The importance of contradictions in social intervention

A company in Spain gets bought and bought again. Land reform initiatives take place in northern Zimbabwe. A military academy in the US enforces ostensibly silly regulations in the service of important purposes. A hospital in the UK undertakes an organizational change effort. These are separate events, not particularly unusual ones, taking place in four countries on three continents, in very different types of settings, at first blush with very little in common. Yet together they point to dimensions that are crucial to the purpose of this journal, and they do so primarily by means of the stories they include. In this brief discussion of the very interesting and thought provoking empirical articles in this special issue, I want to reflect on some small part of their contributions, as well as some of the questions they provoke about issues relevant to Intervention Research. In his article here Paul Bate uses Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales 8 as a framework for discussing the organizational change effort in the UK hospital. This is a rhetorical device that enables Bate to present aspects of the change effort as they are experienced and described by each of the participants. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Talesin the 14th century to describe the stories that a group of people traveling as pilgrims to Canterbury tell each other along their journey. Each story is identified with the story-teller, in many cases his or her occupation or equivalent role – thus, the reeve’s tale, the wife of Bath’s tale, the prioress’s tale, the knight’s tale, and so forth. The stories are linked primarily with individuals and their roles, but they tell much about life in England at the time, and about the attitudes and character of the different story tellers. The stories are fictional. Nevertheless; they describe something true. Without Chaucer, we would understand much less about daily life in England at the time than we otherwise do. That these stories are still remembered and serve as a model for other literature even 600 years after they were first composed is a great testament to the power of Chaucer’s writing. Some old stories are very influential, in part because they continue to convey important information.