Democracy’s New Discipline: Public Deliberation as Organizational Strategy
基于多方法田野调查，研究专业咨询行业如何将公共协商作为战略工具销售给面临抵制、重组等挑战的组织，揭示其培养利益相关者同理心、降低公众期望、促进对紧缩措施接受度的作用。
Scholars of politics have studied deliberative events as political processes aimed at empowering citizens, a perspective that frames organizational subsidies of public deliberation as civil society sponsorship. Based on multi-method fieldwork, this article investigates deliberation as a strategic tool marketed by an emerging industry of professional consultants to contemporary organizations facing resistance to retrenchment, redevelopment, and reorganization. This field-level organizational perspective reveals that deliberative solutions are sold to public, private, and third-sector managers in terms of their potential to cultivate stakeholder empathy for decision-makers, downsize public expectations for administrative problem-solving, and produce behavioral alignment and positive attitudes toward austerity measures. The simultaneous framing of deliberation as civic renewal and as a preemptive strategy for reducing contention demonstrates how sponsors have leveraged the ambiguities enabled by the reconfiguration of civic activity and authority described in this special issue. As such, we argue that understanding the political implications of the expanding market for sponsored deliberation requires a comparative historical approach to organizational strategy.