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Conflicts\r\nbetween economic accumulation and political legitimation emerged as contradictory\r\nstagflation leading to delinking the gold standard and abandonment of the Keynesian\r\nconsensus and Bretton Woods system. The Macdonald Royal Commission on Economic\r\nUnion and Development Prospects for Canada abandoned its claim to public enlightenment\r\nand social consensus in validating free trade. The economic constitution of free trade limits\r\nsocial rights and future political intervention into the economic sphere. The social\r\norientation to emancipation and well-being are restrained to utilitarian discourse.\r\nCritical Theory of the Frankfurt School is compared with positivism and interpretivism\r\nwithin an analytic frame of ontology, epistemology and methodology. The historical\r\nbackground of the Frankfurt School is discussed with contributions by Adorno, Foucault,\r\nFreud, Habermas, Honneth, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. A meta-theoretical framework is\r\ndeveloped for use in social work theory and practice. Jiirgen Habermas' Theory of Social\r\nAction is analysed within the frame as arguing the good life in the public sphere. Habermas'\r\ninterpretation of the crisis of the welfare state as the colonization of the lifeworld by strategic\r\ncommunication is applied to the recent free trade and social policy debate. Universal\r\npragmatics and the criteria of universal validity claims is developed.\r\nA communication assessment method is developed from Habermas' universal validity claims\r\ncriteria and theory of communicative action. The typological criteria is used to measure\r\npublic consensus on The Globe and Mail Newspaper coverage of Canadian public sphere\r\ndiscourse on free trade and social policy from 1980 to 1995. A multi-stage sample of textual\r\narguments is deconstructed and analysed within an \"ideal speech situation\" of the\r\nhermeneutic-dialectical computer program ATLAS\/ti. Qualitative analysis and statistical\r\nmeasures of Chi-Square Analysis and Dendrograms are adapted to the validity claim criteria\r\nto describe the results. Methodological results are tentative, and presented as an exploration\r\nof theory applied to method which is useful for social work theory and practice. The\r\nimportance of the Habermasian revision of Critical Theory to social work theory and practice\r\nis discussed.","@language":"en"}],"DigitalResourceOriginalRecord":[{"@value":"https:\/\/circle.library.ubc.ca\/rest\/handle\/2429\/5760?expand=metadata","@language":"en"}],"Extent":[{"@value":"10379630 bytes","@language":"en"}],"FileFormat":[{"@value":"application\/pdf","@language":"en"}],"FullText":[{"@value":"TOWARDS A COMMUNICATION ASSESSMENT METHOD: A N EXAMINATION OF THE MEDIA TREATMENT OF SOCIAL POLICY AND FREE TRADE by RICHARD DEHLER BURNS B.A., The University of Waterloo, 1986 B.S.W. (Hons.), York University, 1991 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SOCIAL WORK in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (School of Social Work) We accept this thesis as conforming ^te^he required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA December 1996 \u00a9 Richard Dehler Burns, 1996 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia,, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying\" or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of S O C I A L - \u2022 V\u201e,QtejC-The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date \u00b017 T W 0 7 , DE-6 (2788) ABSTRACT A Critical Theoretical perspective is used to analyse the underlying logic of globalization (flexible capital accumulation) as problematic for social policy and programs. Conflicts between economic accumulation and political legitimation emerged as contradictory stagflation leading to delinking the gold standard and abandonment of the Keynesian consensus and Bretton Woods system. The Macdonald Royal Commission on Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada abandoned its claim to public enlightenment and social consensus in validating free trade. The economic constitution of free trade limits social rights and future political intervention into the economic sphere. The social orientation to emancipation and well-being are restrained to utilitarian discourse. Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School is compared with positivism and interpretivism within an analytic frame of ontology, epistemology and methodology. The historical background of the Frankfurt School is discussed with contributions by Adorno, Foucault, Freud, Habermas, Honneth, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. A meta-theoretical framework is developed for use in social work theory and practice. Jiirgen Habermas' Theory of Social Action is analysed within the frame as arguing the good life in the public sphere. Habermas' interpretation of the crisis of the welfare state as the colonization of the lifeworld by strategic communication is applied to the recent free trade and social policy debate. Universal ii pragmatics and the criteria of universal validity claims is developed. A communication assessment method is developed from Habermas' universal validity claims criteria and theory of communicative action. The typological criteria is used to measure public consensus on The Globe and Mail Newspaper coverage of Canadian public sphere discourse on free trade and social policy from 1980 to 1995. A multi-stage sample of textual arguments is deconstructed and analysed within an \"ideal speech situation\" of the hermeneutic-dialectical computer program ATLAS\/ti. Qualitative analysis and statistical measures of Chi-Square Analysis and Dendrograms are adapted to the validity claim criteria to describe the results. Methodological results are tentative, and presented as an exploration of theory applied to method which is useful for social work theory and practice. The importance of the Habermasian revision of Critical Theory to social work theory and practice is discussed. i i i T A B L E OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Table of Contents iv List of Tables vii List of Figures iX Acknowledgement x Dedication xi INTRODUCTION 1 Chapter One Pan-Critical Meta-Theory Zo A Meta-Theoretical Perspective Three Meta-Theoretical Traditions ^ 2 . Historical Background Normative Structure of Critical Theory J Ontology Axiological Assumptions ^ Epistemological Assumptions 37 Methodology and Praxis H-Z Media Studies ^ Importance to Social Work Discussion ^ Chapter Two Jiirgen Habermas Arguing the Good Life ^ Ontology 6 0 Epistemological Assumptions ^ Lifeworld and System ^ Colonization of the Lifeworld ^9 The Crisis of the Welfare State 7\u00a9 iv V The Good and the Just Life *7fe Intersubjectivity of Social Becoming 7\u00ae -Social Action &\u00a3 The Public Sphere 8*7 Free Trade and Social Policy \u00a37 Universal Pragmatics and the Justification of Validity Claims 9% Summary of the Habermasian Project Chapter Three Methodology \u00abCI Habermas' Validity Claims lOl. Prior Studies and Rationale for Sampling The Globe and Mail Newspaper 1 o f Data Collection and Sampling Procedure Ifc\u00a3 Reliability Raters Itf? Data Analysis Design Uo Chapter Four Findings and Analysis Descriptive Findings *'& Statistical Analysis 1 ^ Chapter Five Conclusions Glossary , S \" S Bibliography '\u00ae^* Appendix A . l A Summary of Positivism, Interpretivism, and IIS Critical Theory Appendix A.2 Three Meta-Methodological Approaches to life Research Appendix A.3 Evaluative Criteria For Each Data Collection 197 Step Appendix B . l Theory of Social Action 1^ 8 Appendix C. l Appendix C.2 Appendix D. l Appendix D.2 Print Media Coverage of Free Trade and Social Policy\/Program - 1980 to 1995 Globe and Mail Coverage of Free Trade and Social Policy\/Program - 1980 to 1995 Sample Articles by Categorical Inductive Strategy and Social Action Analyses Correlation Matrix for Time Difference between 11 Article Date Categories on 11 Variables Over Rescaled Absolute Euclidean Distance (Dissimilarity) and Similarity Coefficient Matrix 2 \u00bb 0 Appendix D.3 Quantitative Content of Argument Structure by Article Item Appendix E . l Appendix E.2 Appendix F . l Appendix F.2 Appendix F.3 Appendix G. l Reliability Inter-Rater Profile by Percent Reliability Inter-Rater Knowledge by Time Spent Per Article Item Pre-Study Questionnaire Study Questionnaire Post-Study Questionnaire Deconstructive Analysis of Textual Argument 2A Z US V l l LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1 Formal-Pragmatic Relations &t' Table 2.2 Contributions of Reproduction Processes to Maintaining the Structural Components of the Lifeworld ^ Table 2.3 Functional Differentiation of Social Formations ^ Table 2.4 Types of Action 6* Table 2.5 Reproductive Functions of Action Oriented to Mutual Understanding ? s Table 2.6 Stages in the Development of Law.... '. 77 Table 2.7 Elucidation of the Stages of Moral Consciousness (Kohlberg) \u00a9 z Table 2.8 Domains of Reality and Validity Claims of Language Usage Table 2.9 The Trivium of Communicative Evolution * Table 2.10 Universal Principles of the Ideal Speech Situation , Table 3.1 Definitional Referent of 54 Particular Stratagems under 4 Taxon of Validity Claims and Social Action Categories Table 4.1 Hierarchical Cluster Analysis of Argument Strategies with Dendrogram using Centroid Method -tt-M-Table 4.2 Hierarchical Cluster Analysis of Social Action with Dendrogram using Centroid Method 1 Table 4.3 Rescaled Absolute Chi-Squared Coefficient Matrix for 6-by-6 Social Action Categories ^7 Table 4.4 Hierarchical Cluster Analysis of Validity Claim Violation Categories with Dendrogram using Centroid Method *M V l l l Table 4.5 Chi-Squared Tests for 4-by-4 Validity Claim Violation Categories on 54-by-54 Inductive Strategy Variables \u00ab3b Table 4.6 Rescaled Absolute Chi-Squared Dissimilarity Coefficient Matrix for 4-by-4 Validity Claim Categories on 54-by-54 Variables. Table 4.7 Symmetric Measures for 4-by-4 Validity Claim Violation Categories on 54-by-54 Inductive Strategy Variables 131 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 Perceptual Map to the Three Meta-Theoretical Traditions ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Special thanks to my thesis committee mentors for providing an authentic educative experience, and the School of Social Work, The University of British Columbia for providing the \"ideal speech situation\" within which to be educated. DEDICATION In memory of Lenord Gratten Burns (1921 to 1996) and Dorothy Therese Dehler (1927 to 1983). INTRODUCTION A struggle is being waged between the factions of the capitalist class whose vested interests are served by protectionism and super-militarism, and the global banks and transnational corporations whose profits and power depend upon international free trade, detente, and accommodation with Third World economic nationalism. What is occurring is not just a deficit restructuring plan over short-run profits and power alignments, where Liberal Party public policy is no different from Progressive Conservative policy. We are seeing a struggle over the shape of the national division of power, the international division of labour, and the nature of the role of the state in the process of capital accumulation and redistribution for the coming decades (Honneth, 1995b; Sklar, 1980, p. 579). The policies of the Trudeau, Mulroney and Chretien governments cannot be fully appreciated except in the context of the formation of huge economic blocs on a global scale. When the classical-liberal ideologies led by Ronald Reagan came to power, it was inevitable that U.S. relations with Canada and other developed capitalist countries deteriorated. Feeling they had secured their positions within Canada and having acquired a substantial interest in U.S. corporations and the U.S. market, most of Canada's big corporations were now of the opinion that it was better to consolidate their positions. Most of Canadian big business abandoned the Trudeau government and sided with the Regan Administration and the U.S. transnational corporations as manifested not only in the political and military sphere but also economically in the form of the demand for free trade. l 2 Van Houten (1991, pp. 152-153) presents three forces of globalization in Canada. First, there was an acceleration of the process of corporate concentration in all branches of the economy leading to the rise of large, diversified Canadian owned conglomerates which transformed themselves into transnational corporations. Secondly, the process of concentration was encouraged by direct and indirect state intervention. The Trudeau government relaxed business competition rules and provided tax incentives to large Canadian corporations in order to help them become even larger and encourage their expansion into international markets, particularly but not only the U.S. market and their transformation into transnational. Thirdly, a qualitative leap took place in the late 1970's in the amount of Canadian direct investment going abroad. Canadian monopolies outgrew the nation-state, because it had more capital than it needed or could use for the development of the domestic economy. Canadian big businesses became exporters of capital on a far greater scale and transformed themselves into transnational corporations. These three elements of globalization in Canada may be more simply stated. First, the need for larger markets: the nation-state can no longer satisfy the accumulation needs of transnational corporations and their shareholders; Secondly, increased capital mobility and flexibility; and lastly, greater specialization (Drache & Gertler, 1993, p. ix). During the early 1980's, Canadian and other foreign firms became strong enough and wealthy enough to compete with U.S. corporations on U.S. soil. The actual result for Canada, under guise of globalization, was decreased global trade while increasing trade with the US. Conflict between the transnational corporation and the nation-state has long been an important one for underdeveloped countries, the subversion of national economic sovereignty 3 which foreign ownership represents, and the set of reactions expressed broadly by the term economic nationalism. A relatively new phenomenon, however is the emergence of this issue among countries such as Canada and Australia, which have most of the structural characteristics of economically developed countries, but have predominantly foreign ownership in their manufacturing and natural resource industries. Here the issue is posed in terms of the limited effectiveness of the traditional techniques of economic control and regulation in the context of what Levitt (1970) called a \"branch-plant economy.\" Labour is generally suspicious of the power and intentions of foreign corporations but conditioned to believe that they are an indispensable means of securing higher living standards. Different segments of national capital make tactical alliances with or against different segments of foreign capital depending on where they perceive their interests to lie. Block (1980) argues the nation-state is buffeted between the powerful pull from the multinational corporations to adapt to the requirements of transnationalized capital by accepting a reduction in its sovereignty on the one hand; and on the other, pressures from opposing national groups and classes who see the nation-state as the principal remaining means of defending their interests. In that sense we seem to be witnessing a process of denationalization of capital, a corollary of frvmmationalization as corporations adopt a truly global view, wherever they may be, and favouring those governments which offer them the biggest bribes. Up to WWI, capital was international but corporations were (by and large) national. Capital exports took place mainly in the form of portfolio investments financing more often than not locally-organized enterprises abroad in the production of primary products needed by the imperialists 4 centres. In the imperialists centres, national, monopolistic, vertically-integrated corporations, closely allied with their governments, fought each other for access to the raw materials and the markets of the world. The important development since that time is the direct organization of production abroad by monopoly capital, providing itself directly with primary products and penetrating foreign markets more and more through foreign production rather than exports of finished goods. In the process, direct investment has displaced portfolio flows as the main form of capital export, and national companies have become world corporations. Central to business's case against government interference is an ideology that deems the economy a \"private\" sphere, despite the enormous social power that is wielded there. Increasing government involvement in the economy breaks down both the fact and the ideology of the distinction between public1 and private spheres. According to the influential German theorist Jiirgen Habermas, this \"recoupling of the economic system to the political.. . repoliticizes the relations of production\" (1975, p. 36), and it creates dangers for the very survival of private power. A genuine \"substantive democracy, would bring to consciousness the contradiction between administratively socialized production and the continued private appropriation and use of surplus value\" (Habermas, 1975, p. 36). To avoid this problem, the modern state tends to develop \"a system of formal democracy\" which among other things involves \"a legitimation process that elicits . . . diffuse mass loyalty - but avoids participation For Habermas, the 'public sphere' is where citizens openly discuss issues of general social interest as equals. What Plato and Aristotle called the 'Polis' (Dalton, 1968, p. 65). They come together, not as subjects of the state or individuals pursuing their own economic interests, but as citizens. 5 [through] institutions and procedures that are democratic in form, while the citizenry . . . enjoy the status of passive citizens\" (Habermas, 1975, p. 37). Alan Wolfe's law of political motion for the seventies - \"the more the center tries to woo it,\" the stronger the Right becomes, and the further to the Right the centre must shift applies here (Sklar, 1980, p. 579). Rather than co-opting the Right, the Right becomes stronger the more the centre tries to woo it. Wolfe (1980, p. 548) claims the price trans-capitalists are being forced to pay in order to hold power is the public repudiation of their own ideas. A partial welfare state is as difficult to realize as a partial pregnancy. At stake in the debate over the responsibility of government, as Crozier et al (1975) pointed out, is not the economic issue of the fiscal crisis but the political one of the rights or ordinary people. If the matter were simply one of trying to bring budgets under control, a middle of the road position might make sense, gradually curtailing expenditures and raising taxes. But if the issue is political, then the middle ground dissolves. On the one hand, social services establish certain expectations which, as Bell (1976) has notes, tends to rise. Once they have been given social security, it is difficult to keep people from wanting health insurance, and then public day care. Even in the United States, the welfare state has never lost its popularity (Wolfe, 1980b, p. 550). On the other hand, any attempts by centrist factions to speak the language of fiscal responsibility and restraint fuels a right wing reaction against the welfare state in toto. Reactionaries are simply better at tax-cutting rhetoric than centrist Liberals. If the public mood becomes one of seeking large-scale tax reductions, then political discourse will be led by the extreme Right, as already appears to be the case. When Liberal Leader John Turner 6 tried to appear as Conservative, they undermine their own base in the middle and found himself running after the Right, always trying to keep up with a mood that outstrips them. Then the public moods seems to be one of mouthing the Right's rhetoric of tax cuts and limitations on government while electing Liberals (or Democrats) to preside over the resulting mess. There is an apparent stand-off. The Right is frustrated because its ideas are being adopted as it is being excluded from power and the Democrats are frustrated because they are in power but unable to develop any ideas. This is not the atmosphere in which ready solutions to contradictions are possible. Wolfe (1980, p. 301) argues that the deep conflict between the legitimation and accumulation functions of the capitalist state is only a starting point for understanding the nature of government activity (Wolfe, 1980, p, 301). Transnational corporations are concerned that democratic institutions were making it difficult for political leaders to adhere to liberal economic principles in domestic and international economic policy (Girvan, 1980, p. 521). These concerns were voiced in The Crisis of Democracy which adopts Habermas' ideals for corporate purposes (Wolfe, 1980, p. 301). Corporate commitment to democracy may be as much tactical or strategic as principled, that democratic structures be retained only until their breakdown is further advanced (McBride & Shields, 1993; Wolfe, 1980, p. 300). Huntington (cited in Wolfe, 1980, p. 306) views the changing patterns of political perception and participation as causing an excess of democracy, which has a correlative or corollary, the paucity of accumulation. The serious debate surrounding this work confers legitimacy upon its ideas. The crisis of democracy reflects a struggle for much more than the right to consume 7 either corporate products or liberal democratic symbols. It reflects a desire for an ideal speech situation translated into ideal action. This is more than the hard-won right to choose between candidates who reflect variations on the same theme, or how much hunger the poor should exchange for how much warmth in winter. The crisis of democracy reflects a struggle to assert democratic control over the political, economic, and social system. Formal political democracy cannot exist without economic democracy and economic democracy and economic democracy cannot exist under liberal capitalism (Sklar, 1980, pp. 45-47). The legitimation function is responsible for obtaining mass loyalty to the system. Just as accumulation has moved from the realm of the private corporation to that of public agencies, legitimation becomes centralized as well. Families, neighbourhoods and private associations play a smaller role in structuring obedience; education propaganda agencies and the bureaucracy become much more active (Wolfe, 1980, p. 301). The conflict between legitimation and accumulation is historic. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, the constant and frequent revolutionary pressures of the urban working class had brought about the extension of the suffrage and, at the same time, the beginning of serious state regulation of the economy (Marx, 1867, pp. 389-416; Resnick, 1984, pp. 20-22). Left to their own devices (\"freedom of contract\") market forces tended brutally to exploit and even destroy working people. Aided by the Depression and the Second World War, the process of state involvement in the economy reached enormous proportions. When Canada entrenched its Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada, 1982), government spending in support of private enterprise and non-corporate welfare had approached fifty percent of Gross National Expenditure (Bird, 1979, p. 9). State sector workers accounted for perhaps one-8 quarter of the labour force (Bird, 1979, pp. 97-100). This has been a constant and increasing source of annoyance and concern to the most powerful and wealthiest sectors of society, that is business, not only for the immediate interference with profit-making it poses, but for the long-term consequences of popular control of the economy. Business's response has been an unrelenting campaign against government involvement in the economy, except where it is the beneficiary. The result is the wholesale privatization of government-owned enterprise and the massive attempt at de-regulation that is the \"Free Trade\" movement, a drive to end all purely political barriers to the free movement of capital throughout the North American continent, while protecting the rights of business to receive government subsidies so long as they do not \"discriminate\" on merely national grounds (Drache, 1987, p. 77; 1988). Some say Canada was on the verge of realizing the good life and the just life by 1969. By 1973, this ideal was shattered (CBC, November 1996). Thirty years earlier, the 1943 Bretton Woods system was adopted as a compromise solution (Ruggies, 1982, p. 393) to resolve the clash between domestic autonomy and international stability. The \"essence of embedded liberalism [was] to devise a form of multilateralism that is compatible with requirements of domestic stability\" (Ruggies, 1982, p. 399). This Keynesian consensus resulted in unprecedented growth and prosperity in North America. Yet in 1972, the OPEC embargo signalled that something was wrong. On the surface, it would appear that capital and labour had reached a point of detente (Sklar, 1980, p. 7). The simultaneous growth of inflation and unemployment, called stagflation occurred in direct contradiction to Keynesian theory (Cooper et al, 1973, p. 3). Keynesianism suffered a fatal blow, and fell into disfavour among big business, government economists, and policy-9 makers. On August 15,1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon delinked gold and the dollar, thus unilaterally destroying a central pillar of the Brettoh Woods system (Cooper, et al, 1973, p. 30; Gilpin, 1987, p. 140; Harvey, 1990, pp. 137-145; Sklar, 1980, p. 7; Tester, 1996b, p. . 124). Gowa (1983) argues this action was taken to increase U.S. freedom of economic and political action. The \"Nixon shocks\" violated the rules of \"free trade\" as the unobstructed flow of capital, goods and services between countries as embedded in Bretton Woods. This harsh display of economic nationalism horrified the multi- and transnational corporations. Since the economies of most countries are dwarfed by the economic power and resource control of the largest transnational corporations and banks (Sklar, 1980, pp. 9-17), these corporations were able to administer a short, sharp disciplinary shock to the nation-state. Traditionally, free trade negotiations have focussed on the elimination of tariffs and quantitative restrictions on merchandise trade. With the completion in 1987 of the major tariff reductions negotiated under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Tokyo Round, tariffs were no longer the main focus, particularly for Canadian exports to the United States (U.S.). The vast majority of Canadian shipments to the U.S. entered tariff free, and less than 10% of exports faced U.S. tariffs in excess of 5%. Products facing these higher tariffs included clothing, textiles and footwear (Vosko, 1993, 1994). For Canada, more important than the removal of remaining U.S. tariffs was the objective of maintaining secure and stable access to U.S. markets without constant trade disputes over U.S. countervail or other safeguard actions; to reach consensus with the U.S. on what Canadian federal government assistance to industry was countervailable; exemption from 'Buy America' rules; 10 and to settle upon a dispute-settlement mechanism that did not rest entirely upon decisions made in the U.S. The U.S. wanted all trade in services included in any free trade arrangement. Services include the communications and cultural sectors (telecommunications, radio, television, newspapers and publishing), advertising, transportation, consulting, recreational facilities and financial services of all types. The U.S. also wanted unhindered access for investment in Canadian industries, and particularly guaranteed access to energy and minerals , without Canadian federal government surveillance or restrictions of any type. The gains many Canadians expected if negotiating objectives were achieved included the possibility of attaining greater economies of scale and lower costs in manufacturing by having guaranteed access to the huge U.S. market, greater incentives for domestic firms to do more research and development and adopt the latest technology available from abroad, more processing of natural resources in Canada prior to exporting them, greater employment, lower foreign ownership in the long run, and lower prices for consumers because of domestic tariffs being removed and greater productivity of Canadian industry. Dispute occurred within Canada regarding how extensive the gains would be. Some observers felt that they were greatly exaggerated and that the costs of free trade were being understated or ignored. The macroeconomic models used to estimate the gains frequently disagreed in their predictions, so that their major contribution was to emphasize how difficult it is to predict the effects of trade liberalization. Al l parties agreed, however, that a flexible Canadian dollar relative to the U.S. dollar, was an important safety valve. Since the U.S. had come off the gold standard, it would be easier for the Canadian dollar to be artificially pushed closer to parity 11 with the U.S. dollar. This side-deal would cause many Canadian industries difficulty in competing with U.S. firms in the Canada-U.S. market. A concern of some Canadians was whether a bilateral trade arrangement with the U.S. involving all service industries, including many of a cultural nature, combined with relatively unhindered access for U.S. investor to the Canadian economy, and a continental energy policy would erode Canadian economy and political sovereignty irreversibly. A closely related concern was with respect to the overestimate by many Canadians of the net gains from free trade and the hope of the federal Conservative government that a free trade deal would restore its favour with voters. The fear was that these conditions might stimulate Canada to give away too much in the negotiations without gaining its main objective -guaranteed access to the U.S. market through exemption from highly protectionist existing and forthcoming U.S. fair trade or contingency laws. The position taken by most of those concerned was that a multilateral approach for free trade through the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations may be a more desirable alternative for Canada in the long run. Grinsun and Cameron (1993, p. 10) believe free trade will result in: (1) transnational corporations and capital taking the lead role in the economic sphere; (2) weakening government intervention by redefining the relationship between the state and civil society; (3) impose neo-liberal economics policies (monetary macroeconomics, privatization and deregulation) in place of Keynesian full employment; (3) harmonize downward labour, occupational, social, and environmental standards (social dumping); (4) promote regressive, post-Fordist restructuring and weaken trade unions; and, (5) weaken the provision of public services within all member states. 12 PM Mulroney and President Reagan signed the Free Trade Agreement January 1988. Despite the agreement, trade disputes between Canada and the U.S. still arise. Softwood lumber, salmon, wheat, sugar and beef have all prompted retaliatory tariffs and have invokes the disputes settlement mechanisms. The Royal Commission on Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada (Macdonald Commission) (Canada, 1985) played a key role in the validation (\"legitimation\") of free trade by shifting this option to the centre of the Canadian political agenda. By objectively distorting the socio-economic utility of free trade, the Commission abandoned the classical duty of knowledge to provide public enlightenment (Wisman, 1990, p. 113). Since royal commissions are perceived to operate impartially, they are the ideal instruments of brokerage politics. In contrast to the theoretical purpose of producing a consensus through the formal process of fact-finding, the job of a royal commission is to appear to have produced a consensus. A royal commission can change not only the focus of public discourse but also conventional wisdom, by generating an \"expert\" body of knowledge (Drache & Cameron, 1985, p. xi). Commission member Gerald Docquier argued that the commission should have sought \"full employment and social justice\" (cited in Drache & Cameron, 1985, p. x). Instead, the business agenda dominated deliberations. The Progressive Conservative media communications strategy is explicitly stated in a document from the Prime Minister's Office dated in September 1985: Our communication strategy should rely less on educating the general public than on getting across the message that the trade initiative is a good idea. In other words, a selling job. The public support generated should be recognized as extremely soft and likely to evaporate rapidly if the debate is allowed to get out of control, so as to erode the central focus of the message. At the same time a substantial majority of the public 13 may be willing to leave the issue in the hands of the government and other interested groups, if the government maintains communications control of the situation. Benign neglect from a majority of Canadians may be the realistic outcome of a well-executed communications program (cited in Winter, 1990, pp. 46-47). The key problem leading to the adoption of freer trade policies was stagflation2 (Sklar, 1980, p. 7). Labour typically identifies unemployment as problematic, while capital interests identify inflation as the culprit. Though Keynes wanted low unemployment and low inflation, the inflation-unemployment dichotomy which positivistic science defines as our options, frequent results in a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. Wisman (1990, p. 121) argues that rather than disclosing the social potential, Keynesian economics unintentionally acts to restrict social consciousness as to the options for improving human welfare. Canadian social policy and programs have largely been the product of Keynesian economics. The Canadian government's belated invitation to the Director General of the GATT Multinational Trade Organizations (MTO) to \"review . . . . implications of the MTO's responsibilities for its cooperation with the Bretton Woods institutions, as well as forms such cooperation might take, with a view to achieving greater coherence in global economic policy making\" (External Affairs, 1993), highlights that nation states \"are subservient to the needs of the marketplace\" (CCPA, 1992, p. 1). The deskilling of the nation state reduces it's capacity to buffer against the rapacity of the marketplace without a domestic Social Charter (Glasbeek, 1992, p. 115). 2 Stagflation refers to the situation of high inflation coupled with high unemployment. 14 The concept of a global perspective on social problems (Santiago, 1993, p. 207; Tester, 1992) is supported by Walker's (1993) argument that Canadian de-industrialization is not the result of the Canada-U.S Free Trade Agreement. Similarly, SPARC'S (1993a, p. 2) call for complementary social strategies to economic restructuring and free trade in meeting the broad aims of society support a global perspective on well-being. The future of social security and well-being must assess the impact of the global economic recession and the collapse of the centrally planned economic systems (ISS, 1992, p. 9). Drover incisively notes that perception of free trade determines \"concerns for social policy harmonization\" (1988, 6). And while Frenzel and McCready (1992, p. 342) do not specifically cite Drover, they counter that \"concern over social programs\" is based on a \"misperception\" of the magnitude of social program expenditures. Seemingly oblivious to utilitarian debate (Bentham, 1982; Mills, 1968, p. 25), Frenzel and McCready quantify U.S. social program expenditures as 2 percent of GDP higher than Canadian expenditures. That Canadian social programs quantitatively delivered \"the greatest happiness for the greatest number\" highlight the qualitative element within utilitarianism which is classical liberalism. Though Frenzel and McCready perceptively distinguish the Canadian contractarianism of \"peace, order and good government\" in the British North America Act from the American utilitarianism inherent in the \"life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness\" of the U.S. Constitution, their utilitarian misperception clouds the very issue of social policy harmonization to the general equivalent of utilitarianism. As Sen notes, \"utilitarianism is an inadequate definitional base for well-being\" (cited in Drover and Kerans, 1993, p. 4). Which make \"the relative role of (Canadian) government\" 15 (Frenzel and McCready, 1992, p. 352) in social programs harmonizing to the residual role of the U.S. government (Spicker, 1993, p. 122) is the core of the issue. Leaving \"a strong residue of uneasiness over the fate of Canadian social programs\" (Frenzel and McCready, 1992, p. 358) by \"the harmonization of social programs revealed at the core\" (Hum, 1988, p. 28) of an absolutist, residual model (Spicker, 1993, p. 7). Concerns for harmonization and the race to the bottom inherent in free trade pale in comparison with the real significance of \"the limitations they place on future governments and the future democratic majorities that stand behind them\" (McBride & Shields, 1993, p. 169): \"In the past when things went wrong, governments could try new policies. The tragedy now is that governments' ability to act appropriately when the economy deteriorates has been abdicated by almost total reliance on market forces, a turn of events that reflects not simply the political whim of the current government, but that has been codified in international law\" (Cohen, 1992, p. 15). More disturbing than the harmonization of public policy within the free trade zone or even the dismantling of Canada (McBride & Shields, 1993), is the economic thought underlying the recent Canadian free trade debate. The free trade compromise abandoned the classical duty of knowledge to provide \"public enlightenment\" (Wisman, 1990, p. 113). Free trade was justified to the Canadian public as an instrument to revitalize the Canadian economy while preserving the unique Canadian social policies. Despite these promises of jobs, prosperity and protection, the free trade negotiations were the subject of intense public debate (McRae & Steger, 1988, p. 3). The popular Canadian consensus was for democratic control of the economy with new forms of participation. Canadians were asked to reach \"a 16 new social consensus on economic policy\" (Drache & Cameron, 1985, p. ix). In fact, free trade agreements \"are precisely about restricting or eliminating choice at the societal level\" (McBride & Shields, 1993, p. 169). The full nature of problems, as well as the full array of options for their solutions, is rarely given an open public forum. Habermas is more forceful: The solution of technical problems is not dependent on public discussion. Rather, public discussions could render problematic the framework within which the tasks of government action present themselves as technical ones. Therefore the new politics of state interventionism requires a depoliticization of the mass of the population. To the extent that practical questions are eliminated, the public realm also loses its political function (1970b, pp. 103-104). Instead, politics is reduced to the electorate's casting a choice for one or another candidate with the candidates team of economic experts (Wisman, 1990, p. 120). If there is anywhere that media coverage of important events must occur it is in the public sphere. Yet, The Globe and Mail's coverage of the 1988 Federal, \"free trade\" election was pro-free trade and pro-Progressive Conservative (Winter, 1990, pp. 135-142). In a positivistic study that was methodologically designed as a circular argument (Winter, 1990, pp. 128), the ultraconservative Fraser Institute think-tank found The Globe and Mail was balanced in coverage of free trade (Fraser Institute, 1988). Nevertheless, even the Fraser Institute concluded, The Globe and Mail were strongly was biassed in favour of the Progressive Conservatives (Fraser Institute, 1989, p. 2; Winter, 1990, pp. 128,141). Studies found that \"free trade is good\/bad for you\" (Winter, 1990, p. 29). Evolutionary changes must be compared continually with genuine revolutionary alternatives, alternatives which begin with the social, political, and economic needs of the 17 marginalised people of the world as the objective of economic development and social change (Girvan, 1980, p. 464). People are taught what to think, never how to think. \"Higher education is the most important value-producing system in society. That it works poorly or at cross-purposes with society should be a matter of great concern\" (Crozier, 1975, p. 185). Since modern social thought has been largely moulded by its formation within the evolution of capitalist society (Habermas, 1984, p. 4), it too has abrogated its duty to enlightenment (Brunkhorst, 1992, p. 146; Wright, 1993). Social policy and programs have met the needs of capital accumulation. The institutions of capital accumulation operate by an instrumental form of action which constricts the possibility of communicative interaction. The instruments of capital, \". . . money and power - more concretely, markets and administrations - take over the integrative functions which were formerly fulfilled by consensual values and norms, or even by processes of reaching understanding\" (Habermas, 1992, p. 175). Wright (1993) says Canadian progress toward enlightenment, as the intersubjectivity of the individual and the collective, has been replaced by technological progress and progressive capital accumulation. Yet liberal economics as an ideology is in a state of crisis. The very essence of economics concerns its social function, its scope and its methodology. Even the liberal premise of separation between the political and economic realm is considered obsolete: \"issues related to economics are at the heart of modern politics\" (Cooper, 1973, p.). We could use economic thought to participate in the process of public enlightenment as to exactly what ends or goals might constitute the public good and the just economic order (Habermas, 1974, p. 40). Economics could address the social practice of interaction. 18 Economics could also participate in the public sphere where 'public opinion' is formed. But, as Polanyi points out, \"Instead of the economic system being embedded in social relationships, these relationships are now embedded in the economic system (cited in Dalton, 1968, pp. 70-71). The importance to social work, which seeks emancipatory enlightenment as progress will be apparent as the positivism limits the distribution resources and thus highlights the stakeholder need for identity, resources and caring relationships (Drover and Kerans, 1993, 5). The capacity to influential participatory discourse without constraint, which is the essence of social work practice (Drover and Kerans, 1992, 67). For critical theory, which calls into question our very notion of progress, a theory of the necessity of overcoming distorted communication must be part of an endless process of collective learning (Morrow, 1994, 320). Habermas argues that decisions can be reduced to yes\/no answers. These are not black and white dichotomies, but a call for such diffuse simplicity. Most members of the public cannot participate in debating discourse, this suggests the need for a return to the classic trivium or even quadrium. Canadians were told that free trade was just a commercial agreement which did not effect social policy and programs. They were asked to reach \"a new social consensus on economic policy\" (Drache & Cameron, 1985, p. ix). How are we to know if Canadians reached such a consensus, and whether this consensus was rational? The ideal speech situation, a public sphere free of domination is an ideal against which to measure progress. This study develops a communication assessment method from Jiirgen Habermas' theory of 19 argumentation and universal validity claim critieria. Chapter One will set the meta-theoretical context within which this study will occur. Chapter Two details the critical reflective \"lens\" of Jiirgen Habermas through which the problematic will be critically examined. Chapter Three develops a critical methodology based on the ideas of Habermas as posited within a meta-critical theoretical framework. Details of the problematic discourse will be described. The problematic will then be situated within the critical framework for an assessment of it's validity claim. Chapter Four will analyse the findings of the methodology, the claim of the problematic to validity, and problems of the sample, methodology and rating reliability. A Conclusion will follow which discusses implications of this methodology for the social work profession, examines the theoretical results of the study, and offers direction to achieving the \"good life.\" CHAPTER ONE iM\/V-CRITICAL META-THEORY In this chapter I describe the meta-theoretical dimensions of Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School tradition. The chapter is organized into six sections. First, I provide a brief overview of the three meta-theoretical traditions of positivism1, interpretivism, and critical theory. Second, the goals and underlying philosophical assumptions of critical theory are presented. Third, I offer a workbench for meta-critical method with salient dimensions of critical theory for meta-application in subsequent chapters. Fourthly, I discuss critical theory's contributions to media studies. Fifth, I discuss the importance of critical theory to social work. Finally, I discuss potential applications of critical theory to free trade for academics, public interest groups, and private interest groups, for emancipating us from the contemporary crisis of the welfare state. A Meta-Theoretical Perspective The meta-theoretical perspective of critical theory (Bohman, 1990) is a systematic critique of social conditions that aims to envision both the good life and the just life. Meta-1 Positivism refers to empirical approaches that apply natural science methods to social phenomena (e.g., behaviourism, cognitive psychology, and systems theory). Positivism does not refer to the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle (Outhwaite & Bottomore, 1994, p. 697). Interpretivism refers to any approach that stresses a socially constructed reality that must be interpreted (e.g., semiotics, hermeneutics, and ethnomethology). 2-0 \"2-1 theory derives from the Greek, meta- expressing such ideas as change, succession, progress, beyondness, higher and, finally transcending (Onions, 1966, p. 572; Partridge, 1958, p. 399; Skeat, 1980, p. 344). Theory derives from the Greek and Latin, thebria2 meaning a looking, seeing, contemplation, whence a lens (Onions, 1966, p. 916; Partridge, 1958, pp. 710-711; Skeat, 1980, p. 551). Therefore, meta-theory can literally mean, a transcending lens of progress in addition to being a theory of theory. Similarly, metanoia derives from the Greek, meta-, and the Greek, noesis and noia, meaning mind, usually intellectual mind or world reason and nous3, the strategic mind (Partridge, 1958, p. 441). Thus, metanoia is the transcendence of, or emancipation from intellectual limitations. Metanoia is the obverse of paranoia (para, beside). Where paranoia is the enclosing, constraint of intellectual limitations, metanoia is the emancipation from, or transcendence of intellectual limitations. In this way, mind is understood as total Beingness, rather than a mechanical device to grasp current conceptions (Walker, 1986). Critical theory explicitly declares an emancipatory interest in releasing constraints on human freedom and potential. Since critical theory does not represent a single or unified approach, we cannot describe it with a single definition (Crozier, 1991, p. 90; Held, 1980; Tar 1979). Self-knowledge \"is the first task and the deepest principle of critical theory\" Aristotle classified knowledge into three general groups: a) Thedria, abstract or cognitive knowing; b) Praxis, practical knowledge that comes by doing, from activity or development of a manual skill; and c) Poiesis orpoetikos, knowledge that is involved in making, producing or creating something (Angeles, 1994, p. 233). Aristotle distinguishes between nous pathetikos, the strategic sense-testimonial mind, and nous poetikos, the divine aspect of mind able to comprehend the eternal, only in the abstract (Angeles, 1994, pp. 207-208). \"\"2.\"L (Honneth, 1993, p. 9) which is \"supposed to liberate the species from a disturbance, a 'pathology' in its process of self-formation\" (Honneth, 1993, p. 279). Jiirgen Habermas, a contemporary critical theorist whose theory will be further described, partakes of psychoanalysis as \"the prototype\" of critical theory by incorporating its insights into \"the significance of self-reflection\" (Held, 1980, p. 322). As Held points out, the methodological character of psychoanalysis provides critical theory with the systematic insight into the deep-structures of society (1980, p. 324). By drawing on the metatheoretical and dialectical-hermeneutic techniques of psychoanalysis, critical theory can identify potential points of crisis in the deep-structure, and dissolve ideological deformations. The term critical theory usually refers to the group of researchers who collected around the Institute for Social Research (i.e., Frankfurt School) (Fuhrman and Snizek, 1979\/80). Although the projects of Habermas and Honneth attract attention to critical theory, no systematic presentation of these ideas relating to free trade and social policy exists in the literature. Three Meta-Theoretical Traditions Comparing critical theory to existing perspectives is the simplest introduction. Figure 1.1 presents a perceptual map of alternative approaches to seeking knowledge in free trade research. This map positions alternatives along two continua (adapted from Denzin and Lincoln, 1994, pp. 107-117; Smith, 1990). The subjective-objective axis focuses on the fundamental assumptions made about the nature of reality. Extreme subjectivism holds that we construct social reality based on the perceptions of individuals. Extreme objectivism \u20222.3. assumes that social reality exists as a concrete objective entity, which is independent of our perceptions (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994, p. 111). The order-chaos axis focuses on views regarding social change, which range from a regulation or 'order' to a radical change or 'chaotic' stance. 'Order' approaches asks how can we hold society together without change, so it does not fall apart. The 'chaos' approach asks how we may emancipate human beings from the structures, that limit and repress their developments (Smith, 1990). Objective-order constructs presently dominate free trade research (cluster 1 in Fig. 1.1), which adopts an economic orientation focused on explaining, and predicting existing market behaviour. Positivism views scientific certitude as \"inexorably lead[ing] to human progress\" (Dean and Fenby, 1989, p. 47). Some economic research has adopted a hermeneutic approach (Lavoie, 1990; Palmer, 1990, pp. 299-318) emphasizing a subjective-order orientation (cluster 2 in Fig. 1.1), and some economic research uses critical theory (cluster 4, in Fig. 1.1) as adapted from Habermas (Wisman, 1990, pp. 113-133). Although this new research clearly enriches the field, it generally just describes society. Like other current research, it is not critical or visionary. Critical theory stresses both the subjective and objective aspects of social reality but also seeks social change that will improve human life. Given the important role economics plays in public policy and social welfare, a social change orientation is relevant. In Weber's view, the process of historical progress has dissolved into \"pure utilitarianism\" (cited in Pusey, 1987, p. 53). Habermas revised this view of progress by stressing that the changed perspective is also a narrowed perspective (Pusey, 1987, p. 53), and the pressure for rationality potential of mutual understanding in communication Subjective Objective Figure 1.1 Perceptual Map of The Three Meta-Theoretical Traditions \"increases the need for achieved consensus, and this increases the expenditure of interpretive energies and the risk of descensus\" (Habermas, 1989, p. 183). A \"media of communication\" can divert or hoodwink these treacherous pressures of descensus (Habermas, 1989, p. 183). Empiricism has colonized modern society, and dominates both free trade theory and social work theory which aim at technical control. Economic and social work practices have a longstanding reliance on positivism and the empirical analytic model (Dean and Fenby, 1989, pp. 46-47). This dominance distorts the emancipatory orientation of seeking to liberate people from constraining structures, yet encourages us to recognize that we inescapably tie knowledge to interests (Balaban, 1989). The issue must become not whether one can be apolitical in research or declaring which political stance one takes, but how can research be pre-political or pre-ideological. Critical theorists question the very aim of social science. Since critical theory asserts the impossibility of separating the observer from the observed, the reified consciousness of the critical observer inculcates a positivistic nature (Balaban, 1989). Habermas describes the \"colonization of the inner world\" by an \"autonomized social substance,\" as penetrating from 'outside' into the 'inner' world of the individual (1989, pp. 522-547). Both positivists and interpretivists (clusters 1 and 2 in Fig. 1.1), regard the use of scientific knowledge as external to the knowledge itself (Sewart, 1978). They produce knowledge as neutral information, which they can variously apply, according to the interests of the group applying the information. By separating knowledge (facts) from use (interests), conventional approaches rarely challenge the existing system; they tend to preserve the status quo, even pursue the status quo ante. Critical theorists do not believe that science is an activity removed from practical or moral action. The connections between theory and application are of central importance. Critical theory is a political and moral social science, designed to change society for the better (Fuhrman, 1979). In a free trade context, the output of critical theory may be useful to academic, public, and private interests. For the academic constituency, critical theory provides a new approach that investigates those aspects of life that constrains some stakeholders or that generates conflict. For the public constituency, critical theory provides a systematic approach to revealing deception and its consequences. It also has potential to generate social change strategies that may prove useful to legislators and activist organizations. For the private constituency, critical theory may provide a way to achieve comparative advantage without contradicting the public interest. As companies' policies improve on such issues as the protection of the environment, animal testing, and treatment of women and minorities, they receive a better rating and potentially can capture a very profitable market segment. From a critical perspective, this action is significant because it resolves the tension between public '2-6 and private interests. Wright, in translating Innis suggests using \"tension between opposites so as to avoid domination\" (1993, p. 67). Historical Background The dynamic historical context in which critical theory arose has had an impact on the theorists and their ideas. The Russian revolution that held such promise degenerated into Stalinism, and fascism and Naziism gained powerful footholds in Europe. The critical theorists, who were primarily middle-class, German-Jewish intellectuals, were forced to flee their homes. Their forced exile and subsequent isolation in the United States gave them a common sense of purpose, to construct an approach that was both scientific and political - a progressive and positive force in changing society (Held, 1980; Jay, 1973; Pippin, 1978; and Stern, 1983). Critical theory developed out of two general periods. The first began in 1923 with the founding of the Institute of Social Research (i.e., the Frankfurt School) and ended fifty years later with the death of Max Horkheimer. The second period began with Jiirgen Habermas' continuing project of remoulding of critical theory. The roots of critical theory lie in reinterpretations of Kant and of Marx in the early 1920s by scholars such as Lukas, Korsch, Gramsci, and Mannheim. Two strands of thought emerge from Kantian critique of reason (Kant, 1781). The first is historical research and reflection. The second infuses the historical dimension originating in Hegel's critique of Kant (Crozier, 1991, pp. 91-92). Scholars were also interested in recovering the original ideas of Marx before his ideas were corrupted by attempts to adapt their meaning to political and economic circumstances (Feenberg, 1981). These researchers were not members of the Institute of Social Research, but their work influenced the development of what we would later call critical theory. Founded as an autonomous research organization, the Institute was formally associated with the University of Frankfurt. Thus, the Frankfurt School. Under the guidance of its first significant director, Grunberg, the Institute remained officially independent of all party affiliations (Held, 1980), a circumstance that contributed much to its achievements (Jay, 1973). In 1931, Horkheimer replaced Grunberg as director of the institute (Tar, 1977). Horkherimer, along with Adorno, Lowenthal, Marcuse, and Pollack, approached political economy more philosophically. Specifically, they became united in their commitment to explore the relationship between knowledge (theory) and action (practice). Simultaneously, four psychoanalysts became members of the institute: Fromm, Landauer, Meng, and Fromm-Reichmann (Jay, 1973). The psychoanalysts added an emphasis on reflection, dialogue, and emancipation, notions that eventually became useful in forming critical theory's methodology. By exploring the relation between individual and society, they helped to link the economic base and cultural superstructure. Although each of these individuals had a unique research agenda, under Horkheimer's direction, general themes and a body of work arose that were eventually called critical theory. Habermas (1989c, 292) argues that six themes dominated the Institute up to the New York break up in the early 1940s: (a) the forms of integration in postliberal societies, (b) family socialization and ego development, (c) mass media and mass culture, (d) the social psychology behind the cessation of protest, (e) the theory of art, and (f) the critique of positivism and science. The following themes represent a summary of their works: 1. Research should focus on both a critique of society (i.e., the structure of authority and the emergence of mass culture; Jay, 1973) and the ways in which society is know (i.e., positivism and interpretivism). 2. Criticism of science and society should be interdisciplinary. The boundaries between the social sciences fragment scholars and inevitably blur their understanding of interconnections. They require a combination of philosophy, structural, and psychological perspectives to understand authority, mass culture, and science. 3. They should reject Orthodox Marxism (Held, 1980; Jay, 1973; and Tar, 1977) due to the risk of substituting one ideological domination with another (Dean & Fenby, 1989, 50). Changes in social context (i.e., the failure of Marxism in the Soviet Union, the separation of ownership and control of production, the emergence of the professional managerial class, and the ability of capitalism to absorb crises) had rendered this perspective obsolete. The proletariat would not be the agent of change. New mechanisms had to be found for connecting theory to practice (praxis). 4. Research should emphasize the societal totality (Held, 1980; Sewart, 1978) . If science is to participate in the process of social development, facts cannot be separated from values. The totality includes the social ends and technical means. 5. Genuine knowledge (products of science) is the most effective instrument for the emancipation of humans (Comstock, 1982). Science should focus on improving the quality of life for repressed social groups. (Critical theorists did not agree on how to defend the normative basis of critical theory). As the Frankfurt School established its research program under Horkheimer, the Nazis assumed power and the critical theorists were forced to flee Germany (Held, 1980; Jay, 1973; Tar, 1977). By 1934, through efforts of the US Office of Strategic Services, the group had found a home at Columbia University. Feeling alienated in the hub of the capitalist world, the members retreated into their work. The next sixteen years of cultural isolation were their most productive (Jay, 1973, pp. 355-370; Wolff and Moore, 1967, pp. 427-433; McCarthy, 1978, pp. 442-464). Their work continued until 1950 when the institute was invited to return to Frankfurt. Returning as celebrities, Horkheimer and Adorno disseminated the group's ideas in Europe. Marcuse and Fromm remained in America and eventually became well , known to American social scientists. Herbert Marcuse focussed on the dialectical tension of progress as unidimensional. That is, a macrological analysis of the totally administered affluent society in search of oppositional tendencies using the criterion of marginalization. Economic well-being sought through war, could only be avoided by an ontologically reconstructed episteme4 of production. Marcuse (1966) believed social reproduction must be without the determinism of domination and exploitation, for the power of corporate capitalism stifles the emergence of such an imaginative consciousness (Marcuse, 1972, p. 24). Marcuse's focus on Eros as the reversal of Thanatic progress (1974, p. xiv), was in response to Freud's depiction of progress as the liberation of Eros from the destructive domination of Thanatos. Freud was not a member of the Frankfurt School, though his exploration of emancipation within the inherently dialectical progress (Freud, 1962) is an important contribution to this tradition. Sisyphus's emancipation from the circularity of progress (Bulfinch, 1978, p. 186) was by outwitting death. The outcome of emancipatory struggles as Hitler emerged in Germany, was then unforeseen (Freud, 1962, p. 92). Like Freud, Foucault's work also informs the tradition of emancipation, where power is seen to derive from discourse (Gosden, 1994, p. 142). Discursive power \"is everywhere; 4 Derive from the Greek, meaning, to know. The epi-, upon + histemi, I place. Thus, a positioning of oneself required for comprehension (Partridge, 1959, p. 892). . 1 0 not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere\" (Foucault, 1981, p. 93). The function of discourse is a means for control (Honneth, 1993, p. 141), where the rules of discourse \"define . . . the control of objects\" (Foucault, 1981, p. 49). A discursive praxis or episteme (Honneth, 1993, 110, 143) orders a \"knowledge whose function is to control the natural or social processes of the environment\" (Honneth, 1993, p. 143). Thus, discourse is an ordering of statements under the common function of controlling reality \"constituted by the impulse of an interest in domination\" (Honneth, 1993, p. 145). \"Ontological statements about the constitution of linguistic reality thus finally account for the object domain\" (Honneth, 1993, p. 148). As Foucault is unable to consistently define the central idea of \"discourse,\" he concludes with \"the functional characterization of discourse as a means of domination\" (Honneth, 1993, p. 148). Truth, for Foucault, \"is a thing of this world\" (1980, p. 131), the product of multiple constraint. The regime of truth, is a political economy characterized by five traits. First, truth \"is centred on the form of scientific discourse.\" Second, truth is \"subject to constant economic and political incitement\" (the demand for truth is as sustained as the demand for economic production or political power). Third, truth is \"the object, under diverse forms, of immense diffusion and consumption\" (circulating broadly through social apparatuses of information and education). Fourth, truth is \"produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses\" (media, university). Fifth, and last, truth is \"the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation\" (ideological struggles) (Foucault, 1980, pp. 131-132). Where Foucault found power diffuse throughout society, Horkheimer and Adorno locate power as archetypal. A deep-structure of progressive domination within their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Their conceptual model stands prominently in the concept of late-capitalist domination (Honneth, 193, p. 93). Like Janus (Bulfinch, 1979, pp. 10, 917), the Dialectic stands at a \"deep normative stratum\" (Honneth, 1993, p. 65) between modernity and postmodernity \"so that it can look in two directions at once\" (Rocco, 1994, p. 72). Habermas' (1992, pp. 106-130) savaging of Dialectic hinges on an analogic (Schleifer, 1990, p. 81) dispersion of Janus (Bulfinch, 1979, pp. 10, 917), expiated as \"two faced\" (Habermas, 1992, p. 109) in the uneasy coexistence between depth and surface (Derrida, 1978, pp. 213-214). For Habermas, the Dialectic represents a conceptual impossibility of a social theory fixated on the civilizing process of the domination of nature which treats the oppressed individual as a passive victim (Honneth, 1993, pp. 95-96). However, Horkheimer and Adorno's use of the Odyssey anticipates two of Habermas' key concepts: communicative and strategic action. The synchronic time (meaning) of communicative action meanders in dialectical relation with the diachronic time (linear) of strategic action. In the Odyssey, the centripetal, symmetry of modernity is in dialectical tension with the centrifugal, asymmetry of postmodernity. Communicative and strategic action will be discussed in detail in Chapter Two. Horkheimer and Adorno also anticipate aspects of Habermas' theory in their treatment of morality and Enlightenment. The Marquis5 de Sade represents the embodiment This aristocratic title derives from mercdri compounded with commercdri to mean \"to trade together\" (Partridge, 1959, p. 382). The letter of marque was originally issued to privateers as a trade charter. Derived from mercurius, the Roman god of commerce and speedy messenger, the letter of marque anticipates contemporary transnational corporations and friction-free capital. 3z of Enlightenment rationality (Held, 1980, p. 159). Where with \"control-oriented action\" humans distance themselves from nature (Honneth, 1993, p. 59), and reason becomes \"the organ of calculation, of planning; it is neutral in regard to ends: its element is coordination\" (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944, p. 88). De Sade is not completely strategic, he reveals the communicative identity of (subjective) reason and domination (Held, 1980, p. 159). With the deaths of Adorno in 1969 and Horkheimer in 1973, Fromm in 1981, and later Marcuse, the Frankfurt School ended its 50-year history. Critical theory had been so dependent on these two men that, were it not for Adorno's student, Jiirgen Habermas, it, too, might have passed from the scene. The Normative Structure Of Critical Theory In this section, critical theory's guiding assumptions and goals are discussed. Although the version of critical theory that follows borrows heavily from the Frankfurt School and Habermas, it draws most heavily from the critique and revision of critical theory by Axel Honneth (1993 et al). As such, this version of critical theory is an intertwinement of Horkheimer and Adorno, Foucault, Fromm, Marcuse and Habermas. This proposes adopting the existentially based linguistic technique of deconstruction (Wood, 1992). While this method derives from the critical theory revisionist project of Habermas, it is not intended to capture any single critical theorist and can best be viewed as a generalization across several theorists (e.g., Habermas, 1971; Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944; Marcuse 1964). First, ontological assumptions are discussed, the nature of reality and social beings. Second, terminal and instrumental goals are presented. Finally, epistemological assumptions 33 are outlined, including the nature of the knowledge generated, the view of causality, and the relationship the researcher has with the social actor. Appendix A . l provides a summary of the assumptions and goals of this critical theory. The goals and assumptions of positivism and interpretivism are also provided as a point of reference, and a means of comparing competing views in the free trade debate. While positivism and empiricism are often used interchangeably, they are actually complementary positions. Positivism advocates the formulation of laws and predictions about events according to external objective views, while empiricism is the belief that knowledge can be objectively derived and verified through sensory data and mathematical techniques (Dean and Fenby, 1989, p. 47). Ontology Critical theorists question the extreme positions of interpretivists and positivists. For example, because they believe that all knowledge about the world is subjective, interpretivists overlook the material dimensions of reality; that is, once created, social reality can influence individuals. Conversely, because they believe that a single, objective reality exists, positivists forget that our social world is a historical product, that we are the architects of our social world. According to Jay (1973, p. 54), critical theory focuses on the \"force field\" or constant interplay between subject (meanings) and object (social structures). Thus, reality is socially produced through social interaction. However, once constructed, it \"acts back.\" The attempt 3+ to reify the active conteneur6 into an inert contenant results in . Critical theorists specifically point to and study the tensions or inconsistencies between subject and object. These inconsistencies or contradictions are the source of change. At any moment, contradictions provide the impetus and direction for creating a better society: \"The real field of knowledge is not the given fact about things as they are, but the critical evaluation of them as a prelude to passing beyond their given form\" (Marcuse, 1969, p. 145). To elaborate, over time, objective conditions of action tend to contradict the intersubjective meanings attributed to them (Comstock, 1982). In other words, reality is enacted or socially produced, but in time these social structures become stubborn, resist social change, and thus become constraining. Unless reflection occurs, the meanings people attribute to social structures change more slowly than the structures themselves. Thus, reality - the meanings given to social structure and the objective structures - is inherently contradictory. For example, voters believe they have the choice between voting to the right or left. Americans believe a democratic ideology exists that allows free speech, individualism, and pluralism. Similarly, Canadians believe a democratic ideology exists that provides for peace, order and good government. The Mexican democratic ideology is limited to one party. As a consequence, citizens in each country believe they exercise free will in their consumption choices. However, the people who control mass production benefit by producing homogeneous products, so the production technology constrains choices. The interpretive understanding of the subject (that we freely consume) is contradicted 6 Conteneur derives from the French to emphasize the active function of this matrix in contrast with the inert, container-as-thing-meaning oicontentant (Ogden, 1992, p. 618; Partridge, 1959, p. 117; Quinodoz, 1992). 35 by the concrete social reality (mass consumption). These contradictions or inconsistencies between subject and object are salient for the critical theorist. If people become aware that their ideas about reality are not congruent with reality, this awareness may serve as an impetus for rational social development and change. Nature of Social Beings. From a critical perspective, humans are neither completely reactive (extreme positivism) nor completely proactive (extreme interpretivism). Social actors are able to affect their social world, but this influence is mediated through the historical totality. To rephrase, because past social creations constrain us, we are not free-wheeling creators of our future. Critical theorists nevertheless assume that humans have the potential to become anything they wish since we can never know the fundamental nature of humans. Thus, when critical theorists reflect on the nature of social beings, human potential becomes the measure of all things (Fuhrman, 1979). Although reality can be considered a human product, it is often created \"behind the backs and against the wills\" of some individuals (Jay, 1973, p. 49). People who own and manage technology, finance capital, and the communication and transportation infrastructure generally have more of an impact on the creation of reality than does the average person. Furthermore, the more powerful sectors may often reproduce society in a way that solidifies their dominance. This explains the contradiction of the US government ban on some harmful products to protect its citizens, and not banning manufacturers from dumping these products overseas. Although dumping these products on others countries is in the interest of the companies (i.e., profit maximization) and the US economy, it is not in the interests of unsuspecting foreign consumers. This focus on interests is important because critical 3*: theorists insist on the political nature of science and society. Axiological Assumptions Terminal Goals. Consistent with its ontology, critical theory begins with two value judgements (Marcuse, 1964, p. X). First, human life is worth living. Second, human life can be improved. According to Jay (1973), critical theory is one more attempt to bring the Greek political experience (democratic free speech) together with Greek philosophy (reason). Thus, the terminal goal for critical theory is a form of social organization that makes possible freedom, justice, and reason. Instrumental Goal. Habermas' theory of communicative competence suggests those goals that may be instrumental in achieving the terminal goal. This theory addresses discourse (through an analysis of speech acts) as well as the normative structure of speech that allows individuals to communicate. Habermas states that a rational consensus can be reached only if there is a \"symmetrical distribution of chances to select and employ speech acts\" (McCarthy, 1978, p. 306). General symmetry refers to a situation in which all people have an equal opportunity to engage in discourse unconstrained by authority, tradition, or dogma. This condition of symmetrical free speech is Habermas' ideal speech situation. In addition to the ideal speech situation, all participants must have the same chance to employ constantive, regulative, and representative speech acts. This requirement ensures that no assertion will be exempt from critique, no single participant will gain privilege, and the participants will be truthful so that their inner natures will become transparent to others. Habermas' identification of an ideal speech situation provides the grounds for the ' 37 \u2022 critique of distorted communication. Distorted communication reproduces those belief systems that \"could not be validated if subjected to rational discourse\" (Schroyer, 1973, p. 163). Because of unacknowledged social forces in the self-formation process, humans may not be cognizant of distorted communication. Criticism reconstructs a communicative competence that, in turn, leads to a rational consensus. Thus, the ideal speech situation anticipates an ideal social structure that makes possible freedom, justice, and reason. Like any other axiology, its instrumental utility lies in its ability to serve as a guide or as a critical standard from which actual discourse can be evaluated. Since the ideal speech situation provides all participants with equal power, the social organization of communication prevents decisions made on the basis of greed, tradition, dogma, authority, or coercion. Although the practical problems of striving toward the ideal speech situation are immense, Habermas' theory of communicative competence serves as a critical standard. Epistemological Assumptions Knowledge Generated. The kind of knowledge that is legitimized as \"scientific\" varies a great deal depending on the approach. Positivists, who focus on revealing underlying regularities, generally do not question social reality. Social structures are reified; they are treated as objects, independent of the social actors who created them. People are alienated from their creations and are unable to see themselves as actors capable of changing those social structures that make up society. Interpretivists also tend to reinforce the status quo. They take a nonjudgemental stance, which assumes that all groups and cultures are equal. Consequently, they offer no way to envision a better society (Fuhrman and Snizek, 1979\/80). Over time, both of these approaches to social science generate knowledge that becomes an integral part of the existing society instead of a means of critique and renewal (Landmann, 1977). Critical theorists, on the other hand, first form an understanding of the present historical formation, then strive to move beyond this understanding to reveal avenues of change that are imminent in the present order. Changes will be possible if contradictions are revealed between the interpretive understanding of the subject and the historical-empirical conditions of the object (Comstock, 1982). In this way, the knowledge generated by critical theory is forward-looking (recall Marcuse's second value judgement, that human life can be improved), imaginative (according to Adorno, one must not only see the old in the new, but also the new in the old), critical and unmasking (Habermas suggests that ways of communicating or social structures that contradict general symmetry need to be revealed), and practical (according to Horkheimer, critical theory mediates theory and practice). A unique aspect of the critical-emancipatory interest is that cognitive activity unites both empirical and normative theorizing. Empirically, critical social science analyses how power relations constrain the realization of human potentials in a given context. Further, it is claimed that power relations engender forms of distorted communication that result in self-deceptions by agents with respect to their interests, needs, and perceptions of social reality. This type of empirical analysis is, in turn, closely linked with implicit normative claims - that is, the necessary assumption of an ideal speech situation where falsifying consciousness would be reduced because communication would assume the form of authentic dialogues not 3*L based on asymmetrical relations of power. In this way analysis shifts persuasively from an empirical analysis of what is to a normative analysis of what ought to be. Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action (1981; 1989) which will be developed in detail in Chapter Two, involves a shift from the ahistorical, a priori certainties derived from philosophical reflection as in Kant, to a universal pragmatic task of identifying and reconstructing universal conditions of possible understanding. This kind of research involves the clarification of universal validity claims from structural analysis, held to be universal in , the sense of forming a part of the deep structure of any possible form of society. Assuming the existence of such universal features embedded in human social life, it becomes possible to criticize deviations. While such processes of communication and interpretation may appear open and relative, they are grounded and made possible by the four implicit \"validity claims of comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness, and T i g h t n e s s \" (Habermas, 1979, p. 3). An excellent example of \"critical\" knowledge is Friefe's (1986) work on teaching illiterate adults in Latin America. According to Friere, a historical-empirical understanding of the educational system reveals a \"banking concept\" of education: an \"all-knowing\" teacher deposits knowledge into the students who are empty vessels. Those students who passively receive the knowledge are the \"better\" students. Such an educational system is oppressive because it does not teach students to inquire actively about the world. It produces a passive population that serves the interests of the existing social order. Here, the status quo needs individuals to accept and adapt to the existing conditions rather than to change the oppressive conditions. Within this system, students are blind to the educational interest and inaccurately see themselves as acting freely. 4-0 Friere (1986) suggests that education should be a \"problem-posing\" activity that can overcome the teacher-student contradiction by making both individuals simultaneously teacher and student. \"In problem-posing education, men (sic) develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation\" (Friere, 1986, pp. 70-71). Social actors transform their world first through reflection and then through action. Thus, Friere's problem-posing approach is critical, forward-looking, imaginative, and practical. View of Causality. Social actors are influenced by constraining social structures; however, this influence is mediated by the actors' meanings and understandings. Prediction may be possible if these meanings are stable (Comstock, 1982). This view of causality is motivated by and illustrates critical theory's ontology. Humans are confined by social structures, which are real, independent, and measurable (determinism). At the same time, they are the architects of these social structures (voluntarism). Furthermore, these causes and effects can only be understood relative to the historical totality from which they emerged. It is the inconsistencies between subjective understandings and historical-empirical conditions that directly underlie the critical theorists' view of causality. This view is rooted in their theory of social change. They propose that through reflection, participants are able to identify constraints on general symmetry. These \"constraints\" are in the forms of distorted communication, contradictions between meanings and social conditions, contradictions between values and motives of different stakeholder groups, authority, dogma, tradition, bounded rationality, myth, rules, and so on. Dialogue or critical discourse exposes constraints to those groups who are constrained. In time, this exposure may lead to social tension and reform. This reconstruction permits a nearer approximation to the ideal speech situation. The new organization will facilitate critique since discourse is freer and more open. Reflection must, nevertheless, remain an ongoing process. Research Relationship. From a critical perspective, one cannot separate the social organization of knowledge from the knowledge itself. Scientists are involved in the creation of social conditions; thus, their research is influenced by political action and vice versa (Comstock, 1982; Sewart, 1978). The researcher cannot be divided into two beings: a nonpolitical, scientific theorizer and a political, philosophical participator (who votes in political elections, speaks out at city council meetings, works on policy in academic committees, et cetera). Critical theory holds that, because scientific theorizing is inseparable from political action, the researcher should take into account who benefits from the research. Research should be emancipatory, designed not only to reveal empirical and interpretive understanding, but also to free social actors who are constrained. Researchers should move beyond mere observation of subjects or participation in the informants' social reality and attempt through dialogue to reveal constraints, thereby motivating informants to engage in conscious political action (praxis). Simply put, the purpose of critical research is to make life better for the social actor. Thus, the relationship between the critical theorists and the social actor is one that is based on a continuing dialogue or critical discourse (Comstock, 1982; Jay, 1973; McCarthy, 1978). Metaphorically, the critical theorists is a \"liberator\" seeking through dialogue to make social actors aware of oppressive structures, a first step on the road to social 4-z change. Methodology And Praxis Conventional research inquiry implies a \"high degree of specificity\" (Lincoln & Guba, 1985, p. 221) in its design. Its purpose is to validate established objective truths. Critical theory approaches methodology in the philosophical sense of meta-theory. Gadamer, on the other hand, conceives of \"method\" as something opposed to truth, which we attain only by sustained interpretation and understanding (cited in Habermas, 1995, p. 21). Therefore, critical theory is methodologically prescribed as method (Morrow, 1994, p. 36). Since critical theory is concerned with assessing the truth of validity claims, Habermas argues that \"hermeneutics is at best an art, but never a method\" (1995, p. 21). Positioned as a \"force-field\" (Jay, 1993, p. 8) between objectivity and subjectivity, order and chaos, a critical theory of hermeneutics endeavours to \"reconstruct the original creative act\" (Bleicher, 1980, p. 15) to achieve emancipation from within the text, thus modelling a textually ideal speech situation (Agger, 1989, p. 9). The moment of success in understanding the original creative action, is the moment of emancipation (Habermas, 1970a, p. 215). We do not interpret the past through the needs of the future, for the present horizon is where these needs begin to take shape (Silverman, 1991, p. 177). Instead, the reified structures of social institutions that \"resulted from repressed needs\" (Held, 1980, p. 277), are a source of distorted and limited communication that we can emancipate. Habermas embraces the horns of the positivism-interpretivism dilemma through inter-subjectivity. Achieving emancipation within the inter-textuality of the ideal speech situation H O is the \"intra-textuality\" of ideal text and therefore the ideal society it prefigures (Agger, 1989, p. 62). Critical theory avails itself of both positivistic and interpretivistic tools to clarify definition and to resolve the problematic. Objects are symbolically ordered according to universal standards. Measurement standards which can be replicated, guarantee in principle, the intersubjectivity of experience that permit subtle distinctions and precision descriptors (Habermas, 1994b, p. 96). The praxis is seamlessly integrated with theory in this intensive research design (Morrow, 1994, p. 250) iterating from within the textual media. A fusion of horizons' of understanding is achieved to de-reify discursive patterns of domination on the presupposition that all discourse is oriented toward truth (Habermas, 1970, p. 372). Critical theory is critical because it asks \"meta-theoretical questions and seeks to draw attention to the relations of power that shape social reality\" (Morrow and Brown, 1994, p. 59). These questions must be asked from an ontological viewpoint of care. The episteme of critical theory, like Being and Time (Heidegger, 1962), hinges (Wood, 1991, p. 173) on care. For the continuity of being over time is care (Heidegger, 1962, p. 84), the locus of identity is care (Winnicott, 1960, p. 39), and as Dasein1, the nourishing matrix* of resource is care (Dreyfus, 1992, p. 223). The articulation of being over time is \"well-seeking\" (Drover and Kerans, 1993, p. 7). Though Habermas has distanced himself from Heidegger, Being and Time is \"probably the most profound turning point in German philosophy since Hegel\" (Habermas, 1992b, p. 140). 7 Dasein is derived from the German of being-there-in-the-world. Hence, life-world (Dreyfus, 1992). 8 Matrix is derived from womb (Greek) and matrice (Middle French) (Goux, 1990, p. 218 fn; Partridge, 1959, p. 386) to convey the matricyclic nature of active resource container. Iff Care is the \"formal existential totality of Dasein's ontologically structured whole\" (Heidegger, 1962, p. 237). The projection of being, when \"understood ontologically, is care\" (Heidegger, 1962, p. 84). Care understood ontologically is the issuance of being which epistemologically stands on itself. Care is the legitimate heir to putative knowing's stance on episteme (Heidegger, 1962, p. 194; Wood, 1991, p. 175). There has been an attempt at quantifying Dasein itself. Though care as being eludes the reifying and deifying processes of the physical mind. The development of patina, by the very rich is such a putative attempt at stretching being, as status over time as lineage. Care was seen as \"gentle\" and thought to take five generations for the common to develop such gentle qualities. Appendix A.2 presents an approach to applying critical theory, which is contrasted with the positivist and interpretivist approaches. A critical research method is discussed in detail with examples drawn from the current CUFTA and NAFTA situations. The discussion of the critical research process is organized into three stages: the initial stage, the data collection stage, and the evaluation stage. In the Initial Stage, applied critical theory research explores concrete, practical problems in everyday life (e.g., recycling of waste, dumping of dangerous products in Third World countries, media manipulation, et cetera). It is the ongoing, daily struggles of real people that interests the researcher, not abstraction. In the initial stage of research, a practical problem is selected, then all stakeholders and claimsmakers who are affected by the circumstances surrounding the problems are identified. One example of the selection of a practical problem is the harmonization of social programs under the NAFTA. A number of stakeholders are involved in this problem: those claimsmakers who require medical care, and those who are unable to work due to jobs or age, to note just a few. Data collection in critical research is broken down into five steps (see Appendix A. 3). This data-gathering approach builds on and extends the work of Comstock (1982), Lincoln and Guba (1989), and Murray and Ozanne (1991). The Interpretetive Step. From a critical perspective, social problems result from contradictory interests and differences in power. This situation leads to social structures and processes that are constraining to some stakeholders and beneficial to others. The first step in a critical research process is to develop an interpretive understanding of each stakeholder's worldview since people's behaviour can only be understood in light of their specific interests. This understanding of individual and shared meaning is developed through dialogue between the researcher and the social actors. Researchers are successful to the extent that they come to see and talk about the world. In achieving a critical perspective, the researchers themselves should establish a statement of beingness, an ontological step based on care. Since the Rensissance, there has existed a particular \"confluence of individualism with competitive ambition\" which was amost entirely absent in the Middle Ages (May, 1979, p. 150). Individual competitive success is both the dominant goal in our culture and the most pervasive occasion for anxiety. Since there is a corollary between failure of others and one's own success. The capacity for historical consciousness is the capacity for self-consciousness - the ability to see one's self simultaneously as subject and object (May, 1979, p. 152) on the level of physical reality, and more, to be consciousness conscious of itself as consciousness. The competitive individualistic ambition had important psychological repercussions on the individual's relation to himself. The Historical-Empirical Step. Al l history is contemporary, particularly those \"hidden parts of the past\" which survive without our awareness of their impact (Mumford, 1944). Social reality includes not only the intersubjective understandings of the social actors (i.e., the subject) but also the material forces that may constrain social action (i.e., the object). Thus, the second step in the critical research process is to grasp the historical-empirical development of any relevant social structures and processes that have determined or constrained the intersubjective understandings. Past empirical studies are reviewed and new empirical studies may be conducted to grasp the social and historical construction of existing conditions. In others words, an attempt is made to understand the reified context in which the ideas of social actors have developed. It is only when social actors see that their own social conditions were constructed in the past that they are able to realize that they create their own future structures by virtue of their own consciousness. This realization is an essential step toward freedom and change. To grasp the concrete, reified, material, socio-historical conditions regarding the harmonization of social programs, the researcher reviews all empirical studies done on the free trade issue, the Trilateral Commission, the relevant nation states, trade negotiators, consultants, academics, and \"independent\" organizations such as the Fraser Institute or the more interdependent organizations such as the Canadian Forum. The researcher also constructs a historical record of free trade and harmonization. Care is taken to note any underlying interests that may have shaped these constructions. For example, studying the genesis and evolution of the Trilateral Commission, and the role played by the public relations firm of Burston-Marstellar. The researcher might consult newspaper articles and letters to the editor, and all public statements made by elected politicians, as well as transnational representatives. In doing this, the researcher tries to grasp the socially constructed reality that exists separatedly from and influences the perceptions of the social actors. Once the social actors themselves understand the objective social conditions, they may be able to change them. The Dialectical Step. In step three, the output from the previous two steps is combined into a single analysis. By comparing the social actors' intersubjective understanding to the historical-empirical conditions, the researcher looks for inconsistencies or contradictions that may have arisen because intersubjective understandings evolve slowly and sometimes become inconsistent with objective social conditions. By taking a critical, dialectical approach, the researcher attempts to understand the inconsistencies between the objective social conditions and the intersubjective meanings. Here, it is the difference between the subject and object that is of interest. The revealed contradictions are elaborated, and any stakeholder that is constrained by the contradictions is identified. The Awareness Step. In step four, the critical researcher hopes to engage the social actors in dialogue to help them see their current situation differently, open up alternative ways of acting, and initiate programs of action. While researchers can foster awareness in a variety of ways, an obvious approach is through some type of educational program (using dialogue). However, other strategies could prove equally, if not more, effective in making people aware and willing to get involved: essays, plays, novels, movies, and satires (e.g., Doonesbury), to name a few. In the NAFTA example, researchers might achieve awareness through news releases to various media. By publically presenting contradictions, the researcher strives to generate dialogue. Or, the researcher could contact and encourage activists to help educate claimsmakers about the claims-jumpers. The Praxis Step. As a final step in the research process, the researcher participates in a theoretically grounded program of action that is designed to change social conditions and create a better society. For a critical theorist, application is the ultimate test of a proposition. Having identified a contradiction, the theorist must envision new unconstraining social conditions and try to bring them into existence through political action. In this case, the theorist must do more than rally public support for changing the NAFTA. In the initial stage of research, the problems must be evaluated as to whether they are concrete and practical and of interest to real people. For each of the five steps in the data collection process, evaluative criteria also exist (see Appendix A.3). In the interpretive step, the researcher must form an understanding based on the perceptions of all the people involved. During this stage, the researcher may use evaluative criteria appropriate for interpretive research, such as those proposed by Hudson and Ozanne (1988, p. 515) and Guba and Lincoln (1989, p. 228). In the historical-empirical step, the theorist must understand how social conditions are historically grounded. Here, if methods such as surveys are used, then traditional evaluative criteria such as validity and reliability could be considered. In the dialectical step, the researcher must identify all contradictions as well as all injured parties. In the awareness step, the researcher must engage the social actor in dialogue to achieve an understanding of existing social conditions. Finally, in the praxis step, the researcher considers whether life has improved for constrained stakeholder groups. Al l research is evaluated on the basis of criteria that are determined by the approach used (see Appendix 4>? A. 2), so critical research must be evaluated by its own criteria. Quality empirical work is the penultimate goal that is necessary but not sufficient to reach the ultimate goal of making society better. Media Studies Thompson (1994, pp. 28-29) examines critical theory, the work of Innis and McLuhan, and hermeneutics as three traditions of thought for developing a social theory of the media. Critical social theory includes the works of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas. Horkheimer and Adorno (1944) depict enlightenment as mass deception due to an objective social tendency incarnate in the hidden subjective purposes of company directors economically interweaving the cultural. This total domination of everyday life by the media is made problematic by Habermas who perceives subjects being able to resist these processes (Morrow, 1994, p. 189). Habermas (1994) articulates the importance of the media's role in the transition from absolutist to liberal-democratic regimes, and the articulation of public opinion through the print media, as a vital feature of modern democracy. The more consensuses that are formed by the media, the more complex becomes the network of media-steered interaction. The media reduce the complexity of consensus formation to yes\/no positions. Delinguistified aspects of communication complexes, such as money and power, connect interactions in space and time into ever more complex networks that \"no one has to comprehend or be responsible for\" (Habermas, 1989, p. 184). Within this contradiction occurs the emancipatory potential for \"these media publics hierarchize and at the same time remove S O restrictions on the horizon of possible communication. The one aspect cannot be separated from the other - and therein lies their ambivalent potential\" (Habermas, 1989, p. 390). The second tradition of thought stems from Innis' and McLuhan's examination of the relation between media communication and spatial\/temporal organizations of power. Within this structural tradition are Porter's (1965) and Clement's (1975) analyses of the structure and concentration of the mass media as \"gatekeepers of ideas.\" These studies lend structural credence to Foucault's notion of the diffusion of power throughout society, where the economic process is a mere backdrop to social power (Foucault, 1979; Honneth, 1993, p. 194). Discourse is used for economic domination and a theory of knowledge becomes a theory of power (Foucault, 1980). Foucault identifies the institutional origins of the modern mode of thinking which views humans as isolated individuals (Honneth, 1993, p. 187) important for competition and progress. Foucault and Habermas both argue in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and in the tradition of hermeneutics (Honneth, 1993, p. 153). The third tradition is that of hermeneutics and the contextualized interpretation of symbolic forms. Hermeneutics see our world-view as a language-made affair that varies historically from culture to culture. We adjust not to the reality of a world but to the reality of other thinkers. Our basic mode of existence in the world is within language (although we are not captives), which we interpret. This interpretive experience is the hermeneutic claim to universality, which implies that ontologically, \"we are interpretive beings\" (Teigas, 1995, p. 145). It is the particular form of intersubjectivity of mutual understanding that determines the scope and structure of corresponding world views (Habermas, 1970, p. 373). Where the hermeneutic claim describes and understands scenic views, the critical-\u2022SI.-:' emancipatory objective is to criticize and transform them. Critical-emancipatory knowledge is a species of the hermeneutic-historical claim to the dialectic of the recollection of tradition and the anticipation of freedom (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 100). This implies that values and norms have social functions linked to social and cultural reproduction - that is, the maintenance of a particular set of social relations that disadvantage some groups compared with others, and that critical-emancipatory knowledge is an evolving social progress. In short, a fundamental assumption of critical theory is that every form of social order entails some forms of domination and that the critical-emancipatory interest underlies the struggles to change those relations of domination-subordination (Morrow, 1994, p. 149). Chomsky's notion of \"linguistic competence\" as the mastery of an abstract system of rules, is based on an innate language apparatus within the interpretive domain of hermeneutics. Nevertheless, such competence is a monological capability grounded in positivism, resulting in the \"total reification of all intersubjective relationships within the framework of objectifying sciences\" (Habermas, 1970, p. 373). Such deformations of pure intersubjectivity are found within the empirical methodology of both positivism and interpretivism. Importance to Social Work Social work has a longstanding reliance on positivism and empiricism. Empirical domination may be social work's struggle for legitimation while embedded in contemporary culture (Imre, 1982, p. 2). Positivism views scientific certainty as inexorably leading to human progress. Similarly, empiricism provides the technical control to reach the object of ocular desire. The reproduction of social work knowledge through education is based on similar epistemological assumptions. Social work instructors proceed out of empiricism (positivism and interpretivism) or an existential framework which steers both the content and process of teaching (Berman-Rossi, 1988). This narrows the methodological framework to reproduce the status quo. Educators dilate the consciousness of the students within an expanding framework of different philosophies. Students come to understand how different philosophies lead to different ideologically distorted evaluative practice. As advocate, the social worker needs to organize practice and research in terms of their basic epistemological differences. The social work profession seems to be in an ideal position to develop critical theory as a foundation for professional action (Dean & Fenby, 1989, pp. 51-53). Empirical and positivistic application of child protective legislation by police and social workers frequently leads to explosive outcomes. In an era of self-reliance and social program reduction, social workers grow weary of handling \"explosive ingredients\" (Habermas, 1975, p. 78). In Vancouver (CBC, 1996, August 3), child protection social workers have sought assistance from Vancouver Police who report a significant increase assisting local social workers to practice child protection. Stripping the buffer of social programs while depriving those stakeholders of private and public recourse (Habermas, 1975, p. 79), leads to \"their needs becoming] explosive\" (Drover & Kerans, 1993, p. 23). Since social workers are often in the front line of implementing such an ideology, social program changes are disconcerting. Because of the longstanding dominance of empiricism in social work instruction and S3 practice, emancipation will not be easy. Funding and accreditation need not be put at risk with a broadened framework of education and praxis. This discussion of the importance of critical theory will be further developed in the concluding chapter. Discussion This chapter offered a panoramic view of critical theory in relation to positivism and interpretivism. While a research method based on critical theory's history, assumptions, and goals was presented and potential applications were suggested, the application is preliminary and by no means exhausts the material available on the free trade argument. Before summarizing critical theory's contributions, three limitations should be discussed. The first limitation is the problem of implementation: critical research is deeply involving. The five-step research process requires that one not only form a subjective awareness of objectivity, but also a program of action. Such an enterprise probably cannot be accomplished in a single study and might require involvement with groups outside of academia. Such research requires a longer research horizon and a deeper commitment to the substantive problem. Although the problem of implementation does not reveal a flaw with critical theory, given resource limitations, the number of researchers who can afford to engage in critical research may be limited. The second and third limitations are more fundamental to critical theory, so fundamental that they have become key research questions for contemporary critical theorists. The second problem is rooted in the critical theorists' claim that all knowledge is historical. If this is so, how can a researcher step out of this historicity and offer a critique of society by a transcendent rational standard? It is difficult to defend the existence of historical knowledge while at the same time suggesting that an ahistorical basis for critique exists. Each member of the Frankfurt School, including Habermas, his grappled with this issue. Although I recognize the problem, I choose to align with Habermas and his notion of an ideal speech situation. Here a rational consensus is anticipated providing access to a rational anchor for critique (e.g., human rights, freedom, liberty, and justice). The third problem involves how one moves from abstract theory to concrete social change. In the applications section, a free-floating intelligentsia is suggested which could help resolve this problem of agency. Of course, such a group could only be successful to the extent that they were autonomous yet also able to communicate with progressive forces in society and those who were constrained. Ties to funding institutions are inevitable, publication outlets are institutionally controlled, and the dominant associations exert a powerful influence (Noble, 1993). Nevertheless, this issue of agency cuts to the heart of critical theory. It can be summarized by the following question: How can critical researchers deepen public consciousness about acquisition, consumption, and disposition in a way that transforms society for the better? Despite these problems, a critical theory of free trade has much to offer. Although all social theories are ideological, critical theory differs from other approaches by explicitly acknowledging its emancipatory interest. Critical theory seeks to free people from all forms of domination. It attempts to envision new forms of rational social organization. By providing a concrete method of doing critical research, researchers will be better equipped to investigate broader issues of societal welfare or well-being. Although social criticism is inescapably negative, one way to make researchers more fully aware of their potential for changing the world is through critique. Because critical theory involves praxis, it is forward-looking, forever revising. Yet critical theory challenges researchers to move beyond critique, to envision a life free from constraints, and to build a society that embodies this image. In Chapter Two, which follows, I will situate the theoretical project of Jiirgen Habermas within the meta-theoretical framework. The basic tenets of this project will be refined for use in the subsequent methodology and research chapter. CHAPTER TWO JURGEN HABERMAS In this chapter I describe the Habermasian project within the meta-theoretical dimensions of Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School tradition. The chapter is organized into fourteen sections. First, I provide a detailed overview of Habermas' theory of communicative action as arguing the good life of an ideal speech situation. Secondly, I discuss how Habermas' theory is ontologically situated. Thirdly, I examine Habermas' epistemological assumptions. Fourthly, I discuss the two major components of lifeworld and system. Fifth, the colonization of the lifeworld is described. Sixth, the crisis of the welfare state is examined. Seventh, Habermas' idea of the good and the just life is detailed. Eighth, the historical implication of the intersubjectivity of social becoming is described. Ninth, Habermas' idea of social action is highlighted. Tenth, the public sphere is briefly examined considering the new media (particularly the print media) and an ideal speech situation. Eleventh, I apply Habermas' theory to free trade and social policy in Canada. Twelfth, I examine Habermas' validity claims, and offer a workbench for applying these truth claims in subsequent chapters. Finally, I provide a summary of Habermas' theoretical work with particular emphasis on the truth claims. Habermas' theoretical project is guided by a simple idea. In the context of \"a modernity at variance with itself\" (Habermas, 1992c, p. 396), he is preoccupied with the public and non-violent force of the better argument, which he terms rational practical discourse. Uncoerced participation can be guaranteed with yes or no position to statements about the world and the way it is understood. Guaranteed participation, regardless of reference to the worlds of nature, of society, or themselves. The better argument is central to identifying the good life (Myerson, 1994, p. 73). Arguing the Good Life Although Habermas departed from the Frankfurt School and considers himself \"the last Marxist,\" his project may be considered an extension of this tradition (Held, 1980). Habermas' theory produces a criterion forjudging a society, an activity, an institution, an ideology. Habermas argues that any: . . . attempt to provide an equivalent for what was once intended by the idea of the good life should not mislead us into deriving this idea from the formal concept of reason which modernity's decentered understanding of the world has left us (Habermas, 1981, pp. 73-74). That argument is central to this 'attempt' to identify the good life1, reveals the heart of Habermas' project (Myerson, 1994, p. 72). Habermas focussed on the two central problems that exist in the work of the Frankfurt School. First, how can we connect theory to political practice? Second, how can we create knowledge that is historically bound, yet simultaneously have an ahistorical (universal) basis for critique? Habermas tries to reconcile stability with dynamism, for critical theory presupposes a dynamic way of life (Myerson, 1 Plato refers to the Good (Agathon), as the Ideal, the one and only archetype, from which all other forms receive their being (370BC, p. 81). Jung similarly refers to the one collective archetype (1934). In Western mythology, the teleological good life might refer to heaven (Frye, 1981). For Habermas' theory of communication, the good life is the Ideal speech situation (1981, pp. 73-74). 1994, p. 80). The first question arose because the Frankfurt School rejected the proletariat as the agent of revolutionary change. Consequently, they were left with a theory that said what was wrong but did not say how to make it better. Habermas attempted to reinvigorate critical theory politically by giving it a new foundation in communication theory. In providing a new foundation, he also helped address the second problem of the Frankfurt School by providing a normative basis for critical theory (Roderick, 1986). Neither positivism nor interpretivism provided Habermas (1976) with a satisfactory conception of the relationship between theory and practice. Habermas held that the relationship between theory and practice strongly influences a positivist social science. That positivists discover causal relationships between variables and this information is then used to manipulate and control the social world. Positivists provide tools (means), but they give no direction (end). In an interpretive social science, the relationship between theory and practice is clarification; that is, they discover the forms of life that underlie behaviour (e.g., norms, ideas, values, and beliefs) through communication with stakeholders. However, this understanding is purely descriptive and provides no basis on which to evaluate different forms of life. No basis upon which to then advocate one form rather than another. Critical theory, Habermas claims, has an interest in knowledge that will enable humans to achieve sustenance, self-determination, and autonomy. In other words, humans have an emancipatory interest in knowledge that enhances the possibility of freedom (Habermas, 1971; Sewart, 1978). As illustrated at Table 2.1, Habermas (1971) justifies critical theory by arguing that its standards are already implicit in knowledge. Conditions SI underlying the possibility of objective knowledge include those essential for the maintenance of free and undistorted communication (Ingram, 1990, p. 113). Therefore, in a critical social science, the relationship between theory and practice is a \"critical\" one; theory unmasks social contradictions, revealing how the social structure facilitates and maintains these distortions. Through dialogues with the social actor, the critical theorist seeks awareness of alternative social structures so theory can be a force of change in society. Critique, however, can only arise in communicative action. It is in the domain of communication through the identification of the ideal speech situation that Habermas attempts to defend the normative basis of critical theory through the development of a theory of communicative competence. The conditions of the ideal speech situation represent an ideal, for: the ideal speech situation is neither an empirical phenomenon nor simply a construct, but a reciprocal supposition unavoidable in discourse.... it is a fiction which is operatively effective in communication. I would therefore prefer to speak of an anticipation of an ideal speech situation.... it is a critical standard against which every actually realized consensus can be called into question and tested (Habermas, 1975, p. 258). Tab le 2.1 Formal -Pragmat ic Rela t ions B a s i c ~ ~ ^ - ^ ^ Worlds Attitudes 1 1. Objective. 2. Social 3. Subjective 1. Objectivating Cognitive-instrumental relation Cognitive-strategic relation Objectivistic relation to self 2. Norm-Conformative Moral-aesthetic relation to a nonobjectivated environment Obligatory relation Censorious relation to self 3. Expressive Presentation of self Sensual-spontaneous relation to self Note. From The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume One (p. 237), by J. Habermas, 1981, Boston, M A : Beacon. Central to Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action is that conceptions of reason or rationality used in most social theory do not provide a basis for answering the Hobbesian problem of social order, or adequately describing the processes of modernization (White, 1995, p. 203). Social theory as based on a critique of modernity, where the Enlightenment's notion of progress rested on a Newtonian model of reason, has been invalidated with the collapse of the Fordist paradigm (Drover & Kerans, 1992, p. 66). A crucial element in revising critical theory is the capacity to \"secure its normative foundations only in a philosophy of history\" (1989, p. 382). Situating the theory of communicative action within this critical meta-theoretical frame marks the \"beginning of a social theory concerned to validate its own critical standards\" (Habermas, 1981, p. xxxix). Habermas seeks to take the obsolete social theory of modernity, and integrate, within a single theoretical framework, the two competing epistemological visions which social theory has constructed since the Enlightenment. Ontology Traditional ontology is concerned with the abstract nature of beingness. In contrast, scientific ontology is concerned with \"the entities posited or presupposed by some particular substantive scientific theory\" (Outhwaite & Bottomore, 1993, p. 429). Social ontology has become central to contemporary social theory within the scientific ontology. Since Habermas is concerned with social ontology, he rejects the philosophical ontologies of German idealism. As of yet, Habermas has not developed an explicit ontological position, focussing instead on epistemology. Morrow (1994, p. 155) however, argues that Habermas necessarily assumes an ontology of critical realism. Habermas distinguishes between work and symbolic interaction, claims that the social sciences can analyse the process of societal reproduction, and that the reconstructive sciences can describe the deep-structures of language and cognitive development. A critical realism is not based on a correspondence theory of truth as in traditional realism. Unlike critical realists which presuppose a duality of identifying deep casual mechanisms as viewing reality outside discourse, Habermas views discourse as oriented to truth (1970, p. 372). Critical realists view deep structures as \"a property of being and not just a property of our discourse about being\" (Baugh, 1990, p. 60). From this perspective, Habermas could not know being in-itself, because our knowledge is always mediated by interpretations. In Habermas' investigation of the hermeneutic sciences of interpretation, he is not describing an ontologically distinct sphere of objects (Held, 1980, 306). Instead, Habermas attempts to offer another viewpoint from which reality is disclosed. While the knowledge claims of empirical-analytic sciences purport that reality may be technically controlled and universally replicable, the hermeneutic sciences \"grasp interpretations of reality with regard to possible intersubjectivity of action-orienting mutual understanding specific to a given hermeneutic starting point\" (Habermas, 1971, p. 195). Simply put, individuals act within a collective matrix of intersubjective meaning (Crossley, 1996, p. 173; Held, 1980, 306). Since this matrix of intersubjectivity is both a temporal structure and indicates an essential incompleteness of our social world, Crossley refers to \"the fabric of social becoming\" (1996, p. 173) rather than beingness. Perhaps for this reason, Habermas has explicitly focussed on epistemological assumptions instead of ontology. There is however, 42. an implicit social ontology of beingness within Habermas' idea of the \"ideal speech situation\" (1993b, pp. 56-57), the \"universal validity claims\" (1979b, pp. 2-3), and the central notion of \"arguing for the good life\" (1981, pp. 73-74; Myerson, 1994, p. 72) and \"the just society\" (1996, pp. 98-99). The argument is the social becoming, the good life is the social beingness. Epistemological Assumptions Morrow argues that \"despite a kind of realistic ontology, the interpretive structuralism of critical theories is necessarily pragmatist and constructivist with respect to epistemology and methodology\" (1994, p. 157). The crucial distinction between Critical Theory and the empirical-analytic approach is between surface correlations of phenomena as opposed to the generalizations about deeper causal apparatuses and structural rules that operate historically (Morrow, 1994, p. 158). Habermas (1971) argues that since Kant, epistemology as the critique of knowledge has been progressively undermined. Epistemology has increasingly limited to examining questions internal to the mechanics of methodology, thus losing sight of the significance of the role of the epistemic subject (the knower) and of reflection by the subject on their activities. As the philosophical basis of critique dissipates, \"the meaning of knowledge itself becomes irrational - in the name of rigorous knowledge\" (Habermas, 1971, pp. 68-69). Knowledge must discard the illusion of objectivism, the notion that \"the world appears objectively as a universe of facts whose law-like connection can be grasped descriptively\" (Habermas, 1971, p. 304). This illusion, Habermas argues, conceals the 63 processes in which facts are constituted, and thereby \"prevents consciousness of the interlocking of knowledge with interests from the lifeworld\" (1971, pp. 305-306). Habermas calls for a pre-scientific pattern of orientation, to produce the perspectives from which reality is first constituted as an object of experience for humans (Honneth, 1993, 209). To dissolve this illusion, it is necessary to understand the activity of the knowing subject and the moment of reflection and of self-understanding (Held, 1980, 297). For Habermas, knowledge is formed in three vital interests: i) information that expands our power of technical control; ii) interpretations that make possible the orientations of action within common traditions; and iii) analyses that free consciousness from its dependence on hypostatized power (1971, p. 314). The knowledge-constitutive interests are general interests. They are underlying modes of understanding through which reality is disclosed and acted upon. There is an implicit ontology here, in the delineation of a viewpoint from which reality is constituted. For Habermas, knowledge tied to interests is early the key for the epistemological justification of a critical social theory (Honneth, 1993, p. 208). The basic cognitive strategies of the human interpreter are determined by conditions and problems governing its reproduction, \"by the socio-cultural form of life as such\" (Habermas cited in Held, 1980, p. 297). It is therefore Habermas' contention that \"the critique of knowledge is possible only as social theory\" (1971, p. vii). Lifeworld and System 6\u00abr Habermas' social theory is composed of two 'levels', one level is termed 'the lifeworld', the second level 'the system'. Many ideas are drawn from Husserl (1970; 1991), and Schultz and Luckmann (1973), including the concept of the lifeworld. This lifeworld, is \"the intersubjective base of the socio-cultural world\" (Crossley, 1996, p. 73). Since systems are always necessarily anchored in the lifeworld (Crossley, 1996, p. 99), it remains the primordial society constituent. The interactive distinction between lifeworld and system is grounded in Marx's theory of social labour. Unlike Marx, Habermas does not reduce this to labour. The irreducibleness of social communication, paves the way for a re-conceptualized society, in which neither sphere has conceptual primacy. Problems arise, however, when system imperatives infringe upon the lifeworld. Strategic communication gradually takes the lifeworld for-granted and treats the lifeworld as just another stakeholder. In developing the idea of the lifeworld, Habermas outlines the first stage of his social theory. The lifeworld's intersubjective horizon of shared convictions and values (Crossley, 1996, p. 73) furnishes a stable background. By processes of everyday communication, this stability provides society with a vital social core and \"institutional framework.\" Accordingly, societies reproduce themselves by continuing the interpretive activity of proceeding generations in which the members intersubjectively exchange the world orientations and situational definitions stored up in the lifeworld. As illustrated in Table 2.2, Table 2.2 Contr ibut ions o f Reproduct ion Processes to M a i n t a i n i n g the Structural Components of the L i f e w o r l d ^ ^ ^ ^ Structural ^^^components R e p r o d u c t i o n ^ ^ processes Culture Society Personality Cultural reproduction Interpretive schemes fit for consensus (\"valid knowledge\") Legitimations Socialization patterns Educational goals Social integration Obligations Legitimately ordered interpersonal relations Social memberships Socialization Interpretive accomplishments Motivations for actions that conform to norms Interactive capabilities (\"personal identity\") Note. From The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two (p. 142), by J . Habermas, 1989, Boston, M A : Beacon. this process of the symbolic reproduction of a society occurs within the three dimensions of cultural tradition, social integration, and individual socialization (Honneth, 1991, pp. 288-289). In the first sphere of society, the 'lifeworld', communicative action predominates. For Habermas, communicative action involves reproductive processes of cultural transmission, social integration, and socialization. He suggests there are three structural components to the modern lifeworld capable of being differentiated from one another. This differentiated trinity corresponds to culture, society, and personality. Habermas clearly illustrates the process of differentiation by comparing the communicative reason of modern capitalist societies with that of so-called 'primitive' societies (see Table 2.3). In such tribal societies, the three validity claims of communicative action (subjectivity of the speaker, truth of circumstance and role\/rule structure of social world) are not differentiated. Consequently, validity claims cannot be contested and debated .'-\u00a36.''\"' in the same way (Crossley, 1996, p. 106). Table 2.3 Functional Differentiation of Social Formations Social Formations Principle of Organization Social and System Integration Type of Crisis Primitive kinship relations: primary roles (age, sex) no differentiation between social and system integration externally induced identity crisis Traditional political class rule: state power and socio-economic classes functional differen-tiation between social and system integration internally determined identity crisis Liberal-capitalist unpolitical class rule: wage labour and capital system integrative economic system also takes over socially integrative tasks system crisis Note. From The Legitimation Crisis (p. 24), by J. Habermas, 1976, London: Heinemann. Different tribes with their different situational contexts and life experiences (Hall, 1969 & 1989) would view and interpret their worlds differently. Given the protracted human gestation period, different genders likely occupied different familial roles and world views. Habermas argues that: . . . the lifeworld, which is at first coextensive with a scarcely differentiated social system [i.e., in tribal society], gets cut down more and more to one subsystem amongst others. In the process, system mechanisms get further and further detached from the social structures through which social integration takes place (Habermas, 1989, p. 154). Social formation of the state comes through the hierarchisation of tribal society. Whether matriarchal or patriarchal equivalencies (Goux, 1990; Smith, 1990), their political domination undermines kinship relations and tradition. The ancient legitimacy of kinship is 47 : undermined by state and judicial authority. This legal and state power overrides mutual tribal agreement. After barter is de-linguistified into money, economic functions are enveloped and steered by the state. At this stage, political power guides society. Monetary consensus gives birth to a society organized by means of monetary exchange and the market mechanisms. Within the romantic ferment of the enlightenment, utilitarian principles are blended with qualitative principles to form liberal-capitalism. Tradition and its normative framework no longer drive society, but neither does the power of the state. Now, the relatively unconstrained process of financial exchange constitutes the engine of social change dubbed progress. Economic class imperatives now steer the lifeworld. Romantic notions of enlightenment as social progress are undermined by technological progress. Different classes, with different experiences and life conditions, interpret the world differently. Social institutions in modern capitalist society which provide the cultural-linguistic background of the lifeworld, are found primarily outside the influence of the state. These institutions are within what liberal theory, descriptively identifies as 'civil society' (Habermas, 1993a, p. 452). Among these institutions of the lifeworld are the voluntary associations which comprise society's 'public sphere' (Calhoun, 1993). The relation between lifeworld and system constitutes the battleground between the dynamics of modernity; capitalism, which is typically strategic rationality, systematized and secured in the media of money; the nation state (especially the welfare state), which is systematized and secured through the media of bureaucratic-administrative power; and democracy, which is formed (rather than systematized) through the dynamics (rather than secured media) of consensually oriented 'political will formations' that are anchored in the lifeworld (Rundell, 1991, pp. 137-138). Conflicts arise at the seam between system and lifeworld. Habermas considers this conflict, as differentiation and interrelation of system and lifeworld, at two distinct levels: the methodological level and the social-evolutionary level (Crossley, 1996, p. 107). At the methodological level, lifeworld processes and mechanisms are distinguished by the knowledge, goals and orientation of the actor, and more importantly, from communicative negotiations between actors. As illustrated by Table 2.4, the system level is the structure of impersonal interconnections which mediate and coordinate actions beyond the awareness of the actors. This refers those purposes of both communicative and instrumental action, which transcend the individual goals of the actor who performs them, and refers to the mechanisms which link such purposes. Principally, it concerns those actions which are structured through their institutional situation or context. Table 2.4 Types of Action \u2014 A c t i o n ^^Or ien ta t ion Action Situation Oriented to Success Oriented to Reaching Understanding Nonsocial Instrumental action . Social Strategic action Communicative action Note. From The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume One (p. 285), J. Habermas, 1981, Boston, M A : Beacon. Habermas is clear that it is specifically economic structures and mechanisms, alongside political structures and mechanisms, which have become differentiated in this way. The mediational mechanisms of 'money' and 'power' bypass communicative negotiation. Habermas places society's political and economic subsystem (with their operating 'mediums' of power and money) within the 'sphere' of the system. With this, Habermas follows the earlier critical theory of Horkheimer, Adorno and others, by maintaining that the development of capitalism is associated with the generalization of instrumental rationality to even broader areas of social life. This process Habermas describes as the 'colonization of the lifeworld'. Colonization Of The Lifeworld Having laid the foundation of the reproductive aspects of lifeworld, Habermas enters upon the second stage of his social theory. As illustrated at Table 2.4, Habermas asserts that purposive-rational activity (that contributes to the material reproduction of society), has supplanted communicative action to govern alone, these functional mechanisms of material reproduction (Honneth, 1991, p. 291). This 'system' sphere comprises social structures in which instrumental action predominates. Habermas' distinctions between lifeworld and system and between instrumental and communicative action (see Table 2.4) have significant consequences for our understanding of modern social life. For these distinctions allow him to rework the Weberian thesis of the rationalization of society to effect a decisive break from the pessimism that is at the heart of Weber's treatment of the 'iron cage' of modernity. Weber's thesis held that the progressive rationalization of society during modernity meant a paradoxical increase in autonomy and loss of freedom as the instrumentally rational subsystem of state and economy found an 7o increasing role in the socialization of individuals. This involves a heartless and amoral system continuing to expand remorselessly to overtake increasing areas of social life, which lies at the heart of Habermas' formulation of his 'colonization of the lifeworld' thesis. Habermas offers an escape from the iron cage, by reinterpreting the rationalization process of modernity as taking place at both the systemic level, where instrumental forms of action become increasingly efficient and effective, and at the level of the lifeworld, where communicative structures become increasingly rational as we confront and remove relations of domination, so that communication can rationally arrive at consensuses. Habermas' postulates that society can evolve a 'post-conventional consciousness' that is capable, not only of asserting itself against systemic pressures, but giving the system radical directive force. Within this context, Habermas advances his theory of 'discourse ethics' as a deontological proceduralist moral theory capable of rationally revolving practical political questions 'in so far as they are of a moral nature'. This positions us to focus upon his application of this theoretical framework to an account of the 'crisis' of the welfare state. The Crisis of the Welfare State Since formulating his theory of communicative action, Habermas has represented the welfare state as in 'crisis', as a potentially doomed project that is in a 'desperate race with time' (Habermas, 1986). This account of the crisis of the welfare state has its roots in what he perceives to be the apparent contradiction between the goal of the welfare state interventionism and the methods which have been selected to achieve this goal. Habermas' general position is that welfare state interventionism, although intended to promote 'social integration', has 'pathological consequences' that inhibit socialization. Habermas draws these consequences from Marx, and to a degree Foucault's analyses of modernity; his category of 'pathological consequences' includes the effects which can be associated with social process of reification, alienation, surveillance, and normalization. For Habermas, these social phenomena suggest a more fundamental social problem, the devolutionary 'colonization of the lifeworld'. Habermas first formulates the idea of a legitimation crisis of the welfare state by offering an account of the colonization of the lifeworld in socio-evolutionary terms. Central to this account is a functional interpretation of the relationship between lifeworld and system. For it is one of Habermas' major theoretical premises that the functional differentiation of the two spheres has characterized modernity; the competing logics of the rationalization of instrumental and communicative action have been pivotal during differentiation. Refining Parson's functionalist account of society, Habermas employs a distinction between 'social integration' ('integration' and 'pattern maintenance') and 'system integration' ('adaptation' and 'goal attainment') (Parsons, 1971, pp. 4-28). The lifeworld performs the function of 'social integration' that is intrinsic to communicative action. The economic and political subsystems assume responsibility for 'system integration' by 'steering' society, through their operating media of money and power, around environmental resistances. The present welfare state crisis originates with the origins in liberal capitalism. During this stage, the economic subsystem became dominant as it assumed responsibility for system integration, with the political subsystem acting the role of setting apart and defending the economic subsystem. Following Marx, Habermas attributes to the ideology of the market, a key role in 72-depoliticizing economic relations by distorting moral and ethical perceptions of social life. Social integration, which includes the function of legitimation and had been functionally differentiated from the political authorities of traditional societies to be found in the lifeworld, thus finds itself entangling with the system. The assumption of socially integrative tasks by the capitalist market was the driving force that propelled society toward the welfare state of late capitalism. Habermas interprets liberal capitalism as characterized by recurring crises, as the unregulated process of economic growth produces, at almost regular intervals, temporary systemic steering problems, dysfunctions in which the economic subsystem is attempting to overcome temporary problems of adaptation or goal attainment. Now that society's economic subsystem has assumed socially integrative tasks, these economic crises affected social integration by repoliticizing the economic system that in turn lead to critiques of the ideology of the capitalist market. Late capitalism, the stage of social development that the growth of the welfare state characterizes, arises from the attempt to control these economic crises and to prevent system collapse. Society's political subsystem ceases to play merely a negative role of providing an institutional defence of the economy to become directly involved in the pacification of class struggles by controlling aspects of both economic production and distribution. This involves a transfer of some functions of system integration to the political subsystem that, in turn, requires a further extension of the political administration. However, as the political administration now directly intervenes in the sphere of production to control the dysfunctions of the market, the market itself is by that repoliticized. The capitalist system, no longer 73 finding itself supported by the ideology of the market, thus finds itself facing a legitimation deficit. The political subsystem seeks to offset the missing legitimation by extending rewards conforming to the imperatives of the system, rewards of money and power which support the 'bourgeois ideology of achievement'. Habermas predicts that a legitimation crisis will occur either when the state runs out of the ability to supply such rewards or when expectations arise that cannot be satisfied by them. The contradictory element in the development of the welfare state resides, as I have shown, in the means by which the political subsystem functions to serve the goal of system integration. In the welfare state's desire to deliver rewards of money and other resources through bureaucratic and legal delivery to reconcile democracy and capitalism, the 'system' is brought directly into contact with the social structures of the lifeworld. From this contact, the disintegration of life relations is an ever-present possibility. For the instrumental rationality of the political subsystems administrative operation is capable of migrating into the moral and ethical institutions of the lifeworld by that affecting its self-understanding and diminishing its potential to supply legitimation. Here, Habermas suggests that 'technocratic consciousness', the mode of operation of administrative apparatuses, can itself by understood as ah ideology. Unlike the previous ideology of the market in liberal capitalism that operated to conceal and mystify class relations, technocratic consciousness operates to repress ethics as an element of social life; it causes people to loose consciousness of the distinction between work (instrumental action) and interaction (communicative action) and to start thinking of the world as something objectively given (something explicitly about instrumental action). 'It is a singular \"7* achievement of this ideology to detach society's self-understanding from the frame of reference of communicative action and from the concepts of symbolic interaction to replace it with a scientific model'. The result of welfare state interventionism, then, is to diminish the capacity of the lifeworld to supply legitimation since interventionism results in the \"objectivization and removal from the lifeworld\" (Habermas, 1989, p. 369) of those areas of social life into which the welfare administration intrudes. Habermas' (1976, p. 5) refers to the legitimation crisis where \"the ultimate grounds can no longer be made plausible, the formal conditions of justification themselves obtain legitimating force, and the level of justification becomes reflective\" (Pusey, 1987, p. 43). When Habermas turns to the legal system, legitimacy is redefined as validity (Habermas, 1996a; Tweed & Hunt, 1994, p. 303). Within social theory, legal validity fulfills social integrative functions, which operates as a \"hinge\" or \"transmission belt\" between system and lifeworld (Habermas, 1996b, p. 136; Tweed & Hunt, 1994, 303). Thus, the legitimation crisis of the uncoupling of the economic system from reciprocity with the nation-state is an area of potential debate to expand future free trade debates from a narrow economic viewpoint (Habermas, 1976, p. xxiii). Habermas' colonization thesis often appears to mirror the pessimism and fatalism of Weber's and Luhmann's treatments of modernity, yet consistently stresses that the lifeworld does not passively accept invasions, but reacts against administrative and other forms of systemic manipulation. Social movements which have emerged since the 1960s are interpreted as seeking to contest the excessive state interventionism which has caused the invasion of the lifeworld. These movements are seen as responding to crises caused by the IS erosion of individual and collective identities associated with the colonization of the lifeworld (Habermas, 1992c, p. 365). The significance of this formulation is that democratic politics becomes reactive or defensive, with politics aimed at establishing barriers to ensure the preservation of the lifeworld (see Table 2.5). Table 2.5 Reproduc t ive Funct ions of A c t i o n Or iented to M u t u a l Unders tanding ^ ^ ^ ^ Structural ^ \u2022 \\ c o m p o n e n t s Reproduction^v^^ processes Culture Society Person Cultural reproduction Transmission, critique, acquisition of cultural knowledge Renewal of knowledge effective for legitimation Reproduction of knowledge relevant to child rearing, education Social integration Immunization of a central stock of value orientations Coordination of actions via intersubjectively recognized validity claims Reproduction of patters of social membership Socialization Enculturation Internalization of values Formation of identity Note. From The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two (p. 144), by J. Habermas, 1989, Boston, M A : Beacon. For Tweedy and Hunt (1994), the idea of \"barriers\" lies at the heart of Habermas' approach to the transformation of the welfare state. Habermas emphasises that the welfare state lacks the capacity to solve its own problems and that simple reformist approaches are not sufficient. These are not barriers per se, but a failure to mourn modernity which leaves society bereft of new ideas and moral consciousness necessary to evolve. Reformist approaches are merely policy reforms or refinements in the equilibrium point between the expansion of the social welfare and market-based modernization. Status quo defences of the 7\u00a3> welfare state ultimately fail to challenge the form and methods of welfare state intervention. Habermas urges the redefinition of the relationship ('shifting of forces') between society's political and economic subsystem and society's autonomous public spheres which are found in the lifeworld, through the erection of a \"democratic dam against the colonizing encroachment of system imperatives on areas of the lifeworld\" (Habermas, 1992a, p. 444). An agenda of \"social curbing,\" which involves reflexive self-limitation of welfare state interventionism to protect those: areas of social life that are functionally dependent on social integration through values, norms, and consensus formation, to preserve them from falling prey to the systemic imperatives of economic and administrative subsystems growing with dynamics of their own (Habermas, 1992a, p 444). Habermas' political optimism resides in the hope that a consciously self-limiting political subsystem, supplemented by an active and vibrant public sphere, will allow the lifeworld and communicative rationality to flourish. Society's only remaining hopes for emancipation are in the lifeworld. Only the continued rationalization of communicative structures of the lifeworld can ease the emergence of a post-conventional consciousness capable not only of resisting, but also directing, systemic pressures. The Good and Just Life Habermas' strategy of social transformation is not a liberal-conservative political program that calls for rolling back of the welfare state. For while Habermas places a heavy burden upon the distinction between lifeworld and system, in effect using this distinction as a standard for judging the authenticity of forms of socialization, it is equally true that he n 7 perceives \"no recognizable alternative\" (Habermas, 1986, p. 9) to the welfare state project. Habermas explicitly states that for underdeveloped countries (and for developed countries with an underdeveloped welfare system), there is \"no plausible reason to diverge from this path of development\" (Habermas, 1986, p. 10). The liberal-conservative alternative, characterized by a supply-side economic policy and an emphasis upon the restoration of traditional norms (i.e., family values) must ultimately become even more authoritarian and repressive as this solution will leave legitimation gaps as welfare and other institutions which support the bourgeois ideology of achievement are either withdrawn as part of the rolling back of the welfare state or restructured in forms conducive to increased surveillance and normalization of welfare claimants. The liberal-conservative approach is therefore seen only to impair further the state's ability to function without directly coercive support. Table 2.6 Stages in the Development of Law Stages of moral consciousness Basic socio-cognitive concepts Ethics Types of law Preconventional Particular expectations of behaviour Magical ethics , law Revealed Conventional Norm Ethics of the law Traditional law Postconventional Principle Ethics of conviction and responsibility Formal law Note. From The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol . Two (p. 175), by J. Habermas, 1989, Boston, M A : Beacon. Tweedy and Hunt (1994) caution against the limitations which Habermas' dualistic framework imposes upon struggles around democratization. A significant implication of his theory is that the lifeworld, not the system, should be the principal target of efforts to 7f. democratize social life. Habermas regards the instrumental rationality of the system as a threat to the lifeworld, but also the communicative rationality of the lifeworld, with its emphasis upon democratic and participatory decision making, as a potential threat to the system. Habermas considers the: state apparatus and economy to be systemically integrated action fields that can no longer be transformed democratically from within, that is, be switched over to a political mode of integration, without damaging their proper systemic logic and therewith their ability to function (Habermas, 1993b, p. 444). Habermas' solution aims at \"a new balance\" between system and lifeworld, and not necessarily at the democratization of the state or work place (Habermas, 1993b, p. 444). Habermas continues to develop his theory, which is instrumental to achieve the more general goal of improving the quality of life. Intersubjectivity of Social Becoming Habermas (1979a) proposes reconstructing historical materialism to eliminate the apparent defects of teleological and economic determinism seen in Marxism. This reconstruction moves beyond the fundamental pessimism of Critical Theory by resuscitating the possibility of an emancipatory critique. An emancipatory critique of society is twofold, criticizing the notion of synthesis through labour and supplementing it with one of synthesis through interaction (Postone, 1993, p. 230). In place of the general theory of history found in Marxism, Habermas proposes a theory of systemic and evolutionary mechanisms. These mechanisms operate at the level of communication, not the economy. Habermas sees society Tl as an integrated, unstable system in which there is endogenous growth of knowledge. The system continually reaches a state of \"near to equilibrium\" and throws up systemic problems. Habermas (1979b) argues that: I. Systemic problems that we cannot solve without evolutionary innovations arise in the basic domain of a society. II. Each new mode of production means a new form of social integration, which reifies around a new institutional core. III. An endogenous learning mechanism provides for the accumulation of a cognitive potential that we can use for solving crisis-inducing system problems. IV. We can use this knowledge to develop the forces of production only when we have taken the evolutionary step to a new institutional framework and a new form of social integration. It remains an open question, how this step is taken. The descriptive answer of historical materialism is: through social conflict, struggle, social movements, and political confrontations (which, when they take place under the conditions of a class structure, can be analyzed as class struggles). But only an analytic answer can explain why a society takes an evolutionary step and how we are to understand that social struggles under certain conditions lead to a new level of social development. I would like to propose the following answer: the species learns not only in the dimensions of technically useful knowledge decisive for the development of productive forces but also in the dimension of moral-practical consciousness decisive for structures of interaction. The rules of communicative action do develop in reaction to changes in the domain of instrumental and strategic action; but in doing so they follow their own logic (Habermas, 1979b, pp. 147-148). Historical interpretations of key social actors, as particulars within their past context, are narrative descriptions of episodic change. Historians report on episodes (En), from at least two-different event perspectives, both of which are diachronic. Past-present horizons from the present perspective of the historian, are different from present-present reports of television, or past-past perspectives of social actors. Past-future perspectives of autobiographies, a key source of historical data, represent a different perspective. Social actors express different synchronic meanings in their present-present perspective, than the diachronic, historical account of a present-past perspective. Fusing these horizons in rank-order, as pre-given narrations of episode E l (in relation to different, later E2, E 3 , . . . En episodes), produces nothing more than a linear string of present-centred, episodic beads. Particular actions by key historical figures are important only in summary relationship to collectivities within their specific time-space perspective (Habermas, 1979a, pp. 8-11). Theoretical statements permit derivation of conditioned predictions of events that will occur in the future, but narrative statements can only deal with past diachronic events (Tenbruck, cited in Habermas, 1979a, p. 10). Within the force field2 of centripetal and centrifugal tension, we must predict future needs from the present horizon, where these needs take shape (Misgeld, 1991, p. 177). Al l the energy of the presumed future needs, serve only to deepen and intensify images of material needs in the here-and-now reality (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 149). Any fulfilment of future needs depends on the emancipation from reified structures of social institutions of the present horizon. Reified structures formed by the repression of needs in past horizons (Held, 1980, p. 277). In All Good Things (Friedman, 1994), the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard travels between the past, present, and future, while attempting to prevent the destruction of humanity by its own actions. Picard receives emancipatory clews 2 Jay (1993) uses the term \"force field\" as the dialectical tension between the parenthetical domains of modernity and post-modemity. Benjamin views dialectical change as the penetration \"by actuality\" of the force field between \"fore- and after-history\" (1989, pp. 60-64). Therefore, a force field is constructed of past and present moments, in anticipation of the future SI from Q, the not so ideal representative of our future good life. Similarly, emancipation within communicative action develops in dialectical interplay of diachronic (linear, temporally sequential time) and synchronic (meaningful) events, within the domain of instrumental and strategic action. Habermas' theory of evolution appears as a diachronic counterpart to the synchronically-laid-out theory of communicative action (Honneth, 1993, p. 282). The interplay of diachronicity and synchronicity represents an inextricable component of the dialectical nature of this project. For Habermas, this has meant informing the dialectical interplay of communicative and strategic action with evolutionary stages of moral-practical consciousness. As an analytic instrument, this leads to harnessing the why of social evolution into new levels of enlightened, social progress. Understanding the how of the dialectical interplay of social evolution and communicative action must inform beyond developmental episodes. Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development (cited in Habermas, 1979b & 1995) explains the why of Habermas' theory of evolution (see Table 2.7). Klein's (1935) notion of 'positions' as fundamentally different from the ideas of developmental stages and developmental phases, may explain the how. Habermas considers psychoanalysis \"the only tangible example of a science incorporating methodical self-reflection\" (1971, p. 214). Emancipation is the guiding interest of the critically oriented sciences and of all systematic reflection, including philosophy and psychoanalysis (Habermas, 1971, p. 310). Much as hermeneutics is concerned with interpretation, for Habermas, Freud's psychoanalysis is concerned with the construction of interpretations (Held, 1980, p. 321). As \"depth %2. hermeneutics\" (Habermas, 1971, p. 241), psychoanalytic theory is linked with practice through methodically incorporating self-reflection (Held, 1980, p. 248). Self-reflection brings to consciousness, the determinates of the self-formative process and structures of distorted communication (Habermas, 1971, pp. 22-23). Applying the hermeneutic techniques of psychoanalysis, allows deep-structure deformities to be isolated and eradicated. Reified structures of past repressed needs may be emancipated from encrusted patterns of domination. Possibly, diachronic time is a reified structure imposed on synchronic 'time' to harness social reproduction. Table 2.7 Elucidation of the Stages of Moral Consciousness (Kohlberg) Cognitive Presuppositions Stages of Moral Consciousness Idea of the Good and Just Life Sanctions Domain of Validity Ila. Concrete-operational Thought 1. Punishment-obedience orientation Maximization of pleasure through obedience Punishment (deprivation of physical rewards) Natural and social environment (undifferentiated) 2. Instrumental hedonism Maximization of pleasure through exchange of equivalents lib. Concrete-operational Thought 3. Good-boy orientation Concrete morality of gratifying interactions Shame (with-drawal of love and social recognition) Group of primary reference persons 4. Law-and-order orientation Concrete morality of a customary system of norms Members of the political community III. Formal-operational Thought 5. Social-contractual legalism Civil liberty and public welfare Guilt (reaction of conscience) Legal associates in general 6. Ethical-principled orientation Moral freedom Private persons in general Note. From Communication and Evolution of Society (p. 81), by J. Habermas, 1979, Boston: Beacon. If the medium of reaching understanding through language is what distinguishes the life-form of the human being, then we cannot reduce social reproduction to the single \u00a3 3 dimension of labour, as in Marx's reduction (Postone, 1993, p. 229). For Marx, the spatial and temporal growth of human beings, is calibrated in forms of here-and-now (material) reality. There is a greater readiness to build a superstructure for reality (the present) along a vertical axis of upper and lower than to move forward along the horizontal of time (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 148). Beyond this activity of dominating nature, we must regard the practice of linguistic mediation as an equally fundamental dimension of historical development (Habermas, 1979a). By expanding Marx's conception of history to include the dimension of a theory of action, Habermas associates the two action notions of 'labour' and 'interaction' with different categories of rationality. In the subsystems of purposive-rational action into which we organize the tasks of social labour and political administration, the species evolves through the accumulation of technical and strategic knowledge. In the institutional framework in which we reproduce the socially integrating norms, the species evolves through liberation from all constraints which inhibit communication (Habermas, 1979a). This model of society, in which action systems organized according to purposive rational criteria are distinguished from a sphere of everyday communication, gives Habermas the starting point of all further extensions. Clearly, the utterance of the lifeworld, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by ideologically-distorted consciousness around the given object of an utterance (Habermas, 1993a, p. 427). The utterance of the lifeworld cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue. After all, the utterance arises out of this dialogue as a continuation of it and as a rejoinder to it - it does not approach the object obliquely from the sidelines. Habermas combines Peirce's analysis of the scientific community from the perspective of an 'idealized' communication community (Habermas, 1994, p. 108), with social processes of individualization by means of socializing Mead's framework of 'universal discourse' (Habermas, 1989, pp. 3-4). The point of this theoretical universalization of the communication community is the claim that \"the social life-process has an inbuilt relation to truth\" (Habermas, 1981, p. 105). This universalization, along with the socialization (including 'de-politicization' or internal differentiation) of the concept of communication is a characteristic feature of the post-metaphysical thought of modernity (Habermas, 1992), marking a radical break between social scientific thought and the political thought of the ancient world and the classics of political philosophy (Habermas, 1994). Communication action aims ultimately at a rational agreement between ego and alters. Whereas purposive-rational or even value-rational actions form a system by latching onto other actions, communicative actions form a social system by attaching themselves to the actions of others (Habermas, 1989, p. 58). For Habermas, the opposition between symmetry and asymmetry is central, not just to role theory, but also to theories of the ideal conditions of communication. The differentiation between symmetrical and asymmetrical conditions of communication is important for distinguishing between distorted or disturbed and undistorted communication. Habermas (1971) traces the failure of Dilthey's approach to an objectivistic hermeneutics (rooted in an untenable, irrational vitalism) to the evolution of world-views, as influenced by developmental psychology and structuralism (1979b, pp. 95-129). Collective activity produces most changes in the deep structure of values and JS5 meanings, below the level of conscious, strategic action. The persistence of unifying patterns (Zolla, 1981) of social action participates in a meandering orientation to truth (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) while simultaneously partaking in the discourse of social and historical hetero-glossolalia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces) (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 272; Habermas, 1970, p. 372; Habermas, 1981, p. 105). Habermas links his social theory to the whole trivium of disciplines of rhetoric, dialectic, and logic (Myerson, 1994, p. 45). Once having exposed the contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language, the threefold discipline make possible, a concrete detailed analysis of any utterance. Alongside the centripetal forces of the unconstrained, universal consensus, the centrifugal forces of strategic action carry on their uninterrupted work. Alongside the ideologically distorted communication of the centralized unification of the world-view, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and dis-unification go forward toward an unconstrained, universal consensus. A succession of paradigms has shown the basic indivisibility of thought in economics, philosophy, and physics throughout history (Hsieh & Ye, 1991, p. xiii). The philosophy of any period is always interwoven with the technology and science of the period, but only fundamental change in science produces reactions in philosophy (Jeans, 1966, p. 2). Social Action Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action was adapted as meta-typology with u inductive strategies of argumentation substructed3 as taxon (sub-categories). As illustrated at Appendix B . l , social action (Habermas, 1976, p. 209) involves two lines of communication, communicative action and strategic action. Communicative action presupposes mutually recognized validity claims making possible direct understanding about the validity claims. Strategic action recognizes no mutual validity claims, and understanding can only be indirectly inferred from indicators to determination. Communicative action is consent-oriented aimed at reaching a rational agreement and meaning. Two elements of communication action are action oriented to reaching understanding and consensual action. Consensual action presupposes agreement about implicitly raised validity claims as background consensus because of common definitions of the situation. Action oriented to reaching understanding leads to consensual action, and may employ strategic elements provided they are meant to lead to direct understanding. Consensual action involves two aspects of action and discourse. Action is the praxis of emancipation. Discourse examines as hypothetic and themantic, validity claims raised for statements and norms. Participants in discourse retain a cooperative attitude. Consensual action allows the use of strategic elements to guide discourse to the truth. Strategic action is purposive-rational and oriented to success. Strategic action involves two elements of openly strategic action and latently strategic action. The intention of strategic action is interpreted narrowly as special cases of latently strategic action. Substruction is the process of extending the dimensions of a single type in order to form the full typology of which it is a part (Lazarsfeld in Bailey, 1994, p. 24). The classification process of underlying or supportive structures of taxon. The opposite process is to begin with a full typology and eliminate some of its cells through various strategies. SI Latently strategic action is composed of two elements of manipulation and systemically distorted communication. Systemically distorted communication is ideological, unconscious deception, where at least one participant deceives themselves about the pseudo-consensus. Manipulation is conscious deception, where at least one other participant is intentionally deceived about the strategic attitude cloaked in a pseudo-consensual manner. The Public Sphere Much of the role of citizen is performed within the public sphere. Habermas (1989c, p. 136) defines public sphere as the realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. The public sphere is constituted by means of debate and discussion of issues of common concern. But not all views have equal access to the public sphere. Private ownership and control of the media, not to mention editorial policies and effects of the cultural backgrounds of those who create programs can lead to the exclusion of views of certain groups and in relation to some issues. The importance of Habermas and his 'ideal speech situation' is evident here (Stevenson, 1995). If we need an ideal speech situation anywhere, then it is surely in the public sphere, where our political debates are conducted. Instead of an ideal speech situation, we have a system steered by money and power. Free Trade and Social Policy The \"Free Trade\" movement, is a drive to end all purely political barriers to the free movement of capital throughout the North American continent. This protection of the rights 88 of business to receive government subsidies holds so long as they do not \"discriminate\" on merely national grounds (Drache, 1987, p. 77; 1988). However, free trade is more than the uncoupling of the private economic sphere from the public sphere. The presumption of economic rationalism is that the reproduction of society turns increasingly, or even exclusively, on a strengthened mode of system integration in which the role of coordination or steering passes from the inefficient and inferior state apparatus, to the supposedly better one of the economy (Pusey, 1991, p. 18). The 'crisis of the state' has become the 'crisis of society'. Societies and social reproduction are now threatened by the very coordinating structure used to guide progress. This economic steering mechanism violates the adaptive capacities of ordinary social life and threatens the social reproduction of culture and individual identity. This Economic rationalism treats its inner environment of civil society and politics much as the malleable object of development and rationalization. Even in nation-state societies, where the residues of older social structures (such as church, remembered history, extended family, and community) have been all but spent in the pursuit of progress in little more than a generation, the premise of the economic logic remains the same. The idea of an economic system is a symbolic, social construction (Goux, 1994). Universal Pragmatics and the Justification of Validity Claims Habermas frames his theory of argument within his larger theory of rationality, which is in turn supported by the theory of argument. There is \"the goal of formally analyzing the conditions of rationality\" (Habermas, 1981, p. 2), where argument is central to identifying the good life (Myerson, 1994, p. 73). Achieving the good life requires determining what it n means for people to act rationally; under what conditions they can do so; and what prevents people from acting with reason. Ultimately, Habermas proposes to define the type of social development which promotes rational action. While being rational is a corollary of knowing things, it is not identical to knowing the answers. Rationality is dynamic, and has \"less to do with the possession of knowledge than with how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge\" (Habermas, 1981, p. 8). Our actions are rational if they are open to defence and criticism, if our actions are appropriately influenced by other views. Thus, experience is the basis of Habermas' theory where we share this fundamental recognition: This concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld (Habermas, 1981,10). This means, that participation in an argument leads toward not just agreement, but a new union of views and parties and the recognition that we share a common world. Our common world comprises a world 'out there,' and a world 'inside.' We share a common world of language, and the capacity to interpret through the speech act of language. Table 2.8 represents the correlations that obtain for our common world: a. The domains of reality to which every speech action takes up relation. b. The attitudes of the speaker prevailing in particular modes of communication. c. The validity claims under which the relations to reality are established. d. The general functions that grammatical sentences assume in their relations to reality. For Habermas, the T with which a speaker performing a speech act identifies, belongs to the lifeworld (1985, p. 107). Mcintosh however, argues that the self is not wholly the product of the lifeworld, and we cannot understand ourselves without accounting for the twin polarities of person and self, lifeworld and unconscious (1994, p. 26). The T forms a background, but is not thematized in, an on-going communication. The objective, social, and subjective worlds, on the other hand, form a reference system for everything which the participants in communication can thematize and on which they might come to an understanding with one another (Habermas, 1985, p. 107). Table 2.8 D o m a i n s of Rea l i ty and Validity Claims of Language Usage Domains of Reality Mode of Communi-cation: Basic Attitude Validity Claims General Functions of Speech \"The\" World of External Nature Cognitive: Objectivating Attitude (e.g., assertions, contesting, descriptions, explanations) Truth (grounds) Representation of Facts (Constantive) \"Our\" World of Society Interactive: Conformative Attitude (e.g., commands, advice, recommendations, requests, warnings) Rightness (justification) Establishment of Legitimate Interpersonal Relations (Regulative) \" M y \" World of Internal Nature . Expressive: Expressive Attitude (e.g. admission, revelation, deception) Truthfulness (confirmations) Disclosure of Speaker's Subjectivity (Avowal) Language Comprehensibility Note. Synthesized from Habermas (1979b, p. 68) and Held (1980, p. 338). Universal validity claims form three relations to reality: representing facts, establishing legitimate (or valid) interpersonal relations, and expressing one's subjectivity. Habermas argues for \"the discursive redemption of validity claims of truth and rightness\" (White, 1995, p. 126) by looking to the pragmatic structure of communication oriented to understanding. Language can be conceived as the medium of three interrelating worlds: the objective, the social, or the subjective. Statements within the three worlds of language may be indexed to a validity claim: the propositional component is correlated to the objective world of things and to the truth claim, the illocutionary component is correlated to the social world and to the Tightness claim, and the expressive component is correlated to the subjective world of inner states and experiences and to truthfulness\/sincerity (Habermas, 1979b, p. 67; Skjei, 1985, p. 89). Comprehensibility concerns the deep-structure of language which joins the communicative modalities of lifeworld and system. Comprehensive consideration of all relevant features of the situation requires, for Aristotle, perception of the particular4, which thus represents the minor premise of the practical syllogism (cited in Gunther, 1993, p. 189). Habermas notes in contrast to Aristotle, that \"today all discursive knowledge is . . . more or less context dependent, more or less general, more or less rigorous\" (1993b, p. 25). It is not just, the nomological knowledge of the objectifying empirical sciences that raise a claim to universal validity. Notwithstanding that today, the universal good is divorced from the faculty of knowledge (Habermas, 1993b, p. 25), a contemporary interpretation of the Socrates-Plato thesis of universal good against the grain of the Aristotelian particularity is useful. Habermas is aware of the classical syllabus of rhetoric, logic and dialectic as depicted at Table 2.9. He uses this trivium in each analysed argument (1981, p. 26). In analogy to 4 From Latin, particularis; from pars, partis, a part. In metaphysics, an individual existing unity interrelating with other unities, but not a universal. An individual member of a class as opposed to the property of the class (Angles, 1994, p. 220; Runes, 1962, p. 226). 92. this Aristotelian canon (Ebbesen, 1981), Habermas distinguishes between the logical level of products, the dialectical level of procedures, and the rhetorical level of processes of argumentation (Gunther, 1993, p. 41; Myerson, 1994, p. 45). TABLE 2.9 T r i v i u m of Communica tiveJ2volurion Discipline Praxis Consciousness Telos Dissipative Action Regressive Rhetoric Process of Collapsing intellectual boundary Integration of Assertive Resistance Defensive Strategies Argumen-tation Expanding emotional boundary Intellect\/Emotions Receptive Persistence Inability to deal with emotions Dialectic Pragmatic procedures Moral Responsibility Contradictory-free meaning Emancipation Infinite Possibilities Logic Products Individuated collectivity Universal Consensus Genesis Reified Structure Note. Adapted from Habermas (1981, p. 26), Jung (1977), Myerson (1994, pp. 44-45), Tannenbaum & Hanna (1985), and Walker (1986). The genesis of formal logic in the Socratic-Aristotelian legacy into the so-called \"three principles of thought\" (Angeles, 1992, p. 167), justifies universal claims by ontological reality, cognitively necessity, and epistemological prenotion in semantics. Propositional claims join the parenthetical ambiguity of subjects and predicated by copula is. Since the design of an ideal speech situation is necessarily implied in the structure of potential speech where \"all speech, even of intentional deception, is oriented toward the idea of truth\" (Habermas, 1970, p. 372), the ideal speech situation is stretched, in abstractum (Walker, 1986) across the syllogism as depicted in Table 2.10. The minor premise forms the particular sensory-testament of the situation. Together, when guided byphronesis5, there is an assurance of a telos6 of the good life at each iteration (Giinther, 1993, p. 172; Habermas, 1993b, pp. 25,117). Table 2.10 Universal Principles of the Ideal Speech Situation Axiomatic Principle Logical Syllogism Ideal Speech Law of Identity. A is A Major premise Truth is that which is so. Law of Excluded Middle A is A or A is not A . Minor premise That which is not so, is not Truth. Law of Non-contradiction A is A or A is not A cannot both be true. Conclusion Therefore, Truth is all there is. Note. Synthesized from ideas of Aristotle and Socrates (cited in Angeles, 1992, p. 167), Habermas (1970, p. 372), and Walker (1986). The copulative particularity of the minor premise is both inferential and logically inductive in the application of prelocutionary strategies of argumentation oriented toward success. It is the very ambiguity of the copula that permits emancipatory evolution or phronesic progress in reconstructing the original creative act. Such induction is ampliative inference not explicative, and is fraught with inductive strategies of argumentation. These fallacies of argumentation do not guide with phronesis, but are used to persuade acceptance Phronesis entails knowledge of the goods (ends, goals) of rational human conduct, and knowledge of means and their proper application in achieving those desirable rational goods. Distinguished by praxis from theoretical knowledge and practical skill (Angeles, 1994, p. 228; Runes, 1962, p. 235). Used here to mean step-by-step goodness, not just teleological goodness. Habermas interprets phronesis as a negative in constrast to the positive claims of episteme, the faculty of knowledge (1993b, 21). From the Greek, telos, whence teleological. The end term of a process, purpose, completed state; specifically in Aristotle, the purpose or final cause (Angeles, 1994, p. 309; Runes, 1962, p. 315) of a particular conclusion. \"Proponents and opponents engage in a competition with arguments in order to convince one another, that is, in order to reach a consensus\" (Habermas, 1995, p. 160). Habermas defines argument as: . . . that type of speech in which participants thematize contested validity claims and attempt to vindicate or criticize them through arguments (1981, p. 18). Thus, argument corresponds to the 'central experience' of a 'unifying' process. The one thing not arguable, is the definition of being rational and by corollary irrational (Habermas, 1981, p. 18), for \"anyone who systematically deceives himself about himself behaves irrationally\" (Habermas, 1981, p. 21). Those engaged in an argument try to convince the other of the validity of their claim to reach a consensus. An argument may be defective by virtue of the premises not supporting the conclusion. Those engaged in argument may employ tricks or deceit to be successful in winning the argument or persuading for the consensus. These strategies of deceit and trickery are fallacies, as derived from the Latin, fallacia. These fallacies can be divided into two broad categories: deductive and inductive or formal and informal. Deductive fallacies are invalid arguments involving an error in formal logic in which the conclusion is not a necessary product of the premises. Deductive methods are positivistic, and typically suspend the acceptability requirement for the premises. This suspension of independent support for the premises means the dependent outcome equals the independent input. Such suppositional reasoning supports the status quo (Phelan & Reynolds, 1996, p. 148). When deductive arguments are sound, it is by virtue of entailment1. Inductive reasoning is most commonly used in discourse. Informal fallacies or strategies are invalid inferences. Inductive methods assess the validity of the premises in support of the conclusion. Errors occur in inductive reasoning with conclusions not following the deductive structures and rules of logical validity. Inductive arguments are considered reliable when, given that we accept the factual premises, there is a low probability of mistakenly asserting a claim of validity (Phelan & Reynolds, 1996, p. 22). Inductive strategies may be classified under three general categories: 1) Material strategies dealing with the facts and content of the argument. a) Fallacies of evidence with premises not providing factual support for conclusions. b) Fallacies of irrelevance with premises being irrelevant to the conclusion. 2) Linguistic strategies involving the defective use of language including, ambiguity, vagueness, definition, inconsistency, opacity, and circularities. 3) Irrelevant emotional appeal as strategies affecting behavioural responses such as appealing to prejudices, biases, loyalty, and fear (Angeles, 1992, 104). Arguments attempt to establish validity claims by citing persuasive reasons, to support a claim proving its truth. The supporting reasons are premises, the conclusion is the claim, and the argument contains sets of premises and a conclusion (Habermas, 1981, p. 26). Textual arguments are typically more complex than \"a sound bite\" or image that implies a single premise supporting a conclusion. Still, complex or extended arguments comprise Entailment means that provided we accept the premises, it is impossible to resist the conclusion rationally (Phelan & Reynolds, 1996, p. 22). variations on this standard. Besides the single premise supporting a single conclusion, there are series of two or more premises, each of which is independently intended to support the conclusion. There are conjunctions of two or more premises which are jointly intended to support the conclusion. Nevertheless, combinations of these three arrangements are the basic patterns of all extended arguments All arguing shares this structure, the pattern of claim, reason and counterclaim leading toward mutual understanding and agreement by modification. For Habermas, this structure is more important than the differences between one argument and another due to particular requirements: Thus all arguments, be they related to questions of law and morality or to scientific hypotheses or to works of art, require the same basic form of organization which subordinates the eristic means to the end of developing intersubjective conviction by the force of the better argument (Habermas, 1981, p. 36). The 'eristic'8 dialectic (Angeles, 1992, p. 90; Runes, 1962, p. 96) refers to the classical arts of persuasion by the Sophists. Eristic artifices are the 'means', which serve to reach true agreement. Habermas means the process of arguing forces people to follow these patterns. The structure of language itself follows a relentless course toward the resolution of differences. The eristic is defined as subordinate to the organization of the argument. The content of argument varies, but they all take one form: The phrase eristic dialectic is used pejoratively, referring to the Sophists' claim to debate to make the worse appear better, and the better appear worse. Eristic is from the Greek, eris, meaning strife or conflict. Spurious reasoning characterized by the exchange of ideas in which the aim is not truth, but the intentional use of any kind of argument and manipulation of language to win a dispute or persuade someone of the truth of a point in question. Aristotle contrasted apodeictic, which mean certain beyond dispute, with eristic dialectic, which meant subject to dispute (Angeles, 1992, pp. 17, 90; Runes, 1962, pp. 15, 96). T7 What is common . . . is the form of argumentation: We try to support a claim with good grounds or reasons; the quality of reasons and their relevance can be called into question by the other side; we meet objections and are in some cases forced to modify our original position (Habermas, 1981, p. 31). Habermas uses four implicit \"validity claims of comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness, and rightness\" (1979, p. 3) to realize the ideal speech situation. However, not every speech action can be unambiguously classified under the modes of communication (at Table 2.8). But, every competent speaker unequivocally chooses one mode, since every speech act must raise three universal validity claims (excluding comprehensibility). The speaker singles out one validity claim to thematize as a component of speech. Individual validity claims may be suspended (in strategic action, truthfulness; in symbolic action, truth) (Habermas, 1979b, p. 41). Nevertheless, every valid norm must fulfil the condition that: All affected can accept the consequence and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation) (Habermas, 1995, p. 65). This compels what Habermas, following Mead, calls the universal exchange of roles in a principle that constrains all affected to adopt the perspectives of all others in the balancing of interests (Habermas, 1995, p. 65). Modernity is typified by a differentiation and development of the constellations of the three 'modern' types of action complexes and institutional forms: science, morality and political legitimation, and aesthetics. This has an homologous relation with the philosophical level, with the differentiation of the types of rationality appropriate to the formation of action\/knowledge in those three spheres. Thus, each form of differentiation accords with the way in which humanity orients itself to the worlds that it creates - the external world of nature or systemic environments, termed the system and the world of intersubjectively constituted sociality which her terms the lifeworld, encompassing everyday life in the mundane sense, political forms of consensus formation, as well as the world of inner subjectivity of desires, needs and fantasies which matches, homologously with aesthetic experience. Throughout Habermas' project there is formalised the distinction and differentiation between system and lifeworld, and the perspectives which each embodies, embraces and develops. Social systems, as they become more complex, differentiate themselves and become self-regulating according to their own media, or forms of self-regulation and self-reflexivity, constituted through either purposive\/cognitive or strategic knowledge and criteria of validity. The lifeworld thematises the normative structures (values and institutions) of society. According to Habermas' schema, this 'inner life' of society does not belong to the system simply as an environment, as do other systems; rather it exists as a world sui generis9 and resists total absorption to the system's imperatives through socialized individuation and the interpretative capacities which persons and societies have to develop to ensure a coherent identity. This distinction, with the particular lifeworld perspective, allows Habermas the critical leverage, which he believes the Frankfurt School denied itself. Habermas has developed a critical program of the deformations and unfettered expansions of instrumental 9 Of its own kind or class. From the Latin, the only one of its own kind; peculiar. <=tr and strategic rationalities whilst simultaneously providing the basis for this critique from the vantage point of redeeming the U t o p i a n horizon of modernity itself. Located neither in the world or perspective of systems-orientated administrative affairs or capitalist commodification, nor in aesthetics, but in the moral-practical perspectives located in the lifeworld. With this notion of discourse ethics located in the lifeworld, I return to the opening theme of this chapter and a suitable place to summarize the Habermasian project. Summary of the Habermasian Project Habermas' project is to argue the good life. For Habermas, the good life is the practical force of the better argument within the ideal speech situation of the public sphere. Economic person and citizen stand as two differentiated and competing aspects of the modern world. Modernity develops from the formation of the modern state from its absolutist form, to its form as a constitutional republic to its form as a social democratic welfare state in the twentieth century. In this framework, the public sphere is diagnosed as having both shrunk and been absorbed by the state or the interests of capital. The public sphere emerges through the perspective of Habermas' differentiated image of society with its paradoxes and pathologies in the relation between its system and lifeworld constituents. The autonomous systems of the market or the bureaucratic-administrative-welfare state can 'infiltrate' lifeworld contexts in a way that can assimilate the lifeworld to one or other of the system imperatives. This phenomena of \"the internal colonisation of the lifeworld\" by the system results in the \"cultural impoverishment and fragmentation of everyday consciousness\" (Habermas, 1989, p. 355). But this process of colonization is not \u00bb 0 0 total, it is neither precipitous nor does it predecide the outcome. Rather there are only tendencies and contradictions because the lifeworld itself contains a permanent communicative potential through which protests and social movements are formed. The issue then becomes what type of potential is located in the lifeworld and its social movements. From the vantage point of conflict Habermas singles out the public political sphere. That is, the democratic moment of modernity, as the central guiding focus for his theoretical and philosophical endeavours. The problem he sets for himself is its meaning and grounding. Habermas' sympathy for Aristotle's notion of politics as acting and doing, as praxis and poeisis, as against technique, strategies and technical expertise clearly lurks between the meaning and grounding. Habermas hypotheses that deviations from communicative action: A. increase in proportion to the degree of repression which characterizes the institutional system within a given society; B. The degree of repression depends on the developmental stage of the productive forces and the organizational authority of political and economic power (Habermas, 1970, p. 374). In establishing the sensus communis, the truth is in the agreement, in the activity of understanding and reaching consensus over the norms which are deployed. For Habermas, this is essentially a practico-discursive affair in which, through argumentation, the social actors expose and make know the norms that are in use. Language \"is orientated to observing intersubjectively valid norms that link reciprocal expectations\" (Habermas, 1979b, p. 118). This provides the basis from which the rational content of communication is established. Rationality entails: 10 f . . . the moral-practical aspect of responsibility of the acting subject and the justification of the action norms . . . [to express] the truthfulness of intentional expressions and [... ] the rightness of norms. In this sense, while language is always 'content sensitive' it presupposes a validity basis in which the participants at least implicitly raise and reciprocally recognise a consensus that makes communication possible (Habermas, 1979b, p. 118). There is a shift in emphasis from universal pragmatics where the ideal speech situation functions as a normative horizon to the activity of discourse or argumentation itself. The rationality criteria of social action are located and made visible in the act of speaking itself. We are, for Habermas, neither labouring serfs nor ratiocinating capitalists, but speaking, interacting and potentially free and democratic beings. We are interpretive beings within an interpreted universe of our own making. In the following Chapter Three on Methodology, I will apply Habermas' four validity claims of comprehensibility; truth; rightness; and truthfulness together with his theory of social action (communicative and strategic action) to a sample of free trade discourse from the public sphere. The consensus claim of the discourse sample will be assessed for validity. CHAPTER THREE METHODOLOGY In this chapter I develop a 'methodology' for assessing dialogical forms of argument. The chapter is organized into five sections. First, I outline Habermas' validity claims criteria which will form the basis of this methodology. Secondly, I establish a rationale for choosing The Globe and Mail Newspaper sample by outlining prior research into free trade. Third, I specify how the data was collected, and their sources. Fourth, I clarify the sampling procedures and reliability raters. Last, I describe how the data will be analysed. Habermas' Validity Claims Habermas (1979b, p. 65) argues that anyone acting communicatively, must raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated or redeemed. In participating in the process of understanding, raising the following four validity claims is presupposed: a. Uttering something understandably (Comprehensible); b. Giving the hearer something to understand (Truth); c. Thereby making themselves understood (Rightness); d. Reaching an understanding with another person (Truthfulness). Moreover, Habermas asserts that communicative action can continue undisturbed, only so long as participants suppose that their validity claims are justified (1979b, pp. 2-3). While \u00bbc3 each speech act carries specific meaning, it puts forward general claims. Thus, speech-act-typical commitments are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) linked to obligations to provide grounds or justifications (Held, 1980, 337). Consequently, the recipient can be rationally motivated to accept the content of the assertion along three modes of communication - the cognitive, the interactive and expressive. Table 3.1 depicts a typology1 of 54 inductive strategies substructed under 4 taxon (categories) of Habermas' validity claims and the 4 taxon of social action. Strategic Action typically invalidates it's claim, though Action Orientated to Reaching Understanding sometimes contains strategic elements of rhetoric. Table 3.1 Definitional Referent of 54 Particular Stratagems under 4 Taxon of Validity Claims and Social Action Categories Validity Claim and Communicative Action Truth Truthfulness Rightness Comprehensible Action Orientated to Reaching Understanding Action Consensual Action Discourse Invalidity Claim and Strategic Action Openly Strategic Manipulation Latently Strategic Communication Systemically Distorted Communication Untruth Untruthfulness Wrongness Incomprehensible Particular Stratagem Angeles (1992) Ebbesen (1981) Hughes, W. (1996) Johnson & Blair (1977) Angeles (1992) Hughes, W. (1996) Johnson & Blair (1977) Phelan & Reynolds (1996) Angeles (1992) Hughes, W. (1996) Johnson & Blair (1977) Runes (1979) Walton (1985) Angeles (1992) Hughes, W. (1996) Johnson & Blair (1977) Walton (1991) Note. Synthesized from Habermas (1979) and Johnson & Blair (1977). Typology is another term for classification. A typology is usually multidimensional and conceptual. One cell of a typological table is a taxon, from the taxonomy. Taxonomy generally refers to classification of empirical entities. Multiple cells within a classification table are taxa. These types of types are also called subtypes or subtaxa (Bailey, 1994). f_6\u00abf The typology developed from these validity criteria (at Table 3.1) was used to evaluate textual arguments about free trade, and social policy and programs. A situation of unconstrained discourse is abstracted as hermeneutical-dialectic in order to translate distorted intra-textual validity claims into an emancipatory understanding about universal norms. Prior Studies and Rationale for Sampling The Globe and Mail Newspaper Media coverage of free trade was considered \"objective\" by some studies (Bannon & Westell cited in Winter, 1990, p. xiv). Other studies found \"free trade is good\/bad for you\" (Winter, 1990, p. 29). Bannon's (cited in Winter 1990, p. 37) examination of newspaper headlines showed them balanced but leaning toward contra-free trade. Similarly, Westell (cited in Winter, 1990, pp. 32-34) argues that content analyses conducted after the election showed the media were balanced, rather than supporting free-trade. A study of free-trade coverage in seven Canadian papers by Carleton University's journalism department revealed that the Toronto Star ran the greatest number of stories on the subject. However, its coverage contained the highest proportion of stories reflecting unfavourably on free trade (cited in Hayes, 1992, p. 229). Research suggested there was an attempt at debate between The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star on free trade. This coverage may have yielded a potent sample, but an ostensibly irate reader brought the Toronto Star before the Ontario Press Council over its free trade coverage (Hayes, 1992, p. 229) who had \"discussed his strategy with the Conservative Party\" (Winter, 1990, p. 2). Winter interpreted The Globe and Mail's coverage of the 1988 Federal, \"free trade\" election as pro-free trade and pro-Progressive Conservative (1990, pp. 135-142). In a positivistic study that was methodologically designed petitio principii (Winter, 1990, pp. 128), the ultraconservative Fraser Institute think-tank found The Globe and Mail was balanced in coverage of free trade (Fraser Institute, 1988). Nevertheless, even the Fraser Institute concluded, The Globe and Mail were strongly was biassed in favour of the Progressive Conservatives (Fraser Institute, 1989, p. 2; Winter, 1990, pp. 128, 141). The Globe and Mail prominently present themselves on the front page as \"Canada's National Newspaper\" (Winter, 1990, p. 16), is readily available nationally, and are considered factual. The Globe and Mail is considered the authoritative national newspaper targeted toward upper-income earning businesspeople and those influential in policy decisions. A national newspaper should inform the public on issues of national importance, and should generate debate. The Globe and Mail have historically supported free trade, freedom from government interference, and conservative orientation (Doyle, 1990; Hayes, 1992). The media studies tended to offer a \"shallow analysis\" (Hayes, 1992, p. 232) of the debate which is not useful for critical theory. Data Collection and Sampling Procedure Media coverage of free trade in North America precedes the birth of Canada. Since an adequate representation of the current free trade debate must date to the McDonald Commission, data was collected for the period 1980 to 1995 (most recent coverage in the database). A multi-stage sample of The Globe and Mail Newspaper coverage was determined with the Canadian Business and Current Affairs CD-ROM Index (CBCA, 1996) available on-line through Simon Fraser University. The CBCA amalgamates the Canadian News(paper) Index (1977-1992) (CNI) and the Canadian Business (Periodicals) Index (1975-1992). Covering all major Canadian journals, magazines and daily newspapers totalling some 250 publications, the CBCA comprises significant features of public sphere discourse. The CBCA is classified according to codes published in the Canadian Index. An alternate method of sampling was the Infomart Full-text coverage of Canadian Newspapers and Business Periodicals. While a Boolean Search of Infomart would have yielded a more reliable sample, at $100 per hour it was considered cost prohibitive. CBCA Micromedia codes the content of print media articles according to Canadian News Index classification criteria. Using a Boolean Search, all texts concerning the topic of free trade from 1980 to 1995 inclusive were selected as an internal sample. A second Boolean Search examined at all texts concerning the topic of free trade and social policy\/programs for the same period combining the internal sample with purposeful content sample. Since the CNI databases are categorized using specific codes, the definitions of social policy and social programs were singularly explicit synonyms. These social policy \/program definitions were derived from Armitage (1988), Guest (1991) and Yelaja (1987), and included the synonym's health care, medicare, pensions, unemployment insurance, UIC, labour\/labor, social policy, social programs\/programmes, social welfare, welfare, regional development, development, redistribution, education. This definition did not include the topics of taxation or the environment within its parameters. The actual text was acquired from The Globe and Mail Microfilm. Photocopies of the individual textual articles were made from the microfilm reader. The individual sample t\u00a97 articles were then scanned and typed in a standardized format as DOS files, and saved as ASCI-DOS files labelled by article date for subsequent computer analysis.. A Likert Scale questionnaire (at Appendix F.2) was developed for consistency in rating textual arguments. This two part study questionnaire standardized the counting of premises and conclusions; counting of inductive fallacies; and identification of communicative action, validity claims, media representation, social topic, issue and theme. Reliability Raters Habermas (1979, p. 3), like Andren (1981, p. 46) considers reliability a species of objectivity and positivism that seek to validate parenthetical truths. Reliability seeks to objectify intersubjective testability as an invariant that can be reproduced according to a known standard (Andren, 1981, pp. 47-48). Such an objective standard must invariably leave people behind in the wake of certainty. As intersubjective emotional beings, people evolve (Plutchik, 1980) toward the truth. Objective certitudes of reliability and validity are unproductive in intersubjective semantic analyses. Consensus coefficients such as Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance are invariably unreliable without comprehensive analysis of agreements and disagreements in coding. This underwrites Habermas' four implicit \"validity claims of comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness, and rightness\" (1979, p. 3). Reliability testers (raters) were recruited from amongst colleagues, friends and family. The selection criteria was simply those who had the time and ability to participate in the study. Respondents received a letter explaining the purpose of the study with assurances of participant confidentiality, and completed the Pre-Study Questionnaire (at Appendix F.l). to* The Pre-Study Questionnaire asked for some personal information, educational background, knowledge and opinion of free trade and social policy issues, knowledge of the study method, and frequency of newspaper reading. Eleven raters (N=ll) completed the Pre-Study Questionnaire and were expected to rate a minimum of three articles up to the maximum eleven articles (depending on time). Raters were instructed on the method by means of a standard training package. This training kit contained: (a) an explanation of inductive fallacies, (b) social action theory, (c) the method of rating, (d) a glossary of fallacies and social action theory definitional referents, (e) the eleven articles, (f) deconstructed articles with argument diagram and an interpretation of the article. Raters were to read over the materials and arrange to meet with me regarding any problems. They were also encouraged to call with any problems encountered. Raters were to judge reliability by rating the sample articles against nominally quantified units. The Post-Study Questionnaire (at Appendix F.3) asked about the methodology, newspaper readership, and opinion on the impact of free trade on social policy. The methodology questions inquired into time spent on the study, clarity of instructions and difficulty of learning the method, and usefulness of the method. A Study Questionnaire (at Appendix F.2) was used for coding each article along prescribed guidelines. Individual texts were quantified according to the number of premises in the statement of content, number of premises in the surface and hermeneutic analysis, the number of missing or implied premises, the number of minor and major arguments, the inductive fallacies at each argument, the overall style of inductive fallacy, the style of argumentation as defined by Habermas' typology. IXfl To assess the clarity of the research instrument and measure consistency, tests of inter-coder reliability were conducted. Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance (W) is a measure of agreement among raters. A measure of one (1) indicates complete agreement, and a zero (0) shows complete disagreement. Each case is a judge or rater and each variable is an item being judged. During the preliminary\/pilot study, each respondent received a package of learning materials on the methodology and definitions of the study besides the articles and multiple choice questionnaire. Respondents were to expected to deconstruct each article according to the standardized format and depict the arguments diagrammatically. Given the complexity of the analysis, even logically coherent results would have been difficult to assess for reliability. Respondents were instructed to read the materials, learn the method, and analyse the articles. A second pilot study was developed in response to the difficulties experienced by respondents in analysing and standardizing articles. This second study was more streamlined, with each respondent receiving the same package of learning materials on the methodology and definitions of the study with the articles. In addition, diagrams of the textual analyses and multiple choice questionnaires accompanied articles (at Appendix F.n) to code fallacies in pre-identified arguments. Counting premises and conclusions tested argument reliability that they compared against the diagrams. Analyses of the articles and the multiple-choice style questionnaire were issued and used because preliminary\/pilot studies revealed that the time necessary to devote to the study far eclipsed the time respondents could spend. To assess the clarity of the research instrument and measure consistency, an Alpha (a) test of internal reliability and Standardized 1(0 Item Alpha were done for the questionnaires. Data Analysis Design Word Perfect 7.0 for Windows was used to count the number of words in individual articles. This counting quantified the size of the articles. The Perpetual Calendar (1996) computer program was used to figure out the diachronic distances in days between articles and the day of the week the article appeared. ATLAS\/ti (Archive for Technology Assessment, the Lifeworld, and Everyday Language Computer Aided Text Interpretation and Theory Building) program (Muhr, 1991; 1994) was used to analyse the multistage sample (Carney, 1972, p. 146). ATLAS\/ti acquired the individual, sample articles (as ASCI-DOS files) as a single hermeneutic unit called Globe and Mail Coverage. Texts within the hermeneutic themantic framework (Muhr, 1991, p. 351) are oriented to the ideal speech situation of the pre-programmed validity claim criteria. The ATLAS\/ti program was chosen over the NUD*IST (Non-numerical, Unstructured Data Indexing, Searching and Theorizing) program (Richards & Richards, 1994a) because ATLAS\/ti was developed in part using Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action (T. Muhr, personal communication, October, 16, 1995). ATLAS\/ti was also considered less positivistic and structure imposing than NUD*IST, and similar computer-aided text-interpretation programs (Fielding & Lee, 1991; Richards & Richards, 1991; 1994b; Weitzman& Miles, 1995). Through the lens of the ATLAS\/ti's \"ideal speech situation,\" the sample Globe and Mail articles were deconstructed, standardized, and analysed according to textual argument. HI This method exposed the basic elements of argument, premise, conclusion, inductive strategy, social action, validity claim and mode of communication. Al l eleven articles attempt to established validity claims by citing persuasive reasons, to support a claim proving its truth. The supporting reasons are the premises and the conclusion is the claim, and the argument contains sets of premises and a conclusion. Al l eleven articles were deconstructed in ATLAS\/ti with individual premises and conclusion quoted as in vivo quotation codes. The in vivo quotation codes were grouped into premises labelled as \"P\" and the conclusion labelled as \"C.\" An asterisk was added identifies hidden assumptions, the missing or implied premises as \"P*.\" The premise and conclusion codes are then arranged according to the aim of textual argument. The premises (P), implied premises (P*), minor conclusions (C), and the main conclusion (MC) are organized along the path of the extended argument. The path of the extended argument leads from the reasons (premises) to the goal (conclusion). If the article provides acceptable premises, which are relevant and sufficient, then the conclusion must be true. The highest standard of acceptability is truth. The accurate interpretation of the argument path follows a hypothetico-deductive method (Phelan & Reynolds, 1996, p. 154). Where deductive thought moves from the general to the particular, inductive thought infers from the particular to the general. The hypothetico-deductive method is used from within the hermeneutic approach, and involves both deductive and inductive reasoning. Interpreting from the conjunction of the whole and particular involves simultaneous visualizing of both the textual particularity and the comprehensive depiction of the argument. This conjunction of comprehension is the essence I l l of hermeneutics. ATLAS\/ti's simultaneous conceptual and textual interpretation supports a hermeneutic comprehension of the argument (Muhr, 1991, p. 350). Premises were linked together following the line of argument. The minor conclusion of each minor argument became a node. Nodes and premises were arranged along the line according of the main argument. This conceptual method is described in detail by Anckar and Ramstedt-Silen (1981), De Bono (1994), Dey (1993), Findahl and Hdijer (1981), and Miles and Huberman (1994), with detailed techniques linking conceptual with argument structure in Hughes (1996), Johnson and Blair (1977), and Phelan and Reynolds (1996). Since ATLAS\/ti has limited graphic presentation features, data was exported into the Inspiration (1994) computer graphics program to clarify the illustration for presentation. Like ATLAS\/ti, Inspiration allows a toggling between textual and graphical depiction of argument. Al l sample articles were classified with this process. The basic rule being that classes formed must be both exhaustive and mutually exclusive (Bailey, 1994, p. 3). The classification scheme of the two principal typologies was multidimensional. Thus far, the typologies have been qualitative, in the sense of being formed without quantification or statistical analysis. The dimensions are either correlated or not related when we count individual categories, or taxon as nominal data whose values are thus quantifiable. These nominal values were entered into the SPSS 7.0 (1995) database. Clustering methods were used to create homogeneous groups of cases (Aldenderfer & Blashfield, 1984, p. 9; Wasserman & Faust, 1994) and induce data structure not apparent in the conceptual stage. Where empirical research is conceptual and deductive, using numerical \\\\2 data after the conceptual types have formed, cluster analysis is inductive, and begins with the data seeking to form the classification empirically through numerical analysis of the empirical cases (Bailey, 1994, p. 34). The inductive strategies identified in the argument paths of the sample Globe and Mail articles were counted and entered into the SPSS 7.0 (1995) database as categories. Social Action and Validity Claim categories were also identified. SPSS 7.0 Professional Statistics Option (1995) was then programmed to analyse the nominal categorized data to detect the resultant structural pattern of the arguments, communicative pattern and validity claims as a single hermeneutic unit. Hierarchical cluster analysis was programmed using the Centroid Method. The hierarchical cluster procedure was used to identify relative homogeneous groups of the inductive strategy variables using an algorithm that starts with each variable in a separate cluster and combines clusters until only one is left. The centroid method calculates the distance or difference between two clusters as the distance between their means for all of the items. The SPSS 7.0 program was used to produce the clustering results in the form of a Chi-Squared Dissimilarity Dendrogram. This method conceptually illustrates the combined patterning of inductive strategies, communicative action and validity claim used in the article sample to influence acceptance of the claims about the influence of free trade on social policy and programs. The percentages of individual and combined influence are broad figures measured from the Euclidian area of the pattern. These figures are more precisely calculated using a coefficient of Chi-Squared Dissimilarity from the typological matrix. A Chi-Square Measure of statistical dissimilarity and a Coefficient Matrix was then used since the data were nominal counts. The Absolute Values were Rescaled to 0-1 range to standardize the distances since the size of the relationships between the strategies was of interest. Chi-Square tests were computed to yield Phi (b, Cramer's V, Contingency Coefficient, and Approximate Significance were used to measure reliability. Phi (b is a symmetric measure equivalent to Pearson's correlation coefficient. Cramer's Vis a measure of association based on Chi-Square (x2). Cramer's P\"is always between 0 and 1 and can attain a value of 1 for tables of any dimension. Contingency Coefficient is a measure of association between two categorical variables and is a function of Chi-Square. The statistical analysis of validity claims seeks to test a hypothesis. This would demonstrate whether the observations occurred by chance or not. A null hypothesis (H0) would show the observations were the result purely of chance. The alternate hypothesis (Ha) would show there was a real effect. That the observations were the result of this real effect. The significance of the hypothesis is checked against the probability of committing a Type I (1-a) or a Type II (1-|3) error. A Type I error is to reject the null hypothesis when it is true; a Type II error is to accept the null hypothesis when it is false. A Type I error is like an alarm without a fire, while a Type II error is like a fire without an alarm. The emphasis is on avoiding Type I errors. A significance of p < .05 is the conventional level for declaring adequate statistical evidence to support rejection of the null hypothesis. This test indicates a confidence level of 95%, with the probability of error occurring less than 5 times in 100 observations. Rejection of the null hypothesis at this level results in only a 1 in 20 chance of making a Type I Error. For the purposes of this method exercise, the following hypotheses are proposed: I) The Globe and Mail media argument is of Strategic Communication; II) Habermas' validity claim criteria was violated. In the following Chapter Four on Findings and Analysis, I will present the results of this methodological chapter as descriptive findings and statistical analysis. The typologies and clusters will be related to the validity claim criteria and to social action. I will also discuss problems encountered with the method which account for not attempting to prove the hypothesis. These findings will demonstrate whether the hypotheses proposed earlier in this chapter are valid or not. CHAPTER FOUR FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS This chapter is divided into two major parts. First, I describe the findings of this study. Second, using statistical analysis, I demonstrate the relationship between the findings and the criteria of Habermas' validity claims. Descriptive Findings The Canadian print media coverage of free trade and the social aspects of free trade during the period 1980 to 1995, as categorized in the Canadian Business and Current Affairs (CBCA) database is graphically depicted at Appendix C . l . The free trade coverage (N=22,456) is 99 times greater than that of the social policy \/program aspects of free trade (N=227). Even 227 articles were an excessive number to analyse in any depth. Therefore, the sample was further stratified to just those articles on the social policy\/program impact of free trade which appeared in The Globe and Mail during that period 1980 to 1995. As illustrated at Appendix C.2, The Globe and Mail coverage of free trade issues (N=4,006) which began in 1982 was 91 times greater than the coverage of social policy \/program impact of free trade articles (N=44) which began in 1985. This was consistent with the CBCA full coverage. The Globe and Mail Sample. The 44 Globe & Mail articles on the social \" 6 117 policy\/program aspects of free trade (N=44) were read and further screened according to the selection criteria of the impact of free trade on social policy \/programs. Seventy-five percent of the articles (N=33) were found to concern free trade and only made reference to social policy. According to the CBCA database and selection criteria, only twenty-five percent of the Globe & Mail articles (N=ll) about free trade and social policy actually concerned the social policy\/program impact of free trade. This may illustrate the perceived importance of social policy\/programs compared with business issues. The implication of this inequality of the private sphere of corporate interests over concerns of the public sphere is the construction of the world viewed. Media coverage was more concerned with process than content, and the Globe & Mail had the highest percentage of statements on the dispute mechanism. The media's focus was on the confrontational aspect of the negotiations (Fraser Institute, 1988, p. 5), like a competitive sporting event always cast in the final minute of play. Description. As illustrated at Appendix D . l , the 11 articles reflect public concerns of the time. The first three articles dated September 30th, 1985, May 6th, 1986 and September 6th, 1986 report on the trade talks and argue that social programs are not at risk, and thus safe under free trade because social issues are not part of the trade negotiations. Almost a year and a half later, the next article dated December 27th, 1987 reports on social groups arguing that the free trade risk to social programs is not being accurately presented. The November 5 th, 1988 article is part of the 1988 Federal Election (know as the free trade election) campaign coverage, and draws on a retired Supreme Court Justice and Tory founder of health care to claims that medicare is not threatened. That opponents of free trade such as John Turner and Ed Broadbent do not understand the trade agreement. The most thoughtful article of the series appears a year an a half later on July 31st, 1990 and reports on Professor Hurtig's comments to the Canadian Senate on his examination of the free trade agreement and it's impact on social welfare. With this article the coverage of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement is completed and subsequent articles relate to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The October 19th, 1990 article is a very complex, yet tiny article reporting on comments made by Jesse Jackson at an anti-free trade rally in which he warns against NAFTA threatening the universality of health care. This article is followed eight days later on October 27th, 1990 by a letter to the editor from then Federal Health Minister Benoit Bouchard in which he presents the counter argument that far from threatening health care, NAFTA will improve it with efficiency. Several months later on February 14th, 1993 appears an article reporting on Canadian Labour Congress President Bob White arguing that free trade threatens Canadian employment prospects and unemployment insurance. Two days later on February 16th, 1993 there appears an ideological article reporting on all the cheap shots directed against free trade which do not look at the positive aspects. The final article of the series appears on August 4 th, 1994 some six months following the signing of NAFTA and reports that a Fraser Institute study found NAFTA was no threat to social programs. The small article makes not mention of the pro-free trade stance of the the Institute, nor the methodology used. Time and Spacing. As illustrated at Appendix C.2, the 11 articles, though drawn from a 15-year sample, occur within the span of 9 years from 1985 to 1994, and make up spotty coverage of the issue of freer trade's impact on social policy and programmes. The Perpetual Calendar (1996) computed the diachronic distances in days between articles and the day of the week the article appeared. Global distance between articles ranges from 4 days to 3,230 days, with a mean distance of 294 days (see Appendix D.2). This is a significant lapse in time to maintain focussed discourse on a public issue as important as social policy. The article where Jesse Jackson warns that universal health-care is threatened by NAFTA received a letter to the editor's response with an 8-day distance between them. The articles with the 4-day distance were globally but not specifically related. The greatest distances between diachronic articles are gaps of 633 days between 1988 and 1990 after the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement took effect and 811 days between 1990 and 1992 while NAFTA was being negotiated. The lone article (Valpy, 1990, July 31) between 1988 and 1992 is the single most impartial, factual and educational of all sample articles. Only one article appeared in the Saturday edition, which may be considered a leisure reading day. Fifty percent of the articles appeared in the Tuesday edition, tucked away in the middle of Sections A or B. No article rated front page coverage. The Fraser,Institute did a \"shallow analysis\" (Hayes, 1992, p. 232), of how importantly the media considered free trade, and found the Globe & Mail gave one third of its coverage was given front page placement (Fraser Institute, 1988, p. 1). Using the Fraser Institute's placement importance methodology with the CBCA sample, the impact of free trade on social policy\/programs was not considered as important since presentation was toward the end of each section. Word Count. WordPerfect 7.0 (1996) was used to count words in each article (at Appendix D.3), which ranged in size from 132 words to 1127 words, with a mean word count size of 528.64 words (SD_=317.9). The most complex article was paradoxically the smallest in size of 132 words. The right-wing Fraser Institute reported the Globe \"gave opponents of free trade almost twice the space as those supporting it\" and \"published a disproportionate number of references to free trade's possible threat to social issues\" (cited in Doyle, 1992, p. 231). Authors. Seventy percent (N=7) of the article authors were the Canadian Press (CP). Canadian Press is a cooperative service of the Canadian media, primarily controlled by Southam. The CBC Radio reported that CP had helped bind Canada together for eight decades until (CBC, June 1996). Wire services such as CP are sometimes used as part of a \"news management\" campaign by public relations firms (Nelson, 1989, p. 41). Public relations firms like Bursten Marstellar plan events in advance for the purpose of being reported on as \"a pseudo-event\" (Nelson, 1989, p. 53). Globe and Mail editor Cameron Smith does not consider press conference a neutral event, and says reporters do not report on non-events unless something important is said. Reporters gain access to the prime minister for questions (Nelson, 1989, p. 52). Access where \"media will take what we feed them,\" observes White House press secretary Leslie Janka, adding that \"They have to write their own story every day\" (cited in Nelson, 1989, p. 51). A study by the influential Fraser Institute reported that 70% of The Globe and Mail's free-trade coverage was comprised of paraphrased material. Fraser Instituted researchers narrowly concluded that \"this indicates that the distribution of opinion and positions expressed was the direct result of editorial decisions by the journalists and not due to chance\" 12-1 (Fraser Institute, 1989; Hayes, 1992, p. 232). The Globe and Mail articles paraphrased material from press statements and from wire services which had spliced together material from press statements, government reports, and minimal reporting. The public relations branch of a government or firm will issue press statements which become the source for the wire service article. The newspaper then edits the wire service article, and may combine several wire service articles or articles and general reporting. The source of the article becomes progressively more anonymous and third-party with each edit and interpretation. Inter-reliability Raters. Of the initial eleven (11) reliability testers (raters), six (6) raters actually judged reliability by rating the 11 articles against nominally quantified units. The total non-response 5 raters reflected the lengthy learning curve, and the lengthy analytic curve accounted for limited responses. The Pre-Study Questionnaire (as at Appendix F.l) elicited personal and education information. A profile of the raters (at Appendix E.l) shows that gender was equally distributed over the two age ranges of 31 to 40 years of age and 41 to 50 years of age. Raters with post-graduate education amounted to 50% of participants, with 33% having undergraduate studies and the remaining 17% with graduate education. Studies were in Sociology at 67%, Social Work at 50% followed by Health Studies at 33%. Most raters considered themselves Knowledgeable (68%) of Research Methods, but only 33% had a Moderate knowledge of hermeneutics, and only 17% (N=l) had read any Habermas. Only 33% (N=2) were familiar with Chomsky's methodology. Though all respondents were university educated, and most of the respondents had research and logical training, respondents found the task extremely time-consuming and difficult. As tabulated at Appendix E.2, time spend analysing arguments averaged five (5) hours per article and four (4) hours per article analysing the strategies. Al l respondents considered the method a useful method of critically assessing and detecting validity claims within media texts. One respondent mentioned using the method to discover the truth of validity claims made by their spouse. Age, Gender, and Educational backgrounds did not appear to influence reliability, but respondents with knowledge of hermeneutics and of Habermas tended to be 6 times more reliable than those with no knowledge. For the majority of raters, 67% (N=4), the newspaper was the principle source of news. With 33% (N=2) being daily readers. Knowledge of Free Trade issues and Knowledge of Social Policy issues revealed identical results in that 33% believed they had a very moderate knowledge, and only 17% (N=l) believed they were knowledgeable of the key issues. Most raters 67% (N=4) were opposed to free trade, with 17% (N=l) neutral, and 17% (N=l) pro-free trade. The single rater who completed all 11 articles was a longtime (35 year) daily reader of newspapers and implicitly familiar with both the practice and method of analysing text. This rater switched from local newspapers to the Financial Times as a result of explicitly perceiving the strategic arguments of the articles. Three out of eleven raters began analysing the articles, but only one rater had completed 3 of 11 articles within the anticipated time. Only 1 respondent analysed all 11 articles, 1 respondent analyses 3 articles, and 4 respondents analysed 1 article. This produced one rated article, \"Opponents don't understand deal, medicare founder says\" of November 5, 1988, common and thus intersubjective to all \\Z1 , raters. To assess the clarity of the research instrument and measure consistency, tests of inter-coder reliability were conducted. Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance (W) is a measure of agreement among raters. Each case is a judge or rater and each variable is an item being judged. This article enjoyed a Kendall's PF=0.8475, where W ranges from 0 (no agreement) to 1.0 (complete agreement). The Alpha (a) measure of internal consistency of the rating was cc=-0.0586 and standardized item alpha to -0.8230 indicating a significant lack of internal consistency and diversity of scale items. Multi-response sets of Cross-Tabulations were used to include all responses. The revised instrument enjoyed a Kendall's W= 1.000, an Alpha cc=.9809 and a Standardized Item Alpha a=.8161. Counting premises and conclusions tested argument reliability that they compared against the diagrams. While this method enjoyed a Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance of W-1.000, it was unlikely that individual raters deconstructed the articles into the standardized form of argument to compare against the analyses provided and the quantified number of premises, missing premises and conclusions. More likely, individual raters compared their reading of the article against the standardized and conceptualized versions as is reflected in the subjective Likert Scale rating of the accuracy as highly accurate. Statistical Analysis Cluster Analysis is a form of multivariate analysis designed to determine whether units of analysis are similar enough to fall into groups or clusters. It is a method of examining multiple variables at the same time. The results of the clustering procedure for the fallacies are illustrated at Table 4.1 in the Inductive Strategy Dendrogram using the Hierarchical Clustering Analysis with Centroid Method, Absolute Values Rescaled to 0-1. The Dendrogram plot, pasted from SPSS 7.0 (1995), shows the overlapping clusters being combined. Distances are Rescaled to numbers between 1 and 25. Due to the large data base matrix of 54 by 54 inductive strategies of argumentation equalling 2,916 possible relationships, the coefficient matrix is not displayed. Table 4.1. Hierarchical Cluster Analysis of Argument. Strategies with Dendrogram using Centroid Method C A S E Label Rescaled Distance Cluster Combine 0 5 10 15 20 + + + + +-25 --+ -+ -+ -+ -+--+ -+ -+--+ TWO WRONGS VAGUENESS FAULTY ANALOGY SPECIAL PLEADING HASTY CONCLUSION RED HERRING BLACK AND WHITE SLANTING STRAW MAN PROVINCIALISM SLIPPERY SLOPE QUESTIONABLE CAUSE MISLEADING CONTEXT AD HOMINEM GUILT BY ASSOCIATION -+ AMPHIBOLY PROBLEMATIC PREMISE --PETITIO PRINCIPII DUBIOUS ASSUMPTION RULE IV - AUTHORITY --RULE III - AUTHORITY --RULE II - AUTHORITY \u2014 -+--+ +---+ + I I + +--+ I +-+ I -+ +-+ + -+ I I I I -+ -+-I -+ -+ +-I -+ + + I + + --+ I I + +-+ + I + I + Note. Dendrogram was calculated using SPSS 7.0. Rescaled 1 to 25. The Dendrogram cluster combine illustrates a high co-relation of arguments violating Rules of Appealing to Authority. Nevertheless, the pattern separating regions with relatively high overlapping density is complicated and provides few obvious clues of argumentation. The clustering conceptually illustrates the combined patterning of inductive strategies used in the article sample to influence acceptance of the claims about the influence of free trade on social policy and programs. The shape of individual and combined influence are broad figures measured from the Euclidian area of the pattern. Similarly, a Dendrogram (at Table 4.2) and a coefficient matrix (at Table 4.3) was used with Habermas' Communicative and Social Action typology to establish whether actors were oriented toward success without consensus or toward reaching understanding and democratic consensuses. This illustrates the strategies of argumentation used to attempt to establish validity claims of truth. Table 4.2. Hierarchical Cluster Analysis of Social Action with Dendrogram using Centroid Method \u2022' Rescaled Distance Cluster Combine C A S E 0 5 10 15 20 25 Label + + + + \u2022 + + OPENLY STRATEGIC -+ + UNDERSTANDING -+ + \u2014 + ACTION + + + MANIPULATION \u2022 + + + DISCOURSE \u2022 + I SYSTEM DISTORTED + Note. Dendrogram was calculated using SPSS 7.0. Rescaled 1 to 25. The Social Action Dendrogram reveals a distinct pattern of overlapping clusters of Strategic Action, arguments oriented toward success without consensus, predominantly led tv6 by Systemically Distorted Communication and Manipulation. Least influential was that of Understanding. Manipulation is, however, conjoined with clusters of Discourse and Action oriented toward Consensual Action. Action is in turn a conjunction of Manipulation and Understanding. Understanding is the conjunction of Openly Strategic Communication and Action oriented toward Consensual Action. The conjunction of Manipulation and Systemically Distorted Communication make up 20% of communication and appears to steer 50% of Communicative Action. After the repressive findings of the Inductive Strategies used to influence the arguments, this blending of Strategic Action with Communicative Action toward Social Action was cause for optimism. Chi-Squared coefficients (%2) were used to calculate the precise co-relations of the nominally quantified categorical variables of Social Action (at Table 4.3). These values are Rescaled to 0-1, and reveal the combined influence of Systemically Distorted Communication and Manipulation (% 2=1.0000), Systemically Distorted Communication and Discourse (% 2=1.0000), and Manipulation with Discourse (x 2=0.9258) as the most significant conjunctions. These findings are Approx. Sig.=0.012, which is within the conventional p<.05 level, and is unlikely to commit a Type Terror. Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance discovered an interrater reliability of W= 1.000, complete agreement that remained unchanged using the inter-reliability rating of the common article, also W= 1.000 for complete agreement. This may be statistically misleading, since one rater was not in accord on one article in the overall rating. Although the discord was on a potentially ambiguous definitional rating of Systemically Distorted Communication versus Manipulation. I2L7 Table 4.3. Rescaled Absolute Chi-Squared Coefficient Matrix for 6-by-6 Social Action Categories SOCIAL A C T I O N Communicative Action Strategic Action Under-standing Consensual Action Openly Strategic Action Latently Strategic Action Action Discourse Mani-pulation System-ically Distorted Commu-. nication Communi-cative Action Understanding (0) 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 Consensual Action Action .0000 (1) .2441 1.000 .2441 .1548 Discourse .0000 .7559 (3) 1.000 .0742 .0000 Strategic Action Openly Strategic Action .0000 .0000 .0000 (0) 1.000 1.000 Latently Strategic Action Manipulation .0000 .7559 .9258 .0000 (3) .0000 Systemically Distorted Communi-cation .0000 .8452 1.000 .0000 1.000 (4) Note. (Similarity\/(Item)\/Dissimilarity) Rescaled 0-1. a Phi d>=1.000, Cramer's 7=1.000, Contingency Coefficient=0.707, Approx. Sig.=0.012. Consensual Action's allowance for strategic elements in orientation toward the truth supports the cluster findings. There is a moderate conjunction of Consensual Action with Action, R(12, N=ll) = 0.5263, a slightly moderate conjunction of Consensual Action with Discourse, R(12, N=ll) = 0.3158, and a weak conjunction of Consensual Action with Action Orientated to Reaching Understanding, #(12, N=ll) = 0.1358. Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance detected an interrater reliability of 1^=0.9081 on an a=0.5937 and standardized item alpha of 0.6769. The inter-reliability rating of the common article raised Kendall's Concordance to PF=0.9339, but with a decline in oc=0.1720 and the standardized item alpha to 0.3733. 11? Argument and consensus seem incompatible, but are united because people argue rationally only when they seek a consensus (Myerson, 1994, p. 23). Combining the clustered results of the Social Action typology with the Categories of Inductive Strategies typology reveal a potential emancipatory link in the particular approach to validation when it is recalled that all discourse is oriented toward the truth. This orientation toward the truth relates the process of Social Action to the pragmatic procedures of argumentation including Categories of Inductive Strategy within the hermeneutic dialectic circle of an ideal speech situation which produces logic (Guba & Lincoln, 1989, p. 152; Habermas, 1981, p. 26). This logical relationship is the measure of variance or degree of dispersion of categories from the centroid combination. Multi-dimensional scaling and factor analyses detected the general categorical variables as particularly dichotomous. These variables formed hyperspheric shapes in the multi-dimensional space of the hermeneutic dialectical circle. Therefore, shape measures were used to detect the arrangement of points in the space enlightened by the ideal speech situation (Aldenderfer & Blashfield, 1984, p. 34). The Validity Claim Criteria Category Dendrogram (at Table 4.4) uses the same Hierarchical Clustering Analysis with Centroid Method, Absolute Values Rescaled to 0-1. The four validity claims form a distinct clustering pattern of overlapping, violated clusters of Truthfulness and Rightness steered by Truth (actually Untruth). Comprehensibility is the least violated claim. The combined cluster of Truthfulness and Rightness constitutes 60% of the pattern. Similarly, the combined cluster of Truth and Comprehensibility constitute 70% of the Euclidian area of the pattern. Truthfulness and Comprehensibility together constitute only 5% of m the total area. However, the steerage of the Truthfulness, Comprehensibility, Rightness cluster by Truth constitutes 85% of the total area. Table 4.4. Hierarchical Cluster Analysis of Validity Claim Violation Categories with Dendrogram using_Centroid Method \u2022 Rescaled Distance Cluster Combine C A S E 0 5 10 15 20 25 Variable + + + + + + TRUTHFULNESS -+ + COMPREHENSIBLE -+ +-+ RIGHTNESS + I TRUTH + Note. Dendrogram was calculated using SPSS 7.0 Absolute Rescaled Distance 1 to 25. The strength of the combined validity claim categories is similar to the power of newspapers and other corporations interlocking in shareholdings and directorships. The Combines Act seeks to limit individual shareholders from forming an oligopoly or categorical monopoly by limiting the number of overlapping shares to a particular percent or ceiling. Since the sum of individual validity claim violation categories is 70% of violation influence, and the collective influence is 85%. The collective steering influence of the Truth violation is therefore 15% greater than the individual influence of the validity claim violations. Similarly, the combined or collective influence of individual shareholders is greater than the individual influence. This reveals a contradiction between the behaviour of elite ideology favouring individuality free of influence, and the influence that elites collectively exert. The Chi-Squared (%2) Tests at Table 4.5 support the findings of the Dendrogram at Table 4.4. The Truth validity claim violation, %2=20.667, df=5,p < .001, is a valid finding. The 13\u00a9 significance would not violate the Type I error 1 times out of 1,000. Tahle. 4.5. Chi-Squared Tests for 4-by-4 Validity Claim Violation Categories on 54-hy-54 Inductive Strategy Variables Truth Truthfulness Rightness Comprehensibility Chi-Squarea df Asymp. Sig. 20.667 5 0.001 3.778 3 0.286 7.333 5 0.197 5.333 2 0.069 Note. a. 0 cells (.0%) have expected frequencies less than 5. The minimum expected cell frequency is 6.0. Chi-Squared coefficients (%2) as at Table 4.6 were used to calculate the precise co-relations of the nominally quantified validity claim violation categorical variables. The values are Rescaled to 0-1 and reveal the combined influence of Truth and Truthfulness as most significant (%2=1.0000). At (x2=0.8795), the co-relation of Truth and Rightness is equally significant. Truthfulness and Rightness are somewhat less significant (x2=0.7336). Least significant are the co-relations of Truthfulness and Comprehensibility (x2=0.0000), followed by Truth and Comprehensibility (x2=0.6217), and Rightness and Comprehensibility (x2=0.5777). This findings are significant,\/? < .002, to two times in a thousand. This would not violate the Type I error. Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance detected an interrater reliability of JF=0.7597 on oc=0.4399 and standardized item alpha of 0.7429. Supporting the findings at Table 4.7 are Symmetric Measures for the Validity Claim Violation categories. The Truth validity claim and Rightness validity claim respectively are the most significant. This time the significance is,p < .000, no chance of error in a thousand, which meets the Type I error criteria. Somewhat less significant are the Truthfulness validity claim and Comprehensibility validity claims respectively. Their significance is,p < .002, with 2 chances in \u00bbJl a thousand of error. This also meets the Type I error criteria. Table 4.6 Rescaled Absolute Chi-Squared Dissimilarity Coefficient Matrix for 4-by-4 Validity Claim Violation Categories on 54-by-54 Variables Validity Claim Truth Truthfulness Rightness Comprehensibility Truth 1 0.8795 0.6217 Truthfulness 1 0.7336 0 Rightness 0.8795 0.7336 0.5777 Comprehensibility - 0 -Note. (Dissimilarity) Rescaled 0-1. a Phi 4>=1.206, Cramer's V=.696, Contingency Coefficient=0.707, Approx. Sig.=0.002. Table 4.7. Symmetric Measures for 4-by-4 Validity Claim Violation Categories on 54-by-54 Inductive Strategy Variables Validity Claim Truth Truthfulness Rightness Comprehensibility Truth Phi o>=1.807 Cramer's F=0.808 Approx. Sig.=.000 Phi a>=1.072 Cramer's V-.619 Approx. Sig.=.148 Phi c|>=1.537 Cramer's F=.687 Approx. Sig.=.016 Phi dp=.871 Cramer's V-.616 . Approx. Sig.=.189 Truthfulness Phi d)=1.072 Cramer's 7=.619 Approx. Sig.=.148 Phi =.841 Cramer's V=.595 Approx. Sig.=.239 Comprehensibility Phi cp=.871 Cramer's V=.6l6 Approx. Sig.=.189 Phi dp=.716 Cramer's K=.506 Approx. Sig.=.162 Phi
=.981 Cramer's K=.694 Approx. Sig.=.002 In Chapter 3,1 proposed using the statistical findings to test the hypotheses that: I) The Globe and Mail media argument is of Strategic Communication; and, 132. II) Habermas' validity claim criteria was violated. A null hypothesis (H0) would show the observations were the result purely of chance. The alternate hypothesis (Ha) would show there was a real effect. The observations were the result of this real effect. The significance of rejecting the null hypotheses and accepting the alternate hypotheses was to be checked against the probability of committing a Type I (1-a) or a Type II (1-p) error. A Type I error is to reject the null hypothesis when it is true; a Type II error is to accept the null hypothesis when it is false. The conventional significance level of p < .05 would be used for declaring adequate statistical evidence to support rejection of the null hypothesis. This test indicates a confidence level of 95%, with the probability of error occurring less than 5 times in 100 observations. Rejection of the null hypothesis at this level results in only a 1 in 20 chance of making a Type I Error. The statistical findings of this study warrant neither acceptance nor rejection of the hypotheses. There were three main problems with this study, (1) the initial sample, (2) the subjective nature of the rating, and (3) the variable response rate from the reliability testers. The study was compromised from the outset due to problems in the reliability of the data sample. The Canadian Business and Current Affairs CD-ROM Index (CBCA, 1996) was found to be unreliably coded. How reliable or unreliable the database is, is not known. Therefore, it is impossible to determine with the CBCA, how many articles about the impact of free trade on social policy and programs actually appeared in The Globe and Mail Newspaper. The more reliable Infomart \"full-text\" database was not used due to the prohibitive cost of $100 per hour. Due to the complexity of the deconstruction and analysis procedures involved, the \u2022 I 23;-reliability raters merely rated pre-analysed articles which were tested for reliability by the number of premises and conclusions contained within the textual argument. While raters were trained in the method, the results of the initial pilot study demonstrated that the method was difficult, time consuming and the training insufficient. The streamlined study using questionnaires containing Likert scales and multiple choice questions was self-administered by raters in response to the problems revealed by the initial study. While the questionnaires were considered reliable according to the alpha tests of internal consistency, they were none the less applied to pre-analysed articles. Raters still found the method time consuming and difficult, and the actual response rate was very low. Only one rate completed all eleven articles (N=ll), one rater did three articles, and there was only one article which was consistently rated by all eleven raters. While the response rate was statistically corrected, this statistical method relies on a single, ten percent response article. The use of statistical methods was intended as a method of counting responses and testing reliability of analysis. These empirical methods are not inconsistent with critical theory, as they are not intended to override analysis, but to supplement it. Due to the three main difficulties found in the study, the use of statistical analysis should perhaps have been limited to descriptive statistics on the nature of the sample. There are fundamental flaws in the underlying logic of the statistical research design which require further thought and development. The use of the more advanced cluster analysis, Chi Squared and reliability measures such as Cramer's V, were an effort at developing a balanced method of assessing communication using Habermas' theory of social action and universal validity claims criteria. The validity claims criteria were in only superficially delineated in the questionnaires and require further development. is* What this research design attempts to do is link the universal validity claim criteria of general argument with the particular inductive fallacies used. As such, this study attempts to develop a communication assessment method by integrating Habermas' (1979b), Skjei (1985) and Gunther (1993). Skjei has developed a descriptive method using Habermas' validity claims criteria. Gunther offers a more comprehensive approach to argument in the particular. Further development is required on the validity claim criteria. In the next and final chapter, I will discuss some implications of using Habermas' theory of social action and universal validity claims further the findings of this study, problems with the theoretical position, and the short-comings of linking the theory with practice. CONCLUSION In this concluding chapter I will examine the implications of the communication assessment method developed for social workers. First, I will revisit the central tenant of Habermasian theory - arguing the good life. Secondly, I will highlight the key features of social work theory and practice. Thirdly, I will relate critical theory and particularly Habermasian critical theory to social work theory and practice. Fourth, I will discuss shortcomings of the Habermasian theory from the viewpoint of feminist theory. Finally, I will discuss how the communication assessment method can be revised. Corporate Canadians answered the McDonald Commission's cry for \"a new social consensus on economic policy\" (Drache & Cameron, 1985, p. ix). They argued that the good life is best accomplished through freedom from governmental constraint (free trade) and from inflation. But most Canadians do not have the fluidity of trans-corporate players. They might argue their good society as full employment and social justice. Despite the call for consensus, Chairman Donald McDonald publicly committed the commission to free trade (Drache & Cameron, 1985, p. xx). Free traders used their resources and access to the commission to argue the validity and reliability of their beliefs. They bombarded the media with press packages explaining the benefits of free trade in simplistic terms, supported by tax deductions given for advertising in support of free trade (Winter, 1990, pp. 42-43, 80). Those Canadians who did not have access to the commissioners, who were not rich in capital, played little part in the \"new 'social' consensus,\" or in freely choosing the free trade option. This is no surprise, since free trade agreements \"are precisely about restricting or eliminating choice at the societal level\" (McBride & Shields, 1993, p. 169). Instead, the corporate agenda dominated the discourse. A good society is central to a good life. Central to good society is good dialogue. To paraphrase Landes (1995, p. 98), the McDonald Commission displayed a discourse of the particular masquerading as the universal equivalent. For Fraser (1989), the fundamental issue of social debate is need, and arguing the good life can be understood in as many ways as there are arguers of need. As in Habermas: \"How exclusive or inclusive are [the] various rival needs discourses?\" (Fraser, 1989, p. 182), depends on the 'communicative practices.' Some arguing is 'authoritative,' but only when it refers to both knowledge and power, rational authority and political authority. For Habermas, a good society would be an \"ideal speech situation\" within which to argue the good needs. Similarly, Mullaly (1993, p. 34) argues that the social work profession's concept of an \"ideal society\" is a moral consciousness \"founded on humanitarian and egalitarian ideals\" (CASW, 1983, p. 2). Just as a good society is central to a good life, fundamental to arguing the good life and arguing need is communication. Since communication is the basic element in every phase of social work (Loewenberg, 1983, p. 172), social work should be in an ideal social position for arguing its case for the good life. Social work has not achieved this ideal social position. In fact, the cultural climate of free trade and deficit restructuring has left the social work profession increasingly marginalized. Efforts at wooing legitimation through empiricism (Imre, 1982, p. 2) have co-137 opted the social work profession, and have done nothing more than reinforce the positivistic stance. Increased reliance on the individualism of positivism, make the legitimation of collective social efforts increasingly elusive. Additionally, social work's cultural \"embeddedness\" (Weick, 1987, p. 2) has positioned the profession in crisis (Mullaly, 1993, p. 22) . Legitimation, the insider's view, and social work's longstanding reliance on positivism and empiricism (Dean & Fenby, 1989, p. 47) is leading increasingly toward technical control and a utilitarian definition of arguing need. For the social work profession to take this path to fill a desire for legitimacy cravings, is to abrogate the need for emancipation. Emancipation should be the essence of social work. Child welfare agencies are generally the first, if not major, employer of social workers, and perhaps no where is the allure of positivism more evident than in the contradictory role of these agencies. The role of child protection workers seems to demand of social workers that they be both helper and disciplinarian without any theory of moral consciousness. Though children are the renewal of civilization, efforts at legitimizing their protection within the public sphere (accountability), have inexorably led to greater efforts at technical control. Technical control often leads toward what Habermas would describe as \"explosive\" (1975, p. 78) outcomes. When social service agencies co-opt social workers into disciplinary roles which are contradictory to the ideals of the profession, the repressed and inarticulated \"needs [of stakeholder clients] become explosive\" (Drover & Kerans, 1993, p. 23) . The teleological end-state of utilitarianism and free trade are the lowest common denominator of need fulfilment (Grinspun & Cameron, 1993, p. 19; Wisman, 1990, p. 123). \u00ab3\u00ab A social work profession operating from its legitimate position calls into question the telos of utilitarian progress by overcoming distorted communication in the endless process of collective learning. The essence of social work practice is the recognition of unrestricted communication as influential participatory discourse (Drover and Kerans, 1992, 67). Though embedded in the spirit of the day, social work is not bereft of solutions, and continues to evolve (Drover, 1995) as does social theory (Drover & Kerans, 1993). In equating critical theory with structural social work theory, Mullaly (1993, p. 142) misuses both terms. As discussed in Chapter Two, Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School reinterprets both Kant and Marx, while structural social work theory attempts to adapt Marx's ideas into greater structuration. The key difference between these two theories is the materialistic view of history. Nevertheless, both are critical of existing social, economic, and political structures and seeks to change them. The important issue is that placing social work within the broader framework of critical theory and different epistemologies would permit social workers to understand how different philosophies lead to different methodologies and different aspects of practice. Using critical theory would permit social work to operate from the pre-ideological stance of an ideal speech situation. Leonard (1990, p. 3) argues there are three requirements of a critical theory: (1) the sources of domination must be located in actual social practices; (2) an alternative vision (or outline) of life free from such domination; and (3) these tasks must be communicated to those oppressed by the domination. The study in this thesis does not fully comply with Leonard's three criteria. The study reveals the sources of domination located in public sphere discourse and attempts to provide an alternative vision of life free from the domination. Publication of the thesis makes these tasks available to the oppressed, but the language may make it inaccessible to those most oppressed. It may be that theses are an intermediary communique whose ideas can then be simplified for general distribution. This study was an exercise in developing a communication assessment methodology based on the tenants of Habermasian critical theory. Habermas' theory of social action and the universal validity claims criteria were the major focus of the method. The Globe and Mail coverage of the impact of free trade on social policy and programs was selected as the data sample. This sample of public sphere discourse was used to test the pragmatics of the method and reveal needed refinements. Due to sampling problems in the boolean search, rater difficulties, and logic problems in the method, the conclusions reached in this study are tentative and the exercise is perhaps better understood as an exploration of both theory and methods. The findings show how difficult it may be for the public to assess critically and establish validity claims of material presented by the media. Those respondents, who rarely read the newspaper where also those who found assessment the most difficult, believed the coverage to be manipulative, and reported that they considered the media coverage to be mendacious. Those respondents who assessed the truth claims of free trade, changed their views on the affect of free trade on social policy and programs. Insight into the pervasion of free trade as a delinguistified economic system, was one outcome of participating in the process and procedures of argumentation and the evaluation of this speech form. The media's constant inundation offer the numbed reader the relief of binary alternatives - 'yes or no.' Nelson's interpretation of media influence as \"manipulation by I\u00abf0 inundation\" (Nelson, 1989, p. 51), is supported by Laski's belief that \"the real power of the press comes from its continuous repetition of an attitude reflected in facts which its readers have no chance to check\" (1948, p. 670). The focussed complexity of the hermeneutic dialectic in verifying media truth claims is very difficult. Therefore, the statement by influential columnist Jeffrey Simpson of The Globe and Mail, that millions of Canadians \"do not understand or have been too lazy to acquaint themselves with the trade agreement\" (Hayes, 1992, p. 271), is petulant and unfair. More incisive is Simpson's qualified exposure of the contradiction between popular support of the Progressive Conservative Party and the media message: If, in fact, it is true as a departure point that the CBC and The Globe and Mail are the two most powerful media organizations in the country,... and if we have together conspired to be a ministry of propaganda for the Conservative government, there's something wrong when the government's [popularity is] only at 15 percent (cited in Hayes, 1992, p. 259). Analysis of the discourse of domination should be expanded beyond The Globe and Mail to include the text of the Royal Commission. The analysis would ideally include all corporate, government and social groups documentation to legitimately assess the diverse interests effected by free trade. The large volume of documentation would likely need to be sampled randomly to make such a study feasible. Despite the obvious planning on the part of the Progressive Conservative government and corporate interests, no phronesic provision was made to facilitate the adaptation of society into the logic of a free market. This was the essential issue in the articles reporting on comments by Hurtig (Valpy, 1990, July 31) and White (Fagan, 1993, February 14). Instead, Prime Minister Mulroney bluntly told Canadians, they were capable of greater competition, w and must rise to the corporate challenge of successful operation at a continental or global level of production. Failure to adapt reflected individual deviance: the system was right on target. The good life was framed in exclusively commercial terms, perhaps the only terms available to corporate planners and visionaries. Just as the complex linguistic media of barter was delinguistified into the flexible media of money, the communications media appear to reduce public debate and discourse to the simplicity of unreflective binary responses. Repetitive interpretations are only necessary until consensus and understanding has been reached. Delinguistification may allow for greater flexibility of progress at the cost of reaching consensus and understanding. Usually, these binary interpretations serve to relieve social institutions which had been developed to mitigate repressed needs, without fulfilling those needs. These repressed needs must be emancipated and fulfilled. Were Canadians educated in the technical procedures of argumentation and discourse, a counterfactual claim to truth could have been made to challenge the questionable veracity of the authorities. Having a citizenry educated in discourse is a long-range proposition which is itself a counterfactual action to the status quo. The maintenance of social order is deep-seated, and \"social control exercised via norms that are valid for specific groups is not based on repression alone\" (Habermas, 1989, p. 39). Agreement can be objectively obtained and maintained by force, but the use of outside influence or intimidation cannot count subjectively as agreement. Agreement rests on common convictions (Habermas, 1981, p. 287). While the Habermasian framework for discourse analysis and the testing of validity claims is promising, feminist discourse offers alternative perspectives on the same claims. Meehan (1995, p. 1) points out that Habermasian theory is in the tradition of Enlightenment rationality and deonotological ethics which feminists reject. Habermas' use of Kohlberg's moral consciousness has been criticized by Gilligan's (1982) ontological position, which Habermas too quickly dismissed as irrelevant to the universalist project (Benhabib, 1995, p. 182; Dean, 1995, p. 205). The unifying rationality of the Enlightenment seems at odds with the postmodern world of individual brokering. Habermas early recognizes that \"in the process of enlightenment there can only be participants\" (1974, p. 40). Participation within the public sphere must extend beyond the narrow limits of the polis to include the oikos1 (Arendt, 1958; Habermas, 1977). As Landes (1995, p. 98) points out, Habermas overlooks women's discourse of particularity because \"the [male] particular\" masquerades as the universal. This highlights Horkheimer & Adorno's (1944) call for unifying modernity and postmodernity in a dialectic (Rocco, 1994, p. 72). Fraser (1995, p. 22, 47) points out that Habermasian theory's limited reference to gender results in unidirectional colonization channels of influence between system and lifeworld. These channels attempt to colonize the diverse voices into a single viewpoint. Similarly, this theoretical blindspot results in opposition between reproductive processes and action-contexts as unidirectional. However, Meehan (1995) and Fraser (1995) agree that Habermas' work offers a framework for analyzing the structure of modern life, shows potential for both emancipation from political repression, market manipulation and 1 The sphere of biological reproduction and property. Ancient Greece distinguished between the polis of men and the oikos of women (Lander, 1995, p. 100). 1H-3 domination. Habermas' discourse theory offers a normative ideal for diagnosis, a procedure for testing normative validity claims, a model of intersubjectivity and account of the pragmatic presuppositions of discursive validity against which actual relations and discourses can be measured. We should work toward creation of new structures, not new programs, for only structures which democratize the entire accumulation process will be able to generate the new political energy and imagination necessary to turn the negative disenchantment into a positive constructive political system (Wolfe, 198G, p. 306). Given the apparent obsolescence of the nation-state in a world citizenry, Habermas (1995) has begun a debate on the use of the legal system to ensure the discourse of the good life is upheld. The transnational corporations tend to siphon off profit without responsibility to resource or replenish. Given this eclipse of reciprocity by the transnational corporation, arguing the good life may require use of the legal system in assisting the dilation of moral consciousness toward an ideal speech situation. Critical theory has long concerned itself with the notion of progress, particularly technological progress. Yet this thesis study would have been difficult to achieve without the technological developments in information processing instruments. How the procession of technological progress as linguistic medium affects the social progress of emancipation and enlightenment remains to be seen. Technologies are not mere exterior aids, but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word (Ong, 1985). Argumentation and discourse at a deep structural level of hermeneutics may require 14-V written communication. Written argumentation and discourse accelerate the evolution of consciousness as nothing else before. Such discourse is an even more deeply interiorized technology than instrumental music performance. But to understand what it is, which means to understand it in relation to its past, to orality, the fact that written discourse and argumentation are a technology, must be honestly faced. Expansion of the trivium within school curricula would in time train the public toward participatory democracy. Socrates' (cited in Plato, 387BC) concern with the written language reflects his concern about technological progress. At the deep structural level, Socrates may have been concerned about an obj edification and dissociation of memory. Given the etymological origins of money as memory, a deeper concern may lie with the abrogation of interpretive responsibility inherent in the delinguistification of memory as money. Though writing is now deeply embedded in the culture (as is money), the computer may relieve human interpreters of the more onerous aspects of delinguistified rationality. What is important, is that Socrates' practise was to never step outside the ideal speech situation of his lifeworld (community). When Socrates hears the sound of coins in the marketplace, faint but sharp, he heeds the voice of Moneta's2 warning. She asks, 'Does my measure conform to law? Do you keep the rigour of mind needed to preserve it?' (Appelbaum, 1991,45). Goddess of memory and money. GLOSSARY Action as used herein, is the praxis of emancipation. It is a sub-species of Communicative Action (Habermas, 1979, p. 209). Ad Hominem (Latin, argument against the man) arguments divert attention from the validity claim. This involves arguing against the person, or rejecting a person's views by attacking or abusing their personality, character, motives, intentions, qualifications, et cetera instead of providing evidence why the views are invalid. 1. M responds to a position N has taken by attacking N rather than N's position. 2. N's position can be judged without any reference to N's person. (Angeles, 1992, p. 105; Hughes, 1996, pp. 148-150; Johnson & Blair, 1977, pp. 42-49) Amphiboly (syntactical ambiguity) arises from ambiguity of grammatical construction (as distinguished from semantic ambiguity of individual words), a premise being accepted, or proved, on the basis of one interpretation of the grammatical construction, and then used in a way which is correct only on the basis of another interpretation of the grammatical structure (syntactics). Arguing to conclusions based on amphibolous statements results from misplaced modifiers, loosely applied adverbs, elliptical constructions, and omitted punctuation (Angeles, 1992, pp. 8,106; Hughes, 1996, pp. 64-65; Runes, 1979, p. 10). Authority, Improper Appeal to (from Latin, argumentum ad verecundiam) goes together with 1 4 * knowledge Appeals to authority should be restricted to domains which can be characterized as pursuing and arriving at knowledge and truth. Some disciplines restrict notions of knowledge, truth, and fact so no clear application exits. Fundamental here, is a consensus on ontology, epistemology, and methodology. Rule I: The field must be one in which there is genuine knowledge. If an authority is appealed to in support of a statement, Q, then Q must belong to some specifiable set of statements, S, which constitutes a domain of knowledge. Rule II: The particular matter in support of which an authority is cited must lie within their field of expertise. The authority must be generally recognized by the experts in the field. If M is appealed to as an authority on Q, then Q must belong to a class of statements, S, on which M is an authority. Rule III: There should be a consensus among the experts in the field regarding the particular matter in support of which the authority is cited. If there is no consensus among authorities on S, to which Q belongs, then we must note this lack of a consensus in any appeal to authority about Q, and qualify the conclusion accordingly. Rule IV: The authority, M , whose judgement is appealed to, must not be in a situation of bias, or conflict of interest about Q. Rule V: The authority must be identified. If M is appealed to as an authority on S, then M must be identified (Hughes, 1996, pp. 146-8, 160-161; Johnson & Blair, 1977, pp. 145-158). Avowal see Representative speech acts. Black and White arguments arise from (a) the use of sharp (black-and-white) distinctions despite the lack of factual or theoretical support, or (b) classifying any mid-point between the extremes as one of the extremes (Angles, 1992, 105). Communicative action is consent-oriented aimed at reaching a rational agreement and 14-7 meaning. It presupposes mutually recognized validity claims making possible direct understanding about the validity claims. It is a sub-species of Social Action. Two elements of communicative action are action oriented to reaching understanding and consensual action (Habermas, 1979, p. 209). Comprehensible used herein refers to one of Habermas' validity claims. Operating at the deep-structure level of reality and language, comprehensibility herein refers to linguistic intelligibility (Berstein, 1995, p. 48; Habermas, 1979b, p. 68; Held, 1980, p. 338). Consensual action involves two aspects of action and discourse. It presupposes agreement about implicitly raised validity claims as background consensus because of common definitions of a situation. Allows the use of strategic elements to guide discourse to the truth, and is a sub-species of Communication Action (Habermas, 1979, p. 209). Constantive speech acts (e.g., asserting, reporting, explaining, contesting) mark the distinction between being and illusion. Here there is an inherent obligation to return to the source of experience in which the speaker grounds the claim. If this grounding does not dispel doubt, then the problematic truth claim becomes the subject of theoretical and 'methodological' discourse (McCarthy, 1978, 285). Critique has both a negative and positive interpretation (Connerton, 1976). Reflection on a system of constraints that are humanly produced (negative) and the rational reconstruction of the conditions that make language, cognition, and action possible (positive). Dialectics is the systematic analysis of the tension or interconnections between opposites (Bhasker, 1983). Systematically understanding the inconsistencies, tensions, or contradictions between subject and object. Dialogue is a sharing of experience that results in a more and more refined and clarified interpretation. According to Leifer (1986), dialogue can be understood in terms of three phases: (1) preliminary dialogue - a sharing of individual opinions about the phenomena; (2) transitional dialogue - further discussion and examination of the experience that leads to newer, more immediate understanding of the issue in question, and may be tied to group or individual interests; (3) fundamental dialogue - further discussion that leads to a building on previous themes and an interweaving of these themes as they are further illuminated by the data. It is out of this dialogue that a collective understanding emerges. Discourse is understood as purposive action pertaining to a validity claim. Participating in discourse means seeking to succeed in doing something to convince, refute, arrive at a conclusion, and so on (Braaten, 1991, p. 44). It examines as hypothetic and thematic, validity claims raised for statements and norms. Participants in discourse retain a cooperative attitude. It is a sub-species of Communicative Action and of Consensual Action (Habermas, 1979, p. 209). \u2022 IHTV Distorted communication is cornmunication that reproduces those belief systems that \"could not be validated if subjected to rational discourse\" (Schroyer, 1973,163). These would include lies and coerced consensus. Diversion groups fallacies which divert attention from the proposition at issue. The effect is the tendency to distract or shift the focus of the argument. Typically occurring within adversarial contexts, they include: straw man, ad hominem, guilt by association, and red herring (Johnson & Blair, 1977, p. 34). Dubious Assumption occurs where a sentence or position, Q, depends upon an assumption, R, if the truth of R is a necessary condition of the truth, or intelligibility, or appropriateness, of Q. 1. M employs an assumption, Q, in an argument - either a proposition underlying a state premise, or a missing premise. 2. Q is debatable or false (Johnson & Blair, 1977, pp. 135-136). Emancipation is the elimination of impediments to human freedom. Marx ties emancipation directly to the idea of self-determination (Lukes, 1983). Faulty Analogy involves two situations which are similar in some respects, but a particular feature fails to support the conclusion. An analogy may be explicit or implicit, and draws its plausibility from similarities. 1. An analogy is offered in support of the conclusion of an argument. 2. The two things being compared are not similar in the respect required to support the conclusion (Johnson & Blair, 1977, pp. 65-68). Force field refers to the moment constructed of past and present moments, in anticipation of the future (Jay, 1993, p. 8). Free trade is an economic concept used for analytical purposes to denote trade unfettered by government-imposed trade restrictions. It is also used as a general term to denote the end result of a process of trade liberalization. Freer trade is the comparative term used to denote circumstances between current practice and the achievement of free trade (Hart, 1994, p. 426). General symmetry refers to a situation in which all stakeholders have and equal and unrestrained opportunity to engage in discourse (McCarthy, 1978). Good life is an \"aesthetic undertaking\" posed as the question concerning the interpretation of the existential situation of humanity and, resulting from this, as \"the search for an integral mode of existence\" (Gunther, 1993, pp. 158-159). The Socratic-Platonic thesis presents the good as universal and teachable knowledge to guide appropriate action in every situation possible. Aristotle (344BC, pp. 84-100) conception of the good goes beyond this to appropriate action under unforeseeable and changeable conditions. Phronesis guides the social actor in realizing the good life. Guilt by Association involves a faulty analogy by suggesting a similarity with another person or position, but is similar to ad hominem in form, though the attack against the person is indirect through a group or doctrine. The bridge between the individual and the group is how the guilt is transferred. 1. M attacks N (or N's position), based on some alleged association between N (or N's position) and another person, group, or belief (s). 2. Either (a) the alleged association does not exist at all, or (b) it does not provide adequate support for M's criticism of N (or N's position) (Hughes, 1996, pp. 252-253; Johnson & Blair, 1977, pp. 49-53). Hasty Conclusion (or jumping to conclusions) occurs when premises of an argument fail to provide sufficient support for the conclusion, even though the premises may pass be relevant. Premises must be adequate to support its conclusion. 1. M adduces Q, R, S , . . . as sufficient support for T. 2. Q, R, S, . . . , taken together, are not sufficient support for T (Angeles, 1992, p. 108; Hughes, 1996, p. 157; Johnson & Blair, 1977, pp. 17-22). Hermeneutics, or interpretive philosophy, is essentially a philosophy of understanding, which elucidates how it is that one person comes to understand the actions or words, or any other meaningful product, of another (Lavoie, 1990, p. xiii). Ideal speech situation is neither an empirical phenomenon nor simply a construct, but a reciprocal supposition unavoidable in discourse. It is a 'fiction' which is operatively effective in communication. As such, there is an anticipation of an ideal speech situation. As a validity claim, it is a critical standard against which every actually realized consensus can be called into question and tested (Habermas, 1975, p. 258). This is a situation of symmetrical free speech in which all participants have an equal chance to employ constantive, regulative, and representative speech acts (McCarthy, 1978). This means discourse free from distorted communication in which all the participants have an effective equality of chances to take part in the dialogue. The conditions for an ideal speech situation are not linguistic in character, but rather social and material conditions (Bernstein, 1995, pp. 50-51). Habermas' ideal speech situation is designed to be a directly practical alternative to class struggle, a way of achieving rational consensus (Agger, 1992, p. 186) through the non-violent force of the better argument. Elocutionary Act is defined by the meaning expressed by the speaker, which has rational force. That is, the speech act of the speaker motivates the hearer \"to accede to a rationally . . . binding force\" (Habermas, 1981, p. 278). An illocutionary act is included in the prelocutionary act (Skjei, 1985, p. 88). According to Habermas, the illocutionary components bring about an explicit \"claim of propositional truth, normative rightness or subjective truthfulness\" (1989, p. 112) in an explicit mode (1981, p. 289). Impersonation is a category of inductive fallacies which impersonate good arguments. While most fallacies counterfeit sound patters of argument, several types exhibit this strongly. These include: a) arguments from analogy; b) appeals to fairness and precedent; and c) arguments about causal claims (Johnson & Blair, 1977, pp. 65-94). I5T 3 Intimidation is a category of inductive fallacies whose arguments attempt to pressure or coerce acceptance of a conclusion. This category typically includes appeals to authority, popularity, and dire predictions on failure to acquiesce (Johnson & Blair, 1977, pp. 145-169). Latently strategic action is composed of two elements of manipulation and systemically distorted communication (Habermas, 1979, p. 209). Lifeworld is \"the horizon within which communicative actions are 'always already' moving . . . we can think of the lifeworld as represented by a culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretative patterns . . . . [It] is given to the experiencing subject as unquestionable\" (Habermas, 1987, pp. 119, 124, 130), and constitutes the intersubjective horizon of the socio-cultural world (Crossley, 1996, 73). This enclosing horizon affords existential security (care) necessary for communicative action to be tolerable (Myerson, 1994, 79). \"[T]he risk of disagreement\" within the morphogenetic horizon of the lifeworld is \"counterbalanced\" by a conservative reservoir of \"interpretive work [by] preceding generations\" (Habermas, 1981, 70). Manipulation is conscious deception, where at least one other participant is intentionally deceived about the strategic attitude cloaked in a pseudo-consensual manner. It is a sub-species of strategic communication (Habermas, 1976, p. 209). Misleading Context argues by misrepresenting, distorting, omitting, or quoting something out of context (Angeles, 1992, p. 108). Perlocutionary Act is defined by the speaker's non-expressed intention, and are one type of covert strategic action. An illocutionary act is included in the prelocutionary act (Skjei, 1985, p. 88). Habermas defines perlocutions narrowly as special cases of latent strategic action (1985, p. 108). They are a subclass of teleological actions expressed in speech acts where the speaker's aims are not declare or admitted (Habermas, 1981, p. 292). Petitio Principii (also known as, begging the question, circular reasoning or vicious circularity) occurs when its premises presuppose, directly or indirectly, the truth of its conclusion. The function of the premises of an argument is to support its conclusion, and if we have to accept the truth of the conclusion in order to accept the premises then the premises have failed to do their job. Proving the fallacy involves identifying the culpable premise, which is best done by standardizing the argument. 1. One of the premises of an argument is identical to the conclusion or logically equivalent to it; or 2. One of the premises of an argument is such that we could not accept it unless we had already accepted the conclusion (Angeles, 1992, pp. 106-107; Hughes, 1996, pp. 130-131; Johnson & Blair, 1977, pp. 179-183; and Runes, 1962, p. 108). Phronesis entails knowledge of the goods (ends, goals) of rational human conduct, and knowledge of means and their proper application in achieving those desirable rational goods. Distinguished by praxis from theoretical knowledge and practical skill (Angeles, 1994, p. 228; Runes, 1962, p. 235). Used here to mean step-by-step goodness, not just teleological