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?