Stakeholder Analysis

Origin. Mitchell, Agle and Wood's salience model; Freeman's stakeholder theory.

Mechanism. Enumerates parties by three attributes — power, legitimacy, urgency — and predicts which will act. A party with all three is definitive; with one, latent. The prediction concerns behaviour, not entitlement.

Procedure. List every party affected by or able to affect the outcome, including those with no voice. Score each on the three attributes. For each, state its objective function, not its stated position.

Applies to. Implementation planning; predicting where a technically correct proposal will die.

Limitations. Parties with legitimacy and no power are invariably dropped from the analysis, which is the analysis working as designed and is the ethical failure of the model.