5.1. Judgment and power in social learning
At this point, the need and opportunity for the study of social learning within planning, as well as the operational logic and analytical potential of social learning research methodology, should be clear. A gap remains, however, in understanding how we might explicitly judge, rather than merely assume, that the innovation and diffusion repre- sented in any given case of demonstrable social learning is in fact learning of value. This is tied to the persistent and unresolved question of the role of power relations and how to theorise and manage these in planning processes, a question which has dogged the field of planning theory (e.g.Flyvbjerg, 1998). The ability to effect judgment about the value of a change in planning or policy is an artifact of power, much as rationalists may argue that objec- tivity should be the ultimate arbiter. In fact,
Table 3
Forward and backward adaptation of S2’s knowledge codebook
Tacit knowledge Explicit knowledge
Collaboration Linkages Power sharing Indicator based
Forward adaptation
Emphasis on wide citizen engagement
Testing the limits of sustainable
development in time, space and language
Improving local government accountability
Empowering citizens for further engagement
Adoption of projects by opinion leaders
Diffusion through a range of professional networks
Rapid reinvention of projects
Backward adaptation
Emphasis on wide dissemination to decision-makers
Risk of confusing/
losing advocates to better defined pursuits
Carving a unique advisory position for indicator organisations
Insufficient financial and organisational commitment to ongoing monitoring
Trade-off with action toward sustainable development that more directly benefits the disadvantaged
scholars like Randall Albury (1983, p. 36) have proposed that the most ambitious meaning that is realistically possible for ‘objectivity’ in practice is a meaning relative to the group producing it. His definition of objectivity is ‘knowledge produced in conformity with the prevailing standards of scien- tific practice as determined by the current judgments of the scientific community.’ Once again, we find that in the quest for objectivity or rationality, the means by which we define the community making the judgment is critically important in understand- ing the judgment itself. In contentious situations like most planning situations are, ‘power trumps rationality and those with power y transform rationality into rationalisation’ (Bridge, 2005, p. 132).
In pragmatic thought, a great deal of faith is placed in the wisdom of the community of inquirers to organise itself and pursue learning in such a way that democratic progress, and its component parts of more equitable power distribution and better collective judgment, is inevitable over time. For some pragmatists, this faith is a very deep element of their understanding of judgment, power and indeed of the emerging role of philosophy as a whole. Consideration of this final point in the determination of social learning takes us somewhat beyond the realm of that which can be operationa- lised methodologically in specific cases, but is offered here as an aid to thinking about the broader significance and trends of social learning.
Pragmatism provides the argument that power accumulates as it is shared, and that shared power can best be wielded through collaborative decision- making for decisions that improve conditions for the greatest number within the community. This shared vision for decision-making power is critical for achieving policy change away from decisions that benefit the status quo of power relations towards decisions that have benefits for a greater variety of actors, and eventually a ‘consummate’
group of citizens, based on the input of these citizens themselves. According to this view, social institutions exist primarily to give citizens organisa- tions through which to challenge the de facto power of government agencies, and require official govern- ment bodies to incorporate their perspective into decisions. Social institutions, in this way, make: ‘a new sort of individual possible, one who will take nothing as authoritative save free consensus be- tween as diverse a variety of citizens as can possibly be produced’ (Rorty, 1998, p. 30).
Addams (1964, p. 179) visualised the locus of
‘dynamic power’ as ‘residing in the mass of men,’
and, through her pursuit of social democracy, worked for the realisation of this power through the greater democratic education and involvement of all citizens. In her own impassioned words:
We believe that man’s [sic] moral idealism is the constructive force of progress, as it has always been; but because every human being is a creative agent and a possible generator of fine enthu- siasm, we are sceptical of the moral idealism of the few and demand the education of the many, that there may be greater freedom, strength, and subtlety of intercourse and hence an increase of dynamic power. We are not content to include all men in our hopes, but have become conscious that all men are hoping and are part of the same movement of which we are a part.
Despite the pragmatic focus on the idealised scientific community, broadened in topical focus and membership to include all who can take part, as the locus of knowledge generation, decision-making in a democratic context is and will remain a political process, intimately entwined with questions of power. Pragmatic arguments about decision-mak- ing, particularly at a scale to mark the institution of new systems of policy practice, focus on the need and the potential of groundswells of support for new directions based on the persuasiveness of new knowledge transmitted through communities. At the same time, it is difficult to deny that the judgments made to shift or not to shift in beliefs and practice are sure to have a political dimension.
In the analysis of Hall (1993, p. 280):
movement from one paradigm to another will ultimately entail a set of judgments that is more political in tone, and the outcome will depend, not only on the arguments of competing factions, but on their positional advantages within a broader institutional framework, on the ancillary resources they can command in the relevant conflicts, and on exogenous factors affecting the power of one set of actors to impose its paradigm over others.
Pragmatic philosophy’s primary concern in the realm of judgment is
to clarify the moral point of view from which we judge norms and actions whenever we must determine what lies in the equal interest of
everyone and what is equally good for all (Habermas, 2004, p. 32).
The correct moral point of view ascribed to by pragmatists is not the quest for an all-inclusive ‘we’
perspective but particular first person standpoints, with particular life histories and self-understanding, at particular points in time, in dialogue and negotiation. In distinction from other philosophical views of judgment, this equates to a renouncement of potential prescriptive power, in that this repre- sents the belief that ‘there is no answer to such questions that would be independent of the given context and thus would bind all persons in the same way’ (Habermas, 2004, p. 32).
Understanding and developing a sense of humi- lity in the face of our inability to think and judge beyond the bounds of context is central to the pragmatic thought ofRichard Rorty. InPhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and most of his subsequent philosophical writings, Rorty developed the core idea – as a normative view of the potential of human society as well as a prediction for the future role of philosophy – of getting ‘into an intellectual world in which human beings are responsible only to each other’ (Rorty, 2004, p. 4).
Rorty considered this turn towards human reliance on ourselves alone as arbiters of progress and value, should it be successful, to be unprecedented in human history, a change of similar scale to the turn away from a literal interpretation of religious scriptures that happened during the Enlightenment.
Just as the Enlightenment offered human society a new self-image, capable of reasoning with the aid of science and philosophy to make judgments rather than relying on an ineffable God to make them, the
‘new dawn’ that Rorty predicted to be in store for humanity entails abandonment of the ability of pure reason, in the form of science and philosophy, to guide our capacity for judgment. He referred to this new dawn as the beginning of the era of the ‘literary culture’, which makes the age of reason a transi- tional phase beyond which we may be able to reach the full communicative, creative, tolerant, and just potential of our society. It must be a literary culture, in the sense that the processes and products of intellect and reason will be considered no longer as tending towards the revelation of ultimate, complete and final truth – after which, presumably, reason can rest and religion can be completely replaced for the sake of judgment – but instead, and much less
grandly, as contributions to richer narratives, more complete stories, better rhetorical guides to human life, society and understanding. In a literary culture, no single book can be absolutely required reading or hold all the answers although, naturally, we will still be able to distinguish the Great Books as they periodically come into being. Nor could we ever envision our libraries as completely full. The surest means to making proper judgment in a literary culture is not through appeal to a higher being, as in the case of religious culture, nor through appeal to essential beliefs in core truths and laws, as in the case of culture based on reason, but ‘through making the acquaintance of as great a variety of human beings as possible’ (Rorty, 2004, p. 8).
Another less grandiose way to consider this point is to reject the assumption that we can make a clear differentiation between learning- and power-driven explanations of change in planning and policy practice (e.g. Foucault, 1980). Borrowing from Heclo’s definition of social learning as ‘collective puzzlement,’ Hall (1993, p. 289) clarifies that
‘‘‘powering’’ and ‘‘puzzling’’ often go together.’ In contemporary democratic societies, institutions and all other manner of communities combine the intent to learn with the intent to garner and wield power.
Even amongst communities which explicitly abro- gate recourse to power-driven strategies for change in favour of learning, to the extent that they are successful, they will attract the attention of political communities, which will have other ideas about how to use their new ideas to political ends. We found evidence that this occurred in the case of S2 discussed above, in terms of the attention that the community’s knowledge and products garnered from local politicians as well as international groups. Amongst different communities that are avowedly more power-driven than learning-driven, the competition for power itself can motivate certain kinds of social learning. It is difficult to imagine how such groups could exert power in society without at the same time and as part of the same process working to amass power and influence across communities, which means in most cases learning about and articulating ideas for use in persuasion. This is not to suggest that learning- driven and power-driven strategies operate in perfect balance. It does suggest, however, that social learning and power are both operational elements of communities of all types that cannot be isolated or juxtaposed in opposition in any straightforward way.
The larger purpose of social learning research in planning and policy and the means by which to judge and differentiate learning from other types of change can be seen in this light. A research focus on the social learning content and outcomes of innovations in the public sphere corresponds with Rorty’s convictions both that a literary culture is possible and that those who care to investigate can see it emerging in particular cases and contexts.
Thus, social learning research examines the crea- tion, handling, maintenance and traffic of new knowledge codebooks, reflecting particular stories of particular communities working within their given power contexts in search of ‘enlarging the self by becoming acquainted with still more ways of being human’ (Rorty, 2004, p. 13). The notion that pragmatism offers to social learning research, of judging the learning value of an innovation by recourse to the collective experience and sense of an improvement, becomes a promising sign that in this particular community and context, a move has been made towards self-reliance. The more of these codebooks that are created and circulated for interpretation across community boundaries, the more the virtue, value and pride of an emerging literary culture can be considered and shared.
Rather than pretending to offer any insight into ultimate truth, the accumulation of social learning research offers more reasons for conviction about the value of human society as it unfolds and develops:
the more books you read, the more ways of being human you have considered, the more human you become—the less tempted by dreams of an escape from time and chance, the more convinced that we humans have nothing to rely on save one another (Rorty, 2004, p. 13).
This perspective offers a safeguard for the pragmatic emphasis on tolerance, as it provides a subjective means for judgment of the views of some against those of others. The transition to this way of thinking about the task of judgment in human society gradually makes old ways of thinking about judgment quaint and fragmented. As Rorty (2004, p. 18)summarises:
The former philosophers take it as a matter of unquestionable common sense that adding a brick to the edifice of knowledge is a matter of more accurately aligning thought and language with the way things really areyTo abandon the
latter idea, the idea that links philosophy with religion, would mean acknowledging both the ability of scientists to add bricks to the edifice of knowledge and the practical utility of scientific theories for prediction while insisting on the irrelevance of both achievements to searches for redemption.
As it now seems obsolete, publicly indefensible, or ridiculous for western thinkers to think of appealing to God for guidance in making a judgment, so in time should the consideration of science and reason as receptacle of the means for judgment contrast with the rich totality of contextualised experience in community. Instead, what pragmatism would have us emphasise is the value of critical intelligence, continuously shared with others, as our best recourse to making judgments that reflect the values of our communities and contribute to our growth as human beings. This means developing habits of checking narrow individual and within-group inter- ests against the experiences of a diverse variety of people and centring our values and investigations increasingly in the realm of the public good. As James (1899/1977, p. 645) explained in his classic essay, ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings’:
neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he [sic]
stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations.