If you want an illus­tra­tion of the bril­liance and fra­gil­ity of the blo­go­sphere, take a look at Ofcom­watch. It’s a blog about the world of UK com­mu­nic­a­tions reg­u­la­tion which, let’s face it, is about as effer­ves­cent as a day-old glass of Alkaseltzer, and the bulk of its posts are the heroic work of Russ Taylor.

Russ raised an inter­est­ing point the other day about ‘stakeholders’:

Someone recently sent me an Ofcom doc­u­ment called a stake­holder brief­ing from a few weeks ago…as a friend once said, ’stake­hold­ers’ means some­thing less than the public.

Ofcom can talk all it wants to about cit­izens and con­sumers, but when it releases a brief­ing for stake­hold­ers it means the gen­eral pub­lic is excluded. Not good.

In fair­ness, it’s hardly just an Ofcom issue. Stake­holder syn­drome strikes across com­mu­nic­a­tions by Britain’s pub­lic authorities.

The stake­holder was ori­gin­ally con­ceived as a coun­ter­vail­ing force to the share­holder — a means of reg­u­lat­ing cor­por­ate gov­ernance in the era of the great cor­por­ate mono­pol­ies and allow­ing in rep­res­ent­a­tion from labour and the gen­eral pub­lic. Not much came of the idea (except, oddly enough, in post-WW2 Germany).

Now ‘stake­holder’ has come to be used by gov­ern­ment and NGOs as a means of giv­ing offi­cial recog­ni­tion and weight to the pub­lic policy interests of busi­nesses themselves.

But those polit­ical interests are pretty clear. Pub­lic policy is an area in which busi­nesses need to max­im­ise com­pet­it­ive advant­age in order to keep deliv­er­ing returns for shareholders.

Way back in the 1970s, polit­ical sci­ent­ist Charles Lind­blom dis­missed claims for cor­por­a­tions to have a role in the demo­cratic pro­cess, and much of the Trade Union legis­la­tion of the 1980s was aimed at redu­cing ‘cor­por­at­ist’ inter­ven­tion in the polit­ical process.

Is the ‘stake­holder’ label now just a way of legit­im­ising lob­by­ing, since busi­nesses will com­mand far greater resources than the pub­lic and other groups?