Michael Woolcock: Conflict, causal claims, isomorphic mimicry, and the uncertain trajectory of change

Last night I went along to a Dean’s lecture by Michael Woolcock (World Bank) on ‘Development policy and practice as if social theory mattered’.

It was interesting, much more interesting than I expected in fact, and Woolcock is a great speaker (even if his physical delivery is rather distracting). The talk was delivered with a bit of a ‘sense of fun’ and an embrace of intellectual elitism when it came to throwing in big name social theorists wherever possible.

As I now only read anything ‘applied’ as primary texts (i.e. as part of the context that I am looking at), I scrawled down with a bit of a smirk his early points about trying to make social theory and research methods ‘actionable’ and ‘useful’. However, I thought the line he pursued through his talk about change bringing about conflict, so development needs to accept this conflict and work to understand the specific context in order to reduce the likelihood of this conflict becoming violent, was quite a good choice of argument for his talk. Woolcock remarked that change follows an ‘uncertain trajectory’, complete with reference to multiple modernities, and that different disciplines have different ways of making causal claims. I liked the way he set up parallels between changes in the rhetoric around development practices and changes brought about through programs, even though I did not find his comparison between ‘business as usual’ development and ‘New Generation’ projects all that satisfying.

The most useful part of the talk was coming away with the fancy term for describing when projects are seen as being able to be transferred between contexts – isomorphic mimicry. Hopefully now that I am armed with the fancy term I will be able to track down more of this literature.

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Tags: economics, peace, social research