Caroline W. Lee

Is there a place for private conversation in public dialogue? Comparing stakeholder assessments of informal communication in collaborative regional planning

This study contests the universalism of public engagement models by comparing reports of informal communication in two state‐centered participation processes for regional conservation planning. Through interviews with stakeholders, the author finds that both elites and nonelites deployed informal communication to amplify and to defuse pressure for consensus. Much of the power of informal communication derived from its relation to local knowledge and place‐based networking that was irrelevant in principle to formal process activities—and this was welcomed in one community and resisted in another. These differences highlight the overlooked role of regional‐scale political cultures in light of the increasing formalization of participatory best practices. The article suggests that the study of democratic engagement can gain by exploring the contextual implementation of abstract deliberative ideals such as inclusion, publicity, and transparency.

On the Sharing Economy

Sharing, caring, and profit with Juliet B. Schor, Edward T. Walker, Caroline W. Lee, and Paolo Parigi and Karen Cook.

Democracy’s New Discipline: Public Deliberation as Organizational Strategy

Scholars of politics have studied deliberative events as political processes aimed at empowering citizens, a perspective that frames organizational subsidies of public deliberation as civil society sponsorship. Based on multi-method fieldwork, this article investigates deliberation as a strategic tool marketed by an emerging industry of professional consultants to contemporary organizations facing resistance to retrenchment, redevelopment, and reorganization. This field-level organizational perspective reveals that deliberative solutions are sold to public, private, and third-sector managers in terms of their potential to cultivate stakeholder empathy for decision-makers, downsize public expectations for administrative problem-solving, and produce behavioral alignment and positive attitudes toward austerity measures. The simultaneous framing of deliberation as civic renewal and as a preemptive strategy for reducing contention demonstrates how sponsors have leveraged the ambiguities enabled by the reconfiguration of civic activity and authority described in this special issue. As such, we argue that understanding the political implications of the expanding market for sponsored deliberation requires a comparative historical approach to organizational strategy.

Walking the Talk: The Performance of Authenticity in Public Engagement Work

This article examines the performative work of consultants who facilitate public engagement (PE) processes in organizations. Using multimethod ethnography, I find that PE practitioners reconcile tensions between the logics they promote in two different ways. Viewed from one perspective, PE practitioners are agentive entrepreneurs, adeptly negotiating competing logics to reform organizations; viewed from another, they exert a great deal of energy performing rituals that integrate their challenger identities with their elite status as management consultants. Scholars have argued that such contradictions reveal institutional indeterminacy. I argue that the performance of democratic authenticity in PE is both politicizing and depoliticizing.

Conservation as a Territorial Ideology

Growth machine theory has typically interpreted successful contemporary conservation efforts as rare victories of elite liberal factions to protect their own use values or, alternatively, as greenwashing for growth. By studying an elite coalition dedicated to land conservation in the South Carolina Lowcountry, I probe whether growth theory can be used to understand conservation as a territorial ideology in its own right. Intensive interviewing and qualitative content analysis reveal that the conservation coalition uses backstage networking to promote conservation as a homegrown civic virtue. Comparing newspaper coverage of conservation and development projects opposed by the coalition, I demonstrate that the conservation coalitions policing of conservation–related profiteering has occasionally put it at odds with the larger public and its own ideological framing. the conservation coalitions inversion of dominant cultural scripts of growth promotion demonstrates that growth theory can be productively applied to unusual cases.