four - Communicative patterns: what happens when public professionals and citizens meet

Summary

‘[T]he lesson is that participation needs to be understood not as a moment but as a process.’ (Corrado – public professional, Bologna)

This chapter demonstrates that when public professionals and citizens meet, they tend to develop and sustain habitual patterns of communication which limit their ability to address the problems they came to resolve. It introduces the three cases by means of their metanarratives and arrives at a first understanding of what communicative capacity is and why it is important. Each case is characterised by a distinct communicative pattern, each upholding the conflicting underlying narratives of Community and Planning with little regard for the law of the situation. In a Planning narrative, participation works best if everybody adheres to the same structures, plans and ideas, while in a Community narrative, participation works best if people behave in spontaneous, flexible and creative ways in the absence of a system in which plans, rules, structures and roles are strictly specified. Comparison of the cases shows that habitual patterns of communication are sustained when public professionals and citizens fail to recognise how their communicative practices evoke and uphold these two incompatible participatory narratives (or a conflict between them) rather than understanding what type of communication is needed to move the situation forward. The following chapters explain why this often does not happen and in which ways it can be achieved.

The main lesson of this chapter is, as Corrado (a young public professional from Bologna) puts it, “that participation needs to be understood not as a moment but as a process”. One mode of communication might work well at one moment, but is unlikely to remain adequate as situations rapidly evolve in-between public professionals and citizens. As Follett (1919) explains, their encounter ‘is changing its quality every moment … so that at every moment the whole is new. Thus unifying activity is changing its quality all the time by bringing other qualities into itself ’ (p 582). In order to handle this ‘continuous qualitative change, [t]he supreme object of my allegiance is never a thing, a “made”. It is the very Process itself to which I give my loyalty and every activity of my life.’