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Questioning and Organizing Attention

Toward a Critical Theory of Planning and Administrative Practice

Cornell University

To understand what planning and administrative analysts do, and what they can yet do, we need a theory of planning and public administration that combines vision with practice, a theory neither solely utopian nor opportunistic. Jurgen Habermas's "critical communications theory of society" allows us to locate the planning analyst's questioning and shaping of attention, thus organizing and designing, within a political, institutional world of systematically but unnecessarily distorted (and so possibly alterable) communications. A critical theory of administration andplanning argues that the planning analysts' organizing of attention can and ought ethically to work to foster true political discourse, dialogue, and the possibilities of genuinely democratic politics.

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