Resumo

Stakeholder prioritization has been a very discussed theme within Stakeholder Theory since its been launched. Social enterprises have pecualidades that do not make clear the form of prioritization of the stakeholders. This type of the business has a differentiated relationship with stakeholders, for example, stakeholders invest capital without necessarily expecting profit. Thus, there is a need to discuss the prioritization of stakeholders in social enterprises in order to contribute to the managerial practice and the academy.

The paper's research problem is raised: are there different patterns of stakeholder prioritization in social enterprises and in non-social enterprises? With this goal in mind two objectives were determined: (1) to detect which stakeholders are prioritized by social enterprises and non-social enterprises certified by the B System; (2) to analyze possible differences or similarities in the stakeholders prioritization on social enterprise and non-social enterprises.

Freeman (1984) defined stakeholders as “any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization's objectives”. Trying to enlighten the discussion, in 1997, Mitchell et al. proposed a model to detect to whom (or what) manager really should pay attention, which they called theory of stakeholder salience. Mair and Martí (2006) frame it “as a process involving the innovative use and combination of resources to pursue opportunities to catalyze social change and/or address social needs” (p. 37).

As database we used B Impact Reports. First, social and non-social enterprises were separated according to specific criteria. Then the databases were created for calculations and analyzes. For the analysis of the data, was considered the difference test between independent means, which considers as null hypothesis that there is no difference between the means of the two groups analyzed (Lapponi, 2004; Witte & Witte, 2005). For this, a 95% confidence level was adopted, a significance level of 5% for rejection of the null hypothesis.

Initially, in relation to social enterprises, the following order of prioritization of stakeholders was verified: community, workers, environment and consumers. Regarding non-social enterprises, despite different mean scores, the order of prioritization was the same, starting with the community, followed by workers, the environment and consumers. After application of the T test for social enterprises, the order of prioritization defined was: 1 - community, 2 - workers and environment and 3 - consumers. For non-social enterprises: : 1 - community, 2 - workers and 3 - environment and consumers.

As limitations, this study considered only the stakeholder groups listed by the system, not considering other typical groups like suppliers, owners e government.New studies could be developed to understand why the community was considered as the stakeholder most prioritized by social enterprises, and which the implications for the sustainability of social enterprises, and new perspectives besides the socio-environmental impact could be analyzed to understand the prioritization of stakeholders.

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