How Ideas Govern Public Life: A Conversation with Mark Bevir

What can we know about the social world, and how much of it can we control? How high are the stakes in the battle between positivism and interpretive social science? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Mark Pennington (King’s College London) and Mark Bevir (UC Berkeley) discuss wide-ranging questions about the influence of philosophy and social science on public policy. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook, twitter or instagram (@csgskcl). The Guests Mark Bevir is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for British Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He is also Professor of Governance, United Nations University (MERIT) and Distinguished Research Professor, Swansea University. Born and raised in London, Mark moved to Berkeley in January 2000, having worked previously at universities in India and the UK. He has held visiting fellowships in Australia, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Norway, South Korea, UK, and USA. Currently he is the general editor of The Oxford History of Political Thought, and he has been an editor of Journal of the Philosophy of History, associate editor of Journal of Moral Philosophy, President of the Society for the Philosophy of History, and Chair of the Interpretive Politics Group (PSA). Mark has done policy work for governmental organizations in Asia, Europe, and North America, as well as for the United Nations and its agencies. Mark’s research interests in political theory include moral philosophy, political philosophy, and history of political thought. His methodological interests cover philosophy of social science, philosophy of history, and history of social science. His work on public policy focuses on organization theory, democratic theory, and governance. Skip Ahead 0:55: I wonder if you could start by what you’ve been working on most recently, perhaps the book on interpretive social science. 1:55: What is distinctive about the interpretive approach? We have the typical dichotomy between the interpretive or hermeneutic approach to social science and a more positivist view. And positivism is associated with some notion that you can read off almost in a mechanical way people’s behaviour by understanding background conditions, whether they’re economic incentives… or macro-structural influences. 5:29: It seems to me that if you adopt that approach--- I take the point that there’s a difference between particular epistemological foundations for social science and attachment to particular methods—but it seems to me nonetheless that if you do adopt this kind of [interpretive] approach, the implication is, to really get an appreciation of the meanings people attach to their actions or the beliefs they have or the traditions they’re situated in, you have to get up close with the actors. You have to try to be in their heads, and that does imply a more ethnographic approach. 8:48: One of the areas where you’ve applied this interpretive method to great effect is in trying to understand changes in governance relationships, especially within public sector organizations in the last 20-30 years. As I understand it, what your work points to is the influence of a particular set of social scientific beliefs about the problems that face hierarchical forms of state bureaucracy. And your argument is that initially this was questioned from a market-liberal perspective, public choice theory emphasising contracts and markets as an alternative to hierarchy, and then later we have the movement towards joined up governance approaches often associated with New Labour in the UK. And this is another set of social scientific ideas that markets produce excessive fragmentation and they need to be reintegrated in some sense. You make a very powerful claim that essentially i