Beck, E. E. (1996, November 13-15). P for political? Some challenges to PD towards 2000. In J. Blomberg, F. Kensing, & E. Dykstra-Erickson (Eds.), PDC'96: Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference (pp. 117-125). (edit)

Argues that participatory design is not actually research, but only research to legitimize what is primarily a political struggle by designers on behalf of weaker parties.

A similar thread is picked up in Ehn, Badham, 2002.