6. Chapter 6
6.1. Conclusion and questions for further social learning research
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.
in 1990s Seattle, and the contents of its codebook of knowledge, explicitly based on the creation of a sustainability indicator project and implicitly link- ing this to goals of collaboration, policy linkages and shared decision-making power. The argument presented here is particularly relevant to planning and policy research in the field of sustainable development. In-depth study of the individual and group motivations and routines working with this concept may help ensure that enduring civic and democratic goals are not lost in the new sustainable development codebooks that cities are creating and adopting (Campbell, 1996).
To conclude from the case study itself, S2’s Civic Panel process was remarkable for its encouragement of collaboration on the selection of a set of sustainability indicators from activists, philanthro- pists, and leaders. This process was effective in generating attachments and cohesion within the group such that it came to best resemble a community of inquirers. It was effective in spread- ing word of S2 within the international sustain- ability movement. It was somewhat less effective at convincing local policy actors not already com- mitted to sustainable development of the idea’s value. The Civic Panel also actively encouraged linkages among different urban issues, using ex- ercises designed to draw out these linkages. Main- taining an open and consensus-based power structure was equally key and enabled S2 to take a political risk in releasing its indicator report based more on social value than technical soundness.
These were all tacit lessons within the S2 codebook.
While diffusion to key opinion leaders was good, uptake of the report and process was not wide- spread across the range of human diversity of the city. Moreover, the generation of new knowledge via the indicators project has been stalled since 1998. These limitations call into question the effectiveness of S2’s work to diffuse outward to create a new system of policy practice.
These results suggest the potential for further social learning-based research into the effects of planning and policy innovations, and innovations towards sustainable development in particular.
Building on Schon’s (1971) notion that new knowledge and plan experimentation takes place from periphery to periphery or periphery to centre, flexible civic networks and community groups like S2 are doing much of the work of policy innovation in this and other areas (Hallsmith, 2003; Norris, 2001; United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development, 1992;van der Gaag, 2002). If S2 itself has stalled or transformed, have new organisa- tions sprung up that are equal to the challenges and processes laid out in the S2 codebook for progress towards urban sustainable development? Case study findings indicate that knowledge has spread via social learning towards a system of policy practice that includes some aspects of S2’s work and understanding, but rejects others, and the value of the different turns that the practice of indicators has taken is disputable at the more transformative end of the social learning theoretical continuum.
Considerable room for improvement in planning scholarship and practice exists, should the role of social learning be better engaged, better understood, and better operationalised in research. If planners and planning theorists are prepared to concede that
‘the diffusion of knowledge could not be reduced to the mere transmission of information’ (Callon, 1995), then they must also recognise the extreme limitations of an approach to planning research and practice that focuses on the capture and replication of ‘best practice.’ Reproducing the explicit steps undertaken in ‘best practice’ scenarios, as is the implied agenda of this kind of planning research, rarely, if ever, results in replicating the result praised as superior practice. In urban governance contexts, the question of effective transfer of better or best practices is complicated by the failure in many cases for building and sharing knowledge to be a recognised and integral part of governance. This creates the doubly encumbered situation in which the complications of generating social learning out of knowledge transfer are poorly understood and the means to connect the value of learning with the realities and demands of governance are lacking (Hordijk & Baud, 2006).
Social learning, examining the context and con- tinuity of knowledge and knowledge-holders, makes all the difference to the transfer of ideas, informa- tion and innovation (Collins, 1974; Latour, 1987).
The contextual components of social learning, however, are very seldom voiced or inscribed as components of a successful new plan or policy in a manner that is accessible to outsiders. This is even more the case when considering innovations that arise not from within the established institutions of power and responsibility but from groups brought together less formally, by a commonality of focus, worldview and values, to form knowledge commu- nities. For these latter types of groups especially, much knowledge and understanding remains
implicit. This goes with the territory, as people with common motivations have much less need to explicitly communicate many important expecta- tions and practices than would be the case among strangers or people with different values or motiva- tions, such as we find in any given local planning department. Compounding the significance of our failure to understand these processes, it is this latter type of group that is most likely to devise and promote valuable innovations for planning practice.
Much of our tacit knowledge, and the unwritten processes, habits and understandings within groups’
knowledge codebooks at any point in time, cannot be completely understood through dissection and analysis and are only amenable to broad, holistic understanding. Most contextual factors remain tacit even when subject to researchers’ investigations, and not by any will to deceive among research participants. That is to say, people hold a great deal of knowledge that is not readily available to share explicitly with others and is only passed along in the interstices of deliberate communication. This does not make this knowledge useless, although it does present researchers with a particular challenge. As Machlup (1980, p. 175)summarised well:
Generation of knowledge without dissemination is socially worthless as well as unascertainable.
Although ‘tacit knowledge’ cannot be counted in any sort of inventory, its creation may still be a part of the production of knowledgey
Aside from this hidden or subconscious compo- nent of our knowledge, there is a major proportion of our knowledge that we are able to make explicit in different configurations, to different ends, de- pending on the context in which we are asked to reproduce it. This complicates the research task but does not warrant the refusal to investigate the processes of social learning as has largely been the case in planning research to date.
The introduction of a methodological approach explicitly for the study of social learning in planning practice and research holds the potential to give voice to many of the contextual factors in innova- tion processes that are essential to the success of key innovations. While innovation uptake, diffusion and institutionalisation is comparatively rare when considered in rational terms, a social learning perspective may enable research to uncover the more subtle and long-term processes of change in a given social system. A corollary benefit of this approach to research is the introduction of different
understandings of success in planning and policy innovation that may decrease the level of inertia in generating innovations in the first place. The costs of innovating are considerable, measured in terms of the sunk costs of organisation and community building as well as codebook writing and in terms of the scarce resource of the time, creativity, intelli- gence, energy and hope invested in them by willing policy actors. By increasing the likelihood that the learning generated during such experiments and innovations will persist over time, even when they are not successful according to the stipulations of the rational model, social learning research should be able to increase the renewability of this resource.
Social learning research also opens up the possibility of new research questions and new approaches to shedding light on existing questions, in planning theory and in social research more broadly. These questions can be considered, broadly, as falling into four categories. First are questions of the continuity and stewardship of knowledge codebooks. What happens to knowledge and innovation when a codebook is abandoned or when there is a lapse in its stewardship? Knowledge codebooks may be lost, if their legend or the community that created them has left them behind or passed them on to members lacking either procedural authority or institutional memory. At this point, how can disagreements about under- standing be solved or knowledge be recaptured?
The second type of question to be considered is the point of diminishing returns or other nefarious results of the codification of knowledge. Over time, a great deal can become of a community of inquirers, from loss of memory to loss of faith in the knowledge once held to, to continued and progressive codification of knowledge. At what point might the specialisation of a learning com- munity become excessive, turning against the ideal of the democratic community as envisioned by pragmatists and towards organisational rigidity, excessive homogeneity and uniformity? What does the habit of knowledge codification in a particular way do to a community’s responsiveness to new information that does not fit the code, particularly over time?
A third type of question in need of consideration is that of the modes of community formation and maintenance. As modes of relationship building and maintenance change generally in a culture, surely the means by which a culture builds and maintains its knowledge communities must change as well.
What difference does it make to the codebooks, habits, procedures and actions of a community whether that community exists in the same place and time, takes the form of an international network that meets only occasionally, or an electronic network that does not meet at all? What are the roles of spectators versus actors in these different forms of community?
Fourth, and most crucially, this approach to planning and policy research enables us to consider questions of how knowledge is and can be better connected to action. Here arise some of the most perpetually confounding questions, such as how what we think and know reflects what we are doing, how we engage in judgment in order to make distinctions between new ideas and better ideas, and how power relations play a role in all this. What happens when our thinking does not reflect our action, or vice versa, and how can communities interact in order to cope with irreducible differences of opinion or judgment? How does the landscape of knowledge communities, their interactions along with the spaces and people in between communities, affect the knowledge that is gained and its alignment with action? These are only a few of the compelling questions that exist at the frontier of social learning research in planning theory and practice.
Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges the financial assistance of a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship to the research that appears in this paper, and the helpful comments of the anonymous reviewers on an earlier draft.
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