Habermas's Theory Of Communicative Action

Customer Interaction in the IT Service Industry through a Habermasian lens

In this essay I follow Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action and in particular his four types of social action to examine how these can be interpreted for software development projects in the Information Technology(IT) service industry.

Theory of Communicative Action

Habermas develops a concept of rationality that is not subjective to any individual’s perspective of knowledge. He proposes a two-level concept of society that integrates the lifeworld and system paradigms. He then provides a framework of a social theory based on a general theory of communicative action. “If we assume that the human species maintains itself through the socially coordinated activities

The intersubjectively shared lifeworld forms the background for communicative action. (Habermas p.82)

Habermas defines distinct subjective, social and objective worlds which are complementary and define the situational context in which the actors reside. (Habermas p.100)He also introduces a classification of social actions in terms of an orientation to success and an orientation to reaching understanding. An orientation to success implies that actors are primarily interested in achieving an end in the objective world.(Habermas p. 285) To achieve these goals, the actor selects means expected to lead to a successful end. Social actors, says Habermas, seek to communicatively reach agreement by relating to the objective, social and subjective worlds and reaching a common understanding. These actors oriented to reaching understanding are pursuing their own goals as well, yet harmonize their plans of action based on normative agreement and a common definition of the situation.(Habermas p. 286) He provides a typology consisting of four types of social actions - teleological, normatively regulated, dramaturgical and communicative action.

These interactions attempt to be “communicative”. The design cycle of IT service projects are exercises in sharing understanding with the customer and implies inter-subjective interpretation of aspects of an implementation. It completes when the actors agree on a common understanding of what exists, what is right and legitimate as per requirement, and what the customer prefers or desires. The review process of IT projects are a platform for reflection and argumentation which is key to clarify, contest and provide grounds for the validity claims, which are necessary for communicative action. This process is usually a flurry of back and forth communications between the delivery team and the customer. Truth of facts, rightness of norms and sincerity of expressions, which are the validity claims assumed by communicative action can be directly applied to design verification action of IT development projects. In well-defined IT service projects, the social actors achieve understanding through cooperative interpersonal interpretation of the problem to be solved with the customer and seek to achieve consensus through rational argumentation, also called “brainstorming”. Social actors coordinate their actions by cooperative processes of interpretation.