Midcentury Modern: The Emergence of Stakeholders in Democratic Practice

Abstract

Since the 1960s, “the stakeholder,” or affected party, has emerged as a novel democratic subject whose participation in varied institutional sites—from universities to government agencies, corporate boardrooms to international organizations—is seen as necessary for the management of complex problems. However, few specifically attend to the stakeholder as a distinct political subject and consider its implications for democratic practice. This paper presents a genealogy of the stakeholder, documenting its appearance in corporate managerialism and US public administration and showing how racial mobilization, rapid technological progress, and the political rationality of systems thinking provided the conditions of possibility for its emergence. Though orienting democracy around stakeholders permits opportunities for participation in political life, I argue that this subject is predicated on a circumscribed form of participatory politics that erodes habits of discovering a common good, erases distinctions between individuals and corporate bodies, and amplifies the problem of expertise.

Implementation of Systems Thinking in Public Policy: A Systematic Review

“…The discussions in several papers of this type were bounded by the context of public health or the use of a specific method [12,22,28,[30][31][32]44,50,54]. Other papers considered specific aspects of ST, such as the political rationality for providing an environment for democratic practice [38], research and education of ST in public sector practice [27], and contradictions between this approach and political leadership [60].…”

“…Another challenge was to address participation inequality and difficulty in achieving open and meaningful debate caused by hierarchical differences between stakeholders from different levels of decision-making [23,28,38,39,48,50,51,56,81]. Although ST could make significant progress towards including diverse views and information from different stakeholder groups, some specific groups and their views might be left out or underpresented [23,25,39,48,50,81].…”

“…Including social research expertise could help address the ethical dimensions of managing stakeholder participation, such as power relations, gender, and equity issues [50]. Modifying the participatory process, such as shorter workshop sessions, smaller breakout groups, anonymous contributions, and supported virtual participation, would help overcome the barriers to participation that a virtual environment could create [26,38,48,83].…”

Enfranchising all subjected: A reconstruction and problematization

“… 46. Notice, however, that stakeholder consultations proceed along just these lines (Abraham, 2022: 635 ff. ).…”