Classifying employees as stakeholders

Stakeholders are everywhere. By most accounts, employees are stakeholders. But what does classifying a group of individual employees as stakeholders mean? This paper explores the labelling of employees as stakeholders by considering a number of issues: the ubiquity and power of the stakeholder heuristic; threats to the pluralist underpinnings of stakeholder theory; the manner in which employees are identified as stakeholders; and the implications of labelling employees as stakeholders. It is argued that act of labelling and treating employees as stakeholder may well serve the interest of the organisation rather than the interests of employees.