July 8th, 2008. The 19th IABS conference took place in Tampere, Finland. Our Stenden Professor of Service Studies, Dr. Elena Cavagnaro, presented there the first results of a research on the change over at our own Stenden Restaurant from mainstream to sustainability.



Dr. Elena Cavagnaro is conducting this research with the help of Sjoerd Gehrels and Nargiz Raghoebarsing and the support of the executive chef, Albert Kooy, and the Stenden management.

IABS is an acronym for International Association for Business in Society. This association was founded almost twenty years ago by a group of professors who were (and actually still are) member of the highly prestigious Academy of Management. They were looking for a venue to discuss their work where rules would be a bit less formal (but when it comes to scientific discipline even strict) than at the Academy. Among the founders were Edward Freeman (the big name in stakeholders-analysis); Archie B. Carroll (one of the founders of the modern CSR - Corporate Social Responsibility - concept); Thomas Jones (stakeholders- management and accounting); Ann Buchholz (one of the key authors in business ethics) and so on.

This year conference featured two of these big names in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility (Edward freeman and Thomas Jones) as key note speakers. Theme: the future of stakeholders- analysis. After the conference, Elena Cavagnaro was able to spend some time with Professor Freeman and discuss with him one of the ideas he presented during his keynote.

Professor Freeman, or Ed as he prefers to be called, pointed to the need to extend stakeholders- theory to include situations in which the same person unites in him- or herself the role of more than one stakeholder. Think for example of employees of a company as Unilever or a supermarket as Albert Heijn: they are both employees and clients of these companies. In Ed's eyes these stakeholders represent a separate category and we cannot pretend to know their needs and wants simply looking at the needs and wants of employees on one side and customers on the other. A more specific and subtle analysis is needed. Illustrating this, he said that when it comes to the employees-customers companies know that they are their most critical and loyal customers at the same time. Normal customers who are critical, are usually not loyal. However, it is easy to see that employees-customers have other ties that link them to a company than normal customers and could therefore be loyal and critical at the same time.

Companies are aware of this peculiarity. They know, for example, that the ultimate test of a new product is actually done by the employees. If employees do not buy the new product then it is wiser not to try to sell it to normal clients. Ed hopes that a bright student will take over the idea from here and expand the research into other areas (e.g. employees-owners; suppliers that are also competitors etc.).

It was a lively conversation and marked for Dr. Cavagnaro the end of a very successful conference. She met there many well-known scholars in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility research and many new; and received many compliments and encouragements for the research on the change process at Restaurant.NL. Actually different colleagues who were present at Elena's presentation congratulated Stenden for the decision to appoint Albert Kooy as a new executive chef and asked her to bring their best wishes for success to us all in general and Albert Kooy and his team in particular.

So: dear colleagues of Restaurant.NL Robbin Derry; Colin Higgings; Jamie Hendry; Tyron Love; Heidi Wetchler and Ed Freeman wish you a lot of success!