Technocrats or Intellectuals? Reflections on the Role of Housing Researchers as Social Scientists

Like all social scientists, housing researchers must consider their role as knowledge producers in a changing social world. Questions about the appropriate means and ends of social research raise important considerations about policy impact, research quality and the public value of social inquiry. Answering these questions is not helped by the binary between the natural and the social sciences, which has created hierarchies of knowledge in which we have become comfortable and complacent with distinctions between “agency” and “structure”, “soft” and “hard” data; “objective” and “subjective” phenomena and “material” and “discursive” realities. Underpinning these distinctions is a fundamental tension between different rationalities, such as the difference between what Aristotle called techne (technical rationality) and phronesis (value rationality). Research that clarifies the risks and problems faced by contemporary societies should embrace both a value and technical rationality. In the first part of the paper I argue that much of what constitutes institutionally funded housing research, at least in Australia, has been dominated by a technical rationality; with much less attention being given to the significance of values and ethics in clarifying the problems of our time. In the final part of the paper I consider how housing researchers might reframe problems, design methods of inquiry and communicate their findings in a way that contributes to public debate.