The Strategic Cognition View of Issue Salience and the Evolution of a Political Issue : Landis & Gyr, the Hungarian Uprising and East-West Trade, 1953–1967

摘要

Why do firms facing similar stakeholder issues respond quite differently? The recentlyintroduced strategic cognition view of issue salience and firm responsiveness (hereinafter:issue salience model) seeks to tackle this core question of stakeholder theory. I extend thenascent theorizing with a historical case study in order to rethink the model’s firm-centricperspective. The firm under examination in this historical case study is the Swissmultinational Landis & Gyr (LG) during the Cold War period. Like many other Swiss exportorientedcompanies in the 1950s and early 1960s, LG was challenged by Swiss pressuregroups, which were highly effective at putting an issue on the public agenda: the call to breakoff trade relations with the communist East. The empirically grounded explanation of issueinterpretation and response mechanisms derived from this case study offers two keytheoretical implications: First, it shifts our focus outwards, toward the social and politicalcontext, in which issues evolve and play out over time. This elaboration seeks to understandthe role of the social and political surroundings in constituting firm-specific issueinterpretation processes and response outcomes. Second, the findings suggest that the issuesalience model emphasizes an overly homogenizing conception of the firm. By pointingtowards the tensions and ambiguities in a firm’s collective sensemaking efforts, I start acritique of the theory in order to push this important stream of research further.