| Interpretive systemology is a systems approach asking researchers to explore different interpretations of a given social phenomenon or policy problem. While most systems approaches seek to support systemic intervention for social change, interpretive systemologists are mostly sceptical of interventions because they involve finding accommodations between stakeholders with different perspectives. It is these accommodations that allow people to define mutually-acceptable ways forward for organisations, communities or wider society, but this generally involves closing off critique so action can be taken. Instead of accommodation, interpretive systemologists value critique, and they see accommodation and critique as logically opposed. This thesis acknowledges that, in the context of social policy, accommodation and critique are necessarily in tension, but it challenges the idea that they are logically opposed. Therefore, the thesis reconstructs some of the theory underpinning interpretive systemology so that it becomes meaningful to relate accommodation and critique together in research projects. This reconstruction is achieved by drawing on the sociology of Gillian Rose, who examines what happens when a methodology prioritises critique over all other principles. She explains that this compromises any possibility of a positive normativity (a set of values or a pathway for action that people can commit to) because only negative normativity (overthrowing existing commitments through critique) is valorised. Rose also argues that we can work with concepts in tension (like accommodation and critique, or ethics and law) by acknowledging a ‘broken middle’ between them. The task of social policy is to continually work in the broken middle, knowing that it can never be mended, just navigated in practice when the two concepts in tension present decision makers with difficult dilemmas. This idea allows us to recalibrate the relationship between accommodation and critique in interpretive systemology, and the thesis argues that this recalibration is especially useful for analysing processes of marginalisation and conflict during policy interventions. The reconstructed methodology of interpretive systemology is then applied to a study of the UK Government’s 2014 policy that all schools must teach and uphold Fundamental British Values (FBVs). The existing literature on the FBVs reveals a diversity of perspectives, each grounded in different (mostly undeclared) assumptions about wider society. The methodology supports an explicit examination of the broader societal and institutional contexts that made the 2014 policy meaningful in different ways to various stakeholders: specifically, it enables the exploration of different understandings of how the FBVs generate or undermine the institutional preconditions for practical discourse in a manner that accommodates moral diversity within a liberal institutional framework. Three interpretations are provided: two competing liberal perspectives (realism and multiculturalism) and a somewhat-marginalized religious perspective, drawing on elements of Christian and Islamic theology. Although all three interpretations have some shortcomings in terms of their implications for social policy, the thesis argues that aspects of the theological interpretation offer the best prospect of working in the broken middle between accommodation and critique. This is because it embraces a reflexive notion of transformative accommodation, which signals the need for an emergent accommodation responding to critiques of the bi-partisan liberal mainstream and their explicit or implicit emphasis on transformative constitutionalism. Essentially, the idea of transformative accommodation requires critique as much as accommodation. The insights from the use of the reconstructed interpretive systemology are compared back to the insights in the prior literature on the FBVs to demonstrate the added value that the methodology offers to social policy analysis. |
On Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1698754760335916/permalink/3486020611609313/), Gerald Midgely says:
At long last (after more than a year of waiting for the British Library to archive it), Alistair Smith’s PhD thesis is in the public domain. I was Alistair’s first supervisor, and (in my view) this is an important argument about the relationship between accommodation (stakeholders agreeing ways forward for social policy) and critique (questioning the assumptions underpinning such policies). Some systems theorists say that accommodation and critique are fundamentally contradictory, and that we are faced with a choice of either making major compromises on the social policies we might want, in order to achieve accommodations and make a difference in practice, or preserving our critical faculties, but being doomed to a ‘tragedy of enlightenment’ – believing we have better ideas than the mainstream, but always being marginalized from that mainstream. Alistair shows that, by drawing on the sociology of Gillian Rose, we can recognize the tension between accommodation and critique, but still use both ideals in our systemic interventions. For anyone aspiring to a critical approach to systems change, but who fears being marginalized, this is important. Likewise, for anyone facilitating consultancies that always seem to prioritize short-term accommodations over long-term critique, this is good news: you really don’t have to abandon critical thinking when seeking accommodations. Indeed, one of the welcome challenges of systemic intervention is to facilitate critique in ways that still move towards accommodation and action.
You can download the PhD thesis from the ETHOS web site:
Systems Community of Inquiry 