Today I found a man who agrees with me on the meaning of this word: "stakeholder". Radzuan Halim, a former Merchant Banker who now teaches MBA and law students, puts it succinctly in the forum column of The Edge Malaysia weekly business paper for the week of August 15-21, 2011:
"Of late, we find people within a financial setting saying, 'We will ensure the rights of all stakeholders'. "Stakeholder" is actually a third party to whom parties taking a bet or making a purchase entrust their money or make a deposit.
Over time, the term has become wrongly associated with someone having an interest in a particular matter. Shareholders, employers, creditors, suppliers and taxman have "interests" in a company but should not be described as stakeholders in it.
The above diversion is intended to show, firstly, that inaccuracies often creep into word usage and, secondly, that meanings of words do change with time and given sufficient persistent usage, the "wrong" meaning can become accepted. I suspect "stakeholder", which had been wrongly applied to start with, is now accepted to mean an "interested party."
Thanks for setting the record straight, Radzuan. I have the same problem trying to reconcile what i know to be the definition of "stakeholder" with what has crept into common usage and popular understanding nowadays. I guess that if you repeat something often enough, what started off as a false premise could eventually be accepted to be the truth. That doesn't really gel too well with me but it does get down to that when push comes to shove. Adoi!
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