Usable Knowledge: Social Science and Social Problem Solving
Lindblom, Charles E. 1979. Usable Knowledge: Social Science and Social Problem Solving. Yale University Press.
Rating:
4
Summary:
This book was written by a couple of Yale social science professors who interested in applied social research. The book is relatively short, coming in at just under 100 pages. The basic idea is to raise some issues about the practicality of what they call Professional Social Inquiry (or PSI), which is just another term for social science in all its flavors – sociology, psychology, economics, political science, etc. In particular, they are interested in applied social science, which includes things like policy research. Several of the points they make are interesting, but much of the book is spent just defining what they mean by PSI and what their definition includes.
I found one of their major points intriguing. The authors point out that a significant problem with PSI is that it is “destined for steady obsolescence” (p. 52) because society and social problems are constantly changing. This is both good and bad for PSI. It’s good in that PSI is constantly necessary – the phenomena it examines is constantly evolving, meaning the theories, methods, and data need updating. It’s bad in that, unlike the hard sciences, it is very difficult to develop over-arching theories of social life because social life is constantly under flux. As a result, PSI is not, as the authors describe it, “independently authoritative.” PSI relies on common sense and common knowledge for many of its insights and is often seen as the study of common sense. Additionally, PSI relies on the hard sciences for many of its methodologies. In a certain sense, PSI lies somewhere between the hard sciences and common knowledge – it takes the methodologies of the hard sciences and applies them to social issues that common knowledge can and often does address without the help of PSI. Thus, the object of study is both a problem and an opportunity for practitioners of PSI.
While the authors talk at length about this problem and a few others, they don’t actually offer any solutions for the problems they raise; they specifically state at the beginning of the book they go “no further with each issue raised than to indicate that it poses a challenge to research” (p. 3). Thus, the book is a short treatment of some of the problems faced by practitioners of PSI without any solutions offered.
Review:
I think I picked this book up from my department in one of the periodic book “give aways” that occurs when professors are trying to find more book space on their shelves and get rid of old stuff they don’t want. I thought it looked interesting. This past Saturday I was looking for something to read not directly related to all of the other stuff I am constantly reading and I saw this book. I didn’t really plan on finishing it in less than 2 hours, but I did (I did a lot of skimming).
Admittedly, some of the issues the authors raised were intriguing, but for the most part I thought the book was tedious and boring. They did, however, finally hit on one point I really liked on page 99, which is almost the last page of the book. I have often pondered the idea that sociology doesn’t really seem to have a clear agenda in terms of research questions or topics of interest – sociologists just study whatever they want to study and somehow this results in some of the major social problems being addressed. Apparently I’m not the only one to consider this oddity, “The most carefully thought out version of these possibilities is Michael Polanyi’s. His thesis is that science is well guided by a mutually interactive process among scientists in which the “system” achieves a rationality superior to that of any individual in it. … [H]e may be right in arguing that under appropriate circumstances mutual adjustment can achieve defensible coordination and guidance of the complex processes of scientific choice. He points to the market as an example of a different but related kind of mutual adjustment in another area in which coordination is required. He suggests that a “hidden hand” may operate to guide science, even though it is a different hidden hand from Adam Smith’s” (p. 99). The point the authors are developing here is that there is a sense of direction guiding the discipline of sociology, but it’s not something tangible – it’s a “hidden hand” like Adam Smith’s “hidden hand” of the capitalist market. Unseen forces direct research interests toward pressing social issues. And while some people clearly have divergent and odd research interests that have little or no practical bearing on social life, that research is quietly selected against in the marketplace of ideas. The hidden hand pushes an unseen agenda that results in relevant research being valued more than less relevant research. While sociologists may not feel a lot of affinity for economists, in a subtle bit of irony, an element of economic theory may be guiding the very discipline of sociology.
Overall, I’m not sure this book is really worth going out of your way to find. It does make some intriguing points and is probably worth the 2 hours or so it takes to read it, but it’s probably not worth the several hours it would take to find a copy (unless you want mine). It raises some important questions, but it doesn’t answer them. The lack of answers combined with the tedium of defining the issues result in a mostly boring book.