Support oriented social science

This chapter investigates the role of social research in a society developing through ‘improvisation’ and ‘crafting communities’; it examines two concrete cases of knowledge production in cooperation with practice. Knowledge gives direction to the process of crafting and improvising but is simultaneously a product of that very process. A researcher who is engaged in social improvement will be a participant and an observer at the same time. Social science has always played this role in the tradition of action research, a tradition that goes back to the 1940s, when Kurt Lewin was seeking a more productive and supportive form of research. In an improvising society this manifestation of pragmatism becomes radicalized because researchers are no longer unproblematically granted a monopoly on knowledge.