The emergence of a stakeholder‑relational logic in corporate communications

The analytical thinking that CSRD, ERM, CSDDD and UNGP each demand converges on a common approach. That convergence, across frameworks developed for different purposes in different decades, points toward an emerging operating logic in corporate communications, increasingly reflected in contemporary corporate practice.

The four frameworks differ in scope, jurisdiction and origin. CSRD comes from accounting and sustainability reporting; CSDDD from human rights and supply chain due diligence; COSO from enterprise risk management (ERM); UNGP from international law and corporate responsibility. They were developed by different institutions, in different decades, for different purposes. Their primary objects of analysis differ: financial materiality, sustainability performance, human rights impact, enterprise risk and corporate responsibility. But the analytical requirements they place on organisations increasingly overlap.

At its core, that shared analytical approach has three elements: systematic identification of stakeholders and rights-holders; structured assessment of the organisation's exposure – severity of impact on rights-holders, financial and strategic risk from stakeholder behaviour; and integration of that understanding into decision-making rather than communication after the fact.

In their strongest forms, each of these frameworks emphasises substantive engagement, not communicative outreach. Each tends to treat the organisation’s relationships with the wider world as something to be understood in substance, not only managed through perception. Each distinguishes the structural exposure that defines the company from the current matters that need attention now. And each assigns to senior management the responsibility for understanding both.

Taken together, these elements point toward what can be described as a new operating logic. It rests on a simple proposition: the corporation is a bundle of relationships, not only a bundle of contracts. The contract view and the shareholder primacy framework remain foundational in law and finance; the relational perspective does not displace them. It adds an analytical layer without which long-term performance – including the shareholder value that follows from it – becomes harder to explain and harder to achieve.

In practice, this relational layer coexists with – and is often constrained by – the financial and legal frameworks that continue to dominate decision-making. The corporation’s long-term performance depends on the quality of its relationships – relationships that are, like all relationships, shaped as much by emotion as by reason – and on its ability to listen to them, learn from them, and act on what it has learnt.

In this view, communication becomes less a transmission function and more a mechanism through which organisational relationships are understood and managed.

The intellectual lineage is best understood as convergent rather than cumulative. Several distinct traditions developed in parallel from the late 1970s onward. From management theory, R. Edward Freeman’s stakeholder theory (1984), and from legal scholarship, Ian Macneil’s relational contract theory, together reframed the firm as relationally constituted. From communications research, James Grunig’s excellence programme distinguished one-way and two-way models of public relations and demonstrated the latter’s superior organisational outcomes. From sociology and its extension into corporate communications, Stephen Hilgartner and Charles Bosk’s public arenas model (1988) reshaped the understanding of how social issues form and compete, later extended by Marita Vos, Henny Schoemaker and Vilma Luoma-aho into the concept of issue arenas.

From international law and applied ethics, the human rights tradition produced the conceptual move from stakeholder interest to rights-holder claim, formalised in John Ruggie’s UN Guiding Principles (2011). And from accounting, audit and corporate governance reform – Cadbury, King, Treadway, Sarbanes-Oxley – came the materiality, internal controls and risk management infrastructure that COSO’s revised ERM framework (2017) builds on. COSO is not a stakeholder-first framework, but its focus on external context and enterprise exposure incorporates stakeholder behaviour as a primary source of risk.

From the parallel sustainability reporting tradition – established by CERES after the Exxon Valdez incident in 1989, institutionalised through the Global Reporting Initiative from 1997, and developed further through SASB and the TCFD – came the disclosure architecture that the CSRD (2022) consolidates into binding EU law.

The CSRD’s double materiality architecture formalises this convergence: impact materiality draws directly on the human-rights tradition and the UNGPs’ focus on severity for rights-holders, while financial materiality reflects the risk-based logic of COSO, TCFD and mainstream corporate governance.

These traditions remained largely separate for decades. They have converged institutionally over the 2010s and 2020s, incorporating elements from each while retaining distinct purposes. The UN Guiding Principles, adopted as soft law in 2011, have been translated into binding or quasi-binding obligations through the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (2024) and the Norwegian Transparency Act (2021). COSO’s revised ERM framework (2017) and the CSRD (2022) developed in parallel within their own traditions, drawing on overlapping intellectual ground without being direct implementations of UNGPs.

The composite picture is multilineage convergence: independent intellectual and institutional traditions arriving in practice at partially overlapping conclusions about stakeholder-aware, structurally attentive corporate behaviour. Over four decades these streams have moved toward a more aligned understanding of the capabilities organisations require.

The convergence is not complete, and the frameworks retain important differences in scope, method and underlying logic. But in practice they increasingly require similar underlying capabilities.

The paradigm is not without precedent. Investor relations, in particular, exhibits many of its principles in established practice – systematically engaging institutional investors, anticipating their responses, and analysing how the composition of the shareholder base shapes corporate optionality. Where IR succeeds, it does so through continuous intelligence-gathering and relationship management rather than through messaging discipline alone.

What is new in the current development is not the underlying logic, but its extension across a broader set of stakeholder relationships and its institutionalisation in regulatory frameworks.

The practical implications are straightforward. Taken together, these implications redefine communication as a diagnostic and decision-making function, not only a representational one.

Stakeholder language predominates in what follows; the same analytical posture, with stronger procedural requirements, applies to rights-holder engagement under UNGP and CSDDD.

Effective organisations increasingly begin with listening, not messaging. Communication is shaped as much by emotion as by reason – stakeholder reactions are formed by trust, expectation and lived experience as much as by facts – and listening is the discipline that makes the emotional substrate legible. An organisation that hears only stated positions misses the substrate on which those positions move.

Decisions affecting external parties are increasingly taken with prior knowledge of how those parties will perceive and respond. Stakeholder engagement is not only a communications exercise; it is an input to strategy. Over time, reputation tends to follow documented behaviour, not narrative work alone.

This approach distinguishes the foundational approach to communication from the agenda of the day. The foundational approach follows from the defining characteristics of the industry and the company’s structural exposure, and is the long-term posture required to maintain legitimacy and influence. This rarely changes. A company’s current strategic priorities address what the political and regulatory environment is doing now, what stakeholders are demanding now, and what advocacy is required now. These shift continuously.

It identifies and engages in the relevant arenas. An arena forms around a specific issue, with its own actors, dynamics and debate trajectory. Companies operate in many such arenas at once, across regulatory, financial, political, sector-specific and geographic contexts.

It prioritises salience over visibility. The most reputationally sensitive issue is not always the most important. The UNGP principle of salience – focus on the most severe impacts on rights-holders – disciplines the organisation against the temptation to manage reputation rather than address harm.

It increasingly places communications judgement in strategic decisions, not only after them. The communications function is not only a downstream service that translates decisions into language; in stronger implementations, it is an upstream input that informs the decisions themselves.

Adoption remains uneven. Many organisations continue to operate primarily through messaging, positioning and compliance-driven disclosure. The shift described here is therefore not universal, but increasingly visible in regulated sectors and in organisations with significant stakeholder exposure.

Three factors help explain why this approach is gaining traction. First, it aligns with regulatory requirements. CSRD, CSDDD, the Norwegian Transparency Act and the wider family of governance and disclosure frameworks all presume that companies have the analytical infrastructure to assess their impacts on stakeholders and rights-holders, depending on the framework, and to demonstrate substantive engagement with them.

Second, it produces organisational learning. A company that listens systematically to its stakeholders accumulates information about its operating environment that competitors who only message do not have.

Third, it aligns with how sophisticated stakeholders actually engage. Regulators, investors, courts, NGOs and rights-holders assess companies by their behaviour and by the substance of their engagement.

For organisations operating in regulated environments with structural stakeholder exposure, this shift is becoming difficult to ignore. The frameworks now in force do not merely require disclosure; they require understanding.

Increasingly, the question is not only whether companies communicate well, but whether they understand their position in the system well enough to act.

My thinking on corporate communications is laid out here: www.jorgenchristiansen.no/how