Family matters? The effects of size and proximity in the digital age

In Barnett, Henriques, and Husted (2020), we argued that, in the aggregate, the digital age has not given stakeholders greater influence over firm behaviors. In their Exchange article, Jimenez, Xu, and Bennett (2021) agreed with our broad model of stakeholder influence in the digital age but suggested that the model does not account for independent, owner-managed small businesses interacting with local stakeholders in crisis situations. In our response here, we explore the implications of the two factors that underpin their argument—firm size and firm–stakeholder proximity—for stakeholder influence in the digital age. We conclude that some scenarios associated with these two factors are worth further investigation, but they do not fundamentally alter the dynamics of stakeholder influence in the digital age that we identified in Barnett et al. (2020), even for small, independent firms in crisis situations.