possible Habermasian lifeworld-in-system perspective on the social impact of ICT ... of the paper based on Habermas' theory of communicative action. Using an ...
Journal of Information Technology (2002) 17, 89–99
Philosophical foundations for a critical evaluation of the social impact of ICT DAVID O’DONNELL The Intellectual Capital Research Institute of Ireland, 7 Clonee Road, Ballyagran, Limerick County, Ireland
L ARS BO H ENRIKSEN Centre for Industrial Production, Aalborg University, Fibigerstraede 16, DK-9220 Aalborg, Denmark
How do we critically evaluate the social impact of the information and communications technology (ICT) that, in the developed world at least, is central to both economy and society. Market-oriented, functionalist and instrumental views tend to dominate discourse on ICT and the purpose of this paper is to challenge such views by suggesting a critical neo-humanist alternative. Harvey’s critical analysis of recent industrial society, Aristotle’s concept of phronesis and Heidegger’s tool analysis set the scene for the main argument of the paper based on Habermas’ theory of communicative action. Using an illustrative case vignette from the Irish community sector, the paper argues that this theory provides potentially valid philosophical and social theoretical guidelines for a critical interpretive evaluation of the social impact of ICT that focuses attention on normative (‘lifeworld’) as distinct from instrumental (‘system’) forms of rationality.
Introduction Consideration of the impact of information and communications technology (ICT) is central to any debate on contemporary economy and society. This paper explicitly addresses the question of how to evaluate the social impact of ICT critically, rather than ICT per se, from the perspective of those most affected by its emergence – people? Following Burrell and Morgan’s (1979) typology, discussion could be oriented with respect to four possible paradigms: functionalist, social relativist, radical structuralist and neo-humanist. Technological, largely market-oriented, functionalist and instrumental worldviews dominate ICT discourse. The purpose of this paper is to challenge the dominance of such purely instrumental views and to suggest directions towards a post-foundationalist grounding on which a critical neo-humanist evaluation of the social impact of ICT could be conducted. Hirschheim and Klein (1994) summarized the neo-humanist paradigm as follows: The neohumanist paradigm seeks change, emancipation, and the realisation of human potential and stresses the role that different social and organisational forces play in understanding change. It focuses on all forms of barriers to emancipation – in particular ideology (distorted communication), power and psychological compulsions, and social constraints – and seeks ways to overcome them (p. 109).
The main theoretical argument presented in this paper is that Habermas’ (1984, 1987a) Theory of Communicative Action provides valid guidelines for enabling a critical neo-humanist evaluation of the social impact of ICT. Following Habermas’ (1984, 1987a,b, 1990) social and moral philosophy, we grant the interests of citizens and of the ‘lifeworld’ precedence over the dominant systems of ‘money’ and ‘power’. This explicitly means that we evaluate from the critical neohumanist perspectives of emancipation and human potential as distinct from the functionalist system imperatives of capital accumulation, ef ciency, effectiveness and market share. First, the paper situates the discussion of the social impact of ICT with reference to Harvey’s (1990) critical description of recent industrial society. It then draws on theoretical insights from Aristotle’s concept of phronesis and Heidegger’s (1927/1990) concepts of ready-to-hand and present-at-hand in order to illustrate theoretically the taken-for-granted fact that ICT now forms part of everyday social lifeworlds. This allows the paper to create some theoretical distance from the dominant functionalist focus on ICT as a key technological driver of economic growth and business organization. The paper then outlines the contours of a possible Habermasian lifeworld-in-system perspective on the social impact of ICT and the practical implications of this approach are illustrated with a brief case vignette from the Irish community sector. The paper
Journal of Information Technology ISSN 0268–3962 print/ISSN 1466–4437 online © 2002 The Association for Information Technology Trust http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/02683960210145968
90 concludes that the procedural principle of communicative rationality and its correlative structures within particular Habermasian lifeworlds provide philosophical, social theoretical and pragmatic foundations on which critical and interpretive research into the social impact of ICT can be further developed.
Economy, history and society Historicism is the belief that social structures, events and texts are best understood in the context of their historical development. Versions of this view were defended by Dilthey, Lukács and Gramsci. More recently, Popper, Hayek and others criticized the extreme version of this view, according to which historical outcomes are inevitably determined. Agreeing with Popper and Hayek in this instance, if in little else, the paper adopts the milder form embraced by Gadamer, Kuhn and Habermas, where historicism is simply the pragmatic notion that a purely ahistorical perspective on human affairs can be misleading (www.philosophypages.com). As Edward Said put it ‘Who writes? For whom is the writing being done? In what circumstances? These it seems to me are the questions whose answers provide us with the ingredients making for a politics of interpretation’ (Rice and Waugh, 1992, p. 248). How do we seek guidelines for evaluating the social impact of ICT? Do we adopt a systems perspective, complex adaptive systems perspective or post-modernist perspective? Do we follow Derrida, Deleuze and Lacan and attempt to interpret the ICT world as a text? Do we follow Foucault and attempt to interpret the nature of the Internet as an ICT-mediated network of power/ knowledge relations? Do we go with the dominant ow, adopt a comforting denial and follow the early modernist objectivist and linear approach in order to enhance our bureaucratic careers or do we take the neo-humanist route and follow Habermas (1987b) in exploring a late critical modernist intersubjectivist approach? Do we study money, power, texts, technology, hardware, software or people? In the modern age science, technology, nance, business, government and society are interconnected in a complex adaptive global system (at least in the developed world) and cannot therefore be comprehensively analysed separately. Along with Habermas (1984) and Harvey (1990) this paper here acknowledges the complexity of these issues and rejects attempts to represent its totality in terms of highly simpli ed rhetorical propositions (the dominant engineering/business school paradigm) in insisting that critical discursive space be opened up that includes normative/communicative (lifeworld) as well as instrumental (system) forms of rationality.
O’Donnell and Henriksen Harvey (1990) argued that many manifestations of post-modernity ow from the basic operation of capital. Capital’s essential in uence in post-modernity thus makes post-modernity less than unique, but rather a special case of culture in a line of development that can be traced back almost two centuries (http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter). His economic rationale followed the broad neo-Marxist approach of the ‘French Regulation School’ in viewing ‘recent events as a transition in the regime of accumulation and its associated mode of social and political regulation’ (Harvey, 1990, p. 121). From this perspective, the emerging nature of ICTmediated economy and society in the developed world can be viewed as arising from the transformation of the Fordist system of mass production, with its relatively xed system of capital accumulation, its emphasis on standardization, mass production, labour stability and control (critiqued by Weber and the early Frankfurt School as the administered, colonized and commoditized society), to its transformation in the 1970s to ‘ exible accumulation’ and, since the early to mid-1990s, to ICT-mediated electronic business and globalization. Rapidly evolving changes to the legal system in areas such as intellectual property rights, privacy issues, marketing, Internet law and others signal the extent of the transformations in parts of the business and social worlds stemming from developments in ICT. The most important cultural change in the transformation from Fordism to exible accumulation and from modernity to post-modernity is the change in the human experience of space and time. Harvey (1990) provided a graphic rendering of his main point in showing four maps of the world in descending order of size (plate 3.1, p. 241). As Harvey’s (1990) work was published over a decade ago, we can now add another entry as the accelerating in uence and scope of ICT shrinks space and time even further – data, information and capital can travel anywhere in the world practically instantaneously (Table 1). These increasing speeds of travel illustrate that in each phase the sense of global space has changed and with a change in the sense of space comes a correlative change in the sense of time. Harvey (1990) carried this obvious point into a penetrating presentation of the changes in sensibility and reality accompanying these phases of space–time compression. Meg Whitman, the chief executive of cer of eBay.com, noted that we are now close to realizing the ‘. . . dream of a marketplace where people anywhere on the planet can seamlessly trade almost anything’ (eCommerceTimes.com, 22 February 2001). In this market, one can buy, negotiate, communicate and sell almost anything, anywhere, at any time. ICT is changing the structure of business, the way we work,
A critical evaluation of the social impact of ICT Table 1
Time–Space compression: 1500–2000
Era
Mode of transport
1500–1840
Horse drawn coaches and sailing ships Steam train Steam ship Propeller aircraft Jet passenger aircraft Data, information and capital transfer
1850–1930 1950s 1960s 2000 . . .
Mean speed 10 mph 65 mph 36 mph 300–400 mph 500–700 mph Instantaneous
Source: adaptation of Harvey (1990, p. 241).
consumer buying habits, how we pay for products and services and, increasingly, how we interact as citizens with local, regional and governmental institutions. A meeting of the European Council in Lisbon in March 2000 presented the Ciceronian argument that every citizen be equipped with the skills needed to live and work in the new information society. Cicero, one of the earliest advocates of (electronic) democracy (Kearney, 1997) would probably approve: Liberty hath its home in no other form of government except where the power of the people is supreme; and where that is so, certainly nothing can be sweeter; and where there is no equality, there can indeed be no liberty. (p. 41) From the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages, feudalism, mercantilism, colonialism, the Enlightenment and the history of industrialization up to the present, Cicero’s rhetorical challenge remains relevant. It is no less relevant as we enter the disruptive chaos of the Internet age. Time and space have become compressed in the digital now where business, customer, worker and citizen response expectations are now measured in seconds. This theme of space–time compression was also at the core of Bauman’s (1998) critical discussion of globalization. Bauman (1998) viewed the new mobility ‘divide’ as essentially ICT mediated. The ‘on-line’ are global, mobile, credit card owners and are continuously ‘pressed’ for time, while those excluded (either through geographic location or lack of human capital, nancial capital or access to infrastructure) are immobile, localized, probably do not own a credit card and go through life ‘killing’ time. With faster and more expansive telecommunications, nancial markets encompassed the entire globe in very short time-spans. The nancial system has delinked itself from active production of real commodities (Harvey, 1990) and from any effective control by national governments (Bauman, 1998) through space– time compression. The instabilities in capitalist production and a ‘radical shift in the manner in which value gets represented as money’ (Harvey, 1990,
91 p. 296) since the 1970s further caused the change to a post-modern mode of capitalism. Harvey (1990) here linked his argument with that of Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra: The interweaving of simulacra in daily life brings together different worlds (of commodities) in the same space and time. But it does so in such a way as to conceal almost perfectly any trace of origin, of the labour processes that produced them, or of the social relations implicated in their production. The simulacra can in turn become the reality (p. 300). Harvey (1990, pp. 302–7) saw two contrasting sociological effects of this ubiquitous lack of coherence in daily life. First, people decide that they must obsessively take advantage ‘of all the divergent possibilities’ and cultivate ‘a whole series of simulacra as milieu of escape, fantasy, and distraction’ (Harvey, 1990, p. 302). The second effect identi ed by Harvey (1990) is the opposite: faced with fragmentation, ephemerality and collage, people reach out for ‘personal or collective identity, the search for secure moorings in a shifting world’ (p. 302). Harvey (1990, pp. 350–1) identi ed four responses to time–space compression. First, a ‘shell-shocked, blasé, or exhausted silence’, a submission to the ‘overwhelming sense of how vast, intractable, and outside any individual or even collective control everything is’ (Harvey, 1990, p. 350), which is a criticism directed at deconstructionism. Second, a ‘free-wheeling denial of the complexity of the world, and a penchant for the representation of it in terms of highly simpli ed rhetorical propositions’ (Harvey, 1990, p. 351), which is directed at the dominant engineering and business school paradigm. Third, ‘an intermediate niche for political and intellectual life which spurns grand narrative but which cultivates the possibility of limited action’ (Harvey, 1990, p. 351). This can lead to ideas of community and locality, but it often slides ‘into parochialism, myopia, and self-referentiality in the face of the universalising force of capital circulation’ (Harvey, 1990, p. 351). The fourth response is ‘to try and ride the tiger of the time–space compression through construction of a language and an imagery that can mirror and hopefully command it’ (Harvey, 1990, p. 351). He suggested that Baudrillard, Virilio and Jameson are examples of this fourth response. It is claimed here that the emancipatory intent and openness of Habermas’ work quali es for inclusion. Harvey (1990) summed up his economically grounded analysis as follows: The intensity of time–space compression in Western capitalism since the 1960s, with all of its congruent features of excessive ephemerality and fragmentation in the political and private as well as in the social realm, does seem to indicate an experiential
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92 context that makes the condition of postmodernity somewhat special. But by putting this condition into its historical context, as part of a history of successive waves of time–space compression generated out of the pressures of capital accumulation with its perpetual search to annihilate space through time and reduce turnover time, we can at least pull the condition of postmodernity into the range of a condition accessible to historical materialist analysis and interpretation (pp. 306–7). Harvey (1990) thus constructed his entrance into the post-modern world on the foundation of a neoMarxist interpretation of capital. This gives him a kinship with the Frankfurt School as his unwillingness to give up an overarching cause for the rise of the postmodern echoes the original imperatives of the Institute for Social Research under the direction of Horkeimer and Adorno (http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter). Critical social theory has continued to develop up to the present day, albeit in the more modest and sceptical yet decidedly neo-humanist forms advocated by Apel, Beck, Honneth and, in particular, Habermas. Finally, Harvey (1990) claimed to see cracks in postmodernist thought that suggest a ‘subtle evolution, perhaps reaching a point of self-dissolution into something different’ (p. 358). Perhaps, but we do not know. We are content to situate our discussion of the social impact of ICT on the extant edge of critical European modernism. In the following section the paper draws on insights from Aristotle’s concept of phronesis and Heidegger’s (1927/1990) concepts of ready-to-hand and present-at-hand in order to illustrate theoretically the taken-for-granted fact that ICT now forms part of everyday social lifeworlds.
From Aristotle through Heidegger to Habermas Drawing on earlier work (Henriksen, 1999, 2001), it is noted that the word technology derives from the Greek techne and logos. Logos means word, thought, reason, which in turn could be interpreted as a form of knowledge. Techne means art and craft and is one of three ways of knowing described by Aristotle, the others being episteme and phronesis. Techne describes the practical knowledge used when producing art and craft, episteme describes the abstract theoretical knowledge used in science and phronesis describes the social knowledge used in our everyday relations with other people. Techne, as knowledge of art and craft or ICT, is pragmatic; it is practical knowledge of how to make or to do. It is variable and context dependent. It is a means to an end because it is the knowledge that it takes to make, to do or to deliver ICT. Techne is essentially
teleological, that is, a form of instrumental rationality guides it. In contrast, episteme is scienti c knowledge, viewed in Aristotle’s time (if not today!) as universal and independent of time and space. Episteme is guided by a general analytical rationality as found in mathematics, the natural sciences and positivism. Both episteme (in epistemology) and techne (in technology) are present in our languages and in the ICT literature. However, the third type of knowledge is generally absent (see Hirschheim et al. (1996) for a notable exception). We have no phronesis-logy (Flyvbjerg, 1998). Phronesis is the knowledge that it takes to get along in our everyday social praxis. It is an ethical praxis in the Hegelian sense, pragmatic, variable and, again, is context dependent. It is action oriented, practically oriented towards values and is guided by a substantive rationality. An evaluation of the social impact of ICT directs us to phronesis. Gadamer (1992), Habermas (1984) and Heidegger (1927/1990) can help us out theoretically here. The question is whether phronesis is more like episteme and thereby universal or is it more like techne and therefore mutable? Gadamer (1992) suggested through Aristotle that history is productive of real knowledge that is applicable because it differs and that it differs because it is applied (Weinsheimer, 1985). Therefore, phronesis may be more like techne than episteme, as both techne and phronesis are applied knowledge. However, such distinctions may be problematic because they may lead to the erroneous conclusion that science (episteme, i.e. Habermas’ (1984) validity claim of propositional truth related to the objective world) has nothing to do with techne or phronesis. In the present philosophical and post-foundationalist social theoretical climate it is not possible to make such a distinction. A common misinterpretation is the idea that techne and phronesis are subordinate to episteme, ‘one-sided rationalization’ in Habermasian terms. Following Aristotle, Gadamer (1992) and Habermas (1987b) this paper has grounds for claiming that this is not the case. What Aristotle’s distinctions and Gadamer’s (1992) phronesis analysis suggest is that our knowledge of techne cannot be solely of an epistemic character – the logos in technology and by implication in ICT must imply knowledge from all three (Henriksen, 1999). The conventional conception of things, entities, tools, equipment or ICT is that they are a collection of objects confronting the human subject. In this view people and ICT are separated – the world exists as a collection of things/objects that are there simply for people’s use. This is the subject–object relation of the philosophy of consciousness that, according to Habermas (1987b), is now exhausted. This conception is problematic because it does not tell us what the things are. On the contrary, the thing, ICT in this case, becomes ever more remote from us.
A critical evaluation of the social impact of ICT According to Heidegger (1927/1990) the things that we relate to must be understood as part of the world that we also are part of. When we are engaging in and with the world we use ICT for many purposes. ICTs are de ned ontologically by our use of ICT. Therefore it can be said that ICTs are what they are in relation to our use of them, their relation to one another and in relation to the particular situation or context in which they are used. A hammer, the classic example, is nothing in itself (a piece of wood and a piece of iron), but it becomes a hammer when it can be used for driving nails. One could put forward similar examples for portals, PDAs (personal digital assistants), hardware, software, personal identi cation numbers, smart cards and, of course, cell phones. Our main concern in introducing Heidegger’s (1927/ 1990) tool analysis is our relation to ICT or Dasein’s being in the world by the use of ICT. ICT is now in the lifeworld. Heidegger’s (1927/1990) concepts of ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit, tilhånden and taobh liom) and present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit, forhånden and lámh liom) can be used for illustrating this fact. ICT is present-at-hand when it is made an object of analysis in the conventional manner. ICT in the title of this paper is present-at-hand. This paper was communicatively and discursively written by two people with ICT as ready-to-hand in the form of personal computers, electronic mail, on-line search engines, telephones, databases of older papers and so on. ICT as ready-to-hand, tilhånden or taobh liom forms part of our taken-for-granted cyber, Danish and Irish lifeworlds, respectively. The problem with ICT as presentat-hand is that it will neither disclose for us what ICT is nor its impact on our social lifeworlds. The key point here is that we know ICT as ready-to-hand before we know it as present-at-hand because No matter how sharply we just look at the outward appearance of Things in whatever form it takes, we cannot discover anything ready-to-hand. If we look at Things just theoretically, we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But when we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its speci c thingly character . . . The peculiarity of what is proximally readyto-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not . . . [ICT itself] . . . On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work – that which is to be produced at the time; and this is accordingly ready-to-hand too. The work bears with it that referential totality within
93 which . . . [ICT] . . . is encountered (Heidegger, 1927/1990, pp. 69–70). When ICT is ready-to-hand we are most often not concerned with ICT as a tool or technology, but with the speci c work, activity or fun that we are involved in. We are not rst and foremost hammering – we are mending the fence. We are not rst and foremost ICTing – we are communicating, writing, playing a game, working or searching for something on Google.com. ICT as present-at-hand can be discovered negatively, for example when a piece of software is not working the way we want it to, when the Internet connection is ‘down’ or when we are turned down for a job because we do not have the requisite IT skills and, therefore, not ready-to-hand. In Habermasian terms, ICT as ready-to-hand is already part of our tacitly taken-for-granted lifeworld, in the developed world at least. Those who do not have access to either the skills or infrastructure of ICT are excluded and marginalized to the ‘immobility’ (Bauman, 1998) of the no-man’s land of the digital divide. In terms of the social impact of ICT, the lifeworlds of such people have neither ready-to-hand nor present-at-hand: they are effectively disenfranchized from the electronic citizen on-line world.
Habermas: lifeworld-in/and-system In this section the paper argues that Habermas’ (1984, 1987a) Theory of Communicative Action is theoretically rich enough to accommodate considerations of both phronesis and ready-to-hand with respect to the social impact of ICT. In the literature on information systems development related speci cally to ICT the application of Habermasian ideas is not new and is now reasonably well developed. For example, Hirschheim et al.’s (1996) seminal discussion of information systems development could be interpreted as implicitly including considerations of techne, episteme, phronesis and ready-to-hand. The instrumental means–end rationality of the systems of money and power is geared to success, ef ciency, control, pro t or market share. In contrast, the communicative rationality of the human lifeworld is geared to understanding and agreement (Habermas, 1987b). This shift from instrumental success to communicative understanding is a core distinction in all of Habermas’ work. The boundary between system (money and power) and human lifeworld is not a clearcut one – they interpenetrate and reciprocally in uence each other, often mediated by ‘law’, although most discourse on business and technology issues assumes a system perspective.
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94 The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas, 1984, 1987a) demands that both system and lifeworld perspectives are allied to a consideration of the mediating in uence of law. Members of a social collective normally share a largely intangible and tacit lifeworld that only exists in a ‘uniquely pre-re exive form of background assumptions, background receptivities or background relations’ (Honneth et al., 1981, p. 16). Such lifeworlds can be conceived of as ‘culturally transmitted and linguistically organised stock(s) of interpretative patterns’ (Habermas, 1987a, p. 124). Habermas (1984) further argued that communicative action is the social glue that holds such life worlds together. Economics may be of the base, but culture remains largely a super-structural phenomenon. Habermas (1984) de ned communicative action as follows: Communicative action refers to the interaction of at least two subjects capable of speech and action who establish interpersonal relations (whether by verbal or extra-verbal means). The actors seek to reach an understanding about the action situation and their plans of action in order to coordinate their actions by way of agreement. The central concept of interpretation refers in the rst instance to negotiating de nitions of the situation [that] admit of consensus (p. 86). ICT has now entered many lifeworlds – it is tacitly ready-to-hand. Following Parsons’ ideas on culture, society and personality, Habermas (1987a) provided us with guidelines on how to conceptualize lifeworlds (Table 2). Hence, we can use these guidelines to assist in evaluating the social impact of ICT. The structural components of particular lifeworlds (culture, community of practice and selves) meet their corresponding processual needs (cultural reproduction, social integration, socialization and selves development) through three dimensions along which communicative action is conducted (reaching understanding, coordinating interaction and effecting socialization) which in turn are rooted in the structural components of ordinary everyday language, communication and human interaction. The social impact of ICT can be evaluated using the dimensions of rationality of knowledge, member solidarity and personal/group responsibility (O’Donnell, 1999, 2000; O’Donnell et al., 2000, 2003). Both positive and negative impacts are shown in the matrix in Table 2 (negative impacts within parentheses), wherein each segment is numbered in order to assist in illustrating the short case study below. Everyday language and communication is increasingly either enabled or colonized/constrained by ICT in uences and the paper argues here that the social impact of ICT on each of the nine structural segments of the lifeworld (segments 1.1–3.3) can be critically evaluated by inves-
tigating the in uence of ICT on the process of communicative action within each segment. The validity claims of comprehensibility, objective truthfulness or ef ciency, normative rightness and sincerity provide empirical entry points for such evaluations. These guidelines are particularly suited to interpretive case studies or ethnographic research and the paper suggests how this might be practically achieved below.
Emergence of a particular lifeworld ‘Kathy Sinnott has just discovered that her 23-yearold son, Jamie, is left-handed’: at rst glance this is a somewhat unusual headline from the Irish Times of 13 July 2001. Kathy never knew this before because Jamie, who is autistic, was unable to use his hands in a meaningful way. However, following a High Court judgment in October 2000 Jamie had received special education at home and had started to use his hands. In this High Court judgment Chief Justice Barr referred to the ‘depressing saga’ over 20 years in which Ms Sinnott’s efforts to persuade the health and education authorities to recognize autism and to provide appropriate education and training for those with it were met with ‘of cial indifference and persistent procrastination’, which continued up to and throughout the High Court hearing. Chief Justice Barr found that a citizen’s constitutional right must be responded to by the state in full. A partial response had no justi cation in law even in dif cult nancial circumstances that might involve raising new tax revenue for meeting such claims. However, on 12 July 2001 the Supreme Court upheld an appeal by the Irish State against this High Court ruling by a majority of six to one that it was obliged to provide education for Jamie for as long as he could bene t from it (see http://www.ucc.ie/ucc/depts/law/ iv/ii_cases/326_00.html). The Irish State successfully argued that the High Court ruling had breached the principle of ‘separation of powers’ between the judiciary and the legislature by actually telling the Irish Government what education services to provide. This 2001 ruling established that the state’s legal responsibility for the education of Jamie ended when he was 18 years and ceased to be a child – and that the same applied to the 600 others who suffer from autism in Ireland. The Minister for Education noted that he ‘had the obligation of seeking clarity’. Other obligations fall to other departments – that of caring to the Department of Health, that of statutory protection to the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, but, above all, that of funding to the Department of Finance. Kathryn, Jamie’s mother, commented to an Irish Times journalist after the Supreme Court verdict.
A critical evaluation of the social impact of ICT Table 2
95
Contours of a Habermasian lifeworld-in-system
Reproduction processes
Structural components
Evaluation dimension
Culture
Community of practice
Selves
Cultural reproduction
1.1 Interpretative schemata t for consensus: valid processes of knowing (loss of meaning)
1.2 Legitimations (withdrawal of legitimation)
1.3 Behaviour patterns effective in learning and development (crisis in orientation and development)
Rationality of knowledge
Social integration
2.1 Obligations (unsettling of collective identity)
2.2 Legitimately ordered interpersonal relations (anomie)
2.3 Social memberships and ownership (alienation)
Solidarity of members
Socialization
3.1 Interpretative accomplishments (rupture of tradition)
3.2 Motivations for actions (withdrawal of motivation)
3.3 Interpretative capabilities and personal identities (psychopathologies)
Personal responsibility
Source: based on Habermas (1987a, pp. 142–3).
This case was about more than disability. It was about our relation to the state. It was based on the state’s willingness to spend money . . . This was a bad day for disabled people. But I am not going to let Jamie’s education stop here. And I am not going to stop ghting for other people. The state has made promises. It has won today on the strength of those promises. And I am going to see that it keeps them. (Irish Times, July 13, 2001) Dick Walsh, an Irish Times journalist, suggested that she was right on all counts. He cast doubt on the fact that the ministers for education and for health would have appealed to the Supreme Court against Chief Justice Barr’s humane and reasonable High Court judgement that Jamie Sinnott should be educated ‘for as long as he could bene t’ from education. However, Walsh noted that If that judgment stood, the other 600 might expect to be educated, too – and might qualify if the Sinnott precedent were followed. As worried lawyers and of cers of the Department of Finance mutter to each other – an appalling vista. You won’t hear much in these quarters about the Government’s moral responsibility to the Sinnotts or to the others who suffer from autism and their families . . . What is needed is a Government for which the interests of the citizens come rst. (Irish Times, July 13, 2001) Relations between the lifeworld (Table 2) and the systemic media of money and power (legislative power in this case) are mediated by the subsystem of law and the Supreme Court (based on the imperatives of the Irish constitution) put law rmly back into its subordinate Habermasian place in the overall scheme of
things. Such relations are also, if in part, mediated by technology, media and communications technology in particular. Parents of autistic children and adults (an emerging community of practice) (see Table 2) have, since the Irish Society for Autistic Children was founded in 1963 (renamed the Irish Society for Autism (ISA) in 1992) (see http://www.iol.ie/~isa1), struggled to create an identity (segment 3.3), gain recognition (segment 1.2), garner respect, increase public awareness and gain resources from the state (money and power) based on a fundamental guiding philosophy of rights, equality and participation – issues on which critical social theory is well capable of providing insight. The solidarity of this community was further strengthened with the formation of the Irish Autism Alliance (IAA) (see http://iwonder.ie/autism/) on 7 July 2001, 5 days before the Supreme Court ruling. The IAA is an umbrella group of 15 founder member organizations, all of which are established parent groups and the patron is Kathyrn Sinnott. Contact details and general information is available on their World Wide Web (WWW) site and their spokespersons are increasingly quoted in the Irish media. This community has begun to use ICT for furthering its aims and attempting to inject its own form of communicative rationality, via the subsystem of law, back into the dominant Irish systems of money and power. The IAA’s main aim is to represent people with autism on the island of Ireland and to liaise with administrations and political parties in order to increase awareness of autism and improve the provision of health and educational services. In terms of accomplishments (segment 3.1) and capabilities (segment 3.3), for example, the ISA has
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96 nanced and run a number of residential centres, including Dun rth Farm where up to 40 young people with autism live and work in a spacious rural environment. Mr Justice Keane, the one dissenting judge in the Supreme Court appeal, noted that Ms Sinnott’s ‘unremitting battle to secure proper treatment and educational facilities for her son eventually became a campaign on behalf of autistic children generally’, which assisted in the formation of a type of ‘collective identity’ (segment 3.3) noted by Harvey (1990). This case has strengthened the internal legitimacy (segment 1.2) of this community and the wider public sphere as well as motivating (segment 3.2) other parents to join in, thus increasing solidarity (segments 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3) and the politicization and development of such parents (segment 1.3) and their supporters in the wider Irish public sphere. On this latter point, the IAA has been one of the most publicly heard opponents of the Education for Persons with Disabilities Bill currently before the Irish Parliament (Dáil) due to concerns about the educational needs of children under 3 years and adults over 18 years – constraints imposed on their lifeworld by the dominant system of power via the medium of law. Further, Kathy Sinnott is standing as a candidate in the 2002 Irish parliamentary election – a further example of injecting some of the communicative rationality of the lifeworld back into the systems of power and money. This illustrative case vignette is included here in order to emphasize two points: (1) the potential of Habermas’ (1987a) outline of lifeworld structures, processes and dimensions of evaluation as a point of theoretical departure for interpretive case study or ethnographic work and (2) to highlight theoretical spaces within which the social impact of ICT might be investigated. This case demands a much more substantive treatment than can be attempted in this paper. There is obviously much more to this case than the fact that the ISA returns over 5000 hits on Google.com or the fact that a search of the on-line archives of the leading Irish media (see www.examiner.ie/index_examiner. htm; www.irish-independent.ie; www.irishnews.com/ archive2001; www.ireland.com/newspaper/archive/ www.rte.ie/news), on which this vignette is based, provides a substantial amount of coverage. However, using Habermas’ (1987a) dimensions of evaluation, it does suggest how we can identify areas where ICT enhances emancipation and human development or where ICT colonizes social aspects of particular lifeworlds leading to pathological social experiences such as loss of meaning (segment 1.1), anomie (segment 2.2), various forms of alienation (segment 2.3), rupturing of traditions (segment 3.1), unsettling of collective identities (segment 2.1) and others, with a view to actually doing something about it. In the next
section this idea of communicative action, which is the correlative glue that holds the lifeworld together, is explored in more detail.
Communicative action Communicative action under the functional aspect of reaching understanding facilitates the transmission and renewal of cultural knowledge, under the aspect of coordinating action facilitates social integration and the establishment of group solidarities and under the aspect of socialization facilitates the formation of personal and community identities (Habermas, 1987a). According to Habermas (1984) Only the communicative model of action presupposes language as a medium of uncurtailed communication whereby speakers and hearers, out of the context of their preinterpreted Lifeworld, refer simultaneously to things in the objective, social and subjective worlds in order to negotiate common de nitions of the situation (p. 95). The rational internal structures of this process of reaching understanding through communicative action can be characterized in terms of the following. (1) The three ontological world relations of actors and the corresponding concepts of the objective, social and subjective worlds. (2) The validity claims of comprehensibility, propositional truth, normative rightness and sincerity/ authenticity. (3) The concept of a rationally motivated agreement, that is one that is based on the intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims. (4) The concept of reaching understanding as the cooperative negotiation of common de nitions of the situation (O’Donnell, 1999). This procedural structure can be shown to be universally valid in a speci c or particular sense, thus satisfying the scienti c requirements of objectivity (Habermas, 1984, p. 137) in a post-foundationalist manner. The ability to raise validity claims, which can be viewed as a form of phronesis-logy, within this communicative relation is central to the theory of communicative action. When two people communicate with each other, whether face to face, through body language or whether ICT mediated, each utterance that ‘alter’ makes can be implicitly or explicitly accepted or challenged by ‘ego’ on a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ basis. Alter is seen as making a claim to validity with each utterance and ego can either accept or reject this claim. The rst and general validity claim relates to comprehensibility, a claim that is rarely challenged in everyday discourse,
A critical evaluation of the social impact of ICT but which is an often insurmountable obstacle in dialogue with autistic children and adults. The validity claims of propositional truth and/or ef cacy relate to the objective world of facts and/or states of affairs. For example, if a colleague suggests to Kathryn Sinnott that Jamie is right-handed, she can now reject this claim explicitly with a ‘no’ and provide evidence that Jamie prefers to use his left hand; if a member of the board of the IAA suggests that the political route is the only way to go in furthering their aims, others may explicitly refuse to accept the validity of this proposed strategy, seek further evidence from others or produce their own evidence to suggest that the legal route should perhaps be combined with the political. The validity claim of normative rightness relates to the social world ‘around here’ – what is generally considered normative, socially acceptable and often culturally ‘taken-for-granted’ behaviour. For example, if a new tutor joins an adult development group and at the rst meeting starts shouting at the students only to be politely informed that ‘you cannot speak to us like that around here!’, then the validity of the tutor’s actions (linguistic or otherwise such as aming electronic mail or inappropriate body language) is not accepted by these adults as they do not conform to the norms of this particular group. The validity claim of sincerity/authenticity relates to the (inter)subjective world. This validity claim is often accepted or rejected implicitly and silently by ego who decides whether alter is being genuine, sincere or authentic. When rejected explicitly, one may hear such comments as ‘get real!’, ‘pull the other one!’, ‘you must be joking!’ and so on. As the brief discussion on validity claims above is designed to demonstrate, communicative action is a fragile process and when this process is colonized (Table 2) or endangered by system in uences the quality of the lifeworld suffers. By implication, anything that in uences the ability to raise these validity claims negatively will reduce or perhaps even destroy the healthy functioning of particular communities (O’Donnell, 2000). We now have a social theoretical map and empirical entry points within which we can begin to think substantively about the social impact of ICT from a critical lifeworld perspective. The present authors believe that such an approach is capable of providing rich insight into various manifestations of the social impact of ICT in diverse organizational, regional, community and particular settings. Habermas (1987b) accepted that modernity involves the inescapable pluralism of ‘particular’ lifeworlds. He also accepted that the pursuit of philosophy can never lead to a general answer to the question ‘how should we live?’ Philosophy no longer enjoys a superior perspective
97 with a vantage point on the whole. Richter (2001), echoing Harvey (1990) above, observed that most postmodernists stop and abandon any further effort at nding a universal or even universal-seeming concept of the right or the just. Perhaps the position advocated in this paper could best be described as a critical, pragmatic, neo-humanist and post-foundationalist view of social knowledge. Post-foundationalism was coherently summarized by Seidman and Alexander (2001) as . . . a view about social knowledge that states that we always theorise or do research from a socially situated point of view, that social interests and values shape our ideas, that our social understandings are also part of the shaping of social life. Accordingly, post-foundationalism is not a rejection of theory or rigorous social analysis but a position that defends a more complex, multidimensional type of argumentation. Instead of speaking of hard and fast truths, post-foundationalists might speak of credible or persuasive arguments; instead of speaking of research testing theory, they would be apt to speak of how social analysis involves a multi-levelled type of argumentation that moves between analytical reasoning, empirical data, normative clari cation and remains re ective about its own practical social implications (p. 2). This form of pragmatic post-foundationalism provides general contours within which the extreme and untenable positions of early modernist determinism and post-modernist relativism can be avoided. Flyvbjerg (1998) captured the key distinction between a functionalist and a neo-humanist orientation in a recent discussion on Foucault and Habermas, where he argued that the tension is between what should be done (real or normative rationality, for example educate Jamie for as long as he can bene t from it) and what is actually done (formal or instrumental rationality, for example classify Jamie as an adult and therefore disenfranchize his (and others) right to a primary education after the age of 18 years). This is a key distinction that is missed by many critics of applied critical social theory.
Conclusion The emerging nature of ICT-mediated economy and society has been outlined here as arising from continuous transformations in the mode of capital accumulation. Fordist mass production morphed to ‘ exible accumulation’ in the 1970s and, since the mid-1990s, ICT-mediated electronic business and globalization have been dominant (Harvey, 1990; Bauman, 1998). In the developed world ICT has entered and become part of the subsystems of money, power and lifeworld.
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98 The main focus of this paper has been to suggest guidelines for evaluating the social impact of ICT on such lifeworlds from a critical neo-humanist perspective. However, the vast majority of the world’s population remains excluded from the in uence of ICT and substantial sections of the developed world are also marginalized in terms of the digital literacy divide. In focusing on the social impact of ICT we have drawn on Aristotle’s concept of phronesis and Heidegger’s (1927/1990) idea of ready-to-hand in order to set the scene for introducing the contours of a Habermasian lifeworld within which substantive social theoretical guidelines can be found. An illustrative example of how this might be approached for an interpretive case study or ethnographic research is suggested in the discussion of the emergence of the IAA above. The paper claims that the social impact of ICT on each of the nine structural segments of the lifeworld (Table 2) can be critically evaluated by investigating the in uence of ICT on the process of communicative action within each segment. The validity claims of comprehensibility, objective truthfulness or ef ciency, normative rightness and sincerity provide the empirical entry points for such evaluations. These procedural structures within the process of communicative action can be shown to be universally valid in a speci c or particular sense, thus satisfying the scienti c requirements of objectivity (Habermas, 1984, p. 137). This claim is as far as we intend to go in this paper in addressing those critics of Habermas who label his project as ‘grand theory’ or ‘meta-narrative’. McCarthy (1987) noted that Habermas’ (1984, 1987a, 1987b) aim was to reconstruct the moral point of view as the perspective from which competing normative claims can be fairly and impartially adjudicated. This type of neo-humanist reconstruction is universal in import if particular in practice, as in the case of Jamie outlined above. It arrives through ‘reasoned argument among those subject to the norm in question’ and not through a Kantian categorical imperative. We need more enlightenment; it is premature to abandon it. We need to ‘inject communicative praxis’ back into the ICT-mediated systems of money and power – Kathy Sinnott’s work on behalf of her autistic son Jamie is an exemplar of how this is actually being done. Theoretical examples of how this might be achieved can be found in critical management studies (Alvesson and Wilmott, 1992), information systems development (Lyytinen, 1992; Hirschheim and Klein, 1989, 1994; Hirschheim et al., 1996; Klein and Myers, 1999), accounting (Power and Laughlin, 1996) and other elds. This paper concludes that the approach suggested here may allow us to rst identify and then raise consciousness of those mechanisms through which ICT is used for enhancing, colonizing or excluding various
lifeworlds as a prelude to modestly attempting to do or not do something about them. This Habermasian-type project, shorn of its Marxian determinism, implies a more modest conception of the relation between theory and practice than that found in traditional Marxism or earlier critical theory (Baynes, 1989–1990). Critical theorists have a post-metaphysical moral obligation to identify practices of social oppression and exploitation due to ICT in daily social life and recommend strategies through which they might be changed. Members of the IAA, for example, might bene t from basic information technology training, hence allowing for the introduction of on-line mentoring, distance education for both parents and local care assistants, information support and so on through the IAA’s WWW site. Habermas’ (1984) concept of communicative rationality, in which reason is construed in terms of a noncoercive intersubjectivity of mutual understanding and reciprocal recognition (McCarthy, 1997), provides a potentially valid philosophical foundation on which critical evaluations of the social impact of ICT can be developed. The future, albeit uncertain, remains thankfully open.
Acknowledgements We wish to acknowledge the very constructive insights on earlier versions of this paper provided by two anonymous reviewers of this journal, by participants at the European Conference on Information Technology Evaluation (ECITE) in Oxford in July 2001 and, in particular the encouragement and patience of Dr. Carole Brooke throughout the process. The usual disclaimer applies.
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Biographical notes David O’Donnell is chief knowledge of cer of The Intellectual Capital Research Institute of Ireland and a researcher/consultant in the areas of intellectual capital, e-business and e-HR in the Irish ICT sector. Lars Bo Henriksen is an associate professor at the Centre for Industrial Production, Aalborg University, Denmark. He has published in the areas of management, research methodology and philosophy of science and technology and is presently leading a European research project on radical organizational change arising from developments in ICT. Address for correspondence: David O’Donnell, The Intellectual Capital Research Institute of Ireland, 7 Clonee Road, Ballyagran, Limerick County, Ireland.
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