At a time when most enlightened scientists no longer have illusions about 'objective truths', when intersubjectivity is becoming a more widely accepted and used epistemological concept, different and contrasting/ opposing interests are being acknowledged and given legitimacy by an approach that is - hopefully - leading to profound changes not just in academic research but increasingly in the realm of mgt and economics - where it actually emerged from: stakeholder theory. And now that it has in fact been 'discovered' by mainstream politics, one might hope that it will in the long run contribute to a new understanding of democracy.
Originating in organisational theory, the stakeholder concept is a move away from a managerially and ownership-based view of organisations towards a more inclusive perspective (RSA, 1995). An important contribution towards this view was made by the theory of open systems, which included the environment of an organisation and the organisation’s relationships/interactions with this environment in the analysis of organisational processes. Another source is Evaluation Research where the stakeholder concept can prove pragmatically useful: evaluation data grow richer and more expressive through an analysis of the stakeholders involved in the system to be evaluated, identifying their respective interests, taking into account the different evaluative judgements and presenting multiple perspectives. Developers are thus enabled to use feedback from multiple perspectives in the redesign or further development of existing as well as the design of new systems. Used in politics, the stakeholder approach can become a normative device, acknowledging the existence of different interests and their legitimacy, thus encouraging and affirming pluralism and the necessity to negotiate and compromise. This legitimacy must not be restricted to just one or two stakeholders, but should ideally include all vested interests in any given situation. Of course it also raises the question of the distribution of power: a power balance needs to be achieved between the different stakeholders if dialogue is to be possible. Again, negotiation between different viewpoints is required, leading to compromise and ideally consensus in the decision-making process. In a way, the stakeholder concept, starting with subjective viewpoints and gathering them, moves on to a situation of multi-subjectivity or plurality and eventually intersubjectivity. This model is illustrated in figure 1.
The paradigm shift from objectivity to intersubjectivity can be seen as stages of potential, but not necessary or automatic, development (as illustrated in the examples). We consider them to be part of increasing personal growth or maturity, knowing that this implies a value judgement (and awaiting controversy...).
When talking about dialogue, Peter Senge describes two kinds of consensus, which in our opinion highlights the difference between multi- and intersubjectivity: one made up of “multiple individual views ... that seeks a picture larger than any one person’s point of view” (Senge 1990:248); it “builds from the ‘content’ of our individual views - discovering what part of my view is shared by you and the others” (ibid.). This would be what we call multi-subjectivity: finding a common denominator. The other type of consensus is founded on what our model refers to as intersubjectivity: “Each person’s view is a unique perspective on a larger reality. If I can ‘look out’ through your view and you through mine, we will each see something we might not have seen alone.” (ibid.)
The stakeholder theory, with its emphasis on the different perspectives
and needs of the many different actors in a system, bears resemblance to
the emerging paradigm Star (1992) calls “the unnameable”, based in the
networks of interlocking actors found in approaches like distributed cognition,
activity theory and actor-network theory.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
When talking about stakeholders, we need to keep in mind that stakes per se are not ‘objective’ givens (nor, consequently, are stakeholders) but that they only ‘exist’ within and as parts of open systems: stakeholders’ perceptions of each other’s stakes influence their own stakes and vice versa. Since stakes as well as stakeholders can change during a process and over a longer period of time, establishing who the stakeholders are is an important step early on. Stakeholder mapping is a vital tool here, its use requiring time and space; it should go through several stages involving as many stakeholders as possible in order to arrive at a ‘common map’. However, this proves a problem if stakeholder groups are very large, general, vaguely defined, or not homogenous (cf. in our case study: ‘the professionals’, ‘the Professional Body’, ‘the organisational learning experts’).
Furthermore, there is the question of weighting the different stakes: the balance of stakeholders’ claims, interests and obligations towards an organisation and towards each other is intricately linked to the power each stakeholder group has. This, in turn, depends on the roles stakeholders hold within and in relation to the organisation. A lot of clarification and negotiation can sometimes be required here to establish congruence between the amount of power that a stakeholder is presumed to hold (by others) and how much they can actually exert. Roles can and do change over time: in the case study, different roles within the project emerged, became clearer, and changed within a few months, which influenced the stakes involved. Since a stakeholder map only reflects the picture at a given point in time, the exercise needs to be repeated in order to visualise changes and to raise awareness of past and ongoing processes.
The stakeholder theory in organisational theory is now quite mature, to the extent that Evan and Freeman (1993) have presented a set of principles, based on Kant’s dictum that people have a right to be treated as ends in themselves rather than as means to an end, which they say underlies the stakeholder concept. They further argue that the so-called fiduciary relationship that managers have towards shareholders in British and American law - by which managers are said to hold a company in trust for its shareholders, and so have as a basic responsibility the maximisation of their profit - needs to be re-formulated so that there is a fiduciary relationship towards all stakeholders, that managers must act in their interests as their agent.
Donaldson and Preston (1995) justify this concept in terms of property law. It is often suggested, they argue, that a company can be taken to be the property of its shareholders, with the managers as their agents, and so theirs to do with as they please. This is to ignore, they say, the fact the all property ownership is necessarily limited, as part of the running of society. For example, landowners cannot build anything they like on their land, but must seek approval from local government - a limitation on their rights of ownership, but one that society needs to claim to ensure others’ rights are also met. From this concept of limited rights, and the current theory of property rights that they term ‘pluralistic’, Donaldson and Preston conclude there is a moral necessity to take the needs of all stakeholders in a company into account.
At a closer look, the concept of ownership is not all that clear-cut. The workforce can be said to own the labour and sell it, or rent it out, to the company. Professionals can be said to own their skills and qualifications. These things can still be seen as commodities, although they are not tangible objects; but taking this view rigorously makes an analysis very complicated. Does management, for example, own the day-to-day running of the company? Do the neighbours of a chemical plant own the air that is filled with smells and noises?
An early use of the stakeholder theory is by Eric Rhenman (1965), who describes stakeholders as “the individuals or groups dependent on the company for the realisation of their personal goals and on whom the company is dependent for its existence” (p.25). His work is interesting because it is an early work in the Swedish industrial democracy movement, but also because he discusses how to resolve the conflicting interests of different stakeholders: his basic model is that these interests are not dissolved or subsumed but rather that cooperation between stakeholders is sought despite them - akin to our discussion of intersubjectivity, above.
The stakeholder concept was also picked up early on by Russell Ackoff (1974), one of the original ‘soft systems’ theorists; it has been used extensively by Robert Mason and Ian Mitroff (1981). They mainly use stakeholders to identify assumptions underlying corporate behaviour, that might clash between different stakeholders. They have also presented several ways of identifying who are the stakeholders in an organisation: those who have expressed an interest in it; those in formal positions in it; those who others feel are stakeholders; those who participate in the organisation (e.g. in meetings); those who shape opinions relating to the organisation; the standard demographic grouping such as age or race; and those who fulfil a series of important relationships with the focal organisation in the study. They also talk of resolution of conflicting interests, using a series of dialectical processes whereby the prevailing views within a group are compared with their antitheses, to show how important particular views are to the group. Once a particular stakeholder group has identified its main views, these are then examined in a further ‘dialectical debate’ between the groups.
Just as others have tried to talk of non-human stakeholders, Mitroff (1983) has also talked of elements of the individual’s personality - such as Freud’s concept of the ego, id and super-ego; or Jung’s personality types - as stakeholders in that they affect the way individuals behave and when taken together the collective behaviour of a group or organisation.
Related concepts to the stakeholder theory have arisen in the works of two other systems theorists: Peter Checkland and Peter Senge. Checkland (Checkland & Scholes, 1990) makes much use of a representation called the rich picture, which shows a system under study and the relationships within it, the result being very similar to the stakeholder map presented later in this paper.
Likewise, Senge, when calling for systems thinking (1990) in order to enable organisational learning, lists amongst other characteristics:
Thus we have moved from looking at stakeholders in an organisation being considered in general, to them being considered, and involved in a particular process - the evaluation of change. Indeed, as further work from the Tavistock Institute points out, stakeholders in a programme under evaluation are also to be treated as actors in its evaluation (Cullen et al, 1993).
The use of stakeholders in a programme as participants in its evaluation is also discussed at great length by Guba and Lincoln (1989), in their “fourth generation evaluation”. They take the idea of stakeholders to be quite crucial, and give further useful guidelines on how to identify them. They also discuss a rather elaborate methodology for working through stakeholders’ “claims, concerns and issues”, firstly within stakeholder groups and then between groups (to work through unresolved issues). In both cases, they use a process they call “hermeneutic/dialectical”, which involves interviewing one individual, then putting parts of their views to another with contradictory views, then putting the results of this to another individual with again different views, and so on until the first person is reached again (thus closing the circle). This will be seen to be similar to Mason & Mitroff’s approach, although less confrontational than their debate between groups with contrasting views.
Closest to the preceding material has been the report Tomorrow’s Company (RSA 1995), written following an inquiry into the changing nature of British business by top executives of twenty-five companies. The key focus of their report is that of an inclusive approach to business leadership, investment needs, people and society. This is based on the notion that companies must “focus less exclusively on shareholders and on financial measures of success - and instead include all of their stakeholder relationships, and a broader range of measures, in the way they think and talk about their purpose and performance” (p.1). The interesting thing about this approach is that it is grounded in a highly instrumental attitude: the point is to enable British companies to become world-class and globally competitive. This notion of inclusive business practice pervades the report, and the influence of the stakeholder theory can be seen throughout.
This shift in business thinking (reflecting, of course, the management theory discussed above) has been paralleled in Britain by a shift in political thinking. Particularly influential have been economists Will Hutton and David Marquand. They, and following them the Labour Party leader Tony Blair, have sought to move the stakeholder concept from applying just to companies, to one applying to the whole British economy and society - the final chapter of Hutton’s best-selling book (1995) is entitled “stakeholder capitalism”, and Blair recently proclaimed the “stakeholder society” (1996).
As Marquand (1996) makes clear, the stakeholder view of the company leads to a wider change in politics: “property must discharge obligations to the wider community as well as to its owners”; and he says that “stakeholder economics demands stakeholder politics ... the politics of power-sharing, negotiation and mutual education”. Hutton concurs with this. In a lengthy discussion of the embededness of the existing British corporate system (based on short-term satisfaction of rapidly-changing shareholders, and with an adversarial relationship between stakeholders) in the institutions of the British state.
In particular, both Hutton and Marquand argue that the absolute ownership of the firm by the shareholders, and the managers’ fiduciary relationship towards them, is inexorably intertwined with the hierarchical British political system, where the monarch is (in theory) supreme and all British people her subjects, with a chain of power leading down through the House of Lords, the government, and Parliament; and all connected in a web of supporting institutions, such as the law, the ancient universities, the Church and the private schools. Hutton and Marquand - and in their wake, politicians like Tony Blair - are making a rather radical claim in trying to create a stakeholder society: whether it will succeed remains to be seen.
A particularly full use of stakeholder theory is by Vidgen & McMaster (1995). Their account draws mainly on the systems theory work shown above (particularly that of Mitroff and Checkland). They show who are the principle stakeholders in their study of the introduction of a computerised entry system to a car-park - both human groups and technological artefacts - and how their interests differ according to perspectives they label Rational, Organisational and Individual. As they crucially point out, one feature of this kind of analysis is that some stakeholders are highlighted as having positive outcomes from the system and some negative.
A further important aspect of their discussion (apart from their interesting use of Latour’s work) is their mention of the different knowledge interests - technical, practical and emancipatory - identified by Habermas (1971). As they point out, these relate usefully to conflicting interests of different stakeholders: in particular the conflict between the technological, rational focus of managers and designers; and the practical, everyday focus of day-to-day work.
Walsham (1993) has written extensively on IS evaluation, and uses the stakeholder concept as a key feature of understanding the social context of information systems. Two qualifications he makes are worth repeating here: that it is not possible to incorporate stakeholder assessments in a complete way; and that it should not be held that all stakeholders views are equally valid (p.183). Thus he is brought to the question of the resolution of stakeholder conflicts, on which he offers the view that it is a problem and involves the view of the evaluator as a moral agent (cf. Ramage 1996).
Jurison (1994) provides a useful “stakeholder-based value model” for IS evaluation, firmly rooted in an economic perspective, but based on non-financial benefits and costs as well as financial ones. He also discusses how one might measure these benefits.
Eason (1988) wrote extensively of the importance of stakeholders in requirements capture and design, stating as a major proposition that “the design of effective socio-technical systems will depend upon the participation of all relevant ‘stakeholders’ in the design process” (p.46). He emphasises that he is not just talking about users here, but rather emphasising the many different groups with a stake, including designers.
The ORDIT methodology (Dobson et al, 1994) uses stakeholder analysis in two ways: at the start of a requirements process, the identification of stakeholders is crucial; and at the end of the process, to prioritise different stakeholders’ needs, discuss the outcomes of the exercise with the different groups, and ensure the solution options being presented meet the needs. Similarly, Macaulay (1994) writes about “cooperative requirements capture”, bringing together the different stakeholder groups to generate requirements cooperatively.
In software engineering per se, the concept of the viewpoint has arisen recently (Finkelstein & Sommerville, 1996). This is taken to be a combination of a participant in a software system together with their perspective on the system. Thus we might hold it to be a combination of a stakeholder and their Weltanschauung (Checkland and Scholes, 1990). Because the viewpoint concept derives from software engineering, much of the usage of it has been of the ‘hard’ kind - rather stereotyped ‘lines and boxes’ descriptions. Researchers on the REAIMS project, however, are currently engaged in research on ‘soft’ viewpoints (Steve Viller, pers. comm.) that are more akin both to the stakeholder theory described here and to the Weltanschauungen of Checkland.
Further, the notion of stakeholder involvement is at the very heart of the participatory design concept. That it is politically motivated is also quite clear: the histories of PD in Scandinavia (e.g. Ehn, 1989) discuss the links between system designers and trade unions, and the explicit political motivations of practitioners in this area.
The industrial democracy associated with PD that is such a feature of the Scandinavian workplace is rather strongly linked to the notion of satisfaction of stakeholders - we have already mentioned an early work in this area (Rhenman 1965) that explicitly mentioned the stakeholder theory. Indeed, Bjerknes and Bratteteig (1994) have more recently written that “workplace democracy includes balancing the claims of the different stakeholders” (p.3). As Bjerknes and Bratteteig also write, it has been historically important to distinguish between the conflict-oriented Collective Resource approach (which underlies the projects discussed by Ehn 1989 for example) with the harmony-oriented Socio-Technical approach (deriving from work such as that of Mumford, 1983 and other researchers at the Tavistock Institute). They hold it less important to make this distinction today, and recognise explicitly that it is difficult to treat “workers” as a homogenous group.
To start at the normative level (the easiest to express), there is a simple argument that the stakeholder approach (whether it takes the form of identifying stakeholders or of involving them in the evaluation process) is right. This is the argument found at the heart of participatory design, and holds good here - that people should be involved in decisions which affect their future seems rather natural in a democratic, and humanitarian, society. Thus to consider the effect of a CSCW system we ought to consider all those individuals and groups affected by it, weigh up the benefits and costs, and thus attempt to see its overall effect.
This leads us into a purely descriptive argument. It cannot be denied that there are lots of different groups and individuals with a stake in the outcomes of a CSCW system, and so to represent the situation fully one needs to consider those stakeholders’ interests. There are as many definitions of ‘goodness’, of appropriateness, of a CSCW system as there are stakeholders. This is reflected in the large number of contributing disciplines in CSCW, and hence the need for multiplicity in CSCW evaluation (Ross et al, 1995). Thus by using a stakeholder approach (and here we particularly thinking of something like the mapping exercise presented later) we can gain a deeper knowledge of the evaluation situation.
The instrumental arguments for the use of a stakeholder approach in CSCW evaluation are the fullest. Firstly, there is Grudin’s (1994) oft-quoted argument about usage of systems: for a CSCW system to be effective it must have a rather high take-up rate within the group for which it is intended. But this will only occur if the needs of the various stakeholders that go to make up that crucial group are met: if all the work falls on one group and all the benefits on another (as in Grudin’s study and Rogers’ later study (1994) of this theme), then the system will be resisted and not used. So the consideration and satisfaction of multiple stakeholders may have a crucial effect on whether the system gets used at all.
This last point relates to the justification for CSCW evaluation that Michael Twidale (pers. comm.) has termed “avoiding the junk cupboard”: preventing the phenomenon by which a computer system is bought, installed to great aplomb and effort, and then quietly gets forgotten as it is realised it doesn’t meet the needs for which it was purchased or developed. This is clearly something a designer would rather avoid, and better design can contribute to this, by using ethnography for example (Plowman et al, 1995). However, this can also be a way in which the stakeholder approach can identify whose needs have to be met so a system does not end up in that junk cupboard.
Next, there is an argument relating to the use of stakeholders and viewpoints in requirements engineering, as discussed above. If we take evaluation to be a measurement of whether a system has met its requirements - which is not the only way to conduct evaluation, but is one possible way - then changes in requirements gathering methodologies will need to be reflected in changes in evaluation methodologies. So if requirements are to be elucidated using methods that reflect multiple stakeholders, it seems necessary to do the same with evaluation.
Finally, the question must be considered of how stakeholders have been handled in the CSCW literature in the past. Neither the term nor the concept has been explicitly used as far as we can find. However, there is much work which has talked of the different needs of different groups around a CSCW system. Grudin’s work (1994) has already been mentioned - particularly relevant is his discussion of electronic calendaring, where secretaries have to do considerably more work to allow managers to benefit from the system. Star and Ruhleder (1994) wrote of different needs of user support & users, but also between the “worm community” & other biologists. Orlikowski (1992) identified a conflict between an IT department that just wanted to get Notes running, while users wanted to be trained and have it configured2. Harper (1992) noted that those who need to keep tabs on people (e.g. receptionists) prefer Active Badges to those who the tabs are kept on (e.g. researchers). Lastly, Rogers (1994) found that while the introduction of a new computer system meant management and the accounts department could work much more flexibly, it also meant a lot more work for the sales representatives. All of these in one way or another consider what Plowman et al (1995) have termed the discrepancy problem - that there is a conflict between the needs of one group and another, either between technical people and ‘the users’ or between different user groups.
As a guide, a typical list of stakeholders in a CSCW evaluation might include systems developers and maintainers, ordinary employees ('users'), middle management, top management, employee representatives, outside parties (governments, the public, standards bodies), and the evaluators. The question of non-human stakeholders needs to be considered, as discussed above: for example, if one was developing a high-bandwidth video-on-demand system to run over the Internet, the capacity of the networks is both a constraint for current use and a factor to be considered in what effect the system will have on future capacity. Likewise, the environment cannot be ignored in, say, power consumption issues. The role of the systems developers is also an interesting question: nominally, they should be regarded as stakeholders only during the development cycle (with the focus of technical personnel thereafter switching to maintenance and training, though also perhaps to upgrading); but their effects as stakeholders continue thereafter in, for example, the decisions that have been made to ensure easier development. This also raises a more general question of how stakeholders change during the life of the project: there is nothing to say the same groups will remain as important stakeholders throughout.
Two main normative principles inform the use of a stakeholder approach in CSCW evaluation: to cater for the needs of all stakeholders, and to involve all stakeholders in the evaluation process. The first, of course, is impossible, except by the greatest good luck: in general, some interests of some stakeholders will collide, and will need to be resolved with each other - but the aspiration remains good. Secondly, and more achievable, is what has been called participatory evaluation (for example in Guba & Lincoln, 1989): that stakeholders in the outcome of a CSCW system should be involved in its evaluation, in determining whether it is to be seen as a positive or a negative innovation. These principles are the heart of the stakeholder approach as applied to CSCW evaluation.
We can identify two main ways of conducting the evaluation having identified the stakeholders and given the normative principles above. Firstly, we can do lots of little evaluations on the different stakeholders, looking individually at the different groups to determine the effects of the system upon them (on their work, but also on them as people or as members of particular groups). The results of these evaluations would then need to be synthesised to determine the overall effect of the system upon the various groups.
Alternatively, we can perform a bigger single evaluation (probably usually qualitative methods where the questions under study can be readily changed), that has the existence of the different stakeholders and their interests in mind.
While these are the two main ways that one could conduct a wholly stakeholder-based evaluation, the approach still has usefulness for evaluations where this is not the main focus. In particular, even the process of creating a stakeholder map with members of the system can prove to be a useful learning experience for all concerned (as we show in the case study below). In addition to this, the involvement of stakeholders in an evaluation process is vital to its success - and so identifying who they are and what are their interests is essential as part of any CSCW evaluation.
The project concerned is researching learning processes within a profession; it is funded jointly by the relevant professional body (hereafter called the PB) and the Learning & Teaching Institute (LTI) of Sheffield Hallam University. The project is based at the School of Urban and Regional Studies (URS) concerned, at Sheffield Hallam University; with Mike, the project co-ordinator, being the head of the department that offers the degrees required for entry into the profession. The project team consists of five members: Mike, David (a senior lecturer at Sheffield Business School, SBS), Fides (the research assistant - the only person working full-time on this project), Margaret (a staff development officer for the University), Steve Kirkmichael (a visiting professor in URS, Human Resource (HR) expert, and member of the PB). Being a member of the Steering Committee to this project, Steve K was at first not seen as a member of the core team, which then was referred to within the team as the ‘Gang of Four’ (G4). This name stayed even after Steve K was ‘declared’ a member, because he as well as Margaret, due to their other professional obligations, were not able to invest the same amount of time and effort as the other three, and therefore, as one team member put it, “three full plus two half members still amount to four”.
It is important to mention that the project team is not based within one institute but scattered over three (with up to seven miles’ distance between them). Mike and Fides are the only members working in the same building; Steve K lives south-west of London (some 200 miles away) and only visits for teaching and meeting purposes. This posed quite a communications problem to start with. From the start of the project (September 1995), G4 meetings were agreed upon fortnightly to 3-weekly (not usually attended by Steve K); in between those meetings communications have been mediated by a variety of media: email, fax, telephone, and internal and external ordinary mail. In fact, it was their heavy reliance on email that first gave rise to the idea of evaluating the project team in the context of CSCW.
The Steering Committee, which meets every two months to decide the project’s general direction, was a condition imposed by the PB when it commissioned the project; apart from HR experts, academics and senior managers from related professional fields, it also had a PB representation (Brian Lawson) and an organisational learning expert (Tom Boydell) on its list.
We must stress here that while much of the evaluation in general has
been concerned with technology, the part of the study presented here is
to do with the more general issues of stakeholders within the team, and
their relations to each other. As much as the question of the technology
used, the team are as interested in the evaluation of how much they are
a learning organisation (Senge 1990) and the stakeholder exercise primarily
contributed to that.
Before it began, Magnus (as evaluator) prepared a large piece of paper with lots of little pieces of paper representing who he thought were relevant stakeholders. The team added several more during the exercise.
We started with the following: Mike, Fides, David, Margaret, Steve Kirkmichael (a former human resource director in the profession), the project’s Steering Committee, the Professional Body (PB), Brian Lawson, the professionals as a group, the Learning Company Project (LCP, a group of organisational learning Consultants involved with the project), organisational learning experts as a body, and Magnus as the evaluator. There were 12 initial stakeholders in all. To this list were added: the PB’s research committee and Market Sector Panel chairs, URS, Tom Boydell, Human Resource Directors (HRDs) as a group, Sheffield Business School, and the university’s Learning & Teaching Initiative (LTI) who part-fund the project - 7 more stakeholders. On reflection, it might have been better to get them to identify all the stakeholders, to see for example if they included the organisational learning experts and the professionals as relevant.
We had laid out the stakeholders Magnus had suggested on the paper in approximate positions, with bits of blu-tack on the back of the pieces of paper. For the next half hour or so, we then collectively shuffled them around, added new people, and generally debated who should go where. An interesting phenomenon was the use by the team members of overlaps in the pieces of paper to symbolise particularly close working links, where their roles in the system overlapped one with the other.
There were noticeable links arising between Mike, Fides and David - Fides’s symbol overlapped a bit with Mike’s, and a bit less with David’s; but Margaret stood alone. We believe (perhaps optimistically) that the construction of this part of the map acted as a learning experience for the team in that it gave them a mechanism to reflect on their roles.
Another large overlap was seen in the various people connected with the profession: Steve Kirkmichael overlapped with the steering committee, as did Brian Lawson, who in turn overlapped with the PB research committee (which served as his link to the PB itself). The Market Sector Panel chairs also linked with the PB. Curiously, the professionals themselves, while standing close to all this, didn’t overlap as such with anyone... This seems to raise two issues: firstly, the relationship of the project team to the professionals as a group, and the need for the team to be more closely involved with them; but at a second glance it also raises the general question of the extent to which it is possible to be in contact with an abstract group like a profession (as opposed to a more concrete group like the professional body, although even this is only possible through representatives).
As the exercise progressed, the team realised there were beginning to be two main groups circling around the core team, representing the two sides of the project: organisational learning/theory people and those connected with the profession (theory and practice?). This led to a certain realignment of various of the tokens, especially to make it explicit that of the Fides-Mike duo, Fides was on the theory side and Mike on the practice.
Towards the end, the team decided (of their own volition, without Magnus’s prompting) to draw three circles to represent the two groups described above and the core team. An interesting feature of this was that they had no qualms about partly including some people and excluding others, to reflect their relative roles. Thus the core team group (the most contentious on this matter) included Mike and Fides completely, but cut both Margaret and Steve Kirkmichael so that about 2/3 of their tokens were inside the circle; and cut off a small corner of David. (This at his own suggestion to reflect that he ‘does less’ on the project than Fides or Mike). It should be pointed out here that when this part of the exercise occurred, Margaret had already left so the groups were constructed by the other three (plus Magnus) - her reaction to her position would be interesting to hear.
The other two groups are less exciting. In the practice corner (with the purple pen) sat: the Department, Steve Kirkmichael, the steering committee, Brian Lawson, the PB research committee, the PB, the MSP chairs, the professionals, Mike and about 3/4 of Fides. It is interesting to note here that this circle as originally drawn excluded Mike completely (and indeed Fides), and they were only added at my prompting. What unconscious motivation that had can only be speculated on...
In the theory corner (with the red pen) there was: Fides, David, Margaret, Tom Boydell, the LCP, SBS, organisational learning experts, Magnus, a tiny corner of the LTI (~10%), a rather larger chunk of the human resource directors (1/3), and about half of Mike. It’s interesting to note that the steering committee don’t get a mention here, despite the presence on it of Tom Boydell (who admittedly appears separately) and another academic expert in organisational learning.
Finally, at two different times the question of the centre of the diagram came up. This was held to be at two different places: about halfway down Mike’s token, and about halfway down Fides’s. While these two crosses are rather close together, the tension this reflected (between theory and practice) seemed to speak to the team members.
The mapping exercise seemed to us a most valuable way of eliciting the team’s opinion about the various relationships. It also (as the Tavistock researchers say about evaluation - Sommerlad et al, 1992) perhaps contributed to their organisational learning, in that it led them to reflect about various of these relationships, particularly to do with the nature of the core team and the position of the centre.
However, the approach sits within a paradigm shift in academia (Star 1992) and in business (RSA 1995; Senge 1990) that is moving towards a concept of connections between individuals and groups based on networks of knowledge, skill and technology. The approach has also proved successful in Germany and Japan over many years (Hutton 1995).
As well as linking in with these ideas, the approach has relevance in CSCW for normative reasons discussed above (that it is a ethically right to involve those affected by change in the decision-making process about it). It has also importance in an instrumental way: to take into account the importance that the usage rate of a CSCW system is rather high if it is to be effective; to link in with the viewpoint approach current in requirements engineering; to avoid one’s carefully-crafted system never actually being used; and to cater for the multiple different definitions of what is good that are found within settings of relevance to CSCW.
Despite the fact that so far no ‘hard’ empirical evidence has been found for a correlation between a stakeholder approach and financial success in business, and according to Donaldson & Preston (1995) is not possible to be produced, we would still argue that a stakeholder approach is likely to be beneficial in organisational practice. One important point is that these benefits are of a qualitative, system and long-term nature, and links are therefore bound to be indirect. We would also support the suggestion of the Dahrendorf Report (1995) to use a wider definition of succes, instead of a narrow, merely financial one. On the other hand, financial gain is not to be excluded - but a stakeholder approach is a long-term investment (just like training or Total Quality Management) that needs time to ‘sink in’ before it can produce results. All these arguments call for qualitative research and longitudinal studies. Wait and see...
Bjerknes, Gro and Tone Bratteteig (1994). User Participation: A Strategy for Work Life Democracy? In PDC ‘94: Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference, pp.3-12.
Blair, Tony (1996). Speech on the stakeholder economy, Singapore, 7 January 1996. Reported in The Guardian newspaper.
Burrell, Gibson & Gareth Morgan (1979). Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis. London: Heinemann.
Checkland, Peter & Jim Scholes (1990). Soft systems methodology in action. London: John Wiley.
Cullen, J., J.Kelleher & E.Stern (1993). Evaluation in DELTA. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 9:115-126.
Dahrendorf, Ralf et al. Report on Wealth Creation and Social Cohesion in a free society. Commission on Wealth Creation and Social Cohesion, 50 Cumberland Mills Square, London.
Dobson, J.E., A.J.C. Blyth, J. Chudge and R. Strens (1994). The ORDIT approach to organisational requirements. In M. Jirotka & J. Goguen (eds), Requirements Engineering: Social and Technical Issues. London: Academic Press.
Donaldson, Thomas and Lee Preston (1995). The Stakeholder Theory of the Corporation: Concepts, Evidence, and Implications. Academy of Management Review 20(1):65-91.
Eason, Ken (1988). Information Technology and Organisational Change. London: Taylor & Francis.
Ehn, Pelle (1989). Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artefacts. Hillsdale, NJ, USA: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Evan, William and R. Edward Freeman (1993). A Stakeholder Theory of the Modern Corporation: Kantian Capitalism. In Tom Beauchamp & Norman Bowie (eds), Ethical Theory and Business. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA: Prentice Hall.
Finkelstein, Anthony & Ian Sommerville (1996). The Viewpoints FAQ. Software Engineering Journal 11(1): 2-4.
Freeman, R. Edward & David Reed (1983). Stockholders and Stakeholders: A New Perspective on Corporate Governance. California Management Review 25(3):88-106.
Greenbaum, Joan and Morten Kyng (1991). Introduction: Situated Design. In Joan Greenbaum and Morten Kyng (eds), Design at Work. Hillsdale, NJ, USA: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 1-24.
Grudin, Jonathan (1994). Groupware and social dynamics - 8 challenges for developers. Communications of the ACM 37(1):92-105.
Guba, Egon & Yvonna Lincoln (1989). Fourth Generation Evaluation. Newbury Park, USA: Sage.
Habermas, Jurgen (1971). Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press.
Harper, Richard (1992). 'Looking at ourselves: an examination of the social organisation of two research laboratories', in Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 92), pp. 330-337.
Hutton, Will (1995). The State We’re In. London: Jonathan Cape.
Jurison, Jaak (1994). Measurement and evaluation of IT benefits: a stakeholder-based approach. In Proceedings of the First European Conference on IT Investment Evaluation. Birmingham, UK: Operational Research Society.
Macaulay, Linda (1994). Cooperative requirements capture: Control Room 2000. In M. Jirotka & J. Goguen (eds), Requirements Engineering: Social and Technical Issues. London: Academic Press.
Marquand, David (1996). A stake through the heart of old simplicities. The Indepedent (UK newspaper), 15 January 1996, p.13.
Mason, Robert & Ian Mitroff (1981). Challenging Strategic Planning Assumptions. New York: John Wiley.
Mitroff, Ian (1983). Stakeholders of the organisational mind. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Mumford, Enid (1983). Designing human systems for new technology: the ETHICS method. Manchester: Manchester Business School.
Orlikowski, Wanda (1992). Learning from Notes: organisational issues in groupware implementation. Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 92), pp. 197-370.
Plowman, Lydia, Yvonne Rogers and Magnus Ramage (1995). What are workplace studies for? In Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW 95), pp.309-324.
Ramage, Magnus (1995). Hanging around doesn’t mean sitting on the fence. In Lydia Plowman, Yvonne Rogers and Richard Harper (eds), The Professional Stranger. CSRP 428, School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences, University of Sussex.
Rhenman, Eric (1965). Industrial Democracy and Industrial Management. London: Tavistock.
Rogers, Yvonne (1994). Integrating CSCW in evolving organisations. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 94), pp. 67-78.
Ross, Susi, Magnus Ramage & Yvonne Rogers (1995). PETRA: Participatory Evaluation Through Redesign And Analysis. Interacting With Computers 7(4):335-360.
RSA (1995). Tomorrow’s Company. Report of an Inquiry by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, 8 John Adam St, London, UK.
Senge, Peter (1990). The fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday.
Sommerland, Elizabeth et al. (1992). A guide to local evaluation. Evaluation Development and Review Unit, Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, London.
Star, Susan Leigh (1992). The Trojan Door: Organizations, Work, and the “Open Black Box”. Systems Practice 5(4):395-410.
Star, Susan Leigh & Karen Ruhleder (1994). Steps towards an ecology of infrastructure: complex problems in design and access for large-scale collaborative systems. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 94), pp. 253-264.
Twidale, Michael, David Randall and Richard Bentley (1994). Situated Evaluation for Cooperative Systems. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 94), pp. 441-452.
Vidgen, Richard and Tom McMaster (1995). Black Boxes, Non-Human Stakeholders and the Translation of IT Through Mediation. In Wanda Orlikowski, Geoff Walsham, Matthew Jones and Janice DeGross (eds), Information Technology and Changes in Organizational Work, London: Chapman & Hall, pp.250-271.
Walsham, Geoff (1993). Interpreting Information Systems in Organizations.
Chichester: John Wiley.