Dear Terry,

In using the term legitimate stakeholder, I did not intend a narrow
legal use of the term, but a broader use of the idea of any person or
creature with reasonable rights by virtue of being a human being (or
in some cases, an animal) involved in a situation where he or she has
a stake.

The issue involves ethics. And, as these things always do, the
opportunity to apply force creates the opportunity to create
legitimacy for those who deserve it or deprive them of it.

This issue applies to any field of human activity. It is not specific
to design. I've been thinking of this in relation to the genre of the
Western movie, in great part because Ditte is writing her doctorate
in theology on Clint Eastwood's great movie Unforgiven. (For those
who do not know, Ditte is my wife.) One reason I admire Unforgiven is
that fact that Eastwood so clearly demonstrated the ways in which law
and justice can come into conflict. Ditte has discovered a rich vein
of feminist legal scholarship that addresses these precise issues,
and they draw a large range of conclusions from them that apply to
this thread. (See, for example Buchanan and Johnson 2005).

Because the issue of legitimacy is ethical at heart, it involves
normative concerns. The law as a whole -- civil law and canon law --
engages the sciences in which we address nomos, the range of
considerations that give rise to normative communities. The late
Robert Cover wrote an article on exactly this theme in 1983, but it
is also the core issue in Peter Berger's two books of 1967, the well
known Social Construction of Reality written with Thomas Luckmann and
the equally useful Sacred Canopy.

Any professional practice involves issues of stakeholder legitimacy.
In effect, this involves all fields that Herbert Simon considered to
be design sciences. Stakeholder legitimacy brings us back to the
larger discussion of ethics, though, and this transcends law.
Nevertheless, it involves the question of who belongs to a community
or polis.

In Pol Pot's Cambodia, anyone defined as an "intellectual" -- for
example, anyone wearing glasses -- had no legitimate rights. In
Hitler's Germany, large groups of people were legally defined as
illegitimate, many by virtue or religion or social group such as Jews
or gypsies. At first they had no rights. Then, they were
exterminated. Many nations have deprived other people or groups of
legitimacy with terrible crimes against human rights, often denying
afterwards that the crimes had even taken place. In some cases,
nations even dance around their own laws to make the illegal possible
-- this is taking place today with the Bush doctrine of extraordinary
renditions and extraterritorial prisons where one can supposedly hold
prisoners outside the jurisdiction of the courts. In nations where
the practice of slavery was permitted, the slave was chattel property
with no individual rights beyond those assigned by the owner.

Legitimacy involves far more than law. Law implements concepts
anchored in our view of human rights and legitimacy. In most design
contexts, this is not a matter of law, but a matter of reflection and
ethical sensitivity. When it comes to choosing movies in our house,
only two stakeholders care about the content of movies, Ditte and me.
On some issues, however, our dog Jacob is a legitimate stakeholder
and we take his needs and often his preferences into account. At
school, I often deal with problems that address different stakeholder
communities, and some of these require careful negotiation. I
sometimes feel that we ought to consider the needs and preferences of
groups while other faculty or administrative decision makers do not
feel they have a legitimate stake in the problem at hand.

One must determine these issues on a case by case basis. In many
cases, legitimacy is a matter of negotiation. In some cases, however,
ethics require us to ignore mutual benefit in favor of such criteria
as human rights or appropriate legitimacy under universal law. In
such cases, I make decisions based on ethical criteria without regard
to how these decisions may affect my interests. These kinds of
decisions are rare. That is what makes it so important to make them
well.

In design, this brings us back to the issue Victor Margolin and Clive
Dilnot brought up here a few weeks ago, ethics in design.

This week saw two important anniversaries. The 16th was the memorial
of the Holocaust. The 19th was the anniversary of the Battle of
Lexington and Concord, the first armed conflict in the revolution
that would establish the thirteen colonies of British North America
as an independent nation. It is difficult to imagine how the United
States got from there to Guantanamo and a government that justifies
torture.

I really did not intend to say this much about legitimacy. The way
you asked for my views opened a large range of issues. For the most
part, the concept of legitimate stakeholders involves issues we can
resolve at a local level with a bit of sensitivity and good will. Few
design problems require legal jurisdiction. Many design problems
require the kinds of understanding and negotiation I referred to in
mentioning Anders Skoe and his problem solving method.

Yours,

Ken



References

Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy. Elements of a Sociological Theory
of Religion. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1967.

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of
Reality. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1967.

Buchanan, Ruth, and Rebecca Johnson. 2005. "The 'Unforgiven' Source
of International Law: Nation-Building, Violence, and Gender in the
West(ern)." International Law: Modern Feminist Approaches. Doris Buss
and Ambreena Maji, editors. Oxford, UK: Hart Publishing, pp. 131-158.

Cover, Robert M. 1983. "The Supreme Court 1982 Term. Foreword: Nomos
and Narrative." Harvard Law Review, Vol. 97, pp. 4-68.


--

Terry Love wrote:

Hi Ken,
Thanks for a good post. Can you expand a bit on how  you see
'legitimacy'/'legitimate' and the processes of legitimating. For example, do
you see it specific to the legal institutions that can insist on
legitimation by force, or negotiated agreement based on mutual benefits
independent of force.
Cheers,
Terry


--

Prof. Ken Friedman
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management
Oslo

Center for Design Research
Denmark's Design School
Copenhagen

+47 46.41.06.76    Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95    Tlf Privat

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