Communicative Action

Conceptual Overview

The theory of communicative action is associated with the writings of Jürgen Habermas, widely recognized as the leading contemporary proponent of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. In an attempt to transcend the somewhat reductive critique of Western rationality that had come to be associated with his predecessors, Habermas invoked a distinction between instrumental rationality—the pursuit of efficiency and the predominance of means over ends—and communicative rationality, which is oriented toward the achievement of mutual understanding.

Integral to any understanding of communicative action is recognition of Habermas's a priori commitment to the social nature of language, which is underpinned by what he terms universal pragmatics and communicative competence. These are expressed in a desire for mutual understanding in that every speech act derives its validity from four claims: intelligibility, [Page 209]propositional truthfulness, sincerity on behalf of the communicator, and the assumption that the act accords with dominant norms and values. Any and every speech act is infused, therefore, with intersubjectively recognized claims to be valid.

From this, Habermas is able to posit the view that embedded within communicative action resides the possibility of an emancipated form of social organization in which action is guided not by the imposition of instrumentally determined practices, but rather by consensus derived from open, critical dialogue. Communicative action aspires, therefore, to what Habermas describes as the ideal speech situation—that is, dialogue free of institutional coercion and other distorting influences such as ideology or a personal intent to deceive—and is characterized by an orientation toward the achievement of consensus grounded in critical dialogue and the strength of rational argumentation.

An important critical component of Habermas's work that relates to the theory of communicative action is to be found in his proposition that contemporary Westernized societies are increasingly encountering a colonization of everyday communicative practices whereby the rationality of our communicative interactions is increasingly displaced by a rationality oriented toward not critique, truth, or consensus, but rather the technical control and effective deployment of economic and sociocultural resources.

Critical Commentary and Future Directions

Within the field of organization studies, the work of Habermas in general, and his theory of communicative action in particular, has only quite recently started to have a recognizable impact. In part, this is perhaps due to the apparent lack of concern found in this particular aspect of Habermas's work with the question of empirical research and its relationship to contemporary critical theory. Of likely equal importance, however, is the rather unfashionable faith Habermas continues to place in the capacity of reason to act as an arbiter of validity claims in a field that has become—in its more critical quarters—somewhat enamored with the apparently antifoundationalist claims of poststructuralism.

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