ABSTRACT
The traditions of governance since the Second World War outlined in Chapter 1, of professional control and then market competition, have been unable to respond to the concerns of citizens experiencing misrecognition and lacking a voice in the concerns confronting their lives. Addressing such exclusion thus depends on citizens becoming engaged and committing to the democratic change of practices in the community at work and in civil society. The distinctive disposition of citizens, I proposed in Chapter 2, is to discover a quality of agency, individually and collectively, that grasps the possibility of making a new beginning to reimagine and renew the communities in which they live. The principal quality of the citizen, simple to describe yet forbiddingly difficult to develop, is the capability to find a voice to speak out with others in the public square. We have understood from the social psychologist Vygotsky that speaking with others is the fundamental medium of learning to think and act. For political scientists, moreover, voice is the expression par excellence of protest and political action. Hirschmann 1 proposes that while ‘exit’ typified economic action, setting in motion an impersonal process of challenge to protect interests, voice articulates a complex explicit process of confrontation and change. Ranging from faint grumbling to violent protest, voice is defined as any attempt to change rather than escape from an objectionable state of affairs, whether through individual or collective petition. Though here, I want to argue that voice is not necessarily negation, but is also an essential expression of re-constructive development.
