Beyond Kantianism - Response to Critiques

I am flattered and privileged to have received four such astute critiques of my work from an international cast. I will reflect at length about many of their points in future work but to respond fully would require a very long article and so I will highlight some of the more salient issues. The authors share misgivings about my commitment to a realist version of governmentality theory so I will try to articulate a bit more clearly how it is different from two major alternative perspectives highlighted by the authors: what I term a `discursive` governmentality perspective (Stenson 2005), and the neo-Marxist regulationist school of political economy. However, deeper normative questions are raised, for example by Wendy Larner, about what it means to be progressive or critical within the broad terrain of liberalism (which can include neo-liberals and neo-conservatives) in the wake of the collapse of communism and much of the power of western labour movements, the rise of the new emancipatory and environmental social movements and varieties of religious fundamentalism. As social scientists and university intellectuals we usually argue that our work differs from journalistic reportage or ideological polemics that gather supportive evidence through selective fact gathering. This is because we dig beneath the flux of events and surface appearances and debates to uncover the deeper structures of thought and social relations that shape our experiences and the flow of events. And we also engage with contrary evidence that troubles our truth claims. This is the work of theory. I accept that theory plays a vital role but argue for a more grounded approach rooted in empirical research using a variety of methods and data sources. Hence I adopt a more cautious approach to conceptions of the `deeper structures` we uncover. At best we can only know them through provisional heuristic modelling and it is best not to reify them.

Book Review of “Frontiers of Social Research: Japan and Beyond”. 351 pages, Trans Pacific Press, 2007, edited by Akira Furukawa

The title ‘Frontiers of Social Research’ implies a pioneering spirit, embarking upon unchartered territories. However, the most fascinating and insightful moments of this book are those which explore age-old Japanese research techniques and the potential for new methodologies to look to the old. The key theme of the work is the role of the researcher and the researcher’s relationships with research participants, the research audience and with knowledge itself.

Beyond the Pro and Contra of Evidence-Based Practice: Reflections on a Recurring Dilemma at the Core of Social Work

Currently, social work is witnessing a quite polarized debate about what should be the basis for good practice. Simply stated, the different attempts to define the required basis for effective and accountable interventions in social work practice can be grouped in two paradigmatic positions, which seem to be in strong opposition to each other. On the one hand the highly influential evidence based practice movement highlights the necessity to base practice interventions on proven effectiveness from empirical research. Despite some variations, such as between narrow conceptions of evidence based practice (see e.g. McNeece/Thyer, 2004) and broader approaches to it (see e.g. Gambrill, 1999, 2001, 2008), the evidence based practice movement embodies a positivist orientation and more explicitly scientific aspirations of social work by using positivistic empirical strategies. Critics of the evidence based practice movement argue that its narrow epistemological assumptions are not appropriate for the understanding of social phenomena and that evidence based guidelines to practice are insufficient to deal with the extremely complex activities social work practice requires in different and always somewhat unique practice situations (Webb, 2001; Gray & Mc Donald, 2006; Otto, Polutta &Ziegler, 2009). Furthermore critics of evidence based practice argue that it privileges an uncritical and a-political positivism which seems highly problematic in the current climate of welfare state reforms, in which the question ‘what works’ is highly politicized and the legitimacy of professional social work practice is being challenged maybe more than ever before (Kessl, 2009). Both opponents and proponents of evidence based practice argue on the epistemological, the methodological and the ethical level to sustain their point of view and raise fundamental questions about the real nature of social work practice, so that one could get the impression that social work is really at the crossroads between two very different conceptions of social work practice and its further professional development (Stepney, 2009). However, this article is not going to merely rehearse the pro and contra of different positions that are being invoked in the debate about evidence based practice. Instead it aims to go further by identifying the dilemmas underlying these positions which - so it is argued – re-emerge in the debate about evidence based practice, but which are older than this debate. They concern the fundamental ambivalence modern professionalization processes in social work were subjected to from their very beginnings.

Beyond the Margins: Analyzing Social Exclusion with a Homeless Client Dataset

A great share of literature on social exclusion has been based mainly on the analysis of official survey data. Whereas these efforts have provided insights into the characteristics and conditions of those people living at the margins of mainstream social relations, they have however failed to encompass those who live beyond these very margins. Meanwhile, research on these hidden subpopulations, such as homeless and other vulnerable groups, remains generally less abundant and is significantly detached from the theoretical core of the debate on social exclusion. The concern about these shortcomings lies at the heart of our research. We seek to bring some light to the area by using data made available by an organization that provides services to people experiencing homelessness in Barcelona (Spain). The data sample contains clients in early stages of exclusion and others in chronic situations. Thus, we attempt to identify some of the variables that operate in preventing the "chronification" of those individuals in situation of social exclusion. Our findings suggest that certain variables such as educational level, income and housing type, which are considered to be central predictors in the analysis of poverty, behave differently when analyzing differences between stages of social exclusion. Although these results cannot be extrapolated to the whole Spanish or European reality, they could provide useful insight for future investigations on this topic.

Centralization versus Delegation in an Experimental Capital Budgeting Setting

In an experiment, we model two stylized facts about capital budgeting practice, budgetary slack creation and delegation of decision-making authority. In our setting, under centralization, headquarters announces a budget, the division manager gives a cost report, and headquarters decides on the project. Under delegation, headquarters allocates a budget to the manager, and the manager is authorized to make the investment decision. We argue that the ability of headquarters to commit to a budget moderates the effect of delegation, and we find evidence in favor of our argument as there is an interaction effect of delegation and commitment to budgets. The effects of delegation are particularly strong when budgets are non-binding as delegation serves as a substitute for commitment in this case. This leads to smaller expenditures and to a higher headquarters’ payoff under delegation than under centralization. In contrast, when headquarters can commit to the budget, the descriptive data are consistent with our conjectures about the effects of honesty preferences, but the effects are too small to be significant.