Social learning in planning: Seattle’s sustainable development codebooks

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PROGRESS IN PLANNING

Progress in Planning 69 (2008) 1–40

Social learning in planning: Seattle’s sustainable development codebooks

Meg Holden

Urban Studies and Geography, Simon Fraser University Vancouver, 3rd Floor, 515 W. Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6B 5K3

Abstract

This paper investigates the power and potential of studying planning and policy innovations from a social learning standpoint. Social learning is an important but under-investigated feature of planning and policy processes, and a particularly critical goal in the adaptation of innovations. While often cited as part of the desired outcomes of planning and policy processes, social learning is rarely investigated from a process-based perspective able to reveal how and why it occurs to different degrees in different contexts. At the same time, such process-based understanding is precisely what is needed by theorists and practitioners alike in order to improve the impact factor of plan and policy changes, to improve the transferability of ‘best practices,’ and to bolster public support and engagement in public affairs. This kind of research requires a new, comprehensive theory of social learning within planning and policy contexts as well as new analytical tools for studying social learning processes in particular cases.

Review of the concept of social learning in this paper begins in the policy literature, where key definitional debates are drawn out. From here, the literature on social learning is examined comparatively at three points along a continuum from the most conservative to the most radical views of the process. At the conservative end of the spectrum, organisational learning theory offers a view of incremental social learning within functional groups in a competitive context. Moving towards a more optimistic view of the transformative potential of social learning, communicative action theory considers social learning within a dialogic context among communities of practice. At the most radical end of the spectrum, the philosophy of pragmatism, often drawn upon in planning and policy theory, offers a thorough argument for the role and value of social learning within democratic society, and its potential to transform individuals, groups and practices. These different approaches to social learning represent a field of debate in need of greater engagement and testing in order to be specified and resolved.

Integrating insights from the different perspectives on social learning, a methodology is developed to guide case study research into the processes and outcomes of social learning in policy and planning innovations. The proposed methodology includes four necessary steps of investigation: identify the community of inquirers as unit of analysis; investigate tacit knowledge by studying group routines; study processes of change within communities and knowledge codebooks; and search for the diffusion of knowledge to a system of policy practice. The utility of this methodology is exempliﬁed in the case of an innovation in Seattle, Washington – the civic network Sustainable Seattle’s sustainable community indicators project.

The outcomes of this case study as well as directions from the literature are taken to recommend further investigation and application of social learning research methodology. The role of judgment and power in the diffusion and adoption of new directions in planning and policy are also considered, both for the challenges that they pose to a social learning focus www.elsevier.com/locate/pplann

doi:10.1016/j.progress.2007.12.001

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and for the complementarity of their effects on change processes in real-world contexts. The uptake and endurance of innovations in planning and policy depend not only on their rational wisdom or utility, but on contingencies in interpretation and understanding of how and why the innovation works and for whom, passed in both explicit and tacit forms within and between different policy actor communities. Evidence of social learning in communities working on innovations can be found through the investigation of each community’s knowledge codebook over time. This new way of thinking about planning and policy innovations opens up a range of new research questions, considered at the end of this paper.

Keywords:Social learning; Organisational learning; Communicative action; Collaboration; Pragmatism; Seattle; Washington; Sustainable Seattle; Sustainable development; Case study research

Contents

1. Chapter 1. . . 2

1.1. Introduction . . . 2

2. Chapter 2. . . 5

2.1. How do policy actors learn?. . . 5

2.2. Comparative approaches to social learning in planning and policy research . . . 8

2.2.1. Organisational learning . . . 8

2.2.2. Communicative action theory . . . 10

2.2.3. Pragmatism as planning theory . . . 11

3. Chapter 3. . . 15

3.1. Towards a methodology for assessing social learning . . . 15

4. Chapter 4. . . 20

4.1. Social learning in the case of Sustainable Seattle . . . 20

4.2. Steps in social learning research in the case of Sustainable Seattle . . . 21

4.2.1. Identify communities as units of analysis . . . 21

4.2.2. Investigate tacit knowledge by studying group routines . . . 23

4.2.3. Study processes of change within communities and codebooks . . . 26

4.2.4. Search for the diffusion of knowledge to a system of policy practice . . . 29

5. Chapter 5. . . 31

5.1. Judgment and power in social learning . . . 31

6. Chapter 6. . . 34

6.1. Conclusion and questions for further social learning research . . . 34

Acknowledgement. . . 37

References. . . 37

Biography. . . 40

1. Chapter 1

1.1. Introduction

How do communities learn? The assumption of the possibility of learning is central to planning theory and practice, in that all planning presumes that either the physical arrangement of space, or social interactions within space, or both, can be changed with some purpose in mind. Change would hold no value, after all, if planners did not believe that there is at least a fair chance that changes can be purposeful and that changes can be improvements – that we can and do learn from past

experiences, patterns and ideas and that we can translate this learning into new plans. It is a matter of common understanding, in planning and public practice as in any professional ﬁeld, that with time comes wisdom; but good training and education can substitute for time, as can experience, and perhaps even natural ability. We have remarkably few analytical tools to assess when and how learning is taking place in different contexts and amongst different professional and public communities, however. And what about processes that may actually erase pre-existing learning? In failing to understand how learning processes function in the public realm, planners and policy makers miss an

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important means to connect with communities and members of the public to push for desired ends.

As a specific, collective form of learning, social learning has special significance in planning and policy fields. Individuals and communities have diverse, partial, and sometimes irreconcilable perspectives on public problems and solutions. Learn- ing together where these partial views intersect, diverge, and may reach compromise may be the only democratically legitimate means of devising socially reliable solutions to many contemporary planning and policy problems. Without understanding and indeed promoting social learning,

‘there is little hope of reasoned resolution of the clash of inevitably partial ideologies or rationalities’

(Dryzek, 1990, p. 122).

Despite the centrality of the expectation of learning to planning progress, planning theory does not have a coherent theory of learning within planning processes, referred to most broadly as social learning. When planning and policy theorists do consider social learning, or knowledge development more generally, the goal is usually to understand policy transfer or the shaping of public agendas, both of which are outcomes, rather than the shaping of processes and procedures in the work of planning and policy. In this vein, the pursuit of

‘best practices’ has become particularly popular in recent times (Bulkeley, 2006; Rashman & Hartley, 2002). Rarely do researchers consider the full spectrum of contextual factors that can make or break the ability of a given ‘best practice’ to transfer usefully to a different setting. Hall (1993, p. 276) makes the point that although it appears frequently in the literature, the concept of social learning ‘has been presented in only the sketchiest of terms y those who use the concept have yet to develop an overarching image of the way in which ideas ﬁt into the policy process or a clear conception of how these ideas might change.’ Further, our knowledge of how learning occurs in the practice of planning remains limited by a lack of methodological tools and approaches for studying this learning.

With roots in the rational model, policy and planning research have a reputation for being much too sanguine about the directness of information ﬂow and uptake in the policy process (Innes, 1990;

Rittel & Webber, 1973; Simon, 1957). In aspiring faithfully to rationality, mainstream policy and planning analysis may be efﬁcient, but trade off any degree of realism in addressing and responding meaningfully to complex social problems. It is

therefore not a stretch to say, along with Dryzek (1990), that narrow, instrumental rationality in policy and planning research dominates at the expense of democracy. What democracy can mean to planning and policy research is the existence and adequate consideration of the necessary social institutions and habits of interaction to check facts and perceptions, moderate biases, experiment with different approaches, and reﬁne and implement solutions. Thus, key to the democratic practice of planning and policy research and to socially satisfactory outcomes of this research is a commitment to social learning, or ‘learning achieved through the practice of collective enquiry and public deliberation’ over public goals (Minteer, 2002, p. 45).

Friedmann (1987) situates social learning as a theory of knowledge about planning that emerged after the more traditional social reform and social mobilisation traditions and in part as an adaptation of the conservative policy analysis tradition. Social learning, from its origins, appealed to and was adopted by both conservative organisational theorists like Donald Scho¨n and Chris Argyris and revolutionary theorists like John Dewey, Lewis Mumford, and Edgar Dunn.¹ As social learning language and argument has branched and spread, important debates have emerged over the use and meaning of social learning and of learning in planning and policy processes more generally.

The premise of social learning ascribed to here is that the process of obtaining, interpreting, and acting upon information in planning for a city’s future is much less like a computer algorithm than it is an embedded collective reasoning and learning process towards public ends – and planning and policy researchers have a lot to learn about such learning processes. As part of a learning process, certainly decisions depend on good information, but they also depend on contingencies in information transfer between those who create or collect the information and those who have the power to interpret it, not to mention attitudes and predis- positions towards learning itself among those in power positions.

This paper works towards a process-based theory of social learning for planning and a translation of this theory into a methodological approach that will enable planning researchers to investigate processes of social learning more rigorously in a broad range

1Friedmann (1987)additionally includes Mao Tse-Tung in this group.

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of planning and policy contexts. The theoretical contributions that will be drawn upon, juxtaposed and comparatively assessed come from policy theory, organisational and management theory, communicative action theory, and pragmatic philosophy. Our starting point for investigating social learning is policy theory’s development of the concept via policy learning. This starting point presents us with three key debates that have pervaded the study of social learning in other disciplinary contexts as well, namely, whether social learning is deliberate or subconscious, what groups are best suited for engaging in social learning, and the likelihood of social learning to lead to incremental versus larger scale change. From here, we will present and compare the perspectives on social learning offered by organisational and management theory, communicative action theory, and pragmatic theory. Each introduces a somewhat different understanding of social learning, including how to know when it has or has not occurred, whether social learning can result in transformation or only incremental change, and the nature of the group that engages in social learning. To understand the range of approaches to social learning available to planning theory, we will situate these key deﬁni- tional differences on a continuum, whereby organisational theory provides the most conservative, and pragmatism the most transformative, conception of the potential within social learning for innovation, learning, and diffusion of this learning to create new systems of policy practice.

Next, to tackle the question of how to think about and investigate the importance of social learning in planning and policy processes, a series of methodological steps is developed and presented for identifying and researching social learning. They are to identify communities as unit of analysis, to investigate tacit as well as explicit knowledge held by communities, to study processes of change in both community membership and knowledge codebook contents, and to search for evidence of the diffusion of knowledge to a new system of policy practice. The value of this methodology will be exempliﬁed in the test case study of a policy innovation made by a citizen’s network in Seattle, Washington. Though not persuasive as a case of rational policy innovation and uptake, the Seattle case exempliﬁes potential lasting social learning effects, making social learning policy research an appropriate option for the study of leading edge change in policy. In examining the case of innova-

tions in urban policy towards sustainable development,²in particular, we demonstrate the power and potential of evaluating and researching policy experiments and innovations as social learning processes. At the same time, this type of investigation provides the ground on which to advance social learning as a critical overlooked function of the policy professions.

The challenge that social learning attempts to address is how democratically engaged communities may engage productively and effectively with large- scale social problems that require the involvement of multiple institutions, expert knowledges and political will to articulate, debate and ultimately solve. Social learning can thus be viewed as a public, collective process of innovation, communication and common understanding plus value-based judgment that learning has occurred. Thus, for a planning or policy innovation to be incorporated into practice via social learning, the communication and common understanding of an innovation must be proven to occur and the innovation must be proven to have value in its context. The ﬁrst step in analysing social learning is grasping the mechanisms for diffusion, communication, and common understanding of innovations. The following step is to differentiate actual learning from simple diffusion by identifying the judgment that determines an innovation to be of value. In sum, the two questions posed in an investigation of social learning are:

when is a change enduring? and when is a change of value?

The basic insight in articulating planning and policy processes via social learning methodology is that new information is learned within communities through a process of coding that is not transparent.

Understanding this process can be aided by distin- guishing between tacit and explicit knowledge and through appeal to the metaphor of the knowledge codebook. Information can be taken up as knowledge of one of two types: articulated or codiﬁed kinds and unarticulated or tacit kinds.

Whereas explicit knowledge is that part of what we know that can be recorded and passed on in ways that make it amenable to transfer to different contexts and to people not involved in the initial

2For the purposes of this paper, we will use the deﬁnition of sustainable development adopted by theWorld Commission on Environment and Development (1987): ‘development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’

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construction of the knowledge, tacit knowledge is that portion of knowledge that is much more difﬁcult, or even impossible, to record, transfer, or otherwise communicate to the uninitiated.

Systems of knowledge in various themes, such as sustainable development, can be considered to form sets of ‘codebooks’ of theories, origin-stories, practices and performance measures, and processes of change. Knowledge codebooks, in this usage, are considered in the sense ofPolanyi’s (1967) original discussion of the nature of tacit knowledge, as the library of ideas, information, and other sources shared by members of a community as a common motivator and reference, as well as the lexicon that enables group members to interpret these sources in a way that is mutually understandable and that advances their purpose. All communities can be considered to hold a knowledge codebook in common, and this knowledge codebook will contain both explicit and tacit knowledge, to the extent that the latter can be codiﬁed or translated into code with the assistance of a kind of lexicon or legend.

This metaphor is complicated by the fact that the tacit knowledge of, for example, sustainable development, exists not in the codebooks themselves but in the patterns of ﬁngerprints that have – and have not – been laid on the codebooks. Only those who know the code are in any position to use the codebook to best advantage. In other words, knowledge depends on the communities that keep it, who know more than they can tell (Polanyi, 1967). In this paper, we differentiate between three key types of communities in terms of the different nature of their construction and handling of knowledge codebooks and their propensity to generate new knowledge through their organisation and operations.

The study of social learning via community types and knowledge codebooks suggests an afﬁnity with semiotic methodology, the study of texts as sets of signs, objects and interpretants – and how these three elements interact without completely corre- sponding to one another beyond particular contexts. In semiotic theory, a code is a device that connects signs and their objects, as well as a rule for interpretants in the derivation of signs to represent particular objects (Eco, 1976). This borrowing from semiotics is entirely consistent with the theoretical approach to be developed in this paper, given the important role for the philosophy of pragmatism in the argument for the study of social learning and the importance of early pragmatist Charles S. Peirce to

the development of the ﬁeld of semiotics. It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve deeper into semiotic theory and methodology than the explica- tion of the notions of the community of inquirers and the knowledge codebook, however.³

Policies and plans leave a trail that communities travel; social learning in planning and policy research picks up on this trail to better understand the social nature of knowledge development, use and learning. Understanding how methodologically to integrate consideration of social learning into planning and policy practice and research promises to provide the ﬁeld with a richer understanding of changes over time, how to distinguish between valuable and detrimental change, and how to hold on to changes that represent beneﬁcial learning.

2. Chapter 2

2.1. How do policy actors learn?

The difference between simple change and learning that can endure, not to mention be judged as an improvement, is one that planning and policy theorists have long sought to resolve. In seeking a renewed approach to this question, we are interested here in the kind of learning that can be said to occur amongst planning and policy actors. We are referring to policy actors in the sense of ‘action’

detailed by HannahArendt (1958)as that uniquely human faculty, as distinct from labour and work, which deﬁnes how people relate directly with one another, establish our identities, innovate and accomplish the unexpected. ‘Action’ is the realm of politics and also of the polis, the human community that retains the memory and continuity of actions by carrying them forward through dialogue and other means. So, in seeking an understanding of social learning among policy actors, our interest lies in the learning that can occur within communities engaged in action in democratic societies, regardless of the type of work or labour individuals within the communities do, their position, status, or expertise.

To begin this chapter, we outline three key debates that have been central to the development and use of social learning within policy and planning contexts since the concept’s initial

3Readers interested in pursuing the ties between pragmatism, social learning and semiotics further might begin with Liszka (1996).

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popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. These debates are: the occurrence of social learning as accidental or deliberate over time; the role of different groups in learning, and particularly of the government versus the public, and the path and pace of social learning as either step-wise and gradual or comprehensive and deep reaching. Taking this understanding as our point of departure, we then construct a new synthesis of social learning theory for planning, drawing from current literature in organisational theory, communicative action theory, and pragmatic theory, to build a comparative framework.

The concept of social learning can be traced in the policy literature toHirschman (1963),Dunn (1971), andHeclo (1974). Social learning theory evolved as an alternative to the rational policy model with a focus on politics, institutions and ideas as explana- tory factors for and potential antidotes to the failure of most policies to entail long-term observable change (Dunn, 1971; Friedmann, 1973; Talen, 1996). Heclo (1974, p. 306) described the policy learning process as ‘a relatively enduring alteration in behaviour that results from experience; usually this alteration is conceptualised as a change in response made in reaction to some perceived stimulus.’ Emphasis on learning mitigates the focus on power relations as primary determinants of policy outcomes.Heclo (1974, p. 305), for instance, argued that social policy changes not just because of power relations but also because of inquiry driven by uncertainty. In his classic statement: ‘Policy- making is a form of collective puzzlement on society’s behalf.’ Models of policy learning have focused on agenda-setting (Kingdon, 1984), con- vergence and collisions among policy networks (Hoberg & Morawski, 1997), the development of domain-based policy monopolies (Baumgartner &

Jones, 1993) and long-term advocacy coalitions (Sabatier, 1988). That is, policy research in social learning has typically focused on unexpected effects of the social and human-centred nature of policy change rather than on the motivations for, process and outcomes of learning per se. Speciﬁc research into how to recognise and differentiate processes, types and outcomes of policy and social learning is rare (Birchmayer & Weiss, 2000).

If the rational model is thought of as postulating that plans and policies change based on expert analysis that speaks truth to power, social learning introduces the possibility that ideas based on experiences, and their pathways to assimilation by

both expert and non-expert actors in public processes, may also bring about changes. The original policy theorists of social learning differed in their position towards learning as accidental or deliberate, a distinction that becomes critical when considering the encoding of sequential learning stages in a community over time. Whereas Heclo conceived of policy learning as a mostly tacit or subconscious activity, others have called it a deliberate process of adjustment – or codiﬁcation of knowledge. To Hirschman, in his assessment of innovations and implementation processes in development, policies cannot be engineered and planned out in advance; they must change in an incremental way, with policy actors experimenting and reevalu- ating along the way, taking advantage of situations and addressing contingent problems as they arise.

Hirschman (1971, p. 204)believed that development would proceed only in those places where motives for development already exist and development reforms are likely to be implemented, even in the absence of external aid. Change therefore takes place not as a result of rational planned processes but as a result of a combination of factors such as local energy, knowledge, and incremental implementation through linkages to local problems and opportunities. Clearly, this is a description of a learning process that is at least partly deliberate.

Sabel (1994) takes social learning theory in the direction of learning by monitoring, a deliberate process. This introduces to social learning the important notion of the community doing the learning and its key characteristics. He demonstrates how benchmarking across innovative groups encourages learning and ultimately better results. He examines, as did Hirschman, how collective-action problems are solved at the micro-level and how change takes place from that starting point in order to posit a more realistic theory of what governments might do to promote existing public processes that work.

Sabel in particular examines how trust and social capital are developed in collective-action groups attempting to solve problems by implementing a solution that monitors progress and how benchmarking creates a competitive stimulus for change.

Strong trust and social capital create a situation in which members of a group can readily see the interdependence of their situations and future and then can engage productively in problem-solving discussion, action and monitoring of their efforts in a continuous learning, cooperative and stabilising process.

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Related to this point, another key part of the debate about social learning has centred on who could be expected to learn, to accumulate lessons and to change public decisions on that basis. The traditional view on this debate has been that this type of learning was the exclusive terrain of central government and that neither the public at large nor even the cadre of analysts and bureaucrats em- ployed by government could be expected to have sufﬁcient interest or scope of understanding for social learning in public affairs (Hall, 1993).

Systems theorists, like Churchman (1968), took exception to the concept of government as expert, to be accorded the same kind of exclusive expectation of knowledge generation as a laboratory scientist.

This was due to the nature of human society as a large, complex system. To improve planning, then, the role of the public was critically important, such that it became government’s duty to convince members of the public of the societal need for their collective inquiry, insight, and creativity in order to solve public problems:

The so-called experts know less about the planning of human society than does the public, because in each case the expert brings in a thoroughly biased viewpoint; on account of his expertise he is forced to concentrate on only one aspect of the living system. There seems to be no successful way in which the expert of large-scale systems can become a ‘generalist’yThe under- lying ethical principle here is that every man ought to feel that by his nature he can acquire knowledge about how society should be designed (Churchman, 1968, pp. 83–84).

Democratic method in planning and policy analysis is based in collective deliberation and self- government through expanding spheres of inclusion, rather than clear divisions between those with the power and expertise to analyse policy and make decisions and those who must accept and live by the decisions.Sabel (1994, p. 272)refers to the challenge as that of ‘turning, amidst the ﬂux of economic life, the pragmatic trick of simultaneously deﬁning a collective-action problem and a collective actor with a natural interest in addressing it.’ Along the same lines, Schon (1971, pp. 177–178) disposed of the idea of government as ‘experimenter for the nation’

that works to identify the correct solution to a policy problem and then to pull society at large along in its adoption. Instead, he saw government’s responsibility to be in the detection of policy

innovations and changes taking place in the

‘periphery,’ by which he meant non-government groups, to pay explicit attention to the emergence of new and popular ideas, and to advance broader adoption of the innovation by induction. The opportunity for learning by decision-makers, therefore, lies primarily in discovering innovations taking place at the periphery, not in developing innovations from scratch at the centre. The movement of social learning is from periphery to periphery, or periphery to centre, with government functioning best as facilitator of this learning rather than as exclusive inquisitor or trainer.

As a third debate within theories of social learning, early theorists and practitioners did not necessarily consider it possible for social learning to include changes to core beliefs (Bennett & Howlett, 1992). Most espoused an ‘unbalanced’ and step- wise, as opposed to balanced and comprehensive, approach to policy change. Attempts to do every- thing at once rather than in a piecemeal way would increase the chance of failure of the entire endea- vour. Learning through experience and mutually adjusting practices in order to respond to new and unperceived conditions was the surest path to effectiveness. Those closest to direct experience of conditions were thus in the best position to learn from and improve upon them: ‘the much maligned

‘‘hard way’’ of learning by experiencing the problems at close range may often be the most expeditious and least expensive way to a solution’

(Hirschman & Lindblom, 1969, p. 364).

Innes (1990), on the contrary, in her interpretive/

interactive model of the policy process, considers large impacts and shifts in core beliefs possible results of research and data dissemination. The interpretive model of policy making includes a broader view of what counts as knowledge, such as stories, myths, and social constructions. Knowledge and action both are simultaneously technical and political creations, with scientiﬁc measures and humanistic meanings. Their integration does not happen rationally, however, and the research results that have had impact still may not ﬁgure largely in eventual decisions.

This debate is linked to the question of how closely the practice of social learning compares with an idealised notion of scientiﬁc inquiry. The accumulation of scientiﬁc knowledge, of course, is primarily a step-wise matter, with paradigm change or changes to core beliefs occurring very rarely, usually over a span of generations (Kuhn, 1962).

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Incrementalists among social learning theorists, then, would seem to support the notion of social learning communities as analogous to scientiﬁc communities, whereas this view would have less traction amongst those who take a more interpretive approach, like Innes. To Lee (1993, p. 178), who employs social learning theory in policy analysis, social learning is primarily tacit and unintentional, including ‘much that could not be described step by step as learning but only the fashioning of dimly seen compromises under the press of circumstance.’

Building a quasi-experimental frame for designing and testing new innovations can help level and clarify some of this confusion and dimness. Policy experiments modelled after the scientiﬁc method allow analysts to design methods with explicit information requirements in mind, collect and analyse information in order to compare expectations with results, learn from their comparisons, correct errors, improve on imperfect understanding, and change actions and plans (Campbell, 1969).

This quasi-experimental frame creates favourable conditions for the development of a trail of the processes and results of different attempts, which if followed carefully, is likely to result in learning.

2.2. Comparative approaches to social learning in planning and policy research

Different theories of learning focus differently on the necessary criteria of successful social learning. In Table 1, key characteristics of the approaches of organisational learning, communicative action, and pragmatism, as afﬁliated theories of social learning in planning theory, are outlined in relation to each of the three debates described above: the accumulation of learning over time, as either accidental or deliberate; the differential role of different actors, particularly experts and non-experts; and the pace of learning as core level or incremental. The landscape of planning theory is diverse, but these three different theoretical perspectives can be considered to exist along a continuum of social learning-based approaches to change. At the organisational learning end of the continuum, social learning is theorised as a force operating within existing institutions, while at the end of the continuum occupied by pragmatism, new structures and conceptualisations of democratic society at large are proposed to better serve the need for social learning. In between these poles, communicative action models of social learning operate. Table 1

summarises key aspects of each of these three perspectives, which are described and compared in more detail below.

2.2.1. Organisational learning

Organisational learning is an approach to understanding catalytic change that has been applied primarily to businesses and production practices – the quest is for the learning organisation (Senge et al., 1999). Learning organisations use a team- based structure while supporting team members’

desires for gains as individuals, and work to achieve a shared vision and understanding of the world, most commonly drawing from systems theory. They share characteristics such as openness to question- ing, dialogue, risk taking and experimentation based on new information, inclusiveness and empowerment, and ﬂexibility within a sense of community (Braham, 1995). Organisational learning research and practices look primarily within a given organisation for learning, although researchers and consultants sometimes reach outside the organisation itself. Organisational learning within an organisation is often demonstrated by team- building exercises and friendly competition across functional work groups within an organisation, offering and recognising efforts towards self- improvement and expansion of the expertise of individuals in order to grow the strength and resilience of the organisation as a whole. An example of the latter kind of organisational learning, learning across organisations, is what is known as the ‘external challenge: peers from outside the organisation conduct a review by examining key documents and asking challenging questions of staff and stakeholders. The results are then discussed with management’ (Auluck, 2002, p. 114). This approach enables organisations to beneﬁt from external interpretation of what others think of them and to hear their ideas about how they might improve.

Molnar and Mulvhill (2003)propose a new term, sustainability-focused organisational learning (SFOL), to describe a trend in the private sector to engage at the same time with a sustainable development approach and with organisational learning techniques for change adoption. From their case study results, it is clear that the most committed businesses are pursuing organisational learning towards sustainability with a view that extends beyond corporate boundaries. Programmes include, for example, employee exchange programmes with

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non-profit organisations and educating workers through the supply chain on sustainable systems thinking and action. However, the radical learning potential of the SFOL model remains limited by the profit-seeking nature of business: ‘Businesses must not sacrifice competitiveness and financial performance if they wish to maintain a leadership role in the collective enterprise of sustainability’ (Molnar &

Mulvhill, 2003, p. 174).

A way out of the limitations of the organisational learning approach imposed by its focus on the corporate sector for applicability to public issues has been proposed: expand the notion of return-on- investment to include efﬁcient use of tax dollars.

The learning organisation has been thus posited as an ideal for public service organisations as part of

the move to align government with good business practices (Auluck, 2002; Oakland, 1999). The applicability of the model to public service has been debated, particularly in the UK (Edmonstone, 1990;

Rashman & Hartley, 2002; Smith & Taylor, 2000;

Wallace, 1997). While transparency, accountability and efﬁciency in government are goals shared with those of learning organisations in the private sector, the direct application of organisational learning theory and practice to the public sector seems to limit our understanding of political learning types within government rather than expand the concept of the learning organisation. In sum, organisational learning theory offers an entry point to social learning in both research and practice at the most conservative and conceptually bounded end of the

Table 1

Comparative approaches to assessing effective change in policy research Change effectiveness

criteria

Organisational learning Communicative action Pragmatism

Deliberate or accidental learning, towards acceptance in diverse social system

(L)Predominantly within- group learning

(L)Private sector

development limits range of learning outcomes to maintain proﬁtability

(+)A variety of techniques for engagement and representation allow participation in line with different capabilities

(+)Efforts to meet individual interests produce interdependency and collective interest

(L)Predominantly beneﬁts inclusion of community leaders

(+)The success of socialised experience draws more people into democratic negotiations

(+)In the long run, all people will recognise the beneﬁts of

participation and their own abilities to participate

Differential roles in learning, expert/public relationships

(+)Team building replaces typical hierarchical relationships

(L)Standing for participation depends on internal deﬁnition of members and stakeholders

(+)Enables experts to learn about public preferences

(+)Aids public recommendations based on understanding a larger context

(L)Blurring boundaries between formal government and public can also compromise democratic processes

(+)Practical wisdom can be cultured in every person

(+)Roles differ based on division of labour rather than power or class

(+)Ongoing democratic negotiations gravitate towards consensus

Pace of change, incremental versus core

(+)Change can be pursued within institutional structures and pathways

(L)Well entrenched decision-making institutions resist change

(+)Large-scale shifts in belief are possible results

(L)Legal requirements can prevent new approaches to engagement and decision-making

(L)Many issues are not amenable to resolution via collaborative participation

(L)Lack of collaborative skills and opportunities for dialogue plus time and stafﬁng costs limit ﬂexibility

(+)Dialogue to ﬁnd knowledge and change is needed to answer problems at particular times

(L)Limited by the perception that to share power and experience is to lose power oneself

(+) Theorised contribution of the approach to social learning and (L) recognised limitation to social learning application within the approach.

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continuum but stops short of offering great insight into learning in the public domain.

2.2.2. Communicative action theory

In comparison with organisational learning, the communicative action model of policy making takes a broader view of what counts as knowledge, including stories, myths and social constructions and of who should be involved in the team of learners. Embedded in this view is a more nuanced understanding of the tacit dimension of learning – the notion that knowledge influences policy without being used overtly (Innes, 1990). Recently, this model has been reframed as the collaborative participation theory of planning (Booher & Innes, 2002;Innes & Booher, 1999, 2004). This approach fits squarely within the communicative turn in planning theory identified by Healy (1996) with debts toHabermas (1996)andForester (1993).

Communicative action is a multi-dimensional and evolutionary model of practice in which citizens, organised interests, and professionals in public and private sectors engage and interact in a common framework that exists parallel to and cognisant of each actor’s independent actions. The model intends to be inclusive, future-oriented, adaptive, and self- organising in content and membership, seeking to challenge the status quo and to ‘build shared knowledge and heuristics for collaborative action’

(Innes & Booher, 2004, p. 422).

This model presents a particular reformulation of the expert–public divide. Whatever their formal, direct effects on decisions, products of professional research inﬂuence planning and action by framing policy problems, creating boundaries on options and setting the terms of public discussion, even in cases where these are left unstated. According to Innes (1990, p. 35), knowledge.

Inﬂuences as it becomes internalized in the shared understanding of a communityy more often as part of taken-for-granted assumptions, which frame problems and put bounds on the solution options, than as a result of explicit information processing in relation to policy questions.

The type of knowledge generated by different information is dependent, in part, on the nature of the information itself (Hicks, 1995; Senker, 1995).

Knowledge and action both are simultaneously technical and political creations, with scientiﬁc measures and humanistic meanings. Similarly, to

Habermas (1996), information may lead to instrumental policy change through ﬁrst changing people’s beliefs, relationships, degree of consent, expectations, trust, ambitions, and/or mode of attention.

Thus, the most rigorous technical data product may not lead to any instrumental action if its presentation fails to change people’s beliefs, win people’s consent, garner people’s trust, or convince people to take it seriously. At the same time, the data product may serve as a form of communicative action, by inﬂuencing political relationships, setting up expectations, shaping understandings, and/or limiting or expanding further actions (Forester, 1993).

When compared with organisational theory, the communicative action model offers a more radical perspective on the prospect for wholesale change emerging from innovation processes. Early theorists and practitioners of social learning did not necessarily consider it possible for social learning to include changes to core beliefs (Bennett & Howlett, 1992) and the organisational learning perspective suggests that learning is most likely when it is in keeping with existing organisational norms and structures. By contrast, the communicative action model considers large impacts and shifts in core beliefs to be possible results of public planning processes. These shifts happen due to ‘the transformative power of dialogue’:

When an inclusive set of citizens can engage in authentic dialogue where all are equally empow- ered and informed and where they listen and are heard respectfully and when they are working on a task of interest to all, following their own agendas, everyone is changed. They learn new ideas and they often come to recognize others’

views as legitimate. They can work through issues and create shared meanings as well as the possibility of joint action (Innes & Booher, 2004, p. 428).

Communities’ ability to create ideal dialogue conditions is a hotly debated issue in planning and social theory. Despite the many forces working against transformative dialogue in communities, Castells (1997) argues for its potential based on his notion of three distinct types of identity that people take at various times: legitimising, resistance, and project identities. While the legitimising identity tends to be along the lines of the dominant culture of the nation-state by default, resistance identities (e.g. Black Panthers) are regularly formed by

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communities in opposition to these dominant identities, and project identities (e.g. sustainability, environmentalism, altermondialisme) create new social identities beyond the currently possible and experienced. Moving through the list thus enables increasing degrees of empowerment and self-deter- mination among democratic communities. Experi- encing the deﬁnition and maintenance of these different types of identities also makes possible different types of communication, and the success of communication attempts to create feelings of solidarity and common purpose, or to improve one’s own ideas, can reinforce willingness to deﬁne one’s identity in line with the communicative participation form. Thus can legitimising identities give way to resistance identities, and resistance identities to project identities, gravitating towards successful social movements with mainstream recognition and with the concerted power to achieve and maintain authentic dialogue conditions. As interpreted byVerma and Shin (2004, p. 137):

New social movements, such as environmentalism and feminism, emerge, not in the traditional paths set by the emergence of labor movements through the legitimizing and eventual domina- tion of the movement by the state, but by a widening of resistance.

Strains of planning theory that align with the communicative action model of social learning thus expand on the potential of learning for a range of groups of citizens, working on a range of types of problems in need of innovation, via collaborative and community-oriented means. The potential to use social learning to move from incremental to transformative change is hinted at via the experience of authentic dialogue. In order to ﬁnd more guidance and speciﬁcation of how and why and for whom this transformative learning may occur, and to relate these processes back to the larger goals of the development of intelligence, moral community, and democracy, we turn to the domain of pragmatism.

2.2.3. Pragmatism as planning theory

Pragmatism is a philosophy that has been recognised by planning theorists for its potential contribution to understanding and bolstering social learning (Blanco, 1994;Hoch, 1996;Stein & Harper, 2000). Early policy analysts like Wildavsky (1979, p. 393)noted their debt to early pragmatist Dewey and claimed that ‘policy analysis has its foundations for learning in pragmatism’. Pragmatic inquiry

works towards ﬁxing belief in an ever-expanding community of inquirers, establishing a systematic approach to testing, adjusting, and adapting to new truths that can be agreed upon by an increasingly diverse group of people. A pragmatic method of learning consists in setting up real-world experiments, publicly arriving at results, and debating and making incremental changes based on these results.

The challenge of a pragmatic framework to planning for social reform is to ‘find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one’ (James, 1907/1977, p. 379). Critical to the pragmatic notion of rationality are collaboration and groundedness in experience. Muller (1998), Teitz (1996), Forester (1989), and Allmendinger (2002) are among the other planning and policy theorists who recognise the value of the pragmatic method of learning, or approaching truth via the constant revision of beliefs through open discourse.

As it has been applied to planning theory by these scholars, a pragmatic approach to learning values relevance, comparability, consensus, and stewardship in the outcomes of dialogue over correctness and orderliness in the conventional rational way of thinking (Hoch, 1996, 2002). This is possible due to the connection between intelligence and action within pragmatism, whereas the rational method tends to separate these two concepts.Dewey (1931/

1981, p. 54)described the relationship this way: ‘The function of intelligence isy taking account of the way in which more effective and more profitable relations withyobjects [of the environment] may be established in the future.’ Hoch (2002) presents the case of a pragmatic evaluation of 40 different attempts to create a built environment for sustainability that identifies and measures each different perspective in a simultaneous comparative fashion, providing a tool for better deliberation. Rather than elevate theory over practical reason, the pragmatic analyst asks: ‘what must we know to cope with our problem?’ (Hoch, 2002, p. 54). This suggests that a pragmatic approach to assessing impact and change is more likely to enable flexibility in outcomes and strategies than a conventional rational approach (Hoch, 1996).

Four major themes of pragmatic philosophy with direct bearing on its approach to social learning have been identiﬁed by Festenstein (1997). A pragmatic approach assumes, ﬁrst, that truth and reality cannot be observed from a rational, objective

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distance by a trained spectator or professional; the world affords no mirrors to reality. Pragmatists argue that no access to truth, reality, or right action exists outside of collaboration and experimentation with others:

True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as (James, 1907/1977, pp. 311–312).

If a belief can be veriﬁed often enough by the experiences of enough people, not only can it drive democratic consensus, it can also become ‘ﬁxed’

into habits. In other words, truth comes from practice, as does social morality. According to Jane Addams (1964, p. 273): ‘action is indeed the sole medium of expression for ethics.’ Right and ethical actions are those based on beliefs considered true by the greatest number, based on the greatest variety of individual experiences and ways of seeing the world (Westbrook, 1991, pp. 62–65).

The second assumption in pragmatism relevant to social learning is that no particular set of beliefs can be judged better or worse in a definitive, rational way. Negotiation, compromise and incremental improvements are necessary to resolve disputes and derive progressive policy solutions. Not far from this concept is the pragmatic notion that thinking and learning are social. Because each person experiences and reflects reality differently, and because reality itself changes so fluidly, the only way to amass any ideas about reality that could be called knowledge is in the human community, the social group (Dewey, 1938/1986). Tolerance for the ideas of others is therefore a key element in thinking socially. Since the ideas of others become part of our basis for knowing, we must tolerate them, no matter how different they are from our own.

Interpreting Dewey’s philosophy of democratic education,Boisvert (1998, p. 114)explains:

Decisions are made neither by individual acts of will nor by individuals who claim access into absolute truths. The process, rather, involves a willingness to take into account the information provided by others as well as their desires and situations.

Negotiating in common in order to act together towards common societal goals allows us as a

society to accomplish more than we could as individuals:

Our co-citizens can be seen as offering opportunities for working toward a shared outcome that could not emerge but for a concerted, cooperative effort. The motivation, in such a case, is intrinsic, linked to the cumulative working out of an end (Boisvert, 1998, p. 113).

A third pragmatic tenet of importance to theorising social learning is that human societies learn through negotiation processes when these processes take place within a ‘moral community’

modelled roughly after the community of inquirers involved in scientiﬁc research, in terms of their cooperative and experimental approach and reliance on self-correcting feedback to accumulate knowledge.

The early pragmatists sought to expand the method of scientific experiment into the social world and they thought democracy the ideal political system for this. To Dewey, experimental science was a refined and exacting manner of everyday inquiry, already closely approximated by the innate imagi- native and inquisitive tendencies of children. He believed that the monitoring and peer-review practices of scientific communities serve as good models for planning and public policy innovation and problem solving. Rather than attempting to apply scientific formulae and ‘value-free’ categories to policy problems, the pragmatic approach adopts instead the community-experimental and incremental, negative-feedback-based method of scientific inquiry. Scientific inquiry offered humanity its best tool for free and effective reflection and for the compounding of relevant, practical knowledge through group deliberation and verification of results.

The value of this tenet depends fundamentally on an expansion of the territory of the scientiﬁc method beyond its traditional body of study, traditional students and practitioners. In fact, Dewey considered experimentalist science most crucial in guiding ordinary people’s moral judgments: ‘science must have something to say about what we do, and not merely about how we may do it most easily and economically’ (Westbrook, 1991, pp. 170–171).

That is, Dewey sought to apply scientiﬁc method to inquiry into matters where practical judgment and not simply instrumental reason was needed (Bernstein, 1987). In speaking of science, Dewey intended to speak allegorically of the value of traditional moral norms in scientiﬁc communities,

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namely: ‘the practices of free communication, diffusion of information and rigorous testing of conjectures.’ To act with the morality of an ideal scientiﬁc community means adopting:

a willingness to work within the concrete circumstances in which [one] ﬁnds himself [sic];

a preparedness to examine the sources and consequences of his own dispositions; an openness to criticism and to the modiﬁcation of desires and intentions in the light of new knowledge, and of the exercise of intelligence and imagina- tion (Festenstein, 1997, p. 45).

By working this way on the operation of democratic society, society could ‘unify freedom and authority’

(Festenstein, 1997, p. 78) as scientiﬁc communities have aspired to do, avoiding the popular miscon- ception of authority as a sacriﬁce of individual freedom.

The fourth and ﬁnal tenet of pragmatism important for understanding social learning is that individuality only occurs within such a self-governing, learning society and democracy itself consists of a community of ongoing, collective deliberation. The building up of social knowledge, to Dewey, is the key goal of activity in all its forms. To Dewey’s contemporary and pragmatic colleague Jane Ad- dams, this activity included philanthropy in particular, which to her was not the enactment of individual goodness but simply the democratic realisation that the wellbeing of all is critical for the wellbeing of any one person. The act of running her settlement house, Hull House in Chicago, was an inextricable part of Addams’s philosophy, because to her, philosophy, as all thought, was the by-product of activity. Addams went so far as to say that the distinction between thought and action was artiﬁcial, a practical distinction only made to help people adjust and establish themselves in the world.

Learning occurs through sharing ideas and through social activity, particularly when this activity is done for the good of the greater group.

Each of these four tenets of pragmatism – that true ideas and ethical beliefs are those that hold true through action in speciﬁc contexts, that all beliefs and truths are open to renegotiation in changing contexts, that social learning occurs within a community of inquirers, and that individuality is a derivative of social learning – has drawn criticism from other quarters within philosophy. In The Public and its Problems, Dewey (1925–1927/1982) addressed the main criticisms often levelled at

pragmatists’ assumptions about the ability of all people to join in the pursuit of ongoing learning and development. He had faith that practical wisdom could be cultured in every person so that daily actions could proceed in democratic form. People’s beliefs result from socialised experience and the articulation and interpretations of that experience offered by a group, or community of inquirers.

Belief, in turn, is critically important in determining iterative truths, or that which in certain contexts is true because it makes a difference to those who hold it. The actions of the community of inquirers to test propositions ensure that democratic negotiations tend towards consensus. Intelligence results from the adjustment and readjustment of beliefs and habits based on continuing negotiation. Dewey’s faith was in the power of this process of social learning to bring all people to embrace their superior powers as members of an egalitarian community of inquirers, compared with those they could develop as individuals. His reasoning was that inquiry leads directly to recognition of the limits of inquiry as currently practised:

The more one appreciates the intrinsic esthetic, immediate value of thought and of science, the more one takes into account what intelligence itself adds to the joy and dignity of life, the more one should feel grieved at a situation in which the exercise and joy of reason are limited to a narrow, closed and technical social group and the more one should ask how it is possible to make all men [sic] participators in this inestim- able wealth (Dewey, 1931/1981, p. 58).

Dewey (1931/1981, p. 397) prophesied that: ‘y the great scientiﬁc revolution is still to come. It will ensue when men [sic] collectively and cooperatively organise their knowledge for application to achieve and make secure social values.’ The political structures of democracy set up a standard – in pragmatic terms, set up habits – of increasing cooperation, tolerance and equality which could experimentally and incrementally be improved upon. In the long run of the democratic experiment, antagonism would be unnecessary because all people would recognise the divergent views of others emerging as a possible result of their own thought. This would create a society tolerant of a wider variety of differences. This in turn was important because it would allow the interaction

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of a diverse range of views and actions so that better outcomes could emerge and society could continue to improve. In the sense of continually improving dialogue and action in the presence of habits of tolerance, the pragmatic embrace of democracy was the embrace of a form of human development that could be both progressive and sustainable in the long run.

Addams fully realised, as well, the failure of many committee efforts to outshine individual efforts.

Still, she did not waver in her commitment that the time had come in the evolution of democracy for the age of individualism to become the age of association. She believed the problem of committees to be that most members had not learned to act together and entered what ought to be common work with highly individualised intentions and methods for action. Because individuals act promptly while committees deliberate processes, individual action often seems more successful. However, Addams (1964, p. 138) believed that people often became

‘dazzled’ by the success of the individual ‘while only dimly conscious of the inadequacy of his code,’ such as was the case in many factory boss–labour union battles of her time. The method of collective action could be developed and could result in a more social democracy:

if the need of the times demand associated effort, it may easily be true that the action which appears ineffective, and yet is carried out upon the more highly developed line of associated effort, may represent a ﬁner social quality and have a greater social value than the more effective individual effort (Addams, 1964, p. 138).

An additional challenge to the potential of collaborative effort and decision-making is that many individuals enter collaborative associations without a developed idea of democracy or social morality. Instead, ‘exaggerated personal morality is often mistaken for a social morality, and until it attempts to minister to a social situation its total inadequacy is not discovered’ (Addams, 1964, p. 176). Such attempts fail because the individuals involved have no commitment to access the experiences of others before making decisions about action and no commitment to the value of each individual in common life. Therefore, when con- fronted with a variety of information, individuals become overwhelmed and focus only on the information relative to their own experience. In such a situation, no social learning occurs. In order

to work in democratic association, it is necessary to learn and relate to the experiences of others:

it is necessary to know of the lives of our contemporaries, not only in order to believe in their integrity, which is after all but the ﬁrst beginnings of social morality, but in order to attain to any mental or moral integrity for ourselves or any such hope for society (Addams, 1964, p. 177).

By the same token, in order to be effective, information must reach the people who can use it and in formats that allow all people to understand and apply it.

The philosophy of pragmatism, long drawn upon in planning theory for its emphasis on the joined nature of thought and action, thus offers a strong articulation and defence of social learning. The pragmatic vision of social learning rests on the notion that the truth of an idea is contextual and tied up in the habits that any given truth produces in those who believe it, that beliefs must be constantly negotiated and tested in social settings in order to be socially useful, that societies learn best when people organise themselves in communities of inquirers through which they can test and negotiate beliefs, and that individuals need membership in an active community of inquirers in order to develop fully as thinking individuals. This constitutes the most radical view of social learning on all counts.

Situating the pragmatic deﬁnition of social learning at the farthest and most ideal reaches of the theory and practice of social learning is of particular use because although functional groups and communities of practice also hold particular codebooks of knowledge, communities of inquirers are the sole type of group with the intent and power to generate new knowledge.

As part of a continuum of theories of social learning, organisational learning, communicative action, and pragmatism represent three approaches that together point to the need for a re-estimation of the value of social learning processes in planning and policy change. Closer examination of processes of social learning, how actors in planning and policy processes learn from one another and the lasting and unexpected results that this may have, can enrich our understanding of the means of change.

Methodological and analytical tools are needed to facilitate this understanding; it is to this task that we now turn.

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3. Chapter 3

3.1. Towards a methodology for assessing social learning

Equipped with an understanding of the range and limits of the domain of social learning theory, it becomes possible to develop a set of analytical components, which could be used to test the occurrence and level of social learning in practice in different settings. Organisational learning, communicative action, and pragmatism present different scales and emphases for a social learning-based approach to understanding policy change. Each exhibits its own particular suitability and limitations. This chapter examines the relative contributions and limitations of each of the three discussed social learning theories for planning and policy research towards the construction of a methodological approach to studying social learning. In other words, we will draw on theory to seek an approach to answering the question: how can we recognise social learning when we see it?

From the perspective of organisational change management, the challenge of social learning is rooted in the recognition of widespread power- seeking behaviour among all people (Argyris, 1997, p. 299). Once power seeking and controlling behaviour is recognised, it can be put to ‘the service of learning to improve action.’ Social learning, in this context, means encouraging inquiry and testing results, opening up people’s ability to recognise problems at hand despite the embarrassment and threats that often surface along with problems.

Productive reasoning comes from drawing on power-seeking behaviour and putting it to the purpose of social support, that is, most people’s willingness to act in a stewardship and supportive capacity (Argyris, 1997). Social learning happens, building on Argyris, when an error is discovered, action is taken to correct it, and the correction perseveres in a group. This deﬁnition of social learning, in fact, ties learning inextricably to action, as the correction of error allows people to better produce what they think they know how to produce (Argyris & Scho¨n, 1978).

When conceived as organisational learning, the transformative potential of a social learning approach tends to be limited by the fundamentals of organisational sustainability, which in the case of proﬁt-seeking organisations means proﬁtability (or in the case of government organisations in a

democracy means votes). Organisational learning theory also tends to assume a large role for power hierarchies in the generation of new knowledge, despite its emphasis on team building.

As communicative action, social learning relies on the generation and spread of means of undistorted communication or authentic dialogue (Habermas, 1981). While this is a valuable goal, it has proven very difﬁcult in situations that involve divergent group interests, or multiple communities of inquirers. Access to the means of communication, forums for communication, and powers of persua- sion are all uneven. Political reasoning, and the generation of knowledge in the polis more speciﬁ- cally, has no clear set of rules:

Passionate rhetoric to the point of deception is far more common in politics than is dispassionate reason: the channels of communication are denied to those who have little or no power;

and the consequences that ﬂow from the resolution of a particular debate are frequently immediate and direct, affecting vital interests and commitments (Friedmann, 1987, p. 219).

Without a doubt, a wide range of means of participation and citizen engagement in public planning processes, from public forums to advisory committees to citizen juries, active in most contemporary democracies, has improved habits of communication between parties with diverse interests and power roles. Just the same, the widespread application of communicative action would seem to require a whole new democratic and power- balanced political system that we have never yet managed to bring into existence.

Pragmatism, as a philosophical grounding for social learning-based research, constructs an idealised model of the scientiﬁc method and human responses to error. The ideal ‘normal science’ model is one in which the knowledge base of the inquirers contains a great deal of shared basic understanding and common principles and at the same time remains mostly tacit as a means to improve the efﬁciency of the common work (Kuhn, 1962).

However, when applied to democratic society at large, this model faces challenges as citizens respond to new information in unpredictable ways. Often new information that challenges existing knowledge is met with disbelief or scepticism, long after a model of scientiﬁc inquiry would predict it to be incorporated into knowledge codebooks. Moreover, it is not always clear how an error has been made,