Corporate citizenship and indigenous stakeholders : exploring a new dynamic of organisational stakeholder relationships

The notion of corporate citizenship has re-emerged in the late 1990S as a topic of considerable academic and managerial debate. Corporate citizenship is the recognition that a business organisation not only has financial responsibilities to its shareholders, but also social, cultural and environmental responsibilities to the community from which it seeks a licence to operate. It is argued that this 'stakeholder approach' is necessary for an organisation to remain sustainable in the long term. However, defining the basis ofstakeholder legitimacy is problematic and tends to be framed from the perspective of the business firm, which limits understanding of the more complex dynamics of organisation-stakeholder relationships, especially if the stakeholder groups have very different social, cultural,political and economic agendas from those of industry. Indigenous communities all over the world constitute one such stakeholder group. Historically, these communities have had little say on the kind of development that has taken place on their traditional lands. The paper examines how mining companies perceive and manage the social, cultural and economic impacts of development on their indigenous stakeholders, and explores different themes underlying the relationships between mining companies and indigenous stakeholders in Australia.