Multi-standing governance is the model’s alternative to shareholder primacy, and it is more rigorous than the usual “stakeholder” language it replaces. Once a firm is seen inside its full web of relationships — owners, workers, customers, suppliers, communities, public infrastructure, future participants — treating shareholder standing as the only legitimate standing becomes hard to defend. Shareholders hold real standing, because they provide capital and bear financial risk; they do not hold exclusive standing.
But the answer is not that “everyone is a stakeholder,” which is too vague to decide anything. The model makes the question precise:
Which groups have standing regarding which decisions?
Shareholders may hold strong jurisdiction over some capital questions; workers over certain workplace questions; customers over specific data and product-safety issues; communities where externalities arise. This is the firm-level application of the model’s general treatment of standing as relational and domain-specific rather than generalized — the same logic as functional standing and the guard against standing leakage. See The Generative Firm.