Scholarship and (not “versus”) Activism

Flyvbjerg’s case for phronetic research—one explicitly driven by values and engaged with the world outside academia—is compelling. He summarizes the core of this approach in “the following three value-rational questions: (1) Where are we going? (2) Is this desirable? (3) What should be done?” He adds, “Phronetic researchers can see no neutral ground, no ‘view from nowhere,’ for their work” (61). The scholar, in other words, need not apologize for having a stance. Though this approach is refreshing, it leaves me confused about where the distinction lies between scholarship and activism.

Flyvbjerg’s account of his involvement in the Aalborg development debate is instructive. He finds, like so many city planners do, that the Chamber of Commerce wields disproportionate power over the elected and duly appointed officials overseeing land-use planning. (I know planners in the Denver metropolitan area who have had the exact same complaint.) He laments that the Chamber pushes hard for catering to, and thus encouraging the growth of, automobile traffic.

Clearly, Flyvbjerg has a stance himself on the issues being debated in Aalborg:

With a roughly 50 percent increase in bicycle and public transportation in downtown Aalborg during the first decade of the Aalborg Project, and without the projected 35 percent decline in automobile traffic, but an increase instead, … the pressure on downtown road space has produced harmful effects on environment, traffic safety, and traffic flow…. Thus the losers in the struggle over the Aalborg Project were… virtually all of the city’s and the region’s half-million inhabitants plus many visitors (153).

From my experience working on transportation issues, I can attest that many people would not see increased car traffic in downtown Aalborg as a bad thing. Some would prefer this scenario over seeing all of those cars go to shopping malls in the distant suburbs; others would point to the reality that with so many people driving cars, planners must do what is possible to accommodate them and keep the motor-vehicle traffic flowing smoothly.

Flyvbjerg’s partisan stance caused me to wonder how different Flyvbjerg’s writing and scholarship would be if he were hired by the Danish Cyclists’s Federation (mentioned on 157) or an environmental NGO to write public relations material for them. Flyvbjerg would probably readily accept that he has a stance, since to the phronetic researcher there is “no neutral ground” (61). Still, he does seem to be making some claim to having a view of the situation that is closer to the truth than the view of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce: to him, the headline “Aalborg’s Best Customers Come Driving in Cars” is “misleading” (150).

Flyvbjerg does attempt to discuss what makes a scholar’s stance or interpretation more valid. He argues that a focus on values does not mean an anything-goes relativism—“one interpretation is not just as good as another” (130); yet the main criterion seems to be whether “a better interpretation demonstrates the previous interpretation to be ‘merely‘ interpretation.” He concedes that “social science and philosophy have not yet identified criteria by which an ultimate interpretation and a final grounding of values and facts can be made” (131). Some phronetic scholarship is better than others, then, but what makes it so is, apparently, difficult to make explicit.

In helping the reader better understand phronetic social science, Flyvbjerg provides other examples (162-65), including the book Promiscuities: A Secret History of Female Desire by Naomi Wolf. In describing this book, Flyvbjerg calls it “less academic, though still scholarly informed”—so he is making a distinction between academic and non-academic writing, though the word “less” implies that it is a continuum, not a bright line. I happen to be a big fan of Wolf because of an earlier work of hers, The Beauty Myth. This latter book is extremely thoroughly researched, yet I would probably put it in the category of popular nonfiction rather than scholarship (similar to his assessment of Promiscuities), though I have a hard time pinpointing why. Perhaps it is because the book is intended for a general audience, not an academic one. Yet Flyvbjerg argues strenuously for engaging with the real world, not staying cloistered in the academic domain: “dialogue with groups outside of academia… is at the heart of phronetic social science” (157-58). The audience, then, is apparently not the decisive factor in determining what makes scholarship. Promiscuities is now on my summer reading list, and a quick look at the few pages available online reveals that a portion of it is devoted to autobiographical material related to Wolf’s own adolescence. Is this what makes it less academic and more pop? Not to Flyvbjerg—to him, “Doing narrative” (136) is among his methodological guidelines (chapter 9). If Wolf’s writing is not scholarship to Flyvbjerg, then, it is neither because of the audience nor because of personal narrative.

My questions about phronetic social science, then, remain unanswered. If scholarship is driven by values (see, e.g., 130), what makes it scholarship rather than advocacy? What is the difference between scholarship and non-scholarly nonfiction? If social scientists are not only free to take a stance but perhaps even obligated to do so, what distinguishes the validity of their interpretation from the validity of any partisan on an issue?As Namalie suggests, maybe we all need to learn to be more comfortable with such ambiguity.