The long term objectives of this research are to use tobacco industry documents from online archives and document depositories to describe the strategic relationships of the tobacco industry and selected stakeholders, to define the ethical obligations of the industry to these stakeholders, and to evaluate its performance in meeting these obligations. This model of stakeholder analysis, as developed in the fields of corporate strategy and business ethics, is particularly appropriate for application to the tobacco industry since it includes both a descriptive process for identifying stakeholders and their claims, and a normative, or ethical, assessment of the industry's responsiveness to these stakeholders. The result will be a major overview of the industry's historic and contemporary approaches to its stakeholders, and the reciprocal influences between these stakeholders and the industry. Such an overview will provide a systematic framework for an ethical analysis of strategic decisions by the tobacco companies. This analysis will contribute to a greater understanding by the pubic health community of the effectiveness of particular stakeholder collaborations, and an increased awareness of factors that influence tobacco industry business decision-making. This stakeholder analysis of the tobacco industry will be described and disseminated in research journals in the fields of management, business ethics, and public health. Further products of this analysis will be the development of teaching cases on the tobacco industry for use by management educators, an audience that has been overlooked by tobacco control researchers. In addition, the document findings will be abstracted, indexed, and posted on a website accessible to other researchers. This website will be created by the C. Everett Koop Institute and will be linked to the Dartmouth Medical School website.
