Stakeholder theory has largely been anthropocentric in its focus on human actors and interests, failing to recognise the impact of nonhumans in business and organisations. This leads to an incomplete understanding of organisational contexts that include key relationships with nonhuman animals. In addition, the limited scholarly attention paid to nonhumans as stakeholders has mostly been conceptual to date. Therefore, we develop a stakeholder theory with animals illustrated through two ethnographic case studies: an animal shelter and Nordic husky businesses. We focus our feminist reading of Driscoll and Starik’s (J Bus Ethics 49:55–73, 2004) stakeholder attributes for nonhumans and extend this to include affective salience built on embodied affectivity and knowledge, memories, action and care. Findings reveal that nonhuman animals are important actors in practice, affecting organisational operations through human–animal care relationships. In addition to confirming animals are stakeholders, we further contribute to stakeholder theory by offering ways to better listen to nontraditional actors.

Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by emerald-srm:448207 [] For AuthorsIf you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to discuss emotions within a highly emotive organizational setting through the use of crystallization. The authors contend that the expression of a researcher's positionality as a presence within their research is crucial in contexts where conventional research approaches are unable to capture the depth of the phenomenon under study. The paper argues that the presentation of research findings from highly emotional organizational context will benefit from a challenge to traditional ways of representing and communicating the researcher's experience.As an example of this, in this paper the authors examine the emotions involved in experiencing animal euthanasia in a work context. Design/methodology/approach -The paper draws ethnographic methods of fieldwork in an Australian animal shelter. The paper uses autoethnography and interview data. Findings -Euthanasia is one of the most tolling experiences for animal shelter workers. This paper reveals that through a creative representation this experience may come induce understanding of the emotive context. Furthermore, the employees adapt one or more story-lines to deal with the conflict of euthanasia. Originality/value -The strength of this paper is that it uses a novel approach to present findings in the form of crystallization. It also furthers insight on how organizational members explain their involvement in emotive work-tasks.

Working with animals is a daily occurrence for millions of people who often complete tasks which are tainted, in spite of the work being seen as essential in modern society. Animal shelter-work is such an occupation. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of the caring–killing paradox (a dissonance that workers face when killing animals they are also caring for), through an insider ethnographic study. We find that care-based animal dirty work consists of unique ambiguities and tensions related to powerlessness, deception and secrecy in the work based on a ‘processing-plant’ framework which informs how workers deal with unwanted animals. We find competing ideologies of care and control to be foundational in this work.

This chapter develops understanding of human-animal work (HAW). Work with animals may include ‘dirty work’ laced by physical, social, moral, and emotional taints such as killing those cared for. Much animal care-based work includes a work calling to help animals while the reality can be conflictual for workers, creating paradox and dissonance. The chapter is based on an insider affective multispecies ethnography in an animal shelter when a sudden natural disaster hit the shelter, flooding the organization and forcing a sudden evacuation of animals and humans. The crisis reframed wellbeing for the multispecies organizational actors, leading to less dissonance as callings were enacted in that workers could save more animals than prior to the crisis. The chapter argues that wellbeing, especially in multispecies organizations, is entangled across species barriers. Adopting a posthumanist framing, the chapter argues for a need for multispecies organizations (especially those in the animal welfare sector), to better consider their organizational processes and policies through a lens of interconnected wellbeing among human and animal actors.

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version usually differs somewhat from the publisher's final version, if the self-archived version is the accepted author manuscript.