Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice

Citation

Harrison, S. (2001), "Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice", Journal of Management in Medicine, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 95-97. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmm.2001.15.1.95.2

This volume has been seen by academic political scientists as being of considerable importance and appears in the University of Chicago Press’s prestigious “Morality and Society” series. It is a detailed study of community power in the Danish city of Aalborg but, like its distinguished predecessors in that literature, aims to shed general light on the operation of power by close examination of a specific case. Though the specific case concerns the location of a new bus station (and consequent changes to traffic flows) in Aalborg, one could imagine a similar study of (say) the siting of a new hospital; the study of health policy is dangerously parochial and the conclusions of this study should not be rejected simply because they derive from a policy sector outside one’s usual interests.

The empirical account given is detailed and lucidly written, with careful background about the actors and issues and only minor irritations such as the absence of a scale on the map of Aalborg. The narrative is clear and recounts how an ambitious and apparently rational plan to improve travel and traffic had the reverse effect in consequence of local micropolitics involving local politicians, local businesses, the bus company and the local newspaper. This is hardly a novel finding, but is nevertheless worthwhile in a context where few studies of this depth are ever mounted. A key point is that each actor’s involvement in subverting the plan is capable of rationalisation, a point at which this study departs from earlier studies of community power, which have tended to work from rather different theoretical perspectives. As the title suggests, the author is centrally concerned with the relationship between power and rationality, and there are numerous authorial comments on this placed within the narrative. Unfortunately, at no point is there any extended treatment of these central concepts and this reader was left at a loss to understand the author’s intended theoretical import beyond the inference that his normative preferences run to some sort of Habermasian rationality. It has been suggested to this reviewer that the original Danish language version of the study may have been longer and more theoretically explicit; if this is so it is a pity that more attention has not been given to making the English language version complete.

As it stands, this volume is a good read at an empirical level and almost certainly valuable for teaching purposes, but does not add much to our conceptual or theoretical understanding of planning and implementation in democracies.