Abstract
This study focuses on emphasizing the instrumental role of stakeholder analysis and the concept of business ecosystem. Specifically, a stakeholder relationship might provide the channel for the particular instrumental targets of a business subset. This kind of stakeholder management is based on a principal-agent relationship between industry actors. However, this example, which focuses on horse entrepreneurs and the infectious diseases of this subset of the equine industry, shows that instead of a simple principal-agent relationship, stakeholder management might yield a chain of principal-agent relationships in the form of a principal-agent/principal-agent relationship (for example, one or more of the stakeholders simultaneously takes on the role of both agent and principal). According to the analysis, horse entrepreneurs have this kind of double role in stakeholder management for the prevention of infectious diseases.
TopBackground: What We Already Know And What Is Missing?
It is found that horse entrepreneurs have often rejected a traditional market ethos (Sigurdardottir & Steinthorsson, 2011). Instead, they can create values beyond the economic under the concept of animal disease (the values of animal health and well-being) and cooperate with customers through co-creative processes in which these sustainable values are maintained and respected. In this framework horse entrepreneurs can focus their attention to horse health and the biosecurity of their stables. Biosecurity covers risk assessment and concrete preventive operations, such as vaccination, disinfection, and the quarantine of horses that are sick or from other stables. Previous studies from the US and New Zealand have revealed that these practices are implemented in varying degrees (USDA, 2006; Rosanowski et al., 2012; Rosanowski et al., 2013) but in Finland the horse industry’s biosecurity practices have rarely been studied. Recently, it is revealed that the majority of horse owners (85–95%) vaccinate their horses at least for equine influenza (Koskinen, 2014a) and that those horses active in equine sport arenas are mostly vaccinated (Koskinen, 2014a, 2014b). Worm control practices were statistically combined with the occurrence of helminths and were not explicitly reported (Aromaa, et al., 2018).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Double Role: In the context of this chapter, the horse entrepreneurs have a double role as an agent and a principal.
Equine Industry: Covers horse business with full- or part-time horse-related enterprises and workers.
Communication Chain: Covers horse business with full- or part-time horse-related enterprises.
Biosecurity Weakness: Identified in a principal-agent relationship between a horse entrepreneur and a customer, perhaps due to a complex and distant principal-agent chain between the entrepreneur and those authorities responsible for communicating about infectious diseases and preventive operations.
Instrumental Stakeholder Theory: Integrates stakeholders of business and society, and is the synthesis of ethics and economics.
Principal-Agent/Principal-Agent Relationship: The chain of principal-agent relationship, where one (or more) actor has simultaneously both the role of principal and the agent.
Principal-Agent Relationship: An arrangement in which one entity, e.g. legally, appoints another to act on its behalf.