Abstract

There is a longstanding debate in the stakeholder literature as to who and what really counts as the stakeholders of the firm. Likewise, there have been discussions on whether nature should be considered a stakeholder of the firm. However, one seldom encounters any definitions of the key concepts, that is of nature or the natural environment . We seek to contribute to the debate by taking a closer look at what this thing called nature actually is. In addition, we discuss the implications of this conceptual refinement for the stakeholder model. In order to reinforce the status of the natural environment in the stakeholder model, we propose that any visualisation of a stakeholder network should be embedded in the natural environment