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In a thought provoking article Edward de Bono (1992) gives a glimpse of the social and economic dislocation caused by the Western notion of efficiency in comparison to the social richness of the Japanese concept of effectiveness. His comment that "Unemployment is therefore partly due to the arrogant conceptual ineptitude of Western thinking habits: if efficiency is good thing, then efficiency must be applied to all sectors" illustrates the poverty of efficiency embodied in the the ideology of the market. de Bono highlights the narrowness of the 'cause and effect' ethos the 'problem solving' culture, and its inability to deal with the complex societal problems such as inflation and income distribution in the Western societies. One wonders what relevance this 'culture of efficiency' has to the hopes, needs, aspirations and interests of people of the developing world, let alone its relevance to the global ethnic and political conflicts.
de Bono's article is a welcoming sign for the rethinking of not only '.. our fundamental economic habits' but also the techno-centric focus of new technologies. Recent debates on human centredness, social innovation, codevelopment, and social citizenship are already making a contribution to the shaping of science and technology in the service of people rather in the service of the market. These debates celebrate the richness of diversities of peoples and regions of the world, and provide a way forward for a world of hope building on human wealth rather than of impoverishment arising out of the science of 'cause and effect'.
The societal debates, however, are still dangerously regarded as peripheral concerns by powerful elites, whether they are policy makers, managers, or main stream scientists or technologists who continue to revere the ideology of the 'one best way'. This reverence of reductionism has long been charmed by the ugly scientific beauty of 'quantification', 'specification' and 'calibration', and control contained in the notion of the 'man as a machine'. The scientist asserts the supremacy of the 'one best way', and the public understandably expects the one best answer to the problem, whether it is economic, social, or political. The technologist, in the name of science, obliges firstly by redefining the problem to fit into the 'reductionist model', and then announcing the one best solution with complete certainty, in the 'best scientific tradition'. The myth of the 'quantitative rationality' continues to breed on the scientific respectability it enjoys in the academic world and the management hierarchies. Is there any wonder that any human realities, social, economic, cultural or organisational, which cannot be neatly specified and measured are deemed to fall outside the scientific enquiry and management responsibilities?
If the traditional science cannot provide frameworks and mechanisms for dealing with the societal problems of the 21st Century, then it is time to develop alternative frameworks building upon the debates on social innovation, codevelopment, social citizenship and human centredness. These debates are situated in the social and cultural diversities and realities of societies, and thus provide a rich vehicle for social action. The issue here is more than articulating social issues in terms of human centred sounding language, it is about shifting the 'causal' paradigm of science to the paradigm of 'purposive science', and the economic paradigm from 'efficiency' to 'effectiveness'.
To affect such a paradigmatic shift, we also need to achieve a cultural change in our thinking and action. This cultural change includes a shift from technological development from being a matter of producing products to meet international markets, to being a social innovation process through social diffusion of science and technology for meeting social needs. Technological innovation shifts to social innovation, and added value shifts from the product scenario and becomes 'value added for the whole' based on 'mutually beneficial exchange'. Social cohesion and co-development means accepting diversity and arriving at common perspectives through cooperation and participation. For such cooperation to take place, a new framework for development is needed which relates the role of science and technology to creating a better world for all peoples and all societies. One of the central issue in this cultural change is that we must come to grips the issue that "despite its frequent claim to be neutral and objective, science is not and cannot be above "mere" human politics. The complex interactions between the evolution of scientific theory and the evolution of social order means that very often the ways in which scientific research asks its questions of the human and the natural worlds it proposes to explain are deeply colored by social, cultural, and political biases." (Rose, Lewontin, Kamin, 1992).
References
Edward de Bono, Jobs for all on the pyramid principle, The SUNDAY OBSERVER, 21 February 1993
Steven Rose, R.C Lewontin and Leon J. Kamin, NOT IN OUR GENES, Pelican, 1992
Karamjit S Gill
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