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Here are four common ways of talking about who should be engaged in decision-making or collective work. Each approach has significant drawbacks.
| Definition | Who decides who they are? | Drawbacks | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stakeholders | People with specific, identifiable, relevant knowledge, power, commitment or vulnerability. | The organizers of a process identify the stakeholders. | The organizers retain power and discretion. The process favors people with special “stakes,” who may not represent everyone. |
| Citizens | All adults who are recognized by the authorities as full members of the jurisdiction, e.g., a country. | Normatively, all adult residents have claims to be citizens. In practice, the definition reflects power. | One person/one vote does not reflect the real distribution of influence and interests. Realistically, specific stakeholders will set the agenda. Also, people who are not citizens may have valid stakes. |
| Activists | Members of social movements who have obtained visibility and influence through their struggles. | Activists identify themselves. However, an individual may not be accepted by a given group and may not then be heard. | Since a movement is usually defined by its stance, it cannot represent people with alternative views or those who are neutral or agnostic. |
| The community | Members of an affected group who are outside of the system that organizes the process. For instance, the police consider civilians to be the community. Professors consider non-academics to be the community. For the state, the police and the university might be parts of the community. | Usually, someone with authority defines the community as an “other.” | The abstract idea of a community often devolves to leaders and staff of NGOs or social-movement activists. People who have formal titles may define themselves out of the community, which is a mistake. |
| The oppressed or marginalized, sometimes named “The People” in left-wing discourse. | Members of social groups who are and have been subject to violence, discrimination, dispossession, etc. | People with influence over the discourse–perhaps including those who are themselves oppressed. (But usually, powerful people do most of the talking.) | A negative definition can be patronizing. Defining someone else as oppressed does not empower them. |
See also: citizens, stakeholders, publics, interest groups?; problems with “stakeholders”; and Levine P. (2022), Social Movements and Stakeholder Engagement. In: Lerner D., Palm M.E., Concannon T.W. (eds) Broadly Engaged Team Science in Clinical and Translational Research. Springer