Dissertation Proposal Awards

 

Lite Nartey is pursuing her doctorate in Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Her primary research interest is to explore the relationships, contingencies, and dynamics among firms and their political and social stakeholders. She is specifically interested in multinational firms within the extractive industries because these firms are forced to interact with diverse and often powerful stakeholders including NGOs, governments, multilateral agencies, legal authorities, conservationists, development experts and members of the community in which their operations are located.

 

Lite’s dissertation investigates innovative strategies that multinational firms can utilize to improve relations with their stakeholders. Traditionally, firms undertake corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in a bid to engender stakeholder cooperation and support for their operations. However, these initiatives often provide little to no benefit to both the firms and the stakeholders they seek to benefit. She attributes this to: 1) a lack of firm commitment to effective stakeholder engagement, and 2) a lack of guidance as to how and when to engage which stakeholders. Applying concepts from network theory, Lite’s research details links between the existing network structure of relationships between the firm and stakeholders, and the strategic choices firms can make to alter that structure to engender cooperative relations with stakeholders. Her work seeks to move the focus from moral, ethical, and normative principles of stakeholder engagement, to a focus on profit maximizing behavior and discussions of meaningful, sustainable practices that are grounded in theory. She is advised at Wharton by Witold Henisz.

 

You can view Lite Nartey's CV here.