Discussion paper: - Ray Galvin
Critical realism as a basis for research on overcoming barriers to thermal
renovation of existing homes
Introduction
It is now abundantly clear that human induced greenhouse gas emissions are causing
climate change to an extent that is likely to bring severe damage to human society and
to many other species. The extent to which these emissions need to be reduced has
been amply calculated, and measures have been identified that could contribute to this
reduction in virtually every sphere of life where greenhouse gases are produced. In
other words, we know how to stop global warming.
Yet there is a huge gap between this knowledge and our continued practices. At a
recent conference, Sir John Houghton, former chair of the IPCC, stated that there is
‘no technical problem’ preventing us from reducing greenhouse gases, we just need
the ‘political will’ to do so (Houghton, 2008).
Yet by now it should be clear that such formulations are too simplistic. It seems there
is a good deal preventing us from reducing greenhouse gases, but to date no-one has
made a convincing inventory of the vast array of forces, causes, difficulties,
inhibitions, misconceptions, mistrust, fears, foibles, disorganisation, cash-flow
shortages, ignorance and other obstacles that stand between the world as it is, and a
world of reduced greenhouse gases.
This is especially true of one particular sphere within the range of greenhouse-gas
emitters, namely the energy used to warm our homes. There is an increasing number
of studies as to what prevents thermal renovation of existing homes from proceeding
apace (e.g. IEA, 2007; DCLG, 2006; IEA 2008; Melville, 2007), but only slow
progress is being made in identifying barriers and forming interventions to overcome
them.
Two things are clear. Firstly, there is no simple, straightforward solution to the
problem of how to get people’s homes thermally renovated. Housing – like many
other greenhouse-emitting aspects of life – is richly varied along lines of geography,
culture, wealth, age, local building materials, tenant-landlord relations, local
expertise, local finance arrangements, property rights, and governance impact. A
solution for one particular community in one particular situation might not suit even
the adjacent neighbourhood, let alone the whole world’s housing stock. A great deal
of detailed work needs to be done to find solutions appropriate to each specific area.
Secondly, any solutions that are put forward have to be robust. Thermal renovation is
expensive. It is a big financial commitment for a homeowner, with attendant risks,
and a drain on the public purse where incentives are offered. Solutions found through
research have to be defensible and well-grounded. Although this research will be very
much social in nature, it will not be of much use if it takes refuge in a view of the
relativity of the findings of social science, or confines itself to the interpretive
dimension of discourse.
Hence we need a methodology that is robust enough to produce findings that lead to
policy interventions that work, and at the same time flexible enough to take account
of the many variations of housing needs and aspirations represented in (in this case)
the temperate zones of Europe.
This discussion paper sets out the case for critical realism as a worldview that can
provide the robust approach to truth, together with the flexible approach to reality,
that are demanded by the task at hand. As a philosophy of science, critical realism is
being used more and more in the social sciences, and its reach has now extended into
housing issues (Lawson 2006). It also has the advantage of being a fully integrated
view of reality, across the entire spectrum from physical science to interpretive
discourse. This is important for the issue of thermal renovation of homes, where we
are dealing with realms such as physics, economics, law, psychology and cultural
studies, and being attentive to the forces that run between these.
Beginnings
Critical realism arose in response to dissatisfaction with approaches to knowledge in
science generally, and in the social sciences in particular. Discussion of how our
knowledge of the world is formed, improved, tested, refuted, refined and developed
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has long accompanied the physical sciences. In the early part of the 20th century
physical science was accompanied by positivist notions of truth, whose main
characteristics included a clear distinction between the knower and the known,
together with the view that the world exists independently of our knowledge of it, that
the world is stable, and that it operates according to laws or principles which can be
abstracted from their observed occurrences and generalised to all times and places.
This position was expressed most forcefully by the ‘logical positivists’ associated
with the Vienna Circle. Its boldest assertion was the ‘verification principle,’ which,
though subject to variations among proponents, broadly claimed that for a statement
to qualify as meaningful, its advocate must be able to describe circumstances under
which it could be verified. Hence, for example, the statement ‘There are uranium
deposits in the centre of Pluto’ is meaningful because we can describe the kind of
investigation we would have to undertake in order to verify it (e.g. go to Pluto and dig
through to its core). On the other hand the statement ‘Love is all around’ is not
meaningful because it is not possible to describe robustly how we would verify it.
This would seem severely to limit the possibility of doing social science, since
societies are unstable in time, varied in space, and often seem to operate according to
rules and principles which are difficult to identify, let alone verify.
The most prominent critics of logical positivism included Karl Popper and Ludwig
Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein’s early work, most clearly represented by his Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (Wittgenstein, 1922), was very much in line with logical positivism. In
his later work, however, perhaps most clearly elucidated in his posthumous
publication Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1958), he explored the notion
of meaning, arguing that what is in fact ‘meaningful’ to users of language includes a
far broader range of statements than those of the narrow physical sciences.
The demise of certainty
Popper (1992) pointed out the logical flaws in the verification principle. Firstly, the
principle is itself a statement that cannot be verified, and therefore is, by its own rules,
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meaningless. Secondly, there is no deductive way of verifying any statement that
purports to apply to reality at all times and places. The fact that water boiled at 100
degrees Celsius each of the last 100 times I tested it does not logically, deductively,
imply that it will always do so. The conclusion that it will always boil at 100 degrees
Celsius is drawn using inductive reasoning, which does not have sequential logical
force. The best we could do, it seemed, was to follow David Hume’s notion of the
‘constant conjunctions of events’, in which two events, such as raising the
temperature of a body of water to 100 degrees, and the water boiling, seem regularly
to go together in our experience.
Popper proposed an alternative formulation, the ‘falsification principle,’ which
proposed that a scientific assertion was of value if we could describe the conditions
under which it could be falsified. The statement that water boils at 100 degrees
Celsius is of value because we can describe how it could be falsified, namely, by
doing an experiment in which we raised its temperature to 100 degrees but it did not
boil. There is value in stating, and indeed believing, that water regularly boils at 100
degrees Celsius, until such time as a countervailing event occurs.
While Popper’s formulation saved positivism from foundering on the weakness of
induction, it also introduced new uncertainties. Firstly, a single occurrence of water
not boiling at 100 degrees is unlikely to change the minds of a community of
scientists who have always found it to do so. Scientists are more likely to question the
validity of the rogue case’s experimental design or measurement technique, than
surrender an apparently well-established law of physics.
Nevertheless, scientific views do change, though it usually takes a consistent set of
new occurrences to unseat an established view. But this leads to a further problem: if
a new view overturns an old one, then in what sense can we say that the old one was
true? Taking this further, a scientific explanation that is accepted today may well be
overturned in coming decades by new experimental results. To what extent, then, can
we say that today’s scientific theories represent the truth?
More poignantly, what is the relationship between a scientific theory and the world it
is purporting to describe? If the physical world always behaves the same way, yet our
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theories about it are constantly changing, are our theories really describing the
physical world, or are they merely the constructions of scientists?
This dilemma led to a number of positions in the latter half of the 20th century.
Thomas Kuhn (1970) argued that scientific theories were simply paradigms, or wellorganised, internally coherent ways of describing our experience. A paradigm held
sway in the scientific community for a period of time, and rogue experimental results
were either dismissed, or allowed to modify the paradigm in small ways only. Only
after a succession of incompatible experimental results would a new paradigm arise
that captured the minds of the scientific community and overturned the old one.
Neither the new paradigm, however, nor the old one, could claim to be the ‘truth’
about the world. These paradigms were, rather, organising principles for the
discussion and thought of scientists and others as it stood at that time. Paul
Feyerabend (1975) developed this logic toward an extreme scepticism, in which any
internally coherent paradigm has the same status as any other.
Another approach, pragmatism, has been most clearly developed by Richard Rorty
(1980). Rorty proposed that scientific theories are best seen in terms of their
usefulness, rather than any claim to their truth. One theory might be more useful than
another, because it enables us to achieve more, live better, get more reward for our
efforts. A new theory might be more useful than an old one because it enables us to
achieve more than the old one or to develop more useful technologies.
This begs the question, of course, as to why one theory should prove to be more useful
than another. As Sayer (2000:42) asks, what is it about the theory and its relationship
to the world we live in that makes it more useful to us than an older, discarded theory?
For Rorty this question is irrelevant, and claims that a theory is ‘true’ are simply a
form of self-congratulation that the theory is more useful than that which it is
supplanting.
The rise of the social sciences
The social sciences developed within this milieu of contested issues surrounding the
nature of science. Two broad approaches became evident early on.
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Firstly, there were those who maintained that the methodology and outlook of the
natural sciences could be applied directly to the social sciences, a viewpoint often
termed ‘naturalism’. A statistical survey, for example, could reveal social trends and
associations that could be analysed in the same way as rainfall and temperature
statistics. This view assumed some uniformity in the methodological approach of the
natural sciences, a view that is itself contested (e.g. Steel 2005). A more relevant issue
is whether the notion of cause and effect can be applied to the social sciences. Despite
the different methodological approaches of natural sciences as diverse as astronomy
and microbiology, they do have in common the view that one thing can affect another
in a causal chain, akin to a billiard ball being caused to move due to the impact of the
cue ball. Sayer (2000) points out that much social science proceeds on the untested
assumption that cause and effect operates in social phenomena in much the same way
as it does in the physical realm.
A second approach, at the opposite end of the spectrum, was to focus on the
discourses of the subject of study, and be attentive to the meanings these discourses
constructed. This interpretive approach recognised that the social realities people deal
with are not time-independent givens from the realm of physics, but notions arising
out of discussions and interactions that are often unique to a particular group in a
particular time and space, that are constantly changing in time within the same
community, and that are constructed by the discourse of the community rather than
given from outside. Further, they cannot usually be apprehended by a detached
researcher looking in from the outside, but often only come into view during a
personal, conversational encounter between the researcher and the person or group
being researched. The ‘subject-object’ dichotomy of the traditional hard sciences
cannot be maintained if the researcher wants to find out what is really going on. Even
more interesting, in this very encounter between researcher and researched it is
possible, and sometimes even inevitable, that new social realities are constructed at
the moment of the research. For example, if I ask a Maori woman a question about a
word in her language that she has never been asked about before, she might have an
insight about her local community for the first time in her life. This reality might not
have existed before the research was undertaken, yet it can be seen as a valid outcome
of the research.
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This sensitivity to discourse is often accompanied by scepticism about the value of
that which is not discourse, or, concomitantly, an elevating of discourse to the one and
only worthy field of study.
Here one needs to clarify a further distinction. On the one hand, it is important to be
aware of the impact of discourse on people’s lives, happiness, freedom and
possibilities. Much of Michel Foucault’s work was concerned to explore and expose
this phenomenon. Discourse about sanity and insanity, for example, can have the
effect of disempowering groups within society who are deemed to be insane or
abnormal (Foucault, 1961). Such discourse is usually constructed and promulgated
among privileged groups, who often gain further privilege by the effect of their
discourses (Parker 1999). Showing up these discourses for what they are –
‘deconstructing’ them – enables us to see that their impact often derives not from any
correspondence with the way the world is, but from the force of the discourse itself. A
social science project examining barriers to thermal renovation will be attentive to
such discourses, as they may be very powerful determinants of the decisions of certain
groups as to whether or not to renovate.
But this is a different matter from elevating discourse to the one and only field of
study. One could imagine a study on barriers to thermal renovation of homes, in
which interest was confined entirely to homeowners’ discourse as to why they do or
do not thermally renovate. The disadvantage of such an approach is that some
discourses might be based on false information – such as a misunderstanding of the
payback rules for renovation loans. Such research would miss the opportunity to find
out what people’s response would be to knowledge of the actual payback rules (which
exist regardless of the discourses of particular groups). Since the purpose of this
research is to identify ways of increasing thermal renovation of homes, confining it to
an exploration of discourse is not sufficient.
In its extreme, such research is interested in, for example, only the discourse about
poverty, rather than its physical or political causes. This decoupling of the discourse
about destructive social phenomena from their physical and political causes was a
major factor that motivated Roy Bhaskar to develop a philosophy of science that
robustly combined the physical and the social.
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Bhaskar’s ‘critical realism’ (originally called ‘transcendental realism’) is a robust,
tightly argued account of the world that straddles the physical and social sciences and
the full spectrum of territory in between. Its usefulness in a study of the reasons
people do or do not thermally renovate their homes will become clear as we outline its
principal features.
Fallibilism
To begin with, critical realism is ‘falliblist’, both in its formulation and in the view it
takes of its research conclusions. This means that whatever it says is open to being
proved wrong. It does not merely admit to being contestable, in the sense that
different worldviews may attract different adherents who vie for their worldview of
choice on the basis of its usefulness, elegance, cultural appropriateness, or some other
criteria other than whether or not it is the truth about the world. Critical realism goes
the whole way and claims to be true. But not in a dogmatic fashion. Rather, it makes
the case for its worldview in such a way that its opponents may potentially prove it to
be false, or at least in need of modification.
The same approach applies to the details of critical realist research findings in any
particular field of study. A critical realist might conclude, for example, that
community A is slow to thermally renovate their homes for reasons B and C, but only
when factor D is strongly present. The researcher might claim this is the ‘truth’ of the
matter, and that therefore policymakers can depend on it in forming interventions. But
at the same time, she admits her findings are fallible – that another researcher might
approach the subject of study with a fuller grasp and a more penetrating set of
questions, and conclude that she was wrong, for example, about reason B – but
perhaps not about C and D. This need not invalidate her research. Until the second
researcher comes along, the first researcher’s findings are the best that policymakers
have, and the problem with reason B might blunt their interventions but not make
them ineffective.
For our study of barriers to thermal renovation this ‘fallibilism’ is a decisive
advantage. The point of our study is not to provide merely another perspective on the
issue, or merely to examine how people talk about the issue. It is to find reasons with
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a degree of robustness sufficient to justify the development of particular policy
interventions. To qualify as robust, a finding has belong to the realm of those things
that can potentially be proven false, yet have withstood sufficient questioning to give
policymakers confidence that, on the basis of the finding, it is worth investing time
and effort to form a corresponding intervention. Meanwhile the door remains open to
future investigators refining – or in some cases overturning – the finding on the basis
of better research.
Ontology and Epistemology
Secondly – and closely related to the above – critical realism makes a clear distinction
between ontology (what the world is) and epistemology (what we know about what the
world is).
There is a long-running discussion about the degree to which we can know the world
as it really is. At one extreme, so-called ‘naïve realism’ is the view that our
knowledge of the world is directly mediated, that knowing is a simple, straightforward
matter of receiving an imprint in our minds that directly represents or images or
corresponds to what is there in the world before us, i.e. that epistemology is a one-toone mapping of ontology. At the other extreme is the view that it is pointless to talk of
ontology at all, since what we deal with in life is what we know, rather than some
remote realm of objects that constantly eludes stable knowledge of itself.
A central claim of critical realism is that the world as it is (known or unknown) must
be a reality distinct from our knowledge of it because of the simple fact that it often
surprises us. Our knowledge serves us well in getting round in the world most of the
time, but at times we find, usually to our surprise, that it clearly does not correspond
to the way the world is. We bump into things, chemicals blow up in our face,
tsunamis arise unexpected and cause untold havoc. The most straightforward way of
explaining this is that there is a real world there, which is not the same as our
knowledge of it. This applies to knowledge about discourse as much as to knowledge
of the realm of physics. The meanings and interpretations our human subjects reveal
to us, or formulate in our presence, can be just as unexpected as the way two
chemicals react together under heat and pressure.
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Even if one accepts this distinction between the ontological and the epistemological,
there is a view that it cannot always be preserved, particularly in the social sciences.
This is because the social science researcher constructs her subjects’ discourses with
them, as she interviews them, and therefore the object of study is her (new)
knowledge. But this view is based on a lack of clear thinking. As Sayer (2000:34)
points out, interpreting our subjects’ discourse via our own does not mean we
construct it or produce it. Rather, we construe it or mediate it. If a researcher is
seeking robustly to discover what her subjects’ discourses are, she will be extremely
careful to listen to their constructions rather than her own. In this study of barriers to
thermal renovation it will be vitally important to hold to this distinction. Whatever the
researcher thinks about the need for homes to be warmer, or the injustices or
otherwise of interest rates or building laws for particular groups, her findings can only
have credibility if a researcher of any social or political viewpoint would have heard
the same discourses if listening in to the interview.
Of course, there are situations, such as in action research, where the researcher may
deliberately set out to co-construct discourses with the persons in the subject of study.
This may well be the case in parts of this study on approaches to thermal renovation.
For example it might turn out to be appropriate to gather together a group consisting
of landlords, tenants, bankers, renovators and municipality staff and put to the group a
suggestion as to how to overcome a particular barrier to renovation, based on
knowledge already gained from the discourses of various players and the physical,
economic and social setting. In this case, the researcher will be a full participant in the
constructing of discourse, so that, at least at times during the meeting, the
phenomenon under study and his knowledge of it will be one and the same thing. But
later, when the researcher reports on it, he is then in the position of knowing it as a
phenomenon separate from his knowledge of it. The fact that it was his discourse does
not stop him knowing what it was and being able to talk about it from outside it,
having reflected on it and perhaps put it within a larger perspective. Even here, the
ontological-epistemological distinction has been preserved.
This is not to claim that a researcher is approaching his work value-free. The
researchers’ views on such issues as fuel poverty, public funding priorities, and who
should shoulder the financial burden of CO2 reductions made by homeowners, will
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influence the questions being asked and the framing of the ‘barriers’ identified. But
these will be made explicit. Indeed, we will argue that there is already a set
identifiable values in the literature on barriers to thermal renovation, and the call to
find ways of overcoming these barriers presupposes further values.
The crucial point here, though, is that, whatever the researcher’s values, the discourse
constructed in the research conversation and the researcher’s knowledge of it are not
the same thing. The realities we are studying, and our knowledge of them, are distinct
things.
Structures, necessity and contingency
Thirdly, in terms of critical realism as a philosophical system and worldview, the
most groundbreaking insight in its development was Bhaskar’s understanding of the
structure that lay behind the world that is apprehended by scientists. There has been
much discussion in the philosophy of science as to whether the ‘laws of nature’ are
indeed realities that exist in the world, or are better seen as constructions of human
communities, constructions that are formed to explain or give continuity to observed
phenomena. In the latter decades of the 20th century, social constructionist views of
science increasingly expressed the latter view (e.g. Berger and Luckmann, 1966), as
did pragmatists (e.g. Rorty, 1980). If, as we have seen, scientific theories are
constantly being modified or overturned, are the laws of nature they purport to
describe real things at all, or is it not more convincing to remain agnostic about such
invisible realities and speak instead about the usefulness of one formulation verses
another?
Bhaskar traced the provenance of this way of thinking to Hume’s notion of the
‘constant conjunctions of events’. For Hume, a scientist who causes water to rise in
temperature to 100 degrees Celsius also causes it to boil. The two events conjoin, and
so become associated within a scientific theory. This leaves the field open for positing
what, if anything, lies behind the conjunction of events. A humean would say that,
while it is interesting to note that scientists habitually cause the two outcomes
simultaneously, that does not necessarily imply the existence of an invisible,
underlying law. Hume’s formulation is as compatible with logical positivism as it is
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with Popper’s falsification principle or with Rorty’s pragmatism or Berger and
Luckmann’s social constructionism.
Bhaskar’s decisive insight, however, was that the scientist who causes water to rise in
temperature to 100 degrees Celsius does not cause it to boil. All the scientist did was
cause it to rise in temperature. Something else caused it to boil. This was the event the
scientist did not cause. All scientific research that advances our knowledge, notes
Bhaskar, is of this character. The scientist deliberately sets out to cause something, or
a set of things, to happen, and then observes the associated things that she did not
cause to happen. The things the scientist does not cause to happen are the events of
real interest to scientists.
If the scientist did not cause the water to boil, what did? Here we are driven, argues
Bhaskar, to posit the existence of an invisible reality. We may call this a law of
nature, or merely a structure, or a tendency, but there is no escaping its reality.
Because it transcends (goes beyond) our observations, Bhaskar originally called it a
‘transcendent’ reality. This was a useful term, as it reminds us that these realities are
simply not accessible to human observation. We can observe what they cause physical
reality to do, but we cannot observe them directly. We are left to theorise about them,
express them in formulae such as F = Ma, or use metaphorical language to try to
‘picture’ them.
This belief in the existence of invisible realities that act to make one event cause
another has far reaching implications and sets critical realism apart from a number of
worldviews that have had considerable currency in the social sciences. Views that
embrace relativism, pragmatism or interpretivism are directly challenged by a view
that there are real structures in the world that exist and play themselves out regardless
of how we interpret our experience or construct our discourse. In our investigations as
to why some people do not renovate their homes, we will not merely be comparing
one view with another (relativism), nor merely finding which beliefs have more
usefulness than others (pragmatism) nor merely being attentive to how people
construct meaning in their attitudes to thermal renovation (interpretivism). Rather, we
will be seeking to understand the structures and tendencies in the world, including
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those represented only locally, that do in fact influence people’s decisions to or not to
renovate.
Tendencies and social phenomena; contingency and necessity
Fourthly, critical realism points out that there are clear differences between tendencies
in the realm of the physical sciences and tendencies in other spheres. In the realm of
the physical sciences, ‘tendencies’ exert influence directly, without the need for
human intermediaries. In the realm of social phenomena they also exert influence, but
indirectly. When the temperature plunges to zero degrees Celsius, water freezes and
many people put warm coats on. The former effect is direct, or unmediated, but the
latter happens only via human decision-making. Further, the former effect is
guaranteed, or ‘necessary’ (assuming the water is clean and at atmospheric pressure),
while the latter is ‘contingent’, i.e. dependent on other enabling circumstances.
Critical realists distinguish between necessary and contingent events, though some of
their expressions lack clarity. There are really two axes of distinction, one between
physical and social effects, and another between necessary and contingent effects.
Physical effects include the tendency for water to freeze at 0 degrees Celsius, but this
is contingent upon its pressure and purity. Social effects include the tendency for
people to put on extra clothing when the temperature drops, but whether it leads them
to put a coat on is contingent upon factors such as how well-equipped their wardrobes
are, whether they are inside at the time, how well their home is heated, what attitudes
they have towards consumption of fuel, and whether they bother to make a decision at
all.
Further, as critical realists point out, these invisible ‘tendencies’ not only arise from
the physical realm. Social phenomena also give rise to tendencies. Interest rates exert
tendencies, depending on their level – the tendency to avoid borrowing and to
increase saving, or vice-versa. Property rights, equal opportunities legislation,
unemployment rates and wage levels also exert tendencies. These tendencies do not
operate directly on physical matter, like the tendency for water to boil, but influence
people via human discourse and decision-making. Tendencies of various types can
combine: meteorological phenomena have combined with interest rates and wage
levels to exert influence on thousands of Britons to buy retirement homes in Spain.
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Tendencies can also arise from discourse itself. If a dominant discourse among a
social group in a particular place is that external wall insulation is ugly and destroys
the beauty of brick house facades, this discourse can act as a ‘tendency’ that causes
(i.e. provides a reason for) people who live in brick houses to refrain from renovating.
Since we will be investigating why people make certain decisions, we must look at all
the tendencies exerting influence on those decisions: meteorology, laws of heat
conduction, interest rates, discourse about the reputation of renovation firms,
discourse about consumption and architecture, local presence of qualified engineering
personnel, and so on.
Hence in our study of barriers to thermal renovation of homes we need to be attentive
to all the different types of tendencies exerting influence on our subjects of study.
Critrical realism provides us with a rationale to treat all types of ‘tendencies’ as real.
Though we cannot always observe them directly we can design research to reveal
their effects and hence identify them. Having done so, we can form recommendations
to policymakers as to what kind of interventions are appropriate to take account of
them.
Local, global and situated effects
Fifthly, tendencies do not always have the same effects in every part of the world.
Interest rates of 8% do not deter people in New Zealand from renovating their homes
to the same extent that they might in the Germany, where interest rates are 4.25%.
Turkish homeowners in Vienna might be more interested in thermal renovation than
native Austrian homeowners, for reasons to do with pride at having become
homeowners in a society where this is still rare for eastern immigrant peoples.
Hence the contingency associated with tendencies has a local, situated element to it.
As Guy and Shove (2000) demonstrate through a range of housing case studies,
‘energy-related practices are socially specific and localized in terms of time and
context.’ (p.11). Further, specific types of thermal renovation happen in ways that are
highly dependent on local conditions in time and space. Even if interest rates,
property rights, government incentives, etc., are consistent nationally, different
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communities in specific suburbs and at specific times may have unique sets of
tendencies exerted upon them in home renovation, and they respond accordingly.
A critical realist approach acknowledges the situated nature of discourse and decisionmaking, yet does not conclude that local phenomena situated in a particular place,
time and culture therefore have no relevance to the wider picture. To begin with,
many of the tendencies acting at a local, situated level are either global, national, or
operating at least more widely than the local level. An important type of finding,
whose relevance can be seen widely, is to identify what happens when this
constellation of geographically distributed tendencies meets with a particular set of
local circumstances. This can provide insights for policymakers in terms of how their
interventions might need to be modified or made more flexible, so that they can be
adjusted for local conditions. Further, although each community is in some sense
unique, there are often parallels and commonalities. Issues that arose during a
coordinated renovation program in Lithuania (Kazakevi ius et al., 2002) could have
some relevance to a future program in Slovenia, since both countries shared
communist-era building styles and home ownership structures.
Knowledge and social construction – all knowledge is socially constructed
Sixthly, critical realists’ view that reality exists in and of itself, whether or not it is
known, is fully compatible with their view that all knowledge is socially constructed
(Bhaskar 1989). This becomes clear when we see the point that the word itself, and
our (imperfect) knowledge of it, are two different things. It is not knowledge that
exists in and of itself, but the objects and events that knowers are seeking to know.
Knowledge exists only where it is constructed by knowers
Critical realism therefore distinguishes between intransitive and transitive dimensions
of reality (Sayer 2000:10, Bhaskar 1989). The intransitive is the objects of study, i.e.
what is. The transitive is the discourse that makes up our knowledge of, and reflection
on, the objects of study. Both are real, and the transitive can also function as an object
of study. A community’s knowledge of a physical phenomenon can have impacts on
the community as significant as those of the phenomenon itself.
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These points are significant for our study of barriers to thermal renovation because it
is important to be clear as to what effects are the result of phenomena independent of
the group being studied, and what effects are attributable to the knowledge
constructed within that group. For example, motivation to renovate may be influenced
by popular discourse about winter temperatures, in different ways than by the actual
temperatures themselves. We need to be able to discover how a physical phenomenon
affects both decisions and discourse, and how the consequent discourse further effects
decisions.
Conclusion
Critical realism provides a worldview that enables us to deal with causes and effects
across the full spectrum of types of reality that impinge upon people’s decisions
regarding the thermal renovation of their homes and residential rental properties. This
includes the mechanisms of physics; the effects of standing human agreements such
as in property rights, interest rates and building regulations; the presence or absence
of local technical facilities and expertise; the discourses within the communities being
studied; and the complexities of such forces acting together. It provides a rationale for
doing justice to local, situated phenomena while also justifying proposals that go
beyond the confines of specific groups.
Because of its attention to different types of reality, critical realism challenges the
researcher to think extremely carefully about what tendencies are influencing what
realities, and to work hard at forming appropriate research questions that can bring
these realities to light. Further, because of its fallibilist stance, it enables the
researcher to claim there is truth in his results, even though this is not the whole truth
and may be supplemented or even supplanted by better research later on.
Finally, it offers an ontology that enables us to claim our research results are
defensible across a range of viewpoints, so that they can lead to policymakers risking
the investment of time and money to form interventions which have a good chance of
working.
16
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