The case for cross-disciplinary social science research on poverty, inequality and well-being

Abstract

Arguments for cross-disciplinary research in development studies have been applied recently to work on poverty, inequality and well-being. However, much research on these issues remains fragmented and, in particular, the intellectual barrier between economics and the other social science subjects continues to be powerful. In this paper, we review the prospects for cross-disciplinary research (both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary); and, examine the ways in which forms of being ‘disciplined’, and the linkages between disciplines and professions, constrains such research. We also introduce the papers in this collection and explain their relationship to the quest for cross-disciplinary research on poverty issues. Our conclusion is that cross-discipline working should be promoted and that both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches can benefit research on poverty and well-being, provided that their specific merits and demerits are evaluated in relation to the research task in hand.

Acknowledgements

Hulme and Toye wrote this paper and edited this collection when serving as Joint Directors of the ESRC's Global Poverty Research Group (GPRG). The authors would like to thank colleagues in the Global Poverty Research Group at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford for discussions on these subjects and comments on the draft paper and David Clark for research assistance. The constructive criticisms of the earlier drafts by two anonymous referees were extremely helpful. 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).

Notes

1. This is Jackson's (2002) SAP with human geography added. We have added human geography as in the UK, parts of Northern Europe and US geographers of development studies have played an increasingly active role in research on poverty, inequality and well-being over the last 10–15 years.

2. A notable exception is the World Health Organisation's WHO-QOL project, which developed and applied an instrument for assessing the quality of life in one hundred different fieldwork sites. The abridged version of this measure, which draws on work in 32 localities, covers more second and third world countries than first world countries (see WHOQOL Group, 1998: Table 2).

3. See Sen (1987, 1999). Also see the work of researchers focusing on development ethics such as Crocker (1991), Gasper (2004), Goulet (1971, 1995), Nussbaum (2000), Qizilbash (1996) and Clark (2002a, b), inter alia. There is also a vast literature in mainstream philosophy on the subject of well-being. One of the most notable contributions is Jim Griffin's (1986) book, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance. For further references to the well-being literature see Clark (2002b).

4. Interestingly, Clark (2002b) proposes that an ‘empirical philosophy’ of well-being might advance the understanding of well-being by detaching from social science disciplines and engaging with the views and experiences of ‘ordinary people’ in a logically rigorous manner.

5. The term ‘non-economics’ is sometimes used to refer to the social sciences other than economics. However, such a label may not be helpful as many ‘non economists’ point out that their research is focused on the social, political and cultural understanding of economic issues such as markets, financial institutions, access to resources and accumulation.

6. While the concept of income poverty remains very powerful, aspects of well-being and human development are increasingly on both practical and theoretical agenda. The MDGs are headed by income poverty but vast attention is also focused on the educational, health, equality and other goals that are set. In the world of theory, leading economists are striving to make their research multidimensional (Atkinson, 2003; Bourguignon and Chakravarity, 2003).

7. See the fuller discussion of this problem in Himmelfarb (1991: 171–73).

8. Bourdieu's (1999) study of ‘social suffering’ in France provides a classic example: Of the 629 pages in the text 565 are direct transcripts of interviews and little attempt is made to indicate levels of income or the specific forms of consumption deprivation that interviewees experience.

9. In the 2001 UK research assessment exercise (RAE) groups who submitted to the development studies sub unit of assessment received grades well below the average for social sciences. No group received a grading above 4, indicating that none of them were judged to have achieved ‘international’ standing for their research.

10. Abbott (2001) argues that the ‘chaos of disciplines’ can be understood as fractal distinctions – these are dichotomies in which each dichotomy then fractures into a further dichotomy. This may provide a framework for a more detailed interrogation of the dichotomies listed here than we have space to provide.

11. Lipton (1970), Hill (1986), Bardhan (1989), Harriss (2002), Kanbur (2002), Jackson (2002), White (2002) and Ruttan (2001).

12. The formalisation of the revealed preference approach in demand theory is attributable to Paul Samuelson (1948: 107–17).

13. An early example was Tibor Scitovsky's 1973 lecture on ‘The place of economic welfare in human welfare’ (Scitovsky, 1986: 13–25).

14. But note that while anthropology and ‘qualitative’ sociology sometimes use numerical information they commonly prioritise non-numerical information that does not lend itself to statistical inference and which requires a separate process of numerical transformation, such as scaling or counting, if it is to be subjected to numerical scrutiny.

15. Also see McGee (2004) for a detailed examination of the complementarity of statistical surveys and participatory poverty assessments in Uganda.

16. See the next paragraph for a discussion of the ‘super-positivism’ that is driving much economic research.

17. For a startling contrast see Sociologia Ruralis, the Journal of the European Society for Rural Sociology and Rural Sociology, the Journal of the (North American) Rural Sociology Society. While the journals focus on similar issues, their approaches and preferred methodologies are very different.

18. This was one of Polly Hill's (1986) most trenchant criticisms in her classic attack on development economics, Development Economics on Trial.

19. This can be illustrated by the comments that leading figures make about their disciplines in the same highly reputed, cross-disciplinary encyclopaedia: ‘an important achievement of economics has been its internal intellectual coherence’; ‘it is questionable whether there remains any coherence in the term anthropology at all’; ‘a pervasive dissatisfaction with the continuing divisions and fragmentation [in sociology] … it remains an open question whether a more unified and intellectually coherent discipline will eventually emerge’; ‘political science has still not acquired fully independent status (as a discipline) in many parts of the world’ (Outhwaite and Bottomore, 1992: 20, 184, 483, 636).

20. As an illustration, positivist and critical realist sociologists working (in the same department) on social capital and poverty may find they rarely communicate. The positivists may, however, find their work is closely related to econometricians researching social networks, while the critical realists will find a close affinity to researchers within human geography (see Sayer, 2000: 106–107 for a discussion of the latter).

21. We are indebted to an anonymous reviewer for helping us develop this point.

22. Over the last 10 years this may have started to moderate with gradually increasing numbers of female economists (and even econometricians) and through the influence of feminist economics on development economics. However, we suspect that, at any meeting of poverty/well-being researchers, the probability of an economist being female is still significantly less than of an anthropologist or sociologist being female.

23. Evans (2003, p. 10) citing Charles Merriam in the American Political Science Review (Volume 20, 1926: 186).

24. Historically, development studies has played a major role within Anglophone social sciences in promoting cross-disciplinary research. Abbott (2001: 133) observes that ‘the 1960s, by contrast (to earlier decades) proved an interdisciplinary bonanza, as the modernization paradigm swept development studies in anthropology, sociology, economics and political science. Enormous multidisciplinary teams took on major problems … population, area studies, agriculture, development’.

25. This might be through an individual who personally integrates disciplinary perspectives and methods or by a team (two or more) people coming from different disciplines and producing a unified design for research.

26. See, for example, Julian Huxley's (1946) discussion of the social sciences in UNESCO: Its Purpose and its Philosophy.

27. Paul Streeten (1974: 26) claimed that ‘the only forum where interdisciplinary studies in depth can be conducted successfully is under one skull’.

28. Sen holds positions as Professor of Economics and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard along with other positions.

29. Lipton (1970, p. 11) cited the case of Everett Hagen, when remarking that ‘attempts by first-rate (single discipline) specialists to work in other disciplines … often produce results that are not highly regarded by the new discipline and not understood in the old’.

30. An excellent recent example of effective multidisciplinary research is Hickey and Bracking's (2005) multi-authored collection on the politics of poverty reduction.

31. Cooperation within a cross-disciplinary research programme does not have to mean agreement amongst partners: it can be highly productive when a partner in one discipline puts time and effort into explaining to someone from another discipline their precise criticisms of the concepts, assumptions and methods that have been utilised.

32. ‘To be brutal, economists are forced by the realities to seek to impose their own quantitative and testable hypotheses … so long as other [disciplines] do not put such hypotheses forward’ (Lipton, 1970: 12).

33. Also see Green and Hulme (2005) for a discussion of moving beyond a measurement led conceptualisation of poverty.

34. The UK's Department for International Development (DFID) has recently merged its social development and governance advisors into a single group that seems likely to function as issue specific ‘generalist’ policy advisors rather than the ‘disciplined’ professional role of economists.

35. Most obviously in the UK through the support of the ESRC which has financed an interdisciplinary research centre (the Well-being and Development Research Centre, see www.welldev.org.uk) and a multidisciplinary research centre (the Global Poverty Research Group, see www.gprg.org). DFID has also supported the cross-disciplinary (that is multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary) Chronic Poverty Research Centre (www.chronicpoverty.org).

36. Similar data are not available for other social science disciplines, but one can argue that the ‘high rating’ placed on ‘premier division’ cross-disciplinary journals such as the Journal of Development Studies, World Development, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Economy and Society and Development and Change by the SAPG disciplines and economics in the UK's research assessment exercise augurs well for the future. In the UK the recent establishment of a development studies unit of assessment for the 2008 research assessment exercise (RAE), which allocates research income across departments, creates a potentially favourable context for cross-disciplinary work.