There are two potentially dangerous orthodoxies shared by many social scientists and by policy-makers who commission social research. The first orthodoxy is that people are puppets of social structures. According to this model, what people do is defined by ‘society’. In practice, this reduces to explaining people’s behavior as the outcome of certain ‘face-sheet’ variables (like social class, gender or ethnicity). The second orthodoxy is that people are ‘dopes’. Interview respondents’ knowledge is assumed to be imperfect; indeed they may even lie to us. In the same way, practitioners (like doctors or counselors) are assumed always to depart from normative standards of good practice. This is the divine orthodoxy. It makes the social scientist into the philosopher-king (or queen) who can always see through people’s claims and know better than they do. In contemporary culture, the environment around phenomena has become more important than the phenomenon itself. So people are more interested in the lives of movie stars than in the movies themselves. Equally, on sporting occasions, pre-and post-match interviews become as exciting (or even more exciting) than the game itself.
Both kinds of research are fundamentally concerned with the environment around the phenomenon rather than the phenomenon itself. In quantitative studies of ‘objective’ social structures and qualitative studies of people’s ‘subjective’ orientations, we may be deflected away from the phenomenon towards what follows and precedes it (cause and consequences in ‘objective’ approach) or to how people respond to it (the ‘subjective’ approach). This can be illustrated in two simple diagrams:
Objectivism
Causes > the phenomenon > consequences
Subjectivism
Perceptions > the phenomenon > responses
How can these theoretically informed reflections aid policy-maker the first place, abandoning the divine orthodoxy means that we may be to offer more original suggestions than simply to improve practitioner communication so that it better approximates some idealized model.