Dear ONE-ers,
A plea for thoughts and help (and maybe an interesting discussion starter
to make up for the long post). Long story/short version – I’ve been asked
to write an introductory chapter to a book on social science research
methods for sustainability/SD as a ‘personal reflections’ chapter (based on
20 years on-and-off struggling with it as much as other claims of teaching
and admin allowed).
The upside is I mainly have to reflect, the downside is it is limited by my
own experience of a particular discipline (management) and personal
prejudices about issues and methodologies (I’ve done both quants and qual
research, but have no experience of ethnography for example or some of the
fancy new methodologies my younger colleagues are so competent with). I
also have no real grounding in ‘knowledge production’ scholarship as it
relates to SD. So I suddenly had the genius idea of consulting ONE-ers to
help fill the wide open spaces in my knowledge, experience and thinking
with their insights and perhaps useful sources.
Some of my reflections so far (merely caricatured here for provocation &
some attempt at brevity) include ideas that conducting SD social science
research is hampered by a number of factors including tendencies:
1. Towards confusion caused by the many and varied conceptions of
sustainability that researchers use (not just hard vs soft– I find Hopwood
et al’s mapping from status quo oriented, through reform, to
transformational and varying between social justice focused and
environmental protection focused useful for addressing this);
2. Ignoring the ‘everything is connected to everything else’ law of
ecology, and continuing to construct abstracted and bounded models of a
complex reality in the hope of isolating some relatively simple cause and
effect relationships.
3. Using snapshot research with still relatively few longitudinal
studies, yet we’re considering a long-term/open-ended phenomenon (I think
of 2 + 3 as trying to understand an elephant by taking a myriad of close
range polaroids of it);
4. Reducing people to very abstract one-dimensional constructs
(consumer, investor, worker, voter etc) rather than getting to know them as
people;
5. Measuring some slightly strange things. For example in one of my
areas of interest, consumer behavior, there’s a tendency to measure pro-
environmental behavior by surveying intentions (even though we know plenty
about the gap between attitudes/intentions and behavior), and classifying a
behavior as pro-environmental on the basis of the intention not the
environmental consequences. For example, if we embark on well-intentioned
energy saving at home, that is ‘pro-environmental’ even if we ‘rebound’ by
spending the money saved on something yet more energy intensive.
6. A scholarly tradition of building up knowledge incrementally, yet
sustainability challenges the foundations of many disciplines (like the
assumption that growth is good in economics for example). Years ago I was
inspired by Paul Shrivastava’s critique of how it challenges the whole
basis of organization studies for example. However, being critical of the
cumulative academic tradition in your discipline can feel like career-plan
suicide for the bright young researchers whose energy I’d like to see
harnessed more. Are social sciences perhaps less open than physical
sciences to those received wisdom changing – ‘Ooh look, proof that stomach
ulcers are caused by a bacteria, not stress’ moments?
7. A continuing emphasis on specific disciplines, making it hard to
study something so fundamentally holistic and trans-disciplinary. Journals,
refereeing processes and funding bodies talk about interdisciplinarity –
but often seem to find it hard to walk the talk.
8. Many (sub)disciplines still strongly favour quantitative methods
and model building approaches which often to my eye throw away 95% plus of
complexity/reality in order to test a subset of issues/relationships –
which I have no problem with, till they start making very definite
recommendations for policy and practice based on their results.
9. Still too much separation between those with academic expertise,
and those with practical experience, rather than greater integration in the
co-creation of useful knowledge;
10. The four points above contribute to the idea of ‘narrow channels’
between those who produce and might use knowledge – too many specialised
journals, wanting 6,000 word articles which stick to a narrow range of
methodological conventions (and writing in a language which locks knowledge
into the academic sphere more than unlocking it for others) and which avoid
anything heretical. Not enough space to build anything more holistic or
allow the transition to the type of ‘sustaincentric’ paradigm that the
likes of Gladwin argue for (following on from Dunlap & Van Liere’s NEP);
I’ll stop before this becomes an essay not a post (apologies for the
length/big can of worms)– but I hope people are interested enough to flag
up their thoughts on whether sustainability is a special research case (or
is it exactly like a range of other integrative topics like ‘health’?), and
why sustainability social science research might be particularly
challenging, and point me towards any useful sources they’re familiar with.
Thanks, Ken.