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The Politics of Mediation: Colonization to Co-Generative Democracy

image of The Politics of Mediation: Colonization to Co-Generative Democracy

The chapter discusses the reformation of democracy in light of a sophisticated understanding of mediation processes, the sites where mediation and decisions occur, and the practical inclusive interventions possible in these sites. It develops relational constructionism as a way to better represent diverse values in collective decisions. The goals is to design new processes of human interaction and systems of governance and decision-making enhancing the ability of people to thrive in conditions characterized by fast rapid change, high degrees of pluralism and interdependency as well as highly mediated (and sponsored) human experience. The best interaction designs enable human ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ to contest unwitting consent and otherwise dominate positions producing choices that are creative and customized to local circumstances fostering high degrees of constituent commitment and voluntary compliance.

Keywords: articulation theory ; collaborative decision-making ; corporations ; Democracy ; identity politics ; interaction design ; liberal democracy ; neo-liberalism ; positionality ; social construction

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References

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References

  1. Angus, Ian (1992), ‘The politics of common sense: Articulation theory and critical communication studies’, in S. Deetz (ed.), Communication Yearbook 15, Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
     [Google Scholar]
  2. Apel, Karl-Otto (1979), ‘The a priori of the communication community and the foundation of ethics: The problem of a rational foundation of ethics in the scientific age’, in Towards a Transformation of Philosophy (trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Barber, Benjamin R. (1984), Strong Democracy, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
  4. ——— A (1995), Jihad Versus McWorld, New York: Times Books.
  5. Broadfoot, Kristen J. and Munshi, Debashish (2007), ‘Diverse voices and alternative rationalities: Imagining forms of postcolonial organizational communication’, Management Communication Quarterly, 21:2, pp. 249–67.
     [Google Scholar]
  6. Deetz, Stanley A. (1992), Democracy in the Age of Corporate Colonization: Developments in Communication and the Politics of Everyday Life, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
  7. ——— (1995), Transforming Communication, Transforming Business: Building Responsive and Responsible Workplaces, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press Inc.
  8. ——— (2003a), ‘Corporate governance, communication, and getting social values into the decisional chain’, Management Communication Quarterly, 16, pp. 606–11.
     [Google Scholar]
  9. ——— (2003b), ‘Disciplinary power, conflict suppression and human resource management’, in M. Alvesson and H. Willmott (eds), Studying Management Critically, London: Sage, pp. 23–45.
     [Google Scholar]
  10. ——— (2014), ‘Power and the possibility of generative community dialogue’, in S. Littlejohn and S. McNamee (eds), The Coordinated Management of Meaning: A Festschrift in Honor of W. Barnett Pearce, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 217–34.
     [Google Scholar]
  11. ——— (2017), ‘Disarticulation and conflict transformation: Interactive design, collaborative processes, and generative democracy’, in T. G. Matyok and P. Kellett (eds), Communication and Conflict Transformation, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 3–24.
     [Google Scholar]
  12. Deetz, Stanley A. and Brown, Devon A (2004), ‘Conceptualising involvement, participation and workplace decision processes: A communication theory perspective’, in D. Tourish and O. Hargie (eds), Key Issues in Organizational Communication, London: Routledge, pp. 172–87.
     [Google Scholar]
  13. Deetz, Stanley A. and Eger, Elizabeth (2014), ‘Developing a metatheoretical perspective for organizational communication studies’, in L. Putnam and D. Mumby (eds), Handbook of Organizational Communication, 3rd ed., Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 27–48.
     [Google Scholar]
  14. Deetz, Stanley A. and Simpson, Jennifer (2004), ‘Critical organizational dialogue: Open formation and the demand of “otherness”’, in R. Anderson, L. Baxter and K. Cissna (eds), Dialogue: Theorizing Difference in Communication Studies, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 141–58.
     [Google Scholar]
  15. Gray, Barbara (1989), Collaborating: Finding Common Ground for Multiparty Problems, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
  16. Haas, Tanni and Deetz, Stanley A. (2004), ‘The politics and ethics of knowledge construction in corporations: Dialogic interaction and self-other relations’, in P. Jeffcutt (ed.), The Foundations of Management Knowledge, London: Routledge, pp. 208–30.
     [Google Scholar]
  17. Ibarra-Colado, Eduardo (2007), ‘Organization studies and epistemic coloniality’, Cultural Studies, 21:2–3, pp. 449–514.
     [Google Scholar]
  18. Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal (1985), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (trans. W. Moore and P. Cammack), London: Verso.
  19. McClellan, John G. and Deetz, Stanley A. (2012), ‘Sustainable change: A politically attentive discursive analysis of collaborative talk’, in J. Aritz and R. Walker (eds), Discourse Perspectives on Organizational Communication, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 33–58.
     [Google Scholar]
  20. Pinchevski, Amit (2005), By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
  21. Weedon, Chris (1987), Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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