Talk:Stakeholder (law)

It occurs to me that we might be in a situation in which the same term is being used for very different concepts.

It's possible, but I doubt it. I believe the term as it's used in management of large corporations was adopted to make the persons with management responsibility understand that they are fiduciaries (or trustees) and therefore held to the highest legal standard in holding property that rightly belongs to someone else, to whom they are responsible for it. If I'm right about that, then it's precisely the same concept. -- isis 08:03 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

It might be the same concept, but it is used in a different way in non-profits. In non-profits, stakeholders typically have little or no legal fiducial duties, but their support or input is necessary for a decision to be made. For example, a professor in a university committee is under no legal fiducial duty to the university when it makes a decision on curriculum policy (if anything the professor would probably argue that his moral obligations to academic standards outway whatever obligations he has to the university). The board of regents has the legal power to theoretically overrule the university committee, but that doesn't happen.

In non-profits, the people who have the actual power to make a decision are often very different from the people who have the legal power to make a decision, and the people who have legal power tend to have very little real power. The term stakeholders is to address this political reality. -- Roadrunner