Communicative Action, Democracy and Social Research

Abstract

Can a democratic, inclusive and viable alternative to managerialism be developed? An important strand of contemporary social theory would suggest not. It would situate the emergence of managerialism within a more far-reaching set of social changes that has seen questions of democracy rendered increasingly irrelevant to institutional and societal reproduction in the late-modern world. Bauman (1987), for example, argues that issues of democratic legitimacy have been made redundant in societies where the majority are seduced by the material benefits of consumer capitalism, while the marginalised (such as young unemployed men) are increasingly subjected to coercive social regulation (cf. Galbraith, 1992).