From Stake to Right: Introducing Rightholder Theory to Challenge Institutional Non-Recognition and Unaccountability

Programme

• 09:00–09:10 — Welcome
  Dorte Salskov-Iversen, Head of the Department of Management, Society and Communication (MSC)
• 09:10–10:00 — Annual Lecture
  Professor Rashedur Chowdhury
• 10:00–10:10 — Commentary
  Jacobo Ramirez, Co-director of CBDS
• 10:10–11:00 — Q&A and Discussion with Participants

About Annual Lecture

I introduce Rightholder Theory as a fundamental challenge to the managerial logic underpinning both mainstream and stakeholder thinking. Traditional approaches treat stakeholders as interests to manage. In fundamental contrast, Rightholder Theory asserts that individuals, groups, and communities–especially those whose issues, identities, spaces, and engagement with nature remain unrecognized–are right-bearing actors with claims that exist independent of corporate power and require protection from entrenched organizational biases.

In current management and organization scholarship, rightholders are often rendered invisible or treated as optional. Even well-intentioned engagement is filtered through frameworks that preserve the power of corporate discretion and academic authority–because the language of engagement is about power. This systemic non-recognition and unaccountability leaves rightholder agency, aspirations, and self-determinations neglected, misrepresented, or deliberately ignored. This ensures that legitimate rights-based claims rarely disrupt business-as-usual, when they rightfully should.

The urgency of this shift is evident in Rana Plaza garment workers sacrificed by global supply chains that externalized human life, in stateless migrants denied legal protection, in informal workers whose labor remains unacknowledged, and in indigenous communities whose land and culture are treated as negotiable commodities. These are not merely stakeholders to be consulted. They are rightholders whose claims cannot be subordinated to managerial trade-offs or profit calculations.

Rightholder Theory calls for the radical restructuring of managerial practice and academic integrity to emphasize organizational justice, institutional responsibility, and mechanisms that confront non-recognition and unaccountability. By replacing performative genuflections with principled obligations, substituting recognition of rights for the balancing of interests, and judiciously redistributing power, Rightholder Theory redefines the purpose of the firm, and the role of scholarship to enable re-engagement with rightholders, their spaces, and nature–contributing to transformative justice.