The contours of the “social quality perspective” have recently been revised and developed by a team of scholars from Eastern and Western Europe. This began to take shape in 2016 and was extended in a working paper of the International Association of Social Quality with contributions from the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (IASQ 2019: 48–56)—namely, Working Paper 17/b. The latter discussion became more important in response to the tragedy of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022. This raised the urgency of the question of what the policy application of the social quality perspective means.
One of the chief aims of this work was to explicate the modes of understanding that arise from the ontological and epistemological innovation that social quality theory presents, especially with regard to how these modes are structured. An important task to understand for example the difference between this perspective and existing other main stream approaches. Therefore it is also important to distinguish a fourth framework, as happened in Working Paper 17b, namely the policy framework of the thematic fields, to the procedural framework of societal dimensions, the analytical framework of social quality factors and the conceptual framework that make up the overarching theory. At the same time it is important to summarize these distinctions in order to contextualize the papers presented within this issue. In Working Paper 20 the whole of this configuration of frameworks has been further elaborated (IASQ 2023). The scheme below is derived from this working paper.
At the most philosophically general level the first three social quality frameworks, namely the analytical, the procedural and the policy frameworks, are well-founded and permanently intrinsically related to the conceptual framework. It is oriented on the ontology of “the social”—as a replacement for the vacuous adjective “social,” which derives from a neoliberal understanding of society—as the basis for theorizing social quality (IASQ 2019: 49). The analytical framework comprises three sets of social quality factors, namely, (1) the constitutional; (2) the conditional; and (3) the normative (IASQ 2019: 11). These function as epistemological instruments to understand and appreciate processes within and between the societal dimensions.
Social quality configuration of frameworks
Citation: The International Journal of Social Quality 13, 2; 10.3167/IJSQ.2023.130201
The procedural framework comprises four societal dimensions: (1) the sociopolitical/legal; (2) the socioeconomic/financial; (3) the sociocultural/wellbeing; and (4) the socioenvironmental/ecological dimensions. These dimensions were explicated in Working Paper 17/b. In turn, these dimensions influence the policy framework, which concerns four thematic fields: (1) communication technologies; (2) welfare (employment, public health, education, precarity, aging, etc.); (3) urban circumstances and their current transformations; and (4) overall sustainability. In the very first sense, this policy-related framework came to the fore in Working Paper 17/b (IASQ 2019: 56). Each of the policy framework fields is the subject of considerable debate, but together they are strongly influenced by processes in and between the procedural framework dimensions. As such, the procedural framework delivers the conditions to be able to disentangle the myriad aspects of the four thematic fields of the policy framework, and to understand them from a more detailed and comprehensive point of view. To elaborate this further is one of the challenges of the social quality perspective.
It is important to position the articles in this issue within this overview of the social quality perspective, theoretically and practically. The issues of the first two articles concern specially the second of the thematic fields of the policy framework as a lens to look at three issues, namely, health, gender, and precarity, respectively and the third article in particular the third thematic field, namely concerning an ecological disaster. They each address the effects of these respective issues on the daily circumstances of the populations they consider.
The point of departure for each of these articles is the 2012 publication Social Quality: From Theory to Indicators. There, the emphasis was placed—alongside the completed set of indicators to measure the outcomes of policies oriented toward change in (at that time) four conditional factors—of the analytical framework as a point of departure for at that time at random chosen aspects of the procedural and policy frameworks (Beck et al. 2012: 46–69). Each article reflects particular “interferences” that occur between the analytical, procedural, and policy frameworks. But there remains a missing link, which is a detailed explication of the outcomes of processes, arising from each dimension of the procedural framework explored. This indicates a necessary challenge for future work. Furthermore, the third article—concerning the ecological disaster in Pakistan in 2022—refers to aspects of the ‘social capital approach’ as a guide to understanding processes regarding this disaster. As such, this leads the authors to an excursus in which they reflect on the differences between the social capital approach and the social quality perspective. This reflection may be applied in the near future to understand the differences with other mainstream approaches.
Implicit in these three articles, together with many previous articles published in the Journal of Social Quality, is the reciprocal relationship between practice and theory. This was emphasized in the double-themed issue on the societal impacts of the COVID pandemic (Nijhuis and Van der Maesen et al. 2021). With this in mind, the editors considered it important also to identify the differences between the social capital approach and the social quality perspective. Therefore, the three articles may contribute to a greater understanding of the heuristic meaning of the whole architecture of four frameworks referred to above (IASQ 2023).
New empirical information adjusts theoretical reflections. In turn, these reflections modify the approach of the supposed empirical reality. As Ira Gollobin comments in relation to the grandmasters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “Practice and theory are united by their truth—their concordance with the objective nature of things—and are separated from it by the falsity of either. There can be nothing which is true in theory but false in practice, and vice-versa. Theory purely for the theory's sake is confined to a vacuum, and practice purely for practice's sake is derived of a compass” (Gollobin 1986: 383).
For this reason, this issue concludes with an article about some scientific and philosophical considerations that may help further develop the conceptual framework of the social quality perspective as well. This may have consequences for the 2023 configuration, as published above. These considerations focus on the question of understanding some of the sustainability challenges that reflect what it means to be human in the context of Nature. This is rapidly becoming an argument for bridging the wide gap that currently exists between natural scientists and human scientists, as discussed recently in this journal (Westbroek et al. 2020). The criticism of anthropocentrism necessitates sharpening the concepts of “the social” and humans as “social beings,” concepts that form the basis of the three other social quality frameworks (i.e., analytical, procedural, and policy).
The First Three Articles: Health in India, Gender in Ukraine, and the Ecological Crisis in Pakistan
As argued, the first three articles in this issue address various aspects of societal resilience and overall sustainability, from the perspectives of Indian, Ukrainian, Pakistani, and UK scholars. Equally, each article indicates how these aspects of daily life integrate with societal socioeconomic and economic security issues. Together, they present a picture of how these societal complexities—interpreted by the analytical and procedural frameworks—comprise a range of conditional factors and societal dimensions. Furthermore, it is vital to resist the tendency to isolate each factor and dimension as an entirely discrete facet of societal life. Such an approach lends itself to a false one-dimensional determinism. The interconnection between all these factors and dimensions reflects the need for an overarching perspective, as is posited by the architecture or configuration of the four above-mentioned social quality frameworks.
First article about the public health in the State of Haryana in India
Arshad Ahmed, Kheraj, Amjed Ali, Kiran Rani, and Meenaxy consider the availability and access to healthcare facilities in the Indian state of Haryana. The main finding reveals the significant disparity that exists between specific districts when it comes to the provision of public primary healthcare services. The same holds true regarding the below-standard scores of most districts. The Human Development Index (HDI) includes access to primary healthcare infrastructure as a crucial component of sustainable development is related to the United Nations’ third Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being).
The authors argue that healthcare is not simply a means to well-being, greater socioeconomic security, equity in respect of income distribution, and access to financial resources. It is also a vital contributor to three other social quality conditions—namely, social inclusion, social cohesion, and social empowerment—establishing baselines for the normative factors as solidarity, human dignity, and human rights. As such, the authors place their analysis of the deficiencies of primary healthcare provision in Haryana within a broader context of sociocultural and sociopolitical societal processes and “ethics.” State and provincial healthcare policies largely fail to account for these societal dimensions.
In detail, the study maps out indicators that establish a composite ranking of the availability and accessibility of primary healthcare services across the state. The standout finding is the wide variation in both the provision of and access to healthcare across Haryana's twenty-two districts. Such variations are less about differences in demography and are more about levels of population dispersal and urbanization, as is often the case in situations of intermediate development.
The thorough analysis provided by the authors indicates a clear sociopolitical process at play. The state's northern districts can command access to relatively higher levels of healthcare resources, when compared to those in the southern districts. Even so, the state capital (Gurugram) was ranked among the lowest resourced districts. This all indicates that policy was organized around factors other than the discriminatory activities of a central urban political elite. These factors require illumination and should be investigated in future research.
As the authors conclude, there are normative factors conditioning access to available healthcare. The allocation of resources depends on the political context. Those districts that are seen as having less of a sociopolitical, socioeconomic, or sociocultural voice within the state's politics appear to receive disproportionately lower levels of healthcare provision. That represents a moral failure in the way in which the sociopolitical and sociocultural dimensions of inclusion, cohesion, and solidarity are distributed in the crucial sphere of healthcare accessibility.
Second article about legal rights between the gender in Ukraine also in contemporary time of war
Political engagement of a different nature is the theme of the article from a team of Ukrainian scholars, namely, Liudmyla Protosavitska, Olena Yara, and Vira Kachur. For these authors, it is the unequal distribution of legal rights between the genders that provides the focus on societal (in)equality and the principle of the inalienable universal human right to equality before the law for all genders and both sexes (SDG 5: Gender Equality). This global goal encompasses promoting, enforcing, and monitoring an end to gender-based discrimination. Equally, it promotes the recognition of the economic and cultural values of domestic, unpaid, and non-market-based work together with ensuring that women are enabled to fully participate in all forms of political and economic public life.
The research on which this article is based was, inevitably, disrupted by the catastrophic invasion of Ukraine's sovereign territory by the Russian state in February 2022. This led to a more qualitative and impressionistic research endeavor focused on the everyday lived experience of gender, which is a key feature of social quality. Gender divisions and “traditional” binary roles—allocated culturally between the sexes in Ukrainian society—were identified in respect of political representation, economic and educational participation, and health outcomes. These are the main dimensions included in the Global Gender Gap reports.
In each of these spheres of social quality—social inclusion, socioeconomic security, social cohesion, and social empowerment—women are deeply disadvantaged and subject to inequality and discrimination. But there were peculiarities related to the position of women that were inherited from the period during which Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union. Under Soviet communism, there was an ideology of the strong woman working outside the home. Even so, child-rearing, domestic work, and family care are still regarded as “natural” female roles, while men are discriminated against in respect of taking on conventional “women's work” in schooling, cleaning, and domestic service. As such, gender divisions are reinforced on both sides of the sex divide.
Yet, everything changed after 24 February 2022. The authors report that “in all four societal dimensions, the territory, people, and society of Ukraine are completely devastated. The crisis affects all Ukrainians, without exception.” Despite this, a disproportionate burden has fallen on women to sustain the structures of everyday life, particularly given the conscription of men into the military. Women have become the arbiters of balance in daily life. During the horrors of war, new gender divisions, sex stereotypes, and opportunities for female professionalization have emerged. Inevitably, the post-wartime situation in respect of gender remains unpredictable. Nevertheless, Ukraine's experience may provide a template for transformation across Europe toward achieving greater gender equality while addressing the challenges of a renewed fascistic far right.
Third article about societal aspects of the recent ecological disaster in Pakistan
A further complexity of the twenty-first-century polycrisis, related to the impact of climate change and its socioenvironmental dimension of societal life, is the focus for the article from a team of Pakistani and UK scholars, namely, Fariya Hashmat, Tony Bradley, Ahmad Nawaz, and Asad Ghalib. This article considers the impact of the 2022 floods in the Indus Valley on the resilience of households affected by catastrophic environmental events. How to respond to the displacement of flood-affected households is a significant issue for federal and provincial administrations across many parts of South Asia. In particular, the state seeks to build on the personal and societal capacities of households in order to allocate resources in the most efficient way.
The research team began with the hypothesis that those households with greater financial, technical, human, and social capital endowments would be most able to withstand the threat of displacement. But the findings of a survey of households in one district revealed a more nuanced picture of responsiveness. The researchers used the Disaster Adaptation and Resilience Scale (DARS) to measure the ways in which households identified their own responsiveness. Based on findings from the survey, households were grouped into four categories: “vulnerable,” “absorptive,” “adaptive,” and “transformational.” These reflected two pairs of dichotomies. Households could be distinguished as having lower or higher capital attributes and as being either able to remain in their pre-flood location, or to require displacement to a new domicile further away from the river basin. The authors assumed that households would seek to avoid the societal upheaval of displacement. Those with the most limited resources were vulnerable to future shocks and required the most help to withstand the impact of subsequent flooding by being displaced. By contrast, some households, with modest capital, were able to absorb the impact and remain in their prior location. Other households, with greater capital stocks, remained but in a way that saw them adapt to their physical and social circumstances in order to prepare for new flood events.
More surprising, for the researchers at least, was a fourth group of households. These had higher-level resources but “gamed the system” by actively seeking displacement. In this way, they were able to bank on local authorities to transform their situation. While the survey methodology mainly involved gathering quantitative data using the DARS, some more qualitative information was collected. This indicated that some households were able to utilize political connections to enable their transformative displacement. The authors identified these “gatekeepers” as having a strategic capacity, which the state could capitalize on, to enable other households to move around the above-mentioned societal categories from vulnerable, through absorptive and adaptive, to transformational. As such, the study points to further, more ethnographic research needing to be conducted with those groups in the “absorptive” and “transformative” categories.
An Excursion: The Social Quality Perspective and Social Capital Approach
This third article raises an important issue related to social quality research that impinges upon the other contributions to this issue: how to represent and distinguish between conceptions of “social capital” and “social quality.” The social capital concept has become a popular core concept in recent human scientific research.
Nevertheless, it has not been logically framed as an ontological and epistemological framework. Rather, it tends to be deployed in an essentially chaotic and confusing way. It incorporates a range of haphazard meaning systems and hence is open to misinterpretation. In this respect, it is quite different from the concept of social quality, which seeks, through its four frameworks, to distinguish between the strands that social capital inarticulately weaves together. That said, in terms of broad human scientific theory, the different conceptualizations of social capital implicitly connect to the elements of social quality. As Hashmat and her colleagues point out in their Pakistan case study, there are three respective deployments of the social capital theory. These reflect some of the main currents of human scientific discourse and analysis.
First, social capital, as the glue that binds people and networks together, as developed by Robert Putnam (2000) in terms of participation in civic life, is conceived of as a public good that is exercised by the agency of (groups of) persons in society. Putnam's conception reflects the libertarian stance of much American political science. By contrast, from a left-leaning European perspective, Pierre Bourdieu ([1986] 2011) conceives of social capital as a range of political, economic, and cultural resources, access to which is conditioned by the position of classes within the stratified structure of society. For Bourdieu, social capital is fungible, as is any other form of capital, contributing to the power of “capital,” in a Marxian sense, to exercise exploitative societal relations over labor. While it may, superficially, appear that Bourdieu references social capital as a feature of social agency, he uses the term to indicate ways in which norms and access to societal positions are structured and exercised as forms of coercion and control. Between these poles of “social” agency (Putnam) and structure (Bourdieu), James Coleman (1988) describes social capital as the predominant currency for “social” interactionism. It is the lubricant of co-operation and mutual benefit.
Consequently, theories of social capital conflate these three distinct human scientific perspectives without thorough ontological and epistemological elaboration. By contrast, the theory of social quality seeks to disentangle and include them in an ontologically based analytical framework, encompassing various related (personal and conditional) factors and societal dimensions. Putnam's conceptualization is close to that of social quality's conditional factor of “social cohesion” (somehow related to “social empowerment” and “inclusion”). He emphasizes that the amount of trust within society is the stock available for action toward mutual benefit.
By contrast, Bourdieu's depiction indicates the degree to which societal structures enable classes to gain or lose control over “socioeconomic security” (somehow enhanced by degrees of “social inclusion” and “empowerment”). Thence, Coleman's understanding is that social networks (pace Putnam), together with labor market and citizenship rights (pace Bourdieu), culminate in “social inclusion.” As such, a clear articulation of the use of and interrelationships between conditional factors is missing from the various concepts of social capital.
Furthermore, there is no reference to the “socioenvironmental/ecological” as an important condition for sustaining the (social) quality circumstances of daily life. The latter reflects the increasing challenges of a rapidly changing world. Social capital theories largely predated the rise of these universal concerns, as well as the scientific community's awareness of them, inasmuch as we are surrounded by today's climate and biodiversity crises. Increasingly, in the face of today's global environmental challenges, many researchers are turning to issues of ecological equilibrium, social empowerment, and resilience to explain inclusion and cohesion. For example, to comprehensively analyze and understand both the interrelated impacts and causes of the processes involved in the environmental disaster in Pakistan in 2022, it is the multiple components of the social quality analytical framework that are turned to by Hashmat and her colleagues.
We indeed do need comprehensive approaches to be able to cope with the compacities of today's ecological and other crises. Any segmented, one-dimensional approach cannot be effective for explicating or coping with the multidimensionality of the challenges we face. Equally, the limited scope of social capital theories may be traced back to the absence (or concealed implicit presence) of a specific articulated ontology. An elaborated ontology of human existence is quite fundamental to be able to develop a logically matching analytical framework (including factors, processes, perceptions, and so on).
Such a framework needs to provide an articulated, theoretically sound, structured, and applicable research design (Beck et al. 2012). This point is most striking in the deployment of the adjective “social,” which notably is part of the core concept of the theories at stake. Crucially, it is unclear to what ontological pattern or dynamic “the social” refers. This cannot do other than result in the chaotic deployment of concepts and research factors.
In social quality theory, “the social” refers to “the dialectic between processes of human self-realization and the formation of collective identities.” With this process-oriented ontological foundation, a logical configuration of the social quality frameworks (thus including also the policy framework) has emerged. Through this foundation, the exposure of the processes involved in the emergence of societal tensions and contradictions, as well as subsequent human problems, also becomes possible.
The relatively static orientation of the social capital theories toward situations of “capital” instead provide the means to assess the status quo of differential characteristics of communities in relation to societal structures. It is argued that less social capital results in less social cohesion and less social inclusion; more social capital leads to more socioeconomic security and social inclusion. The static character of such an argument does not allow for the analysis of the processes involved in enhancing or obstructing specific levels of social capital. Also, the reciprocity between social capital and its related conditional factors does not come into view. By its scope of included factors and societal dimensions, social quality theory allows for a considerable degree of comprehensiveness. Along the path of its process orientation—on the dynamics of the emergence of and means of dealing with societal and ecological complexities—it offers a key to a greater depth of understanding.
The Fourth Article: To Grasp the Societal and Socioecological Challenges
Several deficiencies in human science theory are tackled in the fourth article, which is by Harry Nijhuis and Peter Herrmann. Specifically, the study addresses the socioenvironmental impacts of the relationship between humans and nature, converging into explorations of the quest for a “rightful place for nature.” The discussion hinges on “the loss of relationality,” “utilitarian approaches,” and “instrumental action” as the main orientations of modern humans’ relationships with nature, which are driven by specific deployments of societal and scientific/technological discourse.
The discussion includes critical reflections on and appraisals of related philosophical views and scientific theories. Segmentation and one-dimensional approaches to understand and deal with today's problematic socioecological complexities, as well as the one-dimensional deployment of technology, are criticized. The authors argue that much of today's tendencies of “derelationing” can be traced back to the ontological and epistemological radical Cartesian dichotomy between humans and nature that had its origins in the Enlightenment.
The authors draw our attention toward various alternative views, each in its own way endorsing the (dialectical) coexistence of humans and nature. The “inescapability” of a dialectical relationship between entities of “all there is” is argued from ontological perspectives, as well as those deriving from physics and human scientific theory. “Ethics” consistently appears as a decisive configuration of forces that drive “anthropocentric” perceptions and the “exploitative” behavior of humans toward nature. The question of what constitutes a coherent and sufficient “ethics” is raised.
Some important tensions between various related issues and perspectives are encountered that require further attention and debate. Among other things, these concern the inclination of rationality (as a basic modern orientation of humans to the world) to become “idealistic” and thus get detached from the “real world”; how to bridge the “communicative” gap that inevitably exists in the coexistence of rational human beings and nature, for instance in our juridical systems; how to bridge the gap (and enhance co-operation) between human and natural scientific discourse; how to create an adequate location of “ethics” as a dynamic subjective and normative attribute, in other ontological and epistemological frameworks, that we deploy to understand and deal with the world; and how to overcome the (self-referential) self-evidentiality of deeply ingrained perceptions through which we understand the world around us and in which we seem to be legitimized to deal with it.
Consequently, tensions between social capital and social quality, and several questions related to humans’ relationship with nature, are reflected in this issue. Many of these topics will be addressed through articles in future issues. Of course, it is a challenge to create a “developmental game” between theory and practice. In this game, on the one hand, comprehensive social quality frameworks can be deployed and, thence, critically discussed in the case studies presented. On the other hand, the frameworks themselves, reflexive in dialogue with these cases, will become learned and develop from these cases. Thus, social quality can further develop into a practicable, valid, and reliable framework for identifying the comprehensive nature of societal and socioecological challenges that we are facing today.
Addendum: Update on the Status of the Proposals for a Koala Park on the NSW Mid North Coast, Australia
In this edition we—Tim Cadman et al—also provide updated colour maps associated with the article “Koalas, Climate, Conservation, and the Community” published in 13.1. A short commentary on subsequent developments in the community campaign to create a World Heritage Area for this beloved marsupial highlights the societal and socio-ecological challenges of reconcilng neo-liberal market ideologies with environmental protection.
References
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