V.K. (Venkata Karthik) Rapaka MSc

Nowadays challenges facing organizations are complex due to the involvement of many parties and the number of issues that have to be addressed. The necessity, but also complexity of the involvement of multiple stakeholders becomes even clearer when organizing solutions to highly significant societal problems. Core characteristic of highly significant societal problems are that they are complex with unknown solutions and intertwined technical and social aspects and that they require sustained effort from a multitude of diverse stakeholders (Eisenhardt, Graebner, & Sonenshein, 2016; George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi, & Tihanyi, 2016). Product development and supply chain sustainability may be examples for daily multi-stakeholder challenges faced by organizations, crises resolution and the management of public safety may be examples for significant societal problems.

A variety of stakeholders is involved, such as buyers, sellers, employees, investors, interest groups, the government, citizens, and so on. They are involved and needed in order to establish an attractive outcome.  However, the interactions between these parties are complicated due to conflicting interests, different beliefs, multiple coherent solutions, and different cognitive frames. Organizing multi stakeholders entails therefore making many choices.

The overarching theme regarding multi stakeholders organizations is to study how these stakeholders overcome ownership, incentive, coordination and cognition problems in order to establish attractive outcomes. These choices are delineated in four projects:

• Cooperatives / Franchises: Two Worlds in One Organization;
• Governance of Bounded Cognition;
• Governance in Crisis Situations;
• Governance of Safety and Security.