Toward a Descriptive Stakeholder Theory: an Organizational Life Cycle Approach

Academy of Management

This paper builds directly on Adizes’s organizational lifecycle model to show how stakeholder priorities shift predictably across the courtship, infancy, go-go, adolescence, prime, maturity, aristocracy, and bureaucracy stages. The authors cite Adizes (1979) as one of the two foundational lifecycle frameworks underpinning their descriptive stakeholder theory.