A CRITIQUE OF THE "INFORMATION SOCIETY" CONCEPT
Changing Maps: Governing in a World of Change
September 1994

by Daniel Yankelovich

The Governing in an Information Society project is taking place at a time when public confidence in our institutions of governance, both in Canada and in the United States, is low and sinking lower. Indeed, in all of the advanced industrialized democracies, governments seem unable to come to grips with the great social and political issues that are of deepest concern to people. As public insecurities mount about job security, personal safety, growing inequality and declining morality -- and the apparent inability of government to cope with them -- institutional legitimacy erodes. That erosion is not confined to government; opinion polls show that it has spread to education, the media, the professions and other institutions.

The informing insight of the Governance project -- one might almost call it a revelation -- is that the principal cause of government’s loss of legitimacy is an obsolete framework within which issues are defined and addressed. Participants in the project are working to free themselves, and their colleagues in government, from the distortions imposed by a dysfunctional way of thinking about and acting on the great issues of our times.

As an alternative to government’s presently outmoded framework, the project offers the concept of the "information society". The project’s main premise can be stated as follows:

The most urgent problems of governance in Canada, the United States and other advanced industrial democracies no longer yield to pre-information age frameworks. When these same problems, however, are examined in the light of ‘information society’ frameworks, new possibilities arise. Fresh thinking can be brought to bear, solutions that did not exist even a few years ago suggest themselves, and implementation can be carried out in a cost-effective manner. The new information society framework can, therefore, lead to a genuine reinvention of government and restoration of public confidence.

Clearly, the success or failure of the project hinges on the viability of this premise. I believe that the premise, properly understood, is sound and will yield new solutions to old intractable problems. But the qualification "properly understood" is critical. The information society concept, as now formulated, is loaded with misleading ambiguities, both superficial and profound.

In practice, the Governance project tends to use the label "information society" as a shorthand way of referring to a vast array of changes in the worldview of the advanced industrial democracies. The key to the correct understanding of the information society concept is, therefore, to comprehend what this emerging worldview is and to identify within it the specific features most relevant to revitalizing government.

In what follows, I will first discuss the ambiguities in the information society concept (both the superficial and the deeper ones), briefly characterize the broader shift in culture which is the context for the Governance project’s work, and then focus the main body of the paper on two features of the emerging worldview that promise to lead most directly to more effective ways of governing.

The Surface Ambiguity

The superficial ambiguity in the information society concept is semantic. To the public at large, the label "information society" implies that the driving force behind the great transformations of our age such as the global economy is information -- more of it, delivered more quickly, and packaged more powerfully as it barrels down the information highway.

In the Canadian project, however, the label ‘information society’ refers to a broader set of transforming changes than those wrought by information and information technology alone. Unless we understand the supple and flexible way the project has gradually enriched the concept of the information society as it has progressed with its work, we could easily be misled into the simplistic view that by information society the project simply means a society in which information is more abundant. In its day to day work, the Governance project encompasses a number of trends and transformations which include but are not confined to information or information technology.

On such trend, for example, is the breakdown of boundaries that have heretofore rigidly separated various branches of knowledge from each other. In recent years these boundaries have grown progressively more blurred and indistinct, even in such conservative institutions as universities. As one observer remarked, "We are beginning to recognize that God did not create the universe according to the departmental structure of our research universities." (This trend partly relates to information but it relates even more profoundly to new ways of thinking and knowledge).

The information society label is misleading in another respect as well -- as the project itself recognizes. For purposes of governance, the focus is less on information than it is on frameworks for interpreting information. The first report of the project makes this point explicit in its illuminating essay on the information society concept. "The focus", it states, "is not so much on the management of information as on management of the frameworks within which information is interpreted." (Emphasis added, p.33).

This distinction is so abstract that we may not immediately realize its full implications. But it is this very distinction that lies at the heart of the Governance project. In the context of the project, the term "information society" should not be understood merely as referring to new ways of managing information but as referring to new ways of perceiving the world, thinking about it and interpreting its meaning.

The Deeper Ambiguity

Once we recognize that the information society concept focuses on frameworks for interpretation rather than on information itself, we are then free to confront its deeper ambiguities. Even a casual reading of the project’s deliberations reveals that it is hunting bigger game than the mere management of information. Something so limited in scope as the management of information could not conceivably have the large effects the project is looking for. And the ambitions of the project are large: it is seeking nothing less than a decisive transformation in governance from its present state of semi-paralysis and low public esteem to a state of high effectiveness and renewed public confidence. Reinventing government, if it can be done at all, is not going to be done by juggling information more cleverly.

Here, then, is the deeper ambiguity of the project. What the project’s information society concept is really about is an ambitious effort to reframe the vast network of assumptions undergirding both the organization of government and government’s relations with the citizenry. These assumptions are being undermined by a vast culture shift that is unfolding in all of the advanced industrial democracies. What the Governance project is doing is strategically selecting some of the new concepts the culture shift is generating and applying them to government. The process of selection is, however, a prickly task because the culture shift itself is so sprawling and amorphous.

THE CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY

The culture shift is unfolding both at the level of ideas and institutions. At the level of ideas, it takes the form of a sweeping critique of modernity. What is generally meant by this vague word ‘modernity’ is a constellation of values, concepts, assumptions and modes of thought that began to emerge in the 17th century, became further elaborated in the 18th and 19th centuries and grew rigid and doctrinaire in the 20th century. Only now is the modernity paradigm beginning to lose some of its credibility and power, being slowly displaced by a new constellation of ideas whose shape and form is not yet clearly discernible.

One quick way to grasp the modernity paradigm is to think of it as a series of distinctions that, after the Enlightenment, crystallized the intellectual framework of the West for controlling knowledge and organizing action. All of us born in this century have learned to live and work in a world dominated by an inherited division of effort between scientific and nonscientific forms of knowledge, between value and fact, between the individual and the society, between the professional and the amateur, between government and the private sector, between labor and capital, between city and country, between the secular and the divine, between one profession and another, one nation state and another, and so on.

Sociologist Anthony Giddens characterizes the rise of modernity as representing one of the few real discontinuities in human history, in terms of the pace of change wrought by technology, the scope of change which affected the entire world, and nature of modern institutions which transformed traditional ways of life into the nationalized, urbanized, industrialized societies of today . We live our lives and do our work wholly immersed in the modern world: it is as familiar to us as the houses we inhabit and the streets we walk. To the extent that this still dominant mode of thought is being challenged and replaced by other frameworks for interpretation, to that extent we find ourselves entering a strange and unfamiliar world.

The strategy of the Governance project is to begin to map that new world. It is doing so

• by identifying those trends that signal a change in one or another vulnerable part of the modernity paradigm,
• by critiquing the most crippling flaws in the existing framework, and
• by seeking to replace its defective parts with assumptions and methods of organization better suited to solving the problems that governments must address.

In this effort, the Governance project is not alone. It is, in fact, part of a vast intellectual enterprise that cuts across many different fields. The various efforts to reform modernity have many names. "Information society" is just one of them. "Post-industrial" is another. "Post-structural" and "post-modern" are others. For more than a century now, seminal thinkers from many disciplines have questioned the fundamental assumptions of the modern era. They have challenged virtually every aspect of the frameworks of thought underlying the modern sciences, the professions, the humanities and the arts. It was Nietzsche who is generally acknowledged to have initiated the post-modern critique. Since then, a small army of thinkers from fields as diverse as philosophy, literary criticism, sociology, history, political science, anthropology and the physical sciences have deconstructed one or another facet of modernity with their own critiques.

So diverse is this enterprise that each school of thought attacks a different aspect of modernity. Max Weber, one of the early sociological critics of modernity, attacked what he called the process of rationalization -- the tendency of "instrumental reason" to dominate all forms of modern life, ultimately creating, he believed, an "iron cage" civilization stuffed with "heartless experts" and "spineless pleasure seekers". The philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, who has written extensively about post-modernity, attacks modernity’s "metanarrative" of progress and the claims of science to be a superior path to knowledge.

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz attacks one of modernity’s most subtle assumptions. As Geertz wryly notes, anthropology has long been dominated by a "me-anthropologist-you-native" framework. That framework, he argues, is now yielding to a new way of thinking in which the information content remains constant (he is the anthropologist and his informant is the native) but the mode of interpreting the relationship has shifted. Geertz says that he has stopped thinking about the relationship in a way that suggests a vast social distance between anthropologist and subject, with the anthropologist occupying the high status, disinterested observer role and the informant reduced to an impersonal object of study. Even more fundamentally, the me-anthropologist-you-native framework suggests a sharp, virtually unbridgeable gap between observer and the object of observation which a closer examination shows to be arbitrary and profoundly ideological: its purpose is to preserve distance, preserve superiority in status, preserve a conception of social science that has not proven very productive or insightful.

The cumulative effect of these and many other critiques of modernity is a powerful one: it is transforming the way we think about the world and everything in it. Its implications for governance are all-embracing.

But the critique of modernity has not gone smoothly. Few critics agree with one another. All are pursuing different agendas. Some are so hostile to modernity that they reject it in all of its forms -- rationality, logic, truth, reality, science, order. Out goes the baby along with the bath water. Other critics pursue a vaguely ‘new age’ line of thought, blurring the hard edges of modernity in a cloud of semi-mystical emanations. The Governance project is typical of yet another school of critics who seek to preserve and expand the immense benefits of modernity while softening its excesses and correcting some of its more mechanistic tendencies.

Members of the various schools of thought have mounted heated attacks against each other, filling the air with controversy and making it almost impossible to develop a reasoned perspective about the true defects and glories of modernity. The result has been a mixed blessing. Today, post-modern thinking is a potpourri of creative ideas, destructive ideologies, strident arguments, brilliant insights, prejudices, pretentiousness, vendettas and obscrurantisms. In G. Himmelfarb’s scathing words, "The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism -- relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity..." The post-modern movement is at once a source of immense intellectual energy and at the same time a colossal intellectual mess.

To succeed, the Governance project must exercise great judiciousness in selecting useable ideas from the vast storehouse of post-modern thought. "Great ideas," Alfred North Whitehouse once observed, "often enter reality in strange guises and with disgusting alliances". The same insight is conveyed in cruder form by an old joke. A farmer is seen to be digging furiously into a huge pile of horse manure that towers above his head. When a bewildered observer asks why he is digging, the farmer replies in some exasperation, "Because there’s a pony under all this horseshit." For officials wrestling with the day to day problems of governance, the challenge is to be able to extricate the pony.

In what follows, I identify the two defects in the modernity framework that are the most harmful to governance. The first of these is the attempt to manage complexity by means of compartmentalization: the work of government is done through a variety of agencies and departments neatly compartmentalized each from the other on organization charts which seem logical but rarely mirror the reality with which they must cope. The second defect is the tendency to objectify relationships in a manner that distances the people in government from those they serve. These two defects feed on each other, almost guaranteeing in advance that government will be both inefficient and offensive to the citizenry. Finally, I will suggest several ways in which the information society framework can help to overcome these defects.

The First Defect: Compartmentalization

Perhaps the most distinctive feature -- and crippling defect -- of modernity is its mode of imposing order on the chaos of experience. Over scores of years, one institution after another has developed an ingrained habit of compartmentalizing, dividing and subdividing all aspects of reality according to certain logical principles in order to maximize their control over their environment.

In Western civilization the process of logical categorization can be traced all the way back to Aristotle but, in the modern era, it has been extended systematically to institutions and to the life world (lebenswelt) as well as to ideas. In its advanced form, this is the process that Max Weber feared would lead to an iron cage of rigid and destructive compartmentalization. Today, rationalization takes the form of inexorably greater bureaucratization, specialization, regulation, computerization, abstraction and manipulation of the public and of the political process.

The rationalizing of virtually every aspect of the life world is, of course, a fundamental phenomenon of contemporary existence. From childhood on, all of us internalize this feature of the modern framework so thoroughly, that we often are unaware of the automatic ways in which we compartmentalize reality in order to deal with it. Unfortunately, reality doesn’t always cooperate. On some issues it stubbornly refuses to reflect the neatness of the categories we bring to the task of apprehending it.

We can see this process of categorizing reality being applied in every issue that involves governance. Some issues fit into the bureaucratic boxes that government creates, but the most important ones do not. They are too sprawling to fit.

The best way to grasp the harm this defect causes is to look at a specific issue. Consider, for example, the emerging threat to our societies of class warfare. This threat is implicit in one of the Governance project’s scenarios. It is as applicable to the United States as well as to Canada, and is, I believe, the most likely outlook for the future of both nations unless the two societies actively intervene to change the flow of history.

In this scenario, the private sector has succeeded in creating a reasonably strong economy accompanied, however, by high unemployment and exceptionally high frustration levels for the majority of the work force. There are enough good full time, full benefit jobs for the highly skilled and/or well educated minority (about 40 percent of the U.S. work force), but not for the 60 percent majority who either lack a four year college education or those specialized skills that happen to be in demand at the moment. As a consequence, the incomes of all but the top tier stagnate or deteriorate. Among the majority, expectations are lowered. Political ressentiment grows. The underclass swells. The gap between rich and poor widens. Social cleavages, crime and social pathology grow ever more serious, threatening to undermine political stability even though the economy flourishes according to the familiar standards of GDP growth and return on capital.

This scenario need not be imagined for a remote future. It is already happening. In the emerging global economy the class warfare scenario is a far more likely outcome than it would have been in the more autonomous, less interdependent economies of the past. The brutal fact is that in today’s global economy employers can grow and be profitable by restructuring their operations so as to be less dependent on large numbers of full-time, full-benefit, locally recruited employees. They can systematically reduce their own work force, utilize the work forces of other nations, and organize their work in such a way that much of it can be done by a contingent labour force, a labour force that does not have to be paid benefits and does not have be granted even the most limited job security.

With modern technology, it is possible today in any one nation to achieve economic growth by employing only a fraction of the total number of people who are seeking jobs. The result is either high unemployment, as we are seeing in Europe, or the steady substitution of low wage, low benefit jobs for high wage, high benefit ones, as we are seeing in the United States. At some point when the public’s frustration level reaches a critical mass, the issue will cease to be an economic one and will become political. In our two societies, at present, we are just beginning to see this happen.

If this process accelerates, it will be an enormous setback for our societies. One of the great achievements of the post-World War II era, was the creation of a two-track job economy: not only could people with a college education make a good living, but so could people without a college education. This was a political accomplishment of the first order: it led not only to prosperity, but also to a conviction of rightness, fairness and legitimacy. It was this two track economy that made us into middle class societies, with home ownership in the United States reaching the 70 percent level. If the trends I have been describing continue and even accelerate, our societies will grow ever more divided and embittered, fanning the flames of demagogy.

There can be no more urgent task for leadership and governance than to slow, stop and reverse these trends. And there can be no better test of the merits of the Governance project than to ask whether its master concept, the concept of the "information society", gives leaders a more effective strategy to accomplish this goal than do existing governance strategies.

One approaches a problem like the threat of class warfare with the utmost respect for its complexity. It is unyielding to conventional approaches. The right framework can be decisive: a relevant framework can bring success while an obtuse framework almost guarantees failure. Unfortunately, the existing policy framework is of the obtuse kind: where it should be revealing solutions it obscures them; where it should be focusing on the critical factors, it deflects and divides attention.

When we look at what needs to be done to head off class warfare, we immediately see the irrelevance of the old framework. The knowledge base and the governance institutions that must deal with it have been compartmentalized in a highly dysfunctional manner. On the institutional front, work is separated from education. Education is divided from training. Academic education is divided from vocational education. Higher education is divided from lower. Labour is divided from management. White collar work is divided from blue collar work. Business is divided from government. To reverse the class warfare trend we need policies that blur and loosen up all of these dichotomies, rather than treat them as if they were engraved in stone.

On the knowledge front, the situation is even worse. In all but the most advanced policy think tanks, the relevant professions of economics, politics and sociology are divided from each other as separate disciplines, each one jealously guarding its own narrow preserve, each armed with its own methodology, subculture and metanarrative.

In summary, while the reality of the class warfare threat cuts across many disciplines, requires bold acts of political will and moral vision, and demands a unified institutional effort to deal with it, the existing policy framework fragments and dissipates the knowledge base, lacks moral vision, and undercuts the unity of institutional action. The knowledge base needed to devise strategies to combat class warfare is fragmented in ways that ravage the integrity of the issue. And the bureaucratic institutions needed to counter the trend are too rigidly compartmentalized to take effective action.

The dysfunctionality of the existing framework does not, of course, guarantee that the new information framework will succeed any better in assisting political leadership to head off destructive class warfare. But it has a reasonable chance of doing so for two reasons: one negative, the other positive.

The negative reason is that it is not burdened with the rigidities of the existing framework. The new information framework still is in the process of emerging, but to judge from the general direction in which it is developing, it is seeking actively to correct the dysfunctions of the old framework. Thus, in its general tendencies, hierarchies are flattened, teams work across organizational and institutional boundaries, education and training are seen as aspects of a single whole, work and education are more closely integrated, business and government seek new forms of partnership rather than persisting in destructive adversarial relations, information is disseminated more widely, and vision, informed by ethical values, is understood to be more important to the advancement of human purpose than technical reason. Every one of these characteristics, and many more, remove obstacles from governance initiatives to counter class warfare.

On the positive side of the ledger, the grounds for hope are even greater. When one steps back from all of the institutional obstacles imposed by the existing framework, the problems that are leading to class warfare do not seem insurmountable. While, technically, it may be possible for the economy to grow without good jobs for the bulk of the work force, such a result is unacceptable morally and politically. When leaders ask what kinds of proactive initiatives they can take to reproduce the postwar equivalent of the two track job system (when those without a college education also could make a good living), there are some obvious answers that can serve as a useful point of departure for policy and vision.

While our society, at present, suffers from a paucity of good jobs for those who seek them, it does not lack vast areas of unmet needs. Potentially, there are tens of millions of jobs needed to provide better child care service, home care for the aged and the infirm, training for the millions who are functionally illiterate or whose jobs skills need to be upgraded, support systems for homeless and for those excluded from mainstream society, as well as jobs renewing the nation’s infrastructure. And, for many of these tasks, people do not have to be at the cutting edge of advanced technology.

In our mixed economies, there is plenty of precedent for government to seek to compensate for market failure. Also, opinion polls show that while the public (at least in the United States) distrusts government’s social agenda (on the rational grounds that government hasn’t learned how to cope with social problems very well), it does support a proactive government in the economic arena. There is virtual consensus that market solutions should have priority, but that when these fail government must step in. For the public, the issue is not ideological but pragmatic. The public mandate is: Do whatever it takes to make the economy work to provide good jobs for all who seek them, and who have the skills and motivation to do them well.

There is almost no end to the jobs one can imagine that, if filled, would enhance our nations’ quality of life as well as directly benefit those who fill them. Where imagination is lacking is in addressing the problem of how to match unfilled needs with jobs for people who want to work. This failure of the political imagination is directly traceable to the existing framework. The professionals trained within it simply do not think in these terms; they have what the late Herman Kahn aptly called a "trained incapacity" to do so. But the bolder thinkers in our societies who are at home with the new information framework would not shrink from this task.

The Second Defect: Objectification

The second defect in the day-to-day operating framework of modern government takes its toll on the bond that binds leaders to voters, government to citizens. It distorts that bond, making leaders less effective than they should be and citizens less responsive, and responsible, than they should be.

This characteristic has long been familiar both to Marxist and non-Marxist philosophical critics of modernism who refer to it as the process of objectifying relationships inappropriately. Marx associated this characteristic that he called "reification" with capitalism, but most post-Marxist philosophers have generalized its application to all aspects of modern life. At this late date in the 20th century, it is clear that they are correct. Objectification is not confined to the capitalist system of organizing the economy or to the government-citizen relationship: it is omnipresent in our culture. When the surgeon thinks of the suffering patient as the "infarction in Room 379" , when the giant corporation thinks of its employees as "labour", when scientists think of their subjects as "the control group", we know that objectification is operative. In everyday life, this process of depersonalizing relationships is so automatic and omnipresent that we take it in stride. It annoys us, but we shrug it off as part of the price of living in a complex technological society. We remain unaware of how deeply destructive it is .

Clifford Geertz was noting this defect in his own field of anthropology when he referred to the "me-anthropologist-you-native" framework. In that example, the existing framework automatically converts the subject of study into an object of study, distancing the social scientist and coloring every aspect of discourse between social scientist and subject.

These distortions take a particularly heavy toll in the political and governmental domain. In effect, they create an invisible barrier between government and citizens. Government officials come to see themselves as elites who "do things for" the people. And "the people", placed in the role of those for whom things are done, grow passive and unrealistically demanding. The relationship inevitably deteriorates, with people constantly nagging at government about their rights, while government officials, tiring of the unreasonableness of incessant public demands, respond by becoming more secretive, cunning and manipulative. A vicious cycle is set in motion which erodes our democratic institutions.

This defect, as it applies to the government-citizen relationship, has been noted and diagnosed in several different ways. David Mathews, President of the Kettering Foundation and former Cabinet member in the United States government, has been studying the relationship between government and citizens for many years. In his recent work, he identifies this framework defect with the growth of professionalism. The American public, he notes, may like and admire individual professionals -- their own doctor, congressperson, or kids’ teachers -- but they are in revolt against professionalism as a doctrine.

Professionalism developed in the United States in the 1890s and early 1900s. As it did so, it drew heavily upon the growing prestige of science as a privileged and superior method for gaining knowledge. It internalized many aspects of the culture of science, including the high value placed on objectivity, instrumental reason, the rigid separation of fact from value and the distancing of scientifically minded professionals from the "objects" of their study. Mathews observes that as professionalism evolved to its present advanced state the distancing effect between professionals and public has grown more pronounced. Presently, he states, the relationship of professionals to the public

In my own work in the field of public opinion I have attributed the growing gap between leaders and public to the dominance of what I call the Culture of Technical Control. This is the trend in our culture to seek to gain ever greater control over all aspects of life by technical means, and that results in creeping expertism. In my book, Coming to Public Judgment, I advance the thesis that the Culture of Technical Control is "undermining the country’s ability to reach agreement between the public and the experts on the serious problems that beset the society."

While David Mathews emphasizes one destructive form of the Culture of Technical Control -- its distorting effects on professionalism -- I emphasize another, one that manifests itself constantly in the field of public opinion research. Virtually all studies of public opinion find a huge gap between the views of the public and the views of experts and leaders on the vital issues of our times. There is an almost unbridgeable chasm separating elites from public. We are accustomed to looking back with distaste at traditional society with its wide social distance between the classes, while congratulating ourselves on our classlessness and equality. But, in actuality, the distance between our elites and the general public is probably as great as it was in French society just prior to the French Revolution.

Today, the distance is not entirely social: we have achieved somewhat more social equality. The distance is a matter of belonging to two different worlds: the world of professionals, experts and policy elites who manage, through countless conferences and workshops and meetings, to carry on a spirited dialogue among themselves, and the world of the general public which lies in a region so far beyond the policy world as to inhabit a different universe. A great invisible wall divides the two worlds, a wall that is bad for democracy.

The most harmful effects of the wall is to cause the public to persist in a state of raw opinion. My book, Coming to Public Judgment, develops the all-important distinction between "raw opinion" and "public judgment." Raw opinion is opinion on an issue that is formed before the public has had the opportunity to deliberate it and to grasp its full implications. Inconveniently, people do hold strong opinions on subjects about which they know nothing and to which they have devoted little thought. Typically, such opinions are highly volatile, changing from day to day, and full of internal contradictions. The surest evidence of raw opinion is when people are unaware of the consequences of their own views. For example, at the present time the majority of voters in the United States hold favorable opinions of various health care reforms that would, if enacted, produce the very effects they most dread -- impersonal care accompanied by higher taxes and less real decision making on their own part. This is raw opinion.

On some issues, however, the public’s views have evolved from raw opinion into more thoughtful judgment. Typically, this evolution requires a complex process of deliberation that unfolds through a number of stages. One knows that public judgment has been reached on an issue when, on probing, peoples’ opinions are found to be firm rather than volatile, self consistent rather than contradictory, and most importantly, self conscious, thoughtful and responsible about consequences. For example, if people did form firm, unshakable positive opinions on plans for health care reform in full consciousness of their costs and tradeoffs, and if these views did not conflict with their other opinions and values, this would be a sign of public judgment rather than raw opinion.

What is the implication of this discussion for the Governance project? It bears on how we should interpret the concept of the information society. If we give this concept too literal a meaning, it would seem to imply that the best way to overcome the policymaker-public gap and to help the public move from raw opinion to public judgment would be to share more information with the public. But such an inference would be a huge mistake.

Sharing more information with the public is what our societies have been doing for the past four or five decades, through the mass media. Today, the public is bombarded with vastly greater quantities of information than in the past. But, significantly, this has not closed the gap, or moved the public further along the journey from mass opinion to public judgment. In a study of public opinion in the United States conducted in 1989, political scientist Michael Kagay and a co-author measured the public’s current knowledge of politics and civic affairs and compared it to their level of knowledge 40 years earlier. The authors were disappointed to find that the public’s knowledge levels were hardly different than in the 1950s. As one of them commented, "It is hard to imagine, if this is the level of information citizens bring to politics, that they have enough context to make informed political decisions."

It is to avoid inferences of this sort which place an exaggerated value on conveying information that I have focused on the objectification defect of the existing framework. We need to recognize that the true problem is not a lack of information. Rather the problem lies in the tendency of governments to objectify themselves and, in so doing, to distance themselves from ordinary citizens. It lies in the tendency of governments to assume airs of superiority because they have more information, and to treat people as objects for spinmeisters to manipulate, rather than as citizens whose values and points of view carry as much weight as their own. Once we recognize this, we can begin to see a solution to the problem of a distorted relationship between government and citizens.

The solution is more genuine dialogue, not more information. Information is an aspect of dialogue, but not its essential feature. To illustrate, in President Clinton’s forays into so called "town meetings" we have the outward form of dialogue but rarely the substance. If, in one of these pseudo town meetings, the President transmits information to citizens and the citizens in turn seize the opportunity to urge the President to pay more attention to their own special interests -- more money for disabled veterans or drug treatment centers or flood victims -- it is highly unlikely that genuine dialogue is taking place. In these town meetings, the President of the United States and ordinary citizens are seen and heard addressing each other, but just because information is transmitted or because a special interest is urged by an individual rather than by an organized group doesn’t constitute dialogue.

The philosopher Martin Buber observed that in the I-thou form of dialogue both parties, both the I and the thou, are changed and changed forever. In these town meetings, neither side has truly listened to or understood the standpoint of the other with any of the depth needed to achieve what Buber had in mind. Neither side has changed in any essential way.

The key point here is that dialogue is the single most powerful tool governments possess for helping citizens to navigate the difficult journey from raw opinion to public judgment. It can do so by engaging citizens in a deliberative process that is focused on shaping policies that are consonant with peoples’ values rather than policies which violate their values. For example, most of the health care reform plans under discussion in the United States feature some variant of managed care where physician services inevitably become more impersonal in the interests of controlling costs. But on health care, preserving and enhancing personal care is the average American’s most deeply cherished value. Dialogue between citizens and government about this value, what it is worth to people to preserve, and how much impersonality they are willing to accept for the sake of cost savings (they are willing to accept some), would give Americans the impetus to engage the issue deliberatively and move closer to public judgment.

Genuine dialogue does sometimes take place in our societies. It takes place among elites who have established many excellent fora for encouraging exchanges among equals. It also takes place among citizen groups who engage each other in serious conversation. But it doesn’t take place between the two strata, for the simple reason that the existing framework of modernity has objectified them as two strata rather than as a single indivisible whole, some of whom happen to work for the government.

IMPLICATIONS FOR LEADERSHIP

Implicit in this discussion of the new information society framework are some far-reaching implications for styles of leadership. These cannot be developed properly at the end of a long paper, but a brief comment may be in order.

The style of leadership most consonant with the evolving new framework is one in which leaders:

• Resonate well with citizens’ values and share many of these same values.
• Possess the strong moral convictions that citizens aspire to even if they do not always live up to them.
• Possess the ability to listen creatively to what people really mean even when they are inarticulate in expressing their meaning.
• Possess the ability to highlight the value content of alternative policy proposals, as distinct from their technical, bureaucratic, administrative content.
• Respond to citizens as equals.
• Give citizens the opportunity to deliberate alternative choices on important issues rather than rushing to sell them a single prepackaged choice.
  
• Possess the communication skills -- and patience -- needed to help citizens make the journey from raw opinion to public judgment.
• Empower average people to take moral responsibility for the consequences of their opinions.
  
• Endow difficult policy choices with moral vision as well as pragmatic feasibility.
  

There are numerous other leadership qualities implied by the new framework. But these are sufficient to suggest both the continuities with traditional styles of leadership and the differences.

One of the fears expressed by elites deeply immersed in the culture of modernism is that this style of leadership is "wimpy" -- a conception of the leader as discussion moderator. And it is true that prominent among the many mistaken interpretations of new leadership styles is the view that leadership involves a form of participative democracy where everyone has a voice and a vote. Organizations who have experimented with this approach quickly learn to abandon it as unwieldy and ineffective. In any practical model of leadership, responsibility for ultimate decision-making falls on the leader. In Harry Truman’s unambiguous phrase, "The buck stops here." Leaders who guide people to work their own way through thorny issues rather than adopting a "we know best" posture and who create the conditions for dialogue rather than imposing their own views and values on the citizenry are not abdicating their responsibility for making the hard decisions. On the contrary, they are insuring that their decisions, once made, will reflect the true convictions of the citizenry as well as their own best judgment.

The essence of the leadership style implicit in the new framework is not that it is more democratic in the sense of shared decision making, but that it is more democratic in the process that leads up to the final decision.

SUMMARY

To summarize the highly compressed argument I have sought to develop in this paper, I am concerned that the great promise of the Governance project can be blunted by a misunderstanding that will surely confuse outsiders and may even confuse the Project participants themselves.

The participants are searching the crowded cupboard of post-modernist thought for new insights that will help them overcome the obsolete features of government in the interests of restoring legitimacy to governance and regaining the confidence of citizens. They are correct, I believe, in their assumption that the post-modern critique harbors the kind of revitalizing insights they seek. But they are mistaken, I have argued in this paper, in identifying these liberating insights with something called the "information society." At best, this label is a misnomer; at worst, it is terribly misleading. Information is a minor part of the treasure they seek. Indeed, among the worst features of modernity are its unrealistic assumptions about the nature and power of information.

The true object of the search into post-modern thought is to liberate the modernist world view from a deeply embedded distortion that has long undermined the work of government as well as other institutions: an unwitting tendency to objectify the lebenswelt and then to compartmentalize it by categorizing human experience into a series of oversimplified dichotomies (e.g., fact vs. value, economics vs. politics, scientific vs. non scientific modes of knowing). These dichotomies illustrate what Alfred North Whitehead has called "fallacies of misplaced concreteness" whereby, to put it bluntly, one mistakes high abstractions for hard facts.

This inbuilt tendency of modernity guarantees that information will be misinterpreted, overvalued and misapplied -- the more information received and the more quickly it travels, the greater the likelihood of misuse. Therefore, to identify the liberating change it seeks as the "information society" will cause the project to be just enough off target to jeopardize the potential value of its work.

These are, admittedly, subtle and elusive matters, difficult to apply to the day to day problems of government. But if they weren’t subtle and elusive they would not have been neglected for over two hundred years. For the Governance project this is the pony hidden under the vast pile of horseshit that constitutes the present state of post-modernist thought.