"Freeman is the acknowledged father of the stakeholder approach. His Strategic Management: a Stakeholder Approach (1984) introduced the concept of stakeholders, all of those individuals or groups other than shareholders (or owners) who have a stake in the particular decision or action of companies. The book proved to be a landmark in the development of stakeholder theory, a theory of management and business ethics that emphasises morality and ethicality in managing organisations. This theory was a departure from the dominant Anglo-Saxon approach that grants priority to shareholders and independence of management. Nowadays, the stakeholder approach is mentioned in virtually every publication on corporate governance and corporate social responsibility. By interacting with their stakeholders and societal context, organisations are able to establish their (social) responsibility system, enforced in part through laws and regulations but also increasingly voluntarily through company codes and business principles. The stakeholder theory is applied within various scientific disciplines ranging from business to law, from politics to health."