Relating to theory in the social sector
(Post-hoc title; excerpt from listserv post)

M. Six Silberman
six@wtf.tw

31 July 2010

...as far as I can tell there is much
more time spent in the social sector on "how can we do X?" than on
"how *best* can we do X?" There may be even less time spent on "should
we do X at all?" and "why should we do X rather than Y or Z?"

This is probably as it should be. Theory is in some sense a luxury.
(Institutionally speaking, I guess if you want to ask these questions
for a living you should become an academic or a researcher at a
foundation.) I won't even argue for a "balance": I think there should
be much less "theory" than "practice." Many of the problems addressed
in the sector are practical and immediate, or require theory of a
technical nature supplied by domain experts (mental health,
humanitarian logistics, civil engineering, and so on). But individual
social entrepreneurs (or whatever) do face practical questions that,
if they are to be answered well, demand much greater reflection from
the social sector as a whole. The most obvious such question arises
when somebody is moved by a "new" problem (or an old problem in a new
context):

"Should I start a new organization?"

(" -- and if not, how am I going to deal with this problem?")

This seems simple enough, but based on the number of conversations
I've had with people bemoaning "duplication of effort" in the sector,
it seems like many of us think that too many of us have said "yes".

Part of the problem is that answering this question is much more
difficult than it might first appear. Answering it definitively would
require a normative theory of the social sector. But nobody has one of
those, not even, oops, shredded up in the back pocket of their jeans
that they forgot to empty out before they went to the laundromat. Even
if they did, theirs would look different than everybody else's. So how
do people make these decisions?

My naive guess: they make them on the basis of their own knowledge of
the sector and what they perceive to be needed; what's possible (or
can be made possible) financially and logistically; and how they feel
at the time. This is as it has always been, and I'd be willing to
argue that this yields better results over the short term and at small
scales than any hypothetical approach driven by large-scale analysis.
(To be as clear as possible: I am not suggesting here that some social
sector Politburo should get together and crunch numbers and decide who
gets funded and who doesn't -- nor, I expect, shall I ever advance
such a suggestion.) But as a result we have long-running, repetitious,
and exasperated conversations about duplicated effort, the difficulty
of collaboration, founder's syndrome, and how unfortunate and foolish
it is that our new and direly needed venture addressing urgent problem
X didn't get funded because right now it's hot to fund ventures in Y.

I would like to participate in and foster conversations that negotiate
the following tensions in an *actionable* manner -- that is, in a
manner that affects the distribution of funding:

1. Celebrating social sector work vs. reflecting and developing
generous, constructive, concrete, actionable critique

There is plenty of celebration of social sector work, and no shortage
of promotion, self-promotion, and congratulation. Sometimes we get
absorbed in it in public, which is sometimes embarrassing later, but
this is all essential both for immediately practical reasons and for
individual motivation.

There is also a fair amount of critique in the social sector, although
much of it that I've seen comes from academics or professional
researchers rather than from "practitioners." (How many times did you
have "Sachs/Easterly debate" conversations back when "White Man's
Burden" came out?) But how much of this critique is generous,
constructive, concrete, and actionable? Academics are often the worst
at this. Much academic critique, however laden with jargon, hides the
complaint "why don't you think about X the way I think about it?"

Well, because I think about it the way I think about it and you think
about it the way you think about it. I know what I know and you know
what you know. The hard question is, is there any way you can
communicate some of what you know to me such that I can do what I do
differently -- in a way we both (and my stakeholders -- presumably
they are important too) will agree is "better"?

By "generous" here I mean critique that acknowledges that if somebody
did something, it probably made a lot of sense to them to do it at the
time, perhaps for reasons completely unseen to the critic. Put another
way, generous critique assumes that the object of critique is at least
as smart as the critic.

By "constructive, concrete, and actionable" I mean critique that
suggests what to do now (or next time) -- and presumably why -- rather
than saying simply "we [or you] shouldn't have done that [that way]."

2. Outcome orientation vs. process orientation

When we focus too hard or for too long on a particular outcome --
preserving or scaling a particular institution, moving a particular
health indicator, winning a particular contest, deploying a particular
solution -- we risk compromising the quality of the process,
especially the quality of the relationships we cultivate with
stakeholders and with the people who help us serve stakeholders. We
also risk underemphasizing or overlooking other goals which we might
not have stated explicitly at first but which we come to realize are
also important.

I'll give two examples, one from the development literature of the
late 1970s and one from everyday contemporary life.

>> In the middle of gentle Indian night, an intruder burst through the bamboo door of the simple adobe hut. He was a government vaccinator, under orders to break resistance against smallpox vaccination. Lakshmi Singh awoke screaming and scrambled to hide herself. Her husband leaped out of bed, grabbed an axe, and chased the intruder into the courtyard. Outside a squad of doctors and policemen quickly overpowered Mohan Singh. The instant he was pinned to the ground, a second vaccinator jabbed smallpox vaccine into his arm. Mohan Singh, a wiry 40-year-old leader of the Ho tribe, squirmed away from the needle, causing the vaccination site to bleed. The government team held him until they had injected enough vaccine... While the two policemen rebuffed him, the rest of the team overpowered the entire family and vaccinated each in turn. Lakshmi Singh bit deep into one doctor's hand, but to no avail.

[From Lawrence and Girija Brilliant, "Death for a killer disease",
_Quest_ May-June 1978, cited in Dipesh Chakrabarty, _Provincializing
Europe_, p. 44.]

But "The vaccinations are for their own good!" cries the
outcome-oriented evaluator. Perhaps, but in this case is it not clear
that basic respect for human dignity has been unnecessarily sacrificed
in the name of a macroscopic goal? The goal itself may be worthy[; the
problem is] the single-minded, urgent focus on it.

The second example is something you're all familiar with: "vote for
us" emails (and blog posts and tweets and...) from nonprofits. (I've
taken some flak for calling people out about this on this list. Fair
enough; maybe this is just a pet peeve of mine, then.) Especially in
their mass email form, I'd venture to argue that these notes indicate
[a desire for] an instrumental, one-sided relationship between the
nonprofit and the recipient. "Go vote for us!" Well, why? What if I go
to the contest site and decide some other project is more worthy?
Sure, I might be busy, but am I not a thinking person reasonably
capable of developing my own opinions on the matter? Often senders of
these emails don't bother to develop a particularly deep relationship
with would-be voters, or even to offer an argument about why their
work is worthier than the other contestants'. I would have great
respect for any nonprofit from which I received an email saying, "We
are participating in this contest. Vote for whoever you think should
win." -- for the obvious reason that such a call respects my own
autonomy, not to mention the aims of the contest administrators and
sponsors.

3. Addressing current, pressing situations vs. planning for the future

This tension should be uncontroversial and fairly self-explanatory...

4. Addressing single issues deeply vs. acknowledging the
interrelatedness of many social sector issues

...as should this one.

5. Building and using concepts vs. maintaining conceptual flexibility

So, now we come back to the question that I started this with: how do
we relate to concepts (or, if you want, "theory") in our everyday
work?

In environmental work, for example, there are widely accepted
techniques for estimating carbon emissions associated with particular
technologies and patterns of use. But sometimes techniques for
reducing carbon emissions lead to increases in other kinds of
environmental damage (like using hybrid cars). If an organization
focusing only on reducing carbon emissions ends up creating more
environmental damage in the process, have they not, first, relied too
much on a single concept, and second, failed to balance an outcome
orientation with a commitment to thoughtful process?

There is a conversation here about how "what gets measured is what
gets managed." We can have this conversation if we need to. My
position on this view is that just because it's historically been true
in American business management does not mean it *should* be true, in
business or in nonprofitland. In my mind a definitive counterexample
is offered by the life, work, and teachings of W. Edwards Deming, one
of the originators of statistical quality control, who argued that
"the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown
or unknowable, but successful management must nevertheless take
account of them."

The relationship between concepts and measurement is that management
by measurement alone amounts to reliance on concepts that have
become operationalized (or, if you take a dim view, ossified) in
measurement methods. When concepts and the methods for measuring them
go unquestioned long enough, they can become, in Arundhati Roy's
phrase, "consecrated into ideologies." A good argument can be made
that this is what has happened in economic policy all over the world:
at some point, the idea that growth was good could be supported by
reasoned analysis. Over time the analysis has become politically
unnecessary, and policy efforts aim to foster growth regardless of new
analyses that call the old assumptions into question.

One way to summarize this view is to say simply that in everyday life
and work concepts make good tools but bad masters: the real world
defies the orderly, logical reduction that conceptual interpretation
demands. But as foundations demand more frequent and comprehensive
reporting, more social sector work is funded (or not) based on
analyses and interpretations driven by concepts. So how does this look
in practice? How do practitioners deal with it? Is there a way to push
back on funders if their judgments don't make any sense, if the
concepts on which their funding decisions are based are misapplied?
and so on.