Social Theory Concepts

Following is a summary of a longer discussion on the Conceptual Foundations and Skillful Means that underly SAS², published in A Guide to Collaborative Inquiry and Social Engagement by SAGE Publications and the International Development Research Centre. These foundations draw on and extend lessons from different social science disciplines and perspectives, including:   

• Participatory Action Research
• Social Actors and Political Economy Theory
• Anthropology and Socio-Constructivism
• Management Science and Complex Systems Theory

The approach emphasizes the skill set that people must develop to create and mobilize knowledge that is socially relevant and that embraces dialogue. These skillful means create a careful action-learning process that brings together two important ingredients: the ability to think carefully, with rigor, and genuine caring for others and the world we live in.

On the one hand, SAS² supports people-based abilities to:

• Manage and mediate different views and knowledge systems; and
• Maintain a sense of purpose and social grounding.

The people-based approach of SAS² inquiry draws on some of the lessons of participatory action research in the field of development. It also draws from social actor and political economy theory, by looking at issues of stakeholder power, interests, legitimacy, and histories of collaboration and conflict. Several SAS² techniques build on social anthropology and psychology in a socio-constructivist perspective, by exploring and tapping into local knowledge and value systems in different cultural settings.

On the other hand, SAS² also stresses evidence-based thinking based on the art of:

• Navigating through methods of data gathering and analysis, especially methods that can deal with complexity; and
• Scaling or calibrating the level and kind of evidence and inquiry needed in each situation.

To facilitate evidence-based thinking and dialogue in the context of complexity, SAS² builds on concepts and tools adapted from 1) formal economics and management science, and 2) chaos and complexity theory. These adaptations show how to assess different resource- and risk-management strategies while also dealing with situations that are messy, i.e., filled with uncertainty and the unknown.
The last skill is perhaps the most advanced form of active learning within SAS². It involves the art of:

• Interpreting or making sense of complex information and situations.

Interpreting the findings of a complex inquiry is not an easy task, as most researchers know too well. The task becomes less daunting, however, when it involves a mediation of different perspectives and is grounded in real situations that are meaningful to the people involved. Interpretation is also less arduous when the process of inquiry relies on techniques that are properly selected and combined to create sound and relevant evidence. The analysis becomes all the more meaningful when it is owned by all participants and managed at a scale that suits a common purpose. When these conditions are met, the act of interpretation concludes a thinking process applied with skill through the efforts of all the parties involved.

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Efforts to engage people in research for social change are not new. Participatory Action Research (PAR) and its variants are a strong body of theory and practice rooted in the social reform movements of the late 19th century and with many applications in the fields of international development, social psychology, industry, agriculture, and education. PAR is based on the principles of collective inquiry into problems, with and by those affected, and the actions that emerge from group reflection and better understanding.

The key challenge and major failing in the practice of PAR lies in the nature of intervention by powerful social actors. PAR is often started by outside groups whose clear goals are linked directly to their mandates and areas of interest. More often than not, the PAR exercise is used to uphold assumptions and solutions already built into the problems and objectives already identified, with little scope to challenge agendas or argue for alternative approaches.

This tendency to impose structures is compounded by conceptual and methodological problems that continue to trouble the theory and practice of PAR. Communities are often defined geographically, supporting a romantic concept of social history. A populist and hasty approach to social factors tends to gloss over how complex real life can be, and contributes little to new concepts and practices in the social and management sciences. More recent progress in PAR such as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) often takes a cafeteria approach to the selection of tools and techniques. This approach may ignore important social factors and fail to include local language and the way local people create meaning.

SAS² seeks to overcome these problems by deliberately finding ways to cross-fertilize and dialogue across geographic and knowledge boundaries. It supports a multi-track process that brings together 1) fact finding and analysis by all knowledgeable parties, and 2) negotiated views of problems and options for action. It also employs mid-range or intermediate adaptations of tools and techniques from the social and management sciences that allow all subjects to speak and learn. This way of working supports careful and wholistic diagnostic thinking by the people involved and the strategic and progressive engagement of stakeholders. The result? Intervention, defined as an action from without, becomes almost impossible.

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The stakeholder concept makes an important contribution to collaborative research and social action when other concepts adapted from political economy and social anthropology are added to it. Models based on the stakeholder concept help to name the groups and institutions involved in a situation and how existing or proposed actions may affect their interests. They also explore the resources, influence, authority or power that stakeholders can apply to a situation, and their real or potential opponents and allies. The models allow and accept the constant interaction of communities of interests, thus bringing together the local and global factors of social history and recognizing the critical role of differences in power and interests.

Stakeholder analysis (SA) is a social actor alternative to positivist methodologies. It challenges much of the standard wisdom of stratification theory and political economy based on handy class definitions. It allows for diagnostic thinking that is context-specific and pragmatic, focusing on social actors and what they can do to solve problems and achieve their goals using power and resources they already have.

There remain, however, many conceptual and methodological problems with stakeholder analysis. Tools for stakeholder analysis are often too descriptive and schematic, assuming that problems, interests and group boundaries are clearly defined and stable over time. They neglect issues of stakeholder empowerment and public representations of the common good. As well, stakeholder analysis tends to ignore the question of who should do the analysis and for what purpose - who are the stakeholders affected by the analysis and who should be involved in the assessment process? Stakeholder analysis is often done in a top-down fashion, with a neo-corporate view that seeks to promote "dialogue" without calling into question the way domination and subordination operate at all levels within the increasingly integrated world we live in.

SAS² builds on and adjusts stakeholder analysis in several key ways. First, it suggests a strategic and progressive approach to engagement by focusing on 1) those parties that can and should be involved in the analysis and 2) those that need to be empowered through measures of collaborative thinking and social action. This exercise appears to be simple, but it raises two tricky questions about group boundaries: when to disaggregate a particular group into various stakeholders, and when to lump certain actors into one stakeholder group. The way people respond to these questions must take into account the actual context and the purpose of the exercise, and also the fact that some people may belong to more than one stakeholder group. This is often true of leaders and public officials who have their own stakeholder profile at the same time as they speak and act for broader groups.

Second, SAS² adds depth to stakeholder analysis by offering tools to explore key factors shaping the course of social history. These include power, interests, legitimacy, and also the positions, the values, and the commitments that stakeholders express in real situations, the networks of information that exist between them, and the record of trust, collaboration and conflict that apply to the situation. The way these factors are distributed and combined in each situation affects the stakeholder structure and the scenario that needs to be addressed. This scenario and the key problems it raises are discussed so that strategies can be found to manage them. This may include steps to change certain stakeholder relations, such as actions to reduce conflict or empower the vulnerable and marginalized groups that have pressing needs or interests.

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While stakeholder analysis can use strategic and shared methods to achieve results that stand up, it also raises a basic issue about the use of concepts borrowed from the social sciences, namely, the extent to which such concepts reflect how stakeholders define social categories and relations in their own language and context. Will terms such as power, legitimacy, representation, collaboration, or conflict let themselves be translated or carried from one culture or period of history to another without a change in meaning? What should we do when the 'stakeholder' concept is opposed to local conflict-management values and practices? Shouldn't stakeholders be involved in the action-research process based on the use of local knowledge systems, moving towards a social actor theory that values how people construct their own social and natural surroundings, not to mention the cultural values that guide their individual or group behavior?

SAS² methods, adapted from social anthropology and psychology, point to one of the most innovative aspects of SAS²: its approach to culture, knowledge, and learning. While everyone who is committed to a collaborative research enterprise sees the importance of culture and local knowledge systems, SAS² provides a way to rise above the so-called challenge of 'walking the talk'. Techniques such as Domain Analysis, Problem Domain, Social Domain, Value Domain and Option Domain, with their roots in Personal Construct Psychology, offer both simple and advanced ways to build on knowledge and value systems, using methods that contain no rigid terms or ideas that ignore differences in language and culture. The diagnostic assessment becomes an actor-driven exercise in ethno-sociology, ethno-politics, ethno-ecology or ethno-medicine, depending on the topic area that people choose to explore. Participants, not the facilitator, apply their own knowledge and value system while they also learn from others and negotiate views across social and cultural boundaries. By tapping into knowledge systems that are designed to learn, the techniques go beyond current methods where local knowledge is reduced to descriptive systems (of classes and taxonomies) that are mostly static and isolated from each other.

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SAS² is not a group of tightly structured methods but rather a flexible set of concepts and tools that can be used to create methodologies that suit particular needs. SAS² thus supports social learning systems that pursue goals in ways that are defined and negotiated in context. As such, SAS² helps to integrate stakeholder viewpoints into the science of project planning and management.

Fields such as public administration, organizational development, and business management use a wide range of methods for project planning and management. Famous among these methods, especially in the public sector, are those that involve managing for results - formally known as Results-Based Management (RBM). RBM begins with setting common goals and specific objectives, followed by the design and management of activities to achieve them. The process is seen as a chain of causes and effects that can unfold efficiently and responsibly if based on the right inputs, such as sound analysis and enough financial and human resources. In the recent past, RBM and other planning and management methods have evolved to include critical reference groups in key stages of the project cycle, such as goal definition, data collection, and project implementation.

This way of doing management science, strengthened when carried out in a collaborative mode, has a clear focus on the results to be achieved and the rational means to carry out plans made. This positive organizing principle is a touchstone against which organizations and people can be held accountable. RBM nonetheless lacks reason in one important way: it brings rigidity into planning and management where unpredictability prevails. Reasoned planning in the presence of unpredictability (conditions that affect your chances of success) and with limited knowledge of key factors (factors that affect your certainty of success) may be better served by leaving gaps and details open in the planning matrix, and treating all plans flexibly, as in medical practice.

SAS² provides an alternative to RBM called Process Management, designed to be used in complex, real, unpredictable situations. It supports a process of continuous planning built around actual and proposed actions or activities, rather than starting with defined goals and objectives that may be too ambitious or vague and that may not be shared by all the people involved. Process Management works well when planning involves many stakeholders and people may pursue different goals or activities within a common project or program. It also puts a focus on planning at the right time and at the right level of detail, neither so general as to be of little use, nor so specific as to deny the unknown and the unexpected. Planning in this way can be seen as a series of working hypotheses to be tested against the full, disorganized richness of now. Outcomes cannot be fully predicted and the need to adjust is expected, even when actions are performed with due professional rigor. As well, diagnostic assessments assume an active role in the planning and management process in response to ongoing needs for information and analysis of changing circumstances. Findings of earlier steps become inputs for the design of later steps, turning shared research into a process of social action with purpose.

SAS² integrates management science into collaborative research and social action, using a Process Management approach that admits the complexity of real life and helps navigate in the troubled waters of social history. By the same token, SAS² systematically mixes the social dimension into management processes. It does so through a series of flexible tools and steps that support careful analysis of the actors involved in a project or situation, the problems they are facing, and the options for action they may use to solve these problems and achieve their goals. The result is a 'log navigation' that allows people to log in and out of different sets of themes and tools and the system as a whole. SAS² thus offers a complex systems approach to diagnostic thinking that resolves four problems common in the field: toolboxes that are scattered, planning and research methods that are linear and rigid, analytical guidelines that are sketchy, and analysis that neglects social factors.

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