Habermas and His Communicative Perspective

Communication together with (building) trust is a crucial and indispensable ingredient of trade, of “doing” business. In his Spirit of Law the eighteenth- century French philosopher Montesquieu had already referred to the golden rule that no trade is possible without trust. The sociologist Anthony Giddens is a contemporary exponent of the idea that trust is an indispensable ingredient in building coherent communicative communities.1 But is there, within business environments, any awareness of the societal and human fundamentals of communication as constantly used in creating business relationships, negotiating, all kinds of applications of information and communication technologies, letters, informal talks, meetings – in short, communication as the everyday baseline of human interactions? Little by little technical and interrelational communication seems to be becoming the core element of doing and organizing business