Pluralism, poverty and sharecropping: Cultivating open-mindedness in development studies

Abstract

Pluralism adds depth to the mixing of methods in development studies. Global society has both structure and complexity, and agents within society actively promote competing ways of describing and interpreting that society. Theoretical pluralism offers a way for social scientists to describe and judge the competing theories about a given social situation. (Methodological pluralism is also discussed in this paper.) An example – tenancy in India – is explored to illustrate how pluralists compare theories. The tenancy literature includes neoclassical, institutionalist, and Marxist theories. These cut across three academic disciplines. Pluralist research is often interdisciplinary in such ways. Such interdisciplinary research generates a dialogue across epistemological chasms and across theories that have different underlying assumptions. Pluralist research can be valued for its discursive bridging function. Pluralist research can also contribute to improvements in scientific measurement. Divergent schools of thought can be brought into contact by reconceptualising the objects of research, such as contracts or coercion. In the tenancy literature, alternative ways of measuring and interpreting power arose. Structuralist approaches tended to assume poverty and inequality as part of the context within which economic action takes place. Strengths and weaknesses of such assumptions are examined. The approach recommended here, which is realist, makes possible an improved dialogue about policy changes aimed at poverty reduction.

Acknowledgements

The support of the UK Economic and Social Research Council is gratefully acknowledged. The work was part of the programme of the ESRC Global Poverty Research Group (grant no. M571255001). I am grateful for comments received after presenting this paper at a GPRG workshop and at the conference of the Development Studies Association, Glasgow, September 11, 2003. The reviewer's and editors' comments were valuable in improving the paper.

Notes

1. Figure 1 defines the terms used in the paper. See also Smith (1998) for a full discussion of most of these terms.

2. Sayer suggests that comparing the results of extensive methods with the findings of intensive methods may be useful.

3. In the philosophy of science a technical term, idealism, is used to draw a contrast between purely idea-based and purely reality-based research. However this polarity can easily be exaggerated. Realist research requires conceptual frameworks, and therefore it is not completely divorced from the mental maps of those who make mathematical models.

4. According to atomism, structures, rather than being self-transforming and organic, are simply sets of related objects). In realist literature the most widely criticized form of atomism is methodological individualism. Toye (2003) offers a review of the role of atomism within development economics.

5. The literature on critical realism per se dates back to about 1979 whereas Berger and Luckmann's work dated 1966 would place itself under the different heading of a moderately realist social constructivism. The origins of critical realism however lie in marxism, critical social science, and the idea of progressive social science, which arose in earlier centuries (Archer et al., 1998).

6. This claim is often referred to as the Duhem–Quine thesis. An excellent summary is provided by Quine (1953).

7. The debate over how to interpret Kuhn has taken place in economics (for example Cook, 1999), and in the history of science (reviewed by Manicas, 1987). Two variants predominate in the interpretation of Kuhn's thesis. The weaker variant argues that scientific paradigms are socially grounded, but can nevertheless be compared and contrasted. According to this weak interpretation it is a worthwhile project to make rational judgements about the worth of competing theories. A stronger school of interpretation of Kuhn's work argues that paradigms are simply incommensurate and that there is no possibility of rationally comparing them. This latter interpretation (the ‘strong’ school in the sociology of science) argues that paradigms are primarily socially constructed. In this paper, the weaker interpretation of Kuhn is applied. For a general discussion of this debate, and a review of its implications for economics, see Dow (2002).

8. The 8 per cent figure for India is likely to be an underestimate because land reforms have created an atmosphere within which landowners avoid giving details of tenancy to outsiders. The 15 per cent figure is from Shankar (1999).

9. There is not enough space to cover all the schools in depth here. For instance, development research links tenancy to basic problems of poverty, food security, and the evolution of rights (see Ellis, 2000; Sawadogo and Stamm, 2000); sociologists studying tenancy include Grigsby (1996) and Gray and Kevane (2001); feminist studies include Agarwal (1984, 1994, 2003) and Jackson (2002). In the sociological and feminist literature, the meanings of tenancy are unpacked for differentiated actors.

10. The Washington consensus refers to a synthesis of neoliberal and neoclassical thought favouring free markets.