Who the heck is a stakeholder anyway?

Wes Jamison PUR 6934 Reaction blog #3 Lundgren and McMakin chapter 17

Chapter 17 is perhaps the most useful chapter so far in that it not only gives practical considerations regarding stakeholder participation, but also delves into some more theoretical issues like conflict management and remediation. Whether in the form of the tables at the end of the chapter or the preceding discussion, Lundgren and McMakin make a rather compelling case for stakeholder inclusion in risk management and communication.
One of the more obvious and prescient comments regards the stage at which companies practice stakeholder inclusion: “Stakeholder participation is most effective when key choices concerning the risk have yet to be made. Once an organization is locked on a course of action, participation opportunities dwindle to those that will educate the audience” (pp. 301). Indeed, stakeholder inclusion early in processes often times has historically ameliorated potential critics, and at least placated stakeholders that claim to be affected by the risk. It also functions within the context of Grunig’s Excellence Model in that organizations first scan their environment, engage in two-way symmetric communications and seek to co-orientate regarding the risks, and then if a stakeholder acts in bad faith, is disingenuous, or is otherwise intransigent regarding co-orientation (“they just won’t compromise!”), then the organization can ethically disengage from that stakeholder, monitor the stakeholder’s actions, advocate its own position without reference to the estranged stakeholder, and if needed attack the estranged stakeholder’s credibility or narrative.
The authors note that many stakeholder participation programs fail because of a lack of early, consistent and sustained inclusion. Their explicit and implicit list of reasons behind such lack of inclusion include organizational lack of commitment to inclusion, the lack of planning, ad litigation issues. After all, transparency may work with good faith actors, but NGOs, citizens groups, and lawyers are notorious in corporate circles for acting in bad faith and with less-than-sterling integrity.
They also note that the stakeholders themselves incur certain requirements for success: the size and number of potential participants, the level of interest among those groups, and their willingness to compromise and co-orientate. Each of these findings is valuable and provides insight for the practitioner.
On a more theoretical note, the authors once again “front-load” their article with implicit value assumptions that may or may not be true. For instance, the list beginning on pp.305 that lays out organizational core values that lead to potentially successful participation seems naïve and Pollyannaish--- e.g. “the public should have a say in decisions about actions that affect their lives” carries with it a series of uniquely western assumptions about individual autonomy and individuation from the collective social structures within which all people exist, and those assumptions themselves are under-girded by humanist presuppositions about atomized self-actualization. In other words, the authors take it as a given that all cultures, or even all parties within our culture, believe in either the substantive or normative basis of that statement. It almost goes without saying that successful authoritarian and totalitarian regimes throughout history have operated by different assumptions. Further, the authors never qualify their statements: why should people have a say, why should there be any promise that input will be listened to, why should all participants be given voice, and why should the company even care? The authors beg the harder issues that would provide guidance for practitioners “on the margins,” that is to say, in difficult cases that don’t fit their typology.
More problematic is the assumption mirrored throughout the risk communication literature, derived from Grunig and running through Susskind and all other gatekeepers in the discipline, that stakeholders are good faith actors rather than Machiavellian self-interested pragmatists! It is indeed interesting that NGOs and non-corporate entities fail the same criteria-based test that the authors place upon corporations, e.g. do the Sierra Club, Humane Society of the United States, National Rifle Association, or the American Association of Retired People actually practice the authors’ proposed criteria? Does any other number of entities divulge information, seek coorientation, and implement mutual decision making?
On a positive note, the authors’ discussion of techniques for gathering and evaluating participation were concise enough to be applicable and general enough not to be jargon. Likewise, their review of various techniques from public hearings to focus groups to self-help groups to workshops proved to be very practical and complete. Interestingly, the idea of advisory groups are proving very popular among industry groups, but not because those groups are altruistic or other-directed. Instead, industry groups and corporations have discovered a truism from the crisis communications literature that having advisory groups in place, when coupled with credible best management practices endorsed by the advisory group, provides a veil of protection when a crisis hits. In effect, companies or industry groups that are attacked can point to their advisory board’s support and endorsement, can point to their programmatic emphasis on “accepted” best practices, and can thus avoid blame attribution. To put it another way, the crisis communications literature notes that blame attribution is real, and that entities can pass the buck of blame by labeling sources of the crisis as “aberrations and deviants” from their best practices, and in so doing insulate themselves from blame. When the crap hits the fan, having an advisory board in place (preferably constituted with acknowledged experts coupled with high-profile social activists) that has endorsed the industry’s commitment to best practices does wonders to shift blame; somebody’s got to get pushed under the bus, and advisory boards allow ready outlets for guilt transferal. And yet another interesting outcome of advisory boards is the co-optation of dissent; the political science literature is rife with references to the success of bleeding off dissent by channeling it and shunting it into “process.” As far back as Federalist #10 and Federalist #51, political thinkers have noted that processes that confer legitimacy also bleed off passion, and they indeed co-opt radical change in favor of reform minded status quo ante.
Lastly, the authors could have discussed two additional and relatively current conundrums regarding stakeholder inclusion: inclusion undermines real and legitimate personal and collective opposition to aberrant ideas in favor of pragmatism, and the emerging difficulty of identifying who, exactly, is a stakeholder. Indeed, the authors tacitly accept philosophical pragmatism as the raison d’etre of business, and by advocating that all voices are initially welcome they place corporatist and capitalist ideals at the fore. As much as western intellectuals cringe at the idea, not all value systems, not all voices, are equally valid, and indeed some are evil and immoral. As Peter Berger pointed out in The Homeless Mind and The Sacred Canopy, individuals are profoundly impacted when required to forego their value absolutes (and we all have them) in favor of a creeping and insipid subjective pluralism that supports capitalism. In other words, if the reason for inclusion merely rests upon business success, then employees with very real and deeply felt values should not be required to practice cognitive inclusion involving risk. Should NARAL employees be required to co-orientate with Pro-Life advocates? The very act of doing so, the very requirement to “value all voices” carries enormous cognitive consequence, for proximity to opposing values not only may open one’s mind but also cause anomie and social dysfunction.
Similarly, practitioners are familiar with the NIMBY syndrome. Yet, in the post-modern age, when new media are coupled to social fragmentation and subsequent realignment into digital communities and cognitive ghettos, when social alignment is no longer predicated upon proximity but rather centers around information communities of meaning, who exactly are the stakeholders? What does stakeholder inclusion mean? When the not-in-my-backyard syndrome transmogrifies into the NIYBYE syndrome, e.g. “not-in-your-backyard-either!”, when the old political saw “Think Global, Act Local,” becomes “Think Local, Act Global,” when activists are able to mobilize trans-nationally to oppose practices for ideological reasons, there are a whole other set of contingencies for the practitioner to consider.