Stakeholder Salience for Small Businesses : A Social Proximity Perspective

This paper advances stakeholder salience theory from the viewpoint of small businesses. It is argued that the stakeholder salience process for small businesses is influenced by their local embeddedness, captured by the idea of social proximity, and characterised by multiple relationships that the owner-manager and stakeholders share beyond the business context. It is further stated that the ethics of care is a valuable ethical lens through which to understand social proximity in small businesses. The contribution of the study conceptualises how the perceived social proximity between local stakeholders and small business owner-managers influences managerial considerations of the legitimacy, power and urgency of stakeholders and their claims. Specifically, the paradoxical nature of close relationships in the salience process is acknowledged and discussed.Peer reviewe

Ghosts in the machine:Is IR eternally haunted by the spectre of old concepts?

Where ideas such as the ‘End of History’, ‘Globalisation’ or a ‘New World Order’ once animated the academy, recent debates within International Relations (IR) seem indicative of an emerging sea-change in intellectual trends. Scholars are now mooting instead a ‘Return of History’, the ‘Return of Authoritarian Great Powers’, the ‘Return of Realism’, the ‘Resurgence of geopolitical competition’ and even a ‘Replay of the Great Game’. The resurrection of these so-called ‘traditional’ concepts raises an intriguing question: is the study of IR continually plagued by concepts that refuse to go away? This article begins by reviewing the intellectual historiography of IR, demonstrating that heralds of a ‘new dawn’ have repeatedly encountered the stubborn lingering presence of ‘old’ assumptions. The article then proceeds to analyse how the philosophical metaphor of a ‘ghost in the machine’ can help elucidate these peculiar intellectual quirks of IR, before concluding by contemplating the possibility of eventual ‘exorcism’