Challenges to Political Decision-Making: Dealing With Information Overload, Ignorance and Contested Knowledge by Hubert Heinelt

Author:Hubert Heinelt [Heinelt, Hubert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367729110
Google: r2MEzgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 55834938
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

4.6.2 Mechanisms of communicative interaction from an interpretive perspective

Mechanisms are of particular importance because they are related to the process level of the communicative interaction of actors from which the contents of the knowledge order relevant to their actions arise. This process level of communication cannot be separated from the action arena. Rather, the process level of the communicative interaction has to be conceptually integrated into the action arena, because these processes must be understood from an interpretative perspective through the mechanisms of the actors’ interaction itself. Otherwise, a traditional institutionalism would be followed conceptually, since patterns of actor interaction would be explained solely by the ‘structures of interaction’ or the ‘attributes of the physical world’, ‘attributes of the community’ and ‘rules in use’.

In other words, the actions of the actors who have to decide in a specific action arena in different situations may indeed depend on the ‘attributes of the physical world’, the ‘attributes of the community’ and the ‘rules in use’. However, it is decisive (and this goes beyond Ostrom et al. 1994; see Section 4.1) that the actors in an action arena reflect on, via a knowledge order, the possibilities and restrictions resulting from the ‘attributes of the physical world’, the ‘attributes of the community’ and the ‘rules in use’. The knowledge order, which is relevant for a particular action arena, may have become detached from the actors. However, a knowledge order results from the interactions of the actors involved and has to be reproduced continuously in these interactions – which gives rise to possibilities for questioning the relevance of the knowledge order for actions in this arena. How this interplay can be conceptualized is shown in Figure 4.2 (presented at the beginning of Section 4.2).

• The ‘rules in use’, the ‘attributes of the community’ or the ‘attributes of the physical world’ do not determine actions (see also Blyth 2003). Rather, in communicative interaction actors reflect on the possibilities and restrictions that arise for them in their respective action arena. In these reflections, the actors make use of related if-then constructs and standards of normative appropriateness. Through this content of a knowledge order, the actors concerned identify specific options for action and exploit them in the various situations in which a choice of action is required.

• A certain content of a knowledge order, which is required for any choice of action, is formed and reproduced through the communicative interaction of the actors in an action arena. This interaction is influenced by the structural characteristics of the knowledge order – namely concrete constellations of actors and institutional forms of coordination as structures of interactions.

• However, the structural elements of a knowledge order does not determine the communicative interaction of the actors who have to act in the action arena. Instead, it depends on specific practices or strategies through which the general causal interaction effects inherent in the mechanisms depicted materialize in the process of communicative exchanges.

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