ABSTRACT
Habermas once wrote of his predecessors in the German school of critical theory that ‘what fascinated me right away with those two [Adorno and Horkheimer] was that they weren’t engaged in a reception of Marx, that was not what they were up to at all – they were utilising him’ (Habermas, 1986, p. 77). In this chapter I chart my own utilisation of Habermas in return. Not satisfied with debating the relevance of his concepts to contemporary society in the abstract, this research followed the ‘applied turn’ in critical theory (Blaug, 1997) to see if we could make use of his theoretical ideas as tools for social scientific investigation. In particular, the chapter discusses the way in which the key concepts in Habermas’ theory of modernity – ‘system’, ‘lifeworld’ and ‘colonisation’ – were utilised in my research on social movements (Edwards, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2012). This research focused specifically on a category of social movement that often gets short shrift in conventional social movement studies: the labour movement. I studied a range of public sector unions in the UK which, I argued, were responding in various ways to what could usefully be thought of as a ‘colonisation’ of public sector work. Applying Habermas in the context of the labour movement was not without its challenges, which arose on both a theoretical and methodological level. Theoretically, Habermas (1981) is famous for leaving the labour movement behind in the few direct comments that he does make about the ‘new social movements’ – ‘new’ exactly because they mobilise around conflicts ‘at the seam between the system and lifeworld’ that are distinct from those encountered through the workplace, and surround issues of identity and ways of life rather than working conditions and wages (Habermas, 1981, p. 36). I spend some time discussing this theoretical challenge and how I dealt with it because it had some important implications for how I translated notions of ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’ in research. I came to think of the ‘colonisation of the lifeworld by the system’ as a kind of ‘living battle’ between contrasting ways of thinking and doing that was undetermined, ongoing, and very much inviting of empirical investigation.
