iR2P

iR2P is a multidisciplinary network because multidisciplinary agility is needed to understand and encourage change. This point is captured well in How Change Happens, a report by Roman Krznaric for Oxfam. Here’s an extract:

The development of independent academic disciplines over the past century has resulted
in isolation and overspecialisation. Economists, for example, have learned very little
from sociologists about human motivation, and generally maintain simplistic
assumptions about human nature. Political scientists primarily focus on institutional
processes, and rarely draw on the insights of social psychologists about the determinants
of individual and group behaviour. Some disciplines have focused on quantitative
research, and consider qualitative research to be lacking in rigour and objectivity. Others
engage mainly with current, observable phenomena, and do not possess the long view
encountered among historians. Experts in one discipline frequently find it impossible to
understand the abstruse language or mathematical formulae in the journal articles of
another. The lack of conversations between disciplines has limited our understanding of how change happens.

However, in the past two decades there has been a growth of cross-disciplinary research
that attempts to draw on what has been learned across a range of scholarly traditions.
Crossing the boundaries between disciplines has yielded some of the most significant and
original approaches to how change happens. Here I would like to highlight two of them.

Tipping points
What causes rapid change in human societies? The best-known recent analysis is
Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000),
based on research in diverse fields such as social psychology, marketing, media studies,
criminology, and epidemiology. Using a threshold model of collective behaviour familiar
in the social sciences, he argues that some phenomena spread rapidly when they reach a
‘tipping point’ of social participation or popularity. One of his examples concerns Hush
Puppies, a brand of shoes. Having become unpopular in the USA, the tipping point came
in 1994 and 1995 when sales suddenly shot up. This wasn’t through an advertising
campaign. It was because a few kids in New York’s East Village and Soho began wearing
them, and the fad spread so that Hush Puppies became a cultural icon.

The important issue is how this rapid spreading takes place. Gladwell bases his argument
on several ideas. First, that some people are better than others at making something
spread, such as by having better social connections or more enthusiasm (The Law of the
Few). Second, that there are specific ways to present or structure information to make it
more memorable and effective (The Stickiness Factor). Third, that human behaviour can
be changed through very small changes in people’s immediate environment, for instance
removing graffiti from walls in subway stations can cut crime (The Power of Context).

Personal relationships and mutual understanding
In books such as An Intimate History of Humanity (1995) and Conversation (1998), historian
Theodore Zeldin argues that the most important changes in human history have not
occurred through the imposition or evolution of new political institutions, economic
systems, or laws, but rather through individuals developing deeper understanding of the
perspectives and experiences of others, and changing the way they treat one another on a
personal level. For instance, western governments began introducing legislation to
ensure greater equality between men and women over a century ago. Yet new laws have
not eradicated discrimination against women in the workplace or domestic violence. The
real changes, according to Zeldin, have come through men and women learning to talk
with each other, and with men learning how to empathise with the experiences of
women.

For Zeldin, fundamental social change requires overcoming misunderstandings and
ignorance about people from different cultures, occupations, genders, generations, and
social backgrounds. A method of doing so is to create one-to-one conversations between
strangers where they get beyond superficial talk and speak about their lives on a personal
and emotional level. This would be a microcosmic, personal, and long-term form of social
change.69 A similar approach to change has been promoted through ‘empathy training
programmes’ in prisons (see the section on sociology), ‘immersion programmes’ run by
development agencies, and grassroots peacebuilding and reconciliation projects based on
developing personal connections between participants. These initiatives suggest that society can change by creating and encouraging empathy.