Understanding Human Need 2e. Dean, Hartley
– issued in 1997. The concept was intended to capture the intention expressed in Jacques Delors’ call for a social dimension to the European Union and to establish a dialogue or dialectique between economic and social policy concerns (W. Beck et al, 1997). Social quality was to be a multidimensional concept, through which to evaluate European citizens’ enjoyment of economic security (as a matter of social justice), social inclusion (through forms of participation), social cohesion (by way of social recognition) and personal empowerment (from the exercise of compassion and social responsiveness). The theoretical and empirical development of the concept was furthered by the European Foundation on Social Quality, which in 2013 became the International Association of Social Quality (www.socialquality.org) and now defines social quality as ‘the extent to which people are able to participate in social relationships under conditions which enhance their well-being, capacity and individual potential’. This ‘new vision’ is focused on the objective, subjective and normative conditions of life around the world. The theoretical elaboration of the social quality concept has become somewhat complex (Baers et al, 2005; van der Maesen & Walker, 2012). The components of social quality have been conceptualised in relation to ‘tensions’ between macro and micro level concerns on the one hand and between the organisational and the community level on the other. Each of these tensions have been conceptualised in part through Jürgen Habermas’ (1987) celebrated distinction between system and life-world, and this common influence is reflected in a certain amount of conflation within the modelling process. As presented, social quality is not of itself a unitary concept. Nevertheless, the analysis resonates in certain respects with the approach to human need developed in this book. We shall touch again on the social quality model in Chapter 6.
Another alternative approach to social well-being has been provided through Bill Jordan’s notion of ‘social value’ (2008). This concept is more vaguely specified yet more encompassing than that of social quality. Jordan’s argument is that the ascendancy of an economic model of welfare represented by the Washington Consensus, the marketisation of public service delivery and the promotion of self-provisioning – especially in the Anglophone countries – have crowded out the socially valuable personal relationships, the trust and the participation that sustain the quality of people’s lives. Economic theory, he argues, reinterprets and remoulds the functioning of social institutions and cultural traditions as if they are contracts for individual utility maximisation. Utility becomes ‘a single calculus, and a single currency for exchange’ (p 62). In this context Jordan advances his own critique of the increasingly hegemonic concept, social capital (Field, 2003). Social capital theory blames the Easterlin paradox (see earlier) on deficiencies of social capital, whereas Jordan blames it on the destruction of social value. Social value is presented as an alternative to social capital, and the source of human well-being. There are resonances between Jordan’s arguments and those of other thinkers referred to at various stages throughout this book, including Marx, Baudrillard, Honneth and Douglas (who we shall specifically consider in a moment).
Another multidimensional and multidisciplinary conceptual framework addressed to well-being in a global context was developed by the ESRC Well-being in Developing Countries Research Group at the University of Bath. Their framework rested on five ‘key ideas’: 1) The centrality of social human being; 2) Harm and needs; 3) Meaning, culture and identity; 4) Time and processes; 5) Resourcefulness, resilience and adaptation (McGregor, 2007: 321). Here is a set of concerns that may be held in common by different disciplines from across the social sciences and which can all be encompassed by a term such as ‘well-being’. However, the resulting approach, like that used to define social quality, is complex. It lacks the parsimony or elegance to be hoped for in an effective or enduring theoretical framework. It turns ‘well-being’ into a convenient but loosely defined portmanteau term. Nonetheless, the first of the five key ideas – the centrality of social human being – explicitly emphasises relational as opposed to individualistic approaches and the sense in which it is through social being that the wholeness of the person is established.
McGregor and Jordan both expressly amplify the claim by the anthropologist Mary Douglas that it is still social, not market, relations that provide the cultural symbols and the meanings that underlie all human exchanges (for example, 1982). It is a claim that may be considered in the context of the thumbnail sketch of human history in Chapter 1. Douglas and Ney point to the way that positivist and behavioural social science are premised paradoxically on the asocial individual person. The whole person – the locus of human transactions and the constructor of myth and meaning – is missing; replaced by a ‘choosing machine’ (1998: 184). Douglas and Ney acknowledge that, potentially, their argument is ‘implicitly reactionary yet radical at the same time’ (1998: 4). They recall Sahlin’s claim that pre-modern hunting gathering societies are not necessarily needy, because their wants are scarce and their means plentiful (see earlier). But Douglas and Ney clearly do not advocate an enforced return to a supposedly carefree Stone Age existence. Certainly, human need is not solely satisfied by access to material goods; it also involves persons as cultural and political creatures, whose prime need is to communicate with others and who, in communication with others, make moral judgements about their needs.
Certain social scientists from within different disciplines have attempted to frame more insightful notions of relationality. For example, as an economist Bruni (2010) reflects on the idea of ‘relational goods’. And as a psycho-therapist Gergen (2015) reflects on interpretive methods for understanding clients’ lived experiences of relational processes. Relationships between human beings are to be valued for the ways they assist, support or help to shape the achievement of individual or personal well-being. But from the perspective of the concept of sociality discussed in Chapter 2 they may also be regarded in a more fundamental sense constitutive of human well-being.
Insights into relational well-being or relationality are similarly offered by emerging psycho-social approaches in social policy (Stenner & Taylor, 2008; D. Taylor, 2011), which contend that relational well-being is a social process, not an individual outcome; it is a socially situated experience, not a subjective state. Certainly, this entails a thick rather than a thin conception of human sociality. As David Taylor succinctly puts it, ‘there is no such thing as individual well-being outside human relationships’ (2018: 9). And though Taylor contends that need and well-being ‘refer to two distinct components of human life’, Marx’s claim that the human essence lies in ‘the ensemble of human relations’ (Donati, 2013: 352) would suggest that human need and relational well-being may be regarded as effectively coterminous.
The ambiguous ‘cultural turn’ affecting the social sciences that began in the 1970s (for example, J. Clarke, 1999) opened the door to the recognition of diversity and difference; to post-structuralist understandings of the production of meaning; and to cultural as much as structural forms of explanation. Elements of this turn assisted our understanding of, but also resonated with, the processes of cultural individualisation alluded to earlier and coincided with the ‘death of the social’ (Rose, 1996): that is to say the process by which – to invoke, once again, Habermas’ terminology (1987) – the ‘life world’ has been colonised by ‘the system’; by which social institutions have, increasingly, been taken over by the market and subjected to market principles; by which awareness of the ‘social’ has been displaced by preoccupation with the