On the complexity of stability and change

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.

Payment by results: research methods and disciplinary power

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.

Putting the ‘cult’ into culture

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.

Complex, but not quite complex enough II

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. 

Complex, but not quite complex enough

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.

Conforming and resisting. Thinking with and within institutions

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.

To follow a rule

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.