Civic-izing Markets: Selling Social Profits in Public Deliberation

摘要: Scholars investigating the commercialization of deliberation have forecasted two scenarios: one in which is protected from market and retains its emancipatory power, other corrupted by logics. Drawing on economic sociology “moralized markets,” we find that practitioners themselves frame as a normative alternative to both ordinary politics business usual, using new managerialist discourses spiritual, creative, emotional fulfillment. Multi-method field research demonstrates paid consultants resist commodification, sacralizing practitioners’ callings form civic evangelism fostering art deeply-contextualized process design. The moral authority this “designer democracy” grounded performance measurement “citizen accountability”: rejection consumer demands favor authentically “positive” attitudinal behavioral change. As such, social profits produced public provide quiet forms regulation for their elite sponsors, reframing stakeholder surveillance, control, legitimacy goals outgrowths public-spirited alignment collective aspirations. Paradoxically, deliberative processes may simultaneously enhance political equality reinforce inequalities virtue protection excesses.