BCOM

Along with corporate identity, stakeholders are recognized as significant to both management and organizations. A glance at existing scholarship suggests that stakeholders are scrutinized from within multiple perspectives. For instance, in corporate marketing (Balmer 2011) and corporate communication (Podnar 2014), the traditional viewpoint is that organizations and their managers need to place stakeholders in the forefront of their thinking. And in corporate branding (Hatch and Schultz 2010), critical and constructionist perspectives suggest consumers and other stakeholders to be co- creators in the development of identities and brands. However, the examination of the relationships between corporate identity and stakeholders remains underdeveloped. In this introduction, we examine the corporate identity and stakeholder ‘interface’. Mindful of, and building on, previous discussions in this journal on related issues (see: Alvesson 1998; Balmer and Wilson 1998; Czarniawska and Wolff 1998; Marziliano 1998; Motion and Leitch 2002: Stewart 2002; Lawer and Knox 2008), we argue that corporate identity, and the ways it is conceptualized, is of critical importance in comprehending stakeholders. Marshaling insights from the corporate marketing and corporate communication fields, this article scrutinizes two prominent - albeit highly contrasting - perspectives relating to the corporate identity and stakeholder interface. The first takes an endogenous and institutional approach: this represents the orthodox and dominant perspective that focuses on an organization’s inherent corporate identity traits, ethos, and capabilities. The second adopts an exogenous and relational approach: this exemplifies a critical and constructionist perspective where corporate identities are constituted by the interactions with and among stakeholders. By examining these two perspectives, this article seeks to advance our understanding of the territory and the ays