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Development economics PhD Procreate Research Uncategorized Vignettes Visualising ESL

Making research relevant: Meet Ann, Pol, and Lil

One of the biggest challenges for anyone working on conceptual issues is making their research relevant to everyone else. After all, the first question any researcher should be asking themselves is “who cares”? This is not the passive-aggressive, somewhat depressing question that it could be, but rather a positive nudge to any researcher to bear in mind why you’re doing the research, and who is going to benefit from it.

My research is primarily conceptual, but has three main audiences: academics engaged in sociolegal research, policy makers working in international development, and a lay audience seeking more innovative responses to the financial crisis. Using designerly approaches to make the research tangible and visible, this post puts a face to each of these groups. Let’s meet each in turn.

Introducing Academic Ann…

Academic Ann

Ann works at a university as a law lecturer. She is researching the importance of the legal system for any country wanting to attract foreign investment. She is planning a trip to Sri Lanka – her target country for research – and is going to talk to government ministers, business people and investors, and local communities around investment zones. But how should she frame her research? How can she hold the interests and views of such a wide range of people in one frame at the same time?

Introducing Policy Polly…

Polly has been working at an international development institution for several years now. Her job requires her to use existing research to make policy recommendations for foreign governments, international agencies and charities. She wanted to work in development to reduce poverty, but has become disappointed by the lack of tangible impact her work has, and has been wondering whether there is an alternative approach to understand the causes and ways of addressing poverty.

Introducing Lay Lillian…

Lay Lillian

Lillian is not an academic. Nor does she work in development or policy. In fact, she is a retired dinner lady and pillar of her local community. She doesn’t know much about “the law” or “the economy”, but she cares about her community, and knows that something isn’t working properly. The economy crashed in 2008, and a decade of austerity was rolled out. She was told that there was “no more money” and that budgets across the country needed to be cut. But while her community saw centres close and support disappear, she noticed that the rich continued to get richer. So, she began reading about the crisis, and noticed that there were a lot of people arguing that we need to “do” economics and law differently. Lillian is an interested bystander, and wants to know more.

Why the characters? Personae can be a useful tool for exploring research concepts. We can see the relevance of concepts and frames for our own lives. They can make the conceptual visible and tangible.

Each of these will be developed in future posts, and will each bump up against the limitations of the ways we currently do, talk, and think about legal and economic phenomena. Each of them will then try an ESL lens using embeddedness and then moving beyond embeddedness. Through their eyes, we can explore the benefits and drawbacks of reframing in different contexts and for different audiences.

In the meantime, these characters are by me, using ProCreate on an iPad. They are rough first drafts, and the characters will be developed along with their stories. Copyright 2020.

Categories
acoustic jurisprudence

Musical representations…

Josie Long’s Gambit on chess aired on BBC Radio 4 this afternoon. Not being a chess fanatic, I was only half listening. However, the second half of the programme grabbed my attention when it explored whether a beautiful game of chess could be turned into beautiful music. The composer Erland Cooper explored the sounds you can get from a chess board and pieces, and then set about combining these – with the aid of a computer, bass drum and glockenspiel – into an acoustic representation of a game of chess. You can hear the results in the programme. All of a sudden, the description of the game of chess being played in real time came to life. It had colour, excitement, and layers upon layers of musical description.

While this may not have been the highlight of everyone’s Sunday afternoon, for me this demonstrated the possibilities of describing phenomena acoustically. In fact, it was a masterclass in the potential of musical representations.

What if we use techniques like this to describe economic and legal phenomena? How could we describe economic and legal phenomena? From the example here, the possibilities are endless but also hugely exciting and informative.

Multitrack recording
Multitrack recording image exploring acoustic representations of interactions

I have recently been exploring these possibilities using basic multitrack software to “acoustically imagine” econo-socio-legal interactions. Multitrack recording allows for layering of sounds, in the same way that interactions throughout society form layer upon layer as we zoom out and take a macro look. Early renditions have taken one note to represent one interaction between two actors. However, what if we use an interval like a minor third to represent power relations in an interaction? A falling minor third might represent a detrimental power relationship, while a rising minor third might indicate a positive power relationship. Could an unstable interval, such as a fourth or seventh, indicate unease in an interaction? Stay tuned (no pun intended) for updates about acoustic representations of economic and legal phenomena.

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economics Maps Research Visualising ESL

Maps and mapping…

Sean C Jackson is an artist who draws maps and mazes. The Guardian featured his work recently, and you can see it here. His maps are mostly imaginary, but ask the viewer to dive into the world he has created and puzzle through it. Most of the works sit somewhere between 2 and 3 dimensions, which can make for some disorientation at times, and asks you to engage with the work by turning either your head or the page.

Topography and mapping can be useful ways of visualising ESL, interactions, and social phenomena. Like a map, an ESL can highlight the relevant and hide the irrelevant. Like a map-maker, the researcher using an ESL must choose what is relevant and important and why. Like a map, an ESL lens can also zoom in on areas that are more important, while identifying but minimising others. As a result, we can appreciate the whole landscape in all its complexity and understand the context of the research.

If we were to map out current mainstream approaches in law, economics and sociology, how might it look? The picture below is a (stylised) suggestion that the academic silos of law, economics and sociology would look be islands of research endeavour. They are separated by sea, and generally have their own languages, cultures, and traditions. Some brave interdisciplinary scholars traverse the seas and work on two or more islands, but many do not.

Map of current mainstream disciplines
Current mainstream disciplines as islands of endeavour

How might it look if we were to draw an ESL as a response to these islands? Would they converge? Would we need bridges, ships, or loudspeakers? Would this enable inter-island dialogue, or just increase competition? And what could a map of the topography of ESL tell us about the lens?

Categories
economics Procreate Research Thesis Visualising ESL

Visualising interactions in colour

What if we visualise interactions according to their type? Legal aspects of interactions are red, economic are yellow, and social or other aspects are green.

The first GIF here imagines what interaction patterns might look like if we use yellow for economic phenomena, red for legal phenomena, and green for social, political and/or power-oriented phenomena. They are presented separately, performed between actors represented by the red dots.

The following GIF asks what this might look like when these phenomena occur simultaneously.

The colours show the various phenomena as they are simultaneously performed through interactions.

It is worth noting though that by using colour to separate out the economic, legal, and social phenomena, we are using “embeddedness-based” ESL lenses. In other words, we are accepting that legal, economic and social phenomena are separate.

As I argue elsewhere on this blog, if we really want to talk about, think about, and do the econolegal better, we need to move beyond embeddedness.

Future posts will explore what this might look like.

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Procreate Research Visualising ESL

Visualising interaction patterns… interactively

How can we visualise repeated interactions between a small group of actors?

The GIF above visualises a simple pattern of interactions between a small group of people. The latest update of the ProCreate app on iOS brings with it animation tools and some really exciting possibilities for exploring what econo-socio-legal interactions might look like.

In the GIF, each red dot represents a person. Each time they interact with another person, the link between them is highlighted. Interactions repeat, overlap, or cease.

Stay posted for updates of what happens if we pan out… or add a soundtrack asking what econo-socio-legal interactions might sound like!

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Visualising ESL

The Art of Innovation (Part 1)

There’s currently a very interesting exhibition on at the Science Museum in London called “The Art of Innovation”. It’s about the links and dialogue between the (natural) sciences and the arts.

Given my interest in the dialogue between the social sciences and the arts (have a scroll through some of the other posts in this blog if you’re new), the first part of the exhibition was a little wide of the mark. The artistic side of the first few exhibits included architecture, dress-making and textiles.

However the real showstopper for me was a piece designed by Theodore Olivier in 1830 (see below) in the section on “Meaningful Matter”. These were built to convey complex 3-dimensional ideas to a wide audience. The coloured strings could be adjusted using weighted beads in the frame, meaning that different surface shapes could be modelled according to the mathematical equation at question, revealing a number of surfaces and shapes simultaneously. These frames and models were eventually produced in significant numbers and sold across the world. The one in the picture below was made by French company Fabre de Lagrange.

Exploring surfaces and mathematical equations in 3 dimensions

However, as ideas progressed, these models fell out of favour with the mathematical and scientific communities. After the First World War, the models were displayed in museums as curios where they found a new audience; avant grade artists. The string models represented not the abstract thinking of the original mathematical equations, but the ability to explore shape and form in a new way.

Among those who drew inspiration from these models were Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Hepworth modelled her sculpture on the mathematical models that she had seen at Oxford (see below).

Barbara Hepworth Sculpture inspired by mathematical equations
Barbara Hepworth sculpture inspired by mathematical equations

As a member of the St Ives set, it was therefore no surprise to see Hepworth joined on the opposite wall by a set of sketches by Henry Moore.

Sketches by Henry Moore
Henry Moore sketches inspired by equations

Moore’s sketches drew inspiration from the string recreations of maths equations that he encountered on display at the Science Museum when he was a student in the 1920s. Moore immediately recognised the structural and artistic possibilities the models presented, noting that “it wasn’t the scientific study of these models but the ability to look through the strings as with a bird cage and to see one form within another which excited me”. The sketches on display in the exhibition eventually inspired several wooden string figures of his own.

There are similarities with some of the work I’ve been doing with zentangling interaction patterns, as you can see in my previous posts. I’ve also built 3 dimensional string models using the colours of strings to represent economic, legal and “other” aspects of each interaction, overlapping these to build complex patterns. Some of the questions I’ve been pondering are how models like these could help us explore complex patterns of interaction in the context of the social sciences? How could we visualise economic and legal aspects of interactions using colour to build up overarching patterns of interaction?

Stay tuned for more from the exhibition in Part 2….

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Uncategorized

Visualising the econo-socio-legal crops up in the most unexpected of places…

A loom, for sale in Ikea

I stumbled across this bizarre object in Ikea. It’s a loom – about A3 in size. Apparently, it’s for weaving bags, or rugs, or toys. Or I’m not sure what. Suffice to say though, this is not why it caught my eye.

This little loom is a reminder of a piece I displayed at the 2017 SLSA conference, which used a frame and different coloured threads stretched across it to represent the different aspects of interactions. It is pictured below. I chose red for legal, yellow for economic, and green for social. The threads overlapped and crossed each other, representing the complexity of social interactions with all their various elements in a 3-dimensional model.

Representing the complexities of the econo-socio-legal

So while I may not take up weaving, this did get me thinking about ways of representing and visualising the econo-socio-legal using random and wonderful pieces that you stumble across unexpectedly.

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Uncategorized

Realising that economists have got it wrong – can we finally return to Polanyi?

There was an interesting post this morning in Foreign Policy, and widely followed up on social media sites, claiming that economists are “on the run”. Paul Krugman in particular has come in for criticism, and no small dose of schadenfreude given his recent admission that he got it wrong. There seems to be a dawning recognition, at least in the United States, that free market policies, neoliberal ideals and globalising aspirations have left the “have nots” much worse off than the models predicted. Of course, this becomes a much sharper problem when the prospect of a US election looms large on the horizon.

What does this mean? An end to neoclassical mainstream economics translated into pure policy? Blanchard has been cited as saying that as a self-confessed left wing economist, he now finds himself at the centre of broader debates. Will this mean a re-examination economics from soci

The problem? That free market economics, which told blue collar workers in the US that free trade and neoliberalism would not hurt their prospects, has been shown to be false. Krugman himself, one of the messiahs of free marketeering, has admitted as much in a recent article entitled “What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization”. He acknowledges the huge economic and social upheaval that followed as a result of policies based on his analysis.

This has been called “quite the ‘Whoops’ moment”. But this downplays the devastation wreaked on the lives of millions in the name of ideology. For anyone familiar with economic sociology, this conclusion has been long overdue. Writing in 1944, Karl Polanyi warned of the consequences of unchecked free marketism, insisting that the state was ideally placed to countermove and intervene to protect against the worst excesses of the free market. He paints a duality and constant battle between business, with their drive to lower costs regardless of the impact on workers and society, and the state, drawn in to protect the basic interests of its communities. This echoes the free market-protectionism debates playing out today. The difference now is that those advocating flavours of protectionism, who have been shut out of policy arenas over the past 20-30 years, have gradually been proven right.

This also reflects the economic monoculture described so succinctly by Earle et al in The Econocracy and “something of a guild orthodoxy” in the profession that advises policy makers of the benefits of free markets, free trade and globalisation. If this hint at regret or dawning realisation indicates an expansion of views or a heterodox approach going forwards, this can only be a good thing. We can only hope that the changes brought about do not fade with the cycles of the US electoral system.

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economics Procreate Research Visualising ESL

Visualising interactions using Procreate on the iPad: an update

I’ve recently started using ProCreate on the iPad to explore visual representations of econo-socio-legal interactions. My portfolio has always relied on the good, old-fashioned pen and paper approach, so it’s been really exciting trying out different technologies. I’ve been updating my portfolio and recreating the pieces digitally, which I’ll discuss in this post – with pictures!

I’ve found the app to be really responsive and a fun and easy way to get creative. The Apple Pencil can be a bit frustrating to use as it has that “drawing on glass” feel, and runs out of battery at crucial moments. But the feedback and pressure sensitivity works really well and makes drawing on the iPad a really enjoyable experience.

But on to the content! Here is a first attempt using Procreate at recreating the social fabric of interactions, weaving together three layers. Here, they are legal, economic, and “other” aspects of social interactions. This recalls the goals of Economic Sociology of Law-based approaches that want to recombine legal, economic and social phenomena, as well as recognising the importance of others aspects of interactions. In this, we can refer back to Max Weber’s four interaction ideal-types (instrumental, affective, belief-based, and a traditional); all of which fit into the “other” layer here.

In case there’s any doubt about the three layers, we can add some colour. For me, law is best represented in red, economics in yellow, and social otherness in green.

Then, adding in economic aspects of interactions…

And then, the social “other”, completing the woven fabric of interactions as seen through an econo-socio-legal lens…

The really cool thing about Procreate is that is can record everything you do on a particular canvas, and can reply the progress of the piece as a time lapse video. If you want to see the steps involved in creating this piece, it’s on my YouTube channel here.

I’ve also started redrawing representations of orthodox economics, economic sociology, and economic sociology of law. The idea is that the main stream, orthodox economic theory relies on assumptions and models that provide a straight jacket and that sociological and econo-socio-legal framers can moderate this and make the approach more flexible and more reflective of real life.

So, in the first image, neoclassical economics is drawn as straight lines, with little flexibility outside of the predetermined categories built into the models. In this sense, it fails to capture the complexity and unpredictability of real world interactions.

By incorporating more insights from sociology and from focusing on interactions rather than actors, we can capture the full extent of how complex, dynamic, and unpredictable real world interactions can be, and what this might look like…

All that’s needed now is a roadmap from the orthodox to the heterodox… a visualisation of which I’ll post as an update!

Categories
economics Free market Gig economy Infrastructure Research Uncategorized

Complexity and Community are crucial for rethinking economics

What could society look like if we do economics better?

Do mine eyes deceive me? I came across this post by Evan Davies on the BBC website, where he blogs about the changes taking place in economics. For those fond of the TL;DR, he says that economics has been, and still is, in need of a radical overhaul, given that most economists did not foresee the 2008 financial crisis, and that economics has not addressed its flaws in the decade since. Davies sets out the “two Cs” that make “neoliberal” or orthodox economics models risky (to put it mildly), and these are Complexity and Community. The short version is that people are Complex souls who live in Communities. Well, duh! Some of us have a been banging on about this for a while now.

Davies is clear not to make a straw man of mainstream economics though. And this is an important point. Microeconomics – the small-scale interactions between actors – has been remarkably successful in boiling down our collective lives into theories, formulae, and models that guide economists towards understanding how we act (and then nudging us in the right direction to make better decisions). But macroeconomics – the larger scale stuff that includes GDP, interest rates, international trade and investment and so on – tends to draw on the microeconomic theories and scale them up. But as we all know from experience, the more people you include, the more complicated it becomes to plan anything. And that’s before you start on complex interaction patterns across communities and societies.

Why have things started to change now? As I wrote in a previous post, change occurs gradually. Many successful careers have been built on the status quo of neoliberal or neoclassical, orthodox economics. The core of the academic economics community has developed, advocates, practices and teaches this approach. So revolutions, as in most areas of life, tend to be the exception. When we start to question the entire shape and direction of a discipline, there are myriad interests at play that all need to be reoriented. The mainstream journals, senior economists, and general momentum is geared towards neoclassical theory, and its implementation as neoliberal economic policy. In short, we are steering an oil tanker rather than a Mini Cooper.

Secondly, neoliberal economics is plugged into and reflected in the political mores of the day, and neoliberalism in politics remains in the ascendancy. A theory of economics that retreats from and questions this is bound to raise eyebrows. Perhaps then, eleven years might be a relatively short timespan for the reorientation, or evolution, of a discipline.

So what changes are actually happening now? The past decade has seen a wave of literature questioning the type of society we want to live in, both locally and globally, and the type of economics that might realise this.

But there are more recent projects turning explicitly to the way we do economics and its role in society that are much more exciting. The NIESR has a project underway Rethinking Macroeconomics, which is ESRC funded. The IFS is launching a project looking at inequality in the UK and targeting questions like the kind of society we want (a particularly timely question in the light of the most recent UN Report citing poverty as endemic in the UK). And then there are the centres rethinking traits of orthodox economic theory like the Paul Woolley Centre at LSE, the full title of which is “The Paul Woolley Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality”. The Centre essentially asks what happens if the frictionless markets featured in economic models suffer from, well, friction.

But what alternatives are there? If you’re familiar with some of my previous posts, you’ll know I’m a fan of socio-economic and econo-socio-legal approaches that take economics back into the social sciences. There are myriad alternatives though within these disciplines, including relational work, actor-network theory, community lens, network analysis, systems analysis, and many more. Zooming out somewhat, historical, geographical, psychological and anthropological approaches can also contribute to an understanding of economics as it really is performed in the real world.

But, why should we care? To make a bold, and controversial statement, economics is usually one cause of most social issues facing us today. What do I mean? The rise of populist politics caters to the anger and frustration of the “have nots” in society (economics). Austerity as a response to the financial crisis enacts neoliberal economic theories (economics). The lack of living wages and the rise of insecurity, the precariat, and the gig economy has resulted from technology and a reluctance of government to intervene based on neoliberal economic theories about the free market (economics). Climate change and global warming continue unabated because of the economic consequences of actions to tackle environmental issues head on (once again, economics).

In short, if we want to get society right, we need to get economics right. And that means a retreat from the belief that there is one “right” way of “doing economics”. It means recognising (or re-recognising) that economics is about how people act and interact. And that we do not always act rationally, or even in our best interests. Until economics models and formulae reflect this, we are left with a hollowed-out version of economics that cannot reflect the full complexity of real life. And this is something we all pay the price for. A broader, richer understanding might help us spot the next financial crisis looming on the horizon.