Management Scientists traditionally start with various assumptions about corporate culture - that it is "real", relatively permanent, more about processes than people and somehow created and controlled along the lines of other management decisions.

We deal with the practical implications of this approach elsewhere on ezinearticles, most comprehensively in our article Cultureship - Exploring Corporate Culture and Better Ways. This article is a much broader look at our unique social science approach.

The terms Cosmologising, Double Disconnect, Inert Recursion, Reformativity and Possibilities remain the intellectual property of the author but may be freely used, although not for commercial purposes, subject to acknowledgement.

So, there follows a series of short stories about five Social Science terms. Please make of them what you will:

Cosmologising

"The fetishisation within social research of the metaphysical and the resultant assumptions of truth, respect, trust and usefulness."

Join The Dots And See The World:
A few years ago now I decided that I would like to do a doctorate. I was developing a charity, involved more broadly in social enterprise and reading a lot of interesting stuff. On a commercial front, I felt that my work in organisational culture was stagnating and that it needed jizzing up with new ways of looking and thinking.
I thought the doctorate route could add value and help me develop some better ways. I went to see someone at the university, a gatekeeper to academia.
"You'll need to ask yourself if you are prepared to do all of this. It's not just a question of doing your research and writing it up. There are a lot of 'ologies' to consider - Methodology and Ontology and Epistemology.
And you have to do Ethics."
- Hell, all of these obstacles.....was there an ounce of value-add to be had in any of them?
- I sneaked past the barriers into the academic stockade, fearful whether my joy of knowledge could ever be the same again.

Cosmologising - I was to learn over the next couple of years that there were many requirements to look up into the stars, away from people, in the here and now, in various and changing relationships - and to start joining up the dots into fixed pictures, glittering constellations fixed solidly where others might see only space and movement.

Scales, twins, a Queen, an altar, a chained woman - they're all there if you gaze up away from the world long enough - and join up the dots firmly with enough certainty.

It plays out in various ways, this cosmologising.

Once we have bought into the OEE perma-framework model, the Ontology, Epistemology and Ethics thing, we seek to join stuff up in ever-more fine detail.

I'll tell you another quick story on this.

I was at an academic conference. The presenter was really, really hard at work, joining up the dots. Fat was the new disability. Frameworks begat frameworks, new constellations flew into place. I was talking daily to people concerned about food, weight and dieting and their messy, sometimes contradictory, oft-times emotionally charged and occasionally hilarious daily lives -they just didn't seem to fit somehow with the super-confident dot joining which had me spellbound.

It was beguiling in its revelation by stages, like one of those old Rolf Harris paintings that begin with solid, pre-framing, outline shapes and finally, right at the end, showed the shadowy outline of a person.

More a stylised trick of construction than a portrait.

Then I caught up with myself, realised what was going on - there were a lot of solid, pre-framing outline shapes and finally, right at the end, a shadowy outline of a person:-

Yes, indeed, more a stylised trick of construction than a recognisable picture.

Double Disconnect

"A disconnection between both between the front and the back ends of research and also from the research and a sense of its purpose."

The Best Damn Slipper Distributors Ever

I was at a conference.

A researcher was talking about, I quote, "The critical implications of community interventions." It was a project with, apparently, a number of objectives, although in the telling it all began to unravel rather dramatically. It was if the supposed binding glue of methodology became soggy in the heat of engagement.

It started with the handing out of good, new slippers to older folk as part of a campaign to reduce injuries through falls. There was also a sense of something of a broader, emergent, not fully articulated, social dynamic.

And the guy who was leading it, implementing it, quite quickly became a bit tongue-tied, a bit apologetic, starting to explain that it really wasn't all that much - and in fact wasn't really enough, certainly in terms of grasping, justifying "critical implications".

And so it hung there, flapping somewhat miserably between what I thought was wonderful - I love any social enterprise project which is grounded in honesty and humanity - and the inarticulated "critical implications of community interventions".

The abstracted sociological framework was blocking the goodness, blocking the possibilities. It didn't let the vitality through.

- I've long thought that it doesn't have to be about EITHER Gramsci OR a-hug-and-a-hot-water-bottle.

So the handing out of slippers was great in itself. The speaker recognised that the recipients seemed to value the interest and the contact and that the exercise may have sparked an increased degree of contact between members of that community, or, perhaps, that latent community. There was some talk of maybe helping to get a coffee morning going but we heard no more of it.
Perhaps "critical implications" don't recognise coffee mornings as a possibility.

Perhaps quite a lot of the language we think we have to use simply strangles out the life, sociologises.

That could have been the start of a movement that became The Best Damn Slipper Distributors Ever.

Instead it died in the silent car crash between inarticulable critical implications and the coffee mornings that never happened.

Inert Recursion

"The mono-focus on a narrowed field reflecting back and forth a self-referential and self-justifying theory-data dialogue."

Where Do You Go To My Lovely, When You're Alone In My Head?

I was at the Louvre recently with a group of sociologists. We were looking at the Mona Lisa: telling each other what we saw.

The Marxist scrabbled to uncover cracks in the hegemony of capitalist false consciousness and possibly found a few - but not enough to instil much hope in anyone.

The Freudian searched for latent content and projections - and found plenty.

The Jungian looked for a sense of deepest longing; was that wistfulness the stirrings of a unification of the soul?

The dramatalurgical sociologist identified various acts of self-presentation and identity creation.

The Foucauldian expounded on the power relationships and expert knowledge and their resultant discursive expressions.

The Deconstructionist unpacked the structures of binary opposition that rendered the work of art an act of repression and described how the picture could otherwise, more equitably, have been painted.

The Structural Functionalist saw everything in its appropriate place.

The Frankfurt School Critical Theorist found it a bit predictable of its era and hideously over-commercialised in the modern age.

The Standpoint Feminist saw a flicker of resistance.

The Standpoint Gay Theorist saw an artist corralled into a socially constructed safe role but, again, a flicker of resistance - this time of proto-queering.

The self-professed Post-modernist said there were any number of possibilities but then became surprisingly realist about the tight network of "isms" co-painting the work.

The Ethnomethologist didn't say a lot - he was too busy counting the brushstrokes and checking them against a pantone swatch.

The Grounded Theorist became quite excited to notice that there were also quite a lot of other old paintings that featured women and began to formulate a number of theories concerning the commonality of paintings from certain eras featuring women.

Followers of Pierre Bourdieu balanced the various battles going on over the possession of capital, whilst those more inclined to Robert Putnam observed the exchanges of capital.

The U.S. social researcher couldn't suggest a policy implication straight away - there would need to be a lot of supporting statistical analysis.

Unfortunately, I completely forgot myself. I deserved the cold-stare treatment I received from everyone else in the party. I don't know why I did it. It was one of those things that you blurt out when you forget your sociology. I shudder to think about it now:

"What do you think she's smiling about?"

- Hey, anyway, why should I deserve to venture an opinion at all? - it would seem that I need to get a totalising theory and shunt myself back and forwards towards (and more decidedly away from) people - when you get too dangerously close to spotting detail; that's the point at which to withdraw back into the theory and deal with Reconstruction at a safe distance...

- Does social science (and that includes all the various strands of Management Science) usually see the smile as a smile, true, forced or imagined? Do they notice the effect that the smile might have on the person looking at the picture, be that themselves or another. And do they notice the chain reaction of smiles - do they even want to notice smiles?

I think we could be better at looking for smiles.

Reformativity

"An explicit consideration of the moral purpose of research."

Your Purpose Is Not To Ask Why

I was at a research ethics conference.

Many of the tales and their moral messages revolved around the perceived twin needs to both immerse oneself yet also stand aloof; this within settings morally pre-loaded, such as sexually transmitted disease, women's roles and rights, post-colonialism and self-determination. The keynote anthropologist, however, perhaps with a contrariness that reflected his seniority, spoke at great length about his purported deep involvement and influence in some of the locations he revisited.

I ventured a question:

"What interests me is how we go to places, into the field, with an implicit or an explicit purpose - perhaps, frequently, often both. Should we be thinking more clearly about these purposes and talking about them more openly?"

One reply came:

"I think it is really dangerous if you start going down that road. You have to stay detached and objective in your research."

I was at an academic conference. It was about social enterprise. There were a lot of presentations about the shape and governance structures of social enterprises and about how the shape and governance structures of social enterprises compared and contrasted with the governance structures of private companies.

Earlier that week I had been to see a couple of friends of mine who interact with young people who have spun out of the mainstream educational net and might otherwise carry on spinning until they connect with the Youth Offending networks. They wanted to use my own governance structure documents, which I had got off another friend who runs an alcoholics rehabilitative project, who had got them off another social enterprise. Just ticking the boxes - it wasn't really anything of any core importance to any of us.

I ventured a question: "When I go out and about and mix with social enterprise people, the stuff they tend to talk about is support, inclusion and, yes, love. Why are you putting controlling structures at the heart?"

The responses compositely assembled a picture that these governance issues were the way the conference had evolved - these were the issues they thought had to be focussed on - and that, no, of course no-one would deny that social enterprise had some passionate people involved.

I was at an academic conference. It was about, I quote, "using the concept of 'real lives' in an open way to stimulate debate about how research methodologies and methods in the social sciences and beyond can rise to the challenge of producing knowledge and understandings that are 'vital' and that resonate with complex and multi-dimensional lived realities."

Speaker after speaker delivered real passion about resonance and connection - and that was unequivocally great.

I, for my part, sought a point of clarification with two of them, each along the lines of - "OK, so we are getting living, breathing, crying, laughing, up-close and credible connection. That's got to be good. But can we be more precise, please, about the purpose we have in mind for doing this?"

The responses were:

Firstly - "I'm really serious about this, you know, about resonance and vitality"

And - "No, I wouldn't want to go down that road. There are many different sociologies."

So, I had my answers, such as they came. When it comes to purpose: Don't go there.

To summarise:

We must consider our baggage (though what we then do about it, or what we might be able to do about it, is another day's work): that's Reflexivity.

We might even recognise that by introducing ourselves as self-professed experts into living relationships, we might alter trajectories and connections: that's Performativity.

We could possibly recognise some degrees of explicit and implicit purposes in our engagement with the social via social science: that's Reformativity.....but that's obviously too rich for some.

Possibilitise

"An orientation of research's end point towards openings, not enclosures."

What's Your Story, Then, Sunshine?

I was chatting with my good friend Bradley about Mix-d, his project to ease mixed race into a smoother post-racial place whilst not denying some of its lingering living consequences. He said:

"There are too many brothers and sisters sitting around bleating about 'It gets me', and making claims on the young people. There are too many professionals saying that 'these are the problems'. In fact, everyone's making claims, everyone's looking for problems.

You know, can't we just fuck the disaster narratives off once and for all?

Where are the possibilities for people getting on better in this?"

- And that's what undoing the Miserablism is all about.

There never was a Golden Age and there will never be one.

So that's why we Possibilitise. Horror of horrors, it's explicitly about belief: very real in its effects, just don't expect me to bring some in a jar for you.

Like it or not - and I love it - it's all a metaphor - a story - even though it really matters. And when you start to let the dogmatism go, you give up on your precious Cosmologising, close off your Double Disconnect, see the various viewpoints as alternative vantage points without embracing Inert Recursion, and admit to your own Reformativity; then we let Hope back into social science - and that can feel amazing.

Of course the side effect is that this immediately collapses the sense that social research is comfortably sanitised and sealed against the vulgarities of social activism. But I'm vulgar - and I love people in their all their wonderful vulgarity.

And when it comes to employing the equally wonderful riches of social science to paint ourselves into a dark, paranoid corner, or to turn joyously to face the sunny, possibilities of new relationships, I know where I'll take my chances, every time.

The beauty of this approach, always underpinned with the core human social dynamic of Community, Contribution & Recognition, is that it once-and-for-all the highly artificial concept of a world outside work guided by one set of ethics and an inter-work world guided by the lesser species of business ethics.

Goodness is universal and relies on people in productive and rewarding communities. Period.