The Anatomy of Power: A Bourdieusian Perspective on the Role of Leaders in Managing Capital Flows in Firm-Stakeholder Relationships

The crisis of capitalism and the neoliberal models of leadership, with their key focus on shareholder value, led to growing inequality gaps and increasingly unequal distribution of risk in the global society. Stemming from the organizational level, the persistent challenges of managing stakeholder relationships in a fair, reciprocal manner inspired the public statements on stakeholder capitalism made by influential business groups such as the Business Roundtable and the World Economic Forum. These challenges call for new paradigms in value co-creation, better models based on fairness and a new view of leadership. Recognizing the vast potential of sociology in offering powerful analytical tools and the theoretical renderings of the process to discuss change, we rely on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory to conceptualize the reciprocal relationships in the firm-stakeholder nexus. Employing the idea of multiple forms of capital, the concepts of habitus and field as well as the homology principle, we develop a process model to conceptualize the objective reality in the firm-stakeholder nexus and envision the role of a leader in managing the flows of capital, in the multiplicity of its forms. Building upon the ideas of Bourdieu’s Principles of Economic Anthropology that envisions the social space of the economic field, we develop an intuitive and practical analytical instrument in stakeholder management that captures the complexity of the firm-stakeholder nexus at a suitable level of abstraction and offers a sound theory-informed basis for reflexive analysis for leaders. Our work offers a theoretical contribution to organizational sociology with implications for understanding responsible leadership.