholders. This represents a severe problem globally, manifesting acutely in postcolonial contexts, as firms’ engagement with marginalized stakeholders is either neglected or ignored. This neglect also highlights the problem of epistemic obfuscation in management and business ethics scholarship, through which existing works on decolonization and marginalized stakeholders are either overlooked or co-opted by the mainstream. To advance decolonial organizational scholarship and counter epistemic obfuscation, I propose marginalized stakeholder theory. This theory establishes new pathways for firms to revise their normative principles and decolonize their corporate activities. It enables firms to overcome colonial legacies, reject neocolonial logics embedded in instrumental approaches, and develop decolonial engagement with marginalized stakeholders. To this end, I reconceptualize three engagement approaches—proactive, reactive, and defensive—which are generally used by firms for instrumental purposes. I argue that this reconceptualization provides a starting point for the necessary structural and agentic transformation toward decolonization in epistemic and organizational practices.