Atrisco Well #5: a case study of failure in professional communication

Examines the communication problems that can arise in policy-making situations requiring public input and assent when the ethical and cultural assumptions of technical people representing a government entity differ from those of the citizen participants. Technical people often operate from an “ethic of expediency” that values clear, precise technical data as the basis for decision-making, but when citizen participants hold sharply different cultural values and interests, they may perceive such communication as privileging the interests of government over their own. Drawing on Habermas´s (1979) concept of the “ideal speech situation”, the authors present a case study in which engineers representing a city government attempted to gain the assent of a minority community to a well drilling project. The study suggests that the engineers´ communication, although presented in good faith, did not meet Habermas´s “claims to validity” and was thus seen by community residents as ideologically distorted. Because they did not trust the communication, the residents could not enter into consensus building, and the project remains at impasse. The engineers´ propensity to frame the situation as a technical space for rational decision-making, from which cultural concerns and political motives could be excluded, made them blind to reality as the citizen participants perceived it. Government representatives in such situations have an ethical obligation to observe cultural difference and to create a communicative context in which consensus building is possible