Stakeholders: Who Should we be Considering?

Abstract

The New Zealand technology education curriculum requires children to solve practical problems to meet the needs of stakeholders. The term is not defined in the current draft New Zealand curriculum document. This paper documents findings from an extensive literature review on the term and its application to the New Zealand technology curriculum. It addresses such questions as: So who are these people and do they all have the same rights to be heard and considered? Should the designer of a product, have more say than the person paying for the product or the people who are affected by the product? This article explains the term stakeholder and investigates the history of this term and of stakeholder theory and relates these to technology education.