The history of social inventions

Stuart Conger

The following is extracted from a longer article which first appeared in the Futurist. Conger was responsible for setting up a Canadian Social Inventions Centre called Saskatchewan NewStart. This ran on an experimental basis from 1967 to 1972 and focused on developing new methods of counselling and training adults.

What is a Social Invention?

A social invention is a new law, organisation or procedure that changes the way in which people relate to themselves or to each other, either individually or collectively. Examples of laws that are social inventions include:

1. The Poor Law of 1388, which first gave the poor the right to relief;

2. The Indenture of Children Act of 1601, which spelled out the terms under which children were bound to another person or family;

3. The English Bill of Rights of 1689;

4. The Compulsory School Attendance Act in Prussia in 1717;

5. The Swiss Unemployment Insurance Act of 1789;

6. The laws against cruelty to children that were enacted in the United States after 1875, at which time the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals demonstrated that it was possible to prosecute parents for the abuse of children under laws against cruelty to animals. (We had laws to protect animals before we had them to protect children.)

Social procedures v. social organizations

Social inventions include both organisations and procedures.

A procedure is a method that might be used by many organisations in many contexts. For example: examinations, instructional methods, curriculum design, mental tests, guidance, probation, instructional TV, programmed instruction and behaviour modification.

Organisational social inventions are typified by schools, service clubs, Boy Scouts, mental health associations, women's institutes, child guidance clinics, jails, community colleges, the YMCA and churches.

'Once an organisation is invented it seldom concerns itself with inventing new procedural methods for the delivering of its services or objectives'

Once an organisation is invented it seldom concerns itself with inventing new procedural methods for the delivering of its services or objectives. Instead, it becomes consumed with developing methods of self-maintenance and extension. The restriction of employment to teachers in educational institutions, to social workers in welfare agencies, etc, is intended to preserve territorial imperatives and prevents cross breeding of ideas or methods. Thus, the invention of teachers' contracts, teacher training institutions, jurisdictions, etc, becomes the focus for social inventions in organisations. Therefore, most instrumental social inventions can be expected to be made outside the institutions in which they should be utilised. This is why we need social invention centres that are separate from service delivery institutions. It is because of the inherent threat to the latter of a new procedure, however, that they do not advocate such research centres. A very interesting example is the College of Education that conducts research on teaching - even on new methods - but does not implement the new methods in its own institutions. The difficulty of a social institution in adopting new ways does suggest the value of establishing alternative social institutions and removing the monopoly given to most existing social institutions.

'Most instrumental social inventions are made outside the institutions in which they should be utilised'

Examples of organisations that were important social inventions would include the following:

Procedures that represent social invention would include:

A social invention such as the law court, school, municipal government or prison, spawns many ancillary inventions that ultimately create a social system. For instance, the social system developed around the civil law court includes the judge, jury, lawyer, plea, coroner, justice of the peace, code of law and law schools. Each component of the system was itself an invention, but adapted to fit the system.

Each social system comprises a series of social inventions. Some systems, such as education, are relatively developed, while other systems, such as intergroup relations, have so few methods to rely on that the system is more a constellation of problems than a cluster of solutions.

Medicine has developed a system for inventing better methods of curing and preventing disease, and people recognise this when they support medical research. By contrast, education does not have a well-developed system for the invention of new methods of education. Other social systems such as welfare and corrections are very stable as far as their technology is concerned because they have not established research laboratories at all, and hence, improvements in these areas can hardly be expected, except at a very slow rate.

Some of our social problems in Canada do not even have a system of social technologies to provide relief and hence we can anticipate continued frustration with little hope of improvement. A critical example is the burgeoning problem of racial and lingustic discord in Canada. The social technology for dealing with this problem does not exist and no real efforts are being made to develop it. Among the needed approaches are vastly improved methods of (1) teaching languages, (2) overcoming prejudice, (3) creating and sustaining dialogue, and (4) fostering equality between groups. The present methods that are available are so crude that while they may be used to force progress in one area, they create backlash in another. For instance, efforts to make more people bilingual apparently increase prejudice, and, therefore, our programmes in the entire area of racial and linguistic reconciliation amount to a zero sum game. The elements or components of the system act to maintain the set status quo rather than to encourage progress.

Our present systems of law, education, welfare and municipal government can be directly traced back two, three, four or five thousand years, and changes over the years have modified the system, but not created entirely new systems. Furthermore, social systems as a rule operate as monopolies which, of course, tend to be less susceptible to change or replacement. The citizen cannot choose whether to attend a school, jail, court or welfare agency.

Slow Adoption

If you consider transportation, you find the citizen has several separate choices of systems that he can select, e.g. bus, train, car, snowmobile and motorcycle. Each is separately owned and operated, or manufactured and sold, thus giving the citizen real choice. A prime invention spawned each system: the car, for instance, prompted the invention of motels, credit cards, paved highways, service stations, drive-ins, driver training schools, traffic police, parking meters, shopping centres and automobile associations.

'It takes about 50 years for a new educational invention to come into use in half the schools'

When we look at education today we see signs of people chafing at the monopolistic education system which includes schools, universities, colleges of education, departments of education and teachers' unions. These act as a constellation interacting in mutual maintenance and stability. Studies have shown that it takes about 50 years for a new educational invention to come into use in half the schools. Other social institutions take just as long to adopt new improved methods.

Because of the monopolistic nature of our social institutions and systems, and their difficulty in adapting to new circumstances or achieving a significant measure of self-renewal, it may be as necessary to invent new social institutions as to invent new laws or procedures.

At the same time, however, our social problems are growing in severity and people are no longer docile about being in jail, unemployed, poor and discriminated against, and they are using television, strikes, boycotts, demonstrations and even violence to draw attention to their problems.

Agencies cannot adapt

Present organisations that are almost overwhelmed by the sheer demand to provide services on a minimum budget cannot be expected to invent new methods. Sometimes such agencies are not able to adapt sufficiently to accept new social inventions. A similar situation would have been to expect railways to invent a better alternative means of transportation. They were not even prepared to adopt the car when it was invented. We would still be in the railway age, and the car would still be an awkward means of transportation, if the automobile had been given to the railways to develop.

Yet, this is precisely what is done with our social problems and innovations. If a new educational method, such as programmed learning, is invented, which does not require a stand-up teacher, it is assigned to stand-up teachers to try it out, and naturally, they find it is not very good.

'Better methods of penal reform will be devised only by people who have no direct or indirect interest in maintaining the present system'

For the same reasons, there has been little progress in the reformation of criminals since Pope Clement invented penitentiaries in 1700. Research and innovation in prisons has been assigned to prison officials, and they are no more likely to develop a new method than the railways were to have invented the car. Better methods of penal reform will be devised only by people who have no direct or indirect interest in maintaining the present system.

Need new 'improved' product

It is a fact of commercial life that it is necessary to come up with a 'new improved' product each year. Sometimes an innovation is an improvement of substance, sometimes of style. Sometimes the improvement represents a new generation of the product, and sometimes it fails abysmally. The Ford Motor Company devoted huge amounts of technical and consumer research to design the Edsel, but the car was not popular with the public. As a company. Ford was able to discontinue the Edsel, but if the Edsel had been developed by a governmental agency, it would still be in production and would be given to under-developed countries as foreign aid or as a bonus for buying our wheat.

When the Edsel failed, Ford did not give up its consumer and technical research, but used them to develop other cars such as the Thunderbird and Mustang, which proved successful.

We must do the same with our social programmes. We must see them as stages in the evolution of truly valuable and important social technologies.

One of the problems that we face in stimulating social inventions is the general lack of a recognition that they are necessary. People recognise that cancer can be cured only by medical research, but they do not yet realise that intergroup relations can be resolved through inventing better social methods, and the thing that really is needed is a number of social invention centres to invent these better methods on a continuous basis.

People enjoy being 'guinea pigs'

Some people believe that it is wrong to experiment with human beings. They argue that a researcher who uses people for his own purposes denies them freedom, dignity and self-direction and is probably tricking them into believing or doing certain things that are contrary to their nature or integrity.

'It is a fact of commercial life that it is necessary to come up with a 'new improved' product each year. We must do the same with our social programmes'

There is a popular notion that people do not want to be treated as 'guinea pigs', but the notion is wrong. People enjoy the special attention that they get when they are the subjects in an experiment. People want to be treated as individual human beings. Workers on the assembly line do not receive this treatment. Typists in a clerical pool seldom get it. A child in a class of 40 students does not get it. But subjects in social experiments do get the special attention of someone (the researcher), who pays special attention to them and is genuinely interested in their reactions. Indeed, the good feeling that the experimenter creates in his human guinea pigs, because he is really interested in them, has been known to ruin some experiments.

Experimenting with people means that you assess them at some point in time, try a new programme with some, and an old programme with others, then you assess the subjects again to see if those who followed the new programme are any better off than those who took part in the old. Technically, you are not experimenting with people but with programmes, because if you find that the people are no better off for participating in the new programme, you fault the programme and say we have to develop a better programme.

We can be assured that people do not mind being subjects in human experiments. They will give their cooperation in the project for the privilege of being treated as human beings.

Saskatchewan NewStart has experimented with up to 110 people in its laboratory at one time. Our programme has traded two things for the cooperation of these adults: (a) a commitment to help them meet their objectives in further education and (2) some greater attention to them as people.

At the present time we in Canada are doing little to invent better methods of reducing poverty and other social ills. These age-old problems are getting more serious and there is an immediate need for new methods of resolving social problems. The methods can only be invented by a process of action research which conceives, conducts and evaluates new approaches in real-life situations, in other words, social invention centres.

The methods that are used today to solve social problems are about 4,000 years old, whereas the methods used to solve medical, agricultural, transportation and industrial problems are about 25 years old. If we can establish social invention centres, we can create solutions to our age-old social problems, and can rid society of racial strife, mental illness, crime and poverty. This is a goal worth working for.

Stuart Conger, 572 Highcroft Avenue, Ottawa, Canada K1Z 5J5 (tel 613 729 4913).

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