Hi all,

I am interested in your definitions of stakeholders, not the least because I
have been doing the revisions to my thesis and this is one of the things I
have been modifying and finding quite difficult due to the very issues Ken
describes. I have never considered stakeholders to be people who have only a
financial interest in a design but rather everyone who is involved. Having a
background in both psychology and social science, I work very much on the
perspective that everyone involved in a design and indeed the use of the
final artifact/environment/system brings to it their own values and belief
systems which influence how they perceive both the design and its usage.

This brings me to the interesting topic of ethics and the reason why, though
I am in comparison to most of you, a novice in the design research field,
that I wanted to step in and mention my perspective as perhaps it is one
that most of you may not come across.

My work is in an interdisciplinary field and my PhD was also interlinked
with a collaborative project so there were many issues involving most of the
topics you are all covering, particularly the issue of ethics.

My work and personal experience is with autistic people and my Phd and work
is regarding design and research for this population. All too often, this
user group gets 'designed for' and decisions are made by designers and other
stakeholders based on perceived needs rather than actual needs. In my humble
opinion, the issue of non malificence has always been paramount in any
design, particularly when it is for a 'vulnerable user group' and although I
work in the field of disability, I believe this also applies to other
populations. However, beneficence is often far more ambiguous in that is
very much dependent on each stakeholders viewpoint. In my own personal
experience, this is often where problems occur.

On a slightly lighter note I do find that the term ' tame problem' seems
rather a juxtraposition!

Thanks all for your interesting information and apologies for errors. I tend
to write as I think!

Jacqui

-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken
Friedman
Sent: 22 April 2007 11:47
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Legitimate Interests, Stakes, and Ethics -- Long Post

Dear Terry, Klaus, Francois, Erik, and All,

Thanks to you all for this rich thread. This conversation takes on
the feeling of a seminar. Lacking the typographic resources of a
translator's Bible or a Talmud, I will try to respond to the
intertwined aspects of the thread with footnoted excerpts to specific
posts.

Without recapping the entire issue, I used the term legitimate
stakeholder [1] to describe 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.

In using this term, I am trying to shed light on issues that came up
in our thread on Rittel's concept of the wicked problem.

It is hard to see any completely common usage of the term stakeholder
[2] among designers and design researchers. This is an
interdisciplinary field. Terry and I have identified over 700
different fields and disciplines, sub-fields and sub-disciplines in
the practice of design and design research. I'd argue that many are
probably using the term in much the same way that a sociologist or
organization theorist might use it, but that there is no specific
common usage among designers and design researchers other than this
broader usage.

The "stakeholder approach" in organization theory is also known as
the "constituency approach." [3] I was happy to see Terry's reference
to Brynjulf Tellefsen's work on constituency orientation in
marketing. I would argue that Brynjulf uses the term "constituent" in
much the same way that I use the term "legitimate stakeholder." A
constituency is an aggregation of legitimate stakeholders.

In discussing this, I simply do not mean people with ONLY a financial
interest. Otherwise, could argue that slaves had no legitimate stake
in slavery because they had no "legitimated" legal or financial
interest in the institution of slavery in any slaveholding society
during the 6,000 years or so of legal slavery around the world.

One could argue that slaves had a legitimate stake in the institution
of slavery. Nevertheless, one could not reasonably describe slaves by
using the words "constituent" or "constituency."

Nor do I mean a "legitimated" stakeholder where one group uses legal
machinations to render another group legitimate or illegitimate. I
see what you are getting at here, Terry, but that is not the point.
If you can find a better or more common useful term to describe what
I mean, please use it. I agree with many of your points, but I don't
see the need to split hairs over reasonable synonyms and commonly
understood terms.

Remember the original point of this thread: understanding the nature
of wicked problems.

As Erik, Francois, and Klaus wrote, the designer chooses [4] to bring
in different groups of stakeholders of constituents. As Erik states
-- and I agree -- this is always a matter of ethics. (Francois
describes this in terms of enlightened choice. Without presuming to
speak for Francois, I interpret this as ethical choice. In various
discourses, both Buddha and Kant described enlightenment in terms of
ethics.)

Here, I want to stress again that I do not use the term legitimate
stakeholder in the narrow legal sense of the term. Rather, I meant
the word in a broader sense, much as Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger use
the word "legitimate" in the phrase "legitimate peripheral
participation." In this sense, ethics does come to the fore --
especially because it is often the case that legitimate stakeholders
in a process are robbed of the right to participate by those who can
use force to "legitimate" their own preferences.

This was my point yesterday in specifically discussing dictatorships
and injustice under the law. History suggests that there are many
cases in which a group CANNOT "shout, demonstrate, boycott the
product, and drive it out of the market." In many cases, someone who
"designs something that offends another group or curtails their
income" [or freedom] does so in a way that permits no recourse.

Sometimes groups can "shout, demonstrate, boycott." Despite such
terrible occurrences as the Amritsar massacre, those who sought the
liberation of India from the British Empire were contesting this with
the British. This very fact gave them an opportunity to make progress
despite the fact that this struggle took half a century. This
followed three centuries in which Great Britain took the resources of
India and ruled -- not governed, ruled -- her people by military
force, going back to the 1600 chartering of the British East India
Company, a company that was allowed to maintain its own army,
imposing its will be force of arms where local peoples resisted. By
1900, of course, India was governed by the civil service and ruled by
Great Britain through the force of the regular army. By 1947, Great
Britain restored the rule of India to the Indian people. However,
this was the civilized British.

It is not always possible for people to shout, demonstrate, or
boycott -- and their failure to do so does not imply that they accept
what is being done. In the Soviet Union, Stalin's government killed
between 20,000,000 and 30,000,000 people, many who were simply
SUSPECTED of disagreeing with government policy. (While some say
30,000,000 victims is the correct number, the eminent historian
Robert Conquest has proposed the figure 20,000,000. As a vaudeville
comedian said in another context, "Who's counting when you're having
fun?")

In the Third Reich, shouting, demonstrating, and boycotting ran
counter to the Fuhrer-prinzip. Jews, gypsies, and others had no right
to complain when the government expropriated their properties,
enslaved them for labor, or killed them outright.

It is often wrong to say that anyone who cares will protest. The
failure to protest may also indicate conditions in which legitimate
stakeholders are robbed of the opportunity to complain -- or punished
and even killed if they do. Consider the draconian penalties imposed
upon any slave in the American South who questioned or protested the
will of a slave owner.

Here, I will point to Albert Hirschman's (1970) concept of exit,
voice, and loyalty. In many contexts, one may protest as Klaus
suggests or one may leave. Sometimes, however, this is impossible.
Several hundred million people died over the course of a long
twentieth century in which legitimate stakeholders had neither a
voice nor the opportunity to exit. These days, we see good examples
of this in Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan, though some relatively lucky
individuals have managed to escape with their lives, if nothing else.

These are extreme cases, to be sure. Examining this issue on the
largest historical scale involves a context in which relatively few
designers work. Despite the fact that no one on this list designed
the charter of the British East India Company, the Gulag system, or
the Nuremberg Laws, human beings designed these agencies, systems,
and laws. They reflect on a large scale, the organizational and
professional processes that many of us on this list do see in our
work. I use these examples to demonstrate what happens when hundreds
of small incidents are allowed to multiply and take hold in the
absence of respect for legitimate stakes, stakeholders, and
constituencies.

I remain interested in the larger issues that make wicked problems
wicked and the context in which we can understand and resolve them.
One way to do this is to recognize the concept of the legitimate
stakeholder. Whether or not we use that specific term, I propose that
we do better when we consider the idea of any person with reasonable
rights by virtue of being a human being involved in a situation where
he or she has a stake.

Yours.

Ken


--

Reference

Hirschman, Albert O. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Responses to
Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.


--

Terry Love wrote:

[1], [2]

I'm aware of the many reasons and habits that underpin how designers
and design researchers use the terms 'stakeholders' and 'legitimate'.
I feel it is practical experience not theory or the opinions of
designers that suggests a change is needed.

[3]

I along with many others have found it's helpful to distinguish
stakeholders from other constituencies on the ground of stakeholders
having a legitimated financial stake. This is because in practical
terms it is closely tied to who can participate in negotiation,
whether communities can legally enforce their direct participation in
negotiation on design decisions - or whether participation is just a
patronising sop to design ethics.

Klaus Krippendorff wrote:

[4]

i agree, it is always the designers' decision to circumscribe the
stakeholders s/he wants to consider. this said, it would be foolish
to leave out interested parties to whom a design could matter. how
one consults them or whether one works with them is a totally
different issue

[1]

regarding the issue of legitimacy [1] that ken raises, i don't think
this matters at all -- unless you are a lawyer or want to go into
court to prevent someone from opposing your interests. stakeholders
always (maybe one can qualify it by saying mostly) consider
themselves legitimate in their own terms, and their interests, their
resources, their conceptions do matter, whether one considers the
them legitimate or not.

[6]

also ethical issues, in my opinion, are secondary to the role of
stakeholders. if someone designs something that offends another group
or curtails their income, i would expect that this group will shout,
demonstrate, boycott the product, and drive it out of the market. if
nobody cares, then it is ethical for all practical purposes.
competitors tend to be stakeholders in a particular domain, sometimes
regarding very specific technologies. luckily, we have rules not to
get competition out of hand. but competitors are often formidable
stakeholders.

Erik Stolerman wrote:

[4], [5]

I appreciate the perspective Francois takes (see below) when he
writes that it is up to the designer to "determine" who are
stakeholders and how to relate and give weight to each of their
desires, values and needs. The list of possible stakeholders in each
design situation is basically infinite if we increase the space that
the design can potentially influence. Even the smallest design, such
as a pen or piece of software, might influence the future of the
planet (it takes a bit of imagination, but it is possible). So, at
some level every living and future living person is a potential
stakeholder (this has eloquently been developed by C. West Churchman).

So, in every design situation who is the stakeholder is a design. It
is a design that is a result of the designers judgment, in relation
to intention. Therefore also always [5] an ethical judgment that
ultimately rests on the designers values and character.

Francois Nsenga wrote:

[4]

Obviously, no one would be in a position to deal with all the
requirements of all potential "stakeholders". It is then up to each
expert, each in respective subfield of Design, to determine (a
professionally enlightened decision) the closeness within which one
is to intervene: who are the "stakeholders" I wish to deal with in
order of priority, and within "contingencies" (dixit H.A. Simon) also
ordered according to their relative pressure.

--

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

email: [log in to unmask]

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