STREAMS 9 Political Sociology. Languages of Local Democracy: Case Study of Discursive Collision. Grażyna Woroniecka

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1 STREAMS 9 Political Sociology Languages of Local Democracy: Case Study of Discursive Collision Grażyna Woroniecka

2 1 Grażyna Woroniecka WSiE TWP Olsztyn, University of Warsaw Languages of Local Democracy: Case Study of Discursive Collision The analysis below has been conducted using the term discourse which I define very wide as a specific rationality, logic of perceiving the world and imposing categories on it. Discourse, rationality and language mean almost the same here: they are strategies of communicating actors understandings and contents that are obvious, taken-for-granted for them. I separated three main discourses in an area of communication observed: commonsense discourse rooted in everyday practical reasoning, legal discourse manifested in legal acts, in court and in legal arguments and, in the end, an administrative (beaurocratic) discourse a sort of practical reasoning specific to formal organizations. The latter is not the same as the legal one and it is only weakly connected with the language of law, although often looks similarly. It has different sources which are hidden in everyday practice of institutional activity and hierarchical relation among positions in organization. This has consequences in an order of obedience, of argumentation and in a vision of inner and outer relations of the institution. It is also not the same as everyday practical commonsense knowledge as it is instrumental and more petrified than that. These three discourses are not strictly connected with types of actors. I observed institutional staff and lawyers using commonsense rationalizations mainly, lay people effectively using administrative discourse and both of them making attempts in application of legal discourse to their communicative strategies. In normal, routine situations, however, these three discourses are less mixed, hierarchically organized and people expect them to be tied with their respective background. What makes people to use non-specific discourses, is a radical change destroying previous order and uncovering the potential of opposition and resistance. Alien discourses seem to be means of contesting relations of domination that were secured by previous discursive organization. On the other hand, commonsense discourse in the only one which covers perceived reality relatively continually. Both administrative and legal discourses do it only partially and with numerous gaps of undefined situations. When they meet such, they go down to commonsense rationalization and, after solving the problem, come back to own language. Such a compensation is activated especially in new regulations, in face of new challenges. My case study is an illustration of an event, where social actors activated two conflicting strategies resistance and preservation the status quo using the full range of discourses instrumentally and where they met discursive limits for their actions. The research presented here 1 has been conducted in natural situations of public life in a five year period ( ). The starting point was marked by new legal act 2 which regulated mutual relations between institutional administrators of blocks of flats and their individual owners. Instead previous inequality in this relation organized around evident, legally secured institutional dominance, there was a new idea written into the legal project. To present it briefly, one can summarize it as follows: (1) there are two kinds of owners of the 1 Full presentation of this research program, see: Działanie polityczne. Próba socjologii interpretatywnej (Political Action. An Attempt to Interpretive Sociology), Oficyna Naukowa, Warsaw See also: Conflict Over Joint Householders Possession in Perspective of Discoursive Symbolism, w: Symbols, Power and Politics, ed. E. Hałas, Peter Lang Europaeischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, Ustawa o własności lokali, June 24, 1994 in Dziennik Usaw (offocial publication announcing current legislation), pos. 388.

3 2 whole building (communal and private); (2) both of them have equal rights in voting and sharing costs of building exploitation and modernization; (3) the only limit for right and costs is related with a size of arithmetical share possessed in the whole building; (4) share owners must meet at least once a year to choose board and legitimate crucial decisions. I have been conducted participant observation supplied with additional content analysis and interviews just on those once-year obligatory meetings which supported key parts of material analyzed here. All this looks very liberally, there were some contextual conditions, however, that throw new light on such purely liberal intention of the project. First, respective buildings are old (minimum 50 years) and, what is more important, they have been brought nearly into ruins under communal administration. The new legal act creates some sort of point 0 imposing equal duties on parties of unequal history of ownership. Second, the sense of the term ownership is rather specific here. People who lived in these blocks had been given scarce resource previously: the first administrative decision which allowed them to move in, and the second decision which allowed them to buy their flats at 1 per cent of their market value. They generally perceived communal administration as their patrons (the one who gives scare resources) on the one hand, and their oppressors (the one who inhibit any comfortmaking modernization), on the other hand. This aspect seems to be significant source of ambivalence on the individual owners side and strongly influenced on shaping patterns of communication between the two parties. Their communication during five years showed its dynamics which can be described in terms of phases. Each phase has been interpreted as the next step in the general direction of establishing new consensus around two main dimensions of obligatory cooperation: (1) normative definitions of rules of liberal democracy on everyday issue level action (locally limited) and (2) habits legitimized by tacit knowledge about real rules of mutual relations. Before having presented details, some more general remarks ought to be made here on the way of conceptualization of the noun democracy in terms of interpretative sociology of everyday life. What does democracy mean? I use wide meaning of the term democracy, rather than conventions applied in sociology from political science. When interpreted in everyday life perspective, democracy first of all seems to denote ways of making decisions together under the conditions of rules which regulate specific balance in partners rights and obligations. Passing from democracy in general to local democracy or, in the end, to micro-democracy is thought as a continual process of supplying making decision with directness, with occasions to direct communication in place of performing procedural act of choice. Such formulation, in spite of being somewhat trivial or even over-simplified, specifies the subject field of research enough as it provides two ultimate edges, actors with their practical bargaining are placed between. Legal acts give stimuli to formal institutions to define their interests in spheres and issues where they get in touch with individual actor (private, non-institutional one); ideological (democratic) regulations assume that the latter does the same and operates as if he/she formulated his/her particular interest on a given issue. Further formal democratic procedures are directed on securing some balance between these interests which were generated by two different spheres of social reality: by legal order and by both tacit and articulated content of everyday practical knowledge 3. 3 Pierre Bourdieu used the term practical reasoning to mark this sphere of actors activity.

4 3 Sociological perspective shows that such a vision cannot be fully adequate because of different discursive forces which drive interest formulation in these two orders 4. Emergent legal and political systems do not operate in practical reasoning directly, they are not in a position to create any balance in the discourse they ignore consequently. Systems languages are interpreted in everyday practical reasoning as a kind of general frame only a frame which has its own logic independent of the one declared officially. If we are interested in searching any sorts of democratic balance, we ought to analyze communicative practices of actors negotiating status quo under conditions of institutional rules. When institutions (formal rules) and private actors meet, they activate definitions of each other, test them, try various corrections, bargain, manipulate and doing this they pursue as it is said in ethnometodology normal form. And there is the real problem of local, direct micro-democracy hidden just in this normal form which is rooted in actors interpretative habits, in their biographical experiences, in mutual knowledge of their communication circles or, as one can say, in their political culture. Expected balanced normal form engages both pre-understandings and formulations and it makes actors do hard communicative work to get in for each sequence of communication separately. The more legal regulations differ from common, mutual understandings of individuals, the harder such a work is and the more the idea of legal regulation is threatened by rules of practice 5 and practical understandings which are able to change in into its own conversion. Beyond social ritual The legal regulation gave the municipal agenda the right to initiate the sequence of owners meetings. According to formal regulation they were to represent organizational actor in interaction with individuals. Organizational staff had been given a set of instructions by their formal superiors and tried to persuade that, in fact, nothing crucial had change except costs of keeping the building in order. Office clerks made efforts to present situation as familiar and non-problematic: they used to communicate increase of expenses in the past and expected individual owners to recognize this meeting as the normal practice they had met before. The organizational domination and monopoly for accounts and technical knowledge about the building were components of such normal conditions of mutual relations. Individual owners were given rights to complain and the staff were extraordinary patient and sympathetic as long as participants were complaining as usual. Both sides individuals and representatives of organization took complaining as a sort of ritual, without any serious expectations about its results. Participants roles were distributed in such a way for a long time and created a segment of the reality the municipal agenda existed in. What is significant here, the same performance was presented in the buildings where municipal agenda was a major share-holder and had more rights in voting and in those cases where they were in minority and were formally obliged to be employed by individual owners. This fact indicates that general instruction for the staff was municipal general unified response derived from the interpretation of the change of law in perspective of their separately articulated interest. In general, municipal organization was successful with their covering rhetoric in most meetings: individual owners did not ask for details of the legal act which had changed 4 Luhmann uses the term political inclusion. Cf. Niklas Luhman, Politische Theorie im Wohlfahrtsstaat, Gunter Olzog Verlag, Munchen 1981, chapter 4. 5 In classical thought Emile Durkheim enumerated regulative and practical rules. The obligation of latter were secured by simple inefficiency, e.g. practical rule of using money in business ect. Cf. G. Mulligan, B. Lederman, Social Facts and Rules of Practice, American Journal of Sociology 1977.

5 4 their position so radically and accepted the continuation of the asymmetry in their relations with the organization. They did voting as a sort of a little strange, boring and meaningless indeed moves of their arms and expected impatiently the meeting to be over. Some voted twice and on opposite projects, many of them were absent at all or went home before the ending. Nearly nobody tended to claim their new formal status during the meeting; afterwards, they talked to each other privately, that it was going to be the same as earlier, but more expensive. In a few meetings, however, there happened to be individuals who tried to break familiar ritual of paternalistic framework. They demanded from the municipal agenda to make account of their obligatory administration in frames of the new formal regulation. Such a demand, fully rooted in the legal act and formulated in terms of normatively proper discourse of direct locally embedded micro-democracy, was the beginning of years-long struggle between differently integrated share-owners (individuals and organization) on the one hand, and an interesting case of collision between discourse of normative definitions of rules of liberal democracy and habitus legitimized by tacit knowledge about the real rules of mutual relations, on the other hand. My observation covered those cases where ritual had been broken to make place to conflict. I especially concentrated on one group of owners where conflict burst on the first meeting. One participant (the private owner, I will cal her a leader here) had read the legal act carefully and found municipal information unsatisfactory and inadequate. She demanded her rights in open way and made efforts to persuade other participant. Other private owners gave their support with hesitation and reluctantly in the beginning, but step by step, meeting after meeting (the leader arranged the whole series instead of one meeting to discuss about the new formal situation in legal terms) they took part in changing previous ritualistic form of communication into struggle with making use of legal rights and by legal means. The story of this group is the story of emerging consciousness of meaning of such terms as voting, lobbing, decision etc. Using procedural democratic means, they provoked their municipal partner to do the same and then it became clear that there was a wide gap between two languages: formally declared new rights of private owners and municipal organization s duties on the one hand, and practice of municipal strong domination over individual participants. The former was exposed in general terms using rhetoric of liberal democracy, the latter could be found in encouraging ritualistic communication about particulars, decisions and limits of responsibility. The gap itself was the most carefully hidden aspect of mutual relations. Municipal staff were aware of it and they treated official (legal) forms of speech as something boring but necessary because of conventions; private owners initially shared such a belief and both sides played their obvious roles in this specific performance. Making the gap visible was a destruction of some sort of equilibrium making mutual relations as non-problematic as actors believed it was possible. Contestation of such a consensus changed the whole situation into a problem which needed to be solved. New definitions of each other were needed and new ideas of what to do than as well. In first phases of conflict they were leaders of both sides who were expected to provide necessary definitions and to assure participants of the correctness of their acting. Next phases were open conflict conducted by different means in fields of legal, beaurocratic and commonsense discourses in both direct and mediated communication as well. And in the end, counterpartners found the proper mediator who translated their communicates to each other and communication began to come back to ordinary, somewhat ritualistic forms. Conflict When the opponent broke equilibrium based on municipal-administrative domination, conflict need not have broken yet. Both sides did their best to avoid it. They performed,

6 5 however, two different spectacles of rationalization. The main issues of the organizational actor were focused in preserving status quo: to maintain their monopoly for technical and, what more important, financial information and rights for making key financial decisions. Individual owners pursued their rights of financial information and decision as well. These first claims were grounded in commonsense knowledge 6 and the latter ones in the legal act itself. Those two claims were articulated in languages which radically reversed subject-object relations between actors. The legal act ordered them to be partners; some individual owners proved to be able to activate partners language but municipal organization were not capable of having any partners at all. It could only play a role formally defined as service, but structurally became dominant. Structures of inner communication were so hierarchical and closed to outside claims that there was simply no room for any cooperation. When the administrative performance was broken, staff tried to get the conflict back to the ways of everyday means of interaction. They defined all the situation in terms of personal discourtnesy and attack against basic normal personal relations. Municipal representatives did not come to next meetings if they were not arranged by them. They refused to make any settlements and communicated their decisions only. They hid documentation of the building etc. Wider discursive regulation underlying the functioning of the organization did not allow the officials to accept situation when managers, bosses or directors were legally subjected to outsiders or limited in their decisions by them. So they formulated common share-owners goals in the rhetoric of public service only as far in details as the rationality of the organizational arrangement allowed. On the other hand, individual owners used pure formal regulation language to break the ritual of dominance. The support given to their leader was rather shy and indefinite in the beginning, but when the officials were forced to explain their mistakes and errors instead of dominating in the interaction, the support radically grew 7. Finally opponents entered the phase of passive resistance any of them elaborated own arguments and strategy and it seemed that nothing new could happen. Then the new tactic was tried by municipal administration: they promised some owners a sort of gratification ( free modernization of their flats) if only they constitute the new board. This point was the turning one in discursive strategy of the organization: they realized limits of commonsense argumentation and tried to use elements of formal regulation to restore the previous asymmetry in interaction. The conflict was no longer a matter of direct discursive collision between administrative discourse and common-sense one. The attempt to secure structural features of interactions made both opponents to use first elements of legal discourse which was equally new and alien for both of them. The first outer context 8 engaged was court citation. The opponents became involved in the area of legal regulation when the new board was elected. The communal share was 6 I use the term commonsense knowledge in the sense Anthony Giddens suggested when he constructed a differentiation between mutual knowledge (a stock of knowledge, as Schutz called it) and common-sense. As a form of knowledge, commonsense knowledge has its discursive manifestation which I termed of commonsense discourse. Cf. A. Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method. A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies, Polity Press, Cambridge 1997, p This moment can be explained in terms of delegitimization : the officials were not able to sustain the positive self-presentation of the organization as an object legitimated to dominate. In this way, the obligation to obey disappeared and distribution of support radically changed: private board attained more legitimacy. 8 More detailed analysis of context was presented during ESA Conference in Helsinki (2001) in the paper: Context of Action As Data in Participant Action Research.

7 sufficient to have majority in voting (65 %) and they elected the only person who had previously supported them. The organization forced all resolutions they needed to carry on their routine management. The leader of private owners took official record of this meeting and her next step was to attach it to the court citation. The officials stand and arguments in court were organized as an attempt to persuade the judge about their rights outside the context of legal regulations; they used arguments of administrative practice and common-sense knowledge. They were really surprised at the conclusion which made all resolutions invalid. Municipal administration attempted to establish their claims in legal order five times later each citation tried to present their rights from different point of view but without changing the main discursive strategy, and without any success as well. The last confrontation in court concerned their attempt to introduce a compulsory manager in the building management I will return to this figure a few passages later. Private owners won in the court each time, but this did not bring real, long term solution of the problem of cooperation as municipal administration started each time from the beginning, as if there had been no court experience. Another outer context was local press. Private owners informed press about illegal practices of municipal administration. There were two main journals in Olsztyn: Gazeta Olsztyńska representing official stand of the Town-hall and local edition of the central journal Gazeta Wyborcza, keeping liberal political line and significantly less dependent on local finances. Only the latter decided to publish the critical text; after the publication about municipal illegal activities a lot of private owners called and told stories about meetings in their buildings. In each case there was the same pattern of communication employed but conflict emerged only in a few ones. People asked for help with such incredible behavior of municipal agencies; they felt helpless and upset. They were waiting for any comments, information or a sign that their common-sense definition of the organizational conduct was correct because their neighbors generally accepted municipal domination. The callers wanted to understand what was going on and the collision between their understanding of the situation and the official position they observed was very difficult to bear for them. The third outer context activated in question were municipal and state agencies that were formally obliged to control municipal practices in respects of finances and coherence with legal acts. All of them either proved to be involved in the network of personal (direct or indirect) ties or they shared constitutive features of discourse regulations which I called administrative here; this made all complains inefficient. The prolonged confrontation caused the municipal administration to inspire conflicts in the board s neighborhood (the fourth outer context). They have neglected communal flats for years and conflict was an occasion to direct tenants claims to the private board as the subject responsible for the bad technical state of their flats and the whole building. At the same time for over three years time municipal share-owner paid nothing for building maintenance. This phase can be commented as follows: both sorts of actors (organizational and individuals) constructed new channels of communication and they tried to get support for their own understandings and rationalizations through them. They were looking for corroboration of their concept of normal relations between individuals and municipal organization in general. When their sense of normality had been broken in inner context of communication in the group (share-owners meetings), they tried to reconstruct it in the outer context, arranging extra communication in the group surroundings. The individual owners did the same founding needed support in informal contacts with other private owners and members of boards, with neighbors and members of their families, local newspapers etc. 6

8 7 Parties of conflict assured themselves of their argumentation in this way, but necessary cooperation was still impossible. The legal discourse was initially alien to both conflicting parties. Both actors, however, tried to use it as an instrument of domination over the counter-partner or, in the other words, of imposing their own discourse to cooperation. Legal regulations were general enough to contain both administrative and commonsense discourses; judges hesitated and made attempts to mediate between these two rationalities. The main task of the individual owners was to present their claims in court in such a way that they appeared not to be contrary to demands of administrative discourse. The municipal lawyers arguments, in turn, were based mainly on the common-sense rationality. The legal confrontation became the first forum where parties were forced to conduct their conflict in alien rationality and to adopt its elements to applied discourses in order to win in the court. The Mediator When the compulsory manager had been established by court, the conflict entered a new phase: it was turned back into the inner context of communication, but this time this context was radically changed. Actors communicative strategies were conducted in their own rationalities with the manager playing a role of a mediator. He was familiar with administrative discourse and shared its valuations to the same extent as municipal officials; his communication with them seemed to appear as an inner conflict conducted within the beaurocratic formulations of aims, definitions of winners and losers. The manager was given the role of individual owners advocate; from now on both sides could speak about their claims in their own language and the position of the manager kept them separated. They were brought up to date only occasionally, during obligatory annual meetings. All competitive actions of organizational actor were directed at proving their domination over the manager as a subject of public service. They were reluctant and late in giving him a complete set of documents, questioned his invoices, made caustic remarks and behaved disrespectfully. But private owners stopped to be a side of the conflict. Conversely, they were treated as means in the new conflict between municipal agency and the manager. In six years time the manager has expanded his own firm. He employs eight people now and private owners (except boards, which in a significant change) start to complain that communication with him resembles previous contacts with municipal administrative agendas it includes more and more elements of rituals of complaining instead of intelligible communication in the past 9. In other words, the mediator begins to plunge into administrative discourse leaving his supporters on the opposite side of the discursive differentiation. Such a process can be interpreted as a partial restitution of normal relations contained in frames of discourse confrontation and domination that had taken place previously between municipal agendas and flat owners. Conclusion The relatively extensive presentation of mutual relations among participants of a specific long-term social event allows to present conclusions drawn upon activities observed. They have been formulated as follows: 1. Communication between institutional actor and individual one is organized by regulative contexts of discourses. Discursive contexts are implemented in rationalizations that both actors bring into interaction. Practically, institutional (administrative) discourse is perceived by individuals as a 9 The role of rituals in creating meanings has been significantly empasized by Pierre Bourdieu, cf. P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, Polity Press, Cambridge 1999.

9 8 dominating one such a conclusion is rooted in common-sense knowledge and understandings. This domination emerges in each interaction where one partner is defined as representing an institution. Such a vertical pattern organizes communicative strategies of both participants. 2. Practices of discourse manifestations seem to be superior to formal regulations. Equal status of share-owners proved to be impossible to introduce into communication despite formal change in law (legal act 1994). 3. Administrative rationality is a source of obligatory technical definitions of common goals and actions of the partners; its significance in this sphere is respected within both common-sense and legal discourses as well. To win in court, private owners had to prove that municipal agenda made mistakes and errors that were perceived as such only in the inside context of administrative order of regulation. And more to it, in events presented above the mediator had to reshape communicative initiatives of individual members in such a way that would make them as close as possible to municipal expectations about the proper ways of things. 4. The research led to general conclusion that discursive resources (specifically common-sense, administrative and legal) are distributed among actors in social life, but this distribution can be in certain circumstances - not a strict one. Under the conditions of radical change in institutional order individual actors are able to use effectively administrative and legal rationalities to formulate and struggle aims against the institution, which in turn uses common-sense (more) and legal (to a lesser extent) rationality to secure and preserve its prior elements of rationality, originally formulated in administrative discourse. To search conditions for a democratic balance in people s communication with institutions we ought not to stop with two discourses: legal and tacit discourse of practical knowledge because this leaves the veil on institutional practices uncovered. Tacit practical knowledge contains generalizations about mutual relations of such actors but it is not a source of these generalizations. They seem to be products of tacit dominance conducted and maintained by discursive forces activated by administrative rationality. Democratic balance requires to individuals emancipation of this dominance in their everyday understanding and actions (in micro-scale). Social thought has been engaged in ways of achieving this at least since Webers concept of modern rationality. Mannheim, Habermas or later Luhmann presented more recent ideas. All these thinkers have something in common: they elaborated wide perspectives of concepts to grasp forces that make problem of emancipation of an individual crucial. But there are two main direction of such emancipatory ideas. Luhmann, for instance, follows common belief that education is a way individuals can effectively introduce their interests to political system 10. Weber and Habermas 11 each of them in his own way penetrate a domain of rationality itself seeing operation on it as the chance for individual emancipation. And Mannheim 12 (Habermas in some 10 N. Luhmann, ibid., chapter 4 and Cf. Jurgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, vol. 1: Handlungsrationalitaet und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction Studies in Modern Social Structure, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1940, part V. See also: Jurgen Habermas,

10 9 works, too) formulates his conclusion clearly: this is reconstruction of institutions what is required to re-built order of everyday social actions towards democratic standards. Education can teach people to shape they interests according to rules of dominating discourses, can provide them tools to operate in them when they find it necessary or useful. But this does not solve the problem. Conversely, it petrifies structures of domination of tacit discourses making them obvious for actors in their everyday life. One may say, it is not an emancipation at all, but rather deeper internalization (or, as Habermas says, colonization). Discourse analysis as far as one is allowed to generalize from the case study suggests, that Mannheim s idea (analytically abstracted from its political connotation) was more adequate. Detailed empirical insights and research in perspective of discourse analysis give chance to make the next step from general idea of institutional reconstruction to more specific sociological level to recognition of human experience of institutional conditions and enlarging the extent of democratization (micro-democratization as well) in everyday activities. Theorie des kommunikativen Handels, vol. 2: Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1981, chapter 6 and 8.