Integrative research as appreciative system

Systems Research and Behavioral Science Syst. Res. 22, 299^309 (2005) Published online inWiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI:10.1002/sres.694

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Research Paper

Integrative Research as Appreciative System Nick Winder* School of Historical Studies, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

This paper develops an appreciative method for the management and regulation of integrative research. It distinguishes product from process and emphasizes the value of processes. In human systems, historical events (states) sometimes change the balance of probabilities so that processes are never the same again. Many historical events are manifest as changing beliefs that lead to new behaviours. This irreversible change (innovation) often begins with an increase in the epistemic openness or appreciative setting of communities. As knowledge is exploited, however, appreciative settings become fixed; beliefs are ‘locked-in’ or reified and recognizable epistemic communities form. Integrative research (i) involves two or more epistemic communities, often with mutually irreconcilable beliefs and (ii) requires small, well-managed, ephemeral groups and sympathetic regulation. Institutional constraints are explored with reference to national and supranational research agencies and their practices. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Keywords appreciation; integrative innovation; cultural ecodynamics

research;

‘‘Later academic history shows how tempting it is to accept the convictions of great scholars, enabling new ‘schoolmen’ and new scholastic thinking to establish itself again and again. The discovery of the uncertainty of knowledge must be made ever anew’’. (Oberman, 1993, p. 119)

* Correspondence to: Nick Winder, School of Historical Studies, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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INTRODUCTION The Bruntland definition of sustainability (meeting the needs of today without jeopardizing the needs of tomorrow) forces us to frame questions of inter-generational equity in terms of things (needs). Discussions about policy in respect of sustainability are thereby reduced to reality judgments (what do people really need?) and two broad categories of operational judgment: mitigation (can technologists help us meet current needs sustainably?) and adaptation (must the next

RESEARCH PAPER generation readjust their needs to accommodate changing circumstances?). Questions about mitigation and adaptation, though ferociously complex, can be resolved. For example, it is now widely accepted that the process of climate change is too far advanced for mitigation to be a complete solution—we will have to adapt to a changing climate. The question of needs, however, is much harder to solve because it is often framed in terms of things: do we really need washing machines? Do future generations really need tropical rainforests? These conflicts of interest cannot be resolved objectively; they arise as spontaneous byproducts of cultural ecodynamics, the complex interaction of human beliefs, agency and environment. As we change the way we exploit natural resources, our behaviours become culturally embedded norms that often bear no proximate relationship to physical well-being. People who cannot sustain them can still breed and rear young. Such norms are grounded in habit and purpose, but the idea that they are genuine needs is reinforced by an emerging consensus that leads to political, social and economic reorganization. We may not need estate agencies, gas-guzzling cars, plastic lemon-squeezers or electronic foot-baths, but once the demand is locked-in we cannot dispense with them without causing actual hardship to those who produce and distribute them and perceived hardship to consumers. Cultural lock-in forces us to play a vicious zerosum game in which we must trade our own comfort and well-being off against that of an unborn generation, when we cannot even defeat poverty and starvation in contemporary societies. It acts as a sociological ratchet that drives irreversible change and aggravates conflicts over resources. Sustainability can be redefined by a tiny effort of reconceptualization as ‘meeting the aspirations of today without jeopardizing those of tomorrow’. This is still a reality judgment (sensu Vickers, 1965) but now refers to processes. We aspire to live in a prosperous, peaceful environment, want our children to grow healthy and strong and to find fulfilling lifeways. The arguCopyright
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Syst. Res. ment about ‘things’ almost disappears when we do this. If the effect of our innocent aspirations on Global Commons (the seas, atmosphere and biosphere) is to create a world in which the same aspirations cannot be sustained in the future or, for that matter, in less developed countries today, our current socio-natural configuration is clearly unsustainable. Shifting attention from things to processes banishes three thorny problems. We need not commit to providing uniform distribution of goods and services through space-time. Neither need we haggle about equity—trading our goods off against those of an unborn generation. We do not even have to trade our aspirations off against those of future generations. Rather, we must find ways of living (in a prosperous, peaceful environment where children can grow healthy and strong to find fulfilment) that leave the world in a condition where others can do the same. The need to make difficult decisions—to adapt and mitigate—is invariant under this transformation, but there is less of the hair shirt in this model. Consensus, though difficult, is at least possible because we are no longer playing a zero-sum game in which every player’s gain is another’s loss. The older consensus, which assigns values to goods and services rather than to processes, is deeply embedded in the culture of an influential group. We cannot simply sweep it away. Those who want change must advocate the new model without precipitating a destructive clash of cultures. This is a delicate process that involves advocacy, diplomacy, political action and legal deliberation. We have to find a way of unlocking appreciative settings so as to make innovation possible again. I cannot discuss the sustainability issue further here, but observe that it is representative of a significant category of problem in which tacit values underpin logically irreconcilable reality judgments that lead to conflicts within society and can, under certain circumstances, destabilize our social and natural life-support systems. These integrative problems can create conflicts on spatial and temporal scales from the village square on Market Day to a World War lasting years. Syst. Res. 22, 299^309 (2005)

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Syst. Res. Strong consensus gives people a sense of purpose, underpins cooperation and creates a strong system. However, even the strongest and most vigorous systems falter as consensus ceases to be part of the solution and becomes part of the problem. The custodians of consensus often confound custom with universal truth and fight to defend it. The history of inquisitions, witch-hunts and ideological wars from the Crusades to the present day suggests that integrative problems arise when people fall into the scholastic trap. They begin to reify habits and presuppositions as virtues or self-evident truths and impose them on others. In general, the cost–benefit ratio of reifying knowledge is dynamic and irreducibly inequitable. The benefits accrue in the present, but the costs must be met in the future—usually by someone else. To manage the resulting conflict we must shift attention from things to processes and negotiate new purposes and behaviours. The scholastic trap cost millions of lives in the purges and holocausts of the twentieth century. We cannot treat it as a mere historical curiosity or the preserve of dogmatic theologians. Debates about the effects of carbon emissions on climate, tobacco on health or fisheries policy, for example, often reduce to gladiatorial contests between rival scientific experts; each trying to present as objective and value-free, opinions that are clearly grounded in the value judgments of a stakeholder community. This is why Sir Geoffrey Vickers was so interested in traps. As he explained: A trap is only a trap for creatures which cannot solve the problems that it sets. Man-traps are dangerous only in relation to the limitations on what men can see and value and do. The nature of the trap is a function of the nature of the trapped. To describe one is to imply the other. (Vickers, 1972) That insight is the lens that brings this paper into focus. By studying knowledge integration in research teams we may learn things about the human condition that generalize to the whole class of integrative problems. Copyright
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Integrative Research as Appreciative System

RESEARCH PAPER CONCEPTUAL MODEL 1: APPRECIATION Appreciation is a discursive process by which judgments are formalized to develop policy. The judgments themselves are a conceptual model. Policy is a set of explicit norms and tacit customs that regulates executive action. Vickers calls the willingness of a person or group to revise norms and customs an appreciative setting; it is constrained by intellectual competence, knowledge and receptivity. There are three types of judgment. Reality judgments refer to what actually exists (or might exist). Reality judgments either relate to processes (transformations) or products (states). Products are instantly observable. Processes, however, have appreciable time-depth and involve establishing or sustaining relationships between people and things. It takes more time to observe a process than a product. A letter on the doormat is an example of a product; correspondence (writing a letter) is a process. Operational judgments link products to processes in a causal relationship. Causal relationships are expressed in terms of constraints. If the existence of a product constrains a process, it may be possible to use it as a regulator or policy instrument. Value judgments associate human values to some product or process. Here are some specimen value judgments: (1) The appreciative process is valuable insofar as the policies it produces provide direction, coherence and continuity to the executive processes they regulate. (2) The most useful value judgments are those that assign value to a process. Value judgments imply the direction or purpose of a policy initiative. Values cannot always be quantified. In general, only contested value judgments have ethical or moral overtones.

Consolidation The development of modern algebra marked a revolution in science. For the first time it was possible to speak of processes as real Syst. Res. 22, 299^309 (2005)

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RESEARCH PAPER things—something Classical and Mediaeval scholars found almost impossible. Newton and Leibnitz invented calculus (the theory of rates of change) independently. Probability theory, which dealt with the likelihood of change, emerged through a process of independent development about the same time. By the nineteenth century, scientists had powerful abstract tools for handling the reality and operational judgments that related processes to products. These could be used as the basis of ethical, political or moral inquiry, or, by an effort of mathematicization, to construct equations involving rates and likelihoods of change that underpinned technical intervention. However, the people involved in technical research often preferred to avoid what they saw as philosophical questions about reality, existence and values. The idea that science dealt with objective, empirical ‘facts’ and should be value-free (itself a value judgment) gained widespread support. Vickers’ appreciative method asserts that value judgments, either tacit or explicit, are key determinants of human behaviour. No one would study celestial mechanics, for example, who did not think this a worthwhile thing to do. Even if the motivation were purely financial, a tacit value judgment is required. His second point, made with equal force by the Deep Ecology movement (Naess, 1989), is that in integrative contexts people should reflect on the ethical and evaluative basis of their actions. Technical approaches to socio-natural systems encourage the idea of a product (state) transformed by a time-invariant process into another product. Process becomes cause; product becomes effect. In the humanities, however, we have often to deal with a different model. In historical systems, processes are not time-invariant, but dynamic and are often transformed by products. The perfection of the light microscope, for example, revolutionized biology, as the development of the credit card revolutionized commerce. Every observation of a process requires us to compare observations of state (products) made at different times. So the idea that a state can transform a process, when the very existence of the process can only be inferred through Copyright
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Syst. Res. multiple observations of different states, defies technical ideas about causality and determinism. Many of the states that modify socio-natural processes depend on appreciative settings. The credit card only works where a fragile consensus can be sustained, so the processes that allow us to use them can hardly be treated as time-invariant. More seriously, cultural ecodynamics is a selfreferential science, in which our ideas about the system can be incorporated into the system itself and so change it beyond recognition. Here, a reality judgment constructed for the sake of argument can become a self-fulfilling prophecy with serious consequences for some stakeholders. The hard-science bias towards states is a dimensional chimera (like measuring momentum in litres). States and processes are different logical types because they operate on different temporal scales. This creates problems of interpretation that are especially common in social sciences like economics, for example, where the fundamental unit of value is money (a product). Any attempt to put a monetary value on a process requires us to reduce it to a stream of little products; as though the reason lovers eat together is that food is cheaper purchased in bulk! In economic terms a child in the Third World has less value than my own. To treat this as objective merely because it reduces a process (in this case a life) to a number is to ignore both the uneven distribution of resources, opportunities and conflicts of interest through space-time and the dimensional inconsistency of the method itself. Moreover, the difficulty cannot be overcome by putting in a fudge-factor to make the value of my child’s life equal to that of any other. My child enjoys opportunities and choices only partly determined by relative wealth. Her experiences predispose her to certain lifeways and those predispositions impact on other people to enhance their life experience or not. Vickers approached such problems by explaining that many of the actions that give our lives meaning and structure consist of establishing and maintaining relations with other people and things. The area of enquiry known as Time Geography (Ha¨gerstrand, 1985) takes this idea a Syst. Res. 22, 299^309 (2005)

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Syst. Res. step further by showing that process-sustaining behaviour creates interpretable patterns in space-time. Humans live at the interface of history and geography, where beliefs and experience create patterns in space-time that are evidently non-random, but demonstrably unpredictable. Consequently, human societies cannot be treated as states transformed by time-invariant processes; they are dynamic processes constrained and modified by observable states. States are important, but they figure in the domain of cultural ecodynamics as causes rather than as effects. Moreover, we cannot avoid assigning qualitative values to processes (like a disease-free infancy or relaxing with friends) or using those values to give direction to policy-relevant research, because these are the critical determinants of human well-being. A scientific community that does not engage with this appreciative process is not value-free but valueless.

CONCEPTUAL MODEL 2: INTEGRATIVE RESEARCH Integrative research is the process of creating knowledge across the boundaries of epistemic communities. It is usually undertaken by and for professionals and so can assume a high degree of motivation and competence. Knowledge is shared beliefs that enable people to cooperate. Culture is tacit knowledge embedded so deeply in the human psyche we are largely unaware of it. Culture defines the epistemic communities of which we are members. Any challenge to a culturally embedded belief often receives an angry or defensive response because it challenges the legitimacy of those communities. The resulting loss of trust is culture-shock. Innovation is a change of beliefs leading to a change of behaviour. Culture-shock is an obstacle to innovation because it reduces receptivity to new ways of seeing. Multidisciplinary research is a knowledge patchwork in which each community accepts the beliefs of the others uncritically or ignores them. Unified research requires a shared knowledge base Copyright
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Integrative Research as Appreciative System

RESEARCH PAPER for the whole group. Integrative research occupies the middle ground—an expedient alliance of knowledge communities, valuing disciplined diversity but minded to cooperate if possible.

Consolidation Academic disciplines are an administrative convenience and research that crosses disciplinary boundaries (interdisciplinary research) is often straightforward. However, research that links epistemic communities is very demanding because they are often logically irreconcilable. For this reason an archaeology department often houses prehistorians (who favour a natural science approach) and proto-historians (who favour a humanistic approach). The prehistorians can communicate easily with quaternary scientists, applied mathematicians and physical geographers; the proto-historians have more in common with historians, classicists and sociologists. If you imagine archaeology to be a coherent intellectual discipline you will be disappointed. All becomes clear when it is explained that archaeology is an alliance of at least two epistemic communities, each with different beliefs and purposes (Winder, 2005). Recall that a group’s appreciative setting is determined by intellectual competence, knowledge and receptivity. Intellectual competence is highly variable, but can be changed within limits by education and training. There are instruments that bear on knowledge and receptivity too, but they often pull in different directions. Multidisciplinary approaches change the appreciative settings of participants by making unfamiliar knowledge available to each. Many people believe sustained multidisciplinary initiatives create a flow of innovations but the historical evidence is unclear. Driving disciplines together creates sustained culture-shocks that harden appreciative settings and cause schism. If there are strong incentives to persevere (financial subsidies, perhaps) unified structures emerge. The fusion of biology and chemistry, the collapse of geography into human and physical subsets and the split between the hard- and soft-system Syst. Res. 22, 299^309 (2005)

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RESEARCH PAPER communities over the last 30 years illustrate this process. Multidisciplinary revolutions are transient perturbations—nudges that change the course of history, but carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. People compete for the resources to exploit new knowledge and represent the tension between doubt and certainty as a conflict between progressive and reactionary tendencies. Soon the whole programme stands on the authority of one epistemic community and the scholastic trap is sprung. The scholastic trap is an artefact of limitations imposed on us by the human condition. The analogy with biological dynamics is striking. Just as intensified exploitation of an ecosystem can reduce productivity by destroying biodiversity and fragmenting habitats, so intensified knowledge production can reduce adaptive potential by destroying epistemic diversity and fragmenting communities. Shifting to a project-based form of research is a natural coping strategy. A project is a short-lived alliance of researchers with a start date and end date and a deliverable. The growth of projectbased multidisciplinary initiatives has been called the Mode 2 revolution (Gibbons et al., 1994). Mode 2 research is carried out in the context of its potential application, and is necessarily interdisciplinary. The Mode 2 revolution is an artefact of post-war ‘big science’, accelerated by graduate unemployment in the late 1970s. It caused a dramatic shift in the balance between teaching and research in universities. Universities must now accommodate two different business patterns in a single administrative structure. Mode 1 business (teaching and scholarship) tends to be focused in a single discipline and institution, a large proportion of the costs are fixed, the business cycle is slow and job security good. Mode 2 business is run by institutional consortia and calls for multidisciplinary input. It has a rapid business cycle, variable costs and poor job security. Differential funding has created an informal hierarchy in which Mode 1 is seen as a lowerstatus activity than vocational training or Mode 2. This creates tensions between the soft and Copyright
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Syst. Res. hard sciences, tenured and non-tenured staff, pure and applied subjects. People are torn by conflicts of interest. Their sense of loyalty to the research team(s) of which they are members, to their employers, their academic peers and funding agencies pull in many directions. These tensions create epistemic factions and prime the scholastic trap, making it harder to communicate with fellow researchers. Gibbons et al. formulated the managerial challenge this creates as follows: It is well known how to set up laboratory sites to pursue scientific investigations of various kinds. We also know how to build teams around . . . individuals of exceptional talent . . . What we do not know so well is how to manage the art of facilitating efficient communication between such nuclei as well as between the other equally important elements that one finds in Mode 2. (Gibbons et al., 1994, p. 162)

ENSURING PRODUCT DELIVERY Mode 2 researchers are often trained in Mode 1 institutions (universities) where there is often a striking mismatch between what they are taught and what they actually see going on around them. Consequently, many have difficulty adjusting to the realities of Mode 2 work and must unlearn some of the ideas they were taught. Among many conventional academics, management is often perceived as a threat or, at best, a necessary nuisance. In project-based, integrative research, however, effective management is both an ethical necessity and a fundamental research tool in its own right. Every integrative team is Janus-headed. One face points outwards, participating in the appreciative process that sets its policy environment. The other points inwards and is responsible for executive action. The extrovert competence can be thought of as an administrator accountable to external stakeholders. The introvert competence is project management responsible for the timely, lawful efficient delivery of a product. In an institutional setting the administrator would be Syst. Res. 22, 299^309 (2005)

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Syst. Res. called something grand like: ‘Board of Directors’ or ‘Senate’, but projects are transient, heterachical consortia. The contracts on which they are based are drawn up between employers and funding agencies in respect of intellectual property. Researchers are effectively technicians with no financial stake in those products. If the authors of the proposal also receive a salary, they may be forbidden to claim authorship and must find a surrogate ‘author’ to front their work. Yet the products of integrative research are usually ideas (technically outside the intellectual property legislation). Intellectual authority and the dissemination of ideas are prerequisites of a successful research career. Unsurprisingly, many researchers resent this bind, especially if their contracts are insecure and their employers inept. A skills haemorrhage among contractors, coupled with pressure to reduce costs, drives chronic over-delegation; tasks requiring professional judgment and experience are commonly handed to PhD students. Many contractors quit after their first baptism of fire, further depleting morale and undermining efficiency. In this hostile environment contractors need an exit strategy and many develop a mental picture of the epistemic communities to which they owe primary allegiance. They usually have family commitments too. Though the products of research may be bought and sold, these invisible stakeholders exert a strong influence on the process. Administrators try to work round these conflicts, but managers must work with them. The key, in my experience, is to understand and facilitate individual exit strategies so that goodwill is maintained beyond the end of the project. Administrators are often required to manage. Those that do it well have substantial experience as contractors and remember which role they are playing at a given time. Failure to insulate the team from the concerns of external stakeholders, or to understand the executive process, increases costs, destroys morale and delays completion. It is like hiring someone to paint a house blue and stopping them half way to discuss whether pink would be more popular with the neighbours or if they would prefer to throw the brush away and put it on with a stick. Copyright
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Integrative Research as Appreciative System

RESEARCH PAPER Since knowledge consists of shared beliefs, larger and more diverse integrative teams generally possess less knowledge and are more prone to culture-shocks than small ones. The management implications of this are immediate but often ignored, especially by administrators (Winder, 2004). Large projects must be resolved into epistemically coherent workgroups. Most people should work within those groups most of the time. Less experienced team members (particularly students) should be encouraged to discharge workgroup responsibilities before running off to ‘network’ with others. Their strategic aim is to become the ambassadors of epistemic communities, not academic butterflies. Integration should take place at scheduled milestone events where people come together to communicate. These meetings should be small (seven people or less if possible) with no press involvement or spectators and a well-defined target. Social interaction is essential, but these are working sessions so hedonism should be avoided. Receptivity is enhanced dramatically when researchers become friends. You cannot engineer friendship, but you can facilitate it.

REGULATORY NOISE ABATEMENT Regulators focus almost all their attention on products rather than processes—they monitor deliverables, budgets and deadlines and their intervention in the process of research is usually directed towards these. From time to time policy norms change, often rather dramatically, and these disrupt the research process. The regulator stands outside the project looking in, while the administrator stands inside the project looking out. The policy environment to which the project responds is created at the interface between them, often by an explicit negotiation process. Regulators may need access to the whole team to gather information, but should regulate through the administrator. Their task is to provide advice and to authorize or veto decisions that have not been delegated under the research contract. Regulators should never try to manage. Syst. Res. 22, 299^309 (2005)

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All this is widely understood both by regulators and managers, but there is no formal model for a continuing appreciative process that monitors the impact of a project on external stakeholders. I would like to develop such a model here, borrowing ideas about types of regulation from appreciative theory (Vickers, 1965, ch. 1). Consider a driving game in which the player tries to keep a car on a simulated race-track. When speeds are low the player concentrates on staying close to the middle of the lane. This is regulation by norm. As the road twists and the simulated car accelerates, the driver struggles to keep the car inside the white lines. This is regulation by threshold avoidance. With this distinction in mind, we can proceed. Each research project is based on an effort of abstraction in which a substantive domain (representing reality and operational judgments) is mapped on to a symbolic domain of words or numbers analogous to it in some significant (i.e. valuable) respect. This analogy is called a model. Information gathered from the socio-natural arena in which the team works is fed into the model. The rules of symbolic manipulation are used to negotiate executive actions. These rules always stand outside the model itself. Hard scientists often interpret this lozenge in Figure 1 as containing only the rules of logic and mathematics, but the way these rules are applied is

determined by values and policy. What is done with the symbols is determined, in part, by what is wanted. Information is transmitted from the model to the domain of executive action. Action impacts on the arena, which responds by passing information back to the model. This feedback loop is important. The arena contains external stakeholders (including academic peer groups) and their response to executive action may be unexpected. The team delivers the required product by managing this recursive learning process effectively. Policy has the effect of bounding the research domain by formulating some reality judgments as axioms. This is necessary. It is possible to debate the value-, reality- and operational judgments that underpin fishery policy, for example, but if the group breaks off half way through to argue about the social construction of a kippered herring, the work collapses. However, if the model is allowed to become culturally embedded it can limit action in potentially damaging ways. The concept of a boundary judgment originated in the study of differential equations, where some terms must be designated parameters (fixed quantities) to render a set of equations solvable. The link between these boundaries and physical boundaries is clear in domains like thermodynamics,

Figure 1. A conceptual model of regulating integrative research Copyright
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Syst. Res. physiology or climate modelling because they are usually related to energy and entropy flows. Much of chaos and complexity theory flows from this source. The trick is to explore the stability of solutions by means of thought experiments in which the values of those parameters are perturbed. It is an old systems modelling joke that the first thing you do after turning a variable into a parameter is to vary it. Yet the method is very powerful. The connection of boundaries to reality judgments is more qualitative, but explicit in the work of C. West Churchman and Sir Geoffrey Vickers, among others. Recent extensions include the theory of ‘boundary critique’. The reality judgments that characterize a model system also determine the focus of research, and can create social exclusion by putting some stakeholders ‘beyond the pale’ (Midgely et al., 1998). Where projects have potential impacts on livelihoods and individual well-being, a continuing process of appreciation may be required to ensure that boundary judgments are both scientifically and ethically defensible. The engagement of stakeholders and pressure groups means that this process can easily become very noisy and dealing with it can overstretch the managerial competence of the team. Some of this noise must be filtered out. Boundary conditions are pre-agreed indicators of policy compliance, system behaviour and system health. If these conditions are satisfied, boundary judgments can be sustained, at least for the duration of the project. Checks and balances will be needed to ensure boundary conditions are neither too lax nor too sensitive. This, too, will call for appreciative skills. If the boundary conditions are violated, then either the system does not behave as reality-, value- and operational judgments suggested it would, or policy action has had unforeseen consequences the ethical implications of which must be considered. The regulator and administrator must then re-evaluate the project’s conceptual basis. The group involved should be small and non-confrontational. This restarted appreciative process may simply renegotiate boundary conditions, but it could equally well innovate, producing a new set of boundary Copyright
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RESEARCH PAPER judgments and a new model with new boundary conditions. Killing a project is only justified in cases of incompetence or irretrievable collapse—complexity happens. Killing a model, however, is not done often enough. Best scientific practice requires theories to be empirically testable, but a rift yawns between best and common practice. Macro-economic predictions, for example, commonly fail and senior politicians lose elections as a result, but the appreciative settings of politicians and economists are so rigid the models have no boundary conditions. When a research programme lurches from one catastrophe to another, regulators and administrators should relax their respective appreciative settings and contemplate alternative models.

ADJUSTING THE REGULATOR’S APPRECIATIVE SETTING I moved from engagement in integrative research to studying integration as a process with EPPM (Environmental Perception and Policy-Making), a modest project funded under the third European Framework Programme (FP3) with a budget of about 250,000 ecu. EPPM involved pure mathematicians, archaeologists, agronomists, policy-makers, sociologists and anthropologists. By academic and managerial standards it was a remarkable success, producing reports in the grey literature, four books and a raft of papers over the last 10 years. Each of the regional settings we selected for study contained infrastructural programmes that, in the event, failed to deliver. Relatively large investments had polarized local populations into subsets that we called the authentic knowing and the authentic being groups. The former won differential access to resources, but the programmes disrupted the lives of the latter. These conflicts of interest could not be resolved. Although we did not use these terms at the time, these were ‘wicked’ problem domains (Rittel and Webber, 1973). EPPM concluded that policy-makers should expect central funding initiatives and infrastructural programmes to have damaging and unforeseen consequences in small rural communities. Syst. Res. 22, 299^309 (2005)

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RESEARCH PAPER At the time I imagined it would be useful for our paymasters to know that unique, local problems call for unique, local solutions. I was wrong. Governance structures become increasingly sector-based as one ascends the administrative hierarchy. This fixes their appreciative settings and makes them unreceptive to transsectoral initiatives. This is why, despite a mountain of advice to the contrary, national and supra-national agencies continue to favour large, technical or infrastructural responses to policy problems. These are the only instruments accessible to them and they reject advice that suggests they should use them sparingly. If necessary they will change research policy and pile project onto project until they get advice they can accept. With just under 2% of European GDP invested in research and development, and 45% of that coming from public sources (Eurostat, 2005), the budgets of European Framework Programmes can run to thousands of billions of euros. Central policy in respect of research can polarize research communities, placing some categories of researcher beyond the pale. In the case of policy-relevant research, this can have ‘knockon’ effects on other stakeholders by marginalizing key perspectives. Under FP3 (Framework Program 3) and FP4, for example, small integrative projects focused on revising conceptual structures were still possible, though they had little impact on policy. FP5, however, embraced a new value judgment: the purpose of FP research was not to change the appreciative setting in Brussels, but to deliver solutions to technical problems. We were to find ‘end-users’ for research products (typically managers) and solve their problems. Thus FP5 in its original formulation was based on flawed reality judgments. Research projects solve problems superbly well, but regional managers deal with processes far too dynamic to be reduced to a series of problem specifications and put in abeyance for 3 years while researchers deliberate. As Ackoff explained, ‘managers do not solve problems, they manage messes’ (Ackoff, 1979, p. 51). At the end of FP5 a great consultation exercise was mobilized by the European Directorate General (DG) Research, Copyright
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Syst. Res. which expected to receive expressions of interest from commercial end users. It did not. The majority of expressions came from researchers and research institutions wanting to study something. There was, however, one exception to this rule. The field of nanotechnology, it seems, was entering a focused phase of R&D and had a lusty appetite for publicly funded research projects. The architects of FP6 sought to consolidate the Mode 2 revolution with new policy instruments—quangos called ‘Networks of Excellence’ and ‘Integrated Projects’. These are very large research initiatives, five to ten times as large as under FP5, geared towards a well-defined problem set rather than a single deliverable. It is clearly intended that some will be financially stable, more or less persistent commercial ventures focused on ‘innovation’, which, in EU terms means creating knowledge to sell, either as services (education or contract research) or through technological spin-off. Integrated projects can even mount calls and fund projects in their own right. This policy resolves the managerial problems of the Mode 2 revolution by bringing it into the establishment. The new instruments are spatially distributed institutions—nominally independent, but centrally funded and regulated. After a flurry of multidisciplinary initiatives, internal conflicts will force them either to purge dissenting views or tolerate schism, as the universities did before them. Inevitably, appreciative settings will harden again as the new institutions with their new disciplinary structures jostle the old ones in a zero-sum game with winners and losers on both sides. The winners will probably market themselves as the multidisciplinary hotbed of the knowledge revolution, at least until the next revolution. Meanwhile there is knowledge to sell—not that old-fashioned rubbish about socionatural complexity, but authentic knowledge.

PHOENIX CYCLES If my analysis withstands critical scrutiny, the problem we face is that the ability of institutions to innovate is negatively correlated with their stability, life expectancy and size. This is hardly a Syst. Res. 22, 299^309 (2005)

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Syst. Res. revolutionary idea. It is clearly enunciated, for example, in a history of European philosophy by Russell (1961), a seminal analysis of subsidiarity by Schumacher (1973) and the resilience debate initiated in ecology by Holling (1973). This autocorrelation of stability with appreciative fixity allows patterns of behaviour to become culturally embedded and resistant to change. In extreme circumstances, it creates integrative conflicts where issues of equity are intimately bound to beliefs. Here tension between insiders and outsiders (both human and non-human) may drive a Phoenix Cycle of epistemic stasis, ecological catastrophe and renaissance. The catastrophic phase often involves war, epidemic disease and/or habitat loss. One can find Phoenix Cycles in the history of Western thought from the Italian Renaissance to the post-war ‘systems revolution’ and on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Over the last two centuries, however, human behaviour has begun to influence Global Commons like the oceans, atmosphere and climate. The scale of the catastrophes that have overtaken us has also grown alarmingly. Events costing millions of human lives are now relatively frequent and excite little comment in the media of mass communication. The AIDS epidemic and the collapse of civil society in large parts of subSaharan Africa are cases in point. Our well-being and possibly even our survival as a species may be determined by our ability to break Phoenix Cycles by innovating pre-emptively during the static phase. Given our current socio-natural configuration, it is hard to see how policy in respect of Global Commons can be effected by tiny institutions. Moreover, supra-national agencies exist de facto. They are not going to disappear just because systems practitioners have also discovered that ‘small is beautiful’. It is imperative, therefore, that resources be invested in the study of larger appreciative systems. The principal focus of that research should be on ways of regulating large, stable institutions that keep their appreciative settings open without undermining their executive competence. In this context, the distinction

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2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Integrative Research as Appreciative System

RESEARCH PAPER of regulation by norm from regulation by threshold avoidance may be operationally significant.

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