Should social researchers practice good practice too?

Should social researchers reflect, in their methods, the cultures and practices they study? And in today's fast-changing world is there much value for policy-makers in so-called 'best practice' drawn from yesterday's case studies?
No doubt these questions are, in themselves, a major field of academic study. However, I received some practical exposure to the issues through an invitation to a think tank seminar this afternoon on Community Governance in LSPs (I'll try and explain that later). My conclusion? A bit of practice what you preach (or study) wouldn't hurt if the aim is public benefit rather than Yet Another Research Report.

The think tank had invited about 20 people variously involved in local government, nonprofits and other means by which local residents, businesses, groups, and so on may be involved in Local Strategic Partnerships. These partnerships of public agencies, private and community interests coordinate spending and projects in poorer areas of the UK where the government is investing large sums in regeneration. The research question to be addressed by the think tank and their consultancy partners in the coming months: what are the costs and benefits of the various forms of community governance - by which I think they meant involvement of different interests at various levels.
The purpose of the seminar was to ask a range of 'experts' (I hate that label) their views before starting the field work.
The issue is certainly interesting, and in the field practice ranges from innovative forms of collaborative decision making to committees as usual with a few token community representatives struggling with the officialese.
Which wing would our seminar reflect?
My heart sank on arrival. Board room table, no flip chart, dense paper impossible to skim in time. Then one hour (out of two) spent on Powerpoint..."38 slides in 35 minutes" as one of the three presenters explained apologetically.
No real facilitation, so everyone has to pitch in with their angle, or some response to the slides - if they could remember any. Would you run a community event like this? I hope not. If there's one thing everyone agrees on it is that committee-style meetings lead to point scoring, and real discussion is best done in small groups. Post-its notes, charts and other props can be helpful, designed so that people find some shared framework or at least some insights on which they can agree. As our recent blogwalk event demonstrated, people will come up with great ideas just left to their own devices in the right setting.
It became clear from the points that people were making that there was no agreement on what was meant by community governance, and little chance of reaching any in the circumstances. The notion of benefit raised a lot of questions: benefit for whom among the many stakeholders? If we didn't have those fixes, how could we talk about what works or doesn't?
I'm afraid that sort of set up bring out the worst in me, and I plunged in with a mini-rant about the format, and also about the research methodology. This seemed to be mainly desk research followed by case studies of various LSPs. I tried to argue - drawing on ideas about engagement and knowledge sharing that I have blogged in various items here - that a different approach was needed because the world has changed.
These days at local level we have a very messy mix of agencies and nonprofits usually competing for funding, and needing to 'tick the box' for involving residents, businesses and groups. I reflected some of the resulting frustrations here. People get disillusioned when their views don't make a difference. Agencies struggle with short-term funding and the complexities of matching different working practices and decision making structures.
A lot of the 'good practice' on the processes and methods for engagement and partnership - including books I have written - are from an earlier age when people had to deal mainly with the local council.
Where there are lessons that hold true across time and circumstance they are about the need to build trust and good relationships, recognise that things take time, that people have different preferences for communicating and so on. It doesn't need a new research study to document that.
What would be help now, is some work to model the complexity of local decision making, and to play through just how those age-old issues relate to the specifics of emerging procedures and structures. I tried suggesting to the group that one way to do this would be to run a role-play or other simulation, but either I didn't explain very well or it was outside people's experience.
"Get a few dozen people together, develop a typical local scenario, assign roles that reflect the key players in the area, agree a task like a collaborative bid or action plan, then stand back. You get a lot of insights from designing the event, the conversations and decisions. It won't be predictive - but it will help you develop a new model for thinking about the field. Then you will have framework on which to hang your other research", I said.
"Sounds complicated" replied one person around the Board table. Quite. But as I found at a governance event recently, people can handle complexity fast.
The other approach is to do lots of interviews, and then for the research team to come up with 'the expert answer'.... which then gets duly quoted in the next desk research and so on, dragging academics and - worse still - policy makers away from realities on the ground.
From conversations over a cup of tea afterwards I found that some of the research team sympathised with parts of what I was saying, and welcomed a challenge to their presentation that might lead to creative conversation. But by then it was time to go, and it was not clear how far our views would be taken into account, whether we would get a report back, and whether there would be another meeting. Just like much
real community engagement unfortunately.
PS No event is a wasted if it yields a blog item. I got some useful insights from the exchanges and in writing this, so I don't begrudge the time spent at the seminar. I haven't named those involved because it wasn't an open event, though they are of course welcome to comment below. What advice would I give to frustrated local residents who feel 'community governance' is no more than token places at the Board table? Well, you could try blogging. Who knows what difference it could make, and you may feel better for getting that rant online. Whether you get 'involved' again is another matter....
Update: The think tank IPPR have now mailed me to say there is information about the project on their site, with a link to this blog item which they say is 'useful feedback'. Thanks for the generosity of spirit... I'll try and be a bit more constructive next time!

Comments

[ian]

I've recently joined the board of my district LSP as a community representative - one of five from community planning partnerships. The original proposal was for two but since there are five partnerships we all said no - very emphatically!

It appears that over two years the old LSP board never took a decision on anything. The first meeting of the new board was facilitated (by Lynn Wetenhall) very effectively - we wil have to wait and see how it pans out in a more formal setting but I can already see some interesting clashes with 'old guard' councillors ahead.

[roseardron@btinternet.com]

What a find! Got here via IPPR and should really be somewhere else! Will be back as I feel at home here with the mix of including practice into policy making and generous sharing of ideas and tools. Rose