The Critique-to-Action Paradigm
In my dissertation, I did the typical academic thing and coined a term for a dynamic that I was seeing in the world. I called that dynamic the “data-to-action paradigm.” It’s the “[assumption] that more […] data or better science will lead to action […]” (Fried 2020). In practice, the data-to-action paradigm looks like: thinking that more data about climate will help people understand how to act collectively around climate change, for instance. I also think it looks like the claim that more and better data alone will promote algorithmic justice, or that more and better demographic data will automatically lead to racial equality. The essence of this framing device is that, while data can help people create a more complete picture of the world or inform better models, it does not help people create effective strategies for collective action on its own.
My field — Science, Technology, and Society (STS) — is best known for its commentary on the politics of science; its exploration of the way science is institutionalized, how its institutionalization shapes scientific findings, and how scientific communities determine what legitimate knowledge is. Often, those arguments go something like: “People often think of scientific research as objective and derived from nature, but nature is always mediated by the people studying it and institutions that are also made of those people.” In her dissertation, Sarvy Lotfi points out that the field often reinforces the nature/society dichotomy, even in its attempts to critique it. “Since its beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s,” she writes, “scholars that we now identify as founders of STS set out to flatten [these] dualisms […]. […] With each wave of internal debate, scholars have bumped up against the problem of how to better articulate the gap between nature and society” (309; 2020). I was struggling with this issue in my own dissertation, and in a particular way: if I am critiquing the data-to-action paradigm in STEM, this paradigm must also be related to things I’m experiencing in STS and in the humanities more broadly. If I believe that nature and society are continuous, the knowledge systems around them must be as well. And importantly, humanists also create and validate knowledge; they must fall privy to some version of the data-to-action paradigm.
This particular line of thought inspired me to coin an additional term — the “critique-to-action paradigm.” “This is a phenomenon,” I write,
in which STS leaves a critique of a technoscientific field and assumes that field will naturally (1) know how to interpret critique across disciplines and (2) know how to build processes in between the critique and some desired action […]. This paradigm is just as troubled as the data-to-action paradigm, in that both assume some specialized form of knowledge will automatically manifest in a generalized kind of intervention (111; 2019).
In the data-to-action paradigm, analysts believe data and experiments are enough to bring about systemic change; in the critique-to-action paradigm, social theorists (broadly speaking, not just in STS) believe a really good critique is enough to bring about systemic change. But neither data nor critique can do that on their own, no matter how much integrity they have or how many experts agree that they have integrity. And I’ve come to believe that even good data and good theory together cannot effect change without other ingredients.
Peter Levine writes that facts, values, and strategies are the ingredients that create scalable social change. Levine argues that “the scale of human affairs that lies between a lone individual’s decisions and entire societies seems especially important”:
This is the domain of groups that one can choose to join or leave, that one can tangibly influence through one’s own choices and actions, and that can (in turn) influence the larger world. ‘Civil society’ is the name for that scale of human action where the minuscule powers of an individual obtain enough leverage to count but are not lost entirely in the mass. […] It is politics at the human scale (24; 2015).
Facts help people understand the scope of the issue they are trying to change. “We need to know facts because we should not try to do something that is impossible, or redundant, or that has harmful but unintended consequences” (25; ibid). Values help people determine what is just in their cause. And strategies provide “a path to the desirable results” (ibid).
If I were to do a quick analysis, I would say that data fall into the realm of facts, but not values or strategies (though I would argue that their collection and maintenance can and should be — and are — influenced by values and strategies). Good critiques usually involve some combination of facts and values: in STS, they typically involve historical, sociological, and/or anthropological analyses (which create facts) alongside philosophical analyses about how the world is and ought to be (which create values — keeping mind, of course, that values are always inherent in methodological pursuits, just as philosophical pursuits are inherently based around some kind of fact; keeping in mind also that the space between theories and methodologies is continuous). My blunt take is that there is generally not strategy to be found in the sense of collective change-making at scale. However, strategy is present, I think, around activities like publishing, obtaining grants, competing for jobs, and competing in a more general sense for ideas to become prominent or to be taken up by (more) elite groups of academics. To be sure, I do not think STS is unique in this way — this is a dynamic that exists across the academic space, to varying degrees.
So far, I am arguing that within academic institutions, strategy is often focused on forwarding specific ideas and theories within the institutional space — but not in broad or systemic ways. And not generally in ways that would change the traditional structure of the academy, or that utilize academic ideas to strategically drive collective action. Of course, there are clear exceptions to this rule: trailblazing philosopher/activists Angela Davis and Audre Lorde are two popular examples. It is broadly true that forging such a career is going against the grain. There is also the separate but related issue of public intellectualism, and the question of what it means to be a public intellectual. Not all academics focused on strategies for collective action are public intellectuals, and there are many public intellectuals who do not think about strategies for collective action (and therefore, I would argue, still fall into the critique-to-action paradigm). Its own can of worms, I will not cover public intellectualism in this post.
The lack of broad strategy for collective action in academic spaces has everything to do with institutional incentives. It’s no secret that promotion and tenure are key concerns for academics. And while that’s a frustrating dynamic, I don’t blame any individual academics for it. Academic institutions incentivize this focus: it’s a problem of institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Hawley 1968), the constant feedbacking of groups of institutions toward homogenous bureaucratic structures, encouraged by uncertainty and professionalization. These are the systemic barriers that prevent academics from being more engaged in systemic change-making.
It is easy for one to shrug in the face of stubborn bureaucracies and say, “well, that’s just the way it is.” It is also easy for one to throw up one’s hands in self-righteous frustration and declare that people should just tear it all down. I have come to feel that the latter fulfills the critique-to-action paradigm, often through thoughtfully written diatribes that do nothing to effect actual change. I certainly have fallen into this trap. Arguably, I am falling into this trap right now, by writing this very post — although I am engaged, in my daily work and life, in activities that do not fall into this trap.
I am currently developing some thoughts about how I think political activism can fall into the realm of the critique-to-action paradigm too. After all, it’s not just humanists or academics that have theories about the world; everyone creates mental models to make sense of things (Levine 2024). I hope to develop these ideas in a future post.
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DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American sociological review, 48(2), 147–160.
Fried, S. J. (2019). Landsat in Contexts: Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Data-to-Action Paradigm in Earth Remote Sensing (Doctoral dissertation, Virginia Tech).
Fried, S. J. (2020). How Climate Science Could Lead to Action. American Scientist, 108(1), 34–42.
Hawley, A. (1968). Human ecology. In D.L. Sills (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Macmillan. 328–337.
Levine, P. (2015). We are the ones we have been waiting for: The promise of civic renewal in America. Oxford University Press.
Levine, P. (2024, February 6). different kinds of social models. A Blog for Civic Renewal. https://peterlevine.ws/?p=31126
Lotfi, S. (2020). Capitalizing the Measure of Our Ignorance: A Pragmatist Genealogy of RandD (Doctoral dissertation, Virginia Tech).
