Barriers To Integrity

Modern Modes Of Knowledge Utilization

Donna H. Kerr

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367012281
• eBook ISBN: 9780429725555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the world of Aristotle, the education of individuals might have led to virtuous action. But today, integrity of action also requires the education of institutions. Those very structures designed to enhance the just use of knowledge too often stand instead as barriers to integrity. Bureaucracy shapes our actions in a manner reflective of a Platonic approach to knowledge and the political order—an approach that labels some as "true knowers" and grants them the ultimate power to decide what is to be done. Professionalism, the institution with which we legitimatize and use expertise, imbues our actions with the Aquinian belief that any disobedience of directives from reigning experts risks (unacceptably) the loss of order. In our research system, representing our main collective effort to generate new knowledge, we unwittingly put into practice Hume's conception of knowledge, which takes the outcomes of science to be an accumulation of facts, and John Stuart Mill's political theory, which overlooks the role of community in the lives of individuals. The stakes are high, argues Dr. Kerr. Given these conceptions of knowledge and the political values that are inherent in our primary modes of knowledge utilization—conceptions that we should not embrace—only with fundamental reforms of our institutions can our society hope to gain integrity. Dr. Kerr discusses how bureaucracy, professionalism, and the research system could be altered so that they might structure actions in more defensible and desirable ways.

1
Introduction

From Disappointment to Inquiry

A friend told me that two disappointments cast long shadows on his childhood. One was finding out that mountains are not really purple. The other was learning that coffee does not taste the way it smells.

Likewise, two disappointments await the person who comes to social and political consciousness via schooling. For years the promise of acquiring powerful and even magical knowledge marks a place on the distant horizon toward which to move. The stunning disappointment comes on realizing that while knowledge enlightens us, it does not have the power to enable us to use it. From amongst a multitude of examples, consider but one. Those who argue that over the long run we can continue to count on abundant supplies of energy point to the potential of the nuclear industry. Yet, we know that because of its unique properties helium is essential to the production of nuclear power, and we also know that helium is rapidly becoming scarce. In fact, sometime between 1985 and 1992, demand will exceed supply. Despite this knowledge, we in the United States have abandoned our long-standing program of helium conservation.¹ That the knowledge by itself has not proven powerful enough to guide our actions turns marvelous illusion into childlike disappointment. The awareness that, in this and countless other matters, we could, in fact, put knowledge to use and do not, stokes a mature disappointment.

Experience thwarts the realization of a second expectation, one regarding the enticing aroma that wafts from our professed values. In practice, they do not taste as they smell. Again, examples are uncomfortably easy to locate. Let us pick but one illustration. Many who support the so-called Western liberal democracies do so on the grounds of liberal value-beliefs, including the belief that an essential element in the well-being of all people is the development and enjoyment of their capacities and abilities as individuals.² Now, we know that in a complex economy the development and enjoyment of one's capacities and abilities requires wealth in excess of survival income. Moreover, we know that, for example, in the United States the top two-thirds of 1 percent of the population controls one-half of the total wealth, leaving the bottom 15 percent to function on a survival income, if that.³ But in this country we continue to countenance an economic system that allows the gap between the resources available to those at the top and those at the bottom to become even larger. Disappointment sets in, for we believe—or at least want to believe—that we should somehow be able to formulate actions based on the values we cherish, and yet we fail.

Perhaps we should just accept such disappointments as unchangeable features of our world and accommodate ourselves to "corrected" perceptions. Mountains are not purple up close, yet one can delight in their appearance of purple from a distance. But some disappointments should cause us to focus our concern and consideration on the disparities with the intent of eliminating the sources of disappointment. In those cases, unknowledgeable and value-violating actions constitute potentially grave errors. For example, the widespread failure to bring our knowledge of ecology to bear on how we live is reducing the possible quality of life and appears to be diminishing the carrying capacity of our planet. To act in ways that run counter to our social and political values can be to act unjustly. Countenancing illiberality in our social and political values can effectively deny the development of individuals as persons.

Our discovery is morally disappointing. There is a considerable gap between what we know and value and what we do. Must we accept this gap as an intractable feature of our collective landscape, like the non-purpleness of mountains when viewed up close? Or can we act to remove the object of our disappointment? The answer depends on whether we are able to account for the distance between our knowledge and values, on the one hand, and our actions, on the other hand, and whether our account points to matters over which we can exercise control. The purpose of this study is to offer just such an account.

Throughout history many explanations of the gap between beliefs and actions have appeared. For example, in the Christian story, people fail to do as they know they should because they are, by fallen nature, sinful. In the Freudian view, the energy and inclination to act come from instincts; culture defines what should be done; failures to act in accordance with the cultural constructs of knowledge and values indicate cracks in the cultural veneer. In a strict Marxian approach, knowledge and values are inevitably subverted in action by economic determinants. All of these explanations, and others as well, have their own supporting arguments. I propose not a rebuttal of any particular viewpoint, but rather a more fundamental explanation—one that acknowledges that the judgment of what actions might bring our knowledge and values to bear depends upon one's conception of knowledge and theory of collective action.

More specifically, I shall argue that different and contradictory conceptions of knowledge and their historically attendant theories of collective action inhere in present social institutions. Further, until we "update" our social institutions on the basis of a currently more defensible notion of knowledge and a more acceptable theory of collective action, we shall have to suffer the consequences of failing to act in a manner consistent with our knowledge and values. Only then will we be emancipated from the tyranny of conceptions of knowledge to which we do not subscribe and from values we disavow.

Progress Toward Integrity

If we squint our eyes when we look at the topic of bringing knowledge and values to bear on actions, we can make out the general lines of a more familiar topic: progress. Perhaps above all else, progress concerns the prospect, promise, or hope of a better world, or at least a better world in the eye of the beholder. E. F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, Hitler's Mein Kampf, Dewey's Democracy and Education, Marx's Manifesto, and Augustine's City of God, to name but a few, all regard progress. Each presents an image of a better world and a plan to achieve it. (One may wish to dispute the particular concepts of "better," such as in a vision that includes racism.) Each also promotes bringing knowledge and values to bear in action. To be sure, the particular knowledge and values proffered as proper for guiding action vary from case to case. For Schumacher, knowledge of the environment and technical know-how should be integrated in action with particular qualities of life that can be achieved only in smaller-scale economies. For Augustine, it is the revealed knowledge of a divine design and the overriding value of that design that, if somehow made a part of what we do, will improve our lot. In Dewey's view, to educate well we need to combine democratic values with what we know about how people learn and are socialized. And so on with Hitler, Marx, and other theorists. In every case, it appears that the picture of progress can be painted in the colors of knowledge and values put to use.

A second common element suggests that this book, too, is about progress: the term generally refers not to individuals or even to particular groups of people, but to the whole of humankind. For Schumacher, genuine progress consists not in just Schumacher himself or Canadians or Nigerians adopting small-scale economies, but in the universal adoption of such economies. Real progress for Hitler consisted in actualizing particular Aryan values in boundless domination. Likewise, an interest in closing the gap between what we know and value and what we do extends beyond individual action to collective action and universally so.

Robert Nisbet, in his History and the Idea of Progress, suggests a third commonality. During the Middle Ages, a particular figure of speech bespoke a belief in progress: "We are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants."⁴ The metaphor reflects a belief in the potential increase of knowledge, especially secular knowledge. This medieval view has endured. Marx, for example, saw himself as drawing heavily on the work of Hegel, but, importantly, as superseding Hegel. I, too, will argue that we should revise our social institutions and practices on the basis of knowledge and values that build beyond earlier beliefs to meet today's standards of theoretical defensibility.

In one sense then, the title of this study might be rewritten to include the term "progress," but only in the most limited of three fundamental conceptions of progress. In its strongest sense, progress can be seen as a matter of historical inevitability. In this view, humankind is improving or, minimally, is on the road to improvement, and it could not be otherwise. Just why it could not be otherwise varies with who is telling the story. Augustine's account locates the inevitability of the journey toward perfection in God's grand design. Marx, by contrast, argues that the dialectical, upward-moving course of humankind through feudalism, capitalism, and socialism to communism is inevitable, because it is determined by natural forces that are describable by economic laws. Neither historically, nor logically, nor even psychologically are there grounds for arguing that there is anything inevitable about the prospect of a unity of belief and action. Were the integration of our knowledge and values and our actions inevitable, we would surely know it by now.

In a second, weaker conception, progress is but a historical description. Specifically, the view is that although the lot or nature of humankind has improved over time, it could well have been otherwise. One recognizes this conception of progress in many in-house or commissioned institutional histories. Indeed, one need look no further than oil company advertisements to find examples of this conception of progress. According to the commercials, because of the good work of a particular oil company, our lives have been vastly improved and are still getting better; without the company's contributions, we would be worse off. Thus things are in fact getting better, but not inevitably so. We find a much older example of this theory in the writings of Seneca, who told his contemporaries that succeeding generations always enjoy growth in knowledge, justice, prudence, self-control, and even bravery. In making such statements, he apparently intended to describe what had been, was, and was likely to be for some time in the future. But in predicting an eventual catastrophe, Seneca showed us he believed that while progress correctly describes some of history, the description will likely not always be accurate.⁵ As institutions have accumulated on our collective landscape, how we do things has changed. It is not at all obvious, however, that we have become any better at unifying belief and action. Progress as enhanced integrity cannot, then, be descriptive of actual history.

Only in the third and weakest, most limited sense of the term, does this book address progress. In this sense, progress is a contingent possibility, not an accomplished fact. That is, the human condition could improve, but only if circumstances were to change in particular ways. I shall argue that only if we are able to change those institutions and practices that shape our collective actions can we meet with greater success in our efforts to act in accord with our knowledge and values. In this conception, progress is not inevitable, only possible; it is descriptive not of what is, but of a shift to what could be. Its goal is not a particular political or technological end-state. Instead, its aim is integrity, a way of traveling toward whatever goal. The measure of such progress is the extent to which we collectively are able to overcome barriers to integrity, those structures that impede the joining of what we know and value to what we do. In particular, this study considers the barriers to integrity that inhere in the principal institutions we use to organize ourselves to act or work (bureaucracy), to generate and utilize expertise (professionalism), and to create new knowledge (the research system). This book concerns progress, then, only insofar as it dwells on integrity and on what changes in collective life could facilitate a oneness, a wholeness in our collective knowledge, values, and actions.

Importing into this discussion any notion of progress risks a serious misimpression. Along with any of the three conceptions of progress, we commonly find the belief that there is at hand a full description of what would constitute either perfect people or the perfect human condition, whether in the Christian concept of heaven, in Schumacher's world of small-scale economies, in Marx's portrait of the good life in Economic and Philosphic Manuscripts of 1844, or in some other theory of a perfected state of affairs. One such belief breeds another: that perfection is achievable. Put another way, progress can go only so far, whereupon we will reach a perfected end-state. I presuppose neither that we have such a description in hand, nor that we can, much less will, advance to such a perfect state, nor that humankind is in any sense perfectible. This study is biased only toward the idea that belief and action can be integrated. It is grounded on a value-belief that integrity should be preferred to its alternative and on the understanding that without institutional conditions that favor integrity we cannot know the potential worth of what we believe. Specifically, the ways we organize work, make and utilize expertise, and generate knowledge can thwart our efforts to shape our actions with our value-beliefs and with our understandings about the nature of knowledge. To make progress is to remove those barriers to integrity, rather than to move toward any perfect state.

The Path of This Inquiry

In our personal lives we have a sense of the meaning and value of combining what we believe with how we conduct ourselves. Therefore, it is not difficult to appreciate in a general way our shared problem of discontinuities between collective knowledge and values and our actions in community. The hard part comes in trying to see how to locate and describe the collective problem. The notions of lack of will, bad faith, conniving, thoughtlessness, forgetfulness, and weakness of character that we commonly invoke to explain individuals' lack of integrity simply do not suit collective action. We do sometimes talk of the perfidious quality of an organization or society that espouses particular values and then violates them in the way it conducts its affairs. But in those cases in which abused values are genuinely cherished, the metaphor "perfidy" can only suggest an inconsistency and cannot identify the structure or source of the discontinuity.

The path to understanding the barriers in our collective life that impede integrity is not well marked; moreover, the subject has eluded any focused attention. Thus, it is especially important to offer some explicit remarks on how we will approach the topic. First, I will sketch my approach to describing the problem of the gap between what we know and value and what we do. Then, I will explain briefly why none of the several extant approaches to social research nor a current social science research program could do the same job. Finally, I will outline my approach to removing our collective barriers to integrity, but will leave the particulars to the reader's own discovery.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively, focus on bureaucracy, professionalism, and the research system. Those institutions serve as the vehicles through which we generate and use what we know. That is, they are the modern world's primary modes of knowledge utilization. By focusing on the use of knowledge, we attend also to values. Just what knowledge is brought to bear in given actions expresses our values. Thus, to look at our modes of utilizing knowledge is to regard, as well, our structures for expressing values. In particular, I contend that bureaucracy, professionalism, and the research system have lives of their own, that they are, in a most basic way, untouched by the political persuasion of governments or by developments in our understanding of the nature of knowledge. Each of the three shapes our actions in ways not consonant with theories of collective action or with conceptions of knowledge that are defensible by today's standards.

Chapter 2 first describes the formative power, features, conditions, and function of bureaucracy. Then, by attending to how a "pure" bureaucracy decides what to do, we shall uncover the conception of knowledge and theory of collective action that together form the "deep structure" of bureaucracy. As we shall see, regardless of our understanding of the nature of knowledge and regardless of the political context of a bureaucracy, it functions on what amounts to a Platonic conception of knowledge and theory of collective action. Via this route, we arrive at a way of describing and understanding the barriers to integrity that inhere in the principal way we organize ourselves for work and other collective activities.

Chapter 3, taking the same approach, first describes modern professionalization and then lays bare the decision structure inherent in professionalism. Again we find an institution that biases actions in our collective life in ways that accord with historical precedent, this time Aquinian epistemology and political theory. Unavoidably and despite our best efforts to the contrary, the result further disintegrates our lives with discontinuities between what we have come to understand as the nature of knowledge and what we have come to beli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Bureaucracy
• 3 Professionalism
• 4 The Research System
• 5 In Search of Integrity
• Index
• About the Academy of Independent Scholars
• About the AIS Forum Series
• About the Book and Author