making democracy pay

Continuing the discussion on “social profits” in organizations, how does engaging the public affect an organization’s bottom line? Such a question might seem crass or simply out of place to political theorists focused on the positive benefits public deliberation offers for participants and communities. But it’s an important question, and one that public engagement consultants think about a lot. See, for example, this blogpost on the “ROI” of improving online engagement, or this white paper on “how democratic engagement can cut the cost of government.”

 

While some critics believe public engagement (PE) should be a hallowed space protected from the market, I took two different approaches to this question in my book. Rather than prejudging or minimizing the market for public engagement, I was interested in exploring the empirical reality of the industry for PE facilitation services and products (like software)– and the ways in which it was actively moralized by participants.

 

First, I looked at the use of public engagement by industry clients as an organizational strategy. In the context of organizations using other related strategies (such as public relations, digital campaigning, grassroots lobbying, corporate social responsibility), whether with staff or outside consultants, how much did PE processes cost, how were they being marketed, who was buying them, and for what situations?

 

Second, I looked at the culture around that activity—how consultants used both economic and non-economic language in their work to promote deep democracy. Consultants were very careful to civic-ize the market for engagement, focusing on the production of public-spirited, equitable, representative dialogues and preventing contamination of those processes by interest groups or well-heeled sponsors seeking consent for predetermined outcomes. But consultants were also passionate about linking economic and civic outcomes and saw social and economic profits as interdependent and mutually reinforcing.

 

In fact, the civic authenticity that political scholars celebrate in deep democratic processes is what gives public engagement its marketability for organizations in crisis. This is why I argue that research on participation can benefit enormously from organizational approaches of all kinds.

organizations and the politics of “good” work

Fellow guest blogger Ellen Berrey asked in a previous post how “powerful, elite organizations” can “lessen inequality” or “advance broad progressive causes like social justice.” As someone who has studied the progressive consultants who produce public engagement processes on behalf of corporations, governments, and non-profits, I’m excited to take up her challenge to go beyond cataloging wrongdoing and “foreground power and meaning making.” I think one reason people have trouble understanding the good work organizations do is because it’s complicated. We bring in lots of cultural assumptions about where and when “good” work should be done, and by whom. See, for example, this piece on the EPA’s complicated relationship with “public comments”– the political stakes here are high.

In presenting my research on public engagement consultants and how they make sense of their everyday work to bring democracy inside powerful bureaucracies, audience members have a tendency to want to label top-down public engagement as universally bad or good. Is it an empowering win-win for all involved? Or is it just cooptation? Sometimes public participation practitioners themselves talk about their evolution from adversarial practices to engaged interaction within “enemy” institutions.

In Chapters 3 and 4 of DIY Democracy, I explore how practitioners live within these tensions differently in different moments. Sometimes, they look like entrepreneurs, adeptly negotiating competing and contradictory logics to reform organizations. This coincides with the agentive views of “inhabited institutions” scholars. At other times, they perform a great deal of work to perform rituals that integrate their challenger identities with their elite status as management consultants. Instead of these contrasting practices demonstrating “institutional indeterminacy,” as some scholars have argued, I think that we must link micro-level institutional work to its macro-level consequences to understand how power fits in. At what times do practitioners use either of these strategies to produce democratic authenticity? What are their concrete consequences? Answering these questions can help us to understand meaning-making within organizations as capable of both politicizing and depoliticizing “good” work— sometimes at the same time.

Below: a suggestion wall from a dialogue and deliberation practitioners’ conference