About STAKES
The question behind the project, the four work packages, the evidence being collected, and the rule on naming companies.
- Funder
- Research Council of Norway
- Project number
- 353416
- Scheme
- FRIPRO Researcher Project for Scientific Renewal
- Term
- 1 Jul 2025 to 29 Jun 2029
- Host
- Centre for Global Sustainability (GLOBE/SUM), University of Oslo
- Lead
- Jason Miklian
The project
STAKES asks what the purpose of responsible business is, and it asks it where the answer costs something. In 2019 the British Academy and 181 American chief executives said within months of each other that a company exists to serve society and not only its shareholders. The project follows one European multinational through each of seven fragile countries and a regional case in the Coral Triangle, and asks what that promise was worth to the people on the receiving end. Four years, eight questions, 2025 to 2029.
The four work packages
WP1, business roles in building inclusive societies in fragile spaces, holds the first three questions: what firms take business to be for, how communities read the projects that arrive, and how European regulators set the agenda. John Katsos leads two of them and Jason Miklian the third. WP2, case studies of social impact in fragile spaces, carries every case, together with the questions on what companies deliver, what CEOs and boards decide, and where the agenda is gender sensitive. Angelika Rettberg leads the first two and Jamal Maalouf the third.
WP3, theorising social purpose action by business, takes the results back to theory: whether social purpose improves a firm's strategy in fragile settings, and what an expanded stakeholder theory says about grand challenges. Sarah Cechvala leads both. WP4 is dissemination and engagement, and Jason Miklian holds it. The eight questions are set out one page each.
What the project collects
One survey runs across the seven case countries: seven thousand respondents, a thousand in each, fielded by RIWI. Around 350 interviews follow the decision chains inside the cases, roughly fifty per case, from a head office in Europe to the district where a project landed. A shared coding frame makes the cases comparable. The method page carries the protocol and the survey instrument as they are published.
Naming companies
Case pages name the country and the sector. The company is named once a peer-reviewed output naming it has been published. The reasoning sits on the ethics page, along with the consent, anonymisation and data handling commitments, and it applies to every case without exception.
Funding
The Research Council of Norway funds STAKES under FRIPRO, project 353416, from 1 July 2025 to 29 June 2029. The project is hosted at the Centre for Global Sustainability (GLOBE/SUM) at the University of Oslo.