effect’ or ‘operate.’ The word ‘reality’ on the other hand has its Latin roots in the
term ‘res,’ which means ‘thing,’ ‘matter.’
A reflexive research approach therefore views humans as both the object and the
subject of making history: today’s interactions do not happen in a vacuum but under
the circumstances created by us and the generations before us. As a consequence,
humans experience individual freedom within frameworks for action laden with
beliefs, norms, social roles, typical procedures, rules and distribution patterns that
are not necessarily of their choosing but still shape their sense-making and
behavior. Thus, my personal opinions and behavior are influenced by my surroundings but also influence those of others with whom I am interacting, my
counterparts and observers. And humans are arguably the only species on the planet
that can apply reflexivity in order to discover, assess and creatively work with or
against the frameworks for action that we encounter.
This point was foregrounded in parts of the 2013 World Social Science Report
(WSSR) with the introduction of the concept of ‘futures literacy’:
The complexity of these processes of transformation raises a number of questions, most
notably about people’s capacity to imagine futures that are not based on hidden, unexamined
and sometimes flawed assumptions about present and past systems. ‘Futures literacy’ offers
an approach that systematically exposes such blind spots, allowing us to experiment with
novel frames for imagining the unknowable future, and on that basis, enabling us to critically
reassess actions designed in the present (ISSC and UNESCO 2013: 8).
Not everyone within the transformation research community works with a
transdisciplinary approach and reflexive paradigm. The community combines a
wide array of scientific disciplines and is still sorting out where exactly paradigmatic agreements lie. So within this book I pulled together the work of leading
scholars who do at least reject the positivist epistemology and ontology that one
finds in the mainstream economic paradigm and its methodological individualism.
In this paradigm, humans do not reflect on more than the costs and benefits of the
choice set with which they are confronted. So each person in their economic system
behaves similarly (representative actors), regardless of where they happen to live.
This is very convenient because individual behavior assumptions are aggregated
into extrapolations of how the system will work as a whole and what knock-on
effects it will have—e.g., the prediction that markets will balance themselves.
However, even within allegedly objective, positivist/standard economics, it has
been recognized that such additive approaches risk a fallacy of aggregation, ending
in incorrect predictions. For example, American economist Alfred E. Kahn warned
of The Tyranny of Small Decisions as early as 1966. He stressed that market
equilibrium theory must remain cautious about the reliability of its methodological
individualism: small decisions by rationally calculating actors may well lead to
misallocation effects on the macro scale that produce outcomes which the same
individuals would not choose (Kahn 1966: 23). One prime example of this tyrannical effect in natural sciences is the way that climate change results from the
cumulative effect of what seem to be negligibly small entities of additional CO 2
emissions made on the individual scale.
2 What Political Economy Adds to Transformation Research
15
term ‘res,’ which means ‘thing,’ ‘matter.’
A reflexive research approach therefore views humans as both the object and the
subject of making history: today’s interactions do not happen in a vacuum but under
the circumstances created by us and the generations before us. As a consequence,
humans experience individual freedom within frameworks for action laden with
beliefs, norms, social roles, typical procedures, rules and distribution patterns that
are not necessarily of their choosing but still shape their sense-making and
behavior. Thus, my personal opinions and behavior are influenced by my surroundings but also influence those of others with whom I am interacting, my
counterparts and observers. And humans are arguably the only species on the planet
that can apply reflexivity in order to discover, assess and creatively work with or
against the frameworks for action that we encounter.
This point was foregrounded in parts of the 2013 World Social Science Report
(WSSR) with the introduction of the concept of ‘futures literacy’:
The complexity of these processes of transformation raises a number of questions, most
notably about people’s capacity to imagine futures that are not based on hidden, unexamined
and sometimes flawed assumptions about present and past systems. ‘Futures literacy’ offers
an approach that systematically exposes such blind spots, allowing us to experiment with
novel frames for imagining the unknowable future, and on that basis, enabling us to critically
reassess actions designed in the present (ISSC and UNESCO 2013: 8).
Not everyone within the transformation research community works with a
transdisciplinary approach and reflexive paradigm. The community combines a
wide array of scientific disciplines and is still sorting out where exactly paradigmatic agreements lie. So within this book I pulled together the work of leading
scholars who do at least reject the positivist epistemology and ontology that one
finds in the mainstream economic paradigm and its methodological individualism.
In this paradigm, humans do not reflect on more than the costs and benefits of the
choice set with which they are confronted. So each person in their economic system
behaves similarly (representative actors), regardless of where they happen to live.
This is very convenient because individual behavior assumptions are aggregated
into extrapolations of how the system will work as a whole and what knock-on
effects it will have—e.g., the prediction that markets will balance themselves.
However, even within allegedly objective, positivist/standard economics, it has
been recognized that such additive approaches risk a fallacy of aggregation, ending
in incorrect predictions. For example, American economist Alfred E. Kahn warned
of The Tyranny of Small Decisions as early as 1966. He stressed that market
equilibrium theory must remain cautious about the reliability of its methodological
individualism: small decisions by rationally calculating actors may well lead to
misallocation effects on the macro scale that produce outcomes which the same
individuals would not choose (Kahn 1966: 23). One prime example of this tyrannical effect in natural sciences is the way that climate change results from the
cumulative effect of what seem to be negligibly small entities of additional CO 2
emissions made on the individual scale.
2 What Political Economy Adds to Transformation Research
15