Without rules organisational life would be impossible. They enable and constrain, they set out codes of social conduct between different groups of people, often with different and potentially rival professional backgrounds, trying to get things done together. And they often codify and represent more symbolic and aspirational themes of organisational life: they declare that such and such an organisation takes itself seriously as a professional place to work, and aspires for its staff to act in civilised ways in public and within the institution. Rules may encode organisational habits, routine ways of getting things done more efficiently which have evolved over time. They are also manifestations of political struggles taking place within organisations, which may be compromises between rival positions, but at the very will least tell you something about the particular figuration of power which staff are experiencing in an organisation at any one time. Who sets the rules, why and when they set them, how they are applied, all say something about organisational politics and what GH Mead referred to as the ‘struggle over the life-process of the group’.

Organisational rules can be both explicit, implicit and perhaps hybrid, with explicit rules evolving implicit corollaries, and whether they are one or the other tells an outsider nothing about the degree to which one is obliged to conform to them. Organisational rules may be explicit but more observed in the breach, or implicit and closely followed as a means of including and excluding. In this post I will be dealing just with the more explicit variety and the way that staff take them up, contributing to the stable instability of organisations, which I have been writing about in previous posts.

Although ostensibly introduced by managers to regularise work and make it more predictable they always have unintended consequences and call out different responses in staff, depending on how they are implemented and responded to by all concerned. Rules, like values, are general and abstract, and both may provoke strong feelings in staff. Their general nature requires employees to improvise on them in order to fit the particular circumstances with which a particular member of staff is dealing. As Wittgenstein noted, there is nothing so obvious about rules that they speak for themselves and need no interpretation. Setting and following rules is a highly social activity that needs interpretation, negotiation and compromise. Particularly in cases where there is an insistence that the rule be followed no matter what the circumstances, and without compromise, this may call out highly subversive and even deviant behaviour in staff, sometimes contributing to bringing about the very opposite of what the rules were intended to prevent in the first place.

I was reflecting on this recently because ever since I have joined my institution I have found it harder and harder to get things done. This ranges from booking things like hotels or conference centres, to getting contracted staff paid, through to taking quite small initiatives. Previously as a manager with a given level of authority within the institution I would simply go ahead and book what needed booking, and pay who needed paying, organise what needed organising. Now I am hedged round with requisition forms, purchase orders and injunctions not to commit to ‘verbal orders’ with ‘service providers’, even though these ‘service providers’ may be colleagues I have worked with for many years. It is a conundrum to know how one might organise something, or invite someone to speak without committing oneself verbally.

Although up till now my bosses’ signature was enough to verify what I had done, now my boss may have to have things signed off by her boss, which in turn might be called into question by quite junior members of staff in the finance department for ‘not following the rules’. These rules may be new, or may have lain dormant for years with few people following them, not even finance staff who are the supposed guardians of them, which are now being reinstituted with a good deal of vigour by some. This may be as a way of covering over their own complicity and embarrassment at not having ‘followed the rules’ themselves for some years, but this reaction often leads to my receiving peremptory e-mails pointing out my breaches of conduct and directing me via url to the institution’s web pages where the rules are publically available. Sometimes I am reminded that the most senior manager in the institution himself has recommitted everyone to these rules, it is implied, as a moral duty. Technical procedures are thus cloaked in the language of moral imperative and authority.

As I indicated earlier, in the first flush of a new rule regime, or the reinstatement of an old one, there are often a lot of unintelligent demands to follow the rules to the letter, and which brook no exceptions. That is, until we all adjust to each other’s circumstances, or learn how to game the new regime to get done what needs doing. An example of lack of reflexivity on the part of rule-guardians, sometimes self-appointed, may take the form of insisting again and again that the level of spend on a particular contracted staff member requires repeatedly justifying why I am not putting the work out to tender, even though the contracted staff member is in the middle of a long piece of work and is doing the work exceptionally well. In these sorts of circumstances what I experience as particularly frustrating, as may others, is the inability to negotiate the meaning of the rule in this particular case. Insisting that there is only one interpretation of the rule is of course a very powerful gesture of control and domination.

It may happen that as the new regime becomes more routine, the stakes become less high and we learn to trust each other, it becomes more possible to make mutual agreements. The rule-guardian and those required to follow it negotiate that the rule need not be followed in this particular case, or as things bed down employees find ways to game the rule regime to justify what they intend doing anyway. There are good examples of recent collusive and individual gaming in the UK when British MPs managed in some cases to claim tens of thousands of pounds in expenses, while at the same time claiming, often quite rightly, that they hadn’t broken any of the rules or that they had been encouraged to do so by the office regulating MPs expenses.

No organisational system of rules, no matter how elaborate, can eliminate employee discretion. All employees are likely to aim for a degree of self-control and autonomy, and most organisations say that they aspire for their employees to have it. So staff are likely actively to resist some aspects of organisational control, while going along with others and the pattern of resistance may also amplify rivalries between different professional groups.

In my own institution, a university, one way of interpreting the introduction of this particular set of financial rules is as another manifestation of the ascendancy, over the last two decades or so, of the managerial and financial professional groups over the academic cadre. This has been written about extensively elsewhere and is mirrored in other public institutions such as health and education in the UK where groups of managers have come to dominate. This is not to argue that universities were necessarily better educational institutions when academics prevailed, but  merely that there has been a significant shift in power relations in terms of who decides and about what, and according to what ideology. Increasingly, and as elsewhere, the prevailing orthodoxy in universities in Britain is economic rationality and the three ‘E’s of efficiency, effectiveness and economy. It becomes very hard to justify learning for learning’s sake, running some programmes at a loss because of the prestige and status that they bring, or allowing for autonomy in the fulfilment of other stated organisational goods, such as being ‘agile’ or ‘entrepreneurial’, because these goods are much less rule-governed and rely upon judgement, interpretation, and agonistic discussion.

Sometimes slavishly following a rule is the easier course to take. I am reminded of a passage from Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man:

‘In the contemporary period, the technological controls appear to be the very embodiment of Reason for the benefit of all social groups and interests – to such an extent that all contradiction seems irrational and all the counteraction impossible…The intellectual and emotional refusal ‘to go along’ appears neurotic and impotent..The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life.’

There have always been rules as long as there have been groups, but the nature of the rules and the way they are played out are good indications of the dominance of particular groups in society.

In her book How Institutions Think (1986) the social anthropologist Mary Douglas, who died in 2007, struggles with the paradox of the individual and the social. On the one hand, she argues, it is unreasonable to assume that institutions can think and act as though they had some group mind and body. These are only figures of speech, shorthand, because only individuals can think and act. But on the other hand, the institutions which we form, with their organised ways of doing things, their procedures, rules and sets of values, are one way of organising to promote specific categories of thought, certain choices, and particular values:

Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each others’ ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent. (1986: 91)

One of the things that she is concerned to do in this book is to illuminate more clearly the ways that individuals come together to shape organisations, and consequently the way that individuals in their turn are shaped by the sustained processes and functioning of institutions. She draws on the work of Ludwik Fleck, who coined the term ‘thought collectives’ to describe the way that particular approaches to science become institutionalised so that it becomes impossible to think or argue in a different way. For a more thorough treatment of Fleck’s thought, see Ralph Stacey’s post here. Similarly, institutions constrain individuals in the way that the price of belonging may rely upon obedience to particular ways of understanding the world.

This brings Mary Douglas hard up against the age-old difficulty for the social scientist: how can we possibly think of ourselves in society except by using the classifications established in our institutions? For Douglas this is a necessary task to secure some degree of autonomy and freedom of thought, because institutional concerns are not necessarily our concerns:

They fix processes that are essentially dynamic, they hide their influence, and they rouse our emotions to a standardised pitch on standardised issues. …For us, the hope of intellectual independence is to resist, and the necessary first step in resistance is to discover how the institutional grip is laid upon the mind. (Ibid: 92)

Intellectual independence, which may take the form of resistance, is particularly important in times of crisis such as we are enduring economically and socially at the moment in the UK and throughout most of Europe, and more broadly and deeply in the less developed world. Things need not be the way they are.

Douglas shows how belonging to institutions encourages us to remember and forget, to classify, conferring our identity on us,  and helping to decide questions of justice and morality. Institutions determine who suffers and who survives in times of crisis, a topic we will deal with later in this post. In order to gain legitimacy, she argues, and keep the institutional shape, people in institutions need to make an appeal both to nature and to reason, in order that they can refer to the naturalness and reasonableness of the institutions’ laws and decisions. More than this people operating in institutions have to sacralise the principles of justice. Whilst for every other area of its operation, the institution operates more or less invisibly, in terms of the things held sacred, Douglas argues, after Durkheim, that sacred artefacts, values and judgements are highly public and are appealed to as such. If the sacred is profaned then terrible things will happen. Second, any attack on the sacred will rouse strong emotions to its defence. Third, the sacred can be invoked explicitly, to arouse such emotions and to invoke dire consequences if sacred judgements are not upheld.

Reading this passage in Douglas’ book put me in mind both of the recent riots in Belfast to protest about the compromise decision of Belfast City Council only to fly the union flag on certain days of the year, rather than every day (in line with every town hall in the UK), and the UK Chancellor’s autumn statement. Douglas states:

Entrenched in nature, the sacred flashes out from salient points to defend all the classifications and theories that uphold the institutions. (1986: 113)

So some Unionist parties in Northern Ireland have interpreted the decision not to fly the flag every day as a flagrant assault on their identities as British citizens, and have aroused strong feelings and violence in defence of their concept of their institution and its sacred symbols. Equally, George Osborne made similar appeals to the British public’s sense of fairness, by arguing that keeping benefit increases to 1% over the next year was ‘fair’, making a distinction between those who rise early to go off to work and do the right thing, and those who have yet to open their blinds because they are ‘skiving’ and living off handouts from the state. On the other hand, and earlier in the year, he decreased the top rate of tax for those earning over £150k a year on the basis that this demonstrated that ‘Britain is open for business’. With both stratagems Osborne is recruiting both nature and reason on his side, and appealing to sacred values which need defending, fairness, pro-business, anti-dependency, hoping to stir up strong feelings in those to whom he makes his appeal. If the opinion polls are to be believed so far, then up till now he has succeeded, with the majority support currently for his government’s benefit ‘reforms’.

In terms of the UK economy, why is it that stronger feelings are not stirred up in favour of the already more vulnerable in society and against better-off people, most of whom seem to be surviving the economic crisis very well? Douglas draws on anthropological examples to demonstrate how responses to emergencies are culturally defined and will often work along cleavages that already exist in society. In times of crisis institutions such as governments are likely not to abandon their moral principles but to switch to their emergency set, which will define much more distinctly existing hierarchies and inequalities. Douglas draws on the work of William Torry who observed what happened in Indian villages afflicted by famine. In the crisis the emergency norms dictated that the first to suffer should be the disadvantaged, the marginal and the politically ineffectual:

He (Torry) traces the lines of victimage through the selection process of the regular social system. Whatever are the normative principles of exclusion from privilege or security – whether by birth, or office, or sex, or age, or by definition of deviancy and criminality – these regular exclusions point to who will get less as resources diminish and who will finally be turned out or left behind to starve. (1986: 123)

Existing social hierarchies are exposed and amplified in conditions of scarcity and crisis. But what is surprising to both Torry and Douglas is that the victims meekly accepted the iniquity of their fate and showed little resentment towards those in positions of power who have made decisions that added to their suffering. What both anthropologists thought they were witnessing was not the destruction of the social order, but its affirmation. So in the UK it is the poor who are bearing the burden of austerity, and so too in the developing world in terms of their suffering through trade inequalities and climate change. This does not pass without protest, but protest is far less significant that it might be given the scale of the assault on the most vulnerable.

Of course, there are similarities between Britain and India as well as some major differences. The parallels are to be found in the way that existing social inequalities have been both clarified and amplified by crises and by the particular economic and social programme of the current government in the UK. The government appeals both to nature and reason in implementing their policies and to sacred principles of ‘fairness’ and ‘striving’, what G.H. Mead referred to as ‘cult values’. The differences arise from the history of contestation and protest in the UK, where there are few groups who have accepted their situation as meekly as we are to understand underprivileged villagers in India did. What links the two situations together, however, as Douglas observed: ‘ for better or worse, a community can make its preordained victims bear the brunt of the crisis and solve its allocation decisions by letting the institutions do the choosing, but only when it has conferred legitimacy on them.’ It is the extent of this legitimacy that the British people will only get to explore in the next election.

What is interesting in both Douglas and Fleck’s work is the way they write about the paradox of the individual and the social, how individuals are often thinking within, and on behalf of institutions, constrained and enabled by them. Institutionalisation permeates our thinking, our acting and our moral choices. Douglas reverses the idea that individuals leave trivial decisions to institutions and do the heavy moral lifting themselves, arguing instead that it is the other way round. We are who we are because of the group which we belong to and the way these groups, more or less formalised, condition our responses to ourselves and to other people. Shedding more light on how this happens and what effects our involvement in institutional life has may help us to gain some partial autonomy and perhaps to resist where we need to.

During the last 10-15 years there have been repeated appeals to the complexity sciences to inform evaluative practice in books and journals about evaluation. This partly reflects the increased ambition of many social development and health programmes which are configured with multiple objectives and outcomes and the perceived inadequacy of linear approaches to evaluating them. It could also be understood as a further evolution of the methods vs theories debate  which has led to theory-based approaches becoming much more widely taken up in the evaluative practice. It is now very hard to avoid using a ‘theory of change’ both in programme development and evaluation. What kind of theory informs a theory of change, however?

Although the discussion over paradigms has clearly not gone away, the turn to the complexity sciences as a resource domain for evaluative insight could be seen as another development in producing richer theories better to understand, and make judgements about, complex reality. However, some evaluators are understandably nervous about the challenge of what they perceive as being the more radical implications of assuming that non-linear interactions in social life may be the norm, rather than the exception. In a variety of ways they try to subsume them under traditional evaluative orthodoxies, which is just as one might expect any thought collective to respond.

Take those authors who suggest more or less strongly that the complexity sciences may be a perspective only applicable in particular circumstances and at particular times according to the evaluator’s assessment. Programmes which need evaluating, the authors claim, are either simple, complicated or complex, or complex programmes may have simple or complicated parts. It is considered to be a perspective, that can somehow be grafted onto more conventional approaches dependent upon circumstances. In a domain which is replete with a dizzying array of tools, techniques and perspectives all offered with propositional (if, then) logic, a complexity perspective then becomes another weapon in the rational evaluator’s armoury, but only if circumstances allow.

Evaluators who have an interest in the complexity sciences have an understandable need to define what they are talking about both for themselves and their readers, and this has no doubt motivated them to draw on what has become known as the Stacey matrix (Stacey, 1992). Stacey’s matrix represents a contingency theory of organisations understood as complex adaptive systems and suggests that the nature of the decision facing managers depends on the situation facing them. In situations of great uncertainty and high disagreement conventional linear/rational methods of decisions making are dangerous, Stacey argues. It behoves managers to fit their decision-making methods with the circumstances they analyse as being in one category or another, according to the inevitable two by two grid.

Variations on Stacey’s idea of presenting complexity as contingent decision-making have been reproduced by others, most notably Glouberman and Zimmerman (2002), who seem to have gained purchase amongst a number of prominent evaluation scholars. Glouberman and Zimmerman’s proposal is that social problems are of three kinds: simple, complicated and complex. Simple problems require following a recipe, which, once mastered, carries with it a very high assurance of success. Complicated problems ‘contain subsets of simple problems but are not merely reducible to them. Their complicated nature is often related ….to the scale of a problem like sending a rocket to the moon’ (2002:1). Complex problems are ones like raising a child, where there is no formula to follow, and success with one does not guarantee success with the next.

This is the kind of formulation which may look helpful on first reading but does not stand up to much careful investigation. Nor does it become more credible because it is widely taken up and endlessly repeated. It is hard to conceive of sending a rocket to the moon, except in the very narrow sense of being able to see whether one has landed on the moon or not, as being anything other than a complex undertaking. Inevitably, and on each occasion it will have involved widespread mutual adaptation and improvisation, disagreements, lacunae, the unexpected and the contingent, and with occasional catastrophic interludes (Apollo 13 and the Challenger disaster), which surely bear out the idea the even in highly disciplined scientific contexts the unexpected and the unwanted happen. Even following rules like a recipe, to draw on the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1999), is a highly social process where the rules inform practice and practice informs the rule. There is no recipe so clear that it is completely obvious what to do in every situation, and rules are ‘islands in the sea of our unformulated practical grasp of the world’ (1999: 34). Following a recipe implies a rich background of unreflected beliefs and taken-for granted assumptions about the world which only become evident in the practical application of what James C Scott has referred to as a ‘thin simplification’ in often uncertain circumstances.

If, as this post claims, the heuristic does not seem to support the weight of expectation freighted upon it, how might we account for its continued appeal? Although there seems to be some agreement that insights from the complexity sciences may help us understand why social activity is unpredictable, to consider evaluation practice, which is also a social activity, in the same light radically decentres it: it can no longer be grounded in the certainties of the rational, designing evaluator. That is, if you accept the contention that without an explicit model laying out goals and measurable objectives a programme cannot be evaluated, then theories of change methods, all based on propositional logic models, immediately become problematic if the idea of non-linearity is taken seriously. Each of the proponents of Glouberman and Zimmerman’s framework acknowledges this to a greater or lesser extent. They may do so by arguing that an evaluator needs to make their logic model more ‘flexible’, which appears to mean developing a series of logic models and being prepared to evaluate what are sometimes termed the ‘emergent’ aspects of the programme. Or they may simply conclude that although complexity may potentially offer a valuable framework to understand ‘complex systems’, a complexity perspective cannot be applicable across all evaluation settings. In general then, the heuristic allows evaluators in the mainstream to maintain what John Dewey referred to as a ‘spectator theory of knowledge’, which in this case means the evaluator can decide when the insights do and don’t apply. And they seem only loosely to apply to the evaluator’s own activity.

References

Dewey, J. (2005) The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action, New York: Kessinger Publishing.

Glouberman, S. and Zimmerman, B. (2002) Complicated and Complex Systems: What Would Successful Reform of Medicare Look Like?, Discussion Paper No. 8: Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada, Plexus Institute. http://www.plexusinstitute.org/resource/collection/6528ED29-9907-4BC7-8D00-8DC907679FED/ComplicatedAndComplexSystems-ZimmermanReport_Medicare_reform.pdf.

Scott, J. C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Stacey R (1992) Managing the Unknowable, San Francisco: Josey-Bass.

Taylor, C. (1999) To Follow a Rule in Shusterman, R. (ed.) Bourdieu: a Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.

Evaluation scholars abstract to varying degrees from the social programmes they are invited to evaluate. Perhaps the highest degree of abstraction is demonstrated by those evaluators using experimental methods who are concerned to draw statistical distinctions between a ‘treatment group’ and a comparator group which is randomly selected. Experimentalists are generally disinterested in social theory and think of causality in terms of independent and dependent variables. Meanwhile, adherents of Theories of Change (ToCs) made popular by the Aspen Institute (1997), draw on propositional logic and represent social change in the form of entity-based logic models showing the linear development of social interventions towards their conclusions. Additionally, however, they will often point to the importance of participation and involvement of the target population of programmes to inspire motivation. In this sense TOCs are a hybrid of functionalism and emancipatory social theory, which encourages participants in social programme to be active in the change process.

Less abstract still are ‘realist’ evaluators who claim to be interested in ‘generative’ theories of causality, i.e. ones which open up the ‘black box’ of what people actually do to make social programmes work or not.  Realistic evaluation draws on Bhaskar’s critical realism (1978) as taken up and developed by Pawson and Tilley (1997) and Pawson (2006) and is the theory most often linked to the complexity sciences, particularly complex adaptive systems theory (CAS).  In trying to reconcile realistic evaluation and CAS they adopt a functionalist, systems-based understanding as a default position and argue that interactions between human beings take place as ‘mechanisms’ and have an effect at different ‘levels’ of reality.The conceptual link between  CAS and realistic evaluation is that they both have an understanding that stability and change does not arise because of ‘variables’, the staple of experimental methods, nor does it proceed with propositional logic as in ToC, but as a result of what people are doing in their local interactions with other people. CAS are relational models demonstrating how patterns emerge over time because of ensembles of interacting agents. So from a realistic perspective and in the words of Pawson and Tilley:

Realists do not conceive that programmes ‘work’, rather it is the action of stakeholders that makes them work, and the causal potential of an initiative takes the form of providing reasons and resources to enable programme participants to change. (1997: 215)

So both CAS and realist evaluators are most interested in local interaction as the basis for developing more general observations about the success or otherwise of social interventions. Realistic evaluators argue that interventions do or do not achieve what they set out to because of a combination of context, mechanism and outcomes (CMO). The perspective is concerned with finding what works for whom and in what circumstances and then extrapolating a detailed and evolving explanation to other contexts. In Pawson’s words it is predicated on the ‘steady accretion of explanation’ (2006: 176) about a reality which exists independent of the evaluators who are enquiring into it. 

It is easy to see the appeal of the link between a realistic evaluator’s interest in what people are doing to make a project work, through negotiated order or rule-following, and CAS. Realistic evaluation has much to recommend it in terms of its insistence on the importance of the particular history and local context of social interventions, and that prediction and questions of validity for different contexts are made highly problematic. However, some of the more arcane aspects of critical realism are in danger of covering over what we might think of as the radical implications of CAS. Rather than opening up the black box of causality realistic evaluators, in Norbert Elias’ words (1978: 73), seem to use a mystery to explain a mystery when they draw on the concepts of systems to describe the way that contexts and mechanisms work. For example, Pawson argues that social interventions are ‘complex systems thrust amid complex systems’ (2006: 168), and that: ‘A sequence of events or a pattern of behaviour are explained as being part of a system and the mechanism tells us what it is about that system that generates the uniformity’ (2006: 23).  In my understanding of CAS models there is nothing to suggest that they are either open, nested, or have multiple levels. The global patterning that emerges may tell us very little about the local interaction that has brought it about: even if we were able to identify local ‘rules’ conditioning people’s behaviour, or ‘generative mechanisms’, they would not necessarily help us, since there may be no obvious connection between local and global ‘uniformity’. Additionally, and as far as the term rules is helpful in thinking about human interaction, social ‘rules’ would themselves be evolving according to the contingencies of each social programme. Introducing functional abstractions, ‘system’, ‘levels’, ‘mechanisms’, covers over as much as it reveals about what may be happening in a social development intervention, and promises more than it can deliver if we are to take the insights from CAS seriously. Rather than being concerned with static, entity-based and spatial representations of complex reality where causal powers are attributed to machine-like mechanisms, CAS models are helpful in understanding qualitative changes in ensembles which change over time. It is true that in CAS the rules, in the form of algorithms, are deterministic and are set by the programmes. In a social setting there is no equivalent to the programmer, and in the last post we noticed how Taylor, drawing on Wittgenstein, noted how rule-following has to be contextual and adaptive: in other words, in a social setting the ‘rules’ of engagement are themselves constantly evolving and changing.

Of course, realistic evaluators are not the only evaluation scholars to understand what they are doing in systemic terms, no matter how much the idea of a system is problematized: i.e. scholars often claim that despite using the term, they do not think it is easy to know where the boundary of a system is, or claim that systems are open, or nested, or intersecting with other systems or whatever. It is only a short step to begin thinking that if the idea of a system in social terms is so problematic, then perhaps it would be preferable not to use it at all, but to find some other way of paying attention to, or describing what happens when social development interventions occur. Part of the explanation for the persistence of systemic abstractions may that they protect the discipline of evaluation by separating the evaluator from the object to be evaluated. In this sense, and despite the encouragement of a variety of evaluation scholars to value reflection, reflexivity and multiple views of reality this decentering radicalism rarely takes in the discipline of evaluation itself, with some exceptions. This is not to argue that evaluators, particularly in the realistic school of evaluation are unaware of the way that they influence social interventions, by learning then ‘teaching back’ as Pawson and Tilley (1997) express it. To a degree, then, evaluation scholarship takes refuge behind its abstractions and takes what the philosopher Thomas Nagel (1986) described as ‘a view from nowhere’, by which I understand him to mean that by abstracting away from ourselves as subjective thinkers we leave out precisely what we need to explain. Even those evaluation scholars, who problematize more positivistic perspectives on their discipline by only go so far in developing how much these non-linear sciences apply to them and what they are doing in the practice of evaluation.

References

Aspen Institute (1997) Voices from the Field: Learning from the Early Work of Comprehensive Community Initiatives, Aspen Institute, Washington, DC.

Bhaskar, R. (1978) A Realist Theory of Science, 2^nd Edition, Brighton: Harvester Press.

Nagel, T. (1986) The View from Nowhere, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pawson, R. and Tilley, N. (1997) Realistic Evaluation, London: Sage.

Pawson, R. (2006) Evidence-based Policy, London: Sage.

This week saw the publication of another report into an organisation, the Mid-Staffordshire hospital, which was deemed to have been poorly managed, and therefore to have seriously and dangerously failed its service users. Some of the contributing factors to organisational failure were thought to be the management team and board’s slavish persuance of government initiatives, which led to keeping an over-tight rein on the budget in order that the hospital might qualify to become a Foundation hospital, and/or superficial management to targets. By implication the inspection regime must also be at fault since the hospital seems to have passed a variety of inspections.

From this and other examples, what are some repeating patterns in organisational life, and assumptions informing them? What sorts of things do leaders and managers, board members and government ministers seem to be thinking about management and leadership that might be contributing to the mess?

Apologies in advance for the caricature – it is the weekend.

Belief in visionary leadership 

Leaders are special people, and therefore need to be offered a lot of money, otherwise they will go abroad or work for someone else. And since we’re paying them so much, they have clearly demonstrated that they are special people. One of their unique gifts is to be able to see into the future and to envision how things should be. They can then communicate the exciting nature of their vision to ‘followers’, who are encouraged to ‘believe’ in it. It’s important for leaders to set stretch targets, to urge employees to be above and beyond their very best. They need to unlock the potential of each and every one. Sometimes there may be a problem with the vision, or people don’t believe in it enough or are resistant to change. In the first instance, this might be a ‘failure of leadership’, in which case we need to recruit another visionary leader to turn things around. Otherwise staff just need to believe a little harder and just stop being so resistant to necessary change (see reform and change below).

Leaders have to do the important and big stuff – they have to keep strategic and transformational. Walking around in the organisation, seeing what’s happening, talking to people, is for managers to do, the transactional tasks. It’s important not to get too bogged down in the detail of how the organisation is running.

However, and at the same time, leadership can be spread around a bit. For example, if you adopt a distributed leadership style, then everyone can be a bit of leader and can be co-opted into delivering the vision. Sometimes even your customers or patients can be asked as stakeholders to exercise leadership and join in and help with necessary reforms (see change and reforms below). Leadership is both an exclusive phenomenon and a distributed phenomenon both at the same time.

It’s also important to train everyone in your organisation in leadership skills, right down to the lowliest member of staff. Good leadership makes the difference between success and failure in organisations. Although great leaders are special people, we can also teach leadership as a particular skill set. Set texts should include Jim Collins’ Good to Great and the biography of Steve Jobs.

Belief in the creation and manipulation of culture

Visionary leaders are responsible with their top teams for creating the right culture. This can be a ‘no-excuses culture’, like the one created by the CEO of A4E, the company responsible for security at the Olympics, or it might be a ‘can-do’ culture, or perhaps even a positive culture. When you’re a leader you don’t want people bringing you problems, you want them to bring solutions. And it’s important to be action-oriented, otherwise you just end up in talking shops all day.

In contemporary organisations it’s always important to keep positive. If people have criticisms then these should always be constructively made  – there’s no excuse for just carping – and it’s best if managers decide what’s constructive otherwise we’ll be opening all kinds of cans of worms and chaos will ensue. If we all believe enough in being positive, then the workplace will become a positive place to be: we can create our own reality. We’ll be one organisation, and we’ll really appreciate each other. Bad selves should be left at the door, and in the UK in particular we do have a habit of being rather negative. One of the good things about creating positive cultures is it means we don’t have to worry about negative things like power in organisations. Obsessing about power can just make people anxious.

Top teams are responsible for putting the ‘cult’ into culture.

Belief in targets and inspection regimes

Staff in organisations won’t know what they’re supposed to be doing without an organisational vision and mission, and without targets to underpin them, preferably stretch targets if the degree of dramatic change which is needed is to be achieved. Organisations can get better and better, relentlessly, all the time, and targets are the best way of improving. Although it’s important to be positive, warm words and touchy-feely management approaches aren’t enough. Targets have to be specific, time limited and measurable, so that everyone is clear whether we are achieving the organisational objectives or not. They have to be performance-managed against these clear targets so that they know exactly where they stand in relation to the vision and mission. This is a question of accountability. There’s nothing which can’t be measured, even openness and honesty. Staff should be legally bound to be open and honest, and measured against a metric. Inspection regimes should be zero-tolerant of bad practice so that it can rooted out. There’s nothing like rigorous and continuous inspection for encouraging people to be transparent about what they are doing.

If possible it’s best to link payment to results or performance since this makes everyone focus much harder on what they are doing. What you lose in cooperation between colleagues you gain in individual motivation.

Belief in constant change, known in the public sector as ‘reform’

The world is getting increasingly complex. Leaders and managers have to ‘deliver’ change to keep up, otherwise the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries will overtake us. Changing things constantly is a clear indication of how serious you are about change. And if you think you are in control then you aren’t going fast enough. And that’s why you need special people to lead the change, because everything has become so very complicated.

One of the things that helps change in the public sector is opening up services to competition and the private sector. This creates greater choice, which is what consumers really want from their schools and hospitals. Otherwise you have to design transformational change with ambitious strategies and stretch targets (see transformational leadership above). It’s best to be impatient about change, because you can’t really get enough of it, and change is always for the good, especially when it’s transformational change. However, some employees may be resistant to change and reform and so need to be persuaded why it’s good for them, and for everybody else. If leaders and managers are successful at what they are doing, then employees will begin to see the benefits of what is being proposed. Politics in organisations always needs to be managed.

If you want to keep your organisation up to speed, it’s best to keep scanning around to see what everyone else is doing, because they are probably doing things better than you are. Benchmark yourself. If you’re not feeling anxious about what you are doing, then you should be. Don’t worry about paying attention to what’s happening in your own organisation – much better to import best practice from somewhere else. Learn from the best in class, or from global leaders in the field: it’s the quickest way to be a global leader too.

I was sitting in a meeting with a social development organisation listening to the kinds of requirements that have been placed upon it by a governmental body in order to trigger the full funding for a grant that they had succesfully bid for. 10% of the grant is ‘performance related’. In other words, and on a sliding scale of reward for performance, the social development organisation has to prove that it has helped educate a certain number of girls in a developing country to a predicted level of attainment, and that these girls will have stayed in school for the three year duration of the project and not dropped out. Additionally money is released against the achievement of pre-reflected project milestones. ‘Results’ are validated by ‘rigorous research methods’ which turned out to mean quasi-experimental methods. In other words, the rubric insists that the project sites be compared with communities where there has been no such intervention, and which are ‘similar in every way’. The organisation will only be fully rewarded if it achieves exactly what it said it would, and precisely to the timetable it set out in the proposal.

This particular social development organisation I am visiting is one amongst a dozen or so others which have received similar or much bigger grants, some of which amount to the low tens of millions. All of them have proposed highly complex interventions in very different developing countries involving the girls themselves, their families, teachers, head teachers, community groups, religious and community leaders, sometimes even boys. As with most social development these days the intervention is highly ambitious and leaves the impression that the organisation, working through a local social development organisation in the country concerned, will be intervening in particular communities at breakfast, lunch and dinner and in a variety of different and incalculable ways. This combination of interventions may be necessary, but the extent and range of them makes the question of causality extremely problematic, experimental methods or no.

The other thing that struck me is that the dozen or so social development organisations receiving this money all have to use the same project management tools and frameworks so that the government department can aggregate progress and results across all countries and all projects. Quantification and standardisation is necessary, then, in order to render the projects commensurable, and in order to make a claim that the government has made a quantifiable contribution to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which they can ‘prove’. The kind of assertion that the government would like to make is that it has improved X tens of thousands of girls’ education to Y degree through its funding of a variety of organisations. These results, the claim will continue, will have been rigorously demonstrated through scientific methods and will therefore be uncontestable.

Placing strict requirements on the timetabling of the work, the recording of progress and the measurement of results, has led the government agency to pay millions of pounds to two large commercial consultancy companies to assist with the project management of the project management, and to support the social development organisations with technical questions about how to evaluate rigorously. The second greatest investment, after the social development fund itself, is therefore in mechanisms of standardisation and verification. One of the consultancy companies employs project managers to give technical advice who have worked for other government or international bodies requiring similar ways of working, such as USAID and the World Bank. This is one of the ways in which particular ways of working come to proliferate and become mutually reinforcing.

This is a very good example of the kinds of trends and pressures that all areas of the public and not-for-profit are subject to currently, and this example is so rich in lines of enquiry that I only intend to deal with some of them in this post.

The first thing to say is that the funding of the projects and the elaborate mechanisms of scrutiny and control that are bundled with it is a very good example of what James C Scott (1998) was referring to in his book Seeing Like a State. The need for the bureaucracy to make seemingly uncontested claims about the efficacy of the money they have set aside to improve the lives of girls in the developing world has led to much over-simplification and the insistence on the adoption of reductive tools and frameworks. This simplification is necessary if projects are to be legible, controllable and commensurable at a distance: as in a landscaped garden of an 18^th C stately home, civil servants feel they need a view down long straight avenues of trees. Staff in bureaucracies such as the civil service are struggling with a variety of different bureaucratic values. They aspire to working in ways which are objective and even-handed, they aspire to being professional, but they are also answerable to political masters who may have a limited attention span and short time-frame. One of the paradoxes here is that because of the political pressure governments feel they are under to justify spending or cutting spending, they move to develop complex and expensive apparatuses of scrutiny to put an end to political contestation and uncertainty by claiming that the money is well spent and has ‘worked’ uncontestably, and perhaps even that if the same projects were run again elsewhere they would work again. They turn to numbers to inspire trust, but the kinds of numbers they produce are only understandable with an explanation of the great number of assumptions about what is included and excluded.  It is debatable how credible the claim will sound even to a semi-informed audience. Expense is justified only at great expense.

At the same time, these reductive tools and frameworks do not just represent reality, as Scott observes, they shape it as well. The time and attention of all those involved in the projects are invested in keeping the bureaucratic beast fed. Whatever transpires has to be reframed in the pre-given categories which constitute the project’s most preeminent meaning. Although the staff employed in the social development organisation have a variety of worries, about the broad quality of the work, about unintended consequences, about the relationships with Southern partners which make these projects possible, these concerns have to take second place to the disciplinary regime of scrutiny and control.

The second thing to notice is the coincidence of quantitative methods of research and bureaucratic control, a convergence noticed by the moral philosopher Alastair MacIntyre in an essay entitled ‘Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority’[1]. Quantitative social science methods lend themselves to reinforcing bureaucratic authority, he claims, because they mirror each other; they share the same partial view of the social world. MacIntyre argues that both quantitative social scientists and administrators are concerned with classificatory schemes which suit their purposes and often make no reference to rival arguments about alternative forms of classification; they aspire to producing evaluatively neutral variables and assume that change is brought about causally by them – for the quantitative social scientist this is necessary in order to draw on statistical methods, and for the bureaucrat to claim that their policy intervention ‘works’. Both quantitative social scientists and bureaucrats believe that the social world is manipulable, that they can engineer change in social structures in predictable ways. But they do so by simplifying the world and the selection of hypotheses about the world so that they are only paying attention to contexts where there is an assumption of defined regularity.

“Methodology then functions so as to communicate one very particular vision of the social world and one that obscures from view the fundamental levels of conceptualisation, conflict, contestability, and unpredictability as they constitute and operate in the world.”

In this way, MacIntyre argues, the entwining of bureaucratic authority and quantitative methods acts ideologically, by presenting a particular conception of the world not as a partial view, but as the way things are, as ‘the facts’. MacIntyre’s view is of course counter to what experimental social scientists say about themselves: for example, in their book Poor Economics[2] Banerjee and Duflo set out the argument that ideology is one of the three ‘I’s that get in the way of social development (along with ignorance and inertia). From their perspective, everyone else is ideological except them, as they try to steer a neutral path between left and right in the debate about development drawing on methods which produce objective and uncontestable evidence.

Whatever the case for and against experimental methods in social contexts, the third thing to notice about this particular funding relationship is an underlying assumption about human motivation that links ‘performance’ to payment. It is something of a category error to yoke the two. In a natural science setting the result of an experiment, whether positive, negative or null, is equally important and helpful.  The experiment to educate a given number of girls to a particular standard over a given number of years using specific approaches might or might not be successful. That’s the point of testing the hypothesis. To link payment to the outcome one has predicted in advance of carrying out the experiment is to punish people for getting their hypothesis wrong. This seems to me to assume a veneer of scientific rhetoric but a much stronger underlying theory of human motivation that people will always work better if they are coerced, when they are impelled by punishment or reward. The danger of course that this disciplinary pressure creates all kinds of forced ways of working which are precisely not reproducible without increased coercion, as well as the potential for bullying and gaming the results.

What I see in this particular case is a good example of the way that ideology, reductionism and coercion come together to  constrain the way that people are able to work. It is a method almost entirely predicated on meeting the needs of the bureaucracy which aspires to ‘seeing like a state’. It is based on an impoverished understanding of the complex contexts in which people are working and endangers relationships of equality and cooperation. Despite any claim to the contrary, the particular conditionality of the grant is a very constricting relationship of power and domination, which carries with it an implicit theory of human motivation, that staff are unlikely to do their best unless threatened with financial penalties.

Long before theories of complexity became established in the natural sciences, the sociologist Norbert Elias wrote about social development as the complex evolution of ‘blindly operating’ processes. Greater interdependence in increasingly highly differentiated societies has led to longer and longer chains of people who are functionally interdependent with others. In other words, and without drawing on complex adaptive systems models, Elias noted how we are formed by, and at the same time we are forming the social processes of which we are part. It is not adequate to ascribe social change to the actions of highly charismatic individuals, on the one hand, or to mystical descriptions of emerging ‘wholes’ realising some kind of archetypal order, on the other. Instead, he argues, society evolves through the interweaving of intentions, a patterning which simply produces more patterning. Our plans and strategies form a tissue, an intermeshing web of actions and reactions, which are very difficult to interpret and to predict. There are trends in the patterning of social relations, and these tend in a particular direction. But the direction is not always forwards, and the consequences not always good. Development, or developments, are not always positive but are likely to both create and destroy.He criticises two tendencies in social research which try to understand these developments in the social. The first tendency, which we dealt with to some extent in the last post, is the move to disaggregate social processes into individual components, to atomise, and to assume that change happens in a particular social context at a particular time because rational individuals make changes to their behaviour influenced by variables. Statistical tests are then used to identify the extent to which these variables have influenced average behaviour in comparative groups. The research is carried out with a particular end in mind, that of proving or disproving that that a particular intervention is responsible for measurable changes in behaviour. If there is a statistical difference, then the intervention is deemed to have ‘worked’ and thus to be scalable and replicable elsewhere. This, for Elias, is an inadequate account since it doesn’t take into consideration how the variables are interrelated, by definition has to discount other variables, and assumes that the social evolution is two fixed states interrupted by a period of change. Nor does it take into account much broader social processes and power relationships between communities, between classes, between states and between North and South, if one is considering international development interventions.

Along similar lines a very good account of the inadequacies of statistical techniques to enquire into complex social changes is made by Sanjay Reddy in a review of the Duflo and Banerjee’s book Poor Economics, which you can read here. Reddy argues that by reducing the question of social development in developing countries to a discussion of micro variables is not so much to introduce rigour, but rather rigor mortis. The big questions of political and economic inequality never get addressed with this kind of perspective, he argues, and are replaced instead with what he terms a quietist discussion of the need for small changes in individual behaviour.

Alternatively, the second tendency borrows from the biological sciences, where there is an assumption that social processes are best described as interacting parts within wholes. With this kind of thinking a social intervention is an attempt to bring about wholesale change to the ‘system’ by identifying ‘levers’ to pull, or in some instances these are referred to as ‘mechanisms’. Scientific method is itself differentiated, Elias argues, and the highly processual characteristics of social life need an appropriate method to explore what are clearly dynamic and predictably unpredictable changes and not ones which are imported inappropriately from other sciences. To do so is simply using a mystery to explain a mystery in the case of systems theory.

The reasons we are driven to take up these particular methods for understanding the social world is not necessarily because they are particularly helpful, he argues, but because we are ideologically driven. We find it difficult to understand that our intentions, even those of the most powerful of us, do not always have the outcomes we would like. Our efforts are not directed towards describing and explaining what is actually happening so much as towards making a hopeful and speculative prognosis. So instead we continue to draw upon methods which we convince ourselves demonstrate what we are already looking for.

Both Elias and Bourdieu have drawn attention to the fact that we find it affronting and very difficult to contemplate the idea that we are not in control of our own destinies. Being detached about our involvement in the social would require us to pay attention to both the expected and the unexpected consequences of our plans and actions. This, according to Elias, would be more reality-congruent.

If social development means anything, he argues, it is to do with changes in the nature and character of social relationships of individuals or groups caught up in a figuration of power, a particular pattern of relationships which has evolved over time. More powerful groups do have more power chances, but, as he has observed, it is perfectly possible for these groups to try and enhance their power chances and make them worse, just as it is equally possible for groups of people consciously oriented towards change just to strengthen the tendency of the figuration to remain as it is. To understand more fully the resilience of otherwise of particular figurations of power requires not just paying attention to the new groups or figurations emerging, but noticing at the same time what is happening to the old patterns of interrelating, since the two are always interconnected. The ascendancy of one group is highly likely to be directly related the decline of another. These are not just abstract concepts but real changes in the fortunes and life chances of human beings.

Central to understanding these changes is an appreciation of tensions and conflict, he argues. It is easy to see how the tensions arise between new groups acquiring functions in relation to those groups who are losing them – these tensions form the very kernel of the process of development. They are not a question of personal animosities or the clash of ideologies, although they may also express themselves this way, but are a manifestation of the structural tensions involved in the shift in the balance of power.

In her book Meeting the Universe Half Way the theoretical physicist Karen Barad (2007) draws on quantum theory and the philosophy of the Nobel prize-winning physicist Nils Bohr, to develop her thinking about the paradoxical relationship between the knower and the known and the sense we can make of the world through our engagement with it. She argues that Bohr’s philosophical reflections on his work in physics provides opportunities for linking the natural and social worlds in the sense that we are part of the natural world we seek to understand. She accepts that both Bohr’s views (he was regarded as too philosophical for a physicist!), and her own interpretation of them are contested, but I will explore them nonetheless because both perspectives are interesting and helpful in the context of the discussion on this blog about systematic ways of comprehending the social. Her ideas are interesting in terms of furthering the discussion about what it means to be scientific.

In order to explain Bohr’s philosophy she discusses and represents in great detail two now famous manifestations of quantum physics: the slit experiment conducted by a variety of scientists since the original claim by Thomas Young in 1806, that light demonstrates the properties of both waves and particles and the principle of uncertainty/complimentarity debated by Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.

Briefly to explain the slit experiment and what it reveals about the behaviour of matter: when particles of light are fired towards a light receptor through a barrier which has a single slit cut into it they appear to go in a straight line and strike the receptor directly in line with the firing mechanism. When a second slit is opened up in the barrier next to the first, then the particles appear to interfere with each other and demonstrate diffraction patterns of light and dark lines on the receptor much like the patterning produced by waves becoming superimposed over each other. From a classical perspective, particles are entities which occupy a given amount of space at a particular time. Waves, on the other hand, are disturbances which propagate in a medium such as water or air and can overlap at the same point in space. If this happens then their amplitude can be combined or they can cancel each other out. We may all have noticed the way that wave patterns interfere with each other when we throw two stones into a pond.

So if the experiment is conducted with one slit, then a physicist would conclude the light behaves like a continuous stream of sequential particles. When conducted with two slits, then light particles (or other experiments have demonstrated the same phenomenon given certain physical conditions with other types of matter, whether it electrons, neutrons or atoms) behave very differently. This wave/particle contradiction is important because:

This situation is paradoxical to the classical realist mind-set because the true ontological mature of light is in question: either light is a wave, or it is a particle; it cannot be both. (2007: 198)

Barad directly addresses the point usually made about the quantum paradox, that insights gleaned from microscopic entities have little relevance to considering Nature at the grander scale and disputes the interpretation that they have little relevance for the world we live in. She points out that when the wave nature of light or matter is insignificant i.e. when the wave length is small in relation to other important dimensions, then classical physics provides a useful shortcut for calculations. She regards classical formalisms as an often helpful approximation to the more elaborate calculations of quantum physics which operate at all scales and are a much more comprehensive account of what we observe in Nature. She concludes that: ‘As far as we know, the universe is not broken up into two separate domains (i.e. the microscopic and the macroscopic) identified with different length scales and different sets of physical laws for each.’ (2007: 85) Quantum effects are small if the mass of the object is large. However, Barad argues that quantum physics does not complement Newtonian physics, but supersedes it (Ibid: 110).

Additionally she treats Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, an idea he explored in a famous paper he wrote in 1927 which involved a gedanken, or thought experiment. The paper considers the hypothetical detection of an electron by a photon using a gamma ray or high-energy spectrum microscope. Heisenberg reflects upon the way that the photon would disturb the electron in trying to measure it in a discontinuous way (owing to the Planck constant). Heisenberg concludes from this that there is an epistemic principle of quantum physics, that there is a limit to what we can know about the momentum or the position of an electron because of the incalculability of the technique of measurement.  Bohr was dissatisfied with this explanation and argued that it was not an epistemic difficulty, but an ontological one; that is to say, what we take reality to be. While Heisenberg argued that it was impossible for a physicist to know simultaneously the momentum and position of the same particle using quantum calculations, Bohr argued instead that particles do not have determinate values of position and momentum simultaneously. In other words, and according to Bohr, in order to measure a particle’s position, then one set of apparatus and measurements are required, and in order to calculate momentum, then an entirely different configuration of equipment and measurements are required. The two sets of apparatus are mutually exclusive: in being precise with one measurement the experimenter is electing to be imprecise about the other. In an addendum to his paper, Heisenberg later accepted this qualification of his work:

In this connection Bohr has brought to my attention that I have overlooked essential points in the several discussions in this paper. Above all, the uncertainty in our observation does not arise exclusively from the occurrence of discontinuities, but is tied directly to the demand that we ascribe equal validity to the quite different experiments which show up in the corpuscular theory on the one hand, and in the wave theory on the other (i.e. that we acknowledge complementarity, that is, the necessity of considering mutually exclusive experimental conditions). Quoted in Wheeler and Zurek (1983: 83)

This movement in Heisenberg’s position has been largely forgotten, even by some physicists, Barad insists, in favour of what is now popularly thought of as the uncertainty principle. Both Bohr and Heisenberg are contributors to what is broadly known as the Copenhagen interpretation quantum physics, although, as Barad points out, this comprises a variety of contributors and positions superimposed one on the other: there is no one comprehensive, coherent and determinate position on the variety of theories which make up quantum physics.

Barad goes on to draw some quite profound philosophical conclusions from this insight, drawing on Bohr’s work and his theories about the natural world. For Bohr quantum physics problematizes the strict determinism of Newtonian physics which states that if it were possible to measure the initial conditions of any particle, i.e. the position and momentum and the complete set of forces operating on it, then it’s entire trajectory, past and future, is determined. A Newtonian world view also assumes observer independence passively gazing on reality, the Cartesian separation of knower from the known. In contrast, she argues, Bohr called into question both of these assumptions:

…that the world is composed of individual objects with individually determinate boundaries and properties whose well defined values can be represented by universal concepts that have determinate meanings independent of the experimental practice, and… that measurements…can be properly assigned to the premeasurement properties of objects as separate from the agencies of observation. (Ibid: 107)

For Bohr there was no separating Nature from the arrangements to measure Nature, which he expressed in his own words in his book Atomic Theory and the Quantum of Action (1934/2011) thus:

…the very recognition of the indivisibility of physical processes, symbolized by the quantum of action, has justified the old doubt as to the range of our ordinary forms of perception when applied to atomic phenomena. Since, in the observation of these phenomena, we cannot neglect the interaction between the object and the instrument of observation, the question of the possibilities of observation again comes to the foreground. (Bohr, 1934/2011: 93).

Despite criticisms that Bohr is an ‘anti-realist’ in his philosophical stance, i.e. that he is somehow denying the materiality of Nature or objective standards in science, Barad claims that Bohr is claiming no such thing. To chose one configuration of apparatus to measure the momentum of a particle gives replicable results, and to chose a different apparatus to measure its position gives other replicable results leaving the other quantities indeterminate. These measurements are objective in the sense that they are calculable and reproducible by other scientists. Bohr’s point is that it is the specific nature of the material arrangements that are responsible for producing some values to the exclusion of others. These arrangements evolve through a history of what she terms socio-material practices, which I take to mean the development of methods involving objects and human reflection on objects, which determine the development of any social practice, including of course science. In keeping with the title of her book, Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad is claiming, based on Bohr’s thinking, that it is human practices which make the world intelligible to us. We engage with the world with the view of producing accurate descriptions of it of which we are part (part of the world and part of the descriptions) – this is very different from the idea that there is some idealized, human-independent reality which we can accurately and flawlessly represent. We form, and are formed by the natural world we seek to discover. Our consciousness, our methods, the tools we bring to bear and the objects we attempt to study are all part of one mutually constitutive phenomenon which is non-separable and emerges in the intra-action. Barad borrows another concept from physics which I don’t have time to explore thoroughly here to describe this phenomenon, that of entanglement. We and the world we live in are entangled. This is what Barad calls her agential realist position: the world becomes real to us through our intra-action with it:

Our (intra)actions matter – each one reconfigures the world in its becoming – and yet they never leave us; they are sedimented in our becoming, they become us. And yet even in our becoming there is no ‘I’ separate from the intra-active becoming of the world. Causality is an entangled affair… (2007: 394).

Barad’s understanding of Bohrian physics, depending as it does on the importance of the inseparability of a generative paradox of self and others and self and the world, seems to me to be very close to the pragmatism of Mead and Dewey, and the process sociology of Elias, which we have explored elsewhere on this blog. At the heart of this paradox is, in Dewey’s terms (1925/1997), the object and the experience of the object, which for the pragmatist philosophers were inseparable.

References

Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Qunatum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press.

Bohr, N. (1934/2011) Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dewey, J. (1925/1997) Experience and Nature, New York: Open Court Publishing.

Wheeler, J.A. and Zurek, W. H. (1983) (eds) Quantum Theory and Measurement, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.