Problems, Agendas and Frames

Over the last two weeks, we looked at social problems -- what they are, how we can understand them and how this understanding can be used strategically pursue strategic goals. There is a large and established literature on social problems in the policy sciences. There is a good reason for this. Unlike more mainstream political science, the policy sciences (invented by someone called Harold Lasswell in the 1940s, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Lasswell) have always focused on social problems. We policy scientists think of politics primarily as problem-solving processes. Now, while Harold Lasswell was an idealist and a visionary, he certainly was not naive enough to think that politics is always and everywhere about problem-solving. Indeed, it was Harold Lasswell who came up with the most succinct, no-nonsense definition of politics: Politics is who gets what, when and how. But, he argued, if we began thinking of policy-making as problem-solving, then maybe this could help make political processes better at actually solving these problems. So this is why policy analysts think a lot about the nature of social problems, about how we can analyse these problems, and, of course, about how we can best solve them.

Why, then, is this important for social entrepreneurs? Scholars of social entrepreneurship, such as Geoff Mulgan, also see the process of social innovation as being about solving social problems. (Ok, I’m cheating a bit: Geoff Mulgan is a fellow policy scientist, so he would define it in this way.) But whether you choose to call social innovation the “creation of social value”, “meeting unmet social needs”, or “doing good”, it is, at least at some level, about solving social problems.

What, then, are social problems?

Most of us may have an intuitive conception of social problems that makes them seem like conditions or states of the world that are, for lack of a better word, bad. Much like a disease such as measles or the flu, social problems have an identifiable cause (the rubeola or influenza viruses.....I looked that up) and observable effects (a red rash or fever...I remembered that from experience). And, if we know what causes it, we know how to fight the disease (in our two examples, stay in bed, remain hydrated and take it easy, probably antibiotics to prevent secondary bacterial infections).

On this view, any social problem, say drug abuse, has observable effects (such as crime, delinquency, excess mortality, disease, underachievement) as well as discrete causes (the courts’ leniency towards the trade with drugs). So, if we want to fight drug abuse, then we need to tighten laws on drug dealing.

What happens when we have more than one probable cause? What if it is unclear whether it really is the courts’ leniency or whether it is, say, a lack of constructive after-school leisure facilities for the youth. Simple, say the proponents of this school (sometimes also called “positivist” after its founder Auguste Comte, c.f. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Comte). Basically, all we need do is find the main cause. And we do this by gathering and marshalling as many facts as possible about this social problem. On the basis of this objective data, so the argument goes, we can see identify the main cause and can then design our policy response accordingly.

But there is also another way of looking at social problems. This approach suggests that social problems are somehow internal to the way society works. So, to stay with the medical metaphor, the disease of the social body -- say, drug abuse -- is not caused by an external pathogen (the viral analogy of the “criminal element”). Instead, social pathology emerges because of society itself. These social problems can be “useful” for society and social cohesion: after all, how are we to recognise and enforce moral behaviour if we have no immorality to point to? However, this view -- sometimes called “functionalist” -- also recognises that social problems can become a risk -- or dysfunctional -- to society. Drug dealing may be an effect of the way modern societies work, so the argument goes, but where is the social utility in increased street-crime and soaring HIV infection rates? Whatever the flavour, policy-making along functionalist lines would look for causes for social problems (and their remedies) within society itself.

A third lens thinks of social problems as a product of social interaction and negotiation. Both the positivist and functionalist schools understand social problems as objective conditions in the world “out there”; they disagree about the causes. The third way of thinking about problems -- called social constructivist -- believes that social problems reflect not so much some objective reality as the judgement and evaluation of perceived reality by groups in the policy process. On this view, the way any particular group defines a social problem says more about the social commitments and ideological biases within this group than it does about the objective condition being defined as a problem.

So when Fuller and Myers (1941) argue that  "social problems are what people think they are”, they are saying that the world is socially (and linguistically) constructed (see Berger and Luckmann, 1968). In a nutshell, social constructivist believe that our access to reality is inherently shaped by socially negotiated norms and values. This is the case, they argue, because the cognitive tools we use to understand reality (concepts and ideas that help us imbue things with meaning) and communicate this understanding (essentially language) are inescapably products of social interaction. Therefore, they are invariably and inescapably shaped by social commitments (to this or that social order, belief, etc).  The radical (and, quite frankly, silly) version of this denies the existence of objective reality.....it's all socially constructed. In terms of social problems, these people would argue that there is no such thing as a social problem because every conceivable definition is merely a reflection of some groups' beliefs and values. A more sensible version of this approach argues that there is such a thing as objective reality (try dropping a heavy stone on your foot if you are in any doubt) but that our understanding of this reality can never be complete or unbiased. Here, social problems -- or rather competing problem definitions -- can be thought of as different articulations of the same complex but inherently unknowable reality.

When issues are clear-cut and straightforward, it is more difficult to recognise the social constructions of reality that underlie our understanding of these problems. For example, very few people would argue that beating one’s wife is an appropriate way of inner-family decision-making. Indeed, social constructivists would argue, such a straightforward problem suggests that a particular social construction has come to dominate other possible interpretations. In this case, for good reason.

Yet it is when issues are uncertain and complex -- such as climate change or stem-cell genetics -- that we can observe the way the social construction of problems works. When our knowledge -- scientific or otherwise -- leaves us with more questions than practical answers, we can more clearly see how people in the policy process rely on their values and beliefs to fill these gaps. This is not to say that uncertainty engenders a relapse into pre-modern irrationality. (Of course, the idea that everything between the fall of Rome and before the enlightenment was eminently irrational is itself a very particular -- not to mention inaccurate -- construction of history). But uncertainty and complexity mean that people in the policy process need to bring into line available but incomplete knowledge with available but scarce resources. This, in turn, calls for interpretation and judgment. And our judgment is guided by our ideas and belief-systems.

Take for example the recent ballyhoo on campus about the advert for the neighbourhood purveyor of bio-produce. Let’s leave aside for a moment the question of whether religious imagery is an appropriate marketing tool. Nonetheless, the question “What would Jesus do?” is indeed the way Christians should and do approach uncertain policy situations. It provides a way on pulling together the disparate bits of knowledge and information into a meaningful picture of ‘what is to be done’ (to quote a famous atheist). Different belief systems work in very much the same manner: they provide what is sometimes called “interpretative templates” (Deutungsschablonen) that help us make some sense of the complexity of contemporary policy problems.

So, you may very well ask, what does all this have to do with social entrepreneurs?

First, the way people in the policy process understand and define problems is not merely of academic interest. It is about the exercise of political power. Political science traditionally deals with the way formal institutions distribute, channel and regulate the flow of power through a polity. Some polities are more democratic than others (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyarchy). Some concentrated all the power in the executive. Others, distributed power horizontally across different institutions such as the legislative and judiciary. Some polities additionally distributed power vertically from central to local governments. Many a scientific career has been built on comparing and evaluating different formal designs for channeling and regulating political power. And for a long time, political science believed that this was all there was to understanding decision-making.

In the USA of the 1960s, many thinkers began to wonder why the democratic process was leaving so many Americans without an effective political voice. The most prominent example here is E.E. Schattschneider (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_%28political_theory%29). These social scientists argued that -- yes -- the formal policy process is democratic, open and pluralist for issues that actually make it into the system. There are, however, a whole host of issues and problems that never even get into the democratic political process. As Schattschneider (1960) argues, “some issues are organised into politics while others are organised out”. He called this the “mobilisation of bias”: those with an interest in maintaining the status quo and the wherewithal to affect policy processes mobilise bias in the system to prevent issues even entering the political process. Mobilising bias is about managing the scope of conflict: keep it narrow to avoid change, expand it to precipitate change. (I have the book in my office should anyone be interested).

People like Cobb and Elder picked up where Schattschneider left off. In order to get a better handle on this process of “organising out“, Cobb and Elder suggest we think of politics in terms of agendas. Like real agendas, the things at the top are considered more important than the ”AOB“ at the bottom. They also suggest that we think of policy-making in terms of two agendas: one systemic and one institutional. The systemic agenda, they argue, contains all the possible problems and issues within society (or within the public sphere, to use Habermas’ term). We can think of the institutional agenda as being close to the formal policy process outlined above. The mobilisation of bias, then, is about managing and manipulating the movement between the systemic and the institutional agenda. They refer to this process as issue-expansion (or contraction). These processes of issue expansion and issue contraction involve the manipulation of values and norms as well as societal images, expectations and perceptions. It is about using models (i.e. cognitive resources) and values (i.e. normative resources) to make a particular state of affairs a problem for a sufficient number of people in society. Controlling the agenda in this way, they suggest, is a very effective, if subtle exercise of power: legitimate concerns can be suppressed without resorting to formally illegitimate means.

The way policy actors define and construct problems, then, is crucial to the political process. Problem definition is not only about discovering the ”truth“ about problems by objective measurement (as the positivists would have argued) nor is it simply about understanding its functionality or dysfunctionality for society as a whole (as our functionalists would have argued). Rather, problem definition is about placing an issue on the policy agenda (or keeping it off or, once on the agenda, moving it up and down). It is, in short, about power. But, unlike the formal process with its battery of checks and balances, this field of political power is largely unregulated. (Thinkers like Habermas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas) and those inspired by his work have been calling for the institutionalisation of an ethics of discourse or, in German, ”Diskursethik” (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskursethik, sorry couldn’t find an English entry). As you can imagine, institutionalising the “ideal-speech situation” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_speech_situation) this is not all that straightforward.)

Second, while many social scientists -- as is their wont -- look at all this manipulation with dismay, it also represents an opportunity. Not all people are unreflective automatons driven by their belief-systems. There is, then, a strategic aspect to problem-definition and agenda-setting. In the policy-sciences jargon, we call this aspect the “strategic framing” of policy issues. A ‘frame’ is just a convenient short-hand for a set of ideas and concepts that allows us to make sense of the world. (Applying frames to social reality, Rein and Schön argue, “. . . is a way of selecting, organising, interpreting, and making sense of a complex reality to provide guideposts for knowing, analysing, persuading, and acting. A frame is a perspective from which an amorphous, ill-defined, problematic situation can be made sense of and acted on” [Rein and Schön, 1993, p.146]).

When we speak of strategic framing, we implicitly abandon the idea that policy-making is a problem-driven process. Here, ‘problem-driven’ means the policy process is about seeking out social problems and, once found, rationally solving them. Instead, strategic framing suggests that policy actors exploit the uncertainty and complexity of social problems to pursue a range of objectives, not all of them necessarily related to solving the problem at hand. Significantly, strategic framing stands the “problem recognition -- policy formulation -- policy implementation” process on its head. And lies it on its side. And makes it do summersaults. Strategic framing can aim to show that there is no solution to a problem (e.g. the climate sceptics’ argument hold out on climate mitigation until the knowledge and resources are available). Or strategic framing can show that current solutions are in fact making real problem worse (e.g. Yunus argument that development aid perpetuates dependence). Or strategic framing can be about what Cohen, March and Olsen (1973) call “solutions chasing problems” (e.g. the Cato Institute’s insistence that every conceivable problem is to be solved by free markets and, if it cannot be solved by free markets, it isn’t a real problem).

We can use this knowledge to better understand what successful social entrepreneurs do. As we saw in the case studies, successful social entrepreneurs are very adept at framing and reframing policy problems. They seem to understand the way people rely on belief systems to make sense of uncertain policy problems (see also, Mintrom 2000). Not only that, they also seem very skilful at manipulating these problem definition processes to push their social innovations onto and up policy agendas.

A particularly effective way of analysing strategic framing is to use an approach called “narrative analysis” (see Roe, 1994) . Like most good ideas in social science, the basic concept is simple. It asks you to think of strategic framing as a form of story-telling. On this view, problem-definitions are stories written to convince an audience of sceptical policy actors. These stories weave fact and value into a narrative fabric. In addressing different audiences, these stories will need to find a functioning blend of positivism (what is the nature of this problem qua a problem), functionalism (to what extent does this problem relate to society) and social construction (what social commitments are threatened/ strengthened by this problem). In so doing, they provide us with plausible interpretations of uncertain and incomplete knowledge about complex problems. In the case of reframing, they cast a fresh light on problems long thought solved or, more importantly, unsolvable.

In sum, then, the recognition of social problems as opportunities is not only about discovering unmet social needs. Crucially, recognition also involves appreciating that other policy actors may see the issue in very different ways. Moreover, the successful social entrepreneur needs to understand the reasons why people may not agree. Merely brushing them aside as wrong, stupid or ignorant will, in all likelihood, not be a terribly profitable strategy. Instead, the successful social entrepreneur needs to put together policy stories using “the language” of other policy actors. It is in this way, then, that social entrepreneurs can get their social innovations onto policy agendas.