Introduction

To do justice to contemporary German social critic Jürgen Habermas’ magisterial Theory of Communicative Action requires several book-length treatments. To understand how his broad critique of modern society, interactivity, science, and power might open our eyes to new views of information work requires, perhaps, loosening one’s bounds to strict empiricism and being open to reading far and wide outside the traditional library, information science, and computer science literatures. The result will provide the reader with a lucid and viable world view and grow a rich tree of ideas that apply to everything in information systems, interface design, information seeking behavior, and the sociology of knowledge. This review, naturally, cannot be all things to all readers and will not do justice to the subtly and fecundity of Habermas’ ideas, but it may provide a useful account of the development of the theory and suggest to the reader opportunities for applying it in information work.

The Theory of Communicative Action (TCA) is one part of Habermas’ long examination of positivist science, society, technology, and strategic or instrumental actions that limit one’s ability to perform successfully through linguistic means in the public sphere. By separating communication into several elements and focusing on the motivation behind speech, Habermas is able to articulate an entire speech act theory, socially-sensitive means of verification, and demonstrates with a variety of examples the use of power to control the knowledge-based emancipatory interests of individuals in modern, democratic societies; thus the main theme of the TCA is the theoretical reconstruction of the competencies that people use in every communication to serve these interests.

Habermas’ theory on epistemology differentiates three cognitive areas in which human interest generates knowledge. These areas determine categories relevant to what we interpret as knowledge, that is, they are ‘knowledge constitutive’ – “they determine the mode of discovering knowledge and whether knowledge claims can be warranted. These areas define cognitive interests or learning domains, and are grounded in different aspects of social existence – work, interaction and power” (MacIsaac, 2004). For Habermas, “work” is acting and using language “instrumentally”, typically based in the empirical-analytic sciences; practical interests are human social interaction, or communicative action, governed by consensual norms, reciprocal expectations, and propositions that are valid only “in their intersubjectivity of the mutual understanding of intentions,” which are reflected in the historical-hermeneutic disciplines; and, finally, “emancipatory” knowledge, that is, self-knowledge or reflection, involving recognizing one’s own and others’ motivations and appropriate reaction to actions. The types of knowledge are generated and interpreted through speech acts.

Communications theory

Habermas begins the construction of his framework by dividing communication into social and non-social. The non-social operates on instrumental action and might be considered the linguistic face of reification. The other, social, is also bifurcated into “strategic action,” oriented to success by objectifying objects in the social world and seeking to manipulate them to support one’s own interests; and “communicative action”, which aims at mutual understanding, by meaningful, intersubjective relationships.

This is termed universal pragmatics because such competences transcend specific cultures and societal boundaries. There is the capacity for social actors to produce and to sustain stable, useful, ordered and meaningful social life. Integrating and critiquing many important thinkers, primary among them Kant, Marx, Popper, Husserl, Adorno, Mead, and Peirce, Habermas seeks to work up the “constitutive capacities of the social agent” by calling attention to the “taken-for-granted” practical attributes of competent social agents in producing and sustaining society. Other authors have pursued the same but are rejected by Habermas because their views are monological, overlooking the effects of human interaction, leading to “subjectless rule systems.”

Playing a game is an example of such a rule system. Players of a game recognize and respond to the rules of a game, knowing when a move is appropriate and when it is not, so Habermas incorporates Chomsky’s structuralism and Wittgenstein’s explanation of language games in how humans recognize appropriate language use. Wittgenstein states that there is a basic competency - abiding by the rules - but, interestingly, one does not need to know the rules in detail. People playing games “know how” rather than “know that.” In novel situations, people respond successfully without needing to articulate the rules and that the rules differ in the cognitive role of language, e.g., to communicate facts about non-linguistic world (e.g., “it’s raining”).

Using language to describe the state of affairs in the world, e.g., “it is raining if and only if it is [actually] raining” leads some to think Habermas calls for a correspondence theory of truth. He is more concerned about the appropriateness and entailments of using such sentences in particular settings. Thus language rules for the religious context are not the same as for science; nor poetry the same as for journalism, and so on. What is entailed in making a true or even meaningful sentence is distinctive to that particular language game. In a simplistic example, to utter a sentence is one thing; to utter that same sentence in response to a different language game and be successful means the speaker and hearer need to know the rules of that language and need to be able to relate to each other in concrete situations. It requires knowledge of when certain forms of questions and answers are appropriate. Moreover, it requires a kind of questioning to create mutually the context for a certain form of questioning and so establish the conditions in which the participants can reply meaningfully (Habermas, 2001).

Unlike other forms of communications or linguistic analysis where utterances are parsed into logical units, assigned truth values, and from that one determines the [logical] truth of the whole, as the logical atomists and positivists did and certain analytic philosophers of language do still, Habermas situates utterances in social theory: people act when they speak to others in contexts participates recognize. The speech act behind the surface of the utterance includes commitments or some aspect of the relationship between the interlocutors, e.g, questioning, promising, ordering, requesting, etc. For example, to say “I’ll meet you at the bar at 6 p.m.” is partially informative [the speaker intends to be at the bar at 6] but also a normative commitment on the speaker’s part to the hearer [I promise I’ll meet you at the bar at 6]. If the speaker does not appear at the restaurant at the agreed upon time, then the other person is owed (because of the relationship between them, the “normative right”) some kind of explanation or apology.

Some of this type of behavior is already institutionalized. A religious figure (priest, rabbi, shaman, etc.) who pronounces two people as married brings those two people (and the congregation) into the shared religious community and also changes the social identity of the newly married folk. There are, then, various social, moral, religious, behavioral and social entailments in public speech acts. The theory is not aimed solely at the individual who is affected, but Habermas’ “universal pragmatics” is just that: a reconstruction of the conditions of successful interchange of all language users; why not, then, whole societies, too?

Habermas furthers his idea by considering what types of relationships that exist and recognizes the need to examine the role of cognitive language use. He uses the example of playing chess against a computer or against a human. There is no difference if the humanity of the human player is overlooked. The “inherenet telos” of communication is mutual understanding between subjects; here the mutual anticipation of each other’s intentions. [This is found also in communications theory where speakers will anticipate and so complete sentences for the other.] Keeping to the chess game, Habermas claims that a good game can be strategic - both sides playing to win - and be enjoyable just by following the rules. Although the process can begin and draw to a successful close with checkmate, there may be no literal “communication” between speaker/hearer. For instance, when discourse partners begin to misunderstand the other’s intentions during the game, then communication will break down, or when one or both sides disregard the rules. But communication may continue as language about the language: the players can stop the game to ask for clarification, or even to discuss whether they would agree on suspending play long enough to ask questions.

If the game analogy distorts relations between communication it distorts also the relationship between the speaker and language because communicating partners are intersubjective speakers. Communicators can assess the legitimacy of the social connection as part of the very process of using them, but only so far as they acknowledge each other as competent subjects. Consider the case of a police officer trying to make a difficult arrest. The person being arrested might challenge the officer “You can’t arrest me... I’m in my own house!” As the countless television shows about police activity evidence, the officer will not engage in communication about the legitimacy of his actions: the normative right, his role, has already been established, albeit tacitly, by both the uniformed officer and the person being arrested. The relationship between officer and arrestee is established first by the officer’s role but not usually maintained communicatively: the officer acts strategically to achieve his end, choosing not to respond to some questions. That same officer, out of uniform, off-duty, may not enter someone’s house and make an arrest. The potential arrestee’s demands for explanations are on a far stronger normative ground.

Responding partially to John L. Austin’s (1962) and John Searle’s (1969, 1998) theory of speech acts (that people do things with words, to effect change or to describe something about the world), and from Kant (that language has a transcendental role in that language is not the reality but the possibility of our experience of reality (Habermas, 2001, p. 58)), and from other thinkers (that our language acts are interactions, perhaps our interaction or labor in the lifeworld), Habermas explains the cognitive role of language in providing both propositional content and illocutionary force. Habermas adopts part of Austin’s theory and reshapes it by incorporating the effect intersubjective action exerts over speech. Discourse partners aware of the norms of behavior between them can expect to pursue questions with the other person without necessarily rupturing their relationship and, importantly, by receiving an answer, a warrant, for the speaker’s claim; to “cash-in” the claim. One can say, for example, “I’m thirsty, get me a glass of water” among friends in the appropriate discourse situation, say visiting one’s home, and the hearer will respond by providing a glass of water. The same utterance to a graduate student during a lecture raises different behaviors: “are you sure you want me to get you a glass of water? There’s a pitcher and glass right in front of you.” Or “I’m your research assistant, not your waiter” Either way, discourse partners can remove the locus of attention from the surface or semantic level to the use of the utterance between them, that is the pragmatic level, by “decentering” the discourse.

In an idealized way, if all participants can challenge the claims (both the truth or falsity of an utterance’s content, or the appropriateness of the utterance and the context of their interaction), then to commit a speech act means the other person is entitled, given the relationship between them, to challenge it. Thus to do something with words means the hearer can challenge about the facts in the utterance. To assert a fact in an utterance means the emphasis is upon the relationship established between the speaker/hearer (S/H), rather than the fact itself.

Challenges (“what’s your right to do X”?”) risk a potential breakdown in the conversation; but conversations can continue using language to talk about the conversation itself. One does not need an artificial language (such as logic systems or metalanguage) to discuss the language. (Compare this to philosophy of language theories that require an utterance to be labeled p, for “proposition”, and conversation about “p” are described symbolically through a metalanguage as “that p”.)

On a grander scale, such that of a society, a main point of speech acts is that they are considered successful if they have the force to generate an interpersonal relationship between two or more subjects, freely entered by all partners. Excluding for the moment institutionalized or already ritualized situations, such as baptisms, the speech act generates the context within which a speaker’s agreements, promises, etc., can make sense and be binding on all involved.

The second main point is that speech acts focus on understanding and accepting others’ intentions in speech.

From these theories, Habermas wants to establish a rational foundation, the reasons for accepting or rejecting claims and to establish communicative action as an alternative both to instrumental and dialectical reasoning. This he does in the form of validity claims.

Validity Claims

In principle, one can challenge an utterance, that is demand that the speaker demonstrate that what is claimed, implicitly or explicitly, is valid or acceptable. But to demand this, the speaker must be free to challenge, based on normative right: what rationales might be valid or acceptable? Habermas demonstrates that entailed in an utterance is a four-part validity claim. These claims (1) bind the speaker to the utterance itself, (2) to his own intentions in making the utterance, (3) to the social world of the relationship between participants, and, (4) to the external natural world. The four claims are labeled

1. truth [cognitive content; the relationship of the utterance to the objective world], 2. normative right (or rightness) [the relationship of the speaker to social, cultural, and moral world], 3. intelligibility [the linguistic coherence of the utterance; the basic sense of an utterance that follows the rules of semantics and syntax], 4. truthfulness, or sincerity [the intention of the speaker in making the utterance; the relationship of utterance and speaker].

Redemption or Cashing-in of the claim

Redemption of the truth claims may be at a rather superficial level: the speaker could choose an empiricist response, say showing someone a copy of a book with the author’s name on it in response to the question “Did John really write that book?” More significantly is how a validity claim may disrupt one’s knowledge or the language-game. New evidence, be it evidence that is contrary to an earlier promise or facts or some other entailment that do not hold together, or expectations that are unfulfilled, returns Habermas to his original interest with C. S. Peirce’s pragmatism. For Peirce, scientific inquiry incorporates the taken-for-granted expectations and the disruptive nature of new data and how ultimately the totality of [scientific] knowledge and expectations of it use are adopted and adjusted by the community of scientists. When there is disruption, it is likely that discourse, or some form of argumentation, is required to establish the relevance of the contested truth claim (Habermas, 2001, p. 88). As suggested earlier, it is not solely the truth of something corresponding with reality, but the process through which truth comes to be ascribed to a proposition.

From this Habermas argues to a broader social and discursive perspective: a proposition is true if and only if “everyone else who could enter into this discourse with me” would accept it as true (Habermas, 2001, p. 89). It is important to note, though, that Habermas is not arguing for a simple, relativistic view of truth. Furthermore, Habermas takes this idea from scientific inquiry (the community of scientists) to the larger community, to see this kind of argumentation as an emancipatory account of truth (Habermas, 1976a). Propositions are held provisionally true; argumentation responds to the disruptive evidence. Truth, then, is redeemed through “discourse.”

Validity claim contributions

Each of the validity claims contributes some facet to understanding. Truth and normative right have already been expressed as bearing heavily upon each other.

The purpose of discourse is to move from the appearance of reality to an understanding of truth, if all competent participants could join in free discussion. The participants are themselves somewhat bound to the background of taken-for-granted assumptions (“lifeworld”) and the discourse, which may also call into doubt the competence of earlier disputants, which reintroduces some humanity into truth. Secondly, for competent participants to join in freely means imbalances of power between speakers need also to be addressed. A community of disputants theoretically would address this because all could raise questions, explain, justify, etc., provided all move towards free consensus and mutual understanding.

Society is not the free exchange of ideas nor are all contexts equal: enter normative right again. If there is a normative right to initiate a certain social relationship, then one is associated with social norms. For example a person ordering another given some context, such as higher rank, social role, or something based in other acknowledged norms, such as respect for elders. The point is the legitimacy of the norm and the norm’s binding power are present with and controlled by the participants. Legitimacy must, then, differ from a strict empiricist or positivist view, that logic based systems existing outside their domain of use, the way mathematical and logical truths are believed by some to be immune from human bias, as an external, self-legitimating metalanguage might. Norms do not express a morally binding obligation (e.g., “ought” to do something), but instead reflect an “is” (that a rule is part of a reified social reality) (Habermas, 1976b).

The two remaining claims, intelligibility and truthfulness, are straight forward. Intelligibility is the intelligibility of the actual heard or seen utterance. If a hearer cannot comprehend an utterance, say the syntax is askew or one does not understand a term, the speaker can rephrase or provide an explanation.

Truthfulness, or sincere intentionality, is redeemed by examining the consistency between the utterance and the act over time. The validity claim is based on observation: promising to meet at the bar at 6 p.m. and appearing fulfills part of the claim. Having an inconsistent record of fulfilling promises, of course, impacts this.

Actual communication is not always directed towards mutual understanding and people do not often reflect on the norms between speaker and hearer - there recede at times into the taken-for-granted lifeworld. One does not see the sincerity and intentions of all speech and such speech might be systematically manipulated. What standard is available to help critique and so recognize strategic action? How does one know when there is manipulation or somehow one’s acceptance of speech acts is not fully free? Writes Habermas, there will always be disruptions but a person, or group, can act strategically by treating the others as objects to be manipulated, rather than subjects with whom one communicates: there is “privileged access to weapons, wealth or standing, in order to wrest agreement from another party” (Habermas, 1982) by preventing, forestalling, or otherwise manipulating rational argument and access to validity claims behind utterances.

In sum, the ability to reflect on one’s own assumptions and to treat utterances as hypothetical moves discourse from mere communication between speaker(s) and hearer(s) to the motivations, truths, needs, expectations, and so on, to the mutual relationship between them and how they create the context in which a utterance might be judged true (in their lifeworld) and so warrants the group’s acceptance as part of member’s participation in the public sphere, because the speaker is accountable. Since the way in which this discourse enfolds is critical, Habermas must address the freedom of the participants, their competencies, and how such speech in the public sphere might be distorted.

Systematically distorted communication

It seems one of the most difficult ideas for some to accept is that people in the sciences, or those who create technological solutions to human problems based in science, do not necessarily act objectively and that pure reason necessarily yields unbiased, objective, and humanly-useful consequences. There are certainly situations where people resort, perhaps unwittingly, often knowingly, to long-held deceptions. There are also situations where the symbol system of speech chosen by the speaker and deemed intelligible are unintelligible to the hearer. Resorting to hermeneutic discourse in such situations is useless because the language has become a private language: unintelligibility distorts the communication and the source of that distortion may be intentional as an attempt to avoid conflict. Habermas sees this akin to systems theory, almost as different systems coming together but there are power imbalances in the lifeworlds of these systems, some excluding others from communication, some deliberately shielding their warrants from inspection. In the end, all such efforts destroy consensus and significantly are replaced by stereotypic, unreflexive, rigid relations. The influence is greater than the sum of the parts because this affects the individual’s human development and by extension the others in the lifeworld and whole societies, because even the coherency of social norms are affected. It is not merely the process of rational legitimation but the very demand for legitimacy that is challenged. In light of this, Habermas articulates an idealized model, the ideal speech situation, which is a development of Mead’s work. He sees the need, too, to explicate the process of legitimation and ethical entailments of legitimacy. [Here the reader is directed to Legitimation Crisis, but in brief, without falling into moral relativism, discourse ethics accept the tentative validity of cultural values and helps to expose false consensus, applied by some to the repression and marginalization of interests of certain groups.]

From theory to practice: lifeworld and system

Having articulated a theoretical model, Habermas realizes his model in The Theory of Communicative Action (TCA). In this two-volume work, he explains three themes: concept of communicative rationality, society as consisting of two levels (“system” and “lifeworld”), and a theory of modernity. As already seen, TCA is both linguistic and intersubjective. Habermas explains in a complex of ideas what happens when the notions of intersubjective relationships, language, and universal pragmatics coalesce at the societal level, the social world in which humans work, manipulate each others, or strive for mutual understanding. What competencies are needed in the modern world and how are they formed and used? What happens when the same linguistic and actions occur in similar, but slightly discordant, situations: the contexts shift enough (“topic-dependent contextual knowledge” shifts (Habermas, 1999, p. 241) to challenge naïve presumptions of social norms, of interpretation, and lead to significantly different outcomes. The taken-for-granted assumptions of shared belief and social links become unstable and those affected must attend to the affected part of their lifeworld. What do the affected participants share and on what can they agree? As actions change, so different elements of the lifeworld become relevant. “What is at issue here is the way in which the immediate activity or situation is defined by those participating in it. A ”situation” is “a segment of lifeworld contexts of relevance” (Habermas, 1987, p. 122); what beliefs and competencies from the lifeworlds involved are relevant now? The framework of interpretation can shift.

The beliefs and competencies of the participants are presented, discussed, and validated in and through language. This means the lifeworld is not the physical reality but the linguistically-mediated one. A situation, an utterance, an experience, etc., is meaningless initially at least between people until there is a shared understanding of the event. It is the mutual attempt to draw others into one’s “taken-for-granted” background of the lifeworld that establishes meaning and, in some situations, appropriateness for future action. The collection of abilities that one has at repairing and maintaining social relations in language, moving towards “mutual understanding”, is one’s communicative competence.

These same agents can participate obliquely in situations in which they are not actual subjects: one can see other events and narrate events to others or explicate one’s own past events by drawing on the shared cultural and social norms and knowledge. The lifeworld, then, has three parts: culture, society, and personality (Habermas, 1987, p. 138). Habermas (1988) defines each:

Culture: “the store of knowledge from which those engaged in communicative action draw interpretations susceptible of consensus as they come to an understanding about something in the world,”

Society: the legitimate order from which those engaged in communicative action gather relationships with one another,”

Personality: “the acquired competences that render a subject capable of speech and action and hence able to participate in processes of mutual understanding in a given context and to maintain his own identity in the shifting contexts of interaction.”

This does not suggest Habermas is denigrating science, knowledge, or truth into something relativist: his view of truth in context ultimately is bound in empirical ways to the objective world, although he echos Husserl’s complaint about positivist assumptions that the natural sciences can and do represent the objective (physical) world as it is. Habermas denies that scientific knowledge are necessarily bound to cultural artifacts. Understanding and action in the world (knowledge) in the framework of TCA are liable to create disruptive situations, which act as a check, and result from agents interacting with each others within a shared cultural tradition. Interpretations of events are still bound to rationality, shared bodies of knowledge and social practices. Nor are these bound to a single culture. Habermas abstracts this to the symbolic level, so while individuals are shaped by their societies and vice versa, it is not a particular member of society or a specific society. There is a system of symbolic reproduction that moves between the resources of the lifeworld and the competencies of social agents. There is not a pre-existing role but a dynamism in which the individual’s identity, values, and beliefs are in relation to the normative structures of a society and the fully socialized individual has the interpretive skills to participate in and discuss the objective world. Society does not dictate the shaping of the individual. Resources, competencies, and normative behaviors are played out in a culture for the transmission of rational knowledge and are the source of legitimation for social institutions.

Critique of the TCA

Critique of Habermas’ theory of communicative action is often merged into critique of his overall program, criticizers favoring one part or the other. There is no particular dominant theme and, indeed, a review of the literature suggests, among other things, strong biases on the part of the critic and little sustainable, warranted complaint.

The theory has been applied in many fields. Those issues are discussed below. In general complaints about the TCA range over Habermas’ opinion, real or imagined, about empiricism to the issue of universality. Given his interest in, and original writing on the critique of positivist science, some reviewers focus on his attitudes of technology. To illustrate, Feenberg (1996) offers what is typical of the rather curious cant. He writes ”Design critique holds that social interests or cultural values influence the realization of technical principles. For some critics, it is Christian or masculinist values that have given us the impression that we can ‘conquer’ nature, a belief that shows up in ecologically unsound technical design; for others it is capitalist values that have turned technology into instrument of domination of labor and exploitation of nature ....”

Other authors complain Habermas’ view is too limited, too restricted to that dismissive phrase “dead white men.” Stanley and Pateman (1991) lament that Habermas’ hopeful, universal considerations do not indulge sufficiently issues of gender or race. They ask “is Habermas’ theorizing built on a conception of the world in which, surreptitiously, essentialist characteristics (e.g., ‘middle class’ ‘white’ ‘males’) dominate? It is a fact that the entire ‘project of modernity’ and associated discourses of rationality and progress have historically sided with men over women” (Stanley and Pateman, 1991). Their argument, however, offers no real evidence; they have established in their minds the “fact” of modernity and proceed to dismiss those who disagree. Furthermore, they complain that Habermas’ efforts at universality are ”gender blind” and therefore “malestreams” [sic] analysis. On the other hand, feminist philosopher Selya Benhabib (1986) accepts the theory as an appropriate basis for normative critique for society.

Gilroy complains (1992) that Habermas’ work is too Eurocentric. McCarthy, a translator of Habermas’ work and sometime critic, counters: “Postmodernist critiques of moral universalism too often simply ignore the fact that it is precisely notions of fairness, impartiality, respect for the integrity and dignity of the individual, and the like that undergrid respectful tolerance of difference by placing limits on egocentrism. Typically, such notions are simply taken for granted in anti-universalist invocations of otherness and difference – which are, it evidently goes without saying, to be respected, not obliterated” (1978, p. xii).

In the same way, some authors claim Habermas is focused too much on the bourgeoisie. Given his early social and intellectual environment, critique of Marxian conditions for knowledge in a Kantian framework and the influence that an “affluent proletariat” exerts on historical Marxism, he may skew that way but an open mind sees that given Habermas’ interest in the universal pragmatic perspective that unless one adopts a paternalistic, post-modern point of view, this is not a crippling concern. For example, Byberg (2003) analyzes Norwegian society of the 17th century as a public sphere as the result of the Bishop of Kristiansand’s establishment of 40 reading societies among peasants and the consequences of literacy among those groups.

Nikolas Luhann (1982) is a long-standing critic of Habermas’ efforts, believing that the German social theorist’s work is too big, has too many grounds and arguments, and that communication does not necessarily lead anywhere (quoted in Brand, 1990). Luhmann complains that Habermas does not sufficiently distinguish between two contexts of analysis: formal universal pragmatics or empirical research. Some authors, e.g., Doorne, think Habermas conflates them and claims Habermas is hostile to empirical research and deductive logic. However, Szczelkun, McCarthy, Benoit and others see Habermas as using both tools, when appropriate. Indeed Szczelkun downplays Habermas’ transcendalist gilding and proclaims the TCA itself a product of empirical investigation. McCarthy emphasizes Habermas’ point that competing normative claims are “geared to what everyone could rationally will to be a norm binding on everyone alike … through reasoning argument among those subject to the norm in question” (p. viii). Benoit models human-computer and human-human interaction on the TCA and then uses Habermas’ validity claims as a quantifiable measure of linguistic performance in different normative right.

Habermas no longer uses the “ideal speech situation” to refer to a situation of perfect symmetry among partners and that perhaps affects presuppositions about rational discourse that one makes when engaging in argumentation. As Habermas writes, discourse participants can suspend discourse about an acknowledged shared goal to consider the structure and rules of their linguistic engagement in order to clarify the normative right between them. Habermas never states specifically that discourse parters are equal in all particulars and he takes pains to describe the taken-for-granted aspects of roles in the social sphere.

But the most interesting point is that Habermas avoids contextualism in favor of the necessity of communicative or intersubjectivist approaches, thinking of instrumental vs. communicative rationality, and the need to avoid drifting into private language to cash-in the validity claims. Heath (2003) “criticizes Habermas’ attempt to introduce a universalization principle governing moral discourse, as well as his criteria for distinguishing between moral and ethical problems [by applying game-theoretic models] to specify the burden of proof that the TCA and discourse must assume.” It is not convincing, though, in Heath’s writing that there is any kind of proof, verification techniques, and the like that can address moral problems, since they tend to be transcendental and, like all such argumentation, separate from empirical debate.

The most difficult part of Habermas as a philosopher remains the issues of intersubjectivity, role of rationality, and truth. Powell’s (2002) argument about the role of experience in the vindication of cognitive claims of truth is not sufficient to overcome Habermas’ marrying of his work to Peirce and other pragmatists. The pragmatist account of truth has yet to be fully explained in ways that will settle the minor concerns of correspondence, coherence, and deflationists’ complaints. One must acknowledge, however, that the pragmatist account of truth is difficult to internalize without slipping into relativism, but one suspects that Bertram Russell’s frequently cited, half-citation of William James’s expression of the pragmatist account of truth is a confounding factor (Putnam, 1995).

Again, Powell’s complaint about the concept of intersubjecvity and rationalism in linguistic communication does not deride Habermas’ theory. Habermasian “rational communication” can limit the affected aspects of belief (passion, desire, religious feeling) provided there are willing discourse partners.

Finally, a legitimate difficulty is how to connect rational communicative behaviors to non-rational issues and to non-linguistic forms of communication.

Testing the Theory of Communicative Action is, naturally, the best way to expose weaknesses.

Applications of the TCA

The TCA has been applied to society in general, to organized work and to interpersonal communicative behaviors. It has been tested empirically in a variety of disciplines – management, information retrieval, etc. – as a model for human-human and human-machine information exchanges and as a framework for building actual computerized systems. For brevity’s sake, this section will proceed from the broadest uses of the TCA to specific projects.

Habermas’ work has been considered also as a complement or counter to modernist and post-modernist hypotheses. For instance, Fours considers the theory as many authors do as part of modernism and post-modernism’s concern for reflexivity, since TCA is bound to formal pragmatics, communicative rationality, re-activition of the critical-theoretic program (see also Honneth’s (2004)), and, importantly critique of legitimation. Gimmer is an example of researchers who use the theory to bridge to long-standing complex philosophical concerns, cognitivism, moral vs. ethical issues, and universalization.

If we consider universalization of technology then mass communication comes to the fore. Skollerhorn (1998), Leydesorff (2001), among others, consider the TCA and its effect on people. They examine how people are watched, data and information transmitted, the use of entertainment, and ultimately, how all these come together as mobilization: turning information into action in the public sphere. Skollerhorn, for example, applies the theory to understand the consequences of public environmental policy; Alvesson and Willmott (1992) to “critical management”, and Van Every & Taylor (1998) to modeling the organization as a communicative activity.

A brief list of other applications should suggest to the reader the flexibility both of the theory and of interpretation of the TCA. Wilson (1991) applies the theory to the concept of the “commons” and the use of both hermeneutic-historical and empirical-analytic methods and how the theory can be used to understand the systemic forces on the commons, the reproduction of conservation norms, and the management of the “community” in which these events occur. McDonald (2005) takes the same idea of government policy and TCA and applies it to sport.

In Habermas’ early work, he states he is motivated to a degree by systems theory. It follows that this interest would resonate in systems design, management, information systems design, and the human-information systems that consume information resources. Ng (2002) examines the applicability of university pragmatics in IR interaction; Benoit (1998; 2002) also examines, adopts, and tests the theory for IR. The model has been applied in computerized information systems: the “Coordinator” (Winograd & Flores), “Sampo” (Auramäki, Lehtinen, & Lyytinen, (1988), Milan conversational model (De Michelis & Grasso (1994)), information systems design (Janson and Woo (1995); Benoit (2002); Lyytinen & Ngwenyama (1992)), “doing and speaking in the office” (Flores & Ludlow).

For information retrieval and human-computer interaction researchers, the TCA is potentially a powerful model, but to date has not been fully capitalized. One reason, perhaps, is the lack of interest in education in theory in LIS (Fisher, et al., 2005; Warner, Miksa, Blaire, Bonnici, & Miksa, 2005), the lack of interest in philosophical issues, or the dismissal of that topic entirely. While recently some Library & Information Science authors, such as Budd (2004), tackle the ever-difficult trinity of language, semantics, and philosophy in the form of relevance, others, such as Dobson (2002), Wiegan (2003), and Andersen (2001) put their own fine points on the issue. Anderson asks “information criticism: where is it?” Dobson asks why one should even bother with philosophy. The reason is the compelling insights social theory, philosophy, and systems design have at their intersection, something Arnold (2003), Benoit (2002, 2006), and others confirm.

It should go without saying that considering phenomena of interest from different perspectives is very likely to expand our knowledge of that phenomenon. The difficult lay in reading and publishing across the discipline. Perhaps, without the bona fides a second doctorate provides or evident mastery of jargon of other domains, as well as a commitment to working difficult philosophical intellectual content to comprehension, the TCA, and most theories, will remain outside the reach unless (a) the legitimacy of the model is demonstrated in approachable, familiar forms (empiricism) and (b) an appreciation of the value of theory in general is encouraged.

Conclusions

The TCA is only part of a long developing, expansive, indeed magisterial, view of society, ways of shaping understanding of society and of each others through our communicative actions. Unlike the skepticism of his colleague Adorno, and (for some) the excessive transcendentalism of Kant, critiquing both excessive rationalism and idealism, gathering from pragmatists and Popper, Habermas has created a viable model of how the world works, treading a middle way between extremes of any doctrine and in the end creating a hopeful path for humanity.

But the work is not done. Critique of established agents, working instrumentally and strategically for their own goals, so successfully that what appears natural is really the product of instrumental social agencies, is extremely difficult; perhaps impossible without a renting of the veil shielding educational, technical, commercial, and governmental work.

For those interested in “information”, the TCA is especially useful. It serves as a framework and criterion for critique of information systems (human-human, human-machine, human-machine-human). The validity claims of Habermas’ conception of speech acts can be useful in information providing agencies in understanding the relevancy of the claims, both of the human- and computerized-information resource providing agent. In other words, TCA serves to critique information work practices. Finally, the TCA, derived from social theories, the ordinary language philosophy, work and politics offers library & information science a store of concepts and descriptive language to expand LIS’ efforts and establish bridges to other disciplines, profiting all.

Literature

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Habermas’ Writings (partial list)

Habermas, J. (1971). Knowledge and human interests. Boston: Beacon.

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Helpful Readings and websites

The Association for Information Systems website hosts a number of references on critical social theory. http://www.qual.auckland.ac.nz/critical.htm

Theories used in IS Research: Critical social theory website: http://www.istheory.yorku.ca/criticalsocialtheory.htm

Apel, K.-O. (1998). Openly strategic uses of language: a transcendental-pragmatic perspective (A second attempt to think with Habermas against Habermas). In P. Dews (Ed.), Habermas: a critical reader, pp. 272-90. Oxford: Blackwell.

Cooke, M. (1994). Language and reason: a study of Habermas’s pragmatics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Davidson, D. (2004). Problems of rationality. New York: Oxford University Press.

Davidson, D. (2005). Truth and prediction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Davidson, D. (2005). Truth, language, and history: philosophical essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structure. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Held, D. (1980). Introduction to critical theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. London: Hutchinson.

Ljungberg, J., & Holm, P. (1997). Speech acts on trial. In M. Kyng & L. Mathiassen (Eds.), Computer and Design in Context. Cambridge: MIT Press.

MacIsaac, D. (1996). The critical theory of Jürgen Habermas. http://physicsed.buffalostate.edu/danowner/habcritthy.html

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McCarthy, T. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982.

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Putnam, H. (2002). The collapse of the fact/value dichotomy and other essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Rawls, J. (1972). A theory of justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Rehg, W. (1994). Insight and solidarity: a study in the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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In addition to the above citations

Critique of Technology

Feenberg, A. (1991). Critical Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Winograd, T., F. Flores, (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Norwood: Ablex.

Education

Willson, R. (2000). Comparing in-class and computer-mediated discussion using a communicative action framework. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 19(4), 409-418.

Abras, A., Maloney-Krichmar, D., & Preece, J. (2003). Evaluating an online academic community: ‘purpose’ is the key. HCI International. Crete, Greece. Human-Computer Interaction, Theories and Practice (Part 1), vol. 2, 829-833.

HCI

Gaines, B. R. (1988) Conceptual framework for person-computer interaction in distributed systems. IEEE Transactions of Systems, Man & Cybernetics, 18(4), 532-541.

Human Ecology

Wilson, D. (1991). The theory of communicative action and the problem of the commons. Second Annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 26-29 Sept 1991. [dwilson@aesop.rutgers.edu]

Info Literacy

Andersen, J. (2001). Information literacy: hvad skal man vide for at søge efter information. Biblioteksarbejde, 66. http:// www. biblioteksarbejde.dk/66-summaries.htm

Information Systems; Information Retrieval Systems

Arnold, M. (2003). System design meets Habermas, Foucault and Latour. Socio-technical and human cognition elements of information systems. Handershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing.

Arnold, M. (2003). System design meets Habermas, Foucault and Latour. Socio-technical and human cognition elements of information systems. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing, pp. 226-248.

Auramäki E., E., Lehtinen, K. & Lyytinen, E. (1988). A Speech Act Based Office Modeling Approach. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 6(2), pp. 126-152.

Benoit, G. (1998). Information seeking as communicative action. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of California-Los Angeles.

Benoit, G. (2002). Critical theory as a foundation for pragmatic information systems design. Information Research, 6(2). http://InformationR.net/ir/6-2/paper98.html

Benoit, G. (2006). Theory of communicative action. In S. Erdelez, L. McKechnie, & K. E. Fisher (Eds.). Theories of information behavior: a researcher’s guide. Medford, NJ: Information Today for ASIST.

De Michelis, G., M.A. Grasso. (1994). Situating Conversations within the Language/Action Perspective: The Milan Conversation Model In CSCW'94, Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. New York: ACM, pp. 89-100.

Dietz, J. L. G., & Widdershoven, G.A.M. (1991). Speech Acts or Communicative Action? Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 235-248.

Dietz, J. L. G., & Widdershoven, G.A.M. (1992). A comparison of the linguistic theories of Searle and Habermas as a basis for communication support systems. In R. Van der Reit, and R. Meersman (Eds.), Linguistic Instruments in Knowledge Engineering, New York: North-Holland, pp. 121-130.

Flores, F., M. Graves, B. Hartfield, T. Winograd, (1988). Computer Systems and the Design of Organizational Interaction. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 6(2), pp. 153-172.

Hirschheim, R., & Klein, H. (1994, March). Realizing Emancipatory Principles in Information Systems Development: The Case for ETHICS, MIS Quarterly, 18(1), pp. 83-109.

Janson, M. A., & Woo, C. C. (1995) Comparing IS Development Tools and Methods: Using the Speech Act Theory. Information and Management, 28, pp. 1-12.

Klein, H., & Hirschheim, R. The Application of Neohumanist Principles in Information Systems Development. In D. Avison, J. E. Kendall, & J. I. DeGross (Eds.), Human, Organizational, and Social Dimensions of Information Systems Development. Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 263-280.

Lehtinen, E., & Lyytinen, E. (1986). Action Based Model of Information System Information Systems, 11(4), pp. 299-317.

Lehtinen, E., & Lyytinen, K. (1986). Action based model of information system, Information Systems, 2(4), pp. 299317.

Lyytinen, K. & Ngwenyama, O. K. (1992). What does computer support for cooperative work mean? A structionalist analysis of computer supported cooperative work, Accounting, Management and Information Technologies, 2(1), pp. 19-37.

Lyytinen, K. Information systems and critical theory, in Critical Management Studies, M. Alvesson, and H. Willmott (eds.), Sage Publications, London, 1992, pp. 159180.

Madsen, K. H. Breakthrough by Breakdown, in Information Systems Development for Human Progress in Organizations, H.K. Klein and K. Kumar (eds.), 1989, pp. 41-53.

Mingers, J. C. (1980). Towards an Appropriate Social Theory for Applied Systems Thinking: Critical Social Theory and Soft Systems Methodology, Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, 7, 41-49.

Murray, F. (1991). Technical rationality and the IS specialist: Power, discourse and identity. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 2, 59-81.

Myers, M. D. (1995). Dialectical hermeneutics: a theoretical framework for the implementation of information systems, Information Systems Journal, 5(1), 51-70.

Myers, M. D., & Young, L. W. (1997). Hidden Agendas, Power, and Managerial Assumptions in Information Systems Development: An Ethnographic Study. Information Technology & People, 10(3), 224-240.

Myers, M. D. (1994). A disaster for everyone to see: an interpretive analysis of a failed IS project. Accounting, Management and Information Technologies, 4(4), 185-201.

Ng, K. B. (2002, March). The applicability of universal pragmatics in information retrieval interaction: a pilot study. Information Processing and Management, 38(2), 237-248.

Ngwenyama, O. K. (1991). The Critical Social Theory Approach to Information Systems: Problems and Challenges. In H-E. Nissen, H.K. Klein, & R.A. Hirschheim (Eds.) Information Systems Research: Contemporary Approaches and Emergent Traditions. Amsterdam: North Holland, pp. 267-280.

Ngwenyama, O. K., & Lee, A. S. (1997). Communication Richness in Electronic Mail: Critical Social Theory and the Contextuality of Meaning, MIS Quarterly, 21(2), pp. 145-167.

Orlikowski, W. J. & Baroudi, J. J. (1991). Studying Information Technology in Organizations: Research Approaches and Assumptions, Information Systems Research, 2, 1-28.

Orlikowski, W. J. (1991). Integrated Information Environment or Matrix of Control? The Contradictory Implications of Information Technology, Accounting, Management and Information Technologies, 1(1), 9-42.

Winograd, T., (1988). A Language/Action Perspective on the Design of Cooperative Work. In I. Greif (Ed.), Computer Supported Cooperative Work: A Book of Readings. San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann.

Language / Action

Budd, J. M. (2004, Winter). Relevancy: language, semantics, philosophy. Library Trends, 52(3), 447-462.

Yetim, F. (2004). Universal actability of and with knowledge: managing and communicating knowledge with patterns. In R. Hammwöhler, M. Rittbeger, & W. Semar (Eds). Pragmatik also motto der konstanzer informationswissenschaft. Festschrft für Rainer Kuhlen. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschafft, 271-280.

Peregren, J. (1997). Language and its models: is model theory a theory of semantics? Nordic Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2(1), 1-23.

Oeller, W. (1998, Nov. 19). Negotiation in interaction. Linguist List 9.1645 http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/9/9-1645.html

Librarianship

Buschman, J. (2003). Introduction (Chapter 1), and The Public Sphere Rounding out the Context of Librarianship (Chapter 3). In Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Buschman, J. (2005). Libraries and the decline of public purposes. Public Library Quarterly, 24(1), 1-12.

Kranich, N. (2001). Libraries, the New Media and the Political Process. In N. Kranich (Ed.). Libraries and Democracy. Chicago: American Library Association, pp. 108-112.

Warner, J., Miksa, S. D., Blaire, D., Bonnici, L., & Miksa, F. (2005). Outside theory on the inside of LIS (SIG HFIS, CR). Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 41(1), 555-556.

Webster, F. (2002). Theories of the Information Society. London: Routledge. [Chapter 7- Information Management and Manipulation: Jürgen Habermas and the Concept of the Public Sphere]

Williamson, M. (2000). Social exclusion and the public library. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 32(4), 178-186.

Management and Office Systems

Alvesson, M., & Willmott, H. (Eds.). (1992, July). On the idea of emancipation in management and organization studies. Academy of Management Review, 17(3), pp. 432-464

Alvesson, M., & Willmott, H. (Eds.). (1992) Critical Management Studies. London: Sage Publications.

Auramäki, E., Lehtinen, E., & Lyytinen, K. (1998). A speech-act-based office modeling approach. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 6(2), 126-152.

Broadbent, J., Laughlin, R. and Read, S. (1991). Recent Financial and Administrative Changes in the NHS: A Critical Theory Analysis, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 2, 1-29.

Dietz, J. L. G. (1994). Business Modeling for Business Redesign. Proceedings of the 27th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. New York: IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 723-732.

Dietz, J. L. G. (1994). Modeling Business Processes for the Purpose of Redesign. Proceedings IFIP TC8 Open Conference on Business Process Redesign, Australia. North-Holland, pp. 249-258.

Flores, F., Graves, M., Hartfield, B., & Winograd, T. (1988). Computer Systems and the Design of Organizational Interaction. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 6(2), pp. 153-172.

Forester, J. (1992). Critical ethnography: on field work in an Habermasian way. In M. Alvesson, & H. Willmott (Eds.), Critical Management Studies. London: Sage Publications, pp. 46-65.

Janson, M. A., Woo, C. C., & Smith, L. D. (1993, Aug.). Information systems development and communicative action theory. Information and Management, 25(2), p. 59-72.

Medina-Mora, R., Winograd, T., Flores, R., & Flores, F. (1992). The Action Workflow Approach to Workflow Management Technology. In J. Turner, & R. Kraut (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. New York: ACM.

Winograd, T., (1988). A Language/Action Perspective on the Design of Cooperative Work In I. Greif (Ed.), Computer Supported Cooperative Work: A Book of Readings. San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann.

Mass communication

Baxter, H. (1987, Jan.) System and life-world in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action. Theory and Society, 16(1), 39-96.

Leydesdorff, L. (2001) Luhmann, Habermas, and the Theory of Communication. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 17(3), 273-288.

Skollerhorn, E. (1998, Sept. 1). Habermas and nature: the Theory of Communicative Action for studying environmental policy. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 41(5), 555-573.

Need for criticism

Andersen, J. (2005, Summer). Information criticism: where is it? Progressive librarian, 25.

Dobson, P. J. (2002). Critical realism and information systems research: why bother with philosophy? Information Research 7(2) [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/7-2/paper124.html]

Weigan, W. A. (2003, June). What American studies can teach the Library and Information Studies community about the library and the life of the user. American Studies Association Newsletter.

Organizations as systems

Van Every, E. J. & Taylor, J. R. (1998). Modeling the organization as a system of communication activity. Management Communication Quarterly, 12(1), 128-147.

Sports

McDonald, I. (2005). Theorising partnerships: governance, communicative action and sports policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

See Also

Critical theory

Entry Added: January 29, 2005
Last Update: September 22, 2008