Recontextualizing Social Problems through Metaphor

— transcending the "switch" metaphor

A. J. N. Judge

1. Introduction

This paper is based on the assumption that it is useful to question whether the many existing approaches to social problems and global management, however successful, are sufficient to the challenge of the times. Individually they may indeed be necessary and adequate to particular challenges, but there is every possibility that they may collectively be insufficient to the larger challenge. It is possible to adopt an optimistic attitude in order to safeguard the personal and institutional investments in such approaches. There are however sufficient dissenting views to suggest that it is at least worth devoting some effort to the exploration of much more radical approaches.

For space reasons, the paper will not outline some of the major constraints on global management and innovative approaches to it (Judge, 1987). Conditions, such as the following, have been noted by many authors in different ways : complexity (whether for management or modelling) ; incommensurability of many policy concerns ; limits to comprehensibility by the human mind (possibly even the comprehensibility of appropriateness) ; multiplicity of perspectives concerning any issue or response ; information overload ; urgency ; policy time constraints in relation to electorates ; incom- municability of complex insights to those who must vote on them ; irres- ponsiblity, in some measure, of most social agents ; corruption and deceit of many social agents. For the purposes of the subsequent discussion these can all be usefully treated as design constraints.

Experience of past developments indicates that implementation of desirable institutional innovations is likely to remain limited however much lip service is paid to them. Part of the difficulty would seem to lie in imaginai deficiency on the part of both the innovators and of those to whom the innovations must be made credible. There is merit therefore in exploring radical approaches to ways of configuring the conceptual elements which are the basis for any social innovation — and relating them to the forms of imagery currently favoured (for good reason) by politicians.