Development Intervention: Actor and activity perspectives

DEVELOPMENT INTERVENTION Actor and Activity Perspectives Tiina Kontinen (ed.).

Helsinki – Helsingfors 2004

Development intervention. Actor and activity perspectives. Tiina Kontinen (ed.) University of Helsinki. Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research and Institute for Development Studies ISBN 952-10-1939-5 Taitto: DTPage Oy Hakapaino Oy, Helsinki 2004

Contents 1. INTRODUCTION: ABOUT INTERVENTION AND METHODOLOGIES . . . 1 Tiina Kontinen 2. DEVELOPMENT INTERVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT STUDIES. . . . . 5 Juhani Koponen 3. ACTORS, INTERFACES AND DEVELOPMENT INTERVENTION: MEANINGS, PURPOSES AND POWERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Norman Long 4. DEVELOPMENTAL INTERVENTIONS IN WORK ACTIVITIES – AN ACTIVITY THEORETICAL INTERPRETATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Jaakko Virkkunen 5. STRIVING TO MAKE CAPITAL DO “ECONOMIC” THINGS FOR THE IMPOVERISHED: ON THE ISSUE OF CAPITALIZATION IN RURAL MICRO-ENTERPRISES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Magdalena Villarreal 6. INTERVENTION NEGOTIATED? – PRODUCTION OF SHARED OBJECT AND POWER RELATIONS IN THE PLANNING OF A DEVELOPMENT CO-OPERATION PROJECT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Tiina Kontinen 7. THE ROLES OF THE RESEARCHER IN DEVELOPMENTALLYORIENTED RESEARCH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Reijo Miettinen 8. RESEARCHER’S ROLES AND IDEAS OF INTERVENTION – THE INFLUENCE ON RESEARCH OUTCOMES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 Outi Hakkarainen 9. WHO OWNS THE INTERVENTION? BRINGING THE UNEMPLOYED BACK INTO UNEMPLOYED STUDIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Jussi Silvonen

1. Introduction: about intervention and methodologies Tiina Kontinen Even with the glorious possibilities opened up by new kinds of networks brought about by globalization, at first glance, one would not assume that a rural woman in Mexico taking part in a micro-enterprise scheme, a labour inspector in Finland frustrated by the continuing problems he encounters in his work, a government land official planning a land reform in Peru, an executive member of a small Tanzanian non-governmental organisation, an unemployed man in a Finnish town, an ethnographer in a high-technology laboratory and a democracy activist conducting research into civil-society organisations would have very much in common. In many aspects that assumption is valid. However, in this collection the aim is to discuss these cases from the point of view of being part of interventions, in one way or in another. A similar question could be asked from the methodological point of view: what would connect 1) an actor-oriented sociology of development which studies development interventions implemented by governments or aid agencies in developing societies and 2) activity theoretical studies aimed at studying and improving work activities in the Northern hemisphere? The most obvious answer is that despite addressing traditionally different research objects, both approaches constitute part of the methodological palette of present-day social sciences that subscribe to some kind of constructionist epistemology, that is, to understanding the connection between actors and structures as a two-way movement, and to the belief that phenomena should be studied as they are practiced in everyday activities. However, as will be shown in the chapters of this collection, the methodologies do differ in both their conceptualisation and methodological principles. The collection includes selected papers from a symposium on ”Development Intervention – Methodological Approaches and Debates” that took place on the 15th and 16th of March 20021. This symposium was arranged in co-operation with the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research2 at the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences of the University of Helsinki and the Institute of Development Studies from the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki, Finland. It was a first step in a dialogue between the schools of Development Studies and Activity Theoretical Studies, initiated to discuss the challenging notion of intervention. The symposium enabled main proponents to dis1 2

The grant from the Academy of Finland for arranging the symposium is gratefully acknowledged. The Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research is one of the Centres of Excellence in 2000-2005 nominated by the Academy of Finland.

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cuss both approaches and also gave a number of PhD students a chance to present papers. In the course of the symposium, it became clear that the concept of Development Intervention can be understood in many ways. The papers presented covered issues ranging from economic intervention by the Singaporean state to a very detailed discourse analysis of an intervention meeting concerning a Finnish health care activity. As Juhani Koponen (Chapter 2) puts it, discussion of intervention has not been very popular in development studies. The notion of intervention seems to carry with it an immoral connotation of outsider interventionists messing up insiders’ lives. That is understandable, given the mixed history of development, which started under colonialism and sometimes had quite dramatic unintended (and, at times, intended) consequences for the livelihoods of people. Koponen argues, however, that the notion of intervention continues to be indispensable for understanding development practice, but development studies should rethink its relationship to it and to the whole developmentalist complex which underlies it. Koponen advocates a shift from an ‘ideological’ developmentalist approach to a more ‘methodological’ one which incorporates a commitment to critical reflection on and analysis of development discourse and practice. Norman Long (Chapter 3) presents an actor-oriented approach to the sociology of development, concentrating on the methodology of interface analysis. This approach has been developed over a number of years by researchers at Wageningen University, Netherlands, for “demystifying planned intervention” in a variety of empirical contexts. The chapter demonstrates the contribution of interface analysis vis-à-vis more structural interpretations with the case of land reform in Peru and shows how detailed ethnographic evidence can challenge the simplifying discourses of general theories and policies of development. Long’s use of the notion of interface focuses upon the critical points of discontinuity between multiple actors’ life worlds or domains where relationships become oriented to ways of bridging, accommodating, or contesting each others’ social and cognitive worlds. In this collection, the sometimes sceptical attitude expressed by critics of interventionist thinking in mainstream development studies is challenged by a more positive, or open, view shared by both activity theory and actor-oriented analysis. Although the latter is less directly concerned with designing practical intervention strategies, like activity theory it conceptualizes intervention (including that which is geared primarily to research) as involving a co-constructive, or, co-productive exercise shared by the insiders and outsiders, with the potential to solve some of the problems they face. Additionally, activity theory approach holds the view that acquiring knowledge of the world implies attempts to transform it. Jaakko Virkkunen (Chapter 4) positions the activity theoretical approach in relation to other approaches to research and development of work activities and organizations. He makes the case for focusing on the activity that is subject to intervention rather than on the interventionist-practitioner relationship that other approaches emphasise. Such intervention is related to the learning and transformation of activities in which the creation of new tools and artefacts within the dialogical space provided by the researchers plays a central role.

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In contradistinction to interventions in, for example, rural settings in developing countries, interventions in workplaces are often invited ones – at least by the management of the company or public service. Another distinction is that in workplace interventions, usually no additional financial resources are available to be distributed by the interventionists as is the case in development projects and programmes. Magdalena Villarreal (Chapter 5) provides an enlightening account of the kinds of social negotiations and transformations that take place when poor Mexican women are offered a chance to obtain start-up capital for the establishment of micro-enterprises. Her contribution provides an interesting view on the legacy of the capitalist logic in diverse environments. More specifically her analysis challenges the centrality of the contradiction between use value and exchange value in activity theory by spelling out the complex set of social contradictions entailed by the network of kinship obligations, reciprocal gift-giving and the urgency of obtaining immediate cash benefits in rural communities. Hence Villarreal explores the diverse ways in which actors attribute value to the idea of micro-credit, a common element in present-day development programmes. Micro-credit also plays an important role in Tiina Kontinen’s (Chapter 6) detailed micro-analysis of planning meetings within the context of development co-operation involving Finnish and Tanzanian NGOs. She applies the activity theoretical approach to understand a local development planning process and discusses the peculiarity of power relations in this process. Dealing with power and asymmetries was one of the issues identified as a challenge to activity theoretical analysis at the symposium. If power relations are central to North-South relationships then the effects of power are also present in the research activity itself. In the production of scientific knowledge, the researcher occupies a position of power and authority in selecting theoretical approaches, data and interpretations, and must struggle with the question of whose side he/she is on. The dilemma between normative and analytic types of research and the degree of engagement of academics in policy processes have been much debated in development studies. Reijo Miettinen (Chapter 7) enters this discussion by examining the diverse roles of the researcher in the field of constructivist science and technology studies and participatory learning approaches in organisational learning. Outi Hakkarainen (Chapter 8) provides a more personal appreciation of the roles of a researcher. She reflects on the diverse roles she has played in various research processes in Latin America as a civil-society researcher, being simultaneously a democracy activist, a woman and a mother, and plots the implications for the results of the research. If the main concern of an actor-oriented sociology of development has been that of opening up the ‘blueprint’ model of planned intervention, and the preoccupation of activity theory-based developmental research has been that of conducting interventions whose methodology has been well planned in advance but whose content has been context-specific, then clearly the effort of the psychological intervention sciences has been to try to standardize both. Jussi Silvonen (Chapter 9) discusses an experimental intervention within the field of unemployment studies. He presents the central dilemma of ownership and fidelity in exper-

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imental intervention and proposes a fruitful combination of experimental and ethnographic methods in attempting to understand the effects and processes of intervention in peoples’ lives. The individual contributions in this collection provide a many-sided, if not exhaustive, treatment of the notion of intervention. The main message of the contributions is the call for the abandonment of simplifying and idealized conceptualisations and a strong plea for the need for exploring social practices and real lives in all their richness and fuzziness. For the reader coming from development studies, the contributions give fresh views on bread-and-butter notions such as ‘participatory’ approaches, ‘facilitation’ and ‘ownership’. For the reader interested in developmental interventions in workplaces, the contributions provide a number of surprising angles from which developmental and developmentalist activity itself might be better understood. For a researchers interested in social action and real-life research, the contributions provide useful methodological insights for further consideration. We wish that this collection would be an opening, rather than conclusion, of a dialogue on development intervention and methodologies.

The contributors Outi Hakkarainen (MA) is a researcher with the Service Center for Development Co-operation and a Ph.D candidate at the Institute of Development Studies Tiina Kontinen (MA) is an Assistant at the Institute of Development Studies and a Ph.D candidate at the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Juhani Koponen is Professor of Development Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Norman Long is a Professor Emeritus in the Sociology of Development at the University of Wageningen, the Netherlands. Reijo Miettinen is a Professor in Innovation and Research at the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research, University of Helsinki, Finland. Jussi Silvonen (Ph.D) is a Research Fellow at the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research, University of Helsinki, Finland. Magdalena Villarreal (Ph.D) is a researcher at the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores de Anthropologia Social (CIESAS), Guadalajara, Mexico Jaakko Virkkunen is a Professor in Developmental Work Research at the Faculty of Education, University of Helsinki, Finland.

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2. Development intervention and development studies Juhani Koponen In development discourse one does not hear much of intervention these days. For many people engaged in development, the word ‘intervention’ has become an ugly one that they prefer to shun. On the broader global scene, intervention is mainly associated with things such as conflict, violence and military action, while development is linked with co-operation, partnership and sustainability. Development activists see themselves as engaged in development work, development efforts, or development co-operation, not in intervention. But leaving a word unuttered does not undo a practice practiced. The mainstream of development discourse has a well-known tendency to produce a vocabulary that is somewhat out of sync with what happens on the ground. In terminology, development aid has been replaced by development co-operation, donors and recipients are called “development partners” and stabilisation and structural adjustment have been overtaken by poverty reduction strategies. Such euphemism is obviously conducted in the belief that words contribute to the construction of reality, and the first step towards changing reality is to change the words. Yet we continue to need analytical notions that help us to describe, understand and explain what is happening in the world. To make sense of development, I believe that intervention is indispensable as an analytical notion. This is why it is so refreshing for development scholars to co-operate with fields such as Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research, in which intervention is seen as a central concept and a means of working towards commonly shared objectives. The purpose of our symposium and this publication, a step forward in the process, is to allow some of the different approaches and ideas we have to interact and see whether something new emerges from the encounter.

Development and developmentalism My basic claim is that development as understood by us in our context, international development, or development of developing countries, is in a very real sense impossible without intervention. To put it differently: intervention is part and parcel of development, and development is an exercise which is thoroughly interventionist. What do I mean?

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Usually when we use the word ‘development’, we probably have two things in mind: one is the goal, the aim, and the other is the process, the movement towards that goal. Development as a process is understood as leading towards development as the goal. The goal is thought of as ideal and the process is thought of as factual. If development is a very normative notion, it is because as a goal it is seen as something desirable and worth pursuing and furthering. It is also thought to be as something that is good for all, something towards which all fair-minded people are bound to strive.

So where does the intervention come in? My argument is that intervention is present all the way through. It has to be seen as the third dimension of our notion of development. Without it there would be no such notion, and not much action for that matter. This notion, which I call the modern notion of development, includes, or consists of, three different dimensions. In addition to the goal and the process that leads to the designated goal, there also is the intervention itself: something thought to be necessary to start or trigger off the process that will lead to the goal. In this vision, development is not something that simply happens and takes things in a better direction; it is something that has to be purposefully created, or at least facilitated by development intervention. This notion of development is older than is often realised, and has firm roots in the ideology of European colonialism. However, it is only since the Second World War that it has been used for its present purpose, namely to provide a conceptual basis for a world order of which states emerging from colonialism are an integral part. What makes this notion, and the awareness and analysis of it, of crucial importance is that it provides the intellectual and moral underpinning for those ideas, discourses, ways of action, institutions and other structures that have grown up to further development during the last fifty years or so – to support all the closely interconnected discourse and activity we now undertake in the name of development. A multitude of international, national and, increasingly, local actors are involved in this complex of discourse and action that I propose to call developmentalism. Such developmentalism rests on two ideological premises. The first is that development, whatever the prevailing interpretation of its ‘right’ social and economic contents, is thought to be achievable and desirable and beneficial to all. The second is the belief that that a well-meaning, rationally constructed intervention in a social process will lead to such development, and that it is in everyone’s long-term interest to foster such interventions and development. The contents of developmentalism have changed and keep on changing. What remains is the ideological conviction about the desirability of ‘development’ and the concomitant moral imperative to foster it through development intervention. If this is the case, why is there then such a reluctance to discuss intervention openly, in plain terms, among development activists and researchers?

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I think there are several reasons for this, but in essence they boil down to the fact that our understanding of how the developmentalist complex works is still in its infancy and most of the actors involved have not really thought through their position. This applies to development studies as well. Although it is an integral part of developmentalism, its own position in the developmentalist framework remains confused and ambivalent. One the one hand, development studies strives to be an academic specialisation which is highly relevant to practice. It is commonly distinguished by its problem-orientation and multidisciplinarity. The starting point for development studies is what are conceived as development problems, and research is expected to directly tackle them: to produce and disseminate knowledge that helps us understand and explain the causes of these problems and in this way contribute towards their solution. This should take place without regard for academic ivory-tower specialisations and use the means provided by all the relevant disciplines. With such a multidisciplinary approach, development studies is expected to provide knowledge which will be of practical relevance for ‘development’ whatever we mean by that elusive notion. In this vision, development studies is meant to be an active participant in the developmentalist process. Its justification as a separate branch of academia, distinct from development economics and development sociology, etc. resides in its promise to be of higher practical relevance towards the understanding, explaining and solving of development problems. If a piece of research is irrelevant to this task, it is not good development research, or not development research at all, however academically excellent it otherwise may be. On the other hand, development studies belongs to academia and is committed to follow academic standards in its work of producing and disseminating knowledge. A primary requirement here, of course, is the independence of research from any extra-scientific interests and the maintenance of a constantly alert, critical and reflective attitude towards whatever is being researched and whatever knowledge appears to emerge from that research. The question for development scholars now is how to bring together these two sets of demands: those of practical relevance and those of academic independence and excellence. Or is this impossible, as some people appear to think? If development studies is by definition an integral part of developmentalism, how could it ever imagine being able to disengage from it, while retaining its character as a body of policy- or action-relevant research and teaching? I must say here that I am not entirely sure whether this is possible, but I like to think there is a way out. This way can be sought in the direction of research into actual intervention processes along the lines researchers such as Norman Long and Magdalena Villareal have shown us. There might also be several things that development studies could learn from the way that Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research uses intervention as their research tool, although this requires further probing.

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From ideological to methodological developmentalism One way of framing the task ahead is to suggest that the old agenda of ‘idelogical developmentalism’ in development studies should be replaced by a new agenda that might be called ‘methodological developmentalism’. (I am inspired here by a parallel distinction Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan made between ideological and methodological populism, although my argument is somewhat different.) The old agenda for development studies was groomed in a different world back in the 1950s and 1960s. In fundamental terms, it was a world less complicated than ours, or one we thought was less complicated. Our ideas concerning firstly, what development is, secondly, how it can be achieved, and thirdly, the proper role of research were different: they were simpler or more confident than they are now. Historical development in the Northern countries provided a model of development for the rest to follow. The North had arrived, a state of development had been reached there. The rest of the world had to be developed in order to be able to catch up. Development was seen as an economic process but its main agent, or main vehicle, was to be the nation state. Development was seen as something which could be purposefully managed and rationally planned, by the state and within the framework of the state. Both of the leading contenders in social and political thinking, capitalism and socialism, and the contenders in development thinking, the modernisation school and the underdevelopment or dependency school, accepted this, although they differed in their view of the basic nature and determinants of the development process. Development was seen as an economic process but was also seen as encompassing much more than that - it entailed social transformation. Economic growth was distinguished from development: in industrial countries, growth was needed to maintain distributive politics whereas in developing countries it was needed to achieve the state of development. Development strategies thus became centred on national development planning and on the various macropolicy instruments available to national governments. In turn, these would be internationally facilitated by financial and technical aid from more advanced countries, helping to relieve some of the major resource bottlenecks. The role of research, and of knowledge more generally, was seen as fairly uncomplicated and largely instrumental. Knowledge was taken to mean a true belief: a statement which factually and adequately reflected the state of affairs in the world ‘out there’. A systematic compilation of empirical facts accompanied by both quantitative and qualitative analyses of their interrelationships would enable decision-makers to measure the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action, and would lead to policy prescriptions between which decision-makers could make choices. People were assumed, by and large, to behave rationally, and were also assumed to make the correct choices once sufficient knowledge was available to them.

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The big idea was thus the belief in rational large-scale planned intervention in the basic economic and social processes with knowledge as an essential component. The task for development studies was straightforward: to provide more knowledge, more relevant knowledge, and to feed all this knowledge into the processes of development. Today we know that things did not work out quite that way. Knowledge accumulated but development paths diverged. To most people’s surprise, a handful of small East Asian countries embarked on a homegrown industrialisation process and emerged victorious as Newly Industrialised Countries. This feat is now being replicated by some other South East Asian countries and, above all, by the mother of all tigers, China. Meanwhile, Africa was betrayed the fragility of its modern structures and Latin America was crippled by the debt crisis. Unforeseen by any dialectical analysis, real-existing socialism collapsed as a result of its internal contradictions. Globalisation set in and unleashed market forces across the borders of nation states. With the fragmentation of the development scene, our ideas about development have also been fragmenting and development studies has lost its fixed co-ordinates. Not only are development results much more mixed than we would have wished, our development thinking has also become rather confused and development is becoming a notion that is increasingly contested. Simple models having been dissolved, we do not have any widely shared better models for development in sight and we are now in a somewhat schizophrenic situation.

From modernisation to poverty reduction and back In our mainstream development discourse, the old modernisation agenda has been replaced by the poverty reduction agenda. This is a seismic shift in development discourse closely connected with the concerns that our Northern development model increasingly engenders. Not only has the model been strongly challenged by a number of vociferous critics, even more importantly, a growing number of ordinary citizens in the North are subjecting its premises to critical scrutiny. Mostly this is a result of the way in which our natural environment is reacting to the demands placed on it by the endless quest for economic growth and high levels of consumption - increasing greenhouse emissions, climate change and other global environmental threats. In practice, although it should know better, the North has however been very slow and even reluctant even to modify its consumption-based way of life. The Kyoto agreement, with its very modest targets for cuts in greenhouse emissions, remains unratified and even some of the countries that have ratified it are starting to look for ways to avoid its obligations. Much hope has been placed on the vague idea of non-material based growth, although the celebrated ’new economy’ dissipated quite some time ago. Meanwhile, half of the world’s people continue to live in extreme poverty, most with only marginal if any improvement in their material conditions.

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On the face of things, it might seem that only the socialist variant of modernisation has collapsed and that the capitalist one marches on stronger than ever. We in the West tend to think that our societal model based on free markets has achieved many things which Third World countries would be wise to adopt: the rule of law, democracy, good governance, and relative social equality. But while we would like to export such institutions to those parts of the world where there is a lack of them, we increasingly shrink from exporting the material basis of our society: the economy of mass production and consumption. Instead, we are becoming scared about countries that seem to have embarked on a development path paralleling our own. Now they are taking our jobs from us – what next? We no longer therefore offer our model to developing countries in toto. What is now actively offered is not modernisation but bits and pieces of it, not full-scale economic and social transformation and modernisation but poverty reduction. Introduced by the World Bank under Robert McNamara in the early 1970s and adopted by all donors and multilateral institutions in the 1990s, poverty reduction has most recently been codified and universalised in the Millennium Development Goals, formally endorsed by world leaders at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000. It is very different from modernisation thinking: its aim is to alleviate the worst forms of poverty in poor countries, to manage poverty, rather than helping these countries to catch up and close the gap in living standards which exists between different parts of the world. Whereas doubts about the feasibility of the modernisation model are accumulating in the North, it appears to be getting a new lease of life in the South. Not only among Southern elites, but also much of the general populace continue to regard the North, or the West, as pioneers in development. In the eyes of many Southerners, the apparent ease and luxury of everyday life and the political and military power of the West are based on its material development. Even among those adopting a poverty-reduction orientation, growth continues to be emphasised and development measured in terms of modernisation indicators such as GNI per capita, life expectancy and literacy rates (as in the Human Development Index developed by the United Nations Development Programme UNDP). While the full implications of all this may not be entirely clear, what is quite obvious is that development is a notion that is increasingly contested. While nobody officially utters a bad word against poverty reduction, what countries such as China, Malaysia, or Vietnam are doing in practice is nothing but a sort of modernisation. While other areas stagnate, and some regress, the Third World is becoming increasingly heterogeneous, and we seem to be gaining different notions of development for different parts of the world: modernity for the North and for the more resourceful countries attempting to graduate from the developing country group, and poverty reduction for the remainder. As this is not necessarily accepted everywhere across the globe, the right to define development may be increasingly becoming a bone of contention and a source of conflict. Meanwhile, the capacity of the state to manage and plan development has been eroded under intensifying economic globalisation. In developing countries, the liberalisation of capital movements connected to, and often combined with,

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debt crises, has given the international financial institutions powerful leverage to push through market-friendly reforms. The result of this is that more and more resources are allocated by the market and not by the state. Of course, this has not made the state wither away. In all probability, it has not even made it less important than before. Moreover, the period of extreme neo-liberalism has apparently passed its peak and the state is firmly back in vogue as a development actor. But the role of the state has changed, perhaps irreversibly. Development is now seen as market-led. The state is entrusted with providing the market with an enabling environment within which it can function effectively. It is charged with overseeing the institutional framework without which markets cannot function, for instance by guaranteeing legal rights to private property and the wider rule of law, and making good when there are market failures. Although this does not preclude the kind of active state intervention traditionally favoured by development studies, it does make such interventions more complicated and perhaps from a moral viewpoint also more contestable. Also, the way we regard social research and social knowledge, and the relationship between knowledge and reality, has undergone a sea change. In the social sciences, positivism is out, constructivism is in. Nowadays, the constructed nature of social knowledge is increasingly emphasised. It is maintained that social knowledge is not immediately available as a reflection of the world out there, but is actively constructed in our thinking and our discourse through processes such as conceptualisation and interpretation. Some schools of thought even argue to the point of denying the role of the privileged individual knowing subject, and see knowledge as emerging only in and through social interaction. All these changes notwithstanding, developmentalism is alive and well and development intervention goes on. The modernising countries resort actively to it at national level. At the global level, international institutions are active as ever and bilateral donors are slowly increasing their appropriations of official development assistance. While their goals may now be fashioned in terms of an increase in human capabilities or the reduction of poverty rather than modernisation, belief in the desirability of the goals and the need for intervention to initiate the process for achieving them is still there, even though this intervention and its mechanisms may now be perceived somewhat differently.

Rethinking development studies In this situation I believe we need to rethink our approaches in development studies, hence my call for ‘methodological developmentalism’. So far, development studies has been ideologically committed to the developmentalist complex in that it has not questioned the underlying premise: the basic idea that a well-meaning and rational planned intervention will lead to a process which will lead to desirable state of development in less-developed parts of the world. Such a vague ideological commitment is now plainly inadequate. If we do not quite know what the problem is, or if we cannot agree on what development actually is,

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the task cannot be simply to produce and disseminate knowledge that is good for ’development’. Substituting ’poverty reduction’ for economic development and modernisation without probing its true meaning only makes the situation worse. The focus should rather be on methodological examination of how the developmentalist complex is actually working and what it is producing. Many practical tasks lie ahead. To start with, if the definition of development is increasingly becoming a bone of contention and a source of conflict, development studies cannot and should not wash its hands of this. To retain and regain some of its relevance, development studies must make a much more forceful and nuanced contribution to the discussion of desirable development models. But development studies can hardly afford to embark on endless normative discussions about the ’correct’ content of development. Instead it needs to establish the actual meanings in which the term development is used and chart shifts in its use. Only once this has been done can questions about the desirability of this or that kind of development be put forward. In other words: if development can no longer be seen as an uncomplicated and intrinsically-positive goal – was this ever possible? – we have to reflect upon different notions of development and their multiple meanings, and to do this not only in our explicit theoretical discourses but also in our everyday empirical and praxis-oriented work. We should not be afraid of the conclusion that sometimes, development may be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. But we need to go further into an examination how development works in practice. We have to openly acknowledge the continued existence of development intervention, to recognise that development does consist of interventions aimed to trigger off leading towards desired goals, and to account for what I call the dual nature of such interventions. Development intervention is by its nature both planned and unplanned, and commonly has both intended and unintended effects. In our research we should take both these sides equally seriously if we wish to understand what happens on the ground. If we neglect either one of them our picture remains lopsided, and we will not be able to realise what must remain the ultimate promise of development studies: to produce knowledge that contributes towards understanding, explaining and somehow, if not directly perhaps indirectly, solving development problems When we ask how to do this in practice we come back to our symposium and to the other contributions in this report. Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research can offer us hints as to how intervention works and what can be done with it, although, to the extent which I understand, it has a rather different understanding of intervention, using it as a research method, or introducing it itself alongside the research process. A similar approach has been adopted in development studies by some participatory or ‘populist’ approaches in development studies, and might be worthwhile critical comparison of these experiences with those of Activity Theory. For its part the Longian actor-oriented sociological approach follows a different track. Whereas it acknowledges the social nature of knowledge – that social knowledge only emerges in interaction between different social actors – it emphasises its distinctness from participatory or action research. Its aim is not to contribute to the design and management of new inter-

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ventions but rather to understand the existing and on-going processes and see them not in terms of planned inputs and outputs but as socially negotiated and constructed processes with unacknowledged conditions and unintented consequences and side effects. Such an endeavour must obviously be part of any reconstitution of development studies. ‘Methodological developmentalism’will be as interested in intervention as its ’ideological’ predecessor but its commitment will be to critical reflection on the whole developmentalist complex. It will retain its multidisciplinary ambition, which in fact provides the best case for the continued existence of development studies as an independent body of knowledge. But multidisciplinarity also needs to be seriously rethought and transformed more towards what could be called multi-perspectivity. By this, I mean an approach which looks at a set of commonly perceived problems from a number of perspectives, temporal or spatial or other, and brings these together, fusing and transcending them. Problem-orientation requires this type of integrated approach. On top of all this, we also need to rethink our notions about the ways in which research knowledge can influence development policies and practices. Also in development studies, we have to acknowledge the value of some of the major insights achieved concerning the constructed nature of social reality, and the constituent role of discourses and interpretations and other cultural artefacts in bringing that reality about. We do not however have to buy the idea that social reality consists of never-ending circles of interpretation and discourses and that there is no bottom-line reality somewhere out there beyond our consciousness, or any possibility of us gaining some knowledge of it. Rather, we need to uphold the belief in the possibility of knowledge and continue to develop our multiple methods of acquiring it. In addition, we also have to acknowledge that there is a close nexus between factual and normative statements and that we must not be content with solutions which postulate a sharp and unbridgeable division between these two types of statement. Research knowledge should affect not only our cognition but also our values. Methodological developmentalism thus maintains the promise of development studies to produce and disseminate knowledge that is relevant to development practice but does this in a somewhat different manner. Although its fundamental interest continues to be development intervention, it not only focuses on the course this takes, but also, and perhaps above all, on its broader conditions and consequences. It tackles the whole developmentalist complex, critically discussing developmental goals and examining actual development processes. In these tasks it will need partners such as Activity Theory or actor-oriented sociology and many other social science approaches, since it works with the conviction that basically all good research will at some stage prove relevant to one practice of another.

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3. Actors, interfaces and development intervention: meanings, purposes and powers Norman Long This paper argues the case for an actor-oriented analysis of development policy and intervention. In so doing, I aim to clarify a number of critical issues concerning how social actors, organising practices, cultural repertoires and institutional/structural constraints are conceptualised within this framework of analysis. I also examine the significance of the idea of ‘social interface’ for interpreting policy narratives and planned intervention.3 To give some flesh and bones to the argument, I have included in the discussion an analysis of the discursive and practical implications of a Peruvian Land Reform policy.

The actor perspective The roots of an actor-oriented sociology of development stretch back to Weber’s characterisation of social action as implying simultaneously both meanings and practices. Thus, in various ways, it builds upon symbolic interactionist and phenomenological perspectives of the 1960s, models of social interaction and exchange developed by social anthropologists in the 1970s, and the mounting criticism of structural theories of social change and development promoted by so-called post-structuralist, post-modernist or social constructionist writers of the mid-1980s onwards. By about 1990, this had congealed into a profound dissatisfaction with structural and institutional types of explanations, such as those offered by modernisation, political economy and neo-Marxist theories; that is, with grand theories and hegemonic explanations in general. This was marked by the publication of several, now well-known, papers that diagnosed what came to be called a theoretical impasse in the understanding and practice of development (Booth 1985 and 1994; Schuurman 1993). Already in 1977, in An Introduction to the Sociology of Rural Development, I had stressed the importance of what I called an actor-oriented analysis of development, and in the early 1980s, I set about challenging certain ‘received wisdoms´ current in development theory and research. The main task, as I saw it, was to advance a more sophisticated treatment of social change and development 3

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For an earlier and shorter version of this text, see Long (2003, 47-61).

that emphasised the central significance of ´human agency´ and self-organising processes, and the mutual determination of so-called ‘internal’ and ‘external’ factors and relationships (Long 1984). This implied a focus on the lifeworlds and interlocking ´projects´ of actors, and the development of theoretically grounded methods of social research that allowed for the elucidation of social meanings, purposes and powers. It also required delving more deeply into the social and cultural discontinuities and ambiguities inherent in the ‘battlefields of knowledge’ that shaped the relations between local actors, development practitioners and researchers (Long 1989, Long and Long 1992). This image of the ‘battlefields of knowledge’was chosen to convey the idea of contested arenas in which actors´ understandings, interests and values are pitched against each other. It is here – in the field of intervention primarily, though not exclusively since knowledge dilemmas and controversies also shape the writing and analysis of policy documents and reports, as well as research findings – that struggles over social meanings and practices take place. It is here too that we see most clearly the emergence of various kinds of negotiated orders, accommodations, oppositions, separations and contradictions. Such battlefields arise within and across many different institutional domains and arenas of social action. They are not confined to the local scene or framed by specific institutional settings such as development projects or broader policy programmes. Nor do they involve only interactions between so-called ‘beneficiaries’ and ‘implementers’. Indeed they embrace a wide range of social actors committed to different livelihood strategies, cultural interests and political trajectories. Adopting this stance not only provides a more open-ended way of looking at intervention scenarios and the interlocking of arenas pertinent to development processes, it also provides fresh insights into the so-called ‘larger questions’ of poverty, inequality and domination within the evolving global political economy. It does this by showing how such macro-phenomena and pressing human problems result (intentionally and unintentionally) from the complex interplay of specific actors’ strategies, ‘projects’, resource endowments (material/technical and social/institutional), discourses and meanings. In this way, it explains how the products of social action, such as policy documents, technologies, commodity markets or socio-demographic patterns, are constructed socially and culturally. The approach implies a clear epistemological standpoint. By acknowledging the existence of ‘multiple social realities’ (i.e., the coexistence of different understandings and interpretations of experience), it questions the ontological realism of positivist science (i.e. of a ‘real world’ that is simply ‘out there’ to be discovered). Hence, it conceptualises knowledge as involving ways of construing and ordering the world, and not as a simple accumulation of facts or as being unified by some underlying cultural logic, hegemonic order or system of classification. Knowledge emerges out of a complex interplay of social, cognitive, cultural, institutional and situational elements. It is, therefore, always essentially provisional, partial and contextual in nature, and people work with a multiplicity of understandings, beliefs and commitments (Long and Long 1992, 212-213).

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Methodologically this calls for a detailed ethnographic understanding of everyday life and of the processes by which images, identities and social practices are shared, contested, negotiated, and sometimes rejected by the various actors involved. As I show later, the notion of social interface provides a useful heuristic device for identifying and analysing the critical points of intersection between different fields or levels of social organisation, since it is at these interfaces that discrepancies and discontinuities of value, interest, knowledge and power are clearly revealed. An actor-oriented approach to these issues requires strong sensitivity to the processes by which the practitioner (and likewise, the researcher) enters the lifeworlds of the other social actors (and vice versa), and, therefore, implies a more reflexive type of understanding is often the case in development research. In simple terms, the crux of this argument is that practitioners and researchers are both involved in activities in which their observations and interpretations are necessarily tacitly shaped by their own biographical and theoretical perspectives. Thus, the trick of ‘good’ development practice and ethnography alike is to learn how to turn such subjectivities to analytical advantage. The utility of an actor-oriented approach is that it forces us to inquire into how far specific kinds of knowledge (our own included) are shaped by the power domains and social relations in which they are generated and embedded. This helps us to determine the degree to which specific actors’lifeworlds, organising practices and cultural perceptions are relatively autonomous of, or ‘colonised’by, wider ideological, institutional and power frames. In order to examine these interrelations it is useful to work with the concept of social interface which explores how discrepancies of social interest, cultural interpretation, knowledge and power are mediated and perpetuated or transformed at critical points of linkage or confrontation. These interfaces need to be identified ethnographically, not presumed on the basis of predetermined categories.

Peruvian land reform: policy model and transformations at the interface I first became aware of the need to develop an interface perspective in the early 1980s when reflecting on ethnographic research I had conducted on the Peruvian Land Reform Programme of 1969–1975 instigated by the military government of General Velasco. Although now relegated to the archives of ‘failed’ land reforms in Latin America, the example nevertheless remains highly pertinent to issues of policy construction and transformation. The reform was first promulgated on the 24th June 1969 (The Peruvian ‘Day of the Indian’, later strategically renamed ‘The Day of the Peasant’4), about a year after the military had seized power. The re4

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This change of name was a symbolic measure designed to stress that the reforms were focused upon modernising the peasantry rather than dealing with the issues of ethnic rights and identity, usually referred to in official discourse as the ‘Indian problem’.

form was one of the largest and most sweeping of all agrarian reforms to take place in South America. During Velasco’s period of office, major research was conducted in the central highlands of Peru by a team of British and Peruvian anthropologists and sociologists. The principal focus of the study was an analysis of the changing political economy of the region (see Long and Roberts, 1979 and 1984). This diverse regional economy encompassed large-scale hacienda and small-scale peasant production, complex networks of trade, transport and small-scale enterprise, the urban and mostly ‘informal’economy of the City of Huancayo, and the scattered but important mining settlements of the Cerro de Pasco mining company. Following the announcement of the new Land Reform, three major measures were taken to re-structure the economy and organisation of the agrarian population. The livestock estates were expropriated and placed into the hands of newly formed, government-run co-operatives; the peasant villages were reorganised to promote community-based enterprise, and the administration of agrarian extension and marketing services was centralised through the establishment of new government agencies. Let us now, on the basis of the above research, explore two central dimensions of the Land Reform: first, the social construction of the policy itself; and second, the types of policy transformations that occurred at the points of implementation. Actor-oriented ethnographic research provides an essential baseline for analysing these processes.

The policy model The Land Reform had two central objectives: the redistribution of land in favour of peasant producers so as to boost agricultural and livestock production and encourage increased transfers of capital from agriculture into the wider economy; and the development of new, more equitable, forms of political participation. The reform was envisaged as forming part of a more comprehensive national development plan and therefore linked to other state initiatives (e.g. in the fields of education, technical assistance, and marketing) aimed at improving the social conditions and livelihoods of the poorer sectors of the population. Although the reform stated as one of its principal concerns the encouragement of small-scale agricultural production, the main emphasis (after an initial period when there was some talk of the parcellation of hacienda land into individual household plots) was on the establishment of production cooperatives on expropriated hacienda land and the revitalisation of peasant communities. The latter was to be assisted by the introduction of a new Peasant Community Statute designed to reinforce ‘traditional’ patterns of communal landholding and existing forms of mutual aid and inter-household cooperation, leading to the development of modern multi-purpose cooperatives. The Land Reform legislation contained both a diagnosis of the agrarian problems facing Peru and a programme for solving them. The text drew heavily on the then popular discourse promoting a dualistic hacienda-smallholder community model, which stressed how large estates exploited their dependent Indian populations and

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how peasant communities, composed of small-scale agricultural producers, were tied to them through a pattern of economic and political domination.5 According to this interpretation, the hacienda and community were seen as sharply contrasting social institutions. The opening article of the Land Reform Law talks about transforming the dual landholding system of latifundio and minifundio. This dual system was visualised as structured around the control that so-called ‘feudal’ estates had over peasants both within and outside the haciendas. Peasants were assumed to be poorly integrated into the capitalist economy and dependent upon local hacendados for access to basic resources such as land, credit, markets and education. But alongside the hacienda was the peasant community (comunidad) which, despite internal differentiation, preserved certain communitarian and egalitarian institutions. In the latter case, land, water and basic infrastructure were often communally controlled and production activities organised through a complex pattern of inter-household exchanges and forms of collective labour. Hence traditional forms of reciprocity, systems of mutual aid, and commitment to community-organised projects continued to play a major role in village life. At the inter-community or regional level it was the hacendados, through their alliance with town-based merchants and political authorities, who were assumed to control the marketing of produce and the investment of capital in agriculture and infrastructure. This produced, what the Land Reform text designates as, ‘an oppressive structure’ with the hacendado class acting as part of a regional elite that extracted surplus from its various peasant satellites. The latter were composed of both the ‘free’ peasants (comuneros) of the communities and the ‘tied’ peasants (feudatarios or colonos) of the haciendas. Both types of peasants were considered relatively weak in protecting their own interests: the feudatarios because they owned no land of their own and depended entirely upon the good disposition and favours of the hacendado who offered them small plots in return for a range of labour services; and the comuneros because they looked towards their own localised interests and were relatively unsuccessful in organising themselves on a wider regional basis. According to some observers, this oppressive structure was underpinned by the ethnic division between the mestizos or mistis of the hacendado class and the indios or indigenous peasants. This interpretation of highland social structure combines a functionalist view of contrasting but interrelated forms of organisation, represented by the hacienda and community, with an emphasis on structures of economic and cultural dependency. Such a model was especially prevalent among social scientists during the late 1960s and early 1970s and in many ways continues to shape interpretations of the perceived ‘agrarian problems’of highland Peru. In this regard the Land Reform of 1969 simply reproduced and elaborated an existing dominant discourse, both in how it posed the issues and how it sought solutions. 5

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This image of highland Peru was readily available to the military and their advisers, firstly through the writings of contemporary social scientists of the dependency and functionalist schools (e.g. José Matos Mar, Julio Cotler and other researchers associated with the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and the programme of Andean research promoted by Cornell University), and secondly, through the continuing influence of indigenista writers who extolled the virtues of Indian community life and abhorred the ‘feudal’ control exercised by the highland hacienda. See Orlove and Custred (1980) and Yambert (1980) for a stimulating critique of the simplifications implicit in this type of literature. They offer an alternative approach that focuses upon household agricultural production units, inter-household links and the constitution of corporate groups. They make the important point that ‘Communities and haciendas are the product of peasant social and economic activity, rather than the context which limits such activity’ (Orlove and Custred 1980, 24).

A mismatch with empirical evidence At this point, the validity of the general model of Andean society enshrined in the Land Reform policy needs serious questioning. Two main issues must be addressed: the role and dominance of highland haciendas, and the nature of peasant communities and how they related to the wider socio-economic structure. A central tenet of the Land Reform was that the hacienda system, through its control over land and economic and political institutions at regional level, constituted a major obstacle to agricultural development - particularly in the way it severely limited peasant production and income - and to social change more generally. Though at the time a large body of anthropological and populist writings undoubtedly lent support to such a view, there are significant reasons for querying it. It was true that at the time of the Land Reform a significant proportion of the highlands was under the ownership of haciendas and other properties of over 50 hectares, but in percentage terms this was outnumbered by agricultural units of less than 5 hectares. Of the irrigated land, large properties controlled some 41%, as against 50% for units under 5 hectares; and for dry farm land the proportions were 13% as against 42%. This suggests that smallholder peasant producers played a more important role in agricultural production than the policy assumed. A similar pattern emerges for livestock. Although haciendas formally controlled about 52% of the natural pastures of the highlands, a breakdown of the ownership shows that peasant producers controlled over 50% of each type of animal, while the haciendas controlled only 13% of cattle, 26% of sheep, 6% of horses and 31% of cameloids. These data underscore the important part played by small-scale peasant production. Government policy also made the assumption that hacendados were in fact able to effectively control the territory of their estates and subjugate their tied peasants (colonos) into a state of semi-servitude. And a corollary of this was the assumption that the local power of hacendados was reinforced by their integration into a regional elite of merchants and political bosses. Yet, this too, presented a somewhat false picture of the actual control exercised by highland hacendados. Available ethnographic evidence indicated – though this clearly varied from region to region and from hacienda to hacienda – that many such landowners were in fact unable to control production on their own lands. Indeed, in some cases, colonos built up considerable numbers of livestock surreptitiously using hacienda pastures and marketed them themselves. For example, some shepherds of the central highlands had accumulated as many as two or three hundred head of sheep by the time the Land Reform was implemented. Likewise, it was reported that colonos working on arable haciendas often finished up controlling a considerable proportion of the total land area, such that their overall production level equalled that of the hacendado. Reasons for these anomalies were related to the prevalence of poor pasturage, low quality soils and harsh climatic conditions in the highlands that made large-scale commercial farming a risky venture with low economic returns. Under these conditions, most hacendados were reluctant to invest in fencing, supervision and infrastructure. Also, although they could mobilise support from regional political authorities to evict peasants who had invaded their land, the situation was not that of a hegemonic power structure in which peasant populations were subordinated to the hacienda system and its regional elite. Power domains were much more fragmented and

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at certain critical moments of struggle the crucial loci of economic and political power were located within the municipality, comunidad, and small town, not the hacienda or provincial capital6. The Cornell-Peru Vicos Hacienda Project of the late 1950s and 1960s illustrates the complexity of the situation. This project set out to demonstrate the social and economic benefits to be gained by replacing the existing authoritarian hacienda structure and encouraging the hacienda workers gradually to take over the running of the enterprise. These ideals, however, were constantly thwarted in practice by the complexity of the regional political economy. The hacienda system in the Vicos area thrived on a fine balance of interests between the hacienda and the residents of the nearby valley towns. There had been a relatively wealthy group among the colonos who rented land from the hacendado, employed other colonos, and acted as brokers between the poorer peasants and the townsmen and hacienda authorities. These ties between Vicosinos and the townsmen were later among the most salient limiting factors with which the Cornell-Peru Project had to cope in its efforts to promote Vicos autonomy and self-management, since under certain circumstances mestizo townsmen aided Vicosinos in organising protest movements against the new Cornell management. Above all else, the Vicos case highlights the importance of peasant differentiation within the hacienda and the complex network of interdependence that developed between the haciendas, small towns and peasant villages.7

A warped picture of highland agrarian society These findings seriously question the reduction of Andean social organisation to a simple opposition between exploitative haciendas and a dependent peasantry. Though conditions varied from region to region, few hacendados were strong enough to control fully the use of lands within their estates or to remove peasant squatters. Also, although many hacienda peasants marketed only small amounts of agricultural produce, it was wrong to regard them as a marginalised social group whose primary contacts with the outside were mediated through the position occupied by the hacendado. Many hacienda peasants were in fact involved in extensive networks embracing the hacienda, peasant communities, mines, small towns and the provincial capital. In short, the model of the hacienda system projected by the Land Reform was a misleading reification that provided policy-makers with a powerful instrument for legitimising the increased presence of government agencies in provincial areas aimed at curbing growing opposition to central authority. A similar difficulty arose with the concept of the peasant community or comunidad. In contrast to the hacienda, its essential characteristics were defined as solidarity, cooperation and consensus, whose origins could be traced to the pre-Co6

7

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See Zendejas’s (2003) recent fine-grained historical ethnography of the dynamics of different politically significant social spaces associated with village settlements, landholding organisations (such as the hacienda and peasant community or ejido) and municipalities in a region of Michoacán, Mexico. There exists a large body of general data (both published and archival) that charts the history and results of the Vicos experiment in planned intervention. The information was mostly collected by a team of researchers under the direction of senior anthropologists from Cornell University. William Stein (1985, chapter 5 ‘Townspeople and Countrypeople in the Callejón de Huaylas’) offers an interesting set of vignettes drawn from this data bank that highlight issues of ethnicity, political dominance and town-country relations. He also provides useful bibliographical notes that identify the key works on Vicos and its region.

lumbian ayllu, some kind of corporate kin group. This corporate community model, stressed in both indigenista writings and functionalist anthropology, depicted community organisation as predominantly communal with its own politico-administrative functionaries in respect to land ownership, water control and distribution, and the running of major religious festivals. This notion of community, of course, runs the risk of over-emphasising elements of corporateness and homogeneity. While there was – and still is – a degree of communal organisation at community level for allocating land plots and water and for organising public events of various kinds, these formed only a part of the internal patterns of social organisation. As several contemporaneous studies demonstrated (see, for example, Orlove and Custred 1980; Smith 1984, 1989), it was the household or confederation of related households that was crucial for the management of productive resources and for economic decision-making, not the wider community. A similar issue arises concerning the interpretation of patterns of mutual aid and reciprocity. Although these were frequently based on a strong ideology of balanced exchange between kinsmen, neighbours and community members, many of the relationships that emerged actually reflected a pattern of enduring relationships between households possessing unequal resources. Hence it was often the richer peasant households that benefited most from a series of exchanges set up on the basis of so-called reciprocity. It is also clear that the better-endowed households tended to have better access to community land and water, especially if some senior household member occupied a strategic administrative position. It is important, then, to take full account of the internally differentiated nature of peasant communities. A high level of community solidarity is only likely to manifest itself in the face of some outside threat or at times when critical production tasks demand some way of cooperating. The matter was further complicated in this Peruvian cases by the fact that there existed considerable variation in the extent to which households depended upon agriculture as their main source of livelihood. Studies of the peasant economy of highland communities showed that non-agricultural sources of income from trade, crafts and wage labour (both inside and outside the community) were crucial components in the struggle to meet household subsistence and other needs (see, e.g. Figueroa 1981). The significance of these non-agricultural activities for peasant communities was initially completely overlooked in the Land Reform legislation and in the Stature for Peasant Communities, although modifications were subsequently introduced to allow persons whose principal occupations were non-agricultural to become members of the Peasant Community (Comunidad Campesina). Thus, this pattern of diversified economic activities at community level challenged the simple assumption that traditional patterns of cooperation could be revitalised to promote community solidarity and local development. On the other hand, there was good evidence historically that the very survival of community institutions had depended in part on successive government interventions. The Statute of Indigenous Communities in the 1920’s gave legal recognition to community institutions and later, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, various attempts (e.g. Belaunde’s

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programme of accion popular) were made to promote community development schemes and self-help projects. As several writers have argued, these various government initiatives – and Velasco’s reforms are no exception - were not so much aimed at strengthening or restoring Andean patterns of cooperation but were more related to the State’s concern for extending its control over the provinces by integrating communities into an official administrative structure and mobilising community labour for various programmes of infrastructural development (e.g. for the building of roads, schools and health clinics). The community model then offered an ideal-typical characterisation of peasant communities that failed to come to grips with the major processes and problems of socio-economic differentiation and the multifarious nature of peasant economic life. It therefore provided an unsound analytical and ideological basis for the intended policy. We can summarise the major shortcomings of the social model underpinning the Peruvian Land Reform law as follows: 1. It was built upon an exaggerated view of the role and importance of haciendas in agricultural production and in the wider politico-economic framework. 2. It presented an idealised picture of the peasant community and its potentialities for developing communal and cooperative modes of organisation geared to local development. That is, it ignored class differentiation and the complex patterns of control and patronage. 3. It failed to appreciate that differences in the organisation of household production between so-called ‘tied’ peasants and peasants living in independent communities were differences of degree rather than kind. 4. Linked to these deficiencies, was the failure to understand the mobility of individuals and households between haciendas and communities or the networks of relationships that existed between households living in different urban and rural locations. 5. There was also no adequate understanding of the commoditisation of production and labour, nor of the necessary interdependency of commoditised and non-commoditised relations and values. 6. It neglected the relationship between agricultural and non-agricultural activities and sources of income. 7. It failed to identify and analyse the functioning of the different units of production found in the highlands (e.g. the peasant household, the small-scale farming enterprise, the livestock and arable estates, and cooperative modes of production). 8. It failed to understand the crucial role played by small-scale peasant producers throughout the highlands, whether they lived in haciendas, peasant communities, or were independent of both. 9. It relied too heavily on a dualistic dependency model for understanding the economic and political organisation of the highland regions.

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Transformation of Land Reform policy at the interface: a critical area of research Having provided a profile of the Land Reform policy and identified its more general shortcomings, I now discuss how it was renegotiated during the course of implementation. Modifications of the policy took place several times that required the passing of additional legislation in response to specific problems and loopholes that arose during its application8. As implied earlier in the discussion, government implementers encountered many different socio-economic and political circumstances in the different regions and localities of the country. Hence the programme was introduced unevenly and according to different criteria. A large number of legal anomalies arose: for example, some large landowners managed to hold on to their estates by nominally dividing up their land among relatives and favoured peasants so that their land areas fell below the stipulated legal landholding limit per owner. One particularly ironical case was that of a group of community peasants, who had (before the Land Reform) siphoned off capital derived from a government-supervised credit scheme to purchase a small hacienda of their own, having their land expropriated because its land area was deemed above the legal limit. Another strange case was that of several peasant production cooperatives, that had a few years earlier received land under the reform, advertising in the regional newspaper for the return of ‘their landlord and patron, ‘ whom they apparently held in much higher esteem than the government tecnicos who had been assigned to guide the work of the cooperative. A further interesting dimension was that in some regions of the highlands peasants repelled the Land Reform officials by force and thus prevented the Land Reform from being imposed upon. Each of these Land Reform scenarios shows a different interface situation reflecting different types of local power relations and different patterns of negotiation between peasants, landlords and government officials. The government Land Reform agency was responsible for the operation of the legislation (for example, with respect to expropriation criteria, the eligibility of beneficiaries, and the criteria for membership of the new committees of the cooperatives and so forth). In this they had considerable flexibility and discretion. But they were also at the mercy of peasants and other locally knowledgeable persons who were in a position to distort or conceal information or who could break agreements without immediate or easy detection. The process of implementation was further complicated by decisions taken by the agrarian judges who were appointed to adjudicate over appeals lodged against the Land Reform. Here I do not have space enough to elaborate on the many interesting but complex interface problems that arose. Nor to document how they worked themselves out. But clearly a close-up ethnographic study of the pattern of interactions, manoeuvres and symbolic exchanges that took place between the personnel of the implementing agency and the various other stakeholders would offer penetrating insights into the nature and outcomes of the Land Reform policy. De8

McClintock (1980) traces changes in the legislation and implementation procedures, and connects these with ongoing power struggles within government agencies and between ministries. See also Cleaves and Scurrah (1980).

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velopment interfaces contain within them many levels and forms of social linkage and discontinuity, as well as a multiplicity of different and potentially conflicting value positions, worldviews and rationalities. It is here – at the interface – that policy is put into action, reshaped or radically transformed. Also, as any enlightened planner or frontline development worker will readily acknowledge, it is impossible to separate policy, implementation and outcomes into watertight compartments. There is considerable seepage between each and therefore a mixing of elements such that it is often difficult to say where one stops and the other begins. A further implication is that implementation processes must be looked at diachronically so that the changing nature of the transactions and negotiations between different actors and organisational levels can be analysed. One would also need to examine how particular development project personnel attempt to deal with environmental diversity and uncertainty where a clash of social interests is inevitable. Frontline workers such as project implementers have a considerable degree of discretion in the performance of their tasks, and too do their so-called ‘target’ groups. The latter always have the possibilities to manoeuvre, reject, modify, or accept a particular programme. This, then, is why development interface is a critical issue in the design, implementation and analysis of policy. The often large gap between the rhetoric of national policy and planning and what happens ‘on the ground’- so clearly evident from the above appraisal of the Peruvian reform - calls for close-up analysis of the types of interactions, power relations, negotiating resources, and legitimating norms and values of interface actors and organisations. Such studies reveal concretely the nature of State-peasant relations in particular localities and regions, and thus indirectly facilitate a fuller understanding of the character and significance of particular State formations. However, unlike general theories of the State – that operate at a high level of abstraction, tending towards the reification of State institutions and action – the concern for interface forces one to look closely at State activity as it affects, and is in turn affected by, the actions of its constituent populations.

Some concluding remarks about the Peruvian case The Peruvian example is rich in lessons from an actor-oriented perspective. Although I have not been able to lay out in detail the ethnographic basis for this discussion and critique of the Land Reform policy, it should be clear that the analysis leans heavily on original field data collected using an actor-oriented methodology. Bearing mind the range of issues raised earlier concerning actor perspectives on policy and intervention processes, this case brings to light the following dimensions: 1. It captures the main features of the policy in terms of the images, typifications and discourse used to characterise the essential problems of the agrarian situation in highland Peru, and identifies the sources of this diagnosis. One particularly interesting aspect of this was the fact that the Velasco government did not invent its vision of Andean society but rather it drew upon existing social scientific and populist texts that constituted part of a long-term ongoing debate about the nature Peru and the need for change.

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2. It exposes the simplifications and reifications of government and academic thinking about Peruvian society and counterposes these with the everyday life circumstances and strategies of the principal actors in the scenarios depicted in the Land Reform policy. 3. It brings out the ways in which labelling processes can close off serious inquiry into the multifarious and strategic nature of Andean society, thereby legitimising the design and application of standardised solutions. 4. It indicates briefly how central government and frontline development practitioners adjust to on-the-ground circumstances and attempt to ‘correct’, ‘incorporate’ or ‘nilify’ anomalies and strategic manoeuvres by local and regional interest groups. 5. It emphasises the internal dynamics of intervention and points to how policy formulation and implementation set up social and political ripples which policy-makers and politicians must, in the end, take cognisance of. 6. It provides a snapshot how policy models generate their own answers to problems: that is, how ‘failure’ invites adaptations targeted to succeed next time round. 7. It demonstrates how thorough ethnographic research can play an important role in questioning and possibly redirecting policy choices. 8. It suggests the need for research on the dynamics of interface situations that gives weight to knowledge encounters, the clash of images and interpretative models of ‘social reality’ and of ‘what might be’, and the working out of power relations between the contestants.

Deconstructing planned intervention As the foregoing discussion implies, an actor-oriented perspective has a number of implications for the study (and the design) of processes of intervention, whether in the fields of development or organisational change. In the first place, we need to get behind the myths, models and pretensions of development policy and institutions to uncover the particulars of people’s ‘lived-in worlds’ and their strategies for steering themselves through difficult scenarios and turning ‘bad’into ‘less bad’circumstances. Despite the many critical analyses now available, development intervention is still often visualised as a discrete set of activities that takes place within a defined time-space setting involving the interaction between so-called `intervening’ parties and `target’ or `recipient’groups. Such an image isolates intervention from the continuous flow of social life and ongoing relations that evolve between the various social actors, including of course, though not exclusively, the manifold ways in which local actors (both on- and off-stage) interact with implementing officials and organisations. Development interventions are always part of a chain or flow of events located within the broader framework of the activities of the state, international bodies and the actions of the different interest groups operative in civil society. They are also linked to previous interventions, have consequences for future ones, and more often than not are a focus for intra- and inter-institutional strug-

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gles over perceived goals, administrative competencies, resource allocation, and institutional boundaries. Consequently, intervention processes cannot be not confined to specific spaces and functions delimited by official policies and plans. Nor should we assume that so-called beneficiaries reduce or limit their perceptions of reality and its problems simply to those defined for them by the intervening agency as constituting the `project’ or `programme’. People process their own experiences of ‘projects’ and ‘interventions’, alongside their many other experiences and livelihood concerns. They construct their own memory of these experiences, as well as taking into account the experiences of other groups and actors within their socio-spatial networks. That is, they may learn from the differential responses, strategies and experiences of others outside the target population or specific action programme. And the same holds true for those who work as implementers or facilitators. Thus, for many of the social actors involved, interventions have no clear beginning marked by the formal definition of goals and means, nor any final cut-off point or `end-date’ as identified by the writing of final reports or evaluations. This boxing in of space and time (and therefore also of strategies and options) characteristic of development practice is underpinned by various kinds of interventionist discourse that are essentially ‘diagnostic and prescriptive’ (Apthorpe 1984, 128). Such discourse promotes the idea that problems are best tackled by dividing up the empirical complexity into ‘a series of independently given realities’ based mostly on ‘sectoral’ criteria (such as agriculture, health, housing, and poverty alleviation) and designing appropriate policy solutions. According to Schaffer (1984, 143), such policy discourse encourages the misconception that policy comprises verbal and voluntaristic decisions and authoritative documents, after which something quite different, called ‘implementation’, takes place. This image of the administrative discreteness of policy and intervention processes is reinforced by the notion of the `project cycle’ that frames sequentially the various activities that take place (such as setting the policy agenda, defining the problem, formulating alternatives, designing the policy, implementing it, and evaluating the results) in a linear and logical order (see Clay & Schaffer 1984, 3-5; and Palumbo 1987, 38-41). This encourages the view that project preparation and implementation takes the form of a `rational’ problem-solving process which involves experts (either alone or in consultation with their clients) ‘in becoming aware of symptoms, in formulating the problem, in identifying the causes (diagnosis), in generating alternative solutions and in choosing and implementing an appropriate one ... [and] finally, help[ing] evaluate the results’ (Röling 1988, 57). But, as any experienced practitioner will readily acknowledge, these processes are a lot more messy and often overlap. Each and every one of them is entangled in complex sets of evolving social practices, negotiations, and political and epistemological struggles that involve a multiplicity of actors with divergent and sometimes contradictory agendas.

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Thus, in order to distance ourselves from ideal-typical conceptions of planned intervention, we must concentrate upon understanding planned intervention as composed of complex sets of historically-unfolding social encounters and struggles over meanings and resources, in which certain spatial and temporal dimensions play a role in linking events and processes. There is, as I suggested earlier, on the side of the ‘intervened’, the accumulated knowledge of previous experiences of interventions of various sorts, and not only those organised by the state. These experiences constitute a kind of historical imprint and template which is both ‘collective’, in the sense that it is shared as a legacy by a particular group of people, and ‘individual’, in that the biographies of particular persons contain within them ‘memory banks’ of various intervention experiences. And the same holds for those groups and institutions depicted as the ‘intervening’ parties, such as government development agencies or individual bureaucrats. Intervention processes are thus shaped by both collective and personal memories of state-civic society relations, local initiatives and inter-institutional struggles. Intervention, then, implies the confrontation or inter-penetration of different lifeworlds and socio-political experiences. Looked at from this point of view, the ‘unreal’ time-space and policy-cycle conceptions contained within orthodox intervention models may become strategic weapons in the hands of intervening agencies who, wittingly or otherwise, make superfluous the significance of memory and learning from the past.9 This attitude is reinforced by the assumption that, whatever the difficulties of the past and however entrenched the patterns of underdevelopment, a well-designed and well-targeted programme of intervention can make the break with the dead-weight of `traditional’ modes of existence, thus stimulating or inaugurating `development’, whatever its specific features. These considerations lead to the conclusion that we need to demythologise the idea of intervention so that it is recognised for what it fundamentally is, namely, an ongoing, socially-constructed and negotiated process, not simply the execution of an already-specified plan or framework for action with expected outcomes. It is normally assumed ‘that decision makers, before they act, identify goals, specify alternative ways of getting there, assess the alternatives against a standard such as costs and benefits, and then select the best alternative’. However, as Palumbo and Nachmias (1983, 9-11) go on to point out, policy makers often ‘are not looking for the best way or most efficient alternative for solving a problem. They are instead searching for support for action already taken, and for support that serves the interests of various components of the policy shaping community.’It is not enough therefore to modify or seek refinements of orthodox views on planned intervention. Instead, one must break with conventional models, images and reasoning, and open up the issues to interface analysis. 9

Hence I do not exclude the possibility that intervention practices may significantly affect the social organisation of time and space of those involved. This is illustrated by irrigation projects in the Andes which, in order to cope with their own institutional goals, introduce wage labour for the construction of canals and other infrastructure, when such work is normally organised by communities through the mobilisation of faenas (co-operative labour groups). Since the latter mode of organisation often entails longer time spans than the typical project cycle of five years, the organisation of time, space, labour and material resources are forced into a new and much shorter time frame, with major social implications. For a general discussion of this problem, see van der Ploeg 1987, 155-8.

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The relevance of interface for development 10 research and policy The notion of social interface offers a way of exploring and understanding questions of diversity and conflict inherent in processes of external intervention. Interfaces typically occur at points where different, and often conflicting, lifeworlds or social fields intersect; or, more concretely, in social situations or arenas in which interactions become oriented around problems of bridging, accommodating, segregating or contesting social, evaluative and cognitive standpoints. Social interface analysis aims to elucidate the types and sources of social discontinuity and linkage present in such situations and to identify the organisational and cultural means of reproducing or transforming them. Exploring these dimensions provides a more adequate analysis of policy transformation processes, and enables us to understand more fully the differential responses of local groups (including both ‘target’ and ‘non-target’ populations) to planned interventions. That is, it forges a theoretical middle ground between so-called micro and macro theories of change by showing how interactions between ‘intervening’ parties and ‘local’ actors shape the outcomes of particular intervention policies, often with significant repercussions on patterns of change at regional, national and even international levels. Although the term ‘interface’ tends to convey the image of some kind of two-sided articulation or face-to-face confrontation, social interface situations are more complex and multiple in nature, containing within them many different interests, relationships and modes of rationality and power. While analysis focuses on points of confrontation and social difference, these must be situated in broader institutional and knowledge/power domains. In addition, it requires a methodology that counterpoises the voices, experiences and practices of all the relevant social actors involved, including the experiential ‘learning curves’ of policy practitioners and researchers. In the final section of this paper I wish to extrapolate further the central issues and components of the notion of social interface. This necessarily remains an incomplete vision since in the end the value of the idea and its methodology can only be fully judged through practical application by researchers and practitioners alike.

10

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For an account of the precursors of interface analysis and a fuller explication of it in relation to actor-oriented/social constructionist theoretical perspectives, see N. Long, Encounters at the Interface, 1989, Wageningen; (with Ann Long) Battlefields of Knowledge, 1992, Routledge; and my book Development Sociology: Actor Perspectives, 2001, Routledge.

Key elements of an interface perspective Interface as an organised entity of interlocking relationships and intentionalities Interface analysis focuses on the linkages and networks that develop between individuals or parties rather than on individual or group strategies. Continued interaction encourages the development of boundaries and shared expectations that shape the interaction of the participants so that over time the interface itself becomes an organised entity of interlocking relationships and intentionalities.

Interface as a site for conflict, incompatibility and negotiation Although interface interactions presuppose some degree of common interest, they also have a propensity to generate conflict due to contradictory interests and objectives or to unequal power relations. Negotiations at the interface are sometimes carried out by individuals who represent particular constituencies, groups or organisations. Their position is inevitably ambivalent since they must respond to the demands of their own groups as well as to the expectations of those with whom they must negotiate. In analysing the sources and dynamics of contradiction and ambivalence in interface situations, it is important not to prejudge the case by assuming that certain divisions or loyalties (such as those based on class, ethnicity or gender) are more fundamental than others. One should also not assume that because a particular person ‘represents’ a specific group or institution, that he or she necessarily acts in the interests or on behalf of his/her fellows. The link between representatives and constituencies (with their differentiated memberships) must be empirically established, not taken for granted.

Interface and the clash of cultural paradigms The concept of interface helps us to focus on the production and transformation of differences in worldviews or cultural paradigms. Interface situations often provide the means by which individuals or groups come to define their own cultural or ideological positions vis-à-vis those espousing or typifying opposing views. For example, opinions on agricultural development expressed by technical experts, extension workers and farmers seldom completely coincide; and the same is true for those working for a single government department with a defined policy mandate. Hence agronomists, community development workers, credit officers, irrigation engineers, and the like, often disagree on the problems and priorities of agricultural development. These differences cannot be reduced to personal idiosyncrasies but reflect differences laid down by differential patterns of socialisation and professionalisation, which often lead to miscommunication or a clash of rationalities. The process is further compounded by the coexistence of several different cultural models or organising principles within a single pop-

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ulation or administrative organisation which creates room for manoeuvre in the interpretation and utilisation of these cultural values or standpoints. It becomes necessary, therefore, to identify the conditions under which particular definitions of reality and visions of the future are upheld, to analyse the interplay of cultural and ideological oppositions, and to map out the ways in which bridging or distancing actions and ideologies make it possible for certain types of interface to reproduce or transform themselves.

The centrality of knowledge processes Linked to the last point is the importance of knowledge processes. Knowledge is a cognitive and social construction that results from and is constantly shaped by the experiences, encounters and discontinuities that emerge at the points of intersection between different actors’lifeworlds. Various types of knowledge, including ideas about oneself, other people, and the context and social institutions, are important in understanding social interfaces. Knowledge is present in all social situations and is often entangled with power relations and the distribution of resources. But in intervention situations it assumes special significance since it entails the interplay or confrontation of ‘expert’ versus ‘lay’ forms of knowledge, belief and value, and struggles over their legitimation, segregation and communication. An interface approach then depicts knowledge as arising from ‘an encounter of horizons’. The incorporation of new information and new discursive or cultural frames can only take place on the basis of already existing knowledge frames and evaluative modes, which are themselves re-shaped through the communicative process. Hence knowledge emerges as a product of interaction, dialogue, reflexivity, and contests of meaning, and involves aspects of control, authority and power.

Power as the outcome of struggles over meanings and strategic relationships Like knowledge, power is not simply possessed, accumulated and unproblematically exercised. Power implies much more than how hierarchies and hegemonic control demarcate social positions and opportunities, and restrict access to resources. It is the outcome of complex struggles and negotiations over authority, status, reputation and resources, and necessitates the enrolment of networks of actors and constituencies. Such struggles are founded upon the extent to which specific actors perceive themselves capable of manoeuvring within particular situations and developing effective strategies for doing so. Creating room for manoeuvre implies a degree of consent, a degree of negotiation and thus a degree of power, as manifested in the possibility of exerting some control, prerogative, authority and capacity for action, be it front- or backstage, for brief moments or for more sustained periods. Thus power inevitably generates resistance, accommodation and strategic compliance as regular components of the politics of everyday life.

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Interface as composed of multiple discourses Interface analysis enables us to comprehend how ‘dominant’ discourses are endorsed, transformed or challenged. Dominant discourses are characteristically replete with reifications (often of a ‘naturalistic’ kind) that assume the existence and significance of certain social traits and groupings, pertaining, for example, to ‘communities’, hierarchical or egalitarian structures, and cultural constructions of ethnicity, gender, and class. Such discourses serve to promote particular political, cultural or moral standpoints, and they are often mobilised in struggles over social meanings and strategic resources. Yet, while some actors ‘vernacularise’ dominant discourses in order to legitimate their claims upon the state and other authoritative bodies, others choose to reject them by deploying and defending countervailing or ‘demotic’(lit. ‘of the people’) discourses that offer alternative, more locally-rooted points of view.11 A major task of interface analysis is to spell out the knowledge and power implications of this interplay and the blending or segregation of opposing discourses. Discursive practices and competencies develop primarily within the circumstances of everyday social life and become especially salient at critical points of discontinuity between actors’ lifeworlds. It is through the lens of interface that these processes can best be captured conceptually.

The paradox of ‘participatory development’ Intervention processes are embedded in, and generate, social processes that imply aspects of power, authority and legitimation; and they are more likely to reflect and exacerbate cultural differences and conflict between social groups than they are to lead to the establishment of common perceptions and shared values. And, if this is the normal state of affairs, then it becomes unreal and foolhardy to imagine that facilitators can gently nudge or induce people and organisations towards more ‘participatory’ and equitable modes of integration and co-ordination. This is the paradox of neo-populist discourses and participatory methods aimed at empowering local people. Although such neo-populist measures emphasise ‘listening to the people’, understanding the ‘reasoning behind local knowledge’, strengthening ‘local organisational capacity’ and promoting ‘alternative development strategies’, they nevertheless carry with them the connotation of power being injected from outside in order to shift the balance of forces towards forms of local self-determination. In other words, they imply the idea of empowering people through strategic intervention by ‘enlightened experts’ who make use of ‘people’s science’ and ‘local intermediate organisations’ to promote development ‘from below’. While acknowledging the need to take serious account of local people’s solutions to the problems they face, the issues are often presented as involving the substitution of ‘blueprint’by ‘learning’approaches to the planning and management of projects 11

See Baumann 1996, for further insight into these processes in a multi-ethnic area of London, also Arce and Long 2000.

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or in terms of ‘new’ for ‘old’ style professionalism geared to promoting participatory management and participatory research and evaluation methods. Such formulations, however, do not escape the managerialist and interventionist undertones inherent in the idea of ‘development’. That is, they tend to evoke the image of more knowledgeable and powerful outsiders helping the powerless and less discerning local folk. Of course, many field practitioners facing the everyday problems of project implementation show an acute awareness of this paradox of participatory strategies. But, no matter how firm the commitment to good intentions, the notion of ‘powerful outsiders’ assisting ‘powerless insiders’ is constantly smuggled in. This is the central dilemma of planning and designing the means for engineering change in the first place. It is not removed by stressing the goals of participation and empowerment.

A final comment on the contribution of an interface approach The struggle for space or room for manoeuvre – at once a battle over images, relationships and resources – and the social transformations and ramifications it entails, can, I believe, be captured best through an interface perspective. Such an approach provides a heuristic device for identifying the sites of social discontinuity, ambiguity and cultural difference, and sensitises the researcher and practitioner to the importance of exploring how discrepancies of social interest, cultural interpretation, knowledge and power are mediated and perpetuated or transformed at critical points of confrontation and linkage. In order to get to grips with these contradictory and discontinuous processes, the researcher and practitioner needs to access and learn lessons from the ‘autonomous’ settings in which people cope with their own problems, irrespective of whether or not the foci of concern or parameters of action can be linked with outside intervention. This requires the adoption of a rigorous ethnographic stance. One must go to where people are already engaged in interactions, problem-solving activities or routine social practice and negotiate a role or combination of roles for oneself, as participant observer, active collaborator, adviser, etc. A fundamental principle of actor-oriented research is that it must based on actor-defined issues or problematic situations, whether defined by policy makers, researchers, intervening private or public agents or local actors, and whatever the spatial, cultural, institutional and power arenas involved. Such issues or situations are often, of course, perceived, and their implications interpreted, very differently by the various parties or actors involved. Hence, from the outset one faces the dilemma of how to represent problematic situations when confronted with multiple voices and contested ‘realities’. Specific social arenas are of course discursively constructed and delimited practically by the language use and strategic actions of the actors involved. How far consensus is achieved over the definition of any one situation requires empirical evidence. One should not

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assume a shared vision or common negotiating platform. Actors must work towards such joint commitments and there are always possibilities for opting out or ‘free riding’. All actors operate - mostly implicitly rather than explicitly - with beliefs about agency, that is, they articulate notions about relevant acting units and the kinds of knowledgeability and capability they have vis-à-vis other social entities. This raises the question of how people’s perceptions of the actions and agency of others shape their own behaviour. For example, local farmers may have reified views about ‘the state’ or ‘the market’as actors, which, irrespective of their dealings with individual government officials or market traders, can influence their expectations of the outcomes of particular interventions. The same applies to the attribution of motives to authoritative local actors, such as political bosses and village leaders. The central issue here is how actors struggle to give meaning to their experiences through an array of representations, images, cognitive understandings, and emotional responses. Though the repertoire of ‘sense-making’filters and antennae will vary considerably, such processes are to a degree framed by ‘shared’ cultural perceptions, which are subject to reconstitution or transformation. Local cultures are always, as it were, ‘put to the test’ as they encounter the less familiar or the strange. Analysis must therefore address itself to the intricacies and dynamics of relations between differing lifeworlds, and to processes of cultural construction. In this way, one aims, as it were, to map out what we might describe as cartography of cultural difference, power and authority. Such interface analysis has a direct bearing on how one looks at policy processes. Policy debates, including policy formulation, implementation and evaluation, are permeated by interface discontinuities and struggles. Indeed the whole process consists of an intricate series of socially-constructed and negotiated transformations relating to different institutional domains and differentially affecting a variety of actors. Hence an awareness of the dynamics of interface encounters and how they shape events and actor interests and identities is critical. Whatever the precise policy issues and implementing structures, it is essential to avoid framing problems and looking for solutions from within a framework of formal-logical models and rationalistic procedures. Such approaches accord far too much weight to external expert systems and undervalue the practical knowledge and organising capacities that develop among field level practitioners and local actors. After all it is the day-to-day decisions, routines, and strategies devised for coping with uncertainties, conflicts of interest and cultural difference that make or break policy. Indeed it has been persuasively argued that it is precisely at such implementation interfaces that de facto policy is created. In order to understand these ‘autonomous’ fields of action and the pressures impinging on them, researchers must devise ways of entering the everyday lifeworlds of the variety of actors represented in order to learn how each attempts to deal with the complexities of implementer/client relationships. This requires field strategies based not only on observing and teasing out the meanings of other people’s lifeworlds but also on the willingness of field practitioners and policy makers to share their experiences and to put them to the test. Hence we must de-

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velop types of reflexive ethnography that explore the relationship between actors’practical-everyday and researchers’theoretical understandings of problematic situations. The added value of this approach is that it enables us to consider the practitioner (both researcher and field officer) as part of the web of powers, constraints, opportunities and potentialities of specific intervention situations. Interface analysis offers a useful conceptual framework for achieving this.

A word of warning In building a picture of everyday encounters and modes of organisation and knowledge, we must be careful not to reify cultural phenomena, even if local people and policy makers do so themselves by using labelling or classificatory devices. The latter create simplifications or black boxes, like the idea of society being neatly divided into ‘ethnic communities’or ‘class categories’, or planners’ visions of needy ‘target groups’ or ‘stakeholder categories’, that obscure rather than throw light on the diversity and complexity of social and cultural arrangements. Moreover such reifications enter into the very process of defining problems for solution, and in this way they may perpetuate existing ideal-typical models of what are ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ conditions. Instead we must give close attention to the heterogeneity of social practice by focusing on the differential social responses to apparently similar structural conditions: for only in this way can we explain the significance of certain types of strategic agency and knowledge/power constructions. Examples of interface encounters should not then be cited merely to illustrate general principles of cultural polarity, organisational dualism or hierarchy. Rather, they should be visualised as providing a methodological entry point for examining the dynamics and transformation of inter-cultural and inter-institutional relationships and values. The multiplicity of interfaces associated with development intervention provide a rich field for exploring these issues, since they throw into sharp relief all the ambivalences and complexities of cultural diversity and conflict. They also reveal the paradoxical nature of planned intervention of all kinds – even those promoting ‘participatory’ programmes – which simultaneously opens up space for negotiation and initiative for some groups, while blocking the interests, ambitions and political agency of others. What we now urgently need is to convince policy makers and development practitioners, in search of better project designs and management techniques, to reflect upon and share with us their firsthand experiences of ‘struggling at the interface’. In this way the actor-oriented framework could be further developed in relation to specific policy practices.

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References Apthorpe, R. (1984). ‘Agriculture and strategies: the language of development policy’, in E.J Clay & B.B. Schaffer (eds). Room for Manoeuvre: An Exploration of Public Policy in Agriculture and Rural Development. London: Heinemann Educational. Arce, A. & Long, N. (eds) (2000). Anthropology, Development and Modernities: Exploring Discourses, Counter-tendencies and Violence. London and New York: Routledge. Baumann, G. (1996). Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-Ethnic London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Booth, D. (1985). ‘Marxism and Development Sociology: Interpreting the Impasse’, World Development, XIII, 7: 761-87. Booth, D. (ed.) (1994). Rethinking Social Development: Theory, Research and Practice. Burnt Hill and Harlow: Longman Scientific and Technical. Clay E.J.& Schaffer, B.B. (eds.) (1984). Room for Manoeuvre: An Explanation of Public Policy in Agriculture and Rural Development. London: Heinemann Educational. Cleaves, P.S. & Scurrah, M.J. (1980). Agriculture, Bureaucracy, and Military Government in Peru. Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell University Press. Figueroa, A. (1981). La Economía Campesina de la Sierra del Perú. Lima: Fondo Editorial, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Long, N. (1977). An Introduction to the Sociology of Rural Development. London: Tavistock Publications. Long, N. (1984). ‘Creating Space for Change: A perspective on the Sociology of Development’, Inaugural lecture, Wageningen University. Revised version in Sociologia Ruralis, Vol. XXIV, 3-4: 168-84. Long, N. (ed) (1989). Encounters at the Interface: A Perspective on Social Discontinuities in Rural Development. Wageningen Studies in Sociology, No. 27, Wageningen University. Long, N. & Long, A. (eds) (1992). Battlefields of Knowledge: The Interlocking of Theory and Practice in Social Research and Development. London and New York: Routledge. Long, N. (2001). Development Sociology: Actor Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. Long, N. (2003). ‘An Actor-oriented Approach to Development Intervention’, in Rural Life Improvement in Asia. Edited by Asian Productivity Organisation. Tokyo. Long, N. & Roberts, B. (Eds.) (1978). Peasant Cooperation and Capitalist Expansion in Central Peru. Austin: Texas University Press. Long, N. & Roberts, B.R. (1984). Miners, Peasants and Entrepreneurs. Regional Development in the Central Highlands of Peru. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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McClintock, C. (1980). ‘Reform Governments and Policy Implementation: Lessons from Peru’, in M.S.Grindle (ed.). Politics and Policy Implementation in the Third World. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Orlove, B.S. & G. Custred (1980). ‘The Alternative Model of Agrarian Society in the Andes: Households, Networks and Corporate Groups’, in B.S.Orlove & G. Custred (eds.). Land and Power in Latin America: Agrarian Economies and Social Processes in the Andes. New York and London: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc. Palumbo, D.J. (ed.) (1987). The Policies of Program Evaluation. Beverley Hills and London: Sage. Palumbo, D.J. & Nachmias, D. (1983). ‘The Pre-Conditions for Successful Evaluation. Is There an Ideal Type?’ Policy Sciences, Vol. 16: 67-79. Ploeg, J.D van der (1987). De Verwettenschapperlijking van de Landbouwbeoefening [The Scientification of Agricultural Practice]. Wageningen: Wageningen University. Röling, N.G. (1988). Extension Science: Information Systems in Agricultural Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Schaffer, B.B. (1984). ‘Towards Responsibility: Public Policy in Concept and Practice’, in E.J. Clay and Schaffer, B.B.(eds.). Room for Manoeuvre: An Explanation of Public Policy in Agriculture and Rural Development. London: Heinemann Educational. Schuurman, F.J. (ed.) (1993). Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory. London: Zed Press. Smith, G. (1984). ‘Confederations of Households: Extended Domestic Enterprises in City and Country’, in N. Long and B. Roberts. Miners, Peasants and Entrepreneurs: Regional Development in the Central Highlands of Peru. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, G. (1989). Livelihood and Resistance: Peasants and Politics of Land Reform in Peru. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stein, W.W. (ed.) (1985). Peruvian Contexts of Change. New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books. Yambert, K.A. (1980).’Thought and Reality: Dialectics of the Andean Community’, in B.S. Orlove & G. Custred (eds.) Land and Power in Latin America: Agrarian Economies and Social Processes in the Andes. New York and London: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc. Zendejas Romero, J. S. (2003). Politica Local y Formación del Estado. Procesos Históricos de Formación de Espacios y Sujetos Sociales en un Municipio Rural Mexicano, 1914-1998. Ph.D. Thesis. Wageningen University.

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4. Developmental intervention in work activities – an activity theoretical interpretation Jaakko Virkkunen

Introduction Developmental intervention in work as an activity The prevalent modern form of developmental interventions in work activities is the management consulting that began as a special form of professional and business activity in the early 20th century. The main content of business consulting has, from its beginnings, been to apply scientific knowledge to the organization and management of business activities. Another important form of developmental interventions in work activities are carried out by researchers, who view the intervention as a central element in the research process (Lewin, 1948; Argyris, 1980; Fricke et.al. 1980, 29; Whyte, 1991). The first management consulting firm was established in the USA in 1886. The volume of the activity then increased steadily but slowly until 1960. Growth then intensified, and since the 1980 it has been skyrocketing (Kyrö & Enquist, 1997, 10-11, Kipping & Armbrüster, 1998). There are many reasons for the rapid growth in volume. One of these is the diversification of the areas of knowledge applied, another is the increasing outsourcing of expert functions, and a third is the birth of large international consulting firms. As the activity has evolved, the relationship between science and consultancy has also changed. Many researchers into business and production management, organization and information systems regard consultative work as an essential element in their research work (Gummeson, 1991, 7-8; Lind & Rhenman, 1989). Regardless of the specific form of developmental intervention, the contradictory relationship between scientific and technical generalizations on one hand and the needs and problems in a local activity on the other, is a central dynamic element in developmental intervention as a form of activity.

Research into intervention in work The perspectives from which developmental interventions in work activities have been studied appear to differ along two dimensions. Firstly, some studies take their starting point as the interventionist’s intention while others look the

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process more from the viewpoint of the community subjected to an intervention. Secondly, part of the studies are carried out from an outsider’s and part from an insider’s perspective. There are thus studies that analyze the intervention as the implementation of a new technology or policy decision (Pressman & Wildavsky,1978; Swanson, 1988), and ethnographic studies that analyze how the community subjected to the implementation of a well-intended reform react to the intervention (for a classic of this type see Wolcott, 1977). These studies have highlighted both the dynamics and forms of inertia as well as resistance to and conversion of the initial idea behind the intervention. Prescriptive studies of change management and system implementation adopt the insider’s view of the interventionist and seek to find ways of alleviating resistance, creating commitment to the change, and evoking ideas and contributions from the subjects of the intervention (Checkland, 1985; Leonard-Barton & Kraus, 1985; Kotter, 1996; Argyris, 1970; Schein, 1998). Different forms of action research, on the other hand, make an effort to create a subject-to-subject collaboration between researchers and practitioners and specify the research questions and process in a collaborative manner to make the inquiry a way of increasing the action capability of the practitioners (see for instance Whyte, 1991). The difference between these two lines of research resembles Holzkamp’s distinction between control science that regards people as objects and subject science that regards people as equal partners in the research process (Holzkamp, 1983, 541-545). Despite the significant differences between the above-mentioned types of intervention research, most studies seem to share the focus on the intervention process and on the interaction between the subject and object of intervention. Although analysis of these is necessary, this focus has, however, lead researchers to neglect analysis of the inner structure and developmental dynamics of the system that is the object of the intervention. The outcome of an intervention is, however, bound to be a result of, on one hand, the intervention and, on the other, the mode of operation and the inner developmental dynamics of the system that is the object of intervention. Kurt Lewin, who is regarded as the father of action research, tried to capture the dynamics of the object of intervention with his theory of the phenomenal force field (Lewin, 1936, 1951). This provides tools for analyzing the here-and-now dynamic situation from the point of view of an intervention and helps in defining a change strategy. It focuses, however, on individuals’phenomenal fields and does not provide tools for revealing the forces that lead to change and development in the system of joint activity when it is not subject to an intervention. The theory of sociotechnical systems and the theory of complex systems that emphasizes operative closure and the self-referentiality of social systems focus more on the conditions of stability of the systems than on the dynamics of their development (Eijnatten, 1993; Willke, 1999). It is, however, seldom that an intervention alone can an intervention in itself suffice to produce change and development. It is more likely that an intervention can be successful when it supports and amplifies the forces of development that are inherent in a system. A theory of the developmental dynamics of the object system is therefore a necessary part of any theory and methodology of developmental interventions. While

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system theories recognize this need, they do not provide many tools for answering it (Willke, 1999, 27). In his actor-oriented theory of development and interface approach to the study developmental interventions, Norman Long manages to integrate the analysis of the dynamic processes of self-development in the object of intervention and the intervention process. According to him: “Intervention is an on-going transformational process that is constantly re-shaped by its own internal organizational and political dynamic and by the specific conditions it encounters or itself creates, including the responses and strategies of local and regional groups who may struggle to define and defend their own social spaces, cultural boundaries and positions within the wider power field (Long, 2001, 27).” Also Long defines, however, the unit of analysis in his research primarily in terms of the intervention and does not provide a way to analyze the structures of the activities which the “local and regional groups” are involved in. Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978; Leont’ev, 1978; Engeström, 1987; Engeström, Miettinen & Punamäki. 1999) can contribute substantially to our understanding of developmental interventions in work activities, since it has an explicit concept of the object system of intervention and its inner developmental dynamics, as well as a methodology for the intervention process proper. In this chapter I will present an Activity Theoretical interpretation of developmental interventions. I will first discuss the method of creating such an interpretation. I will then present an analysis of the basic relationships in a system of developmental intervention in work activities and describe three basic types of interventions. Finally, I present an example of a third-level developmental intervention carried out by applying the activity-theory-based intervention methodology called Developmental Work Research (Engeström, 1987).

Remediation as the basic mechanism in the development of work activities One of the main tenets of Cultural Historical Activity Theory is that human practices must be studied as historically-developing systemic formations. The founder of this school of thought, L. S. Vygotsky (1934/1962, 3-4) criticized the empiricist and elementalist view of research that purports to construct an understanding of complex systems piecemeal by studying their elements separately and attempting to create a picture of the whole by adding up the pieces of knowledge so gained. According to Vygotsky, retaining the specific quality of the research object in the analysis requires one to find the smallest and genetically-earliest-possible systemic unit that still carries the specific quality of the phenomenon to be studied. The basic elements, relationships and mechanisms that create these qualities can then be identified in this most primitive form. To understand the complex forms and developmental dynamics of the phenomenon in question the researcher should reconstruct the developmental phases and transformations through which the complex forms pass as they evolve from the rudimentary one. This research strategy has been called ascending from the abstract to the con-

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crete, while qualitatively new forms necessarily first emerge as isolated (that is abstract) deviations of what is general, and develop only gradually into complex and varied forms that have manifold connections to other phenomena, that is, they become concrete (Iljenkov, 1982). To apply this methodological principle in analysis of the phenomenon of developmental intervention in work activities, we have to find its simplest and genetically-earliest form, its germ cell, identify the necessary elements and relationships in this system, and reconstruct in a conceptual way the genesis of the more-complex forms as qualitative transformations of the initial form.

The cultural mediation of human action According to Cultural Historical Activity Theory, the origin of the development of the specifically-human form of life activities lies in tool production and the use of language. A simple example illustrates the basic relationships involved in tool use. Think of a stone-age man who cracks a fresh animal bone with a stone in order to have its nourishing marrow. In this episode, he uses the stone as a tool to change the bone that is the object of his action. In another situation, the man can use a bone to make a hole in a stone when producing an axe. This time the bone is the tool and the stone, as a prospective axe, is the object. Which physical object is the tool and which is the object of the action depends on the end that the human actor has in view and on the operation by which he intends to reach the goal. Putting the bone and stone in certain kinds of interaction through his operations, the man gains knowledge of their qualities, which then makes them potential tools in new situations. A characteristic feature of human beings is to involve objects belonging to the environment in the process of problem solving and attach a specific meaning to such objects in the context of their activity. The meaning given to the objects is established through the operations in which they are involved as actual or potential objects and tools of actions. Learning in tool use has an abductive character12: In a problematic situation, the subject associates one object with another in a goal-oriented action through the idea of an operation realizable by the object in the form of a tool. After the abductive association of the two objects as the object and the tool of an action through an operation, there can be inductive learning and generalization from repeating this operation and also a kind of deductive generalization of transferring the instrument function of the tool-object to other situations and other objects of action. The attachment of a specific, activity-related instrumental meaning to objects about which we were previously indifferent does not concern the transformation of external objects only, but concerns also our psychological self-regulation. A man may make marks along the route he is taking to find the same path later, make a knot in his handkerchief to remind

12

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The general form of abductive inference is: The surprising fact C is observed, but if A were true, C would be a matter of course. Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true (Peirce, 1931-1935, CP 5.p. 189). This form of inference can be turned into a practical syllogism as follows: a problem in reaching the goal of an action emerges C, but if a tool of type A would be available the goal would be easily reached. Hence there is reason to try/develop A.

him of an important thing, or cast discs to make a decision in an ambivalent situation (Vygotsky, 1978, 74 ). The processes of learning and generalizing that are based on tool use take place in the social life practices of a human society in which the tool-operation-object relationships have became stable and generalized and tools and signs are produced for specific purposes. Individuals in a human society thus always have a dual relationship to the objects in their environment: first they have an immediate perceptual and practical interaction with them and second, their interaction with the objects is mediated through tools, signs and rules that provide objects with cultural meaning – what they are in terms of societal practices and what they can be used for or made into. Artefacts that have been made to be used as tools for a specific purpose have the functionality to mediate a generalized human operation. Generations of human beings have objectified their knowledge and skill in various forms of cultural artefacts. The objectification of knowledge and skills in artefacts give them an objective, semi-independent existence which is external to individuals and which makes possible their collective development by people distributed in time and place (Lektorsky, 1984, 137). For the members of the society that know the artefacts, they have an affordance to a specific type of action (Leontyev, 1933; Latour, 1994; Kallinikos, 2003). Learning to use a tool thus means learning to carry out those generalized practical operations the tool has been created for, or learning a word and concept means learning to execute the perceptual, intellectual, and communicative operations a word has evolved to mediate (Leontyev, 1933). When learning to use a tool, human individual has to make the same abductive association between a problem situation and an artefact as a potential ool that was made when the tool was first invented. As human action is always culturally mediated through language and tools, the development of human activity can be characterized as remediation; the replacement of earlier cultural mediators of an action with new, more adequate ones and the stabilization of new tool-operation-object relationships.

The process of remediation of actions The method L. S. Vygotsky used to study the development of higher psychological processes models in an illuminating way the basic characteristics of the abductive association involved in remediation: ”Our approach to the study of these [higher psychological] processes is to use what we call the functional method of double stimulation. The task facing the child in the experimental context is, as a rule, beyond his present capabilities and cannot be solved by existing skills. In such cases a neutral object is placed near the child, and frequently we are able to observe how the neutral stimulus is drawn into the situation and takes on the function of a sign. Thus, the child actively incorporates these neutral objects into the task of problem solving. We might say that when difficulties arise, neutral stimuli take on the function of a sign and from that point on the operation’s structure assumes an essentially different character (Vygotsky, 1978, 74).”

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The process of remediation involves the following five phases: 1) An actor involved in performing an action recognizes that he or she cannot perform it with the available means. 2) The actor changes focus and searches for a new way of acting and a new tool and 3) recognizes that some available artefact can be used as an instrument in performing the task by a certain type of operation. 4) He/she then adjusts his or her way of acting and/or the artefact to make it an instrument in the action, and 5) uses the same artefact in performing other similar tasks. Although the abductive association can be a short moment of insight, the elaboration of the new artefact into a mediator in the activity and the incremental development of the artefact and the skill of using it can be a long process. It is important to emphasize the creative and abductive character of remediation and not to interpret it as direct knowledge transfer. The search for a tool and the abductive association between a task at hand and a culturally-existing artefact does not take place if the subject does not experience a problem in his/her action. Nor does the instrumental relationship emerge if its construction is beyond the means of the actor. The process of learning the operations to use a tool can be too demanding and call for additional mediators that are not within the reach of the actor. In human activities, a tool is always an element in a complicated system of cultural mediators – think for instance the number of specific-purpose tools, words and patterns of behaviour in such a simple activity as civilized eating. A new tool must be adjusted to the prevailing system of instruments. There is thus always a zone of proximal development in which a certain kind of remediation is needed and becomes possible (Vygotsky, 1978, 86; Engeström, 1987, 169). The process of remediation does not take place in a social vacuum. Abductive associations and the establishment of the instrumental relationships are supported by the example of other people and especially by mediated learning experiences in which other people help an individual to recognize the tool-object connection, attend to important aspects of the situation and learn the necessary operations (Feuerstein, Klein & Tannenbaum, 1991). At the level of individual action, guidance that creates mediated learning experiences and remediation of actions is a prototypical form of developmental intervention. It is the way a parent may intervene in a child’s action or a master in the apprentice’s work in order to help him/her develop his/her skills. It is, however, not the germ cell of developmental intervention in work activities because work is not primarily about individual actions but about collaborative production.

Remediation of collaborative work activities In contrast to animals, man does not secure his livelihood through the individual acquisition of food and shelter. Individuals satisfy their needs by taking part in productive work activities according to the societal division of labour and through a societal system of the distribution and exchange of resources. In a developed society, work is primarily work for others. It takes place in systems of collaborative, object-oriented activity that have evolved to meet specific needs in society. Furthermore, activity systems are always embedded in a network of in-

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TOOLS Tool-producing activity

Historically more advanced form of the activity

production

OBJECT > OUTCOME

SUBJECT Subject-producing activity

exchange

RULES Rule-producing activity

distribution

COMMUNITY

DIVISION OF LABOR

Object (client) activity

Figure 1. An activity system within a network of surrounding activities

terdependent activities. Engeström (1987) has presented a model of the basic elements of and the multiple relationships of cultural mediation in an activity system as well as a typical network of activities that surround an activity system (Figure 1). This model of an activity system highlights the fact that an actor in the activity is a member of the community of actors who take part in the activity. Actions by individuals, and the necessary distribution and exchange of intermediate outputs and resources, are mediated through the tools, rules and division of labour of the historically-evolved local system of collaborative activity. The artefacts that have become mediators of the activity are to a great extent the outputs of other specialized activities. Typically, a variety of local activities exist in the society which are oriented towards the same kind of object and meeting the same societal need. In this variety of activities there are historically earlier, less-developed and more-advanced forms of each activity. The last of these provide models of organization and tools that the actors in other local activities can use as resources when searching for ways to develop activities they are engaged in. The central relationship in an activity system is the tool-object relationship, in which the tool comprises both intellectual tools in the form of concepts and technological tools. The object of the activity exists both as a given, empirical reality and as a culturally-mediated and defined entity; the given empirical reality seen through the ”spectacles” of the professional categories of the actors as an object transformable with the available tools and methods. The activity is not possible if the empirical reality differs substantially from what the cultural mediators have been developed for, or if the different mediators are not compatible. Empirical objects may, for instance, change so much that the existing conceptualization of the object and the tools available no longer match with it. When contradictions between the elements of the activity system become aggravating, the idea of object of the activity and its other mediators have to be transformed in a qualitative way.

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The principle and the logic on which the relative coherence of the elements of an activity system are based can be called its concept. In the history of any activity, we can discern both periods of relative coherence and periods of incoherence and aggravated contradictions as well as successive, qualitatively-different concepts of that activity. The concept can be implicit and embedded in the form of a historically-developed practice so that specific research is required for its explication. It can, however, also be consciously planned and exist both as an explicit blueprint in documents and as a form of practice that is based on the blueprint and resembles it more or less. The blueprint of the concept functions as a tool for establishing logical coherence in the actual system of activity. There are only limited possibilities for the remediation of individual actions in an activity system within a certain concept, as exceeding these means both changing the actions of other individuals taking part in the joint activity and the mediators of the collaboration. In the transformation of human work practices, remediation necessarily proceeds in a dialogical process of transforming individual actions and the system of joint activity. According to K. Marx (1973, 705), development in human activities is characterized by a historical process of socialization that manifests itself as the increasing utilization of general societal resources in local activities, deepening the societal division of labour and specialization, as well as tightening the interdependence between geographical areas and activities. The enrichment and elaboration of societal infrastructures of production, distribution, exchange, and communication, as well as the accumulation of wealth in the form of the psychological and technical tools available within the society are also manifestations of this general tendency. For a local, specific activity, there is always the possibility of overcoming aggravated internal contradictions and the threat of crisis by taking a further step in the process of the historical socialization of the activity. This is possible by creating new mediators – especially concepts and tools that expand the object of the activity by widening the boundaries of what is considered to be the object of the activity in terms of time horizon, position in the value chain, geographical area and collaboration, or of integrating research and development into the object of the activity. The expansion of the object of the activity is only possible with a concomitant expansion of the community of collaborating people involved in the activity and also the creation of a new type of subject – perhaps a collective one – incorporating competencies that have previously been separate. The historical process of socialization is tightly connected to the development of technology and social innovations (Freeman & Louça, 2001). The same basic logic and type of activity concept and similar patterns of transformation from one type of concept to another can therefore be found in very different activities. Victor and Boynton (1998) have identified four ideal-typical forms of work that represent different general types of activity concepts: handicraft, mass production, process enhancement, mass customization. The transformation of the concept of a collaborative work activity is a complicated stepwise process of remediation, in which a change in one mediator of the activity creates new kinds of contradictions within and between elements of the activity system that in turn call for new, further steps of remediation until the

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Fourth-order contradictions (between 5. The new system activity systems) of activity:

Consolidation, reflection

First-order contradictions (within the elements of the activity system)

1. Present practice: In-need state

Third-order contradictions (between 4. Application and the old and the generalization: new way) Changing the

activity system

Second-order contradictions (between the 2. Double bind: elements of the activity Analysis and search system) for a new solution

3. Formation of a new object and motive: New model of the activity and new tools

Figure 2. The cycle of expansive learning and development of the concept of an activity

whole concept of the activity has changed in a qualitative way. An idealized model of the cycle of expansive transformation of the concept of an activity is depicted in Figure 2 (Engeström, 1987, 322). The process of the expansive remediation of an activity gets its motive force from the successive emergence and resolution of new types of inner incompatibilities within the activity system. The first phase of the cycle is characterized by a gradual increase in the number of disturbances, ruptures and problematic situations in individuals’ actions within the activity, an increasingly-shared view of the inadequacy of the concept of the activity among those involved in it, and local attempts to change the practice. As further changes in the elements of the activity take place, the in-need state develops into the threat of a crisis and an increase in individuals’ double-bind situations. In a collaborative activity, there are no obvious problems that would directly prompt the search for a new mediator, but rather a variety of individual perceptions and experiences of problematic situations. Before new mediators can be created, the community involved in that activity has to determine the root cause of the difficulties. Instead of an immediate abductive association between the problematic situation and a possible new mediator of the activity, tools for analysing the root cause of the problems are required. An aggravated contradiction between elements of the activity system prompts a debate about the causes of the problems and possible solutions. At some point of this search for new solutions, some new mediator is taken as the basis for transforming the activity, as a potential new tool. It may not directly be the new model for the activity, but rather an

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intermediate tool which assists further search and development of the new concept needed for the activity, a springboard (Engeström 1987, 287): ”The springboard is a facilitative image, technique or socio-conversational constellation (or combination of these) misplaced or transplanted from some previous context into a new, expansively-transitional activity context during an acute conflict of a double-bind character. The springboard has typically only a temporary or situational function in the solution of the double bind.”

The adoption of the new concept or tool as a mediator in some part of the activity starts the process of transforming the activity system. This phase comprises deductive learning about the meaning of the new model in various aspects of the activity, as well as more-inductive generalizing and refinement of new types of actions using the new mediators. Prompted by the collisions between the new and the old elements of the activity, many complementary cycles of remediation arise. In the last phase of the cycle of expansive remediation, new mediators must also be created for the interaction between the central activity and neighbouring activities in the network. In this kind of process of expansive transformation of an activity, actors collectively learn and develop new forms of acting and new cultural mediators that do not exist anywhere to be appropriated completely ready-for-use, but have to be bricolaged and developed by the creative reinterpretation, combination and transformation of available cultural means.

Different types of developmental intervention in work activities Historically, in the societal division of labour, tool-producing activities have begun to separate from the production of the means for supporting life as specific activities at a very early phase of development. Thus besides each production activity there are typically activities which specialize in producing and developing tools for that type of production. The historical development of tools is thus based both on the interaction between learning within the tool-using activity and the tool-producing activity, and the transfer of tools from more advanced forms of activity to those that lag behind in development. In handicraft, the development of work activities was based in the main on incremental changes in and additions to the working implements and methods used in the trade. As long as both the tool-producing activity and the activity of using the tool were both of a craft type, as was the case, for instance, in an agricultural village and the local blacksmith, there was no specialized activity that could be characterized as developmental intervention in work activity. In the late 1700s, scientific knowledge, systematic experimentation and the design of tools started to replace traditional craft secrets and methods and to change the way that the use of new tools was learned (Rorabaugh, 1986). Mere peripheral participation and apprenticeship was no longer an adequate way of

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learning to use a machine or a science-based method. The historical starting point for developmental interventions as a specific form of activity can be located in this phase of early industrialization and the implementation of machines that could only be used through the coordinated social actions of a group of individuals. The design and implementation of such tools in productive use was not possible without at the same time creating rules for collaboration and new forms of division of labour between individuals. In contrast to various forms of individual actions involving guidance and teaching, the design and implementation of a collectively-used machine can thus be seen as the historically-earliest form of the specific activity of developmental intervention in work activities. Although individual inventors largely created the first industrial machines, the dissemination of these machines called for experienced persons who knew how to organize the work activity of using the machine. In the network of activities, developmental intervention in work activities can be located between, on the one hand the central activity and, on the other the activities that produce tools for the central activity and/or the historically-more-advanced forms of the activity that can serve as a model for the central activity. The object of an intervention activity consists of: identifying the problems in the central activity and analyzing their root causes; providing artefacts as potential tools (or other mediators) for the activity that would help to overcome a problematic situation in the activity; helping the practitioners to see the relevance of the artefacts provided; and helping the practitioners to implement the artefact as an actual mediator in their activity. The intervention activity obtains many of its tools from the tool-producing activity and by using the more-advanced forms of the activity as models (Figure 3).

Tool- (rule-) Historically-moreadvanced form of producing activity the client activity

Intervention activity

Client activity in its present form

New form of the client activity

Figure 3. A schematic model depicting the position of intervention activity in the network of activities

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In the model depicted in Figure 3, the subject, community, rules and division of labour of the intervention activity have been left open. These vary to a considerable extent depending on the type of intervention. Marx Wartofsky (1979, 201) has presented an analysis of the different types and levels of artefacts used in human practice. He differentiates between primary, secondary and tertiary artefacts. Primary artefacts are those that are directly used in production such as tools, modes of social organization, and bodily skills that enable the use of tools. The representation of actions by symbolic means generates the distinctive class of secondary artefacts, including models of forms of action, designs and prescriptions that are created for the purpose of preserving and transmitting skills in the production and use of primary artefacts. Secondary artefacts make it possible for practitioners to take an overall view of their activity, and then to reflect on it, as well as to collect and preserve their experiences as potential material for further development of the work. Tertiary artefacts are artefacts that do not have a direct representational function vis-á-vis production but instead serve the free construction, in the imagination, of tools, rules and operations that differ in a distinctive way from those adopted for the praxis. Such “possible worlds” may, however, reflect the limits of the actual praxis and help practitioners to create alternatives for conceivable change in the model of praxis itself. We can say that secondary artefacts serve as tools for reflecting upon, evaluating and developing primary artefacts, while tertiary artefacts serve as tools for reflecting upon, evaluating and transforming both secondary and primary artefacts. The modern form of developmental intervention developed as secondary artefacts became important in the development of industrial mass production in the early 20th century. Mass production became the first broadly-spread general type of activity concept that was applied in a great variety of activities. Its dissemination, a central factor in economic growth until the mid 1970s, was a process of transforming craft-type work activities into industrial-mass production type activities. The way of doing this has been called the ”rationalization” of production. The first tools and methods for rationalization interventions were developed by the so-called Systematic Management Movement, whose best-known representative is Frederic Taylor (1911). In Taylor’s time, mechanical machines were already widely used in production, but the still prevailing management and work practices in herited from the craft era prevented the full exploitation of their potential. Taylor developed a new management system and a method for speeding up manual work. His method consisted of the time-and-motion analysis of work tasks, a way of compiling a model of the optimal method for performing a task and describing it in a document as a standard. This ”one best way” of performing the work was subsequently taught to workers. The basic principles of rationalization interventions, function-based centralization, the phase-based division of labour, and standardization of methods have remained much the same ever since, even though the object of rationalization has grown as firms have grown. Rationalization led to two intertwined types of interventions in work activities. We can call the first of these ”initial rationalization”. These interventions were aimed at transforming craft work into a form of mass production. As the

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mass-production structure evolved, a function-centered form of developmental intervention evolved that applied rationalization ideas to specific aspects of production and management, such as payment-by-results, production engineering, time-and-motion studies, and personnel management (see Kipping, 2002, 30). These methods of intervention exhibit a number of common characteristics. Firstly, they focus on various elements and aspects of the overall system of the activity, but do not change the object and overall concept of the activity. Secondly, the developmental intervention has the character of standardization and/or optimization. Some dimensions in the problem situation are abstracted and the optimum value of these variables is searched for through analysis, design and experimentation. The rationalization of work was an effective way of reducing the unit cost of production, but it led also to a high turnover of workers and problems of motivation, morale and collaboration. Both worker motivation and commitment thus became central variables in which changes were required. A number of intervention methods evolved to deal with these problems (Likert, 1967; Pasmore, 1988; Colembiewski, 1972; French & Bell, 1973). In fact, the history of developmental interventions in work activities has been a constant oscillation between an emphasis on control and an emphasis on commitment (Adler, 2003). A radically-new production concept was developed after the Second World War in the Toyota car factory. In order to make mass production of cars profitable, the volume of production of the factory had to be large. In Japanese markets, it was not possible to sell large numbers of a single type of car. A new form of production therefore had to be invented which would achieve high volumes by producing different types of car on the same line. Taiichi Ohno, manager of the Toyota car factory, used the metaphor of a supermarket as a springboard when creating the new concept (Ohno 1978, 25). In a supermarket, the client collects the things he or she needs into a basket. The shop organization keeps the shelves full of articles. In the new production system, cars were not produced before they had been ordered. Each car order was then like a customer collecting the parts required from the shelves, and the work is so organized that subcontractors always know in good time when the shelves have to be filled. Making this idea a concrete reality in the form of a production system took more than ten years. (Ohno, 1988, Coriat, 2000, 25-26; Pihlaja, 2004). The new concept combined elements of traditional mass production, production ideas developed in Toyota and ideas from quality management (Deming, 2000, Ishikava, 1990). Because of its remarkable success, this concept, later called variously process enhancement, flexible manufacturing, and lean production became a prototype for work organization in many areas outside car production. It also led to the development of a number of intervention approaches, the aim of which was to implement the principles of the Toyota production system, or aspects of it, in other areas of activity. These developmental interventions have focused on systems of continuous process enhancement and quality management, as well as the organization of work into interlinked processes rather than in functional units. Developmental intervention approaches based on the concept of continuous process enhancement comprise both long-term interventions implementing this concept

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in an activity, and more-restricted interventions implementing aspects of it such as quality management, teamwork or process-based organization. The types of developmental interventions in work activities described above apply secondary artefacts as their central tools. These approaches can be divided into three ideal-typical forms which in practice overlap: 1) concept-implementation interventions that support transformation of the whole concept of the activity, 2) optimization/and problem-solving interventions that aim at changing the value of a specific variable in the activity such as worker motivation and morale, unit costs etc., and 3) model-based reorganization interventions that aim at implementing a specific form of action or organization without changing the object and concept of the whole activity. The first generation of management consultation focused on productive work. A second generation of consulting which focused on business strategy, organization, and accounting began to emerge already in the 1930s, but became the dominant area of consulting in the 1960s. Since the 1990s, assisting in the implementation of new company-wide software and information systems as well as the creation of new IT-based forms of network organization has become an important area of business consultancy (Kipping, 2002, 34-38). This new form of consultancy is important since it connects aspects of consultancy and intervention that were formerly separate: business strategy, organization and production work. In the 1990s, a new form of intervention, Business Process Re-engineering, was developed by combining the idea of a process-based organization with the implementation of computer systems (Davenport, 1993; Hammer, & Champy, 1993; Davenport & Short,1990; Hammer, 1990.). At the same time a new general concept of activity, heavily dependent on IT, so called mass customatization, began to spread in industry (Pine II, 1993; Pine II, Victor & Boynton, 1993). Business strategy and concept of productive work are now connected more closely than before. This made transformation of the concept of work activity a matter of strategic importance for firms. In interventions aiming at this kind of transformation, both the object and the process of the activity changes.

Intervention to support theoretical understanding of the work activity and expansive learning The hypothesis of the abductive character of remediation means firstly that successful remediation is not possible unless the practitioners in a client-activity system face the current problems and inner contradictions of their activity. Secondly, remediation calls for cultural artefacts that can be made into new mediators of the activity. This model of remediation helps to identify causes of ineffectiveness in developmental interventions in work activities. I call the two main types of causes of ineffectiveness the ”deductive” and the ”inductive” fallacy.

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These two types of fallacy in developmental interventions demonstrate the importance of the dynamic relationship between local problems and generalized solution principles and models. The deductive fallacy is typical of interventions that have the character of concept implementation. The concrete content of an intervention is deduced from a general concept that is implemented without proper analysis of the nature of the existing problems and their root causes in the activity where the intervention is taking place. The large survey concerning change programs in American firms clearly shows that this fallacy is general (Beer, Eisenstatt & Spector, 1990). Inductive fallacy happens when the intervention focuses in a one-sided manner on revealing and describing the problems in an activity without helping the practitioners to identify new artefacts that could become new mediators in their work. The interventionist expects practitioners to find new solutions just by generalizing in an inductive way from their experiences. This fallacy has been typical of many intervention approaches based on social psychology and ideas of participation (Argyris, Putnam, McLain Smith, 1985; Gustavsen 1992, 2001). The tendency of these approaches to focus exclusively on formal aspects of human interaction in work activities and to neglect analysis of the content of the activity restricts both the interventionist’s and the practitioners’ search for cultural resources offered by similar, but more-advanced forms of activity or theoretical knowledge concerning that activity, and thus does not help in the finding of new models and artefacts which can mediate either in their problem solving or in the activity proper. As a result, this type of intervention tends to produce only minor changes within the prevailing concept of the activity (Argyris, 1974; Cole, 1993). Bartunek and Moch (1987, 486) have presented a classification of forms of change and change interventions into first-, second- and third-order changes on the basis of the changes in the shared cognitive schemata of the practitioners in the client system. In the terminology adopted here, first-order change and intervention would be about incremental changes within the prevailing concept of the activity. Some of machine-implementation, rationalization and process-enhancement interventions clearly fall into this category. Second-order change and intervention would be about changing the concept of the activity in a conscious manner in accordance with a given concept, for instance transforming craft work into mass production or mass production into mass customization. Types of concept implementation and model-based reorganization interventions fall into this category. In these interventions specific models are used to create secondary artefacts that guide the changing of the primary artefacts. The risk of deductive fallacy is high in second-order change interventions. General types of activity concepts such as mass-production and process-enhancement have been developed as solutions to an aggravated inner contradiction in the production activity by identifying the central bottleneck factor that has to be changed. The new concept so developed is the a solution to that specific contradiction of the activity. We can presume that these concepts have spread because the basic contradiction they were created to solve in the first place is general and appears in analogous forms in many activities. The new concept becomes, however, a real mediator of the development of the activity only

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insofar as the central developmental contradiction it incorporates is similar to the one that the concept was first designed to overcome. Third-order change and intervention would be about developing the capacity of the practitioners to be aware of the present concept of their activity and to change it as events require and they see fit. For third-order change to take place new, meta-level conceptual tools are needed to describe the differences between activity concepts. In developmental interventions aiming at first- or second-order change, the interventionist takes responsibility for the direction of the change. In third-order change, the interventionist does not have any specific objectives concerning the direction of change, but tries to help the client system to itself analyze the need and possibilities, and the direction of preferable change. Bartunek and Moch do not, however, present a theory of the kinds of meta-level conceptual tool needed in such an intervention. Y. Engeström has done this on the basis of his theory of expansive learning in the methodology of Developmental Work Research. It is a specific form of developmental intervention which is based on keen co-operation between the researcher as interventionist and practitioners of an activity. The collaboration aims to prompt and the realize the practitioners’ learning activity. Learning activity, according to Engeström (1987, 124-137), is a transitory, intermediate kind of activity which lies between science and work activities. The practitioners distance themselves temporarily from productive work and move to learning activity in order to analyze the systemic causes of the problems in their daily activity, and to developing the form of their activity through collaborative inquiry and developmental efforts. Learning activity makes historical development of the activity system its object, that is, the interaction of the currently-dominant form of the productive practice: its historically more-advanced and earlier, already-surpassed forms. It starts from discrete tasks, actions and problems, analyzes and links these discrete elements to their systemic activity context, transforms them into contradictions within the system that demand creative solutions, creates new solutions to the contradictions by finding a new concept and tool for the activity, and then expands and generalizes these solutions into a new form of societal practice (Engeström, 1987, 125). ”The essential instruments of learning activity are models. With the help of models the subject fixes and objectifies the essential relations of the object. The construction of theoretical models is accomplished with the help of a more general instrument - a methodology. Learning activity may be conceived as expansive movement from models to the methodology of making models and back (Engeström 1987, 126).”

Instead of using a specific, preformed model as a representation of the future form of the work activity, this third-level intervention applies general models and methodology to create models of the present form of the activity and its future form. These models are then used in producing specific representations and primary artefacts for the new form of the activity. In Developmental Work Research, the external researcher interventionist helps those involved in the activity to undertake the actions of analyzing the need

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New solutions, new model for the practice

Future

”Mirror” of everyday practice

Intermediate conceptual tools

(historical and ongoing)

Present

Past Activity system framework

Researchers

Practitioners

Figure 4. The setting of the Developmental Work Research (modified from Engeström, 1991 )

and possibilities for change in their activity, to model the historical development of the activity system and its current developmental contradictions, to design a new concept and corresponding new representations and tools for the activity, and implement the new tools to start the transformation of the activity. This is done in a setting that is an application of Vygotsky’s method of double stimulation and is designed to support the abductive leap necessary for remediation (Figure 4.). Developmental Work Research provides an original solution to the theory-practice dilemma of developmental intervention. The interventionist is neither the ”carrier” of a specific activity concept and model, nor is he/she a process consultant who facilitates collective inquiry by focusing on formal aspects of social interaction of the practitioners (Schein, 1998). The researcher-interventionist is a rather a specialist in the methodology of analysing and developing activity concepts as well as the conceptual tools and kinds of epistemic actions required in this process. The interventionist has a general orientation concerning the historical development of work, but the specific models and solutions used as building blocks in development of the new concept in the client activity are produced through a joint inquiry with the practitioners into the development and existing variants of that specific type of activity. The necessary encountering of problems and the need for change is realized by using a mirror of everyday practice. This mirror can consist of video excerpts of problematic and critical situations in the activity, case descriptions, client interviews etc. It consist also data about changes that have taken place in the activity. Presentation of the mirror material prompts the practitioners to question aspects of their present practice and to analyse their systemic and historical causes. The general model of an activity system (see Figure 1) and cycle of expansive de-

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velopment (see Figure 2) are used as intellectual tools to organize the data, to model the activity and to pursue the analysis to the point where it becomes a hypothesis of the central developmental contradictions behind the daily problems. Both the analysis and the construction of a new model are supported by a multi voiced-debate between the practitioners. Also, clients and other interested parties are often invited to take part in the discussion to secure interaction between all relevant points of view. The phases in the intervention are presented schematically in the model of the methodological cycle of Developmental Work Research (Engeström 1987, 323) (Figure 5). The intervention process starts with an ethnographic analysis of current practice and the various problems and dilemmas the practitioners experience in their daily work activities. The collection and analysis of ethnographic data in this phase has two aims. Firstly, to produce material for use as a mirror in first intervention sessions to help the practitioners identify problems and question aspects of current practice. The next phase of the intervention is the systematic analysis of the activity as a historically-developed, local system. The analysis is divided in three parts: object-historical analysis, the aim of which is to identify qualitative changes that have taken place in its object and other elements of the activity system and to provide first hypothesis concerning its current inner contradictions; theory historical analysis, the aim of which is to determine the different, historically earlier and currently existing concepts of the activity; and actual-empirical analysis, which aims to reveal and describe in detail the forms of actions and processes involved in transformation of the objects of the activity, how specific tools, rules and forms of division of labour actually mediate the activity, and the types of disturbances, ruptures and innovative new actions that occur in daily practice.

Activity 2: Reporting and evaluation Activity 1 Phenomenology, delineation

Practical application of the new instrument to change the activity

Analysis of activity – object-historical – theory-historical – actual-empirical

Formation of new instruments

Figure 5. The methodological cycle of Developmental Work Research

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The result of the historical analysis is crystallized in a model of the most-prevalent inner contradictions in the activity system. This hypothesis of the systemic causes of problems is then enriched, specified and corrected using the data from the actual-empirical analysis. The theory-historical analysis provides sets of concepts for describing and discussing the qualitative variation found in the practitioners’ views, tools and processes, and in forms of their daily activities. The analyses and modelling of different aspects of the activity provide rich material for conceptual artefacts that the practitioners can use to produce a new concept for their activity. The last, important and often time-consuming part of the intervention is practical experimentation with the new concept and the new tools created in the preceding phases. During this phase, many new contradictions emerge which call for remediation of various aspects of the activity and its interaction with neighbouring activities. In the following section, I will present a condensed account of a Developmental Work Research intervention carried out in a Finnish labour protection district organization.

Transformation of the concept of the inspection activity in labour protection A labour–protection inspector’s activity In Finland, there is national legislation and norms regarding the working conditions and safety at work. The enforcement of this labour-protection legislation is in the hands of eleven provincial authorities. The Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (formerly the National Board of Labour Protection) supervises the enforcement work. It also issues instructions on safe working conditions, runs labour protection training and promotes publicity concerning labour protection. The main form of activity in each labour-protection district has traditionally been the inspection of working premises, an activity carried out by labour-protection inspectors. The purpose of this work is to ensure that the labour-protection regulations are being observed and to advise on improvements in working conditions and safety arrangements. Inspectors give specific instructions aimed at eliminating defects and hazards. If this proves inadequate, they can order an employer to remedy a defect within a specific period of time if necessary under the imposition of a fine. In extreme cases, an inspector can order a complete halt to operations or demand that work at a specific site, or a specific machine or using a particular method be discontinued. Inspectors typically have college- or university-level technical training and/or a background as labour-protection managers or labour-protection delegates in industry. In the 1970s the sphere of workplaces to be inspected was broadened radically as a result of new legislation. In order to manage the increased workload with staffing levels that did not increase on a proportional basis, the newly-established National Board of Labour Protection issued detailed instructions to inspectors and attempted to standardize inspection procedures. The Board also de-

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veloped its strategic planning to determine priorities and launched campaigns and projects to focus the work of the inspectors on most important areas. Neither the project work nor the focusing on priority areas developed very much because of the inspectors’ individual ways of working and the division of labour which ascribed each inspector a set of workplaces for which he or she was responsible, their “own workplaces”. During the 1980s, the optimism associated with the reform work of the 1970s disappeared and there was growing awareness and discussion that by making the traditional kind of surveys of work premises, inspectors could not achieve a deep enough diagnostic picture of the safety situation in the work place and have any impact on the root causes of the emergence of safety defects and hazards. Many serious defects and hazards emerged only under exceptional conditions and the root causes of problems were often in practices that were hard to observe. The inspectors complained that the same, often-trivial defects appeared repeatedly in spite of the instructions they had issued and that they were frustrated with the lack of progress in safety at work. In 1989, The National Board of Labour Protection launched a project to develop the inspectors’ work. As a specialist in the developmental work research method, the author of this paper was invited to act as an external interventionist in the project. The following description of the process is based on the data collected and created in this project (Virkkunen, 1995; Virkkunen & Kuutti, 2000).

The developmental intervention At the beginning of the developmental intervention, task-force groups of inspectors in three labour-protection districts were charged with analyzing the historical development of the labour inspectors’ activity system in that district. The intention was to recognize the historical roots of present-day practices and to identify the contradictions within the inspectors’ current activity system that could explain the problems being experienced. Parallel to this work, the interventionist and a labour-safety specialist analyzed the historical development of theories concerning labour safety and especially state intervention in this area through labour-protection inspection activities. Historical analysis of the development of the labour-safety inspectors’ activity (object-historical analysis) showed that despite the increased number of workplaces requiring inspection and rapid technological development, the method and organization of the activity had remained largely the same. The primary tools used by the inspectors were as follows. A workplace card, which provided information about the workplace and previous inspections. Protocols for previous inspections. In some cases, special announcements concerning dangerous substances, measurements regarding hygiene or records of overtime work that the employers were obliged to provide. Checklists, which each inspector usually prepared for themselves. The checklists served to remind an inspector of both matters he or she had personally found to be important from the point of view of safety and of relevant general safety norms, instructions, and recommendations. Another important tool was the inspection protocol, a legal document which the inspectors were supposed to produce following their in-

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spections and submit to the employer for action. The most-important secondary tool was the standard procedure for inspection described in an instruction issued by the National Board of Labour Protection. The results of the object-historical analyses were discussed at a common seminar with the leading officials of the three participating districts, representatives of the inspectors and officials from the National Board of Labour Safety. The interventionist summarized up the results and proposed a generalized model for the main historically evolved contradictions within a labour-protection inspector’s activity system. The model was discussed and subsequently elaborated during the intervention. Figure 6 presents a late, somewhat-condensed version of the model for the central inner contradictions in the inspectors’ activity system at that time. According to the model presented in Figure 6, the inspectors’tools for analyzing the safety hazards and improving safety at work were increasingly inadequate in view of the number of workplaces to be inspected and the changing nature of safety problems (Inner Contradiction 1 in Figure 6). The division of labour, in which inspectors work as individuals and are responsible for a fixed set of their ”own” workplaces, makes this problem even more acute (Inner Contradiction 2 in Figure 6). The result of the theory-historical analysis was crystallized in a model of the main dimension of historical development efforts in labour-safety inspection

TOOLS – An experience-based picture of the typical hazards in the sector – The standardised process of inspection – ’ Workplace card’ containing information about the workplace and previous inspections – Protocols of previous inspections – Checklist – Inspection protocol

1

OBJECT SUBJECT Inspector

2

RULES Number of inspections to be made

>

A large and heterogenous set of workplaces New technologies and hazards of work

OUTCOME Corrections at workplaces

COMMUNITY

DIVISION OF LABOUR

Labour-protection district

Inspectors’ ”own workplaces” – sector of industry – location Management and decision-making hierarchy

Figure 6. Labour-protection inspectors’ activity system and its inner contradictions before the change in the late 1980s

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Indirect control

Corrective control

2

4

Inspection of the laboursafety organization

Labour safety integrated into quality management

1

3

Survey and correction of hazards in work premises

Inspection of the safety of equipment and machinery before installation

Preventive control

Direct control

Figure 7. Model of the historical development of concepts for labour-safety inspection activity

and four historical ideal-typical concepts of inspection activity. This model is shown in Figure 7. The interventionist suggested to the inspectors the hypothesis that the inner contradictions depicted in the model of the current activity system (see Figure 6) were both the root causes of the disturbances, ruptures and problems in their daily work, and the obstacles to collective learning. To provide ”mirror material” (see Figure 4) for the actual-empirical analysis of the activity and for testing and elaborating the historical hypothesis of the root causes of problems the interventionist videotaped ten actual inspections and interviewed everyone who participated in the inspection processes. The National Board of Labour Safety organized small groups of inspectors to look at the videotaped inspections and requested that they analyze the disturbances and ruptures as well as the innovations in the processes. The inspectors taking part in the analysis had full transcripts of both the discussions during the inspection and the protocols for the interviews at their disposal. The inspector groups classified the disturbances and ruptures they found in the process by using the model for their activity system depicted in Figure 6 and also the model for different concepts of inspection activity depicted in Figure 7. Most of the disturbances and ruptures discovered seemed to be really caused by either the inadequacy of the inspectors’tools or by their division of labour, i.e., by the contradictions also found in the historical analysis. Analysis of the videotaped inspections helped the inspectors to begin looking critically at the activity system they had inherited from earlier times. Instead of blaming themselves or each other for the difficulties and attempting to justify their behaviour, they began to focus their attention on possibilities for developing their tools and their division of labour.

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The model of the four concepts of inspection activity was used as an intermediate tool (see Figure 4) in analyzing the videotaped inspections from the point of view of their historical layers. The model helped the inspectors to locate themselves in the broader cultural zone of proximal development of the activity. Although they could identify actions representing the different types of inspection activity in the videotaped inspections, the majority of the actions were clearly varieties of direct inspection (Field 1 in Figure 7). There were however many actions and attempts to inspect the labour-safety organization of a firm rather than just specific safety hazards (Field 2 in Figure 7). In fact, exactly these attempts by the inspectors to develop their way of working created a specific type of recurrent misunderstandings, ruptures and disturbances in the interaction between the inspectors and the workplace representatives, as the latter were mostly oriented towards the specific hazards rather (Field 1 in Figure 7) than the functioning of the local labour-safety organization (Field 2 in Figure 7).

Developing a visionary model for a future activity system The results of the analysis and the possibilities for developing the inspectors’ activity system were discussed at the common seminar for management and inspector representatives. A recurrent theme in this seminar was the need to be able to prioritize the alternative objects of inspection and to concentrate effort on most-severe problems. The inspectors experienced a desire for a new instrument to overcome the contradictions of the activity system (see Figure 6). Such an instrument should enable them to identify important general safety problems, analyze the causes of these and plan an intervention to change the situation. The analysis of, and intervention in important general safety problems would be realized by flexibly-arranged teams of inspectors in accordance with the safety-problem areas that the overview highlighted as being the most urgent. Several ideas for a new instrument that would allow the inspectors to be more selective were presented. The interventionist summed up the discussions in a preliminary model for the inspectors’ future activity system. The first draft of this model was then developed in many discussions. An elaborated form of the model, in which all the components of the activity system would be changed to match the change in the object of the activity, is presented in Figure 8.

Changing the activity in the Uusimaa Labour Protection District In 1990, on the basis of these analyses, the National Board of Labor Protection established a project to develop this new instrument for the planning of inspection activities in a labour-protection district. The project was realized in the Uusimaa Labour Protection District where the new instrument was also first taken into use. The new instrument was called the System for Depicting the Field of Activity (SDFA). It was based on a three-level representation of labour-safety problems in the district’s area of jurisdiction. The representations were planned so that they would allow the ”zooming in” on important areas of interest.

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TOOLS – A developing hypothesis of the causes of labour-safety hazards – The new model of project work: analysis>intervention>evaluation – System of Depicting the Field of Activity – Checklists derived from the analysis of the causes of hazards – Inspection protocol

SUBJECT

OBJECT

Team of inspectors

A general and Diminishing important or overcoming labour-safety problem the problem

> OUTCOME

RULES

COMMUNITY

DIVISION OF LABOUR

Responsibility for attaining the agreed result objectives of the project

Other inspectior teams, network of specialists

Flexible division of labour according important problem areas and projects

Figure 8. Future vision for the inspectors’ activity system

Firstly, the project made a general statistical description of labour-safety hazards in different branches of industry and different trades. This was the first level of the system. Its purpose was to define a set of important problem areas which would be subjected to more-detailed analysis. The second level of description aimed at analyzing causes of identified recurrent labour-safety hazards. The idea of the project group was that the third level would be a plan for intervention to remove the identified labour-safety problems. According to the first-level analysis, labour safety was at its lowest level in the construction industry. In 1991, the labour district initiated a project team to develop a way of analyzing the factors affecting labour-safety in the construction industry. The team developed a database for recording data about safety matters in different forms of construction and in different trades within the construction industry for use as a second-level tool in the System of Depicting the Field of Activity (SDFA). During this project, the second level of the SDFA was gradually constructed as a set of new instruments and forms of social collaboration. The new system comprised four artefacts: 1) A conceptual map of the structure of an industrial sector, with a corresponding database, 2) the hypothesis-driven checklist for inspection of individual workplaces in that sector, 3) a new “script” for inspection discussions, 4) the project report with results for the industrial sector being studied. The way in which these artefacts were interconnected was an essential part

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Database as a common memory for inspectors

Common inspection instrument (checklist)

Comon analysis and synthesis of inspection results

Inspections of workplaces The inspector team’s hypothesis of risk factors in the workplace

Employer’s and employee’s views of risk factors in the workplace

Figure 9. The new instrumentality as a set of tools, actions and forms of collaboration

of the new form of inspection activity. As they were recorded in the same database, statistical data and knowledge from research on occupational diseases, accidents and the well-being of workers in the industry were combined with observations concerning defects in working conditions made by the inspectors during their inspections. In this way, the database, served as a means of combining knowledge from different sources, and also as a collective memory to which all the inspectors had access. The development and use of these new tools made concrete and elaborated upon the vague idea of the new form of activity that had resulted from the seminar. As the tools were taken into use, the inspectors’ relationship to, and interaction with, the workplaces in the Uusimaa Labor Protection District’s area was remediated, and the object of their activity changed qualitatively. Instead of inspecting individual workplaces, the inspectors now analyzed the causes of lack of safety at work in different industries and created measures to improve labour safety. In this sense, the new set of tools formed an instrumentality, a complementary set of jointly-used instruments that combine to produce a new object and motive for the work activity as well as a new mentality within the inspector community. By defining a common object of attention and providing collectively used tools, the SDFA made the team a collective subject of both learning and productive work. The interdependencies between the new tools and actions are presented in Figure 9.

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The nature of the intervention and change in the case example In the case reported above, the Developmental Work Research intervention led to a transformation of the concept of the labour-protection activity in the Uusimaa Labor Protection District. The general model of an activity system was initially used as an intellectual tool to depict and analyze current incompatibilities in the activity system which could explain the double-bind situations and problems inspectors experienced in their daily work. Inspectors were helped to face the inadequacies in their current system by presenting them with video recordings of actual inspections. Before the intervention, inspectors had few common secondary tools for analyzing and planning their work, and the division of labour that was a legacy of earlier times had a particular role in preventing the effective use of representations as a means of planning and developing the activity. The intervention led to a redefinition and remediation of the object of the inspectors’ work activity. Central outcomes of the developmental intervention were a new set of secondary tools, a new collective way of using these secondary tools for planning the inspection activity, and a set of new primary tools. The intensive interaction between representations of the safety situation and the primary tools of inspection made the inspectors’learning more collective and more effective. One important effect of the intervention was that interaction between inspectors and workplaces become more dialogical. Some of the inspectors inspecting companies in the construction industry adopted a new way of conducting discussions at the workplace. These inspectors started each inspection discussion by asking employer’s and employees’representatives to identify the most important labour-safety hazards at the workplace in short separate nominal-group brainstorming sessions (for the method, see: Delbecq & Van de Ven, 1971). The inspector then presented a ranking of the safety hazards typical for that category of workplaces. The ranking had been produced by analysing the SDFA database of safety-hazard information derived from statistics, research reports and inspections of similar workplaces. Following this, the participants compared their own assessments with the one presented by the inspector, provided reasoning and arguments for their assessments, and finally agreed on a joint inquiry into the most-important safety problems at the workplace. The change in the way of working also led to a new level of safety interventions: instead of making corrections at separate workplaces, the inspectors initiated projects to search for new common solutions to recurring safety problems. The use of the activity-system model and a corresponding historical analysis in the intervention thus helped the practitioners to remediate their collaborative activity. The crucial phase in the expansive transformation was redefinition of the object of the activity to comprise general labour-safety problems rather than inspecting singular workplaces. This expansive redefinition would not have had much practical effect had the new secondary and primary artefacts to be used as tools in the inspectors’ daily work not been developed, and also the new rules, principles of division of labour and the new kind of collective subject created. The first breakthrough is the new way of working by the pioneering team in the construction industry and the subsequent spread of the new way of working led

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to difficult and aggravated contradictions between, on the one hand, the new team- and project-based work and, on the other, the old management structure and the necessary everyday client-service work which was also an important part of each labor-safety district’s responsibilities. The new form of work was only consolidated as reorganization of management and client-service work provided solutions for these contradictions. The initial expansive remediation thus led to a chain of new cycles of remediation. A group of building industry inspectors in the Uusimaa Labor Protection District had experimented with new forms of inspection some years before the actual developmental project. They had studied developmental work research at that time and were very ready to use its tools and co-operate with the interventionist. The leader of this group and some of its members were also deeply committed and very energetic in working for change. The number of workplaces per inspector in Uusimaa District was the highest, and consequently the contradictions described in Figure 6 were the most aggravated. As described above, a full cycle of expansive learning took place in the Uusimaa Labor Safety District. In other districts the contradiction was less aggravated and instead of complete change of concept of the activity a number of changes in practice were made within the prevailing concept. Data about the case does not provide a clear answer to the reasons for this difference. In addition to the specific circumstances in the Uusimaa District, the most probable cause is the fact that the new tool was created in the Uusimaa District and that much of the transformation of the activity took place while it was being developed. For the other districts, the tool was provided as ready-made, and inspectors in these districts were not involved in the learning activity connected to the creation of the new tool.

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5. Striving to make capital do ”economic things” for the impoverished: on the issue of capitalization in rural micro-enterprises Magdalena Villarreal Following the concern to transcend social compensation strategies, charity and welfare, it has no become commonplace for development planners to se part of their goals on the establishment of small enterprises in the hands of the poor. Micro-enterprises constitute appealing mechanisms for poverty alleviation, allowing low-income producers, manufacturers and merchants to involve themselves actively in seeking ways out of their precarious situation. The underlying assumption is that, with the provision of “seed” capital, the poor can be introduced into the market. Well nurtured, the enterprise will expand, capital will grow, and the poor will be able to pull themselves out of poverty. Capital is expected to multiply itself and produce profit. But many small enterprises do not survive more than a couple of years and most fail to expand. The “seed” resources that are injected are often diverted, disappear into everyday consumption, or are turned into what Hernando de Soto (2000) labels “dead capital”, which he claims is unable to do “economic things” for the impoverished. In this chapter, my aim is to explore the nature of these “economic things” that capital is expected to trigger. This requires a critical unpacking of the notion of capital itself and looking into the different kinds of assets and resources that are involved in micro-entrepreneurial activity. I will draw upon the cases of individual, family and group resources such as pigs, chicken, bees and cows to discuss the nature of capital in the everyday operation micro-enterprises as poverty alleviation measures in Western Mexico, exploring transactions within different types of “markets” that include money markets for development projects and commodity markets. This inevitably takes us to the analysis of processes of valuation that are brought into play in these contexts. It is important to consider the complex webs of meanings and actions that are activated in the calculation of value, as well as the ways in which those involved interact with money and other resources. I have thus resorted to an actor-oriented approach, which allows us to take situated actors’ practices and transactions as the main focus. It is with reference to these ac-

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tions that resources – be they land, labour, knowledge or cash – acquire value. I contend that a specific resource – monetary or non-monetary – can only become capital when it is mobilized and leveraged within particular circuits of signification where its value is assessed and negotiated according to particular standards, rules and expectations. This has important implication to the issues of poverty and capitalization.

The mystery of capital I will start with Hernando De Soto’s depiction of capital, since his point of view seem to be shared by many development agents and have been acclaimed by some governments – including the Mexican one – as providing the key to poverty alleviation. In his book The mystery of capital, he claims that a large percentage of the poor already posses the assets they need to make a success of capitalism. Based on a 5 year study with a team of 100 researchers from six different nations, he concludes that, at the end of the millennium, the value of savings among the poor was forty times all the foreign aid received throughout the world since 1945 (2000, 5). And, according to his team’s calculations, “the total value of the real estate held but not legally owned by the poor of the Third World and former communist nations was at least 9.3 trillion dollars”. That is, ninety-three times as much as all development assistance from all advanced countries to the Third World in the past three decades! (2000, 35). However, he says, they “hold these resources in defective forms … they are dead capital!”. Because the poors’ economic and social assets are not fixed in a formal property system that can homogenize their qualities and values in such a way that they are broadly recognizable, they are extremely hard to move in the market and cannot be used as collateral to start enterprises. He concludes that in order to make their assets “do economic things” for them, these must be represented in a title, a contract and other similar legal documents, which will allow them to be combined, divided, mobilized and used in commercial transactions. In this way the poor will be able to convert dead capital into an active one that is widely transferable and fungible. And here he has a point. Those identified as poor hold or have access to a host of resources that are not activated within capitalist circuits of profit making. Not only do many impoverished sectors of the world population own houses and urban plots, but they possess agricultural land and have access to mineral resources and forests. They also have skills, knowledge, networks, and rich cultural heritages that could become valuable assets in economic transactions. However, the fact that these are nor gainfully articulated with commodity or financial markets has less to do with a lack of proper titles or legal documents to prove legitimate property than with the social relations involved in capitalization, particularly the processes of valuation, including assessments of people – that is, the identity attributed to property owners and dealers themselves.

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It would appear that De Sato recognizes some of these forms of valuation and assessment as central, since his arguments are based on the postulation that “active capital is mobilized on the basis of formal representations of a good that do not represent the good itself, but our concept of it, the economic qualities we attribute to it in order to produce value”. Hence, the mystery of capital has to do with human actors’ depictions of an asset or good. It is surprising, then, that he should turn a blind eye to the power laden contexts in which negotiations over the concepts and values attributed to particular goods is made. He reduces the problem of poverty to bureaucratic procedures and legal documents that can guarantee private property which will easily perform in “free” market. The myth of a free market has been strongly challenged by social scientists, who stress the forms of exclusion that prevail. The market is discriminatory and excluding. De Soto overlooks the fact that those he labels poor already participate actively in the market, albeit in highly disadvantaged ways. Claims to possession must, of course, be backed by trustworthy institutions, but which institutions are to be considered dependable and how the rules of the game are established cannot be ignored. It is important to take into account the fact that, in seeking to influence the processes of valuation and representation of goods. entrepreneurs draw upon stereotyped notions of the identity different players involved in order to exclude or out-compete their rivals. Thus social relations, power and human interpretation play big roles in the “democratic” process of supply and demand. On the other hand, in De Soto’s conceptualization, the big market operates in one universal language: money. Money is the measure of equivalence, the universal language that everyone can understand. In profitable economic processes, according to his reasoning, the differential value that buyer and seller might attribute to a particular good is irrelevant, as long as they agree on a fixed price. The calculations as to what a fair price would amount to are settled in a “democratic way”: supply and demand. If I desperately need a roof over my head, I will pay the price you ask for your house. Why you are asking such a price is irrelevant, as long as there is someone who is willing to pay. And you are more likely to get the price you want if you have a legal document, which gives me security of having a permanent roof over my head, perhaps status, or I might be considering it an investment for the future. But for De Soto, this is not an issue, since what counts in the big market is the agreed upon value established in monetary terms between those involved in the transaction. However, the “agreed upon” value is an issue, particularly since it implies differential costs for those concerned. The “freedom” you acquired by selling or mortgaging your house and thus being able to invest elsewhere is conditioned by the degree to which you are able to forego the security of a roof, what this entails for your family, how much you gain or lose in terms o social relations, etc. Here political, ethical and cognitive dimensions come to the fore, and as Long (1984, 2001) argues, these do not depend on, nor can they be reduced to, market rationalities.

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The issue of value from an actor-oriented perspective From actor oriented perspective, one has to consider the multiple realities that are constructed and confirmed in people’s everyday lives. Long has, for some time, been pointing out the mistake of giving analytical priority to the capitalist side of the equation in economic transaction, thus failing to appreciate the theoretical importance of non-commoditised relationships (1977;1984;2001). This has two important implications: On the other hand, it warns against the reduction of people’s livelihoods to the pursuit of economic goals, particularly those related to their involvement in a capitalist economy (Arce 2003; Long and Villarreal 1998; 2001). The extended use of economic metaphors to address livelihood issues tends to obscure the complexity of issues entailed. Individuals, families, social groups, institutions and communities are involved in a range of activities – including, for example, entertainment and building relationships – which cannot be packaged into market concerns. As Wallman (1982) writes: “Livelihood is never just a matter of finding or making shelter, transacting money, getting food to put on the family table or to exchange on the market place. It is equally a matter of ownership and circulation of information, the management of skills and relationships, and the affirmation of personal significance [involving issues of self-esteem] and group identity. The tasks of meeting obligations, of security, identity and status, and organising time are as crucial to livelihood as bread and shelter.” Such relationships may or may not affect, or be affected by, economic activity, and one cannot attribute them market value a priori. On the other hand, it calls for the need to consider a wide array of values and institutions involved in market interaction, including social and cultural concerns and patterns of interdependencies between the needs, interests and values of particular groups of individuals. Political issues, welfare considerations and ethical matters are often brought into what appear to be purely economic or financial criteria. Transactions in commodity and other markets are sustained by values and non-commodity relations that vary according to the field of activity and the interests that are played out (Long and Villarreal 1998; 2001; Hutchinson 1996; de Haan 1994; Arce and Marsden 1993; Arce 1997). They must be viewed as the outcome of the series of interlocking encounters and relationships that take place between the various exchange actors who endeavour to defend and reproduce their own enterprises, livelihoods, and cultural repertoires (Long and Villarreal 2001). Therefore, in exploring the issue of capital in micro-enterprises, a crucial concern is how assets are weighted and measured and how their perceived virtues and attributes are made relevant in the context of economic transactions and their evaluation. One cannot assume that exchange value is determined by the utility value of buyers and consumers (Long 2001). Irene Tinker (1995) points out that women entrepreneurs work within the frame of a human economy which addresses social, cultural and familial angles

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of people’s livelihoods, and that these dimensions are not considered in contemporary paradigms used in the evaluation of micro-enterprises. Her point in well taken, but it would be misleading to categorize women’s work a priori as pertaining to a different economy, which can take us to separating off analytically the world of the “poor and marginalized” from the world of the “wealthy and dominant” with its consequent mystification. We have to consider the ways in which a capitalist economy inhabits and survives on human and social resources and categories as well as financial ones. And financial concerns have by now become very important for the social groups involved in development enterprises. To be sure, human dimensions are taken into account in the now trendy notion of social capital, which is used to address social resources that yield benefits such as improved material conditions, increased income and social status. This is not difficult to conceptualize in today’s world, where everyday parlance strongly incorporates economic markers to address “growth” and “investment” in human, intellectual and organizational resources, not only within business and corporations, but also in universities, governments, and social clubs. Notions of social, environmental and cultural capital have eagerly been taken up in the development scenario, where projects and enterprises depend on the good will of donors and other stakeholders who are keen to measure the “cost-benefit” –ratio of their investments. To think of social, environmental, kin, friendship and other resources as capital is to recognize their potential to produce profit in terms that can in some way be made equivalent to financial gain. But the relevant issue is how such equivalences are defined, weighed and attributed value. As De Soto contends, our conceptualization or their economic qualities (or the conceptualization we are able to impose on others) in crucial, because such resources need to be mobilized and leveraged. However, one has to take into account that this can only be done within fields where their value is acknowledged and can be negotiated in accordance to recognized standards, rules and expectations. Here, money does not always function as the standard measure or exchange value. Differential profits are assessed by reference to a combination of what we prefer to call “social currencies” whose value is gauged within particular fields of signification. Social currencies refer us to different frameworks of calculation that co-exist and interrelate in the definition of value equivalences. This allows us to analyze the ongoing struggles and negotiations over value between different sets of actors involved. In such processes one finds that similar monetary denominations can be valued differently, and dissimilar ones might be judged equivalent.13 In what follows, I aim to identify the processes that come into play in the attribution of value to resources of peasant women in Western Mexico such that they are converted or not into active capital in the framework of social policies and processes of planned intervention.

13

Long and Villarreal 1998; 2001.

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Seed capital The women that formed part of a beekeeping group in a small town of Western Mexico were not the poorest in the community, although their family income was then on – or slightly below – what would be considered the poverty line. The government programme offered the group seed money to establish an enterprise, following federal stipulations that rural women should be provided the opportunity to become entrepreneurs. They had been invited to join by the local authority, and accepted, although most would have preferred to stay at home and look after their children and husbands, or carry out small income earning jobs they engaged in, such as sewing, peddling Avon and Tupperware, or cooking meals to sell in the evening. They attended their monthly meetings smelling of soap and shampoo, wearing clean, ironed dresses, and at times jeans, but their situation was by no means ideal. Their husbands, a number of whom possessed land, worked in the fields all day and their income was never quite enough to cover all their basic needs, including sending their children to school, clothing them, covering transportation costs, etc. None had bank accounts and only two had reached secondary schooling, although all but one could read and write. Regional officers were particularly interested in the consolidation of this group. Their reports needed to show gender related activities. Many such groups had been formed in the country. a number of which included women in less advantageous conditions, but most of these groups dissolved, since the members needed to work for a daily wage and obtaining profit, or at least payment for their work was, in the best of cases only possible after a couple of years when the enterprise took off. But Socorro, one of the eldest members of the beekeeping group, laughingly narrated her groups’ decision to choose honey production: “…the women officer asked us whether we wanted chickens, or pigs or goats, or a sewing group. We said bees because we thought we could just leave them and they would work on their own. All we had to do was harvest the honey! Sewing? No, the material is too expensive, and then we would have to go out and sell garments. Chickens, we would have to work hard every day, and if the price of the feed went up between ourselves, instead of having to work as a group, but no, goats are very destructive, they ump fences and get into the men’s fields, and we didn’t want problems with them. So we chose bees, but now we regret it, because we constantly get stung!”

The group had been prompted to select an economic activity and join the credit scheme. They had weighed their options carefully, considering the implications of their decision for themselves in their relations to their families and the community. They wanted a money-earning enterprise, but did not want to jeopardize the time they needed to spend on family commitments, nor did they want to trigger conflicts with other people in the village. For the government officers involved, as is the case with many development workers around the worlds, it did not matter too much whether the women chose

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bees, chicken or goats. In encouraging them to engage in economic activities, their aims were to “help the women help themselves out of poverty”, providing the seeds for what should become a sound economic enterprise. Pigs, chicken, cows or goat were generally classified in a standardized way as “initial capital”, as resources that would reproduce themselves with a bit of enthusiasm and bard work. Their value resided in their potential for rendering incremental monetary benefits. However, this was an inaccuracy that could have serious economic and social consequences. While the prices of inputs entailed, the amount of work involved and the possible price they would acquire in the market were definitely crucial, value was not only measured in monetary terms. The makeup of capital associated with chickens was different from that of cows, bees or goats.

Cows, chicken and piggy-banks I expect we will all agree that it is better for rural women to own cows than to simply have chickens, but I was truly disappointed when, during an evaluationfor-planning meeting with government officers in the region, on e of the local leaders proudly stated that a large percentage of the (largely male) groups in his municipality had dutifully paid the loans they had acquired to buy cattle – some of them ahead of time, even if it had meant that they sold their wives’ chicken to raise the money! His statement was applauded by all of those present – except for myself. Paying loans in time was assessed as an achievement, considering that many of the producers involved had come to lag in their reimbursements to previous government loans. It was generally accepted that this had to do with a lack of financial culture among the rural population. They had become used to receiving charitable funds ad they needed to enhance their entrepreneurial skills and operate in the real world – meaning learning to work for the market and paying for money at “market value”. While I agreed that producers must pay their loans, I could not accept the fact that this should be done with women’s chicken. Having worked in that region for and extended period of time, I knew that chicken were an important element in sustaining the livelihoods of rural families. Eggs and poultry were one of the most important sources of protein and were also crucial in sustaining social relations. It was generally embarrassing for a Mexican family to have no food to offer visiting relatives, and a fried egg was often a solution. Moreover, poultry were resources in the women’s domain. They generally decided when to slaughter or sell a chicken – and which one to get rid of: whether it was a particular hen that no longer laid eggs or one that was not good for looking after her chicks – and also decided on the destiny of the money obtained. And eggs were “borrowed” and sold between neighbours, thus strengthening social links and feelings of solidarity. In turn, cows tended to be thrust into men’s domain. Although women might have them registered to their name, and might even look after them, taking them out to graze and brining them home in the evening, milking them, and curing

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their illnesses, they would most often consult their husbands, sons or male relatives before selling a calf. And if no other urgent need was at stake, men would be allowed a degree of freedom as to how to spend the money. At times this could mean investing in a vehicle, paying for a son’s or daughter’s schooling, fixing the house, or going off to drink with friends. They could also be slaughtered for a special occasion – this would be a demonstration of status for the family. Too often, however, calves were sold before they had the desirable weight in order to pay hospital fees, medicine, or a debt. On the other hand, pigs were the common stereotype for saving. Like in many places around the world, small money –boxes have been modelled on pigs. Piggy banks symbolized the ways in which families saved pesos until they became a significant amount of “hard currency”. Rural families frequently raised pigs on scraps of leftover food, weeds and, if possible, maize, and, when full grown, would either slaughter the hog to keep the lard – thus saving money in the near future since they would not have to buy it – ate a shared part of the meat with friends and neighbours and sold meat and crackling. Or they would sell the hogs to pay debts, acquire a piece of furniture or cover other important expenses. While chicken were generally classified as short-term capital, pigs tended to be places in the category of mid-term. They provided a small savings account, a security set aside for relevant expenditure. However, unless a family possessed a pig or chicken farm, they were not considered capitalized. It was generally expected that the proceeds from small numbers of chickens and hogs would “go down the drain for daily consumption”. They might provide better standards of living, but would rarely constitute “sound capital”. This was not the case of cattle, which, in Mexico, have almost constituted a synonym for wealth. “If we don’t have a cow or two our name” – said a farmer – “I feel dispossessed, as if we have nothing”. Cattle were a longer –term security as well as an investment that could render more profits. While male calves could be sold to cover expenses, a family would aim at using the profits gained to buy more cattle, particularly female calves, which were set aside for reproduction. This was capital that would multiply and expand. But the mechanisms of operation some of these cattle raising enterprises engaged in did not differ markedly form that of piggy banks – since funds were slowly and painfully saved to increase the kitty – except that this “kitty” was larger and it provided more status. And it tended to be tighter. While the tendency with hogs was to “break the piggy band” within a medium term to use the funds in one way or another, cattle – in these more traditional enterprises – was a money box that was only opened for big occasions or urgent needs. Quite frequently, families would forgo daily consumption needs in order to maintain their cows. More than a few women complained that all they obtained from their herds of cattle was the milk they managed to salvage if the cows grazed near the village and perhaps some cheese they themselves fabricated on the milk that was not sold. But their children went without shoes and they hardly ever tasted the meat, since their husband’s one aim was to increase the herd. This was understandable, since a large herd could provide the basis for power and authority in the local scenario, which was quite attractive for someone who resented having always been under “someone else’s foot”.

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Although capital invested in cattle could be fungible – owners did sometimes sell cows to buy vehicles or invest in building their homes, and the status cattle owners acquired was useful to access credit in local shops as well as larger institutions such as banks – this was not quite the fungibility required in today’s entrepreneurial scenarios, where the flexibility to move quickly between one product and the other, to translate one kind of capital to another, is the key to success. In this sense, their cattle was to a large degree “dead capital” to use De Soto’s (2000) way of describing many f the resource possessed by the “poor”. What I am trying to say is not that development programmes should be oriented to chicken rather than cows, but that they constitute different forms of capital, they move within different circuits and render differential benefits. The “economic things” they are expected to produce include social, cultural and symbolic benefits.

Local currencies A range of social values were intertwined with, and to a degree determined, the monetary value that was accorded to a particular good. Hence, 50 pesos earned from a chicken, which were esteemed high, were not the same as 50 pesos that were extracted from the sale of a cow. One was considered a large chunk of “petty money”, to be used for food and basic consumption, and the other, a small fringe of big money, perhaps a leftover after covering important payments which could be destined – why not? – to give the money holder a small break, a bit of pampering to compensate for hard work and sacrifices. There were, to be sure, several categories to be taken into account in the case of cows and chickens. Milk from cows was frequently stashed for daily expenses. Squandering milk money on drink could be judged severely, while the sale of a calf could be set aside for partying. This was most clearly the case with the profits from special breeds of chickens, such as fighting cocks. Fighting cocks were a gamble, a lottery ticket which, when won, was worth a celebration. And these were classified within men’s domain. Although women were frequently expected to feed and look after tem, they would rarely include the proceeds these might generate as part of the family income. It was not all infrequently to hear peasant women complaining about having to tend fighting cocks or look after cattle, yet they continued doing it. Such, submissiveness, however, was not always straight-forward subordination. Keeping a husband happy and looking after his interests could, in certain contexts, render social profits in terms of consolidation of kin networks and solidarity grids. It could entail a form of social collateral, safeguarding the man’s honor and dignity, which in turn produced status for the family, which was useful in producing loans, keeping clients, and receiving gifts, for example. Having a husband was itself important for the upkeep of social networks and status. It was generally signified as security for the family, the woman could increase her solidarity networks and there was a degree to which it made the woman less vulnerable to malicious gossip. Thus social links – including material and kin relationships – were an important asset.

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But although assets (be they social, cultural or financial) might generate added worth, they could also reduce it. For example, money coming form a person linked to a family associated to witchcraft tainted the reputation of the bearer; having social connections to drug traffickers aroused fear in some groups, and women’s submissiveness to their husbands was not considered a positive trait within development enterprises. this, of course, had to do with differential currencies in processes of valuation.

Economic thing Socorro stated that, as a group, they would have liked to raise goats. Goats do not require a great deal of attention, they feed on practically anything – grass form the hillside, leaves and bushes. They could be easily divided among the members of the group, each to whom could use child labour to look after them. Also, goats reproduce quickly, and goat meat is highly valued in the region, so they could obtain good profits. But goats are problematic because they generate conflicts with farmers. They ump fences quite easily, and gobble valuable crops. In local currencies, the social price of raising goats was too high for the women to take a risk. Their links with much needed solidarity networks would be at stake, as would their political space in terms of relations with local authorities. They would likely have problems with their own husbands, who had their crops in the adjacent fields, and who would no want to have their woman involved in conflicts. In settling on bees, however, the women also had to consider local currencies. With the arrival of the so called “African bee”, which was much more aggressive, they were forced to move their apiaries to distant places so as to not risk the possibility that the bees attack farmers or farm animals. But more than that, honey from bees is largely considered an act of providence. In depends on whether and how wild flowers blossom, whether it rains and whether no too many predators – such as ants and toads – reproduce. And if it is an act of providence, they must be thankful and show it with generosity to neighbours and friends. Hence, the women gave away jars of honey and pieces of honeycomb to government officers, local authorities, kin and fellow citizens – at least in the initial stages. When in later seasons the produce was not so good, more than a few blamed it on the women’s greed and lack of generosity. In this case, as in many other development projects, other values should also be taken into account. Government officers expected the women to develop organizational skills and gender consciousness. It was hoped that the activity would help the women reconceptualize their role as women and thus change power relations at home and in the village. It was not just an economic enterprise, but a social one, where the “seeds” to be cultivated were not simply of a monetary nature. Based on the conviction that such values can only grow within a collective enterprise, they should organize as a group, follow democratic procedures and overcome petty conflicts among the members. The latter was perhaps the most difficult, since the women belonged to different kin groupings in the village, where long-held quarrels were latent, but the group did develop democratic skills, they

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came to value their identity as women in a different way, and to move in the world of government offices and beekeepers’ organizations instead of only the village, though, after more than 10 years, they have hardly earned money from the beekeeping enterprise. Thus, the range of resources and assets brought into the beekeepers everyday life endeavours is vast. As I have mentioned, it would be a mistake to package them all in the label of capital, assuming that they are introduced as an investment, with the expectation of profit. Yet, we cannot ignore the fact that many social, cultural and experimental elements are important contributing factors to make an enterprise profitable. The beekeeping venture did not turn out to be a model of profitability in monetary terms, but the women did resort to contacts with other beekeepers in the region when they could not solve a problem, which helped them keep the enterprise afloat. They expanded their networks, gained experience, and learned that they have right to access government credit schemes, as well as other programmes for improving their homes, and scholarships for their sons and daughters’schooling, some of which they have taken up. There was, however, one activity that did not surface for external eyes. This was constructed on the basis of their needs, capabilities, experience and information. They had two harvests a year, which generally yielded almost the equivalent to the amount due to the bank for that period. But their payments were to be made on a two year basis, so they had to hold on to the harvest money for relatively long periods. Quietly, the group decided to lend themselves the money with a very low interest rate. In this way, individual members were able to access funds under better conditions than with local moneylenders, and, when payment was due, they had slightly increased the amount to pay the bank. Although the amounts they borrowed were small, the value of having access to funds when families needed them was significant. The economic things they obtained from their enterprise cannot only be measured in monetary terms. A few years later the women abandoned beekeeping, but they continued participating in local credit and savings associations … and investing in chicken and pigs at home.

The issues of capitalization In retrospect, one can see that there was another important resource being negotiated in the case of the beekeepers. This has to do with their identity as poor rural women. Such identification proved useful to access government funds for the enterprise. Although the beekeepers did not seek out this particular programme, on several occasions they did purposeful portray an image of poor women (which they were, of course) to obtain support for the enterprise. This is nothing out of the ordinary. Successful entrepreneurs capitalise on their identities and prestige (or the prestige of their product). They build an image and profit from it. In development practice such stereotyped image of the poor is important. It fuels motivation for practitioners as well as donors. The poor are portrayed as those who do not have: lacking is the quintessence of their identity, the definition

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of their being. Poverty is about deficit of resources, unfulfilment of needs, exclusion, lack of access, of control and of power. And deficit calls for provision. From this viewpoint, financial resources, education, technology, access, discernment and empowerment must be conferred to the poor. The problem is that the notion of “poor” dooms the bearer to a subordinate, powerless status, and the notion of “provider” predestines the bearer to a higher status, where power and control are accessible. Dearth is thus woven discursively into particular relations of power, subordination and status. Impoverishment can be brought about by lack of employment, by having to invest their meagre profits in health, for example, due to the propagation of sickness and an insufficiency of clinics, or in transport due to lack of proper roads. It has been brought about through processes of colonisation, monopolisation of resources and seizing, as well as the workings of financial and commodity markets. And it continues to be reinforced by biased economic policies, bad planning and mismanagement. But is has also been brought about by distrust towards those they consider poor: poverty is all too frequently associated to ignorance, filth, dishonesty and violence, and such associations close up possibilities of access to information and decision making circles. It has been made possible by lack of legal frameworks to protect their rights, by processes of corruption which foster twisted leadership at local level, and by the people’s diminished capacity for political agency, whose organisations have not been able to represent the interests of their groups in defence of their resources. Political agency has been limited due to lack of information, discrimination processes and lack of technological and market options. To be sure, the beekeepers were not passive victims of such power inequalities. They managed to use their image as vulnerable women to a degree of advantage. However, there was a limit as to how far they could go with the “profits” obtained from this identity. Such practices tend to reproduce, rather than change the conditions that one would like to see transformed. But the point is that stereotypical models of poverty gloss over the complex interweaving of haves and have-nots, the ways in which people gamble with their assets and liabilities, which are of utmost relevance for the reproduction of poverty as well as for the construction of alternatives to it. An analysis of the issue of poverty requires stepping back from stereotypical notions of “the poor” and examining the ways in which those identified as destitute deploy resources and act in pursuing their livelihoods. Resources here include material assets such as land and other possessions, but also immaterial one like social identity. In this scenario, we are less interested in capital itself, and should be more concerned with processes of capitalization. Gaining economic control is not about stockpiling resources, or about proper registration in accountancy books, but entails the use of material and immaterial resources (including social, cultural and symbolic aspects). Until recently, it was believed that savings were the key to capitalisation. However, the relevance of “intangibles” such as knowledge, clientele, image and prestige have come to occupy many pages in management books and are the topic of conferences for entrepreneurs. It is clear that it is not only the amount of resources that makes for wealth or poverty, but the possi-

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bility of usufruct, of transforming them into a steady source of food and other indispensable goods. It is also clear that capitalization is not reduced to accumulation. It has to do with profiting from the value attributed to a particular resource. Hence, a crucial issue – that we have underlined above –is how assets and identities are weighted and measured and how their perceived virtues and attributes are made relevant. And in today’s world, the range of what can be identified as an asset yielding monetary benefits seems to have increased; or at least, diverse resources are quite explicitly priced and allocated in ways that were previously un-thought of. This compels social scientists to reassess the notions of ownership and entitlements, particularly the ways in which these provide the basis upon which poverty is defined.

Bees, chicken, pigs, cows… and social relations. How can they become capital and produce economic things? In De Soto’s view, the difference between dead and active capital is quite clear. One circulates in the market and produces profit, and the other does not engage and therefore does not produce gain. But I hope to have shown that: 1. Gain is not always measured in monetary terms. The makeup of capital is more complex, as De Soto himself recognizes. The material base in terms of direct cash is no longer the main currency in international markets, which, with the turn towards a more virtual existence, recognize pre-existing and new currencies framed in terms of information and trust (Hart 2001; Weatherford 1997; Forrester 2000). Activating capital, in this scenario involves the manipulation of symbols, the imposition of interpretations and anticipation of the future. In the same way, active capital, in rural Mexico, involves different currencies other than solely the monetary. As long as cattle continues to be a marker of status, men will continue preferring this alternative to other, perhaps more profitable ones. And women will tend to weight the costs and benefits of goats, pigs and chicken, calculating in local currencies. It is not that they are not interested in money, or in becoming “modern entrepreneurs”, but anticipation of risks and possible conflicts are strong considerations. 2. Not all of people’s resources are or can be visualized as capital, and, although there are many intangibles that can be articulated into market circuits into producing gain, they do not automatically do so. Hence, the idea that social capital can be injected from the outside is not only misplaced, but can be dangerous, triggering processes in unwanted directions.

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3. It is clear that capital is not a build up of assets, but their mobilization. To accumulate is not capitalize. Actually, the same goes for social assets. It is not the number of social ties that count, but the way these are signified and used. Here calculations and predictions vis-à-vis the future structure of opportunities /where processes of construction of image and identification are crucial) enter into the equation. 4. Hence one has to focus on the processes of capitalization. We have detailed the complexity involved in the micro-entrepreneurial activities of a group of women. To operate a small enterprise they must bring into play a host of resources, weighed and assessed in terms of different currencies. Such resources are not lifeless, and, although they are signified and weighed with heterogeneous dimensions in mind, they must not be separated off as pertaining to a different system. What must be clear is that social, cultural, human, ethical and other dimensions also enter into the equation in “profit-making”. They are not only brought into play as assets, but also as deterrents to the possibility of capitalizing. 5. While on has to acknowledge that power relations lead to forms of exclusion and make capitalization almost impossible for the poor, it is equally important to recognize that power in commonly based on reified forms of categorizations that are credited with a quantification of forces and resources, and this is closely related to the ways in which social and symbolic resources are deployed and made significant. In closing, let us say that poverty – as is depicted in thousands of pages of academic and non-academic literature – is linked to mechanisms of distribution, exclusion and access. If one concentrates primarily on the final picture, the obvious concern is the allocation of resources themselves. The question concerns who owns what: whether the poor possess land, cattle or other forms of capital that can produce food and satisfy their basic needs, and if they have technology and other means to make that production viable. A great deal of emphasis tends to be placed on the need to provide the missing resources (i.e. through land redistribution, education, technological training, credit schemes, etc). To come to an understanding of poverty, we need to delve into the underlying processes by which resources – including land, labour, credit and aid, water and cash, but also knowledge, skills, social networks, organisation and moral entitlements – are accessed, organized and negotiated, recognizing the range of social and cultural currencies that enter into play in economic transactions. Analysing their mechanisms of operation helps us understand the ways in which people juggle with diverse assets and liabilities and the forms of social compensation they devise to cope with uncertainty, so crucial to the workings of their economic life.

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References Arce, A. (1997). Globalisation and food objects. In: De Haan, H. & Long, N. (eds.). Images and realities of rural life. Wageningen Perspectives on Rural Transformations. Assen: Van Gorcum. Arce, A. (2003). Value contestation in development interventions: Community development and sustainable livelihoods approaches. Community Development Journal, vol 38, no 3, 199-212. Arce, A. & Marsden, T. (1993).The Social Construction of International Food: A new research agenda. Economic Geography, 69, 293-311. De Haan, H.J. (1994). In the Shadow of the Tree: Kinship, Property and Inheritance among Farm Families. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. De Soto, H. (2000).The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else. New York: Basic Books. Forrester, V. (2000). el Horror Económico.México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Hart, K.(2001). Money in unequal world. Texere, 1-58799-075-x. Hutchinson, S.E. (1996). Blood, Cattle and Cash; the commodification of Nuer values. In: Hutchinson, S.E. Nuer Dilemmas.Coping with Money, War and the State. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Long, N. (1977). An introduction to the sociology of rural development. London: Tavistock. Long, N. (ed.).(1984). Family and Work in Rural Societies. Perspectives on non-wage labour. London: Tavistock. Long, N. (2001). Development Sociology. Actor Perspectives. London: Routledge.

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6. Intervention negotiated? – Production of shared object and power relations in the planning of a development co-operation project14 Tiina Kontinen

Introduction “The other challenge [for activity theory] is power, we both take as starting point that power is not something that is there to begin with, but which is constructed in the negotiations, but in our [activity theoretical] studies we tend to under conceptualise it, not paying enough attention to power” (Professor Yrjö Engeström in his closing statement in the Development Intervention Symposium 16.3.2002)

As shown in the excerpt above, one of the concluding debates in the Development Intervention Symposium considered the status of power in the methodologies of actor-oriented sociology of development and activity theory. During the symposium, the place of power in methodology was discussed in at least two aspects. Firstly, it was asked whether there is a difference in the asymmetries in the practice of intervention if exercised in the context of Finnish working life or in the context of development co-operation characterised by North-South asymmetry. Secondly, it was noted that the concept of power has played a central role in the actor-oriented sociology of development while in the activity theoretical approach the concept has not been to any significant extent explicitly developed. In this article I explore combining the analysis of power relations with the analysis of object construction in the context of activity theoretical analysis of object construction. This is done by the analysis of one case example, a series of encounters between a Finnish and a Tanzanian non-governmental organisation (NGO). The argument in this article is based on the analysis of six planning meetings in a development co-operation project that aimed at improving the standard of living of retired professionals in Morogoro, Tanzania. In other words, the article looks at the question: How is intervention in the life of retired professionals planned and negotiated? 14

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The first idea of this paper was presented at the Symposium in 2002. Some parts of the analysis have later been discussed in Kontinen (2003). I thank prof. Reijo Miettinen, researchers Sampsa Hyysalo, Jussi Silvonen and Kari Toikka for commenting some of the earlier drafts of the paper.

This article is not therefore a theoretical exercise conceptualising power in activity theory, but rather a trial of what the merging of two different analytical angles may tell about development co-operation of non-governmental organisations. Analysis of constructing power relations in practice is however a contribution to the debate on non-governmental organisations and development. Recently in this discussion the good values and best practices, such as the claimed participatory approaches and partnership-type relationships have been questioned, and examination of the effects of global and systemic asymmetries in co-operation has been called for. (See Nelson & Wright 1997; Cooke & Kothari 2001; Fowler 2000; Hately & Malthotra 1997; Lister 2000; Tvedt 1998). This article has three aims. Firstly, as a result of the symposium, it examines and compares some of the methodological starting points of actor-oriented sociology of development and activity theoretical approach (for comprehensive presentations see Long, this volume and Virkkunen, this volume). It will be pointed out that in the conceptualisation of co-operation situations there are differences in orientations between these two approaches – the most relevant of these to this article is the difference between conceptualising co-operation as negotiating on and constructing shared object, and, co-operation as a strategic struggle. Secondly, the article discusses the possibilities of applying the relational and organisational conceptualisation of power within the activity theoretical approach. Thirdly, it gives an analysis of planning phase in a NGO development -co-operation project first, from the point of view of the construction of a shared object and second, from the point of view of constructing power relations. In conclusion, the conceptualisation of power in activity theory is discussed in the light of the case presented. It is argued that in the processes of constructing a shared object, at least four kinds of constructions of power relations can be identified: the productive power over the potentially-shared object, the strategic power embedded in the tools and language used, the disciplinary power that refers to the techniques by which the objects constructed are kept as an acceptable activity within the arena of activities concerned and the dominating power related to the economical and positional hierarchy that exceeds the given actors and activities concerned. Finally, the question of differences in intervention situations in workplaces in the Northern hemisphere an in the North-South development intervention situations is revisited.

Activity theory and the actor-oriented sociology of development The actor-oriented sociology of development and activity theory seem to share some common principles while differing in some substantial areas of conceptualisation. Activity theory and actor-oriented sociology share the methodological commitment of looking at social processes –be it work activity or development intervention in rural areas – as they are in practice. For practical research, this means close engagement with the actors and ethnography-oriented research methods. However, neither of these methodological approaches is satisfied with

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the simple description of local situations, but strives to connect the analysis of particular situations of social interaction to more general phenomena15. In regard to the analysis of intervention, activity theory and actor-oriented sociology of development preserve different orientations, even if their methodological understanding of intervention as a process of con-construction is somewhat similar. Whereas interest in the actor-oriented sociology of development lies in the analysis of interventions within the arena of development (Long 2001), activity theoretical analysis, and especially its application in Developmental Work Research use intervention as a means of obtaining knowledge about and changing work practices. The ultimate programme for the actor-oriented approach has been that of “demystifying planned intervention”, in which the idea of the social dynamics between the “outsiders” (development agents) intervening among “insiders” (the local people) (e.g. Villarreal 1992, 266) has been in central focus. The activity theoretically grounded intervention usually concentrates on analysis of the activity intervened in16 and has not so far engaged in a detailed analysis of the dynamics between the interventionists (researchers) and the “local people” (the actors within the work activity being researched) (for further consideration see Miettinen this volume; Hasu forthcoming). Both approaches examine the real life practice of actors. However, reflecting the psychological origins of activity theory, the activity theoretical approach uses the concept of subject rather than actor. The subject is not necessarily the individual subject of traditional psychology, but it can be, and at most times is, conceptualised as a collective one. Actor-oriented sociology of development holds a similar view towards the concept of actor: it can be both individual and collective (Long 2000, 195). Actor-oriented sociology of development defines the actor, following Anthony Giddens, as a “knowledgeable and capable” entity possessing agency. For activity theory the “agency” of a subject might be defined as the process of the subject acting upon an object by means of diverse material and ideal artefacts in transforming the object. For Engeström (1987; see Leont’ev 1978) the subject17 is a part and parcel of an object-oriented, socially- and materially-mediated activity system that posses some structural features and specific developmental dynamics embedded in its history. Both of these methodological approaches share the idea of focusing on meeting points or different interfaces at encounters between actors. Both approaches assume that beside the encounter of the individuals actually present in the situation, it is a question of an encounter involving something more general. For the actor-oriented sociology of development, actors carry their whole life-world and social world in their encounters. This life world contains of different values and interests (Long & Villarreal 1993) that are manifested in practical encounters.

15

16 17

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Both approaches have some of their roots in Marxian tradition. The methodological programme of Long (1977) has been to bring the actor into the analysis of more structural and deterministic approaches to development, whereas activity theory at hand started as a psychological tradition (Leont’ev 1978) which aimed at seeing consciousness as continuous interaction with the social and material world, as part of societal activities. The mediating level between individual and society is understood as that of level of activity (Engeström 1987). For a focus on insider-outsider relations vs. the activity under intervention in research of work activities see Virkkunen in this volume. In some methodological texts (e.g. Engeström 1990, 79; 1993, 67) the subject seems to be a pragmatic choice by a researcher, the subgroup “whose agency is chosen as the point of view in the analysis”.

The actor-oriented sociology of development focuses on actors’ strategies when accommodating or struggling against each other (Long & Villarreal 1993; Long 2001). When analysing co-operation between multiple actors, the activity theoretical approach conceptualises encounters as meeting points between diverse activity systems (Engeström 1993; 2001) that differ in their object, the material and discoursive “thing” that an activity system works upon in order to produce some outcomes. In the encounters between multiple-activity systems, it is a question of searching for at least partially-shared object that would enable co-operation, but rarely takes the whole life world, or even the life situation of actors outside the work activity into account (see Hasu, forthcoming). In other words, the main analytical interest of activity theory is in “what” is constructed in the interaction in the framework of a certain activity while the actor-oriented sociology of development stresses the social processes emerging in encounter and holds more open and holistic analytical view of the actors’ livelihoods. This is, of course, also a derivative of the research object – when talking about poor peasants, for example, the “work activity” and other life are difficult to distinguish. According to activity theory, the search for a novel shared object also requires practical creation of new shared instrumentalities (Engeström, Puonti, Seppänen 2003) and tools. The creation and use of these tools imply that both to learn to deal with the emerging new object and the new kind of interaction and co-operation between the actors (see Toiviainen 2003). This is implied in the principle of mediation, where both the subject-object and subject-subject relations are mediated by diverse signs and tools (for the original conceptualisation see Vygostky 1978, 86). This methodological difference between concentrating on the actors’ life worlds and values or on object-oriented activity has its implications for practical research activity. In the Symposium, this difference was explicated in two different forms of advice for researchers engaging with the practices: follow the actor vs. follow the object. The question immediately follows: what is then an object? How can it be followed? In activity theory, the “object” does not refer purely to the objects such as videotapes, money or other material things18, but it merely a process concept19. The object of activities is under continuous discoursive and material construction. When researching co-operation between different activity systems in practice Engeström (1999b, 65) writes that the object is: “(…) to be understood as a project under construction, moving from potential raw material to a meaningful shape and to a result or an outcome. In this sense, the object determines the horizon of possible goals and actions. But it is truly a horizon: as soon as an intermediate goal is reached, the object escapes and must be reconstructed by means of new intermediate goals and actions.” 18

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Marcus (1995) explains various kinds of methodological advice for researching the world system. For him the “following the thing” option has to do with the tracing of movements of money and commodities in the capitalist world system. This concept owes its theoretical roots to Marxist thought considering human, nature-transforming activity (see Miettinen 2001). The object is understood as the “true motive” for human activity (Leont’ev 1978), the movement from tentative raw material into a product which corresponds to a need.

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An object is something that brings the actors together in the first place, the motivation behind negotiations as well as the constructed outcome that is never fulfilled and continues its dynamic development. This dynamic development is driven by the inner developmental contradictions that might be manifested, for example, as tensions in the object (Engeström 2001, 131; 2000, 308-309). Moreover, these two methodological approaches share an interest in the conflicts in interaction and assume that situations of conflict and disturbance in encounters tell something of importance. The source of conflicts is however conceptualised in a different way. As mentioned above, activity theory sees the conflicts as manifestations of diverse developmental contradictions inherent in an activity system. For the actor-oriented sociology of development, the conflicts in interaction situations are manifestations of contradictory interests and unequal power relations (Long 2001, 69). In these statements, we can observe the differences in the understanding of power. Activity theory hardly mentions the concept in relation to contradictions20 and conflicts, while actor-oriented sociology considers power to be a central concept in understanding discontinuities and conflicts. In actor-oriented sociology, the concept of power is connected to that of interests, knowledge and the transformation of meaning. Power is exercised in attempts to enrol others into one’s project by acting strategically. (Long & Villarreal 1993, 157). According to the approach, any interaction presupposes some degree of common interest (Long 2001, 69), but in many cases it is a question of contradictory interests and struggling over whose interest actually triumphs. This negotiation presupposes strategies of persuasion and enrolling rather than of domination. The strategic and enrolling aspect of negotiations concerning shared objects has not been within the scope of analysis of activity theoretical studies. The question asked in this article, in addition to exploring the kinds of shared objects that are constructed, is how was the shared object constructed? By which kind of strategic acts is a shared object constructed? And, how shared was the object in the first place?

Analysing power in practice As stated above, one of the methodological principles in activity theoretical analysis is a concentration on conflicts, disputes and ruptures. These conflicts are interpreted as manifestations of systemic contradictions in the level of activity system. This analysis of conflicts leaves the question of power relations merely implicit whereas one of the explicit aims of the actor-oriented sociology of development is “understanding of the power dynamics involved” (Long 1992, 9). Although the methodological idea of concentrating on power is central, the definition of the concept of power in actor-oriented sociology is an exploratory rather than an explanatory one. Concepts of power, as well as interest and strat20

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Power in activity theoretical analysis (Engeström 1993, 67; 2001, 132) is in some cases mentioned as the historically-formed position in the division of labour, seemingly referring to the hierarchical aspect of power.

egy, are ones that orient the empirical analysis, but are not strictly defined. For actor-oriented sociology, power, interests and strategies seem to be conceptualised as produced in negotiations, in distinction to the rationalistic theories which presuppose conscious goals and interests that individuals pursue at the lowest cost possible to them. Power, of course, is one of the concepts handled most often in the social and political sciences in connection to other concepts such as violence, ideology, discourse and agency. However, the aim here is to give some proportion to the use of the concept of power as a tool in activity theoretical analysis. Theoretically, power has been understood, for example, as a property possessed by dominant groups or classes. Within its emancipatory project, the critical research (for organisational studies see Alvesson & Deetz 2000) in a number of fields has been engaging in revealing the asymmetrical relationships and the “real” interests of those dominated and subjected to hegemonic ideologies. Power has been connected with the notion of dependency, dependent relations such as employee-employer or North-South and the advocating of participation by those who are dependent, both the employees and the beneficiaries, has been a central requirement (see Taylor 2001). Hudock (1999, 26), in reference to Baldwin (1989) reminds us that in NGO-development co-operation, while the first impression of dependency might appear to be a one-way relationship, the “weaker” partner might have a lot of control over the outcomes of projects, and therefore, to some extent over the other party. In researching power in NGO partnerships, Lister (2000) makes use the Dahl’s 1957, 202-203) classical conceptualisation: “A has power over B to the extent to which he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do”. In researching co-operation, this conceptualisation is problematic, since whenever actors co-operate both of them supposedly perform something they otherwise would not do and the power of making the actor do this might lie exactly in the productive co-operation, not in the influence of the A over B per se. In the conceptualisation of power, the Foucauldian thought of discourse as emerging fields of knowledge/power relations has been one of the most dominant views in recent times. In development studies, for example, Escobar (1995) has analysed the techniques by which hegemonic, Westerns discourse has created “development” and the “third world”. Following, for example, the Foucauldian notions of power as a fluid, productive and relational phenomenon, the actor-oriented sociology of development has set an agenda for analysing power as it occurs in practical encounters (eg. Villarreal 1992, 258; for a practical analysis of development discourse shaping local NGOs see Hillhorst 2003, 51-79). This view avoids the a priori assumption of power as a property of some of the actors in interventions and assumes that every actor has a degree of room for manoeuvre. Power is thus more a product of practical struggles and negotiation than enrolling others into pre-existing projects, i.e. A’s power over B. (Villarreal ibid., 255, 257-258; Long & Villarreal 1993, 157-159). In a similar vein Clegg (1989, 17-18) suggests the organisational view of power. He maintains that the focus of interests in the analysis of power should be in the organisational processes and disciplinary and productive techniques whereby power is arranged in a particular field. It is these kinds of processual,

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practical and strategic conceptualisations of power that resonate well with the activity theoretical emphasis on production and object-construction21. Michel Foucault (1982, 217-218) points out that power relations are always intertwined with the processes of production and communication. While activity theory stresses the what aspect of interaction, Foucault (ibid. 211) proposes that we take into account the how aspect as well, i.e. the different tactics and techniques by which the production of a specific what is realized - and not any other what. In the following case analysis, power relations are sought in a practical interaction by making use of the analytical ideas of the critical discourse analyst Ruth Wodak (1996). She conceptualises power as some kind of combination of critical theory and Foucauldian ideas22. In her (1996, 63-98) analysis of power relations within Austrian school meetings aiming at “partnership” and “participation”, she (ibid. 76) first describes linguistic processes such as greeting and introducing the agenda at a superficial level, then explores in great detail the verbal strategies that produce and reproduce power relations. In my analysis, I will look into some verbal strategies as well as the handling of money and documents within the meeting. The underlying idea behind the analysis of power is examination of the practical construction of diverse power relations when planning an intervention.

Case: Improving the life of retired professionals? The project under investigation is a small one aimed at improving the standard of living of retired professionals in Tanzania23. The co-operation partners were a well-institutionalised Finnish organisation (hereafter FIGO) engaged in the promoting welfare of elderly people in Finland, and a small, recently-established organisation for retired professionals in Tanzania (hereafter TAGO). For the Finnish organisation, the project at hand is the first time they have been involved in development co-operation, for the Tanzanian NGO, the project is their first to include a foreign partner. The idea of having a project for elderly people was initiated in the early 1990s by a retired adult educator active in Finland. He had presented the idea to the FIGO already then, but it wasn’t until 1998 that the Finnish organisation decided to engage in a trial of development co-operation and engage in the project. In the meantime, an organisation for retired professionals had been established in Morogoro and had delivered its project proposal to the office of the Service Center for Development Co-operation (KEPA) in Tanzania. The proposal was deliv21

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It should be however noted here that this view of power does not claim that in the present global economic and political configuration there would not be forms of power that are act more by forcing than persuasion, more by dictating than negotiating, and which leave minimal room for manoeuvre for the actors, up to the ultimate exercise of power by violence or killing. She (1996, 28) discusses, for example, the notion of emancipation in these two traditions. For critical theory, more specifically the Frankfurt school’s line of humanist Marxism, emancipation from power is possible by revealing distorted ideology through of self reflection, while for Foucault, power cannot be destroyed, only the forms of power can be changed. This is one of the four cases of small NGO-development co-operation projects that I followed in 1999-2001 for my forthcoming Ph.D-thesis.

ered to the Finnish initiator through personal networks and he contacted the TAGO to be a “partner” in the project. Additionally, the FIGO agreed to start with the project and some planning funds from the ministry for foreign affairs were received. In summer 1999 the representatives of the Finnish and Tanzanian organisations – the so-called project partners – met for the first time for planning the project. This paper analyses this planning phase in the project, firstly from the point of view of constructing a shared object, and secondly, from the point of view of constructing power relations in negotiations.

Constructing the object of co-operation: achieving agreement on the project in the planning phase In the planning negotiations it was in some sense a question of the classical case of a small-scale “planned intervention”, the framework of which had been prepared in advance by the Finnish side of the partnership. The first project proposal by the Finnish co-ordinator from November 1998 describes the project as: “Including two training courses held in two consecutive summers in the Morogoro Region. Each course would give practical training to forty-five retired professionals in some basic skills related to gardening, animal husbandry, homeand handicrafts. These are skills that they could use to get started in the production of goods and services for direct selling, or for their own subsistence needs”.

However, the first encounter between the organisations in June-July 1999 was given the title “planning”. The planning phase comprised a chain of seven meetings (see Figure 1). At the opening session, some 15 retired professionals listed ideas about what kind of products and services they needed in their daily lives, what kind of skills and interests they already had, and which of these could be improved by training. The ideas brought up in this discussion were developed in the planning sessions, at which five Tanzanians (two executive members of TAGO, two ordinary members and one representative from a local umbrella NGO) and two Finnish participants (project coordinator Matt and a representative of the board of FIGO) discussed the content of the project. The analysis of thematic episodes24 in the planning discussion shows that it was in the first planning meeting that the content of the training was mainly discussed. At the third meeting, there was lively discussion about the content of the project and this lead to a dispute situation. The fifth and sixth meetings were primarily co-ordinating ones discussing the practical arrangements.

24

The data for this article consists of recorded and transcribed meetings (N=6) and interviews (N=5) of the main participants in the planning group. The discussion data from the meeting was analysed in two ways based on the contents of the data following the principles of grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin 1990). First, thematic episodes were identified in each meeting on the basis of the topics of discussion. A total of 38 episodes were distinguished in the data. Secondly, a more detailed analysis of the specific content of each utterance was made. This analysis was based on the contents and total of the 199 different content items touched upon. This detailed analysis of the data gave an overall picture of what was talked about in each meeting, what kind of discussion topics the whole planning process consisted of, and production of the content of the object as constructed in the data.

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17.6.1999

18.6

23.6

24.6

28.6

30.6

1.7.

6.7.1999

Opening workshop

PM

PM

PM

PM

PM

PM

Final Meeting

Figure 1. The number and dates of planning meetings (PM) in the FIGO-TAGO project in summer 1999. The data examples used in this article are from the meeting on 24th June 1999

After briefly describing the planning process and the thematic episodes included within it, I analysed the meeting discussions from the point of view of the object – what was the emerging object of co-operation between these two organisations? A detailed analysis of the content of the interaction in six planning meetings (from one meeting, data was missing because of a recording failure) showed that in the planning negotiations, the object of co-operation between FIGO and TAGO was constructed of four diverse aspects. These were: 1) the content of the training course to be arranged; 2) the content of the co-operation project in a larger sense; 3) potential participants in the training course to be arranged; and, to a very limited extent, 4) the life of the retired professionals. In every aspect of the object, certain processes took place during the negotiation, and some new openings occurred. At the end of the planning meetings, a co-operation agreement was drafted. As regards the content of the training, the content that emerged during the discussions was reminiscent of the initial proposal by the Finnish co-ordinator. The planned contents of the training to be provided for retired professionals included gardening, farming, handicrafts, carpentry and one-man business skills. During the negotiations a new emergent set of skills required in an NGO, such as group working, was added to the content of training. In this aspect of the actual content of training, no special tension emerged during the negotiations. On the other hand, in connection with discussions on the content of training, the question of the allowance to be paid to course participants came up and resulted in tension between perceptions of training in which the participants pay a fee and training in which the participants are paid an allowance by the organisers. The solution to this tension was an agreement to pay a small amount of incidental money to participants. In terms of the content of the project, the agendas of the partners were quite different at the beginning of the planning stage. Whereas the Finnish partner had a clear view of the “training project”, the Tanzanians had prepared for more open negotiations about possible support for their planned organisational activities such as counselling, cultivating a shared field for food production and establishing a secondary school. During the planning sessions, one of the issues became

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of major importance. There were continuous discussions during the negotiations, and even conflicts, about the adding of a micro-credit facility in the project so that people participating in the training could be given a small amount of capital to enable them to apply their skills. In the discussion, the question of ”could we include the credit facility in the project?” turned into the question “Should we stop planning the project if training without a credit facility is insufficient”. This latter question was posed by the co-ordinator of the FIGO several times (Meeting 24.6.1999, turns 414,416,418,427). This tension in the object was in fact resolved by excluding the idea of micro-credit firstly from the discussions and secondly from the content of the potential joint project. The object of the co-operation in aspects conceiving the potential beneficiaries of the project was discussed by defining selection criteria for the course participants. In this definition of the object, tension emerged between the idea of offering training to any retired professionals and offering training only to members of the TAGO only, who by definition would be considered to be retired professionals. This tension was solved by agreeing on certain priority categories, so that the members of TAGO, the members of other NGOs and other retired professionals would be selected in the ratio 3-2-1. On a few occasions, a specific beneficiary group consisting of the executive members of TAGO was taken into the discussion. There were attempts to include the executive members, not as trainees, but as trainers in the training course. In this way, the potential benefit for them would have been employment by the project, not skills acquired via the training course. These attempts were however rejected and the selection of the facilitators was left to the training institutions. To conclude, some kind of shared object was constructed during the course of the planning meetings. The diverse tensions in the object were (temporarily, as will become evident in analysis of the later stages of the project) solved by extending the object or excluding something from the object. This “shared” object was materialised in the co-operation agreement drafted at the end of the planning period. The project agreement – a kind of material form of the consensus achieved – states: “the objective of the project is to plan, carry out and evaluate a six week pilot course that would give practical training to 30-40 retired, or soon to be retired, professionals. The aim of the training would be to enable participants to start the production of goods or services for their own subsistence needs, or for direct selling, in order to improve their difficult economic situations”, and further, “the course will include instruction in the following areas: small-scale farming and gardening, handicraft and carpentry, one-man business practices and skills, and st skills needed in NGO activities” (project agreement draft 1 July 1999).

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Table 1. The aspect of object construction and the main tension in the planning meetings The aspect of the object constructed

Main tension

Solution to the tension.

1) The content of the future training course.

Main extensions and exclusions during the negotiation process. Adding of organisational training. Excluding counselling training.

– The allowance question

Training in exchange for a training fee vs. training with paid allowances.

Training with small incidental pocket money.

2)The content of the co-operation project.

The project as a training project vs. the project as training and micro-credit.

The project as a training project only.

3)The potential beneficiaries.

Training for the members of the TAGO vs. training to any retired professionals.

Training open to all, but an agreed priority given to members of the TAGO.

– The facilitator question.

Training facilitators should come from the TAGO vs. trainers from training institutes.

Excluding the micro-credit option.

Later, the object of co-operation between these NGOs, the training course, was made concrete in the following year by it being implemented at two local training institutions25. The emergent object entailed dynamics and tensions. From point of the view of the activity theoretical analysis, a shared object was constructed, although some tensions were identified. However, as the interviews of the actors made after the planning (see table 2) show, the sharedness of the object might be questioned.

25

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Analysis of the implementation and evaluation are outside the scope of this article. It is however interesting to mention that all the tensions in the object that emerged during the planning phase also manifested themselves in the other phases of the project.

Table 2. Excerpts from interviews with actors after the planning session Interviewee

Excerpt

FIGO representative

28.H: we didn’t have special expectations, we had a clear plan of what we are going to do, we are going to prepare this training project, and that is going to be done in cooperation with them, with these two organisations, and this process we had there (…) maybe that they expected the aid coming to many other things also, was a little bit surprising, but it seems that it’s quite common 29.T:so you had already defined it 30.H: yes, yes, a training project, that’s what we went to plan, that was what it was all about, we defined it here already, our own view, before going there (interview 15.9.1999)

TAGO representative

24.H: we had a lot of expectations, as I told you, before [the Finns] came here we sent a copy of our plan to them and, we even wrote a letter telling them that we expect to have a chance to expose more of our problems and we had a lot of expectations, of course but later on we came to down, that since it is our first contact we should limit ourselves to whatever small projects will be acceptable to them, but of course we do expect in the future that we go beyond that small project for bigger cooperation for bigger project (interview 23.7.1999)

In these excerpts, the differing orientations of the partners towards planning in the first place are well manifested. The FIGO representatives had the orientation of “planning a training project in which the TAGO is a local partner” whereas the TAGO had the orientation of “planning co-operation between these two organisations in order to get support for the activities of the NGO from the Finnish NGO, the potential donor”.

Constructing power relations in the planning negotiations Taking up one of the challenges posed by the actor-oriented sociology of development to activity theory, I shall now look at the very same planning process from the point of view of power relations. As before, the idea of looking into the actual interaction26 is followed to see what kind of power relations appear to be at stake and by which kind of strategic acts these are constructed. In this article, following the ideas of the interface analysis I have concentrated, on one encounter, a planning meeting on the 24th June 1999, in my exploration of the practical con26

The identification of diverse strategic acts was of course more difficult than identification of the content of utterances. Possible strategic acts were identified by reading the meetings several times in the light of diverse conceptualisations of power. As stated at the beginning of the article, this analysis represents a trial by the analysing of power relations in practice.

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struction of power. I will look at how the money was handled and discussed in the negotiations, how diverse documents were used as strategic instruments, what kind of divisions were created discoursively, what kind of situations of exclusive communication occurred, and how the content of the negotiations was kept within the “project framework”.

Discussing the money The most evident form of positional, structural and economical power relation is the diverse positions adopted within partner organisations towards potential donor money27, in this case the funds available from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. The FIGO has a legitimate position to apply for such funds, given that it has a partner from Tanzania. For the TAGO, partnership with the FIGO offers a first step towards foreign donor money which would provide financial resources to fund the activities of the organisation. In regard to access to potential donor money, the relationship to power is not, however, a straightforward dependency, but it is to some extend an interdependent one. In this case, however, a certain amount of donor money had already been given to accomplish the planning phase. The area of interest is in the actual acts by which this money was handled and how the potential use of future funds was discussed in the planning meetings. In discussions related to money in the planning phase, the relationship between “those who have control over the project money” and “those who have to bargain for access to project money” - was formed by many small acts. For example, every small amount of money needed for project chores such as copying had to be explicitly requested from the Finnish representatives by the Tanzanian members of the planning team and the need to account for each sum of money was emphasised. Additionally, the paying of meeting allowances for the planning team members at the meeting on 1st July was performed in a way in which, for example, control over the presence of the participants was emphasised. This “performance” strengthened the positioning of the Finnish representatives as controllers of the project money and certainly did not promote the view of a partnership and a shared effort. In addition to the actual handling of existing money, there were two important discussions about the use of potential funds. In connection with training, there was hot discussion about the possible paying of a participation allowance to the participants in training. The basic argumentation for the participation allowance was that since retired professionals have little or no regular income, they live from hand to mouth and it would therefore be difficult for them to be away from their own small businesses during training. The second important discussion concerning money was the demand to extend the content of the project to include a micro-credit facility28 in the project. The main argument for adding the micro-credit service was that the main prob27 28

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As Tvedt (1998) points out, even if we speak about non-governmental development co-operation in practice, it is a question of allocating the funds of Northern governments through the “NGO channel”. This demand is a good demonstration of the spread of social innovations (see Miettinen, this volume). One of the arguments for adding the micro-credit facility was to piggyback on the example of other NGOs in Morogoro, who were already “having it”.

lem of retired professionals was raising the initial capital to apply the skills learned in the training course – poultry raising, gardening or handicraft. As Excerpt 1 (see Table 4) demonstrates, the claim was that even providing a skill opens up new possibilities for action, but in order to practice the skill, some tools and initial financial input would be also needed.

Using documents as strategic instruments In development co-operation, diverse documents such as proposals, reports and plans play a central institutional role. The documents function as tools for transferring information, enhancing communication and sometimes as means for institutional learning. In the planning process which is the subject of this article a number of documents were used. One influential document referred to in negotiations was the problem tree created by the TAGO organisation in an LFA29 exercise in 1998 and sent to Finland as a part of the project proposal. The problem tree demonstrated various problems in the lives of retired professionals. The problem of a lack of training was one of the problems indicated and that particular problem was picked up by the Finns prior to the planning meetings. The existence of this specific problem in the problem tree was used as justification for focusing only on training, as the Excerpt 2 (see Table 4) shows. This useful tool for mapping and communicating the problems of retired professionals to potential donors thus enabled the Finnish participants to pick up one well-defined problem as a starting point for the planning. Had the representation in a form of a problem tree not existed, the agenda of defining the problems of retired professionals would have been more open at the beginning of the joint planning sessions. Additionally, in the actual negotiations in planning meetings, there were a number of documents presented by both parties - such as proposals, budgets, poems and open letters - that contained meta-comments on the planning process. For example, at the beginning of the meeting on 24th June, Matt, the co-ordinator of the FIGO distributed a document commenting on the planning process and Eric, an executive member of the TAGO hands out a similar document. The contents of the documents (see Table 3) clearly demonstrate the diverse points of views emerging in the planning process. At least two kinds of forms of power relation can be distinguished in the content of these documents and the in the way they were used in the meeting. Firstly, the two documents clearly represent the two different interests at stake in the planning – the interest of the FIGO to implement a training project and the preference of the TAGO for projects with more income-generation aspects. Secondly, the documents tell something about the strategies that were used when advocating these interests and in attempts to “enrol the others into it” which represent another form of power, that of condemning the other‘s point of view of the 29

LFA refers to Logical Framework Approach, a logical planning tool much used in the planning of development cooperation. The basic idea of the tool is to first define the main problems of a certain beneficiary group in the form of a tree which depicts the causal relations between the problems. The problem tree is turned out to solution tree that is a basis for planning different kinds of development activities.

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Table 3: Excerpts from the documents exchanged in the FIGO-TAGO meeting of 24th June 1999

Planning process

Paper presented by Matt (FIGO)

Paper presented by Eric (TAGO)

“you have to choose between two roads, two viewpoints, when you make these planning decisions. One of these ways is the road of self-centered, immediatefamily centered interest(…) The other way is the road of community-center interest. Taking this way you would see yourself together with other retired professionals as forming one broad, extended Morogoro family”

“project planning should be a bottom-up exercise and not a top-down imposed set of ideas”

“you need moral courage to say no to the temptation of primary personal and immediate family gains” Contents of the project and planning

“now we are coming to the crucial decisions in this project: to choose the subject content of the first pilot course, to determine the criteria for choosing participants, to choose trainers and teachers and to select the training centre in which to hold the course”

“project should be a problem-solving intervention otherwise it is a waste of resources” “skills acquired through the training project should be immediately put into practice to improve the life situation of retired professionals”

“the Finnish support should address retired professionals priority needs and burning problems including a) having income generating projects/retraining; b) having a revolving credit fund; c) having a retired professionals interaction centre; d) having a tractor to part solve the food shortage problem”

content of the project as well as the ways the other party has acted in the planning process as somehow wrong and suspicious. The document supplied by the TAGO demonstrates that the training project aimed at in the planning phase is not the one that is most immediately needed. In contrast, this would be income-generation schemes, an interaction center and a tractor (all of these are things to which access without outside money would be impossible). Moreover, it makes the accusation that of the planning is a “top-down” exercise which – in development co-operation – is the unacceptable way of planning. In the same vein, the document supplied by the FIGO interprets attempts to extend the content of projects as manifesting “self-centeredness”, once again a phenomenon quite “unacceptable” in NGO-development co-operation. These explicit moral judgements in the documents function as strategies for advocating one’s own point of view in trying to influence, not only the content of the project, but also the interpretation of the “other” as being an acceptable partner.

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Constructing divisions: we, you and them If economic differences between the Tanzanian and Finnish representatives were a quite clear relational fact, it was by no means the only division, or in Villarreal’s words “definition of borders” that occurred in meeting discussions. One way of tracing these divisions is to look at the changing use of the pronouns “we”, “you” and “them”. Taken as the underlying idea of a partnership, the development co-operation project in its ideal form is a joint effort, in which the Northern and Southern NGOs gradually become “us” working together in the project. However, in the practical discussions, differing divisions occur constantly. In the planning negotiations for the FIGO-TAGO project, several kinds of divisions emerged. First of all there were a division between the Finnish and Tanzanian participants. This division was created and reconstructed by using the pronouns “we” and “you” when making statements about division of labour in the project (see the Excerpt 3 in Table 4 for an example). However, the division between we and you as a division between the TAGO and the FIGO - in contrast to “we” as the partners in this project” – was not the only division that emerged. There were some instances when authority was given to an ambiguous “them” in Finland, in contrast to “we” as the Finnish representatives. Moreover, several divisions between the Tanzanian participants were created. Firstly, the division between the executive members and rank-and-file members was clear. The executive members were perceived as legitimate representatives of the TAGO’s rank and file-members. This position appeared to give the executive members on the one hand the legitimacy to both make demands and command the membership, and, on the other hand, a duty of accountability to the membership. This accountability led to the second division: a divide between members of TAGO and other retired professionals when discussing who would be eligible to participate in the planned training. Most of the participants in planning wanted to restrict the opportunity for participation to the members of the NGO. The identified divisions testify to the manifestations of a diversity of power relations in the discourse. The power relations that emerged reflected positional power – “we” as the Finnish NGO were in a position to define the content of the project. This was not, of course, an act of domination as such, but a reconstruction of the existing economical asymmetry and the power that this, to certain extent, brings with it. Analysis of the discoursive constructing of divisions also opens up a simplistic view of the Southern actors being dominated by the Northeners, and the latter’s considering Southern communities to be a “homogenous mass, with an inherent tendency towards collective action” (Green 2000, 72-73). As shown in the analysis, the processes of divisions, exclusion and inclusion are also going on between Southern actors, who might use the “project” to serve their interests in local power struggles.

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Table 4. Excerpts from the planning meeting on 24th June 1999 No

Example of

Excerpt

1

Discussing money in relation to applying potential skills.

423.ERIC: (…) we said that this project should be retired professionals’ problem solving ... and if it is not then it is a waste of resources … you are getting skills, those skills should be put into the practice, so that can help solve the problem you have, now, suppose you are trained for four to five weeks, you come back, you are as poor as, you have skills of course, it is something, but the real problem is that you can’t apply those skills unless you got the initial capital to initiate a project 424.MATT: Is it true that every skill on this list you made of fifteen or twenty things, Eric is it true for all of them? 425. ERIC: I think for every project you are going to undertake you need a capital, definitely, even small

2

Making reference to the problem tree –document.

585. Matt: Eric, we brought with us the problem tree, we saw awfully clearly, it was looking at a bad dream (…). And what I said to you the first day that one of the difficulties what we are going to have is that, that when we only confine our focus to this, limit our focus to this offering certain kind of training”.

3

Making discoursive divisions in speech.

371. Matt: we are responsible for deciding the scope of the pilot project for forty five is the maximum and the four week as the length, and we want to test it, we make those decisions, but who you want to have as target groups, do you want to have it open to all the retired professionals (…) these are things that you should make decisions about

4

Using Kiswahili in the middle of the meeting.

475.CHRISTINA: at least five hundred thousand 476.SEBASTIAN: or more 477.ELIAS: kama unapanda [if you build up the shelter] 478.CHRISTINA: sasa tukiomba hela nyingi [now if we ask too much money/in hesitating tone] 479.SEBASTIAN: say five hundred thousand 480.CHRISTINA: weka minimum, bwana [say the minimum, man] 481.SEBASTIAN: five hundred thousand, that is the bare minimum

5

Constructing a development co-operation “project”(1).

574.CHRISTINA: but yet it is not, it is not too late, or it is not too bad if you are going back to Finland, because it’s not going to be a secret, maybe there will be other NGOs who are supporting credits, who are having credit unions, then you can contact us that we are operating with TAGO we are giving training, but these people lack capital, and because your NGO is working with credit union, why can’t you connect us, so that we manage to get a credit facility to with another NGO, and then, when you are evaluating the use, the impact of the training, they will be coming to evaluate the impact of the credit system, it can work together, they can go together

6

Constructing a development co-operation “project”(2).

585.MATT: Eric, when we brought with us the problem tree, we saw awfully clearly, it was looking at a bad dream, looking into that problem tree of yours, we saw awfully clearly the twenty or twenty five different really serious problems on that tree, one of which was that retired people can’t get credit anywhere. What I said to you the first day that one of the difficulties what we are going to have is that, that when we only confine our focus to this. Limit our focus to this offering certain kind of training, you are going to feel in your skins and in your bodies, that it is not going to really help, and because it’s not going to touch this problem, that problem, and that’s what we are, that’s what we are suffering at this moment, I mean the knowledge that, this little thing that we are thinking about doing is not really going to solve these other problems, and we need other NGOs, other projects for them, and that’s clear

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Using exclusive communication One strategic act used to construct a power relationship in negotiations was shift in the language used in discussions. In some instances in the meetings the language of communication was changed to one that the partners in the negotiation would not understand. The main language used in negotiations was English, but at times communication shifted into Finnish or Kiswahili.30 Most of these shifts of language indicated a greeting or a practical clarification having no strong strategic context, but in some instances the exclusive communication contained a meta-reflection about the planning process and the strategies used, once again revealing the diverse interests involved, as well as the tactics. An example of this (see Excerpt 4, Table 4) is a discussion in the meeting on the 24th of June in which Kiswahili was used in the middle of a discussion about including the credit facility in the project. In this instance Christina made a request that the others keep the figures they uttered reasonable and not ask for too much money because of the fear that they would loose the argument. This meta-argument is an indication of the struggle over potential financial resources. Giving calculations about the practical costs of things serves as a strategy in struggling for the credit facility, but exaggerating the costs should not be exaggerated would be counter-productive.

Holding the project framework: constructing “development co-operation” The “project” concept was used in a number of ways in the planning discussions. For the Finnish representatives, “project” meant, right from the very beginning, this particular “retraining retired professionals” project, while the Tanzanian representatives appeared to use the concept of project, mradi, in a variety of ways (cf. Green 2000). The most dominant use of “project” for the Tanzanians was any new effort, such as starting with poultry or gardening where some kind of initial capital would be needed. This conceptualisation of project was used continuously in arguing for addition of the credit facility to the co-operation project and resulted in a number of misunderstandings. The project as a discoursive manifestation of international “devspeak”, in the sense of the Tvedt’s (1998) ideal model, emerged in the discussion about a micro-credit facility. After it became clear that FIGO was not willing to engage in a micro-credit facility, one of the Tanzanian representatives proposed that another Finnish NGO could adopt that component as another project, and made a case for these two being evaluated separately (see Excerpt 5, Table 4). Accordingly, the statement by the Finnish co-ordinator (Excerpt 6, Table 4) describes the way in which life problems and processes of retired professionals are represented in “development discourse”. The life of these retired professionals is depicted as a series of separate problems to which the solution will be separate projects with separate foreign NGOs. 30

In the six analysed meeting total of 78 quotations were identified where only Finnish was spoken, and in 144 quotations Kiswahili was used.

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Conclusion Analysis of encounters in the planning meetings showed that at least a partly-shared object of co-operation was constructed in the negotiations between Finnish and Tanzanian NGOs. The object was negotiated in its various aspects: defining the content of a future training course; negotiating the more general content of co-operation between these two NGOs; and defining the group of potential beneficiaries. What is notable is that the object constituted by the meaning of the lives of the retired professionals - whose problems it was planned to solve by the project - was almost non-existent during the negotiations. At the end of the planning sessions, an agreement concerning future co-operation was made, a certain shared object was constructed and a consensus reached. The question however remained, as the interviews demonstrated, how authentic (see Wodak 1995, 96) that consensus actually was. Questioning of the degree of sharedness led to analysis of the strategic side of negotiating a shared object and the way in which practical power relations were constructed in the planning negotiations. Some explorative propositions for analysing power in practical situations were made: the ways that money is handled and discussed, the strategic use of documents, the discoursive construction of divisions, the use of exclusive communication, and holding to the project framework. These observations led to a proposal for conceptualising power in activity theoretical analysis. Based on this case, I argue that the activity theoretical approach can enable the combination of at least four different views on power when analysing a practical situation. Firstly, the power in activity theory might be analysed from the viewpoint of power over the object, the productive view on power. This power has to do with the concept of agency, the possibilities and capabilities of constructing and transforming diverse objects. Secondly, power is related to the use of tools and signs in object construction. These tools function both as means of communication and of constructing strategic power relationship, as tools for enrolling others to support one’s own interests and having an impact on the possible acts by others31 (Foucault 1982). Thirdly, the exercise of power could be conceptualised as controlling the systemic integration (Clegg 1989, 18) of the field, or arena, of activities by rules. This control implies the disciplinary view on power, in this case an important aim in negotiations appeared to be constructing a suitable and justifiable development co-operation project, at times even more than to that of finding solutions to the problems in the life of the retired professionals. Fourthly, power could be understood as more structural and positional, a dominative power, manifested in this case by reproduction of the giver-recipient relationship in which those having access to funds have the final say about contents, the means of control, and potential punishment for withdrawing from the co-operation.

31

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Foucault (1982, 220) makes the distinction: “what defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or in the future”.

From the point of view of NGO-development co-operation, this analysis has some implications for understanding the practical construction of North-South asymmetries and difficulties in partnership and participation. In this particular analysis, productive power emerged in the enabling function of North-South co-operation, arranging such training courses that later proved useful to some participants would not have been possible without the co-operation. Simultaneously, negotiations concerning co-operation entailed the strategic use of power aimed at promoting diverse interests. However, in contrast to some extent to the view of proponents for real participation that the Tanzanian points of view would have been “the real” ones, but were dominated by Finnish views, I argue for a more complex interpretation. Discussions concerning the projects as either a training project or a micro-credit project, and, the question of training for members of the NGOs or for any professionals were aspects of the objects of co-operation which also had potential implications for local power relations in the NGO arena in Morogoro. Operation of a micro-credit scheme would have given the executive members both a position of economic power and a position of esteem within the field of NGO “micro-creditism” in Morogoro. Although the view of the end users the retired professionals who participated in the training course is missing from the argument in this article, it can be said that the research revealed the same kind of tension between “potential practical uses of the project” and “getting access to financial resources” (see Kontinen 2004) that also emerges in the implementation and evaluation phase in discussions between partners and in the experiences of training participants. Moreover, based on the interviews with participants six months after the training course ended it can be said that a certain transformation of both meaning and the object had taken place (cf. Villarreal this collection). Despite the actual skills learned in training, a number of participants said they had learned that by establishing an NGO it is possible to find a foreign donor, and some of the participants were already in the process of establishing an “NGO of my own”. Though it is concluded, in activity theoretical terms, that the object of co-operation in this case was intertwining a potential use value in solving some problems in the lives of retired professionals as well as finding a way to resources and power, the means of communication employed served both as a means of achieving consensus as well as a way of playing strategic games, with the rules of the activity enhancing both the production of the object that has use value and disciplining the object to “fit the field”. In methodological terms, the suggestion article is that a methodological “bricolage” combining some aspects of the actor-oriented sociology of development and activity theoretical analysis is a useful tool for understanding the dynamics of development co-operation processes. The conceptualisation of power is just one of the contributions that actor-oriented sociology could offer to activity theoretical analysis, and the productive view of object construction provides an additional angle on the analysis of development encounters.

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This article started with two aims related to the discussions held in the Development Intervention Symposium. The first aim, exploration of the analysis of power relations in activity theoretical analysis has been discussed in the section above. In part, this analysis might also provide hints concerning the question posed at the symposium, that of the question of difference between interventions in workplaces in the Northern hemisphere and within the arena of development. The scope of this analysis was the negotiations on intervention by two organisations, both of them functioning as object of research, not an activity theoretical intervention. In my research, the interventionist ambitions of the researcher were very modest, although it must be acknowledged that research is always an intervention. In the planning phase, my role was very much that of an silent observer at the meetings, but developed in later stages to become more participatory, and, if you wish, also an interventionist in the dialogical sense (see Miettinen, this volume) by arranging a feedback meeting about some of the preliminary findings. Interestingly, in these feedback meetings the tension between the provision of micro-credit and training was reproduced and attempts were made to use me in a strategic manner to advocate the micro-credit view. The centrality of money and the role that access to potential material resources played in negotiation concerning shared objects in intervention within development co-operation is assumed to be different to that in intervention within a Finnish health center, a Finnish primary school or a work in an investment bank. Exploring these differences and similarities in a comparative manner remains a task for further empirical analysis of the practical construction of power relationship in workplace interventions.

References Arce, A. & Long, N. (2000). Anthropology, Development and Modernities. Exploring discourses, counter-tendencies and violence. London: Routledge. Baldwin, D.A. (1989). Paradoxes of Power. Cornwall: Basil Blackwell. Clegg, S. R. (1989). Frameworks of Power. London: Routledge. Cooke. B. & Kothari, U. (eds.). (2001). Participation: The New Tyranny? London: Zed Books. Dahl, R. (1957). The concept of power. Behavioural science, 2, 201-215. Engeström, Y. (1996). Developmental work research as educational research. Looking ten years back and into the zone of proximal development. Nordisk Pedagogik, vol 16, nr 3, pp 131-143. Engeström, Y. (1999a). Activity theory and individual and social transformation. In Engeström, Miettinen, R. Punamäki, R.-L. (eds.) 1999a, 19-38. Engeström, Y. (1999b). The Expansive visibilization of work: an activity theoretical perspective. Computer Supported Collaborative Work, 8, 63-93. Engeström, Y. (2000). Comment on Blackler et al. Activity theory and the Social Construction of knowledge: A story of Four Umpires. Organization 7(2), 301-310.

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Engeström, Y. (2001). Expansive learning at work: toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work, vol. 14, No.1, 2001. Engeström, Y., Miettinen, R. & Punamäki, R-L. (1999). Perspectives on Activity Theory. USA: Cambridge University Press. Engeström, Y., Engeström, R. , Vähäaho, T. (1999). When the Center Does Not Hold: the Importance of Knotworking. In: Chailklin, S., Hedegaard, A. & Jensen, U.J. (eds.) Activity Theory and Social Practice. Oxford: Aarhus University Press. Engeström, Y. & Puonti, A. & Seppänen, L. (2003). Spatial and temporal expansion of the object as a challenge for reorganizing work. In Niccolini, D. & Gherardi, S. & Yanow, D. (eds.). From Knowing in Organisations: A Practice-Based Approach. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fowler, A. (2000). Beyond partnership. Getting Real about NGO Relationships in the Aid System. IDS Bulletin, vol 31, no 3, pp.1-13. Foucault, M. (1982). The Subject and Power. Afterword in Dreufys, H.L. & Rabinow, P. (eds.) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Second edition with an afterword and interview with Michel Foucault. USA: the University of Chicago Press., pp. 208-226. Green, M. (2000). Participatory Development and the Appropriation of Agency in Southern Tanzania. Critique of Anthropology, vol 20 (1), pp. 67-89. Hasu, M. (forthcoming). In search of sensitive ethnography of change: Tracing the invisible hands-off from technology developers to users. Mind, Culture and Activity. Hately, L & Malhotra, K. (1997). Between Rhetoric and Reality: Essays on Partnership in Development. Ottawa: the North-South Institute. Hilhorst, D. (2003). The Real World of NGOs. Discourse, diversity and development. London: Zed Books. Hudock, Ann.(1999). NGOs ad Civil Society. Democracy by Proxy? Cornwall: Polity Press. Kontinen, T. (2003). Producing a ”project” – Power relations in negotiating a shared object in NGO-development co-operation. In Brigham, M. & Brown, C. & Contu, A. & Elliott, C. & Fox, S. & Hayes, N. & Introna, L. & Swan, E. & Turnbull, S. (eds.). Critique and Inclusivity. Proceedings of the 3rd International Critical Management Studies Conference. Great Britain: University of Lancaster. Lister, S. (2000). Power in Partnership? An analysis of an NGO’s relationships with its partners. Journal of International Development, 12, 227-239. Long, N. (1992). Introduction. In: Long, A. & Long, N. (eds.) 1992. Battlefields of knowledge. The interlocking of theory and practice in social research and development. Guildford: Routledge. Long, N. (2000). Exploring local/global transformations – a view form anthropology. In Arce & Long (eds.), 184-201.

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Long, N. (2001).Development Sociology. Actor Perspectives. London: Routledge. Long, N. & Villarreal, M. (1993). Exploring Development Interfaces: From the Transfer of Knowledge to the Transformation of Meaning. In: Schuurman, F.J. (ed.)., 140-168. Long, N. & Long. A. (eds.). (1992). Battlefields of knowledge. The interlocking of theory and practice in social research and development. Guildford: Routledge. Miettinen, R. (2001). Artifact Mediation in Dewey and in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory. Mind, Culture and Activity 8 (4), 297-308. Nelson, N. & Wright, S. (eds.). (1997). Power and Participatory Development. Theory and Practice. London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Schuurman, F.J.(ed). (1993). Beyond the Impasse. New Directions in Development Theory. London: Zed Books. Taylor, H. (2001). Insights into Participation from Critical Management and Labour Process Perspectives. In Cooke & Kothari (eds.)., 122-138. Toiviainen, H. (2003). Learning Across Levels. Challenges of collaboration in a small-firm network. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Tvedt, T. (1998). Angels of Mercy or Development Diplomats? NGOs and Foreign Aid. Trenton: Africa World Press. Villarreal, M. (1992). The poverty of practice. Power, gender and intervention from an actor-oriented perspective. In: Long, N. & Long, A. (eds.). 247-267. Vygotsky, L. -S. (1978). Mind in Society. The development of higher psychological processes. Edited by: Cole, M. & John-Steiner, V. & Scribner, S. & Souberman, E. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wodak, R. (1996). Disorders of discourse. London: Longman.

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7. The roles of the researcher in developmentally-oriented research Reijo Miettinen

Introduction Research approaches that are committed to enhance change either in work activities or in a local community redefine the role of the researcher compared with the positivist approaches that underline the significance of neutrality. However, developmental approaches also define the role of the researcher in a variety of ways because they have different value-commitments and theoretical background assumptions about human nature, social reality as well as about the nature and sources of change. They also suggest different roles for the researcher in interventionist research. In this paper, I will discuss the theoretical foundations and value commitments in some of the developmental approaches by reviewing a scientific debate and by conducting two dialogues. The debate is one on commitment and methodological neutralism that took place in science and technology studies in the 1990s. It continued in current decade as the discussion of an alternative, activist approach in the field. I will extend this debate by introducing the opinions of Martin Hammersley, a well-known methodologist of ethnography, who has actively discussed bias and the taking of sides in social research. The two dialogues are inspired by the discussions of the Helsinki Symposium. In the first of them, I compare Norman Long’s and Bengt Flyjvberg’s concepts of interventionist research with developmental work research based on activity theory. The comparison is worthwhile not only because of the shared concerns in these approaches but also because of their different theoretical background assumptions. In addition, the three approaches have focused on different human practices: development in third world rural communities, regional planning in Denmark, and in the case of developmental work research on work activities in industry, health care, banks and administration in Finland and the USA. This diversity of research objects without doubt offers useful differences in forms of intervention and the researcher’s role. I will suggest that these three approaches are critical of defining the role of the researcher as an activist or facilitator acting on a political or ethical basis only. Instead they operate with roles such as a critical researcher, a creator of space for dialogue and contestation and a contributor to retooling and learning. In spite of

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the apparent differences, these approaches also have many shared concerns and can be regarded as complementary in contributing to developmental and interventionist studies in social sciences. The second dialogue takes place between two imagined interlocutors, an intervention- oriented researcher and a researcher who regards interventions as futile gestures and prefers a careful analysis of objective social processes and forms of power. Although this position can be defended, the intervention-oriented researcher will present counter argument based both on the changing nature of science and the relationship between science and society, as well as on the importance of the corresponding moral commitments of the researcher.

Howard Becker’s reflections on taking sides in social research: activism or methodological neutralism? A good starting point for reflection on the researchers role is Howard Becker’s 1967 paper Whose Side Are We On? In it, Becker presents a natural and empirical account of social research and of the role of the researcher. Becker thinks that a researcher inevitably has normative commitments and will ultimately find herself taking sides. Often social scientists have a liberal political stance and sympathise with the underdog. A critical examination of the prevailing institutional order results in the discovery of various kinds of inadequacies, problems and ways of action that deviate from officially – and publicly – held ideals. These findings turn out be normative. This in turn results in accusations that the researcher has presented only a partial view and not taken into account all the relevant conditions of the activity studied, and has, therefore, adopted a critical viewpoint. The research process and the findings do lead the researcher into taking sides. Becker then asks whether and in what sense such commitments distort the research results. He thinks that the methodological ideals of science help in avoiding the distortions (1967, 246): “Our problem is to make sure that, whatever point of view we take, our research meets the standard of good scientific work, that our unavoidable sympathies do not render our results invalid.” Becker’s starting point is recognition of the impossibility of value-neutrality in research, and a commitment to the ideal of scientific work which produces reliable knowledge and depicts a balanced or whole picture of the phenomenon studied. Becker also deals with the problem of the limits on inclusion of the voices of actors in a research project: because of the basic interconnectedness of societal practices, the number of situated points of view is unlimited. His solution to this problem is a careful definition of the boundaries of the phenomenon studied. Becker’s final recommendation remains somewhat ambiguous (ibid. 247): “We take sides as our personal and political commitments dictate, use our theoretical and technical resources to avoid the distortions that might introduce to our work, limit our conclusions carefully, recognize the hierarchy of credibility for what it is, and field as best as we can the accusations and doubts that surely will be our fate.” Becker’s paper has been interpreted in two ways.32 Firstly, it has been interpreted as an invitation to the conscious taking of sides in research. Sec-

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ondly, it has been interpreted as a call for methodological neutralism, that is, not taking sides in the research process and struggling against the distortion caused by the inevitable prior commitment of the researcher. To study the implications of these positions further, I will introduce the first two roles of researchers – the activist (or normative) role and that of a producer of critical knowledge – using a debate held in science and technology studies in the 1990s. The classical constructivist laboratory studies of the 1980s shared the tendency to preserve an ethnographic distance from research objects. In early, trailblazing ethnographic reports, the researchers’ interaction with the objects of research was not reported. Neither were the voices of the people being studied included in the narratives.33 The background for this methodological tendency was the critical epistemological mission of the constructivist sociology of knowledge: dismantling the realist conception of science, as well as the standard view of scientific methods and the norms of science. The analyst was not supposed to uncritically accept the ‘native’ culture of the natural scientists, who were considered to mostly represent a realist conception of science. The principles of symmetry and impartiality in the new sociology of knowledge (Bloor 1976) suggested that the same kind of (social) explanation should be given for both true and false theories as well as for scientific and ‘pseudoscientific’ belief systems. This was interpreted as a call to avoid taking sides in scientific controversies. In the early 1990s, a number of students of science broke this impartiality by committing themselves to one side of the controversy. Brian Martin (1996) analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of this kind of partisan intervention by a social analyst. He called for a particular kind of participatory fieldwork, in which one goal is “to effect change in the phenomena to gain understanding” (1996, 223). He also points out the central problem of interventionist study, the risk of being captured by one set of participants, “typically, but not always, the side of lesser cognitive authority” (ibid. 265). David Hess (2001), in turn, calls for a second generation or a “postconstructivist” ethnography, which underlines another kind of normativity and is supposed to study “how knowledge and technology could be better constructed” (ibid. 246). Edward Woodhouse, with Hess, Martin and Steve Brayman (2002), suggest a reconstructivist, activist-oriented approach in science and technology studies. They call for partisanship and set up the goal of combining practical relevance and scholarly excellence. The theoretical background for this approach ranges across critical social studies, Marxist traditions, and the social responsibility of science movement dedicated to prevent morally unacceptable uses of science, exemplified by the atomic bomb. Feminist approaches call for giving a voice to those who are marginalized and not normally heard in human practices or in research (Harding 1986; 1996). A primary example of this type of work is Kim 32 33

Hammersley analyzes these interpretations in chapter 3 of his book (2000, 61-90). G, Gilbert and Micheal Mulkay evaluated in the 1980s (1984, 2): “Most sociological analyses are dominated by the authorial voice of the sociologist. Participants are allowed to speak through the author’s text only when they appear to endorse his story. Most sociological research resorts are in this sense univocal.” In their Laboratory Life Latour and Woolgar (1979, 40) mention that they discussed their preliminary drafts with participants and organized several seminary discussions. The contents or results of these discussions are not reported or commented upon. The methodological summary (pp. 252-258) focuses on analyzing how the authors’ construction is analogous to that of the scientists: both make observations, use inscription devices and construct accounts.

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Fortum’s study of the Bhopal accident (2001), in which she adapted the point of view of the victims. Harry Collins, an acknowledged representative of the new constructivist sociology of knowledge, defended methodological neutralism in the study of scientific controversies. He defended a traditional kind of normativity of science, that of producing critical knowledge. He stated that he is not against commitment in general, but against the “commitment to commitment,” that is, against a priori commitment to any party in the controversy. The methodological neutralism of science requires the analyst to listen to both parties before making any commitment (1996, 255). Martin Hammersley, a well-known theorist of ethnography agrees with Collins in his Taking Sides in Social Research (2000). He argues strongly for methodological neutralism and suggests that the best and natural way for social sciences to influence society is to make its results publicly available. In his realistic account, any other goal than that of gaining new knowledge via the research process would jeopardize the objectivity of the knowledge gained. He thinks (2002, 15) that any kind of engagement in political or practical activity will lead us away from research, and consequently, from objective and valid knowledge. Several points which are critical of this discussion can be repeated. Firstly, it is easy to agree about a general commitment to the relevance of research in society, expressed nowadays in the form of the “third mission” of academic research. However, the formulations of this commitment are mostly too general to help a researcher in orienting her- or himself in research into local practices.34 The statement that critical societal problems selected as objects for research (such as ecological concerns or poverty) is fine, but may exaggerate the possibilities open to a researcher (or science in general) for the solving of these social problems and does not provide any orientation at all on how a researcher can contribute to the change or to the good of the activities being studied. Secondly, since social scientists study complex activities which involve the division of labour and networks of interconnected activities, the relevant sides to commit with are by no means evident beforehand (Richards 1996, Wynne 1996). As Brian Wynne points out (1996, 362); “The confrontation between ‘naturalist’ and ‘committed’ perspectives operates from a mutual reification of ‘sides’, and neglects other alternatives. Despite their sharp differences over the ‘taking of sides’ question, both perspectives neglect the more fundamental question: what constitutes a ‘side’ in the first place.” This resonates with the methodological neutralism of Collins: commitment should rather be a result of research than its starting point. Evelleen Richards (1996), a feminist scholar, presents an illuminating analysis of how a research process having a ‘symmetrical’ starting point may lead the researcher to the wrong side. The results of her study on the Vitamin C and cancer controversy was extensively used – against her convictions and her goals – by the alternative medicine movement to criticize ‘school biomedicine’ and to advertise their own methods and products. 34

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For instance, Woodhouse and his colleagues (2002) characterize the activist commitment (2002, 279): “It goes to tackle of how to reconstruct technoscience to promote a more democratic, environmentally sustainable, socially just, or otherwise preferable civilization.”

Thirdly, the opposition between an activist, ‘normative’ or reconstructive approach and ‘traditional,’ knowledge-oriented approaches in research is not fruitful. Much more interesting is to study whether different, partly-contradictionary motives and commitments can be reconciled in research work. Although academic research has lost its traditional source of authority – access to true knowledge – it does maintain its epistemological commitment to produce critical and valid knowledge concerning social phenomena and to maintain the rules, methods and procedures which are required to make this happen. Pels characterized this commitment well as the “overly partisan standpoint of a late-twentieth-century ‘critical presentism’”(1996, 292). When we hope to contribute to the solving of social problems, we have no reasons to give up the development of those methodological procedures that try to secure the validity of knowledge. It is important to maintain the independent and critical voice of scientists and simultaneously look for ways of contributing to other activities in society and to the good of the general public. This is related to one of the key issues of current science and technology policy literature: how the nature of scientific research (or knowledge production) is changing in post-industrial information society. The most-popular scenario is that scientific research will be fused with policy making and product development into “a new production of knowledge” (Gibbons & al. 1994). This will take place in hybrid organizations (characterized as tripple helixes), generalized spaces of knowledge production (called agora) and innovation-oriented contract research. Together with several other commentators, I am skeptical about this vision (Miettinen 2002). Any dialogue is based on variety and the recognition of the differences between institutionally- and historically- located points of views. It is vital that scientific research contributes to democracy and the development of society through its own voice based on a critical epistemic commitment developed and maintained by scientific communities and institutions.

From humanist values and discourse ethics to object-sensitive contributions The participatory approaches adopted in social research, in addition to a general commitment to social reform, take humanist values or discursive ethics that are dedicated to the realization of democracy as a starting point. The term facilitator, used to characterize the role of the researcher in participatory research, was first introduced by Carl Rogers, the best-known representative of humanistic education and the author of Freedom to Learn (1979). In this book, human emancipation is connected to a humanistic anthropology based on the concept of self-actualization (Maslow 1970). Self-actualization is an innate, given tendency to growth every individual possesses at birth, something that cannot be enhanced by any external means. Rogers compares the role of researcher to that of a therapist. His task is to foster or create an environment that favors the natural capacity of an individual for growth and self-actualization. In Maslow’s anthropology the instinct needs are the basis of human nature and its expression. They also there-

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fore constitute also the basis for a value system that allows the natural goodness of man to be realised (Maslow 1976). This conception of the natural development and growth of an individual is a blend of biologism and romanticism (Miettinen 1999a). It therefore largely excludes an analysis of the social and political foundations of the development of individuals. Edgar Schein (1987) extended the therapeutic model to organizational research. The idea of facilitator was also transferred to organizational research in the form of a facilitator of team building, the development of a group towards more-mature forms of interaction. Finally, in participatory action research, the researcher is given the descriptive role name of consultant/facilitator.35 What is common to all these various meanings is an attitude that the outsider knows beforehand either what is to be facilitated or the method that will be used: self-actualization (based on human nature or a mature form of team interaction), development (based on the model of rich industrialized nations) or that development can be achieved by a definite procedure such as democratic dialogue or team building. Norman Long has analyzed neo-populist conceptions in development studies. In parallel with speaking about ‘listening to the people,’ the image of ‘knowledgeable outsider’who is able to establish shared values looms behind the image of (Long 2001, 88) “facilitators can gently nudge or induce people and organizations towards more ‘participatory’ and equitable modes of integration and coordination.” This characterization also refers to another ethical stronghold of the participatory approaches, the ideal of democracy. In Scandinavian participatory action research (Ehn 1993), the goal was the equal participation of workers in the development of the workplace “value-explicit democratic ways of working” (Karlsen 1991, 147).36 The democratic dialogue (Gustavssen 1985) applied Jurgen Haberman’s discursive ethics in developing the criteria for evaluating of the degree of democracy in a dialogue aimed at democratizing work. The researcher controls the procedure and does not interfere with the content. Richard Bernstein rightly points out (1985, 298) that in underlining genuine mutual understanding, discursive ethics tends to become disconnected both from the realities of power and politics and from the important problems in the society and in human practices. Power, the first of these exclusions, is central both in Long’s (2001) and Bent Flyvberg’s (2001) ideas of developmental intervention. According to Long (2001, 59), intervention processes consists of a complex set of interlocking arenas of struggle, each characterized by specific constrains and possible manoeuvres. Long has developed interface analysis, in which the discourses between the relevant actors (such as farmers, administration and a help agency) are analyzed. This opens the possibility of functioning as “bridge builder” between the actors who have different interests, intentions and resources (ibid. 88). “The research35

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The substantial questions have become progressively more important in Whyte’s Participatory Action Research. This used to focus on the problem of the relationship between participation and productivity. In 1991, Becker renounced this as a fruitless question (1991, 237). In studies of agricultural research and development in Latin America, the focus is on technological and institutional innovations. Participation as such is replaced by the problem of transepistemic dialogue between researchers, extensions and farmers. “The main idea behind Participatory Action Research is building more democratic forms of organization and management” (Elden & Levin 1991, 140).

ers should not behave as a social gatekeepers or function as facilitators who decide what is good for the groups of people, or what they are supposed to know about each other, but simply as actors that open up spaces of dialogue between these contrasting modes of knowledge construction built upon different life experiences, expectations and identities.” This role of a researcher could be characterized as the role of constructing the arenas of dialogue and contestation. This suggestion has similarities with Karin Knorr-Cetina’s concept of transepistemic arena in science studies. She suggests that the researchers’ relationships also include collaboration with significant non-scientists (Knorr-Cetina 1982,118): “Different games are played at the same time by a variety of people”. Within the context of regional planning, where the interests of different groups collide, Bengt Flyvberg has developed an interventionist approach inspired by phenomenology and Michel Foucault’s concept of power. While analysis of the polyphony of voices plays a central role, tracing the mechanism of power is the key issue for him (Flyvberg 2001, 145): “Who gains, and who loses, by which mechanism of power.” He also thinks, with Long, that the creation of arenas of dialogue and contestation is a central task in interventionist research. In addition to this, he thinks that the researcher can produce important analyses and knowledge of the key question, bringing his own voice to a dialogue and thus stimulating and transforming it. The basic principles of the social ontology of activity theory are object-relatedness, historical contextualization and the cultural mediation of activity. According to first of these, it is essential to study dialogue and communication as a part of object-oriented, practical activity in which people try jointly to make sense of the world to solve their vital problems and to create or accomplish something together (Engeström 1999).37 The connection of dialogism to the social ontology of practical materialism is epistemologically vital, since it is in this practical activity that objects and people resist our goals and purposes and force us to change our conceptions (Lenoir 1992, Latour 2000). Without a shared object or issue of mutual interest, the idea of dialogue remains procedural, not supplying any substantial, that is practical, orientations.38 The historical approach gives criteria for defining the critical problem of activity: they are expressions of historically-constituted contradictions within human activities. For instance, the historically-developed and constantly reproduced and transformed asymmetrical and contradiction-laden relationship is the one between donors and receivers of development aid. Lev Vygotsky (1986), the founder of cultural historical activity theory, developed the idea of retooling as a vehicle of individual development. The introduction of a new auxiliary tool helps in discovering the conditions of change and identifying a “zone of proximal development.” This idea was later extended to the collective work activities being studied (Engeström 1987, Miettinen &Virkkunen 2004). A definite intervention approach, the change laboratory (see Virkkunen, this collection), has been developed on the basis of the concepts of activity theory. 37 38

It is not an accident that Wittgenstein exemplified a primitive language game referring to the communication between a builder and his assistant (1989, 3). “Discourse ethics does not set up substantive orientations. Instead, it establishes a procedure based on presuppositions and designed to guarantee the impartiality of the process of judging” (Habermas 1993, 122)

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The role of the researcher in this approach is as a contributor to a developmental dialogue which includes the contribution to the retooling and transformation of the object of activity. Even more than Long’s approach, this approach underlines the significance of the connection of discourses to practical material activity. With Flyjberg, it suggests the possibility that the researcher had to contribute to a change in activity by introducing research data, research results and concepts, that functional auxiliary tools that help stake holders re-evaluate their conceptualizations and mutual relationships. Unlike Long and Flyvberg, power relationships have not yet been a separate issue of analysis.

Comparing the approaches and the roles of the researchers Various theoretical approaches, social ontologies and normative commitments can be used to argue for the interventionist approach in developmentally-oriented research. These various ways and metaphors can correspondingly used to characterize the role of the researcher in interventionist research. To clarify this, I discriminate five roles of the researcher may take: 1) An activist taking the side of one group of people (customarily less powerful set of actors or group) 2) A producer of critical knowledge about the prevailing institutional order, 3) A facilitator (of self-actualization, group development, a democratic dialogue or power-free discourse), 4) An organizer of a space for dialogue and contestation, and 5) A contributor to retooling and expansive learning. These positions are not as exclusive as might first appear. I would avoid using the term researcher as facilitator because it is based mostly on idealistic, unrealistic anthropology and an equally-unrealistic concept of democracy. The activist approach role rightly underlines the social responsibility of researcher, but its conception does not suffice to orient the researcher towards conducting research in the field. In addition, the methodological critic of the activist position presented by Collins and Hammerslay does have a point. There are four interrelated reasons according to which a moderate methodological neutralism, or the detached position of the researcher, can be defended. Firstly, the commitment to one of the stake holders in an activity or network of activities should be seen rather as a result of research than a commitment which can be made beforehand. In complex interactions of individual and collective activities, is not at all clear what the sides actually are and how power is pursued. Both constitute an object for study. Secondly, the concept of the value neutrality of science and objectivity as a detachment is a myopia produced by the normative methodology based on analytic philosophy. Naturalistic, empirical and neoinstitutional accounts of science analyze the construction and maintenance of epistemological norms and methodological rules and procedures in scientific communities. These accounts show that these norms, rules and procedures are different to those in policy making or

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product design. A researcher who is committed to the ideal of producing critical and objective knowledge is committed to the preserving an independent role and a kind of detachment form the viewpoints of single actors, withholding his or her initial sympathies. The awareness that the results of research will be evaluated by the scientific community maintains such a position. Thirdly, the contribution of the researcher as a catalyst in a developmentally-oriented dialogue may best be based on the use of the research results obtained (concerning differences, points of view, problems, mechanisms of power), rather than an a priori commitment to one of the stakeholders. Furthermore, even if the research process results in a commitment to one of the parties, the change in practice implies a change in the relationships between the parties (more powerful, less powerful, master-slave). In contributing to such a change, the researcher should listen the points of views of all actors. It might therefore be better for the researcher to function as a boundary broker by using the research results rather than becoming a protagonist supporting one of the parties, in spite of his or her sympathies. Ways of resolving the ‘basic tension’ between practical relevance and the scientific quality of results will without doubt remain a central issue in developmentally-oriented interventionist research. This tension used to be discussed primarily in terms of the tension between rigor and relevance (Rapaport 1970, Argyris & Schön 1991). Argyris and Schön use it in their criticism of the acccount by Blumer and his colleagues’of a participatory action research project in Xerox. They discuss whether the researchers are able to show “rigorously the causal relationship” between the intervention on organizational change. This is, however, a narrow and defensive conceptualization of the problem. It is oriented towards satisfying the expectations of the mainstream positivist quantitative paradigm in the social sciences, based on the idea of linear causality and study of the relationship between independent and dependent variable. Understanding the historical conditions and mechanisms of changes in practice calls for more versatile methodological ideas. Examples of these are the concepts of co-evolution and co-construction of the various (material and social) elements of activity, systemic causality, or the transactional or relational constitution of practices. It is, therefore, more opportune to define the basic tension in terms of the capability of the researchers to contribute to both substantial theoretical discussion in the scientific community and to the development activities studied. In terms of the roles of the researcher, this tension is between the roles of an academic scholar and a consultant/facilitator. If a researcher uses most of the time available to organize the space and processes of dialogue, the possibilities for analysis of data and contribution to theoretical discussions of the issues being studied are limited. This tension is expressed in the fact that reports of participatory projects are often descriptive, lack methodological reflection and do not participate in the theoretical debate (Campbell 2002).39 In part, this tension is a 39

In their account of Participatory Action Research (PAR) Elden and Levin ask what scientific knowledge has been produced through PAR. Their answer is that the strongest contribution is related to “the reflection of metascientific problems of the PAR process” (1991, 140). This refers to the tendency of PAR to make itself into a research object. This kind of reflection does not contribute very much to the substantial questions of the practices studied and may not be interesting outside the confines of the community of PAR practitioners.

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question of priority and timing. A research having strong academic commitment can be interventionist if the results achieved are systematically brought out as a means of reflection for the people and activities studied (Flyvberg 2001, Miettinen & Hasu 2004). This will be almost impossible if the research/intervention process is short and both functions should be pursued simultaneously. Long, Flyvberg and developmental work research suggest a dialogist approach based on a multi-voiced approach and on the idea of creating a space for dialogue. Long and Flyjberg focus on the analysis of multiple interests and projects by actors, as well as on power relationships in discourse and dialogue. Developmental work research, on the other hand, underlines the historical contextualization of discourses and different voices, the tracing of contradictions as a source of development. It also believes that the researcher can contribute to a developmentally oriented dialogue with concepts, data and research-based hypotheses. Both Long and Flyvberg suggest a plurality of arenas for developmental dialogue and contestation instead a single special space for developmental dialogue (such as a change laboratory). This is an important suggestion which does, however, expand the horizon of intervention from a single research project to more long-lasting collaboration and to varying cycles of research and interventions in the confines of an institutionalized set of activities. The idea of plurality of arenas also expands the horizon from intervention methods to the design and evolution of local research programs and their collaborative transepistemic relationships. The suggestion of Long and Flyvberg also demands that we think about the foundations of dialogue, having in mind the critique of discursive ethics. How can resistance and contestation be included to dialogue as a generative force and how can polemics and domination be avoided without resorting to formal procedural ethics or to the authority of one of the speakers (a civil servant in charge, a president of a cooperative or a council, a researcher, an activist)? It might be that historical criticism of the substantive (functional and moral) issues and problems of practice is one answer.40

Power and mediation – skepticism and commitment Based on the concept of cultural mediation, activity theoretical approach underlines the significance of re-instrumentation, that is, the transformation of a prevailing set of instruments, rules and concepts in an attempt to solve the contradictions associated with an activity. This can be criticized as an overly-optimistic enlightenment enterprise which does not take into account the overwhelming re40

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Particularly during the last decade, several attempts were made to develop theoretical foundations of a dialogical approach in social research. In addition to Gadamer’s, Habermas’s and Martin Buber’s (1986) discursive ethics, sociologists of knowledge (Mannheim 1936, Hamlin 1992), social psychologists (Sampson 1993, Shotter 1993), feminist epistemologists (Harding 1993, 1996) and activity theorists (Engeström R 1995, Engeström Y 1999, Miettinen 1999b) have developed versions of a dialogical approach. These versions have used the resources from Marxist tradition and discursive social psychology as well as Bahtin’s and Wittgenstein’s theory of language. This theoretical and practical project is only at its beginning and due to the extensive and varied use of the term, greatly needed. About the connections between Mannheim, Bahtin and Wittgenstein, see Morrow 1998 and Shotter 2000. Flyjberg connects Foucault’s concept of power to the multivoiced dialogues in interventionist social research. For the connection between activity theory and Foucault, see Burkitt 1999.

ality of power relationhips. A realistic alternative, from a skeptical point of view. would be a commitment to analyze the forms of power without the illusion of interventions as vehicles of change. An activity theorist would ask (with Flyvberg and Foucault) whether, if power is an essential part of practice, should it not be studied as a part of object-oriented, tool- and sign-using practices. He or she would further ask, whether any changes in power relationships can even be imagined without conceptualizing the functional contradictions or dilemmas of that practice. He or she would suggest,with Foucault, that history and genealogy are means of questioning the self-evident nature of prevailing institutions and ways of action and are also a basis for suggesting alternatives that better correspond to the demands of present and future.41 An activity theorist would further ask – with Foucault – whether any new instrumentality implies a change in power relationships. Does a micro-credit system not empower women? (see Toulmin 2001). Does a shift from a rationalistic planning system (introduced by the donors) to, for example, participatory rural appraisal, not redistribute power? A sceptic would point out that the new planning tools are primarily rhetorical devices or carriers of wishful thinking, and ask whether the donor’s voice does not continuously dominate the actual decision making – reflecting the colonial history of developmental aid. He or she would be partly right. An activity theorist, however, points out that reality is contradictory: signs and possibilities of the real redistribution of power are also visible in the introduction the new planning procedures. A further question can be asked – what else can be done than insist on the attempts to develop further the forms of dialogue and instrumentalities and contribute to the redistribution of power? A sceptic would be satisfied with the observation and analysis of power in the face of inevitability. An activity theorist would suggest that such an iron cage conception of society and institutions is non-dialectical and that traditional neutral, sceptical, or postmodern deconstructivist attitudes can be questioned in a society where huge amounts of taxpayer’s money are invested in scientific research. He would suggest an instauration of in the style of Francis Bacon’s conception of the true ends of knowledge as a relevant moral attitude for a researcher in the modern knowledge society (cit. Ravetz 1972, 436): “Lastly, I would address one general admonition to all; that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek it either for pleasure of mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or for fame, or power or any of these inferior things; but for the benefit and use of life; and that they perfect and govern it in charity. For it was for lust of power that the angels fell, for the lust of knowledge that the men fell: but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel or man ever come into danger of it.”

Study being an interventionist can be argued both from the interest of knowledge production and from the point of view of inducing change. The former argues 41

In his What Is Enlightment? (1984), Foucault refers to the interventionist implications of genealogical studies as a way of showing how things can be done differently, a way to (p. 45): “separate out, from the contingency that had made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do or think.” He also has presented one of the goals of his genealogical project is to show how things can be done differently (See Flyjberg 2001, 103).

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that interventions (change experiments) produce richer data about the conditions for change and development than can be achieved by non-interventionist, merely observatory research. This epistemic argument alone is sufficient reason to develop the forms of interventionist studies. Since any change in institutions and practices is strongly historically, materially and socially conditioned (e,g, objective), the measures used by a researcher do not cause any change in its basic logic. This further underlines the epistemic significance of interventionist research and suggests that the immediate practical contribution of a researcher to change is likely to be minor.42 This does not, however, in any way undermine the commitment of the researcher to contribute to the good of the people and to change in practices. An activity-theorist would refer to the increasing literature which suggests that a new form of science is emerging. It combines the commitments of producing critical scientific knowledge - maintained by the epistemic and methodological criteria of the partially- autonomous institutions of science - with increasingly-active collaboration with other societal activities to solve the problems and challenges associated with human practices. This form of science has been characterized as “practical natural science” (Keller 2002), or “constructive science”(Krimsky 2003), “use-inspired basic research“ (Stokes 1997). These characterizations reject the traditional spectator epistemology, internalist autonomy of science, as well as the thesis concerning the merging of science into some unified knowledge production system or innovation-driven technoscience. I understand Long’s and Flyjvbergs’s approaches and developmental work research, as examples of this emerging form of science in the social sciences.

From methods and single research projects to the micropolitics of research, transdisciplinary arenas and networks Although it is essential to underline the responsibility of the researcher in contributing to development in the communities and activities she/he is studying, interventionist studies should also extend beyond the limits of separate research projects and local activities. Research areas and programmes are after all to some extent cumulative enterprises, and the basic insights resulting from several studies should be brought together to contribute to societal practice. In addition, a central mechanism of change in human practices is the diffusion to other localities of locally-emerged new instruments and ways of action (Latour 1983). Examples of such locally-developed forms of activity are, for example, the microcredit system in third world communities, quality circles in the car industry 42

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For instance, Robert Cole concludes his interesting reflection on the participant observer role in the studies of quality circles in the car industry as follows (1991, 165): “Whatever the limitations of the activist participant role, it was more than compensated for by the wealth of data that became available to me by virtue of this role. Located in the center of the organizational network, I was privy not just to outcomes but to organizational process in ways that enormously enriched the research.”

or the ethnography of user activity in design work. The articulation and theorizing of the conditions for and means by which these new forms of activity occur is part of their diffusion and further transformation. Bent Flyvberg argues that the active search for forums and channels where the results become heard and stimulate dialogues is an essential part of socially-responsible research (2001, 156): “I would deliberately and actively feed the results of the research back into the political, administrative and social processes that I have studied.” How and by what means this feedback should be accomplished and organized is a major challenge. The results of studies may take many forms such as cross-over books aimed at various groups of readers such as scholarly readers, practitioners, politicians and the larger public. Our research group recently wrote a book From a Product into a Tool: New Technologies in Health Care (Miettinen & al. 2003). This reviews the research literature of producer-user relationships and co-configurative design and the methods of analyzing user needs, and also compares three empirical studies on the development of health care technology.43 The conclusions and recommendations based on the study were divided into four parts according to the audiences: designers, health-care organizations, politicians and technology-development-funding organizations, and finally researchers into design and innovation. We struggled to develop a style of presentation that would make the book accessible to all these groups without giving up our theoretical insights or the most important scientific findings. We expect the book to be a textbook used in Finnish universities and polytechnics. This kind of activity is a reformation of the traditional idea that the results of critical social research will have an effect when they are made accessible in an active manner to relevant social actors. Instead of speaking of the popularization of science and informing a large (uninformed) public (Bucchi 1996), it looks towards the making of results operational for those professional groups and institutions who are interested in them and may use them. These kinds of activities also constitute part of the construction of transepistemic arenas of dialogue and are a natural outgrowth and extension of dialogues organized a part of single research projects. It is these kinds of institutional innovations that Whyte underlined when he spoke of the need for organizing networks and arrangements which stimulate learning across locations (1991, 238), and it is what Long’s idea of multiple arenas of dialogue and contestation imply.

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The technologies studied were Neuromagnetometer, the scanning of magnetic activities in the human cortex (Hasu 2001). a diabetes management software (Hyysalo & Lehankari 2000), and a safety wristcare for elderly people (Hyysalo 2003).

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8. Researcher’s roles and ideas of intervention – the influence on research outcomes Outi Hakkarainen

Introduction When studying ‘real world’ situations, the research process cannot be completely controlled by the researcher, since such situations are complex and generally very ‘messy’. Both qualitative and quantitative methods can be used in real-world research, but research designs are of necessity always somewhat flexible, and the degree of pre-specification is much less than in fixed research designs. As Colin Robson writes (2003, 5-6), flexible designs evolve, develop and ‘unfold’ as the research proceeds because it is not possible to specify all the details in advance. According to him, such designs are necessarily interactive and enable the sensitive enquirer to capitalise on unexpected eventualities. I would also add that because of being interactive, these designs may often also influence the life of the target communities. Real-world research challenges the researcher as a personality, since subjectivity is an integral part of flexible research design. Subjectivity in research is an issue which has caused lot of debate among scholars. For quantitative researchers subjectivity is a variable which needs to be controlled, but qualitative researchers find the issue to be more complicated. Martin Drapeau (2002) brings up different opinions among the qualitative scholars. Many of them suggest making use of subjectivity and drawing on one’s inner experience in order to better understand the subject of study. They think that by distancing themselves from the subject through the use of standardised or semi-standardised methods researchers keep the subject at a distance. Such attempts however also present certain risks, for example, limitations due to researchers’ own blind spots. Drapeau also says that there may sometimes be an unclear demarcation between what belongs to subjectivity and what belongs to delusions. The question for him then is how to make use of subjectivity while avoiding these difficulties. Anne Sofie Fink (2000) underlines subjectivity of qualitative research by saying that the researcher must be expected to feel very personally involved in every step of the research process, since every consideration and decision will have to be based on entirely personal grounds. Gegard W Boucher (2004) argues that to avoid the subject-object trap, the researcher must show that her life experience does or does not influence her research, and that this position assumes researcher

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‘reflexivity’ in that she can be objective about her subjective life experiences. I also think that in the qualitative real-world research – in which the field research is largely based on interaction between the researcher and the individuals studied – it is crucial to explain how much does the background and personality of the researcher influence fieldwork methodology and the outcomes of research, and does this influence reduce the credibility of research or perhaps add value to it. Furthermore, since the possibility of unintended intervention is always present in real-world research it is equally crucial to analyse how different experiences of intervention influence the outcomes of research. In this article I will reflect on the roles of the researcher and different options for intervention on the basis of my fieldwork experience in Peru and Mexico. I will explain the roles I originally had or ended up having in the field, in which context these emerged, and what kinds of experiences I faced when ‘playing’ them. I will also explain my experiences of intervention. Finally, I analyse how these different roles and interventions have shaped the outcomes of the research programmes in question. Before stepping into the story itself I will briefly present the research programmes.

Peru "Oh yes, I would!" I was very enthusiastic about the possibility of being one of three research assistants who would work in an indigenous community. It was the 8th of October, 1984 and we had just arrived at Lima. We were holding our first meeting on the roof terrace of our hotel. A research programme ‘Community and Environment in the Changing Cultural-Ecological System in Peru’ had been in preparation since 1982 at the Department of Geography, University of Helsinki. The fieldwork was carried out between October and December 1984 in co-operation with the Peruvian University of San Marcos. Our research group collected literature and statistical information in Lima but worked primarily in the research area of the Alto Mayo valley in north-eastern Peru, in the province of San Martin. We, the research assistants – five Finnish and five Peruvian students – collected basic material among the local people in three target communities, in an old and a new colonial village and in an Aguaruna indigenous community. The researchers – five Finnish and one Peruvian – collected material at municipal and provincial level. Each researcher worked in turn in all three local communities and carried out interviews with the local authorities. In addition to the educational aims, especially the offering of fieldwork experience to Finnish and Peruvian students, the principal aim of the ‘Community and Environment’ research project was to analyse the ecological and cultural problems connected with rapid settlement in the target region. The research area was part of the Upper Selva, which is located in the intermediate zone between the Amazon Basin and the Andes mountain zone. This area was influenced by a common trend in regional politics in many South American countries, i.e. human settlements, agricultural production and forest management activities being moved to sparsely-populated regions which are often mainly covered by ecologically-sensitive rain forests. As well as the economic reasons, there was political motivation for these programmes. The Peruvian government wanted to integrate

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these remote eastern regions, geographically separated from the coast by the Andean mountains, more closely into the rest of the nation. However, the research project also had an openly-articulated aim of intervention, since it wanted to contribute to the formulation of development plans for Peruvian rain forest region in an ecologically- and culturally- sustainable way. 44

Mexico My second, more extensive and independent fieldwork experience in Latin America is from Mexico. I collected empirical material in the state of Jalisco in north-western Mexico for my dissertation on the Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). I carried out two main periods of fieldwork, in 1995/96 and 2000, but also visited the area for a brief period at the end of 2002 when I presented some preliminary results to the case-study organisations. I wanted to make my analysis a close examination of the everyday life of those Mexican CSOs which were relevant and progressive in the context of my topic, but retain my position as an outsider. In my dissertation, I analyse the role CSOs play in a society in the context of democratisation. The main dilemmas I deal with are CSO service delivery, public decision-making processes and resources. After assembling an overview of civil society activities in the state of Jalisco and especially in the Metropolitan Area of Guadalajara (MAG), I selected three CSOs with different orientations. One of them works for indigenous rights, another on environmental issues and the third was created to improve living conditions on the outskirts of Guadalajara, the state capital, but has subsequently worked on many other issues as well. My dissertation is a mixture of an ethnographic study and a case study. It can also be defined as action research as it matches many elements of this activity, especially in terms used by the Australian school, which underlines the more general influence of studies instead of precisely-defined direct interventions. My research is, for example, closely linked with practice, does not regard the target community as ‘them’ but merely as ‘you’, it engages in mutual dialogue with the target, the research questions and focuses have been monitored and reformulated in interaction with the target community, and the role of researcher has been active. (Heikkinen and Jyrkämä 1999). Furthermore, although my study is not interventionist as such, it aims to contribute to change for the good of society. It was clear from the outset that I would ensure that the case study organisations would be informed about the outcomes, and that I would be pleased if they will considered the results useful. I think that researchers have an ethical responsibility to make their results somehow accessible to the target communities, that we owe them feedback for having co-operated with us.

44

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See more on this research project in Hakkarainen et al. 1992, Kuokka and Niemelä 1986, Tuhkanen 1985, and Tuhkanen 1988.

Researcher’s roles A researcher can have a wide combination of roles during a research process, depending on both the nature of the research and on her own personal background. A researcher’s roles may thus be divided into two groups, those related directly to the study itself, and others related to her ‘being’ or background. I have experienced the following roles or positions in the context of a study: researcher, advisor, conciliator, ‘ tool’, threat, and friend. In relation to myself, being a woman, a mother, and an activist have played some role in the execution of fieldwork. In Peru I was not yet a mother. When conducting the first fieldwork period in Mexico my daughter was one year old, and during the second period of fieldwork she was five and then six, and my son was three. I was nor an activist when doing fieldwork in Peru but got involved in the Finnish Third World Shop movement soon after I returned to Finland. Since those days, civil society activism has been an integral part of my life. Currently, I am involved primarily in issues related to democracy and its different dilemmas, mainly political and economic democracy – in the South, in the North and especially in the relationship between the two – and to some extent in the land issue as it affects the indigenous peoples. I am a member in three Finnish Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and in some international networks. In this chapter, I briefly present how the roles mentioned above existed in the field. Many of them are in some way related to the experience of intervention, and will be explained more fully in the following chapter. In all my periods of fieldwork my dominant role has naturally been that of a researcher or research assistant. In both research programmes my intention was to create a keen connection with the target community while maintain status of an outsider observer. However, when you are in close and continuous connection with the target community it usually becomes difficult to stick to nothing more than the researcher’s role. The researcher’s background begins to become important. As they get to know you, members of the target community easily forget about your original role. This happened to me particularly in Mexico, where I was collecting empirical material mainly among people with whom I shared many elements in life. Many of them were of the same age, urban with an academic education, and all of them were civil-society activists. In Peru, it was easier to maintain the position of an outsider as I was very different to people in the target community: a young female student from Finland is some kind of alien among indigenous people in the rainforest area. Many of them had never even been outside their community, let alone visited an urban centre. Also, language was a barrier, since the majority only spoke their own Aguaruna language, which is very different to Spanish. We used an interpreter in almost all the interviews. However, we three research assistants – one Peruvian man and

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two Finnish women – were able to create quite a strong connection with this Aguaruna community. The breakthrough was our actually working in the community. We two women observed the everyday activities of the women by working with them, and the Peruvian student did the same with the men. In the community, this was considered to be a serious attempt to understand their life and also to respect it. But even so, besides all the friendliness and openness, contact between us remained quite superficial. In particular, the lack of a common language caused many moments of frustration. For example, when we were working with the women in their manioc fields we witnessed intense discussions between two or more women but could not understand a word of what was being said. The women laughed openly at us because we were so ignorant about their world. They were however very friendly. They also gave us food, mainly manioc, as payment for our work. In one of the case study organisations in Mexico, members of the executive committee wanted also me to give my opinion concerning the issues on the table, since in their organisation everyone in a discussion usually gave her or his opinion before the final decision-making. I felt somewhat uneasy about expressing my opinion as I wanted to avoid the possibility of acting as an adviser. I argued that I should not express my point of views as I was not one of them, but they said that although I had no vote I still had the right to speak, and that they would like to hear what I had to say. Thus I did say something sometimes, mainly I supported interesting opinions that had been put forward by some of the activists. There were similar kind of moments also with other case study organisations in Mexico. In the ‘Community and Environment’ project, the role of being an advisor had been allocated to the research director and other researchers, not to research assistants. However, when our research group had a meeting with leaders of the Aguaruna’s regional organisation (Organización Aguaruna de Alto Mayo, OAAM) they treated all of us as foreign advisors and wanted us to give recommendations concerning the future development of Aguaruna communities in the region. This situation was a difficult one for us. We were not in any way ready to offer any serious advice, we were there to learn more about OAAM! It was my experience that in exotic surroundings such as an indigenous community in the rainforest, it may be difficult to maintain a sufficiently-realistic and analytical attitude. At least for me, still a student, this kind of research setting was a kind of romantic trap. This ‘trap’ was obviously related to the fact that it was a very pleasant ‘adventure’ to be in this community. We experienced many warm and joyful moments, since the Aguaruna were quite naturally just as interested in us as we were in them. On many occasions, we acted in a strange way according to their cultural codes, and this caused amusing situations. They laughed at us a lot, and we also laughed a lot at ourselves. It was enjoyable to wash in the river which ran through the community. In a sense I similarly wanted to jump – symbolically – into the enticing river of the positive, friendly, hilarious and pleasant feelings I experienced in this exotic and enthusiastic environment. We were also very pleased that the local people accepted our visit, even appreciated our presence in their community and were willing to engage in dialogue with us.

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It therefore took some time for us to realise and accept, for example, that there was an internal conflict in this ‘paradise’ and that the teacher was using us, the outside researches, as a tool for his own vested interests. In Mexico I was twice faced with the possibility of acting as a conciliator. In one of the case study organisations, I was asked to discuss with the president of the organisation about the lack of internal democracy in the organisation and some questionable working methods. Two employees of the organisation asked me on separate occasions to speak with the leader. They thought that I would be a suitable person to take this initiative, since I was not involved in the organisation but knew the organisation quite well. They believed that the president would listen to me. In personal interviews, other employees also told me about the somewhat difficult internal situation in the organisation. I was very hesitant about such petitions, and in the end did not intervene. In another organisation, I for my part decided to recommend to the executive committee that it would be good to engage in dialogue with a certain local community group, since I had figured out that there were several misunderstandings between this group and the executive committee. I believe that it was partly because of this proposal that my relationship with the president of this organisation became somewhat complicated. According to my understanding, the president began to see me as a threat to his position that he felt I was analysing his way of leading the organisation in a too-critical manner. A final role which I experienced during my fieldwork in Mexico was that of becoming a friend to some members of the case-study organisations. This did not happen during my first period of fieldwork – even though the groundwork for these friendships was created at that time – but when I returned to the same research area four years later to carry out my second fieldwork period. The long difference between the fieldwork periods was partly due to my taking maternity leave, and because I also took an extra year’s leave to be at home with my children. Currently, I have between one and three close friends in each of the case-study organisations. According to my experience, gender is of significance in the field. Both in Peru and Mexico my work was influenced by my being a woman. Being a woman but still different to the local women sometimes caused confusion in the indigenous community of Alto Mayo. Women research assistants could not work alone with men, only when the man’s wife or wives were also present. On collective occasions, however, the members of community found it difficult to locate us in the women’s space and they then treated us like men. At festivals and celebrations we were asked to sit on the bench with the men and not on the tree trunks of the fireplace with the women, and food was also offered to us at the same time as it was offered to the men, i.e. before being offered to the women and children. In Mexico gender had less meaning, but it is possible that some women found it easier to talk to me because I was a woman.

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My motherhood was a significant factor in certain situations, especially in Mexico when I worked with a local group of female activists in a ‘Colonia Popular’, i.e. a living area on the outskirts of the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area. They told me that when they heard from the president of the organisation about my coming to collect empirical material in their local group, they had thought what on earth they – poor house wives in late middle age – could have in common with a highly-educated, young European woman. However, right from the very beginning we got along well and a crucial issue in this connection was the fact that we were all mothers. Also, my daughter’s quite serious illness during the fieldwork removed barriers between us, and these Catholic women prayed for my child’s sake. My motherhood was also considered to be an important and positive thing during my two visits in the Wixarika indigenous communities in the mountains of Sierra Madre Occidental, where one of my case-study organisations works. My motivation and interest in studying civil-society organisations is largely based on my background as an activist. Although I was working in Mexico only as a researcher I informed the case-study associations about my activist background in order to be frank with them and especially to explain my motivation for studying a topic such as civil society and democracy. I noted that members of the case-study organisations were pleased about my activism. I think it had an influence on our relationship, that there seemed to be greater confidence between us than would have otherwise been the case. However, in the end it became very difficult for me to hide my ‘activist self’ and I ended up initiating an activist relationship with two of the case-study organisations. I felt that I had no chance than to act, as when I became familiar with the excellent and politically-very-important work of the case-study organisation working on indigenous rights I felt that I had to start searching for funds to support them as they were doing so excellent and pioneering work – locally, nationally and even internationally – with very limited resources. I made a particular effort after I returned to Finland and since 1997, two Finnish CSOs have provided economic support for this organisation, and have also engaged in other kinds of co-operation with it. During these years of co-operation, three persons from this organisation have visited Finland, since they have been invited to attend international seminars or meetings. Also, a representative from another case-study organisation was invited to Finland by a Finnish CSO and she was able to create links in Finland. Currently this organisation is also receiving funding from Finland for limited period of time. Although I have had many roles in the field my working in the field has been easy in the sense that I have been able, in the main, to openly be my ‘natural’self, especially in Mexico but also in Peru, even though this was in the exotic surrounding of an indigenous community in the rainforest. Researchers may often carry out fieldwork in somewhat hostile environments, and on such occasions proper preliminary planning is even more crucial than in an easier research design. For example, Larry D. Hubbell (2003, 205) explains that although he tried to be authentic he does admit that in some instances he omitted information about his political perspective, particularly when interviewing people with extreme right-wing views. In analysing the dilemma of whether to be authentic or

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not, he cites L.M. Wong (1998, 196-197, cited in Hubbell 2003, 205) as follows: ‘I should have realised that as qualitative researchers, the ethics of ambiguity and ambivalence in research relationships will always be present and dependent on local, strategic, and tactical conditions of the field.’

Ideas of intervention I use the concept of intervention in this article to also mean minor attempts at influencing life in the target community. I do not therefore limit the concept only to the context of planned research interventions. In this chapter I explain my experience with interventions I have faced or created during my periods of fieldwork. I categorise them as direct intervention, indirect intervention, invitations to intervene, and beyond the research: extended co-operation.

Direct intervention As has already been explained, intervention was one aim in the Peru project. On the other hand, plans for this intervention were quite theoretical, as nothing concrete was agreed beforehand with the Peruvian authorities, either at local or national level. In practice, there was only the good intention to offer something useful to the country and the region in which the research would be carried out. One such item was the integration of five Peruvian students and one Peruvian biologist into the fieldwork period. These students were given the possibility to acquire fieldwork experience in their own country and a researcher was able to collect plants in a region of the Upper Selva. When thinking about the possibilities of offering something significant and relevant to planning of the rainforest areas in Peru, it is my opinion that the preliminary plans for intervention were an overestimate. At the end of day, it was most probably a positive outcome that this research project was not able to influence development policies concerning the Upper Selva region. In my master’s thesis (Hakkarainen et al. 1992, 23-26, 194-197), I argued that after six to seven weeks of fieldwork in the Alto Mayo valley, our understanding of the region was still very limited, and possibly therefore also misleading. In our research project, I was able to recognise either quite clearly or to some extent all the six biases listed by Robert Chambers (1983, 13-27) which easily make outsiders view rural reality in a too positive light. According to the spatial bias, regions of easy access are usually selected as the ones for research. People who are interested in rural life often visit the villages where projects or other activities are already under way – project bias – and thus see villages which are usually better off than other villages in the same region. According to person bias, interviews are usually conducted with persons in a good social position. Dry season bias means that the area is visited only during a certain period of year, usually during the dry season, and thus the experience of local reality is less than complete. According to diplo-

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matic bias, outsiders are not willing to meet the poorest or somehow most vulnerable individuals as they are disinclined to violate the intimacy of those people or do not want to wound the honour of the village leaders by searching for the poorest inhabitants. Professional bias means that the interest of an outsider is primarily based on her or his own professional background and not on issues that are especially relevant for that village. In Mexico, I once decided to intervene directly in the affairs of a case-study organisation. As has briefly explained in the previous chapter, at the end of my second period of fieldwork, when attending a meeting of the executive committee for the last time, I suggested that the committee should organise a meeting with a certain local group. I had noticed many misunderstandings between this group and the executive committee. I thought it would be good for the entire organisation to discuss these misunderstandings in an open manner. The local activist group in the organisation, mainly late-middle-age women with whom I had spent a considerable amount of time, felt marginalised. They thought that the executive committee did not value their work and that all the members the executive committee were manipulated by the president. I was very hesitant to do something about this issue but finally decided to rise the matter as I thought that doing so would be for the good of the organisation. Before discussing the issue with the executive committee I asked for permission to do so from local group members. While they were delighted to be offered help with this issue, the reaction of the executive committee was not as positive as I had expected it would be. The president said quite firmly that of course they could have such a meeting but that he thought it would not be worth it. He thought they had already negotiated enough with ladies who just complained about every possible topic and were generally quite passive in the organisation’s activities. The other member of the executive committee did not oppose the president’s statement. After the meeting, I felt that I had perhaps made a major mistake in intervening in this issue. By doing so, I had abandoned the logic of not intervening during my fieldwork. The incident made my relationship with the president somewhat complicated. The final interview with him, just a couple of days after the committee meeting, was a difficult one. I was a little bit frightened about meeting him. He was very diplomatic with me but also expressed very firmly and quite strictly that he did not trust me anymore and that he would not perhaps answer all my questions. At the end of the interview, he wanted to discuss with me the situation of this specific local group which has problems with the executive committee. He explained once again why he considered there to be no need for any discussion with these ladies. I left his office with the feeling that it would have probably been difficult to continue my research with this organisation if my second period of fieldwork were not to have been already at its end. I felt the president’s hostility also on another occasion. There was an urgent political meeting early one Sunday morning among some CSOs which were all involved in the PRD (the Party of Democratic Revolution). There were severe internal difficulties in this leftist party at state level, and the coalition consisting of these CSOs was losing the internal power game. One of the activists had invited me to participate in this

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very interesting and politically important meeting but it was quite clear to me that the president was not at all delighted by my presence. In spite of this, I decided to participate but only as a completely-silent and non-visible observer. A couple of days later, this case-study organisation organised an impressive press conference to announce its resignation from the PRD because of the party’s lack of internal democracy. For a long time I was not able to decide whether my intervention had been right or wrong. My motivation for rising the issue at the committee meeting was ethical. I seriously believed it was right to bring up the misunderstandings as I saw them to be quite important ones. The misunderstandings were on both sides, and if they were not going to be discussed, the problems between the group and the committee would perhaps never be properly resolved. I considered that it would be necessary for the entire executive committee to meet this local group, as usually only the president, who had earlier acted as co-ordinator for the group, visited them. For example, the local group viewed the role of the president as more manipulative in the executive committee than in reality it had been, especially in issues that specifically concerned them. I knew the situation well as I had been present at those executive committee meetings in which the issues in question were dealt with. I did not name any of these misunderstandings to the members of the executive committee, I just said to them that it would be a good idea to organise a kind of round-table meeting, as misunderstandings certainly existed. However, the results of my only open intervention were nothing but negative. The proposed meeting was never organised, I caused some temporary problems in my relationship with the president, and I was maybe also the cause of some disappointment for the local group by saying that I could perhaps help them. However, the local group continued to act friendly with me, and the nature of my relationship with the president also improved when we saw each other again more than two years later, in December 2002. He appeared to have forgotten the negative tension between us and was open and friendly. He seemed generally more relaxed.

Indirect intervention A clear case of indirect or unintended intervention was the possible influence we exerted in the Alto Mayo indigenous community by using the teacher of the community as our interpreter. The conflict situation in the community already mentioned was related to different understandings about future development. The community’s approximately 200 members were divided into two groups in relation to this issue – a conflict between acculturation or modernisation and protection of the Aguarunas’ cultural heritage. The first group, the ‘reformists’, thought that the Aguaruna people should develop their communities to be more ‘modern’, i.e. to be more like the dominant culture of Peru, in this case meaning the ‘mestizo’ villages located close to them. The other group, the ‘traditionalists’, was ready to make some changes in the current situation of the Aguaruna, for example to increase production of food and handicrafts and engage in mar-

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keting to some extent in order to secure access to certain necessities such as medicines, clothes and blankets. The first group was eager to create possibilities for Aguaruna families to achieve significant economic surplus, which would require changes in the structure of land use in the community, since families would need more land if they were to create this surplus. In addition to economic activities and land ownership, architecture was also a dilemma for the two fractions. The reformists were willing to build at least some houses of cement with tin roofs like the mestizos, but the traditionalists preferred traditional houses constructed of natural materials which are better suited to the Upper Selva climate and therefore more comfortable to live in. The reformists invested a lot of effort in challenging the charismatic president of the community, who was the main voice of the traditionalists. The treasurer, together with the village teacher with whom we lived in a building located near the school which had been built by the community, were leaders of the reformists. The teacher came from another Aguaruna community in which the acculturation process had already reached a more-advanced stage since his community was located very close to the road. This ‘Marginal Highway of Selva’ (Carretera Marginal de la Selva), was constructed in the 1970s and runs from north to south through the Upper Selva in eastern Peru. The teacher obviously exploited his function as an interpreter to meet community members and to influence their thinking. On one occasion, for example, an elderly man gave a long explanation concerning a feature of the Aguaruna culture but the teacher translated the entire explanation using just a couple of words. When we tried to ask him to say more about the man’s views, he said that what the man had said was not important and very firmly asked us to move on to the next question. On another occasion, he was very eager to join us in a trip to the eastern end of the community which was the result of an invitation by the president to attend a wedding of his relatives there. We wanted to conduct some interviews during the visit and asked whether the teacher could accompany us as we needed an interpreter. The president rejected this suggestion and organised another interpreter for us. The teacher was very disappointed as he lost an excellent opportunity to get to know the route – a four-hours walk through the forest – to the eastern end of the community. Another, more positive experience of indirect intervention, was the influence of interviews and discussions on members of the case-study organisations. Many people made the comment that answering my questions had made them think about their own work somewhat differently. Some of them wanted copies of the transcriptions of their interviews when these became available in Mexico. Some of the focus groups I found to be of particular interest and they were also obviously useful to the activists. I was pleased to be able to provide the activists with some food for thought since many of them pointed out when agreeing to participate in the research that they considered it to be useful for them if an outsider looks at their activities. The sessions that I held with each organisation in December 2002 were also good in this context. The idea was to check my understanding of each organisation with the activists themselves. I presented them with the outline of my dissertation and the main points of analyses I had made of

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each organisation in relation to the dilemmas posed in my dissertation, and they then had the possibility to comment on and correct my interpretations. An experience of indirect intervention in the sense was also the writing the article on internal democracy in one of the case-study organisations since I wrote the text in dialogue with many members of that organisation. Because of the article, I made in interviews more questions about interviewees’ experience in relation to internal democracy in their organisation than would have otherwise been the case. I also asked the executive committee of the organisation for permission to write this article. The editors – two senior professors from CIESAS (Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social) and the University of Guadalajara respectively – of the book in which the article was going to be published were surprised about my willingness to negotiate with the organisation about the article. I however thought that especially when dealing with the sensitive issue of internal democracy, it is necessary to at least inform the organisation about the article. The executive committee was pleased that I wanted to bring up the issue with them, and had a positive attitude towards the article. I promised to provide them with a draft for their comments before the article was finalised, but only the president actually commented, underlining that he only wanted to raise a couple of matters without the aim of influencing what I had written.

Invitations to intervene In Peru, it was some kind of contradiction that our project had the aim of influencing development policies in the region but when the leaders of the Organisation of Agurunas of the Alto Mayo (OAAM) asked for our recommendations, we were not prepared to say anything to them. This was a clear failure in communication between OAAM and our research group concerning the usefulness of our research outcomes. This meeting too place at the time when our fieldwork was about finished, but still we had barely started to understand what a complicated dilemma the issue of future development in Aguaruna communities represented. We were only able to tell the OAAM leaders at a very general level that we thought they should try to find a somehow constructive balance between the reformist and traditionalist ideas in order to survive as Aguaruna communities. We also recommended that they create links to other Peruvian indigenous organisations working in similar kinds of situations. After the fieldwork in the Alto Mayo valley I felt that we had been very much like Robert Chamber’s (1983) negative academics and not at all like his positive practitioners. We went to the area, collected lot of empirical material and then left never to return, nor will we send any of our results to the people who participated in our research. The sad thing is that this was exactly what happened. Our research group produced reports and articles mainly in Finnish, with some in English but nothing in Spanish. To the best of my knowledge, we were able to do only three small favours for the indigenous community of Alto Mayo. We took them some copies of the just-published Spanish edition of a book by the North

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American anthropologist Michael F. Brown (1984) on the Aguaruna in the Alto Mayo region. This book contained some photos and a short preface in the Aguaruna language. We drew a letter-size map of the community on the basis of the only map they had, which was quite huge, and located the current dwellings of the community on this map. We also gave them many of those things we had brought with us, e.g. mosquito nets and dishes. The most difficult dilemma concerning intervention during my two fieldwork periods in Mexico was to decide whether to discuss the internal democracy of the case-study organisation with the president of the organisation or not. As has already been explained, two employees of the organisations had separately asked me to do this. I knew the president quite well and I knew that he might perhaps listen to me, but I anyhow regarded the task as very unattractive and difficult. In the end I promised to try with the aim of helping the entire organisation, and I asked the president to have lunch with me. We never had the discussion as he cancelled the lunch appointment at the last minute. He said it was because of some work he had to do, he did not know my agenda for the lunch in precise terms. I had prepared myself to speak with him and felt frustrated at not having been able to discuss the matter with him. I did not have another chance to meet him privately since I was leaving Mexico in couple of days. We met on my last night in Guadalajara when he came to visit me with his wife and another friend from the same organisation. In such a situation I found it impossible to broach the delicate issue of internal democracy. I felt a sense of release for not having taken up the challenge, but also uneasy for having promised the two employees that I would do something about the issue. I met one of them on the following day for a quick final discussion, and he was clearly disappointed about my failure to act. For some time I felt very confused about this issue as I was not sure what would be the correct way to behave. When a researcher gets close to a target community, it is difficult to avoid the idea that the researcher has a debt to the community which has opened up its soul. What can of should researcher give to the target community? Sometimes researchers give money or some other material benefit to the people they work with, as did for example, Larry D. Hubbell (2003, 200-201) when interviewing English gang members. In my case this would have been impossible because of a lack of resources. However, once the fieldwork was over I gave the printer I had bought in Mexico to one of the case-study organisations. When the two employees had asked me for this favour, I felt at the same time both uneasy and delighted about what could be an excellent possibility to offer something relevant to the case study organisation, i.e. about offering my services as a conciliator or a consultant. In the end nothing happened and I will never therefore know what would have happened if I had intervened, i.e. how the president and the other members of the organisation would have reacted. I was not at all proud about my actions in connection with the issue. My decision not to intervene on this occasion was not the result of a comprehensive process of deliberation but merely the result of being hesitant, uncertain and unclear. I did not have the courage to respond in a negative manner to those who asked me

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to intervene, but neither did I have sufficient courage to challenge the president of the organisation. I just ended up sliding away from an unpleasant situation, without being honest to anyone who was involved. Maybe I was frightened to broach the issue with the president. He is both a kind person and very committed to his work, but I also saw him as somewhat authoritarian leader, something that was also the case in the other case-study organisation in which my position vis-á-vis the president was complicated. I have defined these presidents as committed paternalists. They were, at least during my two periods of fieldwork, extremely devoted to their organisations but at the same time often blind to the understanding that there are many different but still legitimate and relevant ways to carry out appropriate activities within the organisation. They were not very open to initiatives suggested by newcomers. For this reason, some employees felt they were not appreciated as their ideas made no progress as a result of the president’s resistance. Situations such as this in the field can be very embarrassing, but are also excellent possibilities for learning to act better next time found. It became clear to me that a researcher should always make a clear and exact agreement with the target community in order to be aware of the attitude taken by both partners towards the co-operation. It must be ascertained whether there are some issues which one side takes for granted and the other has not even thought about. From the very beginning, my position was to ensure that the case-study organisations would somehow receive information about all the main results of my research, but that in the final analysis I am the one who owns the research results. Although I discussed these issues with the case-study organisations, I afterwards realised that we had not done this in the proper way enough and that we did not make any written agreement concerning our co-operation. All the organisations I asked to participate in my research were ready to do so, but their internal procedures for making this decision varied a great deal. In one, the president gave permission following the very first meeting that I had with him, in another I participated in the board meeting at which the board members took the decision after I had presented them my research, and in the third, the process took more than two weeks, with each active member reading my research plan and giving her or his opinion about the issue. In this third case, they eventually agreed to participate, but only after they had seen official documents to prove that I really was a researcher from the University of Helsinki and not a government agent or a representative of the cattle owners who were involved with the Wixarika communities in a dispute over land. This organisation is in part working on the very-political and sometimes heated issue of land, and many interest groups are involved in these processes. The work carried out by the organisation could therefore be dangerous, and they had sometimes even needed bodyguards when travelling to the mountains. They had to be very careful about giving their trust. While I had a close and good relationship with this organisation, I was never invited to participate in their internal seminars.

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Beyond the research: extended co-operation As already explained, I could not keep my activist-self completely hidden in the field and thus ended up creating an activist relationship with two out of the three case-study organisations. This relationship was however based on the provision of Finnish funding for their current activities, i.e. it did not mean any kind of active intervention in shaping these activities. This relationship changed only in 2002 when we, a Finnish CSO, together with one of the case-study organisations, organised an international meeting on the land issues affecting indigenous people in the region of the Wixarika indigenous people in the mountains of Sierra Madre Occidental. This was our initiative, which the Mexican partner organisation accepted together with the Wixarika communities. This process was more like an intervention since we created something new together. On the other hand, there would not have been any possibility of carrying out this initiative without full acceptance by the Mexican partner and especially the Wixarika communities, since they were the ones who took the major responsibility for implementation in Mexico. The process was mainly funded by the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs through its support scheme for Finnish CSOs engaged in development co-operation projects, and partly by our own organisation. We wanted to make this effort because the joint activity by the Wixarika communities and the case-study organisation in relation to legal battles over land are exceptional and pioneering in nature, both nationally and internationally. We wanted to create a space for the exchange of experiences and where mutual learning involving them and our other partners from different parts of the world could occur. One of the key topics at the meeting was ILO treaty No. 169, which deals in part with the right of indigenous communities to lands they have originally inhabited. This treaty has been important legal tool for the Wixarika communities in their efforts to recover lands which according to the law should belong to them, but which have been illegally taken away from them, mainly in the 1960s. Mexico is one of the 14 countries which has ratified this treaty. In many other countries, including Finland indigenous groups are pressuring their respective governments to ratify the treaty. In addition to Mexico and Finland, participants from Thailand, Indonesia, India, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, Netherlands and Spain attended the meeting. From Mexico people come from different parts of the country, and from Finland there were two Samis and eight other activists, researchers and students. The meeting was quite a success in many ways. The Wixarika communities were very pleased that people from distant places were ready to make the effort of coming to visit them in their remote locations in the mountains in order to learn and engage in dialogue with them. They were also encouraged by being able to host this kind of international meeting in their communities.

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Influences on research outcomes In addition to fieldwork experiences and research outcomes, a researcher’s background also influences many other things such as the selection of research topics, the research area, methodology, theories and research questions. In the name of transparency and credibility, it can therefore be considered necessary to explain also these kinds of influences in order to present a complete picture of the research process as Gerard W. Boucher requires (2004). I agree with him and again emphasise that my motivation for studying civil-society actors in my dissertation is largely based on my own civil-society activism. In this chapter, my focus will be on the research outcomes, and on those fieldwork experiences which are interrelated with those outcomes. In any real-world research, it is crucial to be precise in explaining how data has been collected, and also what possible shortcomings may exist in the data. The credibility of research is based on an exact description of its different phases. It is equally crucial to explain and analyse the roles of researcher, since she or he is inevitably part of her or his research. The best way to ‘unfold’ a researcher’s role is to explain all the roles played in an explicit manner, thus offering others sufficient tools to estimate the researcher’s influence in the research. (Morgan and Drury 2003; Boucher 2004). In addition to these steps, I strengthen the credibility of my dissertation by coding and organising the empirical material using a computer based programme called Atlas.ti. The empirical material that is featured here was collected, in the main, through open-ended interviews, participatory observation, informal discussions and focus groups. In this chapter I determine as completely as possible how the different roles and experiences in interventions have influenced the outcomes of the research programmes in question. I do this by listing the negative and positive influences I have been able to detect in each role and experience of intervention. In relation to my own experiences in the Peru project, the most-obvious unplanned influence on the research outcome was caused by the interpreter, i.e. the teacher of the indigenous community, since he used us researchers as a tool for his own vested interests. His actions damaged to some extent the collection of empirical material. We realised his intentions too late, at a point in time when it was already too difficult to change the interpreter, and we did not wish to cause open conflict with the teacher. In the final analysis, it is difficult to estimate how much he in fact harmed our research but what is certain is that we missed out on some relevant information because of his too-short and simplistic interpretations during interviews. We cannot of course know for sure, but he might have also translated some views expressed by the interviewees incorrectly. The experience of indirect intervention therefore had a negative influence in relation to the empirical material. It is, however, also possible that this did not have a strong influence on our research outcomes. I think we were finally able to achieve a fairy-full and correct picture of the community, thanks largely to the leader of the community who organised many interviews for us using different interpreters. Our plans for direct intervention and acting as an advisor in the Peru project failed completely, and there were thus not part of any interventionist outcomes in the project. While this failure did not influence the other outcomes of the project, there

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were many other difficulties in the other research communities, and these did influence, at least to some extent, the research outcomes. For example, in another research community in a new colonial village there were many problems with the role of the research group. At first the local people thought they were part of the circus which was visiting the village at the same time. After this misunderstanding was cleared up the rumour spread that the research group was looking for healthy men to take them back to Finland for work, and people were therefore extremely suspicious in their contacts with the group. In the end, our colleagues in this village were able to create some degree of trust among the local people, but were not able to collect as much empirical material as had been originally planned. There was also the absurd problem of an aggressive gang of wild dogs which made it difficult and even dangerous for the research group to move around in the village after sunset. If a researcher gets very close to people in the target community, as I did in Mexico, it certainly raises some difficulties and a number of ethical questions. How should empirical material that is somewhat sensitive be dealt with? Where should the line between respect for a person’s intimacy and relevant research interest be drawn? The personal life of the activists themselves may be quite deeply interrelated with their activism, and all researchers need to take this into account if they wish to understand the nature of a case-study organisation and its members as comprehensibly as possible. Being very close to the target community may easily lead to difficulties in deciding what can and what cannot be published concerning the research. For example, I was told that a key person in one case-study organisation had been unfaithful to this person’s partner, and this behaviour has caused another key member to feel uneasy, with the result that this key member then decided to increase the distance to the organisation. This issue in the activist’s personal life therefore resulted in some changes in the organisation. Without being a friend with this person who told me about the situation I would certainly not have heard the real reason behind this person’s readiness to withdraw from the organisation. I also heard, for example, some confidential information about the political deals made at municipality level. I am not yet sure whether I will use this information in my dissertation. It is a common understanding that in being very close to the target community, a researcher loses her role as outsider and, as a result, also her or his capability to be sufficiently analytical. In the main, however, my experience is different. Although I was close to the case-study organisations in Mexico, I continue to believe that I have been able to also keep distance to them. In addition to all the friendliness and openness, the case-study organisations also wanted – at least on most occasions – to keep a certain distance from me as they wanted me to provide them with an outsider’s view on their activities and role in society. One of the organisations informed me quite strictly that I was not welcome at an internal seminar in which they were going to make future plans for the organisation. I think that the closeness and trust I was able to maintain with the case-study organisations made it easier for me to present my frank and honest views about their own organisations to them, as I did during the sessions that I had with each case-study organisation separately in December 2002. I also think the foundation of open-

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ness and trust on which we operated made it easier for them to reflect frankly my views and correct them when correction was required. I think that being close to the case-study organisations has meant better empirical material for my dissertation. I believe that a result of the closeness is that members of the case-study organisations have been more open with me than they would have otherwise been. I started to work with the case-study organisations by interviewing practically all the activists in them, a total of more than 50, in order to learn to know them better. I always began these interviews in the first round by asking about their own personal background, how they had ended up working in or with the specific case-study organisation, by asking them about their duties in the organisation. I did not therefore only focus on the so called ‘key activists’ in the organisations. In the second, third and in some cases fourth round of interviews, I was more selective. I then tried to interview mostly people who were working with the most-relevant and interesting issues in the context of my study, or who were able to provide me with holistic analyses about the current activities of the organisation and its role in society. I also participated to the greatest extent possible in their meetings and other activities. In creating this closeness with the case-study organisations, I noticed that it influenced a lot that I carried out my field research in two periods. When I returned to the field almost four years after the first period of fieldwork, my relationship with people I already knew become very clearly and quickly much deeper, but it was also easy to work with new people, since they had heard something about me. One crucial element in this dilemma was also my activist relationship, since because of it I had kept close touch with the two of the case-study organisations. My activist relationship with the case-study organisations has also had many other positive effects in relation to my research outcomes. Through the activist linkage, I have, for example, received much material which supports the empirical material I have collected myself. One example of this kind of material is annual reports by the case-study organisation concerning progress in our common project. From 1997 to 2001, I was responsible for this project in Finland. The project is still alive, but another Finnish CSO is now co-ordinating it. I also comment on the reports which another case-study organisation writes for another Finnish CSO. Another positive aspect in the field in connection with my activist background was the willingness of activists to be interviewed. Motivating people to be interviewed is not always easy. Larry D. Hubbell (2003, 201) explains that in his view, there are usually more powerful and numerous reasons why people would prefer not to talk to foreign researchers than to talk to them. I include in my activist ‘scheme’ a documentary book of photographs ‘Jyrkänteen reunalla. Matka meksikolaiseen arkeen’ (On the Edge – Journey to the Mexican Everyday Life) (Hakkarainen et al. 1999), published in 1999, which I wrote together with the Finnish photographer Sanni Seppo and the researcherwriter Auli Leskinen. This book is about the fight for a better life and justice in a Wixarika indigenous community and in living areas in the outskirts of the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area. While it is largely based on the empirical material I have collected for my dissertation, I also collected much published and unpublished material on the history and the culture of the Wixarika communities and the City of Guadalajara especially for this book. Naturally, this information

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also supports my dissertation project. The international meeting that our Finnish CSO organised together with one of the case-study organisations at the end of 2002 was also relevant to my dissertation. This extended co-operation gave me the opportunity to organise sessions with my case-study organisations and check some of the preliminary results with them. As already explained, my most complicated and difficult experiences in the field have been connected with the role of a conciliator. On both of the occasions when faced with this role I subsequently thought that I had not acted properly. I should have thought through how I would act in these kinds of situations before they occurred, and then made an appropriate agreement with the case-study organisations. However, even though I clearly committed some errors, my efforts to act as a conciliator did not damage my research outcomes, since both the incidents concerned took place at the end of my second, i.e. my last, main period of fieldwork. I was lucky, since such events could have caused me a lot of trouble if they had taken place earlier. It might have been difficult, perhaps even impossible, to continue my work with the case-study organisation in which the president became annoyed with me. In the other organisation, my inadequate behaviour could have resulted in difficulties working with those employees who felt disappointed with me. Being a mother had both positive and negative influences in the field. As already explained, my motherhood helped me to make contact with the female activists, as I had a common ground with them. Carrying out fieldwork as a mother, first with one and then with two young children, was however also a complicated matter. I tried to participate as much as possible in meetings and other activities in the case-study organisations. This meant complicated arrangements with childcare, as meetings often started at five or six p.m. and were held on the outskirts of the City of Guadalajara, quite a long way from the place in which I was staying. In certain regions it was also somewhat dangerous to move around alone nine or ten p.m. when the meetings ended, and I also had to think about my nanny’s safety, i.e. that she would have time to get to her home which was quite far from my place. I therefore had to try to balance the carrying out of my fieldwork as well as possible with organising childcare properly. In the end it all went quite well – I was lucky enough to find an excellent day-care centre for my children and an excellent and safe nanny who was able to help me at almost at any hour of the day, on any day of the week. Being in the field with children did not therefore have a great influence on my possibilities of carrying out my fieldwork properly, although there were naturally some occasions when I had to cancel my daily programme because of childcare problems.

Concluding remarks My experiences have shown that researchers will very likely to play various roles –which may be related to research itself and/or to researchers’ personal background – when carrying out fieldwork in a real-word situation. This is especially the case when the fieldwork lasts for a long period of time and researchers have a

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close connection to people in the target community. Many of these roles can be anticipated, but most likely there will also be some surprises in the course of the fieldwork. I have eventually learnt that it will be lot of easier in the field if you have done proper planning during the period of desk work before entering the target community, i.e. that you know what are you searching for, among whom and how. It is also very helpful to have a proper discussion with people in the target community about the details of the research and the phases of the fieldwork. I have ever been able to do this comprehensively enough and there have therefore been some unnecessary moments of confusion during the periods of fieldwork. It is good to be as straight as possible with the target community in order to avoid harmful and frustrating misunderstandings. I have also learnt that it is really well worthwhile being precise and ‘awake’ when creating social links in the target community. It will take some time for an outsider to get even a somewhat realistic picture of an unknown real-world environment. If you rush into the task of selecting your key persons and other necessary support such as interpreters, you may close many doors before even having tried to open them. At least on the basis of my experience in the field, it is almost impossible to avoid not causing some influence into life of the target community when carrying out fieldwork in a real-world situation. It is therefore important that researchers are sensitive enough in noticing situations in which some kind of intervention, was it intentional or not, is taking place. I have also learnt, that it is useful to consider beforehand, are you willing to intervene or not during the fieldwork if you are asked to do so by people of the target community or if you by yourself recover matters you think the target community needs to be informed about. It is also important that you discuss the issue of possible interventions with people in the target community in the very beginning of the fieldwork. This helps to avoid situations of confusion and misunderstandings. I have experienced many roles and moments of intervention during the periods of fieldwork in Peru and Mexico, some of them have also had influence on the research outcomes, even though any of them in a dramatic manner. In Peru, for example, we made the mistake of hiring only one interpreter instead of many, as it would have certainly been possible to also find other ones. This mistake caused us some trouble, since the interpreter was the local teacher who used us as a tool for his own political vested interests. In Mexico, my background as civil-society activist was, in the main, a positive element to members of the case-study organisations and they therefore seemed to be with me more open and friendly than would have otherwise been the case. My fieldwork experiences have naturally taught me a lot. I think we can learn through our mistakes and thus be a little bit wiser in the future. However, even a very experienced researcher will most likely face unexpected situations when carrying out fieldwork in an real-world environment. Fieldwork to a flexible design is always to some extent an adventure. Even though we can never be completely ready for the field, it is still worth trying to be prepared – as much as one’s imagination allows.

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References Brown, M. (1984). Una Paz Incierta. Lima: Centro Amazónico de Antropología y Aplicación Práctica. Boucher, W. (2004). The Necessity of Including the Researcher in One’s Research. (http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/postmet/research.html) [Date of Access: 19th of March, 2004] Chambers, R. (1983). Rural Development. Putting the Last First. Longman Group, Essex. Drapeau, M. (2002). (September). Subjectivity in research: why not? But… The Qualitative Report, 7(3). Retrieved [19th of March. 2004], from http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR7-3/drapeau.html. Fink, A.S. (2000). (December). The Role of the Researcher in the Qualitative Research Process. A Potential Barrier to Archiving Qualitative Data. Forum: Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal], 1(3). Available at: http://qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-eng.htm [Date of access: 19th of March, 2004]. Hakkarainen, O. (1996). Intercolonias. Una contribución hacia la vida democrática. In: Alonso, J. and Ramírez, J. (eds.). Democracia de los de Abajo, Jalisco. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara. Hakkarainen, O., Pönni, A., and Varsa, A. (1992). Sademetsäalueen uudisasutus. Helsinki: Kehitysmaatutkimuksen yhdistys. Hakkarainen, O., Leskinen, A. and Seppo. S. (1999). Jyrkänteen reunalla. Matka meksikolaiseen arkeen. Helsinki: Suomen rauhanpuolustajat ja Like kustannus. Heikkinen, H. and Jyrkämä, J. (1999). Mitä on toimintatutkimus? In: Heikkinen, H., Hubbell, H. (2003). False Starts, Suspicious Interviewees and Nearly Impossible Tasks: Some Reflections on the Difficulty of Conducting Field Research Abroad. The Qualitative Report, no. 2, pp. 195-209. (http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR8-2/hubbell.html). Kuokka. I. and Niemelä. J. (1986). Perinteen ja eristyneisyyden määräämä asutus Habanassa, Koilis-Perun sademetsäalueella. Terra 98:2, pp. 152-167. Morgan, A. and Drury, V. (2003). Legitimising the Subjectivity of Human Reality Through Qualitative Research Method. The Qualitative Report, no. 1. (http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR8-1/morgan.html) Robson, C. (2003). Real World Research. Oxford: Blackwell. Tuhkanen, S. (1988). The upper Peruvian selva as a target for colonization. In: Kuokka, I., Niemelä, J. and Tuhkanen, S. (eds.). General versus unique, cultural change and development geography, pp. 39-58. Kehitysmaantieteen yhdistyksen toimitteita 23. Tuhkanen, S. (1985). Kolme kylää – kehitysmaantieteellinen tutkimusprojekti Perun yläselvalla. Terra 97:4, 203-219. Wong, L.M. (1998). The ethics of rapport: Institutional safeguards, resistance and betrayal. Qualitative Inquiry, no. 2., pp. 178-199.

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9. Who owns the intervention? Bringing the unemployed back into unemployed studies Jussi Silvonen

Introduction This chapter is about the methodological dilemmas in interventionist psychological research on unemployment. My claim is that the unemployed person is in a position of double margins. She or he is excluded from the social arena of working life and is consequently also at risk of exclusion from all other social arenas. The negative effects of unemployment on the jobless individual have been shown in research since the days of the Great Depression until now, in the social reality of late capitalism (Fryer & Payne, 1986; Winefield, 1995). However, the unemployed are marginalized not only socially but also in the social sciences. This marginalization is not as obvious as the social one. Although there has been a remarkable theoretical shift from “blaming the victim” (Ryan, 1976) to more sensitive approaches, the methodology used by social scientists usually regards the unemployed only in a passive role. The social marginalization is doubled by the procedures we practice as investigators of the social world. The emergence of well-intentioned interventionist methodologies in the 1970s and 1980s did not solve the dilemma but only gave it a new form. In unemployment research, interventions are meant to be procedures which help the jobless, but at the same time the unemployed are treated as unable to act on their own. This is the paradoxical situation that I attempt to analyse in this chapter. I shall first outline the historical background to the dilemma, how it has been constructed in psychological discussions about unemployment. Next I will briefly describe the basic ideas of interventionist research as it emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. After these rather methodological accounts, I will go to one case – an intervention study conducted in Finland 1996-2000 – and will illustrate the dilemma using empirical data. In conclusion, I will present some words about the relationship between intervention procedures and individual agency.

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The paradigm shift from “deprivation” to “agency” There have been three basic approaches towards unravelling the effects of unemployment. The first of these was the deprivation hypothesis (DH), according to which the effects of unemployment are only negative, cumulating linearly over time. This hypothesis was derived from the social consequences of the Great Depression in the 1930s, which resulted in the first wave of research on unemployment in psychology and the social sciences (Eisenberg & Lazarsfeld, 1938; Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, & Zeisel, 1971; Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, & Zeisel, 1975). A classic in this early-stage research is Maria Jahoda’s genuine ethnography of people living without work in the city of Marienthal, Austria (Jahoda et al., 1971). Eisenberg and Lazarsfeld provided the following summary of more than one hundred studies of this era concerning the influence of unemployment on individuals: “We find that all the writers who have described the course of unemployment seem to agree on the following points: First there is a shock, which is followed by an active hunt for a job, during which the individual is still optimistic and unresigned; he still maintains an unbroken attitude. Second, when all efforts fail, the individual becomes pessimistic, anxious, and suffers active distress; this is the most crucial state of all. And, third, the individual becomes fatalistic and adapts himself to his new state but with a narrower scope. He now has a broken attitude.” (Eisenberg & Lazarsfeld, 1938, 378)

This picture remained the dominant one for next few decades, and echoes of it can be heard even today, especially in medically-oriented literature on unemployment as in the following: “Numerous studies show that loss of employment is one of the most consistent antecedents of depressive symptoms. Studies suggest that job loss increases the likelihood of risk of alcohol abuse, poor physical health, violent behaviour, child abuse, marital disruption, and suicide. The financial strain of job loss exacerbates the effects of other costly negative life events, such as illness in the family. (—-) In addition, the tensions and disagreements undermine the quality and stability of the relationship between spouses and spouse mental health” (Caplan, Vinokur, & Price, 1997, 344).

Those who presented the deprivation hypotheses probably had the critical intention of revealing the destructive effects of a capitalist economy by uncovering the misery of the unemployed (Wilson, 1997), as a reaction against ideologically-coloured statements about ‘work shy’, ‘the idle poor’ and such like (Burnett, 1994). Although the deprivation hypothesis is based on good will, it is possible to challenge its theoretical grounding. Will the individual who is unemployed really lose his or her subjectivity, his capacity for social action, as is supposed in the deprivation discourse? This question was asked in next wave of research.

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The second theoretical wave of research started after the Oil Crisis in the 1970s, when the question of unemployment once again became actual in the western world. The way in which the problem was now understood was based on the cognitive approach (CA). The time of behaviourism was over and there was a move to consider each individual’s cognitive capacities to interpret the world in which s/he lives. Consequently, concepts such as a sense of coherence, efficacy, or coping were used to explain individual variations in the effects of unemployment. The same situation has different effects depending on the cognitive powers of the individual person to interpret the situation and to act on that basis (Feather, 1990; Liem & Rayman, 1984; Warr, 1987). The effects of unemployment were not mediated only by individual capacities but also by social networks. Social support by the family and especially by the spouse proved to be the factor giving unemployed people the power to survive the negative effects of losing one’s job (Atkinson, Liem, & Liem, 1986; Liem & Liem, 1979). The latest shift in theorizing unemployment happened in the late 1980s when David Fryer and others invented the agency hypotheses (AH) (Fryer, 1986, 2000; Fryer & Payne, 1984; Holzkamp, 1986; Lenkerd, 1995). This hypothesis seeks to understand the unemployed person as an active social agent striving to make sense of his situation, trying to construct his or her future based on the personal and community resources he or she has. As David Fryer put it in his famous programmatic article: “Agency theories tries to focus upon what people bring with them to a situation which is unfamiliar and problematic rather than upon what is taken away from them by removal of a habit-bound set of imposed consequences. It emphasises the destructive aspects of unemployment and the humanity of those who experience it rather than the constructive aspects of employment and the sub-humanity of those who rely on it. It emphasises the desire for self-directness born of a sense of future and agency rather than the dependency born of habit and passivity. It recommends the investigation of considered action and inaction elucidating the options perceived, the impediments encountered and the reasons behind choices rather than the goadings into response of inert, dependent, objects by employer-imposed reinforcement schedules. It makes use of relevant cognitive intentional concepts such as planning.” (Fryer, 1986, 16).

Fryer’s hypothesis was derived from some interesting empirical findings showing that the unemployed really can create their own social space of activities and networks without any sign of depression or deterioration of any kind (Fryer & Payne, 1984). Fryer called these persons “proactive unemployed”, supposing that a proactive way of life would be possible even under conditions of unemployment if minimal economic conditions were secured. As qualitative “thick descriptions” of some unemployed subcultures these studies were convincing as such, but large-scale surveys later showed the number of proactive unemployed to be essentially lower than supposed in Fryer’s original hypotheses. Consequently, Fryer reformulated his theory as an “agency restriction hypothesis”, keeping to his point that the unemployed still have his agent-like capacities even though the limitations on material resources restrict their potential space for activity (Fryer, 1992).

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If the theoretical discourse moved almost linearly from behaviourism via a cognitive approach to agency (restriction) theory, the same cannot be said for methodological developments. On the contrary, there appears to be some strange inertia against new ways of conducting research. Although the cognitive approach opened a view on the active side of human beings at theoretical level, this insight was at the same time neglected by methods excluding the activity of the “subjects” in the name of objectivity. For example, the idea of self-efficacy was measured by a closed questionnaire etc. The transition from the first to the second and then to the third paradigm can be illustrated in a simple figure (Figure 1).

Agency hypothesis

Cognitive approach

Deprivation hypothesis

Tension 1

Tension 2

Figure 1. The paradigm shift in unemployment research

The point of this figure is that the development of theoretical concepts and methodological tools do not take place in the same timescale. As a consequence, there is an inner discrepancy between theory and methodology. Although theory (CA+AH) implies a mediated relation between the unemployed and their social world, the actual research design furthers the idea of deprivation by setting the unemployed in the role of nothing more than a passive respondent. Even behind the rhetoric of agency we can usually find a methodology that excludes the subjectivity of the participants in the research design.

The idea of preventive intervention The idea of preventive mental health care was discussed in 1970s psychology. The idea of prevention was largely shared but opinions about how to conduct prevention differed. Community psychologists such as Rappaport saw interventions as action research aimed at empowering the participants. Consequently, the methods of an intervention should be dialogical ones without any strict prearranged structure (see Rappaport, 1977). However, another approach emphasizing experimental methods won the debate and laid the foundations for preventive interventions in the following decades (see Price, 1983; Price, 1986, 1987).

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Richard Price, a leading theorist of the experimental intervention approach, recognizes the methodological problematic discussed above by naming it the “dilemma of ownership and fidelity” in experimental situations (Lorion, 1983; Price, 1987; Price & Lorion, 1989). If people do not have the feeling that they are the owners of the interventions in which they are participating, they will lose their motivation, and this will reduce the effects of the intervention. However “the sense of ownership may also mean that local participants will seek to modify the program model in ways that address local needs and demands but thereby reduce its effectiveness.” (Price & Lorion, 1989, 116). According to Price, this dilemma can be solved positively by so-called “quality control” which enables every experimental group to actually run exactly the same procedure. Experimental design with randomised intervention and control groups can be effectively realized by carefully controlling the intervention processes. Only in this way can reliable knowledge of the effects of interventions be achieved. The Michigan Prevention Research Center conducted a series of field experiments in the 1980s and early 1990s to evaluate the effects of job-seeking training groups on the re-employment and mental health of the participants. This intervention model, known as the JOBS Program, proved to be successful, exhibiting high positive results in terms of re-employment (Caplan et al., 1997; Price, 1992). The JOBS program is a 5-days seminar with two trainers – both having a history of unemployment – and usually 8-15 participants. The training model is derived from social learning theories, which assume that learning follows from observing others who are socially-significant and competent and imitating their behaviour (Bandura, 1977). These ideas were modified in training groups as a specific form of role-playing in which everybody could exercise his or her skills as a job hunter (Curran, 1992). It was assumed that active learning methods used in learning job-seeking skills with social support from peers and trainers will increase participants’ job-seeking self-efficacy, which in turn will result in a sense of mastery, the capacity to handle setbacks in the unemployed person’s life course (Price, Van Ryn, & Vinokur, 1992; Vinokur, Price, & Schul, 1995; Vinokur & Schul, 1997). By generating supportive interaction in training sessions, the intervention seminar promotes positive mental health and a feeling of well-being among the participants, which in turn increases their capacity to look for work. Procedures in the group are highly structured and follow the same basic schema day by day. The structured model makes it possible to teach group trainers in a short period, which makes the whole model cost efficient (Curran, 1992, 60). In the 1990s, Finland was experiencing one of the most dramatic economic recessions in Europe after the Second World War. The rate of unemployment increased rapidly from four per cent in 1990 to more than 18 per cent in 1994. All possible methods were required in this situation to reduce the negative effects of unemployment. Because the JOBS model had had such positive results in the USA it appeared reasonable to test the effectiveness of the same model in Finland. The Finnish Institute of Occupational Health conducted a preventive intervention, repeating the original experimental design of the JOBS research, in Finland in 1996-2000.

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Over 1200 unemployed volunteers participated in the intervention. They were randomised in the experimental and control conditions. In the period from October 1996 to June 1997, a total of 42 JOBS-group seminars were conducted. Participants were followed up by questionnaires for two years (for details see Vuori & Silvonen, 2002; Vuori & Silvonen, 2004). As in the USA, the training model had positive effects although in a somewhat different way. The re-employment rate was not as high as it was in the USA, but the positive mental-health effects were, perhaps, even stronger. In the experimental group 70% of the participants were re-employed or were in vocational training compared with 64% in the control group. The difference was statistically significant. A statistically-significant difference between groups was also found in the self-esteem of the participants, showing the positive influence of the intervention on mental well-being. These experimental results have been presented in other places (Silvonen, 2000; Silvonen & Vuori, 2000; Vuori & Silvonen, 2002, 2004) and I will not discuss them here in detail, since my interest is not in the effect itself but in the question of how to explain and interpret the effects revealed. I will give only one example of the complicated nature of our findings. As mentioned above, the net effect of the intervention was statistically significant. This was something we expected from our hypothesis. However, taking a look at the re-employment rates by sex results in the surprising figure presented below.

Rate of Re-empl. in 2 years follow-up ,62 ,60

,59 ,58

,57

,56 ,54

,54

Mean EMPLT 4

,52 ,50 ,48 ,46

GROUPS contrl

,47

exprm

,44

female

Figure 2. Re-employment rate by sex

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male

We can see in this figure that re-employment in women in the experimental group is seven per cent higher than in the control group (54 vs. 47 %, p = .039). But in men we see something unexpected. The re-employment rate is two per cent lower in the experimental group than in the control group. Although the difference is not statistically significant (57 vs. 59%, p = .714), it is anyway interesting, raising many questions about the nature of interventions. How should this kind of negative side effect be interpreted? Although not statistically-significant in this case, they anyway show that it is theoretically possible for the intervention to increase the problems of participants in ways which were not foreseen in the experimental design. So we achieved some intended and some unintended results. The strength of our experiment was in its follow-up design, which made it possible to track the effects of the intervention groups even over a two-year perspective. To show an effect is one thing. It is quite another to explain that effect. This was the point at which we expanded the original design by adding the qualitative analysis of micro-processes within it.

Intervention from the agent’s point of view A dilemma always has two sides, two possible ways of looking for a solution. The solution to the dilemma of ownership and fidelity presented by Price was to practice high-level quality control in connection with intervention procedures. Another approach is also possible. Instead of controlling the process, we could try to describe the micro-processes within the intervention groups, to practice the ethnography of intervention in order to gain an understanding of the logic of the “ownership”. Two different theoretical impulses made it possible to view the concept of control in a new light. The first of these came from the post-positivist tradition, and the second from the Chicago school of sociology. Donald Campbell, a prominent methodologist of field experiments, added the following statement in his (and Cook’s) book about quasi-experiments. “Field experimentation should always include qualitative research to describe and illuminate the context and conditions under which research is conducted. These efforts often may uncover important site-specific threats to validity and contribute to valid explanation of experimental results in general and of prelexing or unexpected outcomes in particular.” (Cook & Campbell, 1979, 93). Blumer gave us the idea for a viewpoint which would allow this to be possible, putting it as follows: “On the methodological or research side, the study of action would have to be made from the position of the actor. Since action is forged by the actor out of what he perceives, interprets, and judges, one would have to see the operating situation as the actor sees it, perceive objects as the actor perceives them, ascertain their meaning in terms of the meaning they have for the actor, and follow the actor’s line of conduct as the actor organizes it - in short, one would

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have to take the role of the actor and see his world from his standpoint.” (Blumer, 1969, 73-74).45 Following these ideas from Campbell and Blumer, the original “quality control” procedure was expanded into a systematic observation model. Training groups were observed by researchers and by trainers and both kept diaries of their observations. After some months, the writing of literal diaries seemed to be too laborious to the trainers, and they started to make audio recordings of an evaluation dialogue immediately after daily group sessions. Some intervention sessions were also recorded. Trainers were interviewed at the beginning of the experiment and six months later when the intervention was in its final stage. In addition to this, open-ended responses from participants were collected on the last day of the intervention, and both two weeks and six months later. This qualitative corpus of data made it possible to analyse the actual processes taking place in the intervention groups, not only the effects and their correlation with the background and mediating “variables”. The analysis of observation data from the actual groups showed us how intensive and how basically emotionally-positive the group process was. It is quite clear that a structured training model can positively influence the participants and enhance their skills in the task of job seeking. At the same time, the observations showed that the process is much more complicated than social-cognitive learning theory assumes. A brief illustration of this process follows. The qualitative data consisted of the diaries of the trainers, of observation data and of open-ended comments from participants. The first extract comes from a tape-recorded diary. It illustrates how the trainers experienced the basic dilemma between ownership and fidelity. P8 (243:254) Trainer 1: How can we tell these people that they will get a job if there are no jobs, really? Trainer 2: In some sense you’re right. (—-) Even if we could find all ‘hidden jobs’ that wouldn’t be enough. There are not jobs for everybody. Simple mathematical fact. Trainer 1: But we can’t say that! Trainer 2: Yeah, but it is anyway strange to say that there would be jobs, if there are not. Are we blaming these people? Trainer 1: According to the script (=the trainer’s manual) we are not allowed to say that there are no jobs at all. Trainer 2: There is a contradiction between what we know and what we say. Anyway, we can say that there are more jobs than people usually think.

45

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Klaus Holzkamp’s idea of a “Subjektwissenschaft” also had some influence on my approach .

The example shows how trainers all the time reflected their relationship to the experimental conditions. They also developed a variety of personal styles of reading the script line by line – as it was assumed. Both irony and laughter were among the basic techniques by which they gave new meanings to the script, repeating it group after group. This laughing also functioned as one of the main techniques for the whole group in meaning making and in reinterpretation of the group process. P8 (698:708) [3th day of the program] Trainer 1: Oh no. Today we didn’t have any real discussion, rather just negative feelings. And they started to blame medical doctors, really bad attitudes. Tapsa and Pipsa again … P8 (855:861) [4th day of the program] Trainer 2: This day was, today it happened at last, it started to work. The aggression of the first days against the system, labour office, and anything, changed somehow today to action, to positive activity. I think they worked really intensively today …

This second example tells of the process by which the group constructed a common understanding of their life situation. They did not limit their discussions to topics given in the script, but talked about almost every possible thing they had in mind. By doing so they found common experiences and the insight that they were not alone with their experience. Based on analysis of the ethnographic data for intervention groups, an alternative hypothesis was constructed (Silvonen, 2000). (See Figure 3). Harré’s concept of psychological space (Harré, Clarke, & De Carlo, 1985) and Vygotsky’s idea of the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1987) were used to integrate the observations. Psychological space was understood as a space for joint activity (Shotter, 1995) in which the participants are creating a shared object (Blumer, 1969) by which they interpret their situation but also redirect their own activity. The constructed object functions here as a tool for reinterpreting the role of the unemployed and, as such, recourse to the individual activity (Callero, 1994). This interpretive model can be presented as shown in Figure 3. From the individual participant’s point of view, the process in the group can be illustrated as follows: 1. The starting point is the contradictory state of the unemployed. The harder he or she is seeking a job, the deeper he or she will experience his or her failure to find one. Psychologically, this situation can be described as a state of ambivalence and instability. 2. In the next step, this experience is expressed in the public sphere of the group. The special role-playing structure of the group makes it easy to express feelings of stress, social isolation and insecurity. This experience will become the object of shared conversation.

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Figure 3. The group as a potential space for change

3. Next, the expressed statements of the difficult or even hopeless situation of the unemployed will be re-conceptualised. Expressions like “I am too old to get a job” will be turned into the form “you have some experiences you can use as a benefit”. In the script of the JOBS program, this is the re-conceptualisation of the role of the unemployed as active job seekers, not as losers of work. The qualitative data about the group process showed, however, that this third transition is a critical one which can be realized in many different ways. Not only a new interpretation of the role of the unemployed was constructed. In actual fact, new ideas not anticipated in the training program emerged during the training week. The unemployed created a really strong experience of sharing the same destiny by criticizing labour market officers, doctors, lawyers and so forth. 4. In the final step new role image will re-organize the behaviour of the participant. Theoretically, we can say that the structure of the procedures (roleplaying, practising interviews etc) gave participants a space for new experiences and convinced them of their own possibilities. But this happened not as a simple adaptation of a given behavioural model, but as a contradictory process of interpretations and meaning makings. While making things have a new meaning, participants at the same time reorganized their own social capacities.

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Discussion and conclusions My aim is this chapter has been to highlight some critical points in experimental intervention tradition. My approach was strongly influenced by David Fryer, who has presented the strongest argument against experimental interventions in unemployment research. According to him, interventions of this kind are problematic because: 1) they focus only on the level of individual psychology and locate the cause of unemployment in the unemployed person rather than in social factors (“blaming the victim”). 2) They underestimate the negative long-term effects of unemployment. 3) They can increase mental health problems in those who remain unemployed after the intervention, and 4) because they will not actually create new jobs, they increase competition between the unemployed. (see Fryer, 1999, 2000). Much as I like this argumentation, it remains a critique from the outside. It tells us very little, if anything at all, about the processes which are going on in training groups. Instead of criticizing intervention from the outside only, my aim in this chapter was to take a closer look at 1) how the subjectivity of the unemployed is understood in experimental intervention and 2) what kind of (unintended) micro-processes are taking place in these training groups. The first conclusion is related to the dilemma of fidelity and ownership. According to Price, actual ownership of the intervention, which includes its modification to suit local needs and demands, can “reduce its effectiveness.” (Price & Lorion, 1989, 116). Our results showed that this is not necessarily the case. On the contrary, it was shown that in their joint activity, participants and trainers transformed the intervention script to their local needs in a very effective way. In other words: The effective factor in the experiment was not (only) the intended experimental design but the transformative activity by participants, which created a psychological space allowing the participants to reorganize their action capacity. From the first follows a second methodological conclusion. The idea of total control of the variables in interventions appears to be more a methodological illusion than a reliable procedure, one which could in practice be realized. Consequently, instead of trying to control the experimental process and its variables,46 we should include activities by the participants in the research design. Campbell presents the minimal methodological demand by stating that “field experimentation should always include qualitative research to describe and illuminate the context and conditions under which research is conducted.” (Cook & Campbell, 1979, 93). Here we reach the limits of experimental tradition. If we do not include the subjectivity of the participants in intervention methodology, we cannot achieve a realistic picture of the powers and dynamics that create the effects of the intervention. 46

It is clear from our observations that a simple two-groups experimental design is not adequate to obtain valid information about the effective factors. In the case we accept the idea of control, the design should be expanded to a Solomon design, in which the participants are randomised in two experimental and two control groups with different measurement procedures. In principle, the Hawthorn effect could to some extent be controlled by this way . As far as I know, it has not been used in experimental field interventions.

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