Right to the Library: Following Urban Planning Away from Stakeholder Theory

by Jaime Taylor

Abstract

In the field of urban planning, a well-established and growing body of discourse encourages reconsideration of stakeholder theory. Like urban planning, librarianship has been using stakeholder theory nearly since the theory’s inception, with its prevalence accelerating since the mid-1990s. However, compared to planning, librarianship’s use of stakeholder theory has been undertheorized; in three decades, there have not been meaningful advances or critiques of stakeholder theory’s place in library management. This article will review the advent of stakeholder theory in the business management literature; distill urban planning’s criticism of the theory and ideas for moving past it; and suggest what from urban planning’s critique of stakeholder theory can be adopted in librarianship’s theory and practice. As in urban planning, these new directions for librarianship will be oriented towards democracy and justice. It will also suggest that library workers examine critically the suite of managerial methods borrowed from commerce and reconsider the kinds of scholarship we produce about library management.

Keywords

Library management, stakeholder theory, urban planning, democracy, neoliberalism

Biography

Jaime Taylor is the library systems coordinator at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She holds a Master of Library Science degree from Simmons University. Her research interests include race and gender in librarianship, rethinking librarian education, the capitalist library software marketplace, and challenging neoliberal management of libraries.

Introduction

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. (Le Guin, 2014)

In the field of urban planning, a well-established and growing body of discourse encourages reconsideration of stakeholder theory. This ongoing reexamination is found at intersections of ideas such as the right to the city, critical race theory¹ and other critical theories, and economic justice. It addresses a fundamental problem of stakeholder theory – “collaps[ing] differentiated subjects with complex relations into merely interested parties” (Ferrer, 2021) – and challenges the neoliberal market-logics from whence it sprang. In urban planning, the goal of these new ideas is a “more inclusive and universal understanding of urban citizenship” (Ferrer, 2021), mirroring ongoing discussions in librarianship about how to create more inclusive and just libraries for workers and patrons alike.

Like urban planning, librarianship has been using stakeholder theory nearly since the theory’s inception, with its prevalence accelerating with the rest of the neoliberal project since the mid-1990s. However, compared to planning, librarianship’s use of stakeholder theory has been undertheorized; in three decades, there have not been meaningful advances or critiques of stakeholder theory’s place in library management. Libraries (and planning) adopting the methods of neoliberal capitalism has generally been regarded as a wise choice, or at least a necessary one. But these “transformations...have no stated end-state to which they aspire” (Gorman, 2012, p. 115). That is, without the goal of profit that business firms have, there is no reason to have adopted stakeholder theory or other neoliberal methods.

Why, then, has a method such as stakeholder theory, which was described by its originators as being a way for a firm to relate to those who have a financial stake in its success (i.e., its profit-making), taken root so securely in the managerial methods of librarianship (or the processes of urban planning)? Why have non-commercial institutions intellectually bought into capital’s management techniques when, as Michael Gorman (2012) asserts, “[t]he scientific management or business approach to libraries is largely based on unexamined assumptions” (p. 122)?

In the spirit of Michael Harris’s (1986a) suggestion that “‘library science’ is not a separate discipline, but rather a mediating profession concerned with knowledge derived from all other disciplines, and researchers in this profession must be alert to, and prepared to draw upon, developments in the social sciences” (p. 523), this article will review the advent of stakeholder theory in the business management literature; distill urban planning’s criticism of the theory and ideas for moving past it; and suggest what from urban planning’s critique of stakeholder theory can be adopted in librarianship’s theory and practice. As stakeholder theory has not realized its promise of increased democracy in library (or planning) decision making, these new directions for librarianship will be oriented towards robust democracy and justice. It may also inspire library workers to critically examine the suite of managerial methods borrowed from commerce and to shake out of the outdated (Harris, 1986a, 1986b) and austerity-induced (Connell, 2019; Schleck, 2022) stagnation of our scholarship, which frequently foregoes the “why” of librarianship in favor of a quantifiable “how.”

The Rules of Acquisition: Review of the Business Literature²

By the late 1970s, business theorists were in search of a new direction that would unify ethics and profit-seeking, in light of neoliberalism’s overtake of the mid-twentieth century’s Keynesian compromise.³ In 1979, Charan and Freeman began to sketch out the idea, stating that firms “must now negotiate increasingly with a growing number of external groups. These groups can be conceptualized as ‘stakeholders’... They must be reckoned with because they can often influence an entire market or industry and because failure to negotiate adequately with them could result in drastic changes to a company’s objectives – or even its destiny” (p. 8). Five years after this article, Freeman’s (1984) book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach⁴ describes stakeholders as “any group or individual who can affect, or is affected by, the achievement of the corporation’s purpose” (p. iv). Freeman again attempts to convince managers that they must proactively engage with these stakeholders to secure their firms’ ongoing success, whether or not those managers find such engagement distasteful or exhausting.

The changes in the business environment to which Charan and Freeman were reacting in the late 1970s and early 1980s were the results of neoliberalism’s ascension. As with classical liberalism, the central idea of neoliberalism is that market-logics – with markets unrestrained by state regulation – are the most efficient. Efficient at what is at this point rarely specified,⁵ especially when discussing non-commercial undertakings, and that murkiness is a feature, not a bug; that lack of clarity, “slippery” (Sharpe, 2019, p. 299) language, is a tool with which the neoliberal project first exerts and then maintains hegemony.

Fifteen years after Freeman’s book and after new facets of the idea had been proposed and rebutted (e.g., Donaldson & Preston, 1995; Freeman & Evan, 1990; Jones, 1995), Jones and Wicks (1999) summarized stakeholder theory’s “essential premises” in four points, attempting to unify the various threads of stakeholder theory’s development under the umbrella of “convergent stakeholder theory”:

1. the corporation has relationships with many constituent groups (“stakeholders”) that affect and are affected by its decisions (Freeman, 1984);

2. the theory is concerned with the nature of these relationships in terms of both processes and outcomes for the firm and its stakeholders;

3. the interests of all (legitimate) stakeholders have intrinsic value, and no set of interests is assumed to dominate the others (Clarkson, 1995; Donaldson & Preston, 1995);

4. the theory focuses on managerial decision making (Donaldson & Preston, 1995). (p. 207; citations, italics and parentheticals original)

The purpose of stakeholder theory, and its utility to a firm, is to realize profit. As Charan and Freeman stated in 1979, a company’s “destiny” could be secured or lost based on its relationships with its stakeholders. While Freeman (1984) and Williamson (1984) were solely concerned with corporate governance in their current business environment, within a decade corporate ethics were being folded into firms' relationships with advocacy groups, consumers, or the government. Efficient contracting can supposedly result through consistently acting morally: “The firm will gain competitive advantage if it is able to develop relationships with its stakeholders based on mutual trust and cooperation” (Jones, 1995, p. 423).

Looking back from the 2020s, the addition of ethics and morality reads as an ex post facto defense of capitalism, especially among the corporate scandals of the early 2000s, such as with Enron. (For a scourging of management theory and the business schools teaching it at that time, see Ghoshal, 2005.) Even among those such as Jones who view stakeholder theory as an answer to questions of corporate ethics or morality, there is some recognition that “stakeholder theory is not comprehensive moral doctrine” (Phillips, Freeman & Wicks, 2003, p. 493). Additionally, theorists such as Orts and Strudler (2002) suggest that sometimes a firm only pretends to consider other stakeholders (p. 217). Stakeholder theory can be used to enact corporate ethics, if ethical behavior is desired (or to make urban planning more democratic, if robust democracy is desired), but there is nothing intrinsic to stakeholder theory that leads to ethical (or democratic) results, especially where ethics (or democracy) are at odds with profit.⁶

The boundaries of who or what is a stakeholder have never been settled. There is a strong, though not universal, trend in only including humans and groups of humans (Orts & Strudler, 2002; Phillips & Reichart, 2000). While shareholders may continue to be at the head of the pack, potential stakeholders include “government agencies, environmentalists, consumerists” (Charan & Freeman, 1979, p. 8); “customers, suppliers, employees, local communities, stockholders, and management” (Freeman & Evan, 1990, p. 348); or “non-equity owners, including employees, various types of creditors, and others” (Orts & Strudler, 2002, p. 227), who all may have some influence on or interest in whether and how much profit a firm is able to make.

Some interested parties – at least sometimes – are not considered stakeholders, and one theorist’s list of stakeholders may overlap with another’s list of non-stakeholders. Non-stakeholders might be the natural environment, government and its laws, aesthetics, cultural value, and the community (Orts & Strudler, 2002). They might be competitors and the media, who do not stand to gain if the firm is successful, even while they might have influence on the firm (Donaldson & Preston, 1995). Regardless of who and what is considered in or out, there is broad agreement that the line needs to be drawn somewhere. Otherwise, a firm would be paralyzed by indecision as it attempts to weigh all possible outside opinions. Stakeholder theory would become meaningless through dilution, and “[w]hen everyone in the world is a stakeholder of everyone else, the term adds little if any value and the critics’ charge of conceptual emptiness becomes a rather convincing one” (Phillips, Freeman & Wicks, 2003, p. 492).

Given that stakeholder theory’s purpose – and the purpose of business firms generally – is profit, it was not originally intended to be extended past the business world. Dixit (2012) says that this is because private firms and the market cannot perform public functions well, even on their own terms of efficiency, due to these functions’ high complexity. Firms can be efficient at their “one-dimensional goal” (Dixit, 2012, p. 137) of profit making, but the public sphere’s complex and multitudinous goals do not lend themselves to the market or private commerce.

In addressing criticisms of stakeholder theory, Phillips, Freeman and Wicks (2003) state, “stakeholder theory is a theory of organizational strategy and ethics and NOT a theory of the whole political economy” (p. 489; emphasis original). They were arguing from a pro-neoliberal position, so it is strange that they were unwilling to expand stakeholder theory throughout the political economy, since that expansion is precisely neoliberalism’s goal; they seem to have therefore accidentally made an argument against neoliberalism.

Supporters of this concept suggest that although stakeholder theory was originally applied to the private sector, they believe expanding stakeholder theory to include public institutions is a conceptual advance (see, e.g., Barnett 1997; Hutton 1995; Rustin 1997). While the effort to take business organizations seriously in political theory should be applauded, this particular translation from organizational theory to political theory represents an unwarranted dilution of stakeholder theory. Further, this watering down makes stakeholder theory more susceptible to charges that it is overly broad and meaningless or, if meaningful, the stakeholder economy amounts to little more than the “new socialism” – its contributions to the stakeholder debate being the sparse and occasional insertion of the word “stakeholder” into a tract about liberal macroeconomic policy (e.g., Corry 1997). (Phillips, Freeman & Wicks, 2003, p. 491; references original)

Yet, stakeholder theory – as part of neoliberalism’s suite of methods – has become omnipresent in government, in non-profit organizations, and in the provision of public and common goods and services.⁷ Business firms adopted stakeholder theory to meet their goal of profit-making in a neoliberal, globalized economy. Libraries, which are almost entirely government or non-profit entities, do not have profit-making as their root motivation, which means that business’s tools and methods are not necessarily appropriate.

Planning the Neoliberal Project: Review of the Planning Literature

“‘[P]roject’ refers here to a fluid set of practices and strategies with a certain directionality and internal coherence in terms of actors, positionalities, procedures, and expected outcomes. Tracing this coherence allows the identification of causal sequences and recurring patterns in time” (Sevilla-Buitrago, 2022, p. 3). According to Mark Purcell (2008), a central feature of the neoliberal project is the extension of and absorbing into the private sphere what was formerly considered the public sphere. This is supposedly a means of expanding democracy (of a certain kind) by removing the state’s presence from the personal life, decisions, and purview of individuals. Though this is a political construction, a common interpretation has been that this absence of regulation by the state enables markets for goods and services to find equilibrium through competition between firms and the push and pull of supply and demand. The extension of that market-logic throughout the rest of society and personal life, outside of commercial ventures, is neoliberalism.

A large part of this project is making capitalism seem natural and inevitable (Appleby, 2010; Purcell, 2008; Sharpe, 2019). It is therefore a cultural project, not merely an economic one. By absorbing and co-opting non-commercial institutions into market-logics, neoliberal hegemony seeks to constrain the imagination. If capitalist market-logics are the natural human state (as classical liberalism would have us believe) and the only system that is compatible with democracy (as neoliberalism would have us believe), then it would be both unnatural and immoral to seek any other system of economic, political, or social organization.

For planning, capitalism constrains the field by focusing planning efforts on the economic, profit-generating, or commodity values of land, rather than use values for that land’s inhabitants (Lefebvre, 1996; Purcell, 2008). For libraries, it renders us mere “handlers of commodities” (Budd, 1997, p. 310). Neoliberalism also accounts for the internal structures of both planning and libraries and for the methods used by them, as they have adopted processes of the business world such as stakeholder theory. One particular expression of stakeholder theory in planning has been “communicative planning” (sometimes called “collaborative planning”), based on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action.

Habermas published his Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns in 1981,⁸ contemporary with the work Freeman and other business theorists were doing to develop stakeholder theory – and in response to the same pressures and social changes. Habermas wished to replace instrumental rationality with communicative rationality, in which subjects (that is, people) generate a shared understanding of the world through speech and communication. It is not objective, per se; on the contrary, it relies upon shared subjectivity and social construction built through ongoing communication. Habermas’s theory requires his ideal speech situation be enacted by all parties, or at least there be a striving toward that ideal. That ideal is predetermined (by Habermas) and makes no reference to the specific situation in which it is enacted or to the needs or differences of the people enacting it. Purcell (2008) outlines the ideal speech situation as one where,

(1) no one who is affected by the decision is excluded from the discussion, (2) everyone in the conversation has an equal chance to speak, (3) each interlocutor is willing to empathize with and take seriously all others, (4) pre-existing power differences are prevented from distorting the conversation, and (5) participants must be pursuing not their own self-interest, but the common good of the group. The goal is for participants to use rational (that is, reason-giving) argument to move toward a shared understanding of the common good. Once arrived at a shared common good, they can make the decisions that best serve that good. (p. 45)

Therefore, communicative planning is a method of citizen participation focused on process, positioning the planner as the facilitator of the ideal situation and the communication it generates. It intends to get participants past the power relations, self-interest, and strong opinions (regardless of their validity) they embody outside the space in which the communicative action takes place, with the planner as the force that nudges them into temporarily giving up those positions (Innes, 1995).

Communicative planning tries to make up for the deficits of democracy, the “thin” (Purcell, 2008, p. 34) democracy, in neoliberalism. Because it fails to do so, planning has been criticizing communicative planning for almost as long as it has existed. The main criticism is that it does not – and cannot – meet its own goal of leveling power differences. It is impossible, or so rare as to be impossible in practice, to create Habermas’s ideal speech situations (Goodspeed, 2016; Purcell, 2008). Planning process participants cannot and do not leave their self-interest, biases, education and skill levels, emotional affect, etc. outside the room. As Ferrer (2021) writes, it “collapses differentiated subjects with complex relations into merely interested parties.” A well-executed planning exercise will not change the participants’ context or positionality, especially when deep-seated social discriminations and values discount some participants’ speech before they even open their mouths. Communicative planning demands that power be equalized in a planning process, but offers no way to make it so. In the library literature, Budd (2001) similarly notes the insidiousness of unrecognized ideology: “The shared constructions of the communicative act can, at times, help mask the ultimate intention of the writer. The familiar grammar can induce a reader’s or hearer’s initial acceptance of the communication as neutral and, possibly, as persuasive” (pp. 503-504).

Additionally, the planning literature is full of futility at the possibility of actually having the proper stakeholders in the room (e.g., McGuirk, 2001; Purcell, 2008) and of everyone being willing to take each other seriously and open to having their minds changed for the “common good.” An extreme example from planning practice is a 2019 New York City Community Board meeting, wherein “[a] neighborhood meeting in Park Slope descended into a belligerent free-for-all on Wednesday night, after the event’s invited speaker spewed conspiracy theories about a pedophile-linked bike lobby, then shoved a well-known cycling advocate” (Offenhartz, 2019). There is also the presence of individuals who should perhaps not be included in planning processes and yet consider themselves, and are considered by others, to be stakeholders. Purcell (2008) calls these stakeholders “systematically included” (p. 71) and lists property owners and corporate interests as among those who will never be excluded or have their inclusion critically considered. For example, in 2021 New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority held regional public hearings about congestion pricing in Manhattan below 60th Street (MTA, 2024). These public hearings “offered residents of New York City, suburban counties, New Jersey and Connecticut the chance to comment on the plan” (McDonough, 2021) – and showed a stark example of systematic inclusion, as those for whom the city is only “an object of cultural consumption for tourists, for a estheticism, avid for spectacles and the picturesque” (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 148), were given as much ability to comment as those who inhabit the city.

Professional planners are to serve as “epistemic mediators” (Goodspeed, 2016, p. 3) in this process. This role neglects that planners themselves are human, with human failings. They will enter the process with preferences, biases, desired outcomes, and adequacies or deficiencies in their skills as mediators. They, too, are cast in the impossible role of Ferrer’s merely interested parties, instead of differentiated subjects; as in libraries (Branum, 2008), that neutrality is a myth.

What communicative planning actually offers, in lieu of meaningful democracy in planning decisions, is legitimacy. By having a process that appears “democratic enough” (Purcell, 2008, p. 28), the outcome of that process can claim to be democratic, fair, and just, while perpetuating and reinscribing power differences through that process. By continuing to pretend that planning happens under ideal speech conditions, planners allow for power imbalances to be present but unrecognized in their processes, the same way that neoliberalism has rendered itself unremarked upon. This question of power is exactly what critical theory, such as that espoused by Habermas, is meant to make visible. However, with the emphasis on process, “[c]ommunicative theory avoids dealing with the classic trope of what to do when open processes produce unjust results” (Fainstein, 2000, p. 457). Thus, communicative planning has fallen victim to the exact problem – a deficit of democracy – that it was meant to address.

With planning’s ongoing criticism of communicative planning, some of the issues that surface wherever stakeholder theory is used for non-commercial ventures are visible. Though critical theory is often cited (e.g., Innes, 1995), the relationship between communicative planning and critical theory is superficial. It is true that communicative action challenges an objective or scientific truth. But it does not address power and its sociopolitical origins in any practical way, which is central to critical theory. In response to the long-recognized deficits of communicative planning and the question of stakeholders, urban planning has presented an array of possible theoretical and practical answers.

Leonie Sandercock (1998), reacting not just to communicative planning but to the entire neoliberal project, proposes counter-hegemonic, insurgent planning, working from the margins to decolonize cities and ultimately the world. She wishes to get out from under planning’s professional identity and the history of the profession, which is a history of “planning as social control of (certain) bodies in space – women, ‘minorities,’ the poor, indigenous peoples” (Sandercock, 1998, p. 41). She asserts that the profession is fundamentally not equipped to serve the emerging global, multicultural cities of the twenty-first century. Instead, planning needs a new goal: “to work for structural transformation of systemic inequalities and, in the process, empower those who have been systematically disempowered” (Sandercock, 1998, p. 97). Ultimately, this kind of planner will need to be a traitor to the state, capital, and their profession and instead form allegiance with the communities they work with.

Purcell (2008) offers a way forward that is largely an updated vision of Lefebvre’s “right to the city,” a vision of radical pluralism in response to neoliberalism. Lefebvre and Purcell focus on those who inhabit a city, who have a use value for the city, and not those who have an exchange value. Similar to Sandercock, the users of the space, those who inhabit it, should determine its (and their) future, rather than capitalists who treat the city as a source for wealth extraction and accumulation. This is the undoing and opposite of enclosure. With primacy given to use and inhabitance, instead of accumulation, democracy can be untethered from neoliberalism without ceding power back to a paternalistic state.

While no one has produced a formula – and it would probably not be appropriate to do so – the planners I have spoken with often refer to “weighting” the input received from groups and individuals. To account for existing power differences, those groups with less power and fewer resources should have their input weighted more in the planning processes. More effort should also be expended to solicit that input, as those with more power are readily available and willing to give their opinions. And those more powerful groups will have less to lose – or, and this does not merely concern dollars, can stand to lose it – so their input should be given less weight. This requires planners to have a nuanced critical power analysis (e.g., recognizing that racism is real and systemic, and that reverse racism is not) and is therefore not a simple method with fixed rules.

It is worth noting that many of these suggestions are micro practices (Westin, 2022, p. 133) that require the ongoing overt effort of individuals. They only sometimes verge upon structural transformations in how planning (and democracy) under neoliberal capitalism functions. What do planners or librarians do when their practices are no longer “insurgent,” but are regular, typical, and performed from a consistent position of legitimate power? What are the macro practices and structural changes?

In the Library with the Monkey Wrench: Review of the Library Literature

Libraries and planning both operated under the assumptions of positivism through the mid-twentieth century, for which “[t]he ultimate aim is a power of prediction of human behavior that rivals that of physical phenomena. Such a belief seems to forget that some physical phenomena, such as the weather, are very difficult to predict because of their inherent complexity” (Budd, 1995, p. 296). Leonie Sandercock glosses the history of planning as practiced in the United States and Western Europe as including the rational and scientific approach of the post-war University of Chicago (also highly influential in librarianship’s theoretical development (Harris, 1986a)) and the like (Robert Moses, according to Sandercock (1998): “sometimes you have to hack your way through the city with a meat axe” (p. 27)). Judith Innes (1995) adds that the positivist epistemology was one wherein “[t]he planner is ideally and appropriately a rational man operating at arm’s length from the messy world of politics. These theorists, for the most part, share a faith in instrumental rationality; they share the ideas that technology and knowledge can make the world work better...” (p. 184). However, Sandercock (1998) can continue her history of planning with the rebellions of citizens against professional planners that came with the justice movements of the 1960s and ‘70s and resulted in the beginnings of public participation in planning and a turn towards “advocacy planning” (p. 89), showing a discursive evolution from mid-century positivism, while librarianship is unable to claim the same. Instead, the mainstream of librarianship did not abandon positivism and readily incorporated the neoliberalism that rose at the same time planning was undergoing these changes and embracing critical theory. 

After enumerating half a dozen possible reasons why librarianship’s theory and research are weak (Harris, 1986a, 1986b), Michael Harris (1986b) concludes that,

 ...the real problems lie very deep in the normative and epistemological foundations of research in this field. More specifically, it is suggested that the widespread, and generally uncritical, commitment to a “pluralist” paradigm (or world view) combined with a narrowly “positivist” epistemology has severely delimited our perspective when defining relevant questions and the nature of relevant answers. And that we suffer not from a lack of research, but rather from too much trivial work on the wrong questions. (p. 212)

The result of this is that “the ubiquitous library…remains one of the most understudied of American institutions. Currently we lack a solid body of scholarship that critically analyzes the multiple roles that libraries of all types have played and are playing in their host communities…” (Wiegand, 1999, p. 2). So Wayne Wiegand argued in 1999; perhaps the “tunnel vision and blind spots” he found then have since been resolved?  It would seem not, as in 2015 he revisited the questions and found no improvement (Wiegand, 2015b). Positivism remains libraries’ dominant discourse and continues to leave many questions unasked and unanswered.

If it wasn’t the entry point, the library profession’s use of stakeholder theory (at least in the US) accelerated quickly after the Clinton Administration’s 1993 National Performance Review (hereafter NPR). Based on the findings of the report Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less, which was published that September (Gore, 1993), President Clinton began issuing directives, “including cutting the work force by 252,000 positions, cutting internal regulations in half, and requiring agencies to set customer service standards” (National Partnership for Reinventing Government, 1997). While this effort is mostly remembered for its attempt to improve federal government customer service (see Maret & Eagle (2013) for a genealogy of “customer” in libraries and Budd (1997) for a sound critique of the term), it is obvious that “customer service” is not the only strategy the NPR borrowed from the commercial world. Deregulation, lean workforces, and replacement of employees with contractors are all hallmarks of neoliberal business methods that have been adopted by all levels of government. Yet, recall that Phillips, Freeman and Wicks (2003) suggested that a method such as stakeholder theory was likely to be inappropriate for use by government and other non-commercial organizations.

Like planners, most librarians work for various levels of government, non-profits, or socially-minded commercial enterprises. Thus, the push for the federal government to adopt the methods of commercial firms likely trickled down through state and municipal governments, as well as non-profits that serve quasi-governmental roles. It is likely, therefore, that stakeholder theory found its foothold in libraries after this sea-change in the federal government. From a philosophical perspective, it is easy to see how neoliberalism was readily folded into librarianship’s existing positivism, absence of critical consideration aside; by reducing every human function and interaction to market-logics, neoliberalism finally gave positivism the overarching, predictive paradigm it long sought. 

A search of the library literature bears this out; the word “stakeholders” is rarely present before 1993 and then is notably rising already in 1994 and 1995.⁹ This parallels Sharpe’s (2019) investigation of neoliberal-related terms in literature about reference services between 1975 and 2014; “accountability” began to be used with neoliberal inflection in 1994 (p. 306) and “outcomes” had its first peak usage in 1995 (p. 307). Given the thrust of the federal government’s NPR, this timing supports the possibility of trickled down influence on libraries. There does not, however, seem to be an article or book that introduced the concept and its theoretical antecedents to librarianship the way that Freeman’s 1984 book splashed stakeholder theory into the business world. 

Nor, many years on, have libraries made any meaningful advances in their conception or use of stakeholder theory. As examples of this lack of advancement are Cullen and Calvert’s 1995 article “Stakeholder Perceptions of University Library Effectiveness” and Kim’s “Determining Research Data Services Maturity: The Role of Library Leadership and Stakeholder Involvement” in 2021. This is not intended to pick these two articles out as particularly egregious; instead, they stand as exemplars of the genre. A meta-reading of them (and many other articles like them – again, these are only examples) shows that librarianship’s use of stakeholder theory has remained static. In 1995, shortly after Clinton’s NPR, the idea was being used uncritically, and it still is over twenty-five years later. Neither pole of that timespan questions the appropriateness of using market-logics or the tools of commerce in libraries and the utility of stakeholder theory is an unquestioned premise. Stakeholders and their purposes remain poorly defined, and librarians are somehow supposed to automatically know what the concept means and when, how, and why to use it. Library workers do not connect their use of stakeholder theory to Habermas and the critical theorists in the way planners do, for example, nor write very often of instrumental or normative theories the way business does. The library literature describes how libraries and library workers do things, or perhaps quantifies those things, but not why they do them or whether those methods are appropriate – and that this persists is a direct result of the neoliberal project’s ascension in libraries (Nicholson, 2015). ¹⁰

In sharp contrast to the philosophical work being done in planning at the time, the sudden, unexamined ascension of stakeholder theory demonstrates librarianship’s deficient discourse, long acknowledged (e.g., Budd, 2003; Ennis, 1967; Ford, 2012; Harris, 1986a, 1986b; Pyati, 2006; Radford & Budd, 1997; Wiegand, 1999, 2015b) and which (with the notable exception of critical librarianship¹¹⁾ has continued despite the passage of decades. Contemporary with stakeholder theory’s advance in libraries, there was lively conversation in the literature about the lack of discourse, theory, and philosophy. James Zwadlo (1997) went so far as to say that we didn’t need it. John Budd (1995) wrote, “As a discipline [librarianship] has simply encamped itself with the social sciences, which have been engaged in a quest for respect and respectability as sciences. Insufficient critical questioning has been involved in library and information science, just as there has been an inadequacy of critical questioning in the social sciences at large” (p. 303).

Pulling out one of Harris’s (1986a) reasons for the deficiency, “Progress would require greater funding and coordination” (p. 211), lack of progress since can likely in large part be laid at the feet of the field’s ongoing manufactured austerity crisis, the perpetual do-more-with-less footing that has continually accelerated since at least the Clinton Administration’s NPR, if not since Reagan and Thatcher. Operating in the crisis mode of neoliberalism for several decades has resulted in a field largely unable to do the scholarship of advancing theory, beyond even what was flagged by Ennis in 1967 or Harris in 1986; it’s likely that the added injury of the financial crisis of 2008, itself a product of neoliberal deregulation and commodification, decelerated librarianship’s theoretical explorations compared to the discussions that Budd, Radford, Zwadlo, and others were having in the 1990s and 2000s. Add to this the increase in precarious short-term contract and project positions, also a hallmark of neoliberalism and similar to the adjunctification of college and university faculty, and the profession has little time for the rigorous scholarship that might advance both the field as a whole and individual careers. Think of the cataloger hired for a few months or maybe a year to clear a backlog. That cataloger will be unlikely to produce profession-advancing scholarship while they do so – never mind that once the term is over the backlog will begin accumulating again.¹²

As with planning, librarianship’s use of stakeholders often serves as a tool to legitimize decisions, by focusing on formal political equality in the process instead of justice in the results. Without a power analysis in that process, again as in planning, it is a “thin” democracy – trustees, business people, or large property owners are not giving up their positions of power, nor are racially- or economically-marginalized library patrons and workers gaining power merely by entering into such a process, while the process also reinscribes settler-colonial conceptions of property (Benoff, 2022). Thus, recourse to stakeholders remains a tool for the powerful to make the decisions they wish to make and to retain their property, capital, and wealth, while claiming that everyone has had a chance to have input in those decisions, regardless of whether that input is taken seriously. This is irreconcilable with institutions that supposedly create robust democracy by leveling access to knowledge and resources, such as libraries.

This is why, ultimately, libraries should discard stakeholder theory. It has not delivered on its promise of increased democracy in libraries, which may have been realized earlier if the profession had given it critical consideration at the outset or looked to other disciplines such as planning in the interim, as Harris (1986a) suggests. If librarianship continues its use, we need to admit that democracy is not the goal of public institutions nor of the processes that govern them, despite all our words to the contrary: the purpose of a system is what it does. If planning’s theorists and practitioners were already disillusioned with stakeholder theory and communicative planning by the early 2000s (e.g., Flyvbjerg & Richardson, 2002), it is not premature, more than two decades later, for librarianship to reach the same conclusions. To quote a reviewer of this article to “offer a provocation: what if this way of working we all take for granted as normal actually isn’t at all?”

Making the Road by Walking: Suggestions

At the point we have arrived there is an urgent need to change intellectual approaches and tools. It would be indispensable to take up ideas and approaches from elsewhere and which are still not very familiar. (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 151)

In many ways, the mid-twentieth century Keynesian compromise was better for libraries than the neoliberal paradigm. Post-war expansion of public education, both K-12 and post-secondary, and of libraries within and adjacent to education were the result of consistent public investment, even if largely in support of a nation-state in the throes of the Cold War, as with the National Defense Education Act of 1958, and even as social and legal conditions, e.g., pre-Civil Rights segregation, resulted in differing situations for locales and communities. (See, for example, the entire February 1966 issue of the ALA Bulletin, which was devoted to discussing federal support of libraries.) Under neoliberal market-logics, federal, state, and local governments do not see public spending as a worthy goal to nearly the same extent, leaving libraries consistently under-resourced or at risk of it.

The goal, however, cannot be a return to the mid-century Keynesian compromise, nor to a pre-industrial idea of the commons (see Benoff, 2022). This is not only because to do so would be impossible; the post-war geopolitical position cannot be recreated, less so that of the pre-industrial era. By looking forward instead of backward, librarianship can avoid the anti-democratic aspects of those political moments – oppressive patriarchy, homophobia, racism, and colonialism, as well as the paternalism of unilateral, top-down government decision making. For, “…idealization of the university under the public-good regime requires some strategic forgetting of the ways a relatively unified notion of the public good was achieved during those years...[and] this nostalgia is dangerous in that it risks ignoring some of the critical lessons of the last several decades and turns a blind eye to the sins of the public regime itself” (Schleck, 2022, pp. 43-44). Even now, planning functions as a regulator for the ravages of capitalism, by altering society to account for it (Sevilla-Buitrago, 2022, p. 7), and Keynesianism itself served to bolster capitalism by mitigating its harms: “Keynes probably saved capitalism from itself and surely kept latter-day Marxists at bay” (Reich, 1999).

As it is easier to review the past than see the future, and as ideas of what the future should look like will be iterated as librarianship struggles towards it, where to go from here is less clear:

Can you morph, by stages, from the political economy that we’re in now, which is neoliberal capitalism, to what you might call anti-austerity, to a return to Keynesianism, and then beyond that to social democracy, and then beyond that to democratic socialism, and then beyond that to a post-capitalist system that might be a completely new invention that we don’t have a name for? (Robinson & O’Keefe, 2020)

First librarianship must internalize that neoliberal market-logics do not make sense for libraries and other public and common spaces, goods, and services. Librarianship must admit that it took the bait; the scarcity it has been operating under for the last few decades is a manufactured one. From there we can see that the tools of profit-motivated commerce, including stakeholder theory, are not in the best interest of thriving libraries.

Perhaps the field could start with thinking about value, for both meanings of the word. Valuing libraries, in a non-monetary sense of value, would mean that they should not be subject to market-logics and competition. Competition, after all, demands that some must lose so that others can win, a nonsensical dynamic for libraries. If the focus is instead on the use value of a common good, losers on the level of either individual libraries or individual library patrons (see Budd (1997) for explanation of how market-logics result in abandonment of some patrons) are not necessary; this produces “and” instead of the “or” of market competition. Librarianship can then find concrete actions that will create decision making structures and processes that produce democratic decisions and outcomes. This is necessary for the other meaning of value:

Libraries and all not-for-profit endeavors have to have an animating principle to take the place of the commercial and utilitarian principles that dominate the private sector. Values can be interpreted as fundamental beliefs and convictions that are clearly stated and defined. These values supply that animating principle – and become the reasons why we do what we do and that justify our working lives and the institutions we serve…In the case of academic libraries, those realities are the manifest and demonstrable value to individuals and societies of education, learning, reading, the pursuit of knowledge, free enquiry, and pure and applied research. (Gorman, 2012, p. 115)

Notably absent in both kinds of value is direct reference to management, especially the management tools of commerce or Taylorist scientific management. According to Gorman (2012), if libraries focus solely on management (or technology) and becoming business-like, they “have no stated end-state to which they aspire” (p. 115), as “management and technology are tools and not ends in themselves with inherent value” (p. 124). Writing about “customer service,” but likely applicable to neoliberal management techniques generally, Budd (1997) concurred; “the library’s service, rather than being an end (in the sense of meeting the needs of the academic community), becomes a means (of garnering a larger piece of the budgetary pie)…What becomes especially problematic is the possibility of an accompanying shift in the vision of the library’s purpose” (p. 312). If there is nothing inherent in management choices, we are free to abandon them if they do not serve; libraries need not accommodate a management technique by changing their purposes or, as Budd notes, seeing their patrons primarily as a source of material gain.

With this refocus of “value,” library administrators and other decision makers can find clarity on what their responsibilities are, the same way that planners have been trying to figure out what their roles should be in a robust democracy. For, unfortunately, as Lefebvre (1996) reminds us, “The pressure of the working class has been and remains necessary (but not sufficient)” (p, 157). Instead of being the hand of the market and its interests, administrators can act in ways that truly further the best interests of their libraries and act as “fundamentally a facilitator of projects led by popular sectors” (Sevilla-Buitrago, 2022, p. 217).

Libraries do continue to exist in a macroeconomic environment of capitalism; if nothing else, “publishers and other information producers thrive by exchanging commodities, and libraries are part of that exchange through the acquisition of materials and the payment to access information. …it is undeniable that libraries must engage businesses such as publishers on the publishers’ terms” (Budd, 1997, p. 310). Therefore, like Goodspeed’s (2016) edict to planners, library administrators “must serve as epistemic mediators” (p. 2), translating the needs of library inhabitants into language and concepts that capitalists will accept, while not buying into the capitalist or neoliberal project themselves, instead privileging the epistemologies (Huq, 2020) of library inhabitants. From that position, it is the administrator’s role to protect the library by standing between it and capitalism, while being able to code switch¹³ and move in both worlds, in service of advancing the library’s mission and values, just as Sandercock (1998) recommended for planners. In Westin’s (2022) conclusions of his analysis of the missing discussions of power in communicative planning paradigms, this “might not arise without some actors exercising power over other actors to stabilize power relations and create conditions for concerted action. Hence, we might find that exercises of power over are preconditions for power with” (p. 150; italics original). Library administrators should swap the current orientations of their power over and power with – so that, in contrast to current arrangements, they would have power with library workers and patrons, and power over the external commercial world’s impact on their libraries.

This may be a heavy lift for some library administrators, who in recent years seem to have frequently been hired precisely for their orientation to neoliberalism, market-logics, austerity, and business-like management styles. And perhaps it is unlikely that many will do so. But power concedes nothing without a demand, so we might as well make the demand and be direct about making it. Most library administrators have trained to be and worked as librarians and supposedly hold the same professional values as those who still do. It is not, therefore, out of line to ask change of them, any more than it would be to ask it of rank-and-file library workers. Invoking realpolitik is often enough cover for low expectations and preemptive capitulation; it will not be done here.

This readjustment of administrator goals could address the issue of stakeholders by making the theory irrelevant, rather than futilely trying to map the idea of financial stakes onto libraries’ non-commercial undertaking. It addresses problems created by inequity between stakeholders and in processes by repositioning many of the people and institutions that are currently considered to be stakeholders and by reassigning those that do not value libraries as a common good to positions of less power over libraries than they are currently granted.

Planning shows why this is necessary. Lefebvre and his successors wrote of a right to the city (“droite à la ville”), proposing inhabitance and use value as the epitome of entitlement to urban space. It is not hard to stretch that idea to cover public and common spaces, goods, and services more broadly. Under that umbrella, I propose the primacy of a “right to the library” in library management methods. It pulls in inhabitance and use value as always trumping exchange value and wealth extraction. Where Lefebvre (1996) writes, “[The right to the city] can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life…as long as the ‘urban’, place of encounter, priority of use value, inscription in space of a time promoted to the rank of a supreme resource among all resources, finds its morphological base and its practico-material realization” (p. 158; italics original), we can substitute libraries for cities and urban life: libraries as place of encounter and prioritizing use value, space for library inhabitants’ social reproduction. This matches much better what we know about libraries’ place in people’s lives (Wiegand, 2015a) than does reducing libraries to “handlers of commodities” (Budd, 1997, p. 310).

This approach enables librarianship to figure out whose opinions on the running of the library should be paid attention to and who should be making decisions – what someone’s stake is in it. Both inhabitance and use value point towards library patrons and library workers. Workers gain their inhabitance by spending so much of their lives in the library, tending to its needs and encountering patrons and each other. They draw their subsistence, qualitatively different from the wealth extraction of capitalists, from the wages they earn in the library. Patrons claim use value and thereby their own inhabitance through their presence in the library’s spaces (physical and virtual) and through their encounters with other inhabitants and with the library’s free-at-point-of-use goods and services that are collectively owned by the public of which they are a member. These are the library’s equivalent of Lefebvre’s (1996) “working class" as he continues, “Only the working class can become the agent, the social carrier or support of this realization…Who can ignore that the Olympians of the new bourgeois aristocracy no longer inhabit” (p. 158-159). It is only public divestment – a tenet of neoliberalism – that has required non-public funders and others of Lefebvre’s Olympians to have a relationship with libraries that they do not inhabit, allowing them to shoehorn themselves into the role of a stakeholder via private funding. By altering the relationship to these Olympians, libraries can hereby partially correct the issue of systematic inclusion.

The question then becomes how to balance the different opinions, needs, and desires of those who do have claims of inhabitance and use value. Responsive universalism (Rossi & Táíwò, 2020) or targeted universalism (powell [sic], Menendian & Ake, 2019) offer a theoretical starting point and directly speak to the deficits of communicative action and communicative/collaborative planning.

[Policies] should be weighed and designed to address social identity-based disadvantages with specificity...[and] only a ‘targeted’ universalism that responds to marginalizations inherent in our social structures is true universalism, insofar as it aims at impacting everyone equitably without homogenizing them. In other words, universalist programs need to become truly universal by becoming responsive to differences, such as racial differences. (Rossi & Táíwò, 2020)

This should not be difficult for libraries to incorporate, as we already, at our best, understand and practice related principles such as universal design, in which assets such as physical spaces and websites are designed so that as a baseline they are accessible vis-à-vis many common disabilities, which does not detract from – and may provide better – usability for people without those disabilities. Audre Lorde (1984) tells us of the potential of incorporating difference and the power that difference can provide: “Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) difference lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged” (pp. 111-112).

Returning to the planning literature, this is all similar to Purcell’s (2008) “networks of equivalencies” (p. 82).

Lauclau and Mouffe, and to a lesser extent Hardt and Negri, explicitly reject the reduction of subjects to an identical political subjectivity because it stifles the difference that is fundamental to democratic polity. The equivalence they insist on emphasizes the difference, in addition to the commonality, among political subjects. Radical equalization, then, in the context of radical pluralism, cannot entail total equalization whereby all people must have identical material circumstances or identical political power. It cannot mean people are reduced to being identical political subjects. Rather, it claims a radical equalization of material wealth, political power, and cultural esteem. It demands more than just the modest redistributions of the Keynesian era… It demands instead a substantial equality whereby all people are materially, politically, and culturally equivalent in a way that makes political equality truly possible. (Purcell, 2008, p. 85; italics original)¹⁴

In combining Purcell’s networks of equivalencies and the philosophers Rossi and Táíwò’s responsive universalism, library inhabitants could move away from Ferrer’s undifferentiated, merely interested parties of a stakeholder theory that serves the status quo as well as from the lack of power analysis inherent to communicative action. These concepts could provide a roadmap for differentiated library inhabitants with needs of varying and sometimes competing urgency to make decisions about their library together. Clarity of language when talking about library inhabitants and their needs will help; “[t]hat the language of consumerism and commodification dominates beyond the sphere of libraries is not sufficient reason to accept it uncritically. The library’s language, and practice, should flow from as clear an idea of purpose as possible” (Budd, 1997, p. 319).

In that, so far, libraries do not exist as truly flat organizational structures, library administrators could also borrow Bell’s “embedded planning” (Bell, 2018; Chellew et al., 2024). As with responsive universalism and universal design, embedded planning should not be difficult to incorporate into librarianship – the concept and practice of “embedded librarianship” (e.g., Kesselman & Watstein, 2009) is well established and could be extended to the internal management of libraries. Per Bell,

Embedded Planning means the planner moves with intention to work on the ground in the community to:

• Understand people’s needs

• Build trust and authentic relationships

• Increase participation for marginalized communities through street-level engagement

• Participate in daily community life, and, ultimately

• Advance equity.

My phrase “move with intention” is crucial. It means you push your work as much as possible to the spaces and places of the community. Embedded Planning is a praxis because it puts ideas into action to better our communities. You can do this too. (Chellew et al., 2024, p. 40; italics original)

Similarly, about embedded librarianship, Shumaker writes, “if a regular part of your work involves participating in a group, community, or organizational unit primarily made up of non-librarians, providing knowledge and information services as a part of the group, then you are participating in a growing trend of embedding librarians and their services in settings outside the library” (now-vanished 2008 call for participants by David Shumaker, quoted in Kesselman & Watstein, 2009, p. 386).

Perhaps, as planners have embedded themselves in the communities subject to planning and librarians have embedded themselves where their patrons are, decision making library administrators could embed themselves among libraries’ inhabitants. Adopting Shumaker, their regular work could be situated among non-administrators, among those who are subject to their decisions. This could not be a solely performative embedding and should instead reflect Bell’s “move with intention”: “push [administration’s] work as much as possible to the spaces and places” of the library’s inhabitants. Perhaps an administrator becomes as an inhabitant, rather than the current position of Lefebvre’s Olympian. Faced with the quotidian goings-on of the library in a more visceral way, and grounded in responsive universalism, perhaps decisions will be more equitable, just, and democratic. If nothing else, constant exposure to inhabitants might accustom an administrator to taking seriously inhabitants’ stakes, needs, and opinions; inhabitants, in turn, get access to power that is otherwise frequently denied by administrative inaccessibility.

Having compared the deep theorizing around stakeholder theory in planning with the paucity of theory in librarianship, and while it is a tall order for library workers in an atmosphere of overwork and austerity, the under-theorization of librarianship needs to end, as has long been demanded. To avoid traps such as stakeholder theory, librarianship should embed its theory and praxis in broader philosophical ideas and discussion, as planning has, and as it has done to a limited extent with critical librarianship. Librarianship can then avoid both making mistakes – such as having the unexamined approach to stakeholder theory that it does – and the somewhat put-on or feigned innocence (Benoff, 2022) that it allows itself to maintain in the face of useless and even harmful ideas. If Habermas has not panned out, for all the reasons outlined above, perhaps librarianship could turn to Bourdieu (Budd, 2003; Budd & Connaway, 1998), Marcuse (Pyati, 2006), Foucault (Budd & Connaway, 1998; Maret & Eagle, 2013; Radford 1992, 2003), or the theoreticians of other social sciences that have already moved away from positivism. There may be a nascent turn in this direction happening at this very moment, after years of over-valuing empirical and quantitative methods (e.g., Eaton et al., 2026).

In tandem with a new turn towards theory, library inhabitants must stay vigilant, since neoliberalism can and will co-opt everything, including solutions offered here. Anything concluded otherwise will only be the next thing assimilated into the neoliberal project. Planning can suggest what libraries could do next, but that will only be valid for a short while, and library inhabitants will need to be prepared for their next move.

A Bridge to Somewhere: Conclusions

The aim of libraries’ use of stakeholder theory, nominally, has been to democratize decision making. Having failed, it is time for new directions. If librarianship can move away from neoliberalism’s market-logics, we just might stand a chance at succeeding in the task of realizing democracy and justice in our institutions. We must use other, new tools to do so, as Audre Lorde (1984) reminds us; “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (p. 112; italics original).

The intrinsic problems with stakeholder theory’s use in libraries are:

• It was adopted from business management without theoretical development to adapt it for librarianship, nor has that theory developed in the intervening years.

• The business field indicated that it would likely not be appropriate for non-commercial organizations, creating a mismatch between tool and purpose.

• It systematically includes some people who should not be included in decision making, because of their sociopolitical positions.

• It results in the exclusion of some people who should be included in decision making, because of their sociopolitical positions.

• It does not have mechanisms for addressing power differences and dynamics between people subject to decisions.

• By focusing on formal political equality in process, instead of justice and democracy in results, it manufactures legitimacy for unjust decisions.

• Those administering decision making processes (e.g., planners or library administrators) are falsely positioned as objective and neutral.

It is evident therefore that those inhabitants interested in creating a just profession and libraries that are truly inclusive should not be using stakeholder theory, especially without serious critical consideration. In comparison to librarianship, planning has significantly more advanced theoretical work on the question; there are many ideas that librarianship could adopt from planning to move us forward. These can be adapted and altered as needed for local contexts.

Strategies adopted from planning that libraries could explore include:

• Avoiding the trap of nostalgia for the Keynesian compromise.

• Rejection of market-logics for library management, as libraries do not have a profit-motive; instead, valuing libraries in non-monetary ways and giving primacy to use value.

• Expropriating decision making power over libraries from those who do not value libraries in non-monetary ways and who do not inhabit libraries.

• Naming specific people and groups and naming what their stakes in a decision are, instead of obscuring power and domination by calling them all “stakeholders.”

• Balancing different opinions, needs, and desires of library inhabitants through responsive universalism; making common cause across difference through networks of equivalencies.

• Library administrators embedding themselves into the work of the library and the day-to-day experiences of library inhabitants.

• Advances in librarianship theory and the application of critical lenses; librarianship could look to work that has been done in other fields.

• Forwards-looking vigilance against assimilation and co-option of ideas and methods by neoliberalism; preparation for what to do once these strategies are co-opted.

With this foundation, there are rich avenues for further investigation. Drawing again from planning, future research might, for example, investigate how the late-twentieth century autonomist contemporaries of neoliberalism’s foundations forked away from “the crisis of Fordism-Keynesianism, such as creativity, difference, knowledge, communication, participation, social networks, and capacities for collective appropriation and self-management” (Sevilla-Buitrago, 2022, p. 29) and how such strategies might illuminate possibilities for inhabitants to manage their libraries.

Librarianship might also explore tactics for moving from insurgent to normalized strategies and from micro practices to macro practices. Efadul Huq (2020) writes “that [insurgent planning] practices shift the ground of knowledge from that of professional analysis to that of first-hand collective knowledge of social groups living under oppressive conditions. IP practices start to theorize planning—with its concerns for public good and social justice—from these other sites of epistemologically partial yet advantageous positions” (p. 381). Perhaps the work to be done is on how to operationalize that epistemology without diluting it. The insurgent tactics of “violating modern state laws, accepted customs, the police order, and sovereignty of states” (Huq, 2020, p. 377) might then be retained for the newly inhabited library’s relationships with the neoliberal world outside of it. These avenues for future investigation might be considered through the practical lens of organized labor and patrons unions (such as at the Hennepin County Library; see Library Patrons Union (2024)) as expressions of inhabitance.

Lastly, there are other neoliberal management techniques and organizational principles that have been brought into libraries from the business world that could also be reexamined (see Vong (2021) and Vong (2024) for a good start). Similarly, there may be historical research to be done to more exactly pin down the rise of stakeholder theory and other neoliberal management techniques in libraries and other public institutions, especially in the years immediately after the Clinton Administration’s NPR, or philosophical research to examine how librarianship’s positivism so easily adopted neoliberalism.

In desiring to make libraries more just and democratic environments for their inhabitants, this article has, by charting its development through the business literature and its discontents in planning theory and practice, attempted to refute stakeholder theory as a tool in the library management toolbox. Planning, being another public service profession with a strong theoretical foundation, has provided a rich basis from which libraries can criticize neoliberal management methods such as stakeholder theory, as well as a solid ground on which librarianship can begin to reconsider its theoretical and philosophical gaps. Through these approaches, librarianship may be able to build more just and democratic possibilities.

References

American Library Association. (1966). Federal library legislation, programs, and services [special issue]. ALA Bulletin 60(2). https://www.jstor.org/stable/i25697335

Appleby, J. (2010). The relentless revolution: A history of capitalism. W.W. Norton & Co.

Baer, A. (2016, December 7). Critical pedagogy, critical conversations: Expanding dialogue about critical library instruction through the lens of composition and rhetoric. In the Library with the Lead Pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2016/critical-conversations/

Beilin, I. (2015, February 25). Beyond the threshold: Conformity, resistance, and the ACRL information literacy framework for higher education. In the Library with the Lead Pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/beyond-the-threshold-conformity-resistance-and-the-aclr-information-literacy-framework-for-higher-education/

Bell, J. P. (2018, October 1). We cannot plan from our desks. Planning Magazine. https://www.planning.org/planning/2018/oct/viewpoint/

Benoff, E. (2022). The clash of the commons: An imagined library commons discourse. Urban Library Journal, 28(2). https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ulj/vol28/iss2/2

Branum, C. (2008). The Myth of Library Neutrality. Knowledge Commons. https://doi.org/10.17613/M6JP2R

Brett, R. (2024). Viewpoint: How critical can librarians be? Art Libraries Journal, 49(2), 71-75. https://doi.org/10.1017/alj.2024.6

Budd, J. M. (1995). An epistemological foundation for library and information science. The Library Quarterly, 65(3), 295-318. https://doi.org/10.1086/602799

Budd, J. M. (1997). A critique of customer and commodity. College & Research Libraries, 58(4), 309-320. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.58.4.309

Budd, J. M. (2001). Instances of ideology in discursive practice: Implications for library and information science. The Library Quarterly, 71(4), 498-517. https://doi.org/10.1086/603317

Budd, J. M. (2003). The library, praxis, and symbolic power. The Library Quarterly, 73(1), 19-32. https://doi.org/10.1086/603373

Budd, J. M., & Silipigni, L. C. (1998). Discursive content and discursive power in US library and information science education. Libri, 48, 140-152. https://doi.org/10.1515/libr.1998.48.3.140

Charan, R., & Freeman, R. E. (1979). Stakeholder negotiations: Building bridges with corporate constituents. Management Review, 68(11), 8-13.

Chellew, C., Azunre, G. A., Rantisi, N. M., & Ryan, J. (Eds.) (2024). Planners Network disorientation guide 2024. Planners Network. https://www.plannersnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/DisorientationGuide2024-1.pdf

Connell, R. (2019). The good university: What universities do and why it’s time for radical change. Zed Books.

Cullen, R. J., & Calvert, P. J. (1995). Stakeholder perceptions of university library effectiveness. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 21(6), 438-448. https://doi.org/10.1016/0099-1333(95)90087-X

Demby, G. (2013, April 8). How code-switching explains the world. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/04/08/176064688/how-code-switching-explains-the-world.

Dixit, A. (2012). Bureaucracy, its reform and development. Review of Market Integration, 4(2), 135-157. https://doi.org/10.1177/0974929212465682

Donaldson, T., & Preston, L. E. (1995). The stakeholder theory of the corporation: Concepts, evidence and implications. Academy of Management Review, 20(1), 65-91. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1995.9503271992

Drabinski, E, (2019). What is critical about critical librarianship? Art Libraries Journal, 44(2), 49-57. https://doi.org/10.1017/alj.2019.3

Eaton, M., Jedlicka, C., Pecktal, T., Thomas, R., Reuscher, J. A., Stephenson, C., Diao, J., Turley, J., Blunt, J., Popowich, S., Slater, K., Ball, H., Kirby, M., Senati, V. A., Williams, P., Villa, K., Cirasella, J., & Karlin, J. (2026). Editorial. Humanities Methods in Librarianship, 0. https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/read/editorial-issue-0/section/3e585aea-6489-461a-805f-a491c3a55169

Ennis, P. H. (1967). Commitment to research. Wilson Library Bulletin, 41(9), 899-901.

Fainstein, S. S. (2000). New directions in planning theory. Urban Affairs Review, 35(4), 451-478. https://doi.org/10.1177/107808740003500401

Ferrer, A. ([2021]). It’s time to ditch the stakeholder discourse. Progressive City. https://progressivecity.net/its-time-to-ditch-the-stakeholder-discourse/

Flyvbjerg, B., & Richardson, T. (2002). Planning and Foucault: In search of the dark side of planning. In P. Allmendinger & M. Tewdwr-Jones (Eds.),Planning futures: New directions in planning theory (pp. 44-62). Routledge.

Ford, E. (2012, August 8). What do we do and why do we do it? In the Library with the Lead Pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/what-do-we-do-and-why-do-we-do-it/

Freeman, R. E. (1984). Strategic management: A stakeholder approach. Pitman.

Freeman, R. E., & Evan, W. M. (1990). Corporate governance: A stakeholder interpretation. The Journal of Behavioral Economics, 19(4), 337-359. https://doi.org/10.1016/0090-5720(90)90022-Y

Ghoshal, S. (2005). Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 4(1), 75-79. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2005.16132558

Goodspeed, R. (2016). The death and life of collaborative planning theory. Urban Planning, 1(4), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v1i4.715

Gore, A. (1993, September 7). 1993 report: From red tape to results: Creating a government that works better and costs less. https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/nprrpt/annrpt/redtpe93/index.html

Gorman, M. (2012). The prince’s dream: A future for academic libraries. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 18(2), 114-126. https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2012.704790

Guimaraes, A., Briggs, L., Clark, K., Jasper, W. T., & Wang, Z. (2021). State of project management in libraries. Journal of Library Administration, 61(6), 644-58. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2021.1947055

Harris, M. H. (1986a). The dialectic of defeat: Antimonies in research in library and information science. Library Trends, 34, 515-534.

Harris, M. H. (1986b). State, class, and cultural reproduction: Toward a theory of library service in the United States. Advances in Librarianship, 14, 211-252.

Hathcock, A. (2015, October 7). White librarianship in blackface: Diversity initiatives in LIS. In the Library with the Lead Pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/lis-diversity/

Henry, T., Kauffman, R., & Chiu, C. (2022, June 1). The old and the prudish: An examination of sex, sexuality, and queerness in Library of Congress Classification. In the Library with the Lead Pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2022/the-old-and-the-prudish/

Huq, E. (2020). Seeing the insurgent in transformative planning practices. Planning Theory, 19(4), 371-391. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095219901290

Innes, J. E. (1995). Planning theory’s emerging paradigm: Communicative action and interactive practice. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 14(3), 183-189. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X9501400307

Jahan, S., Mahmud, A. S, & Papageorgiou, C. (2014). What is Keynesian economics? Finance & Development, 51(3), 53-54. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2014/09/basics.htm

Jones, T. M. (1995). Instrumental stakeholder theory: A synthesis of ethics and economics. Academy of Management Review, 20(2), 404-437. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1995.9507312924

Jones, T. M., & Wicks, A. C. (1999). Convergent stakeholder theory. Academy of Management Review, 24(2), 206-221. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1999.1893929

Kesselman, M. A., & Watstein, S. B. (2009). Creating opportunities: Embedded librarians. Journal of Library Administration, 49(4), 383-400. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930820902832538

Kim, J. (2021). Determining research data services maturity: The role of library leadership and stakeholder involvement. Library & Information Science Research, 43(2). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2021.101092

Le Guin, U. K. (2014, November 19). Speech in acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Ursula K. Le Guin. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal

Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writings on cities. (E. Kofman & E. Lebas, Trans & Eds.). Blackwell Publishers.

Leung, S. Y., & López-McKnight, J. R. (2020). Dreaming revolutionary futures: Critical race’s centrality to ending white supremacy. Communications in Information Literacy, 14(1), 12-26. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2020.14.1.2

Library Patrons Union. (2024). Library Patrons Union. Last modified 2024. https://librarypatronsunion.com/

Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: essays and speeches. The Crossing Press.

Maret, S., & Eagle, B. (2013). Situating the customer: The genealogy of customer language in libraries. Progressive Librarian, 41, 18-38. http://www.progressivelibrariansguild.org/PL/PL41/018.pdf

McDonough, A. (2021, October 7). We watched 18 hours of congestion pricing hearings so you don’t have to. City & State New York. https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2021/10/we-watched-18-hours-worth-congestion-pricing-hearings-so-you-dont-have/185934/

McGuirk, P. M. (2001). Situating communicative planning theory: Context, power, and knowledge. Environment and Planning A, 33(2), 195-217. https://doi.org/10.1068/a3355

MTA. (2024). Public hearings. The MTA. Last modified July 7, 2024. https://new.mta.info/project/CBDTP/upcoming-meetings

Morrison, C. D. (2016). Code-switching. In Britannica. Last modified March 25, 2026. https://www.britannica.com/topic/code-switching

National Partnership for Reinventing Government. (1997). A brief history of the National Performance Review. https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/bkgrd/brief.html.

Nicholson, K. P. (2015). The McDonaldization of academic libraries and the values of transformational change. College & Research Libraries, 76(3), 328-338. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.76.3.328

Offenhartz, J. (2019, September 26). Battle over Park Slope bike lane gets physical: ‘You wanna clown around with me?’ Gothamist. https://gothamist.com/news/battle-over-park-slope-bike-lane-gets-physical-you-wanna-clown-around-me

Orts, E. W., & Strudler, A. (2002). The ethical and environmental limits of stakeholder theory. Business Ethics Quarterly, 12(2), 215-233. https://doi.org/10.2307/3857811

Phillips, R., Freeman, R. E., & Wicks, A. C. (2003). What stakeholder theory is not. Business Ethics Quarterly, 13(4), 479-502. https://doi.org/10.5840/beq200313434

Phillips, R. A., & Reichart, J. (2000). The environment as stakeholder? A fairness-based approach. Journal of Business Ethics, 23(2), 185-197. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1006041929249

powell, j., Menendian, S., & Ake, W. (2019). Targeted universalism: Policy & practice. Othering & Belonging Institute, University of California. https://belonging.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/2022-12/Targeted%20Universalism%20Primer.pdf

Purcell, M. (2008). Recapturing democracy: Neoliberalization and the struggle for alternative urban futures. Routledge.

Pyati, A. K. (2006). Critical theory and information studies: A Marcusean infusion. Policy Futures in Education, 4(1), 83-89. https://doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2006.4.1.83

Radford, G. P. (1992). Positivism, Foucault, and the fantasia of the library: Conceptions of knowledge and the modern library experience. The Library Quarterly, 62(4), 408-424. https://doi.org/10.1086/602496

Radford, G. P. (2003). Trapped in our own discursive formations: Toward an archaeology of library and information science. The Library Quarterly, 73(1), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1086/603372

Radford, G. P., & Budd, J. M. (1997). We do need a philosophy of library and information science—we’re not confused enough: A response to Zwadlo. The Library Quarterly, 67(3), 315-321. https://doi.org/10.1086/629965

Reich, R. B. (1999, March 29). Economist JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES [obituary]. Time. https://time.com/archive/6735015/economist-john-maynard-keynes/

Robinson, K. S., & O’Keefe, D. (2020, November 22). Imagining the end of capitalism with Kim Stanley Robinson. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2020/10/kim-stanley-robinson-ministry-future-science-fiction

Rollock, N., & Gillborn, D. (2011). Critical race theory (CRT). British Educational Research Association. https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/critical-race-theory-crt

Rossi, E., & Táíwò, O. O. (2020, December 18). What’s new about woke racial capitalism (and what isn’t): Wokewashing and the limits of representation. Spectre. https://doi.org/10.63478/Q2S3UC3I

Sandercock, L. (1998). Towards cosmopolis: Planning for multicultural cities. John Wiley & Sons.

Schleck, J. (2022). Dirty knowledge: Academic freedom in the age of neoliberalism. University of Nebraska Press.

Schonfeld, R., Burghardt, C., & Mosseri, O. (2022, May 11). The mergers & acquisitions landscape in scholarly publishing [panel presentation]. Charleston in Between, virtual conference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UyYtd1rZzU

Schroeder, R., & Hollister, C. V. (2014). Librarians’ views on critical theories and critical practices. Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian, 33(2), 91-119. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639269.2014.912104

Searcy, C. W. (2018). Project management in libraries: On time, on budget, on target. ALA Editions.

Seitz, D. K. (2023). A different Trek: Radical geographies of Deep Space Nine. University of Nebraska Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.3790069

Sevilla-Buitrago, Á. (2022). Against the commons: A radical history of urban planning. University of Minnesota Press.

Sharpe, K. B. (2019). “Commonsense” academic reference service. The Library Quarterly, 89(4), 298-315. https://doi.org/10.1086/704963

Suber, P. (2016). Knowledge unbound: Selected writings on open access, 2002-2011. MIT Pres.

Taylor, E. (1998). A primer on critical race theory. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 19, 122-124. https://doi.org/10.2307/2998940

Tewell, E. (2025). Two decades of critical information literacy: A review and analysis of the literature. Information Research: An International Electronic Journal, 30(CoLIS), 443-460. https://doi.org/10.47989/ir30CoLIS52267

Vong, S. (2021). More critical, less managerial: Addressing the managerialist ideology in academic libraries. Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 16(2), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.21083/partnership.v16i2.6354

Vong, S. (Ed). (2024). Critical management studies and librarianship: Critical perspectives on library management education and practice. Library Juice Press.

Weber, J. L. (2018, December 21). A history of PMI & its role in project management. Project Manager. https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/history-of-pmi

Westin, M. (2022). The framing of power in communicative planning: Analysing the work of John Forester, Patsy Healey and Judith Innes. Planning Theory, 21(2), 132-154. https://doi.org/10.1177/14730952211043219

Wiegand, W. A. (1999). Tunnel vision and blind spots: What the past tells us about the present; Reflections on the twentieth-century history of American librarianship. The Library Quarterly, 69(1), 1-32. https://doi.org/10.1086/603022

Wiegand, W. A. (2015a). Part of our lives: A people’s history of the American public library. Oxford University Press.

Wiegand, W. A. (2015b). “Tunnel vision and blind spots” reconsidered: Part of our lives (2015) as a test case. The Library Quarterly, 85(4), 347-370. https://doi.org/10.1086/682731

Williamson, O. (1984). Corporate governance. Yale Law Journal, 93(7), 1197-1230. https://doi.org/10.2307/796256

Winston, M. D., & Hoffman, T. (2005). Project management in libraries. Journal of Library Administration, 42(1), 51-61. https://doi.org/10.1300/J111v42n01_03

Zitron, E. (2025, May 21). The era of the business idiot. Where’s Your Ed At?. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

Zwadlo, J. (1997). We don’t need a philosophy of library science: We’re confused enough already. The Library Quarterly, 67(2), 103-121. https://doi.org/10.1086/629928