RATIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY AND RATIONAL AUTONOMY IN ACADEMIC PRACTICE: AN EXTENDED CASE STUDY OF THE COMMUNICATIVE ETHIC OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE
Date
2002
Authors
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Publisher
ORCID
Type
Degree Level
Doctoral
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the interaction of rational accountability and
rational autonomy in interdisciplinary science within the university sector. It focuses on
the cultural, social, and motivational forces that condition and limit the practices of
academic researchers as they constitute and regulate interdisciplinary inquiry and
conduct within the everyday world of the university sector. Findings are analyzed
within an applied critical social theory framework that attends to the micro-level
interaction of instrumental or purposive rational action and communicative or social
rational action within the public spaces that are constitutive of the lifeworld of the
university as a central public sphere in society. The research raises questions of how
academics practice interdisciplinary science and how these practices relate to the
reproduction of the regulative ideal of the university as a community that practices
public reason.
Interdisciplinary science policies and practices are receiving strong endorsement
as one
response to demands for the increased accountability and relevance of academic
practice within Canada's public university system. At the same time that the university
system must respond to external demands for accountability and relevance it must
reproduce itself as a public social institution that is open to the discursive redemption of
contested validity claims that are both factual and normative. The study found that the
medium for the discursive redemption of contested normative validity claims is
participation in processes and procedures of practical argumentation within those social
contexts of the lifeworld of the university that approximate the conditions of
participation in an ideal public sphere.
Using Burawoy's (1991) extended case study method as a
strategy for
operationalizing Habermas' theory of communicative action, two modes of constituting
and regulating interdisciplinary inquiry and conduct within the university sector were
found. Instrumental or purposive rational modes of constituting and regulating
interdisciplinary inquiry and conduct were found to dominate in those social contexts
where consensus on the
goals and purposes of rational academic action were preĀ
existing and presupposed by participants in interdisciplinary inquiry and conduct.
Communicative or social rational modes of constituting and regulating interdisciplinary
inquiry and conduct were found to emerge to dominance in those social contexts where
the goals and purposes of rational academic action were moved into a contested domain.
In the contemporary historical context, questions concerning the goals and purposes of
rational academic action in conditions of uncertainty and complexity have emerged as
crucial issues for members of the university and society in general.
Academics participate in, but also contest the instrumental or purposive rational
regulation of academic practice by using their constitutional autonomy and freedom to
hold others accountable and demonstrate their rational disposition to realize mutual
understanding on contested validity claims that are both factual and normative. In
demonstrating a rational disposition to use their rational autonomy and freedom to
realize mutual understanding on contested normative validity claims, public
intellectuals realize a capacity to maintain and extend the conditions and limits of the
practice of public reason within the university into the constitution and regulation of
public spaces for the practice of reason in the lifeworld of society.
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Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Department
Sociology
Program
Sociology