EDITORIAL: Journal of Corporate Citizenship, Issue 38, Summer, 2010 Can Stakeholder Engagement Be Generative? David Cooperrider and Ronald Fry The Fowler Center for Sustainable Value, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University The importance of stakeholder engagement to effective corporate citizenship and the role of businesses in helping to shape a sustainable future is apparent. From local partnering with NGOs to public-private partnerships in community development, to global networks like the United Nations Global Compact, there is a clarion call for deeper stakeholder analyses, broader stakeholder engagement, and mutual stakeholder action. The connection or link from engaging stakeholders in conversation, sense-making, and decision-making to taking action together is a tenuous one, at best. Yet without multiple stakeholder action that is collaborative and transformational, the promise of corporate citizenship or sustainable enterprises will be hollow. The time has come to examine more deeply the shapes and kinds of high-quality stakeholder engagements that truly become “generative.” We borrow this term from Gergen’s (1994) description of generative theory building as that which is designed to undermine commitment to the prevailing systems of theoretical construction and to generate new options for action. In other words, it is a designed interaction or engagement to: (1) generate truly new ideas that challenge the status quo; and (2) engender within the parties a desire or energy to want to work on those ideas together. The first of these two qualities of generative connections is not new, or mysterious. We engage everyday in conversations designed to generate new ideas…but then what? Typically a ‘responsible’ party is left to take the next step with the list of ideas. Those who contributed to the ideation are left (comfortably) to proceed to the next meeting to offer their ideas and opinions. It is the second quality that challenges our current practice of stakeholder engagement; how to engage in such a way that those participants discover an urge or energy to initiate more interaction to help the ideas come to fruition. When people are in such a generative state, they feel energized as a natural consequence; “the feeling that one is eager to act and capable of acting” (Quinn & Dutton; 2002:37). We are beginning to learn more about the process and impact of these generative connections or what Dutton and Heaphy (2003) term high-quality-connection (HQC). They describe the potential impact of HQC as just what we wish most from stakeholder engagement: parties create positive spirals of meaning about projects and collective endeavors; they may be able to display authentic identities more often, engage each other more fully, be more vulnerable in the process of learning, and experience more interpersonal valuing through positive regard (Dutton and Heaphy, 2003:276); all of which cultivate positive emotions and trust, which contribute to higher coping, greater resilience in the face of setbacks, more creativity, greater attention and a broadening of the thought-action repertoire (Fredrickson, 1998). In terms of the process, there appears to be a shift from a centripetal tendency toward uniformity (agreement) and exclusion toward a centrifugal thrust that unsettles convention and admits new discourses while also including more and more parties to the conversation (Bakhtin, 1981).