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The politics of copresence: an ecological approach to resistance in top-down participation
Abstract
The globally unfavourable assessment of state-generated forms of participation often extends to the citizens’ talk in itself. Today, it is the very idea that ordinary citizens are able to express themselves in a relevant and fruitful way during technical and tightly framed public discussions that seems to be called into question. How do citizens respond to the difficulty to express their ideas or concerns about their neighbourhood, in a forum where they have been invited to do so? What are their reactions to repeated failure to impact the discussions and the projects? ‘Exit’, ‘voice’ and ‘loyalty’ are three typical reactions to dissatisfaction. This paper will describe a fourth option, ‘internal resistance’. Following this option, citizens, while conserving appearances of loyalty, resituate themselves in the interaction through tactical moves that are found to each illustrate one of the main principles of Goffman's conception of the ‘interaction order’: focusing, mutuality, equality.
... Since then, the urge to define what is real and appropriate participation has led to decades of theorizing on the proper ways to structure public participation (see Beierle 1999;Hart 1992;Irvin & Stansbury 2004;Fung 2006 for some examples of ideal conditions for participation). Recent studies of participatory budgeting in Europe (Talpin 2011, Berger 2015 have ...
... This creates a participatory process that is meaningful first and foremost for the authorities arranging it. These findings closely echo results of studies on participation in other contexts (Berger 2015, Talpin 2011). ...
... Youth participation and deliberative democracy carries a promise of inclusion and more efficient policy implementation. The conditions required for achieving democratic legitimacy are elusive but in terms of creating a democratic process this study corroborated previous findings in terms of procedural legitimacy (Beierle 1999;Hart 1992;Irvin & Stansbury 2004;Fung 2006) and the misrecognition of participants skills and agency (Berger 2015, Lichterman & Eliasoph 2014, Talpin 2011. In terms of engaging a multitude of youth, motivating them to participate without inhibitions and giving them space for deliberation the process was a failure. ...
This article examines youth participation in public decision-making through an ethnographic case study analysing structural factors and agency of participants in a process of participatory budgeting. Deliberative democracy is increasingly offered as a policy solution for civic renewal. However, the legitimacy of these processes is commonly questioned. Therefore, procedural theorists have attempted to define ideal conditions for participation, highlighting how the possibility of participation is communicated, the selection of participants and their level of influence.
This study found that while some participants felt the process was meaningful, for others it offered sanctions and reinforcement of existing hierarchies. This article argues that ideal conditions of participation need to be understood in a wider sense, including how participation is made ‘youth friendly’, the opportunities and possibilities of participants in the core of the process versus those occupying marginal positions, and what kind of prior knowledge is necessary in order to participate.
... The view of citizen participation as a ladder, proposed by Arnstein (1969) over 50 years ago, distinguishes between the levels of participation, from "non-participation" and "tokenistic" participation into the highest degrees of "delegated power" and "citizen control". The informal tactics of resistance might be acknowledged by the researchers (see Berger, 2015) but they are discussed and measured mostly by their effectiveness and impact. Engin Isin takes this approach even further in his portrayal of the "the activist citizen, " an actor who make a difference by introducing a break or a rupture (Isin, 2009, p. 379-380). ...
This article examines how the inhabitants of a culturally diverse suburban estate in Finland strive for meaningful encounters in their lives. The focus is on Kontula, a residential working-class district on the eastern periphery of Helsinki, which has become a powerful symbol of the ills of contemporary urbanity—poverty and social problems, as well as rootlessness and the failed integration of the immigrant populations—in the vernacular geography and media representations of the city. I studied how everyday mobility in an increasingly segregated city is related to a range of qualities of sociocultural encounters, both within the immediate neighbourhood and across other urban areas. I argue that for many marginalised inhabitants, agency predominantly emphasises striving for normality, not a challenge to the system. This is why it is so rarely recognised. Themes such as common decency, meaningful activity and equal encounter are much more typical aims of everyday practises than those focussing on changing the conditions. The contexts explored range from the familiar and neighbourly surroundings characterised by high degree of cultural intimacy and effortlessness to spaces with unfamiliar expectations and very different cultural codes. How do people living on the stigmatised periphery establish sense of belonging in a segregated city? How is it possible retain a sense of decency and dignity in unpredictable circumstances? During my long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the area, I concentrated on the qualities of encounters and senses of agency. These are interweaved with the inhabitants' everyday life, realised in their movement across the city and vary considerably in different contexts, reproducing the quotidian urbanity of Helsinki.
... Though not defined as such, the implicit dimension of politics has been explored in recent political and philosophical analysis (Swyngedouw 2011, 372), which have tried to pinpoint what is political and what is not, whether defined as "impolitical" (Esposito 1987), "postdemocratic" (Crouch 2006), "politically perverse" (Arrendt 1995, 6), "apoliticism" (Gramsci 1997, 290) or "postpolitical" (Mouffe 2007). Moreover, social theory and research has made interesting efforts to address the implicit or formal dimension of politics 5 , for example referring to "codes of practice" 5 The implicit everydays or formal dimension of politics has a rich history of research (Cefai 2007: 528), which includes philosophers such as Arendt (1995: 10) and Gramsci (1997: 201), sociologists like Goffman (1963) and Melucci (1996) and an increasing number of social researchers (Gayet-Viaud 2009;Berger 2015;Luvatakhalo 2012). Their studies address the political relevance of the form of antagonistic actions in a variety of ways. ...
Civil society actors' reduced ability to take political action and adopt critical positions towards public institutions is often ascribed to the "marketisation" of the local welfare systems in which non-profit and third-sector organizations operate. This reading of the depoliticisation of civil society is correct, but it has a number of shortcomings, including the assumption that civil society actors are passive agents that are overwhelmed by the depoliticisation mechanisms to which they are subjected. Instead, this paper explores how civic organizations-albeit unintentionally-engender depoliticisation dynamics that shrink their critical strength. To do so, it draws on Gramscian arguments regarding civil society and politics and uses them to illuminate a case study of a local governance strategy (V'Arco Villoresi Green System), involving both experts and civic groups. The main finding of the research is that civil society sustains what Gram-sci called "economism", i.e. a radical rejection of politics, which may be enacted by civil society both when non-critically adhering to governance arenas and when contesting them. The analysis undertaken contributes to our understanding of the depoliticisation of civil society, shedding light, on the one hand, on how this process is not solely due to factors external to civil society and, on the other hand, on what the author calls the implicit dimension of politics.
Drawing on Goffman's Frame Analysis and 20 years of observations of city planning councils in Western Europe and North America, this article lays the groundwork for a grammar of democratic ambiguity characterizing top‐down participatory processes and other public meetings aimed at some degree of citizen inclusion in local, municipal, or regional government. After pointing out Goffman's singular conception of the “interaction order,” the author shows how institutional organizers and ordinary citizens deal with interactional ambiguity, in its contrasting effects on the dynamics of these participatory assemblies. A primary form of ambiguity, between a “representative” and a “deliberative” definition of participatory democracy, is proving inhibiting for citizens' involvement and tends to “suspend interaction.” A second type of ambiguity arises from a wide range of facilitation methods (playful, dramaturgical, educational, therapeutic, esthetic, etc.) designed to transform the initial ambiguity to offer more fluid interaction and more stimulating involvement opportunities, yet in an activity that now has only an uncertain connection to civic participation. The author concludes by presenting some frame‐analytical tools for tracking and evaluating dynamics of ambiguity transformation in participatory processes and emphasizes the implications of this type of sociological analysis for political theory.
All over the world, young people have been leading and participating in multiple forms of climate activism. In this chapter, we discuss the main trends in contemporary literature, proposing new conceptual and methodological paths for centring youth voices in climate activism research. We first identify critical pitfalls in the field of youth participation which are related to research foci, assumptions, and practices: i) the old electoral dilemma, ii) the behaviourist perspective, iii) the ever-search for the spectacular, iv) the individual-collective dichotomy, v) the intrinsic benefit of participation, vi) the extractivist research. We argue that there is a risk of reproducing these pitfalls when researching youth climate activism. Therefore, drawing from empirical evidence (ethnographic, interview and survey data), we propose three pathways to foreground young people's voices and experiences in climate activism: 'beyond climate strikes', 'more than white activism', and 'not like adults'. Finally, we discuss the potential of a conceptual articulation of political agency and imagination and the need for incorporating participatory and visual methods. Such approaches will lead towards a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics and facets of youth climate activism.
In urban planning, participation is a debated concept and through the analysis of the process of Mumbai Development Plan (MDP) 2014–2034, the authors argue that the large and intersectoral mobilization, mixing professional experts and grassroots movements, opened up a “democratic moment” around the making of the MDP, allowing to raise fundamental questions about the just ordering of the city. This democratic moment expanded through the widening and the thickening of the various participatory arenas where planning process deliverables became moments of heightened debate and demands for public participation. Forsaking the closed arenas of technocratic participation, planning was discussed directly on the ground through various participatory methods and community-based counter-projects. Formal arenas were also the locus of enriched participation while inhabitants came with their political convictions and attachments. This enlargement of participation made room for a wide range of knowledge-expert, situated, ecological, local game knowledge, planning professional knowledge, broader academic knowledge to build up critical knowledge allowing to reframe the stakes of Mumbai’s development. The authors complete the analysis of the multifaceted “politics of participation” by looking at what they call “the closure of the democratic moment” through the “(neo)liberal entrapment of participation”.
This article analyses how official citizen deliberation processes interpellate citizens, and argues that this act of invitation is a crucial element of the power dynamics of people's participation in such processes. The interpellation as citizen is both what offers people the opportunity to speak and a central aspect of how people's discourse is constrained and given direction. The study combines a discourse-theoretical perspective on interpellation and subject positions (Laclau and Mouffe) with frame-theoretical insights (Goffman), to analyse the way interpellation works in practice, how certain subject positions rather than others are indicated or prescribed to participants, and the ways these participants endorse them or attempt to (re)position themselves in interactions. Based on the analysis of a citizen deliberation process on health care reimbursement organised in Belgium, we show how the invited citizens are interpellated ? often simultaneously ? as 'nationals', as 'ordinary people', and as 'participants', and how they respond to this. On a theoretical level, this article contributes modestly to a more dynamic, multi-layered and subtle conceptualization of subject positions as constructed through suggestion, response and resistance in concrete interactive settings.
A deep understanding of the use of deliberative processes requires a political ethnography able to detect their consequences for the participants and for the public sphere. This article analyses a participatory process organised in France by an activist-professional facilitator with a small group of bureaucrats and marginalized individuals, designed to promote mutual understanding and raise public issues. This ethnography shows that deliberation in small groups, rather than merely producing consensus and reproducing inequalities in accessing forms of public expression as is sometimes alleged, may generate at least preliminary politicization and the publicization of social issues in working-class districts. These rather fragile effects raise the question of the continuity of collective action and institutional transformations generated by deliberative processes.
L'impératif délibératif
Loïc Blondiaux, Yves Sintomer
Un changement idéologique accompagne les transformations actuelles des pratiques politiques dans les démocraties contemporaines. Il passe par la valorisation de certaines notions : la discussion, le débat, la concertation, la consultation, la participation, le partenariat, la gouvernance. Deux phénomènes sont à l'œuvre. Dans la sphère de l'action politique se multiplient les dispositifs qui visent à intégrer une pluralité d'acteurs et à mettre la décision en débat. Dans la sphère académique la référence à la démocratie délibérative connaît aujourd'hui un succès croissant, en particulier dans le monde anglo-saxon. Existe-t-il un lien entre ces deux mouvements ? Assiste-t-on, avec la montée de cet impératif délibératif, à l'émergence d'un nouvel idéal de gouvernement ? Quelles sont les effets réels induits par la multiplication des dispositifs de participation et des procédures de délibération sur les acteurs, les mobilisations et les décisions collectives ? Cet article tente de répondre à ces différentes questions.
Laypeople's capacity to co-produce scientific knowledge and to evaluate scientific projects has been progressively acknowledged. Yet environmental controversies have led us to consider two other significant phenomena, i.e., laypeople's reluctance to take part in participation arenas, and the ability of these very same people to energetically and convincingly take a stand against the arguments of experts. Considering these two phenomena only as a hold-up on the way to true technical democracy would be an error. They highlight the capacity of laypeople to exercise judgement, which could well lead to their adopting an ironic stance towards both politics and science. In this paper we have attempted to explore the two features underpinning this judgment, namely clear-sightedness and disenchantment. We show that ironic judgment can reflect bad experiences shared by others, and may be potentially strengthened by social sciences theories, especially those criticizing political power and science. However, if widespread, irony could lead to a paralysed society. To conclude, we suggest an alternative way of considering science and politics, removed from either respect or sterile irony. L'idée selon laquelle les profanes sont à même de coproduire des connaissances ésotériques, d'apprivoiser et de coévaluer les projets techniques s'est progressivement répandue. Les controverses liées à l'environnement nous conduisent toutefois à prendre au sérieux deux autres phénomènes : d'une part, le refus de personnes ordinaires de s'engager dans les multiples arènes de participation qui leur sont offertes ; d'autre part, la capacité des mêmes personnes ordinaires à résister de manière radicale, mais "robuste", c'est-à-dire recevable par un autrui quelconque, aux arguments des experts. Ces deux phénomènes ne peuvent être uniquement interprétés comme des retards sur la voie d'une véritable démocratie technique. Ils témoignent de l'exercice d'une compétence de jugement, susceptible de se clore sur un détachement ironique vis-à-vis des mondes du politique et de la science. Nous détaillons deux versants de cette ironie, la lucidité et le désenchantement.
This article addresses the ability of anyone to become involved as simple citizens and as a non-expert in a “participatory democracy” assembly, in the presence of city officials, technical experts and other fellow citizens. Using a method of analytical ethnography –combining communicational pragmatics and ethnographic inquiry– it aims at making better understand the specificity of non-expert competence. Applying this method to an everyday situation, the article shows the limits of strictly discursive approaches of decision-making and reveals infradiscursive grammatical spaces –focused gathering, interlocutory game, acquaintance and joint venture– which participate in regulating the participants’ public commitments. The article finally discusses the critical impact of non-discursive competences of political interaction brought to light by ethnopragmatics.
Des démocrates athéniens à Montesquieu, d'Aristote à Rousseau, personne ne songeait à faire de l'élection l'instrument démocratique par excellence. Démocratie n'équivalait alors pas à gouvernement représentatif, et c'est le tirage au sort qui paraissait le mieux apte à respecter l'égalité stricte des candidats. Que s'est-il donc passé au tournant du XVIIIe siècle, en Europe et aux États-Unis, pour que se renverse cette conception multiséculaire, et pour qu'advienne l'idée qu'une démocratie est, par essence, un gouvernement représentatif ? Ce livre, devenu un classique et augmenté d'une postface inédite de l'auteur, présente une théorie du gouvernement représentatif en s'attachant aussi bien à la tradition européenne qu'aux débats américains.
A number of contemporary democracies have introduced measures to ensure a more equitable representation of women and/or ethnic minority citizens within elected assemblies. These measures have included the use of gender quotas in the selection of parliamentary candidates, and the use of ‘race‐conscious’ districting to increase the electoral chances of ethnic minority representatives. Drawing on a distinction between the politics of ideas and the politics of presence, this book explores and defends the case for such measures. The politics of ideas considers accountability in relation to declared polices and programmes, and sees the sex or race of the representative as a matter of relative indifference. In the politics of presence, by contrast, the gender or ethnic composition of elected assemblies becomes a legitimate matter of democratic concern. This book addresses the concern that the case for political presence could encourage essentialist understandings of group identity or group interest. It argues against an either/or alternative between the politics of ideas and the politics of presence and for a new combination of these two models of representation.
accessible sur Cairn : www.cairn.info/revue-participations-2013-2-page-65.htm
Goffman is credited with enriching our understanding of the details of interaction, but not with challenging our theoretical understanding of social organization. While Goffman's position is not consistent, the outlines for a theory of an interaction order sui generis may be found in his work. It is not theoretically adequate to understand Goffman as an interactionist within the dichotomy between agency and social structure. Goffman offers a way of resolving this dichotomy via the idea of an interaction order which is constitutive of self and at the same time places demands on social structure. This has significant implications for our understanding of social organization in general.
« Where is the danger? »
While Foucault’s work is little mobilized for thinking of the public sphere, it entails to various uses. This article proposes an outline of this diversity which proceeds as much from the breaks, changing stances and contradictions of his thought that from the differentiated readings. If Foucault is usually used to think of the effects of power and police, his work is less used to seize the effects of subjectivation, individual as well as collective. The article insists on all the interest of some works that benefit from foucaultian intuitions to think of the second without ignoring the first. Because where there is power, there is resistance.
The untraceable deliberation
The article deals with an ethnographic approach of a citizens jury held in November 2009 about the new indicators of wealth and ordered by regional council of Nord Pas de Calais. It shows that what is at stake in that kind of procedure cannot be analyzed through the exclusive focus of the deliberative theory. What matters in the case we considered is less deliberation than the constitution of the group, the sociability, the inequalities and the effects of the organizers’ framing.
Recent microsociological reductionisms claim that societal and organizational macrostructures can be “reduced to,” “explained in terms of” or “translated into” the dynamics of elementary interaction systems. Two critical lines of argumentation challenge this claim. First, neofunctionalist systems theory is drawn on to show that reductionist strategies fail to acknowledge the emergent differences between types of social systems and thus run into difficulties in the analysis of macrostructures. A model of boundary maintenance operations in interaction systems illustrates this point. Second, a more internal critique of the logic of reductionism suggests that microsociology does not provide the “foundations” for macrosociology but that micro- and macrosociology should peacefully coexist as equally legitimate ways to make sense of different aspects of social reality.
1. Rethinking Context: an introduction Charles Goodwin, and Alessandro Duranti 2. The indexical ground of Deictic Reference William F. Hanks 3. Language in context and language as context: the Samoan respect vocabulary Alessandro Duranti 4. Context contests: debatable truth statements on Tanna (Vanuatu) Lamont Lindstrom 5. Contextualization, tradition, and the dialogue of contexts: Icelandic Legends of the Kraftaskald Richard Bauman 6. Assessments and the construction of context Charles Goodwin, and Marjorie Harness Goodwin 7. In another context Emanuel A. Schegloff 8. Contextualization and understanding John Gumperz 9. Contextualization in Kalapalo narratives Ellen Basso 10. Radio talk-show therapy and the pragmatics of possible worlds Frank Gaik 11. The interpenetration of communicative contexts: examples from medical encounters Aaron Cicourel 12. The routinization of repair in courtroom discourse Susan U. Philips 13. The negotiation of context in face-to-face interaction Adam Kendon 14. Indexing gender Elinor Ochs.
A conversation has a life of its own and makes demands on its own behalf. It is a little social system with its own boundary maintaining tendencies; it is a little patch of commitment and loyalty with its own heroes and its own villains. (Goffman 1967:113)
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
In this paper an effort is made to review the relevance and limitations of a scattering of near-recent work in sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and conversational analysis with respect to a central issue in the sociological study of social interaction: the taken-for-granted and the inferences made therefrom. The hope is that the line between microsociological studies and sociolinguistics can be shown to be arbitrary, requiring those on each side of the division to address the concerns of those on the other side.
DELEGATIVE DEMOCRACY Guillermo O'Donnell Guillermo O'DonneU, an Argentine political scientist, is Helen Kellogg Professor of lnternational Studies and Academic Director of the Kellogg Institute of International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His books include Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism (1979); Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Argentina, 1966-1973, in Comparative Perspective (1988); and, with Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (1986). Here I depict a "new species," a type of existing democracies that has yet to be theorized. As often happens, it has many similarities with other, already recognized species, with cases shading off between the former and some variety of the latter. Still, I believe that the differences are significant enough to warrant an attempt at such a depiction. The drawing of neater boundaries between these types of democracy depends on empirical research, as well as more refined analytical work that I am now undertaking. But if I really have found a new species (and not a member of an already recognized family, or a form too evanescent to merit conceptualization), it may be worth exploring its main features. Scholars who have worked on democratic transitions and consolidation have repeatedly said that, since it would be wrong to assume that these processes all culminate in the same result, we need a typology of democracies. Some interesting efforts have been made, focused on the consequences, in terms of types of democracy and policy patterns, of various paths to democratization. I My own ongoing research suggests, however, that the more decisive factors for generating various kinds of democracy are not related to the characteristics of the preceding authoritarian regime or to the process of transition. Instead, I believe that we must focus upon various long-term historical factors, as well as the degree of severity of the socioeconomic problems that newly installed democratic governments inherit. Let me briefly state the main points of my argument: 1) Existing Journal of Democracy Vol. 5, No. 1 January 1994 56 Journal of Democracy theories and typologies of democracy refer to representative democracy as it exists, with all its variations and subtypes, in highly developed capitalist countries. 2) Some newly installed democracies (Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Philippines, Korea, and many postcommunist countries) are democracies, in the sense that they meet Robert Dahl's criteria for the definition of polyarchy. 2 3) Yet these democracies are not -- and do not seem to be on the path toward becoming -- representative democracies; they present characteristics that prompt me to call them delegative democracies (DD). 4) DDs are not consolidated (i.e., institutionalized) democracies, but they may be enduring. In many cases, there is no sign either of any imminent threat of an authoritarian regression, or of advances toward representative democracy. 5) There is an important interaction effect: the deep social and economic crisis that most of these countries inherited from their authoritarian predecessors reinforces certain practices and conceptions about the proper exercise of political authority that lead in the direction of delegative, not representative democracy. The following considerations underlie the argument presented above: 3 A) The installation of a democratically elected government opens the way for a "second transition," often longer and more complex than the initial transition from authoritarian rule. B) This second transition is supposed to be from a democratically elected government to an institutionalized, consolidated democratic regime. C) Nothing guarantees, however, that this second transition will occur. New democracies may regress to authoritarian rule, or they may stall in a feeble, uncertain situation. This situation may endure without opening avenues for institutionalized forms of democracy. D) The crucial element determining the success of the second transition is the building of a set of institutions that become important decisional points in the flow of political power. E) For such a successful outcome to occur, governmental policies and the political strategies of various agents must embody the recognition of a paramount shared interest in democratic institution building. The successful cases have featured a decisive coalition of broadly supported political leaders who take great care in creating and strengthening democratic political institutions. These institutions, in turn, have made it easier to cope with the social and economic problems inherited from the authoritarian regime. This...
This paper examines conversational dialogue. It is divided into four parts. The first presents arguments for dialogic analysis, the second lists some failings, the third applies this critical view to the notion of a ‘reply’; the final part is an overview.
The goal of Artificial Intelligence is to identify and solve tractable information processing problems. In so doing, two types of theory arise. Here, they are labelled Types 1 and 2, and their characteristics are outlined. This discussion creates a more than usually rigorous perspective of the subject, from which past work and future prospects are briefly reviewed.
La citoyenneté urbaine du point de vue des gouvernés. Synthèse bibliographique
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Carrel, M. (2007). La citoyenneté urbaine du point de vue des gouvernés. Synthèse bibliographique. Paris: Éditions du Plan Urbanisme Construction Architecture.
Les asymétries de prise. Des formes de pouvoir dans un monde en réseaux. Paris, GSPR working paper, Groupe de sociologie pragmatique et réflexive
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