On Defining and Differentiating
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discourse. Is it possible to combine these different aspects of participatory communication?
The importance of designing and evaluating participatory projects warrants the attempt to do so.
The paper argues that the definition problem results from attempting to define
participation as a single process while it is actually a family of processes. The argument
specifies the conditions of participatory communication in a way that they generalize across
levels or scales of interaction while at the same time specifying different ways participatory
communication can be enacted or expressed. Such distinctions relieve analysis from the need to
debate what is authentic participation and frees it to study what are its different kinds and is the
appropriate role for each. The framework also specifies the means to identify non-participatory
communication. This argument employs Habermas’s theory of communication action, with
particular emphasis on the “action theoretic” part of this theory.
A variety of critics unsympathetic to Habermas’s project charge the theory with idealism,
insensitivity to difference, and an aloofness from power particularly in Third World settings
(Escobar, 1995, p. 221). Without the space to respond here it should be said that good faith and
systematic attempts to meet these charges have been made by Habermas and others (Bernstein,
1992; Habermas, 1982; White, 1988). There is not space to address these and related issues here.
Suffice it for the moment to say that this author believes that the various positions on modernism
have more to offer one another than criticism. A number of proposals have been made to show
how the theory of communicative action can be used productively in relation to the work of
Foucault (Bahr, 1988) and the philosophy of difference as represented by Derrida and Lyotard
(White, 1991), and feminist theory (Meehan, 1995). This analysis is advanced in the spirit of
this kind of synthesis.
Convention