Reinventing Social Dialogue

The theory of social dialogue and practice of public engagement are founded on democratic ideals of participation that remain elusive, despite a connection with established principles of Western democracy, a century of social science enquiry and more recently the growing practice of corporate stakeholder consultation. In theory and practice, dialogues are difficult to characterize and actual evidence for their effectiveness is difficult to separate from interrelated drivers of change. As the explicit communication technique behind many newly minted statements of corporate social responsibility, the latest practice of social dialogue appears too weak to maintain the questioning attitude that dialogue implies. This chapter draws on Jurgen Habermas’s (1968, 1984, 1987) discourse ethics and some original research techniques to assess the controversial issues behind corporate dialogue practice. We conclude that new forms of public consultation offer some promise of change by employing democratic communication processes implied in dialogue and through this a promise to further restore fundamental human rights, or at least the values that lead and protect them. To restore freedoms and define new rights through dialogue is a practice to be welcomed, even while practitioners are challenged to prove the ability of dialogue to deliver such promise. Still, where claims for dialogue are insufficiently evidenced, or imbalanced by inappropriate power relations, public consultation may be considered not as a liberating, democratic communication technique but merely an extension of the power, privilege and control that mark many forms of Western political and economic activity and their miscommunication.