Exploratory social science, Oxford University Press, 2026

I’ve written a book on exploratory social science for OUP which will come out in the second half of next year It extends various other writings I’ve done (eg for the New Institute in Hamburg or a recent piece on an ‘ARIA for social sciences’) and the annual lecture for the UK Academy of Social Science and at Copenhagen University.  Here is a short summary.

‘Should the social sciences only analyse the past and present?  Or should they also help to design and shape the future? I argue that they should do both.[i]  This is a book about why and how to move from sense-making to world-shaping.  It is about why the world needs to use its best knowledge to map out options for the future, options that better meet our needs.  And it is about how to mobilise the insights and methods of the social sciences, linking what we already know with the possibilities that lie ahead, using a wide range of tools from models and designs to systems maps and methods from the arts.

Behind this lies the moral prerogative that anyone who has accumulated detailed knowledge of how social systems work should apply that knowledge to serve the society that has made that knowledge possible, particularly during a period of profound transitions - away from a carbon-based economy towards one that is generative rather than extractive; to new social contracts and settlements that are both fair and seen to be fair; and to lives surrounded by powerful machine intelligences.

We also need this capability if we are to cope with possible periods of retreat and retrenchment, potentially slower growth; worsening demographic imbalances; and heightened conflict.  Periods of difficulty and crisis need good options perhaps even more than periods of progress: how to handle shortages of food fairly, to manage water supplies, to rebuild after civil wars or create new institutions that can be trusted.  Every society needs options, pathways, and sight of roads ahead. Without them, the pitfalls of pessimism, fatalism and the lurch to extremes are much more likely.

This work is as difficult as it is essential.  There are tools and prompts, many of which I describe, but there are no precise instructions.  The work has to be guided by both tough realism about the facts, and idealism about the possibilities.   Yet the work of design is useful both intrinsically as well as extrinsically. It quickens the mind. It forces clarity and sharpness, as does asking the questions: ‘so what would you do?’ or ‘how would we know if you were wrong?’.

This kind of work is by its nature multi-disciplinary; it needs to be done by teams not just individuals; it involves ‘praxis’ – engagement with action rather than passive detachment; and it is fuelled by argument and interrogation, pulling ideas apart the better to rebuild them.   It is enriched when it engages the people whose lives could be affected by new ideas, seeing the world through their eyes and the rhythms of their lives, according to the principle: ‘nothing for us without us.’

It is helped by history – understanding the many paths taken in the past, including the surprising diversity of human solutions: for example, the remarkable variety of democratic mechanisms, from juries and parliaments to chambers of all kinds, the great variety of corporate forms, from mutuals and cooperatives to publicly listed companies and blockchain-based DAOs, or the even greater diversity of taxes that have been imposed not just on incomes but on everything from beards and windows to sugar in drinks.

And it is helped by openness to different political ideas, resisting rigidity and conformism.  What if the 21st century brings a great reversal of the three freedom drives of the late 20th : towards political freedom (espoused by liberals and democrats), economic freedom (espoused by neoliberals) and technological freedom (espoused by the digital elites)?  What if new forms of technocratic authoritarianism become the norm?   What if national borders once again become far less porous?  What if sharp declines in fertility rates prompt a return to the family as a central issue for politics and policy?  What if the revival of religious faith in much of the world spreads, helped by the much higher fertility rates of groups like the Hutterites in the US and the Haredis in Israel? What if China and India become intellectually dominant, providing frames for social thinking that displace those of the West?   What if more biological and networked ways of seeing the world become mainstream?  Progress in ideas has always come from the clash and recombination of different worldviews. Our era is unlikely to be any different.

Here I use the word ‘exploration’ deliberately, drawing on at least three senses that the word blends together.  One is the sense of a chosen direction.    When we explore, we have some sense of where we want to get to but recognise that what we find may turn out to be very different from our expectations.   A second is the sense of questioning.  While exploring we investigate and discover, as if in a conversation with the landscape around us.   A third is the sense of courage: of leaving behind what’s safe and predictable in the hope of finding new truths and new insights.

These seem to me essential activities for any community or society.  But serious exploration is also a protection against vices, and in particular common vices that I call social zombies, follies and fogs.  The zombies are ideas, arrangements and institutions that have far outlived their usefulness, but survive through inertia. These include intellectual frameworks as well as policies and habits.  They are the malignant forms of tradition.  They are very common, the living dead that surround us.  

The follies are ideas that seem promising on paper, or in the mind, but simply don’t work well in practice, and that were not sufficiently questioned and adapted before being implemented.  The fogs are theories, ideas and emotions that are appealing but are essentially vaporous, trivial distractions that may shape how people see the world, but without sufficient grounding or connection to reality.  They also include moods of anger and outrage that make it impossible to deliberate or reason.  They fill up the mental spaces that might otherwise be devoted to more impactful thought and action.

The tasks of exploration and design I describe in this book can be difficult. They take us to profound and difficult questions:  how much can we ever know about what lies ahead? How much can we design, conceive, or shape in a world of such complexity and uncertainty?  How should we find a space between thinking like artists, with maximum freedom to imagine, and acknowledging the constraints of the real world?

The book makes the case for new ways of organising social science, both in universities and beyond.  Programmes to support and do ‘exploratory social science’ would help to generate more options for addressing the big transitions that lie ahead, whether for governments, businesses, civil society and communities – options for anywhere that there is agency. Their purpose would be to map out landscapes of varying degrees of precision and focus.

Through the course of the book I explain why they’re needed and what they would do.  I look at:

·      The purpose of the social sciences – which from the start were conceived as disciplines for both understanding and shaping societies (Chapter 1)

·      How social sciences retreated from their role in exploration and design and how a series of trends – including quantification and abstraction – delivered advances but also squeezed out this capacity for radical design, often leading to what I call ‘unrealistic realism’ (Chapter 2)

·      The many ways in which social sciences can understand the future, from extrapolation and deduction to the search for hidden laws and use of models (Chapter 3)

·      The many traditions in social science that can be drawn on for exploration and design, including problem-solving methods, methods from product and service design, experiment, systems innovation, transitions theories and many more, all of which offer useful tools for creative thinking (Chapter 4).

·      I then turn in Chapter 5 to specific methods can be used to explore, enact and envision better, helping to take ideas from being ‘thin’ to ‘thick’, sketchy to rich and practical.  These include creativity methods, the use of analogy and stories, construction of models and maquettes, and rapidly evolving methods using large language models and AI to speed up creativity, develop personas and explore scenarios, both good and bad.  All of these emphasise that exploration is a continuous, iterative process, and only rarely involves a straightforward solution to a straightforward problem.

·      Chapter 6 describes the options for organising exploratory social science, both in universities and elsewhere, whether within disciplines or across them.

·      Chapter 7 suggests various fields for applying these methods and shows how exploratory social sciences could have helped avoid some of the pathologies of the Internet, and how these methods could be applied to the challenges of creating a post-carbon economy and society or  dapting to ubiquitous machine intelligence.

·      Chapter 8 offers more theoretical reflections on the nature of exploratory work., including the place of praxis, dialectics, ontology and ethics.

·      Chapter 9 looks at the question of falsifiability and the connection between sharper theorising in social science and the work of exploration, emphasising why it’s often better to be usefully wrong than uselessly right.

·      Chapter 10 sets out how exploration can be taught and learned.   I suggest an analogy with architecture which brings together many different disciplines, from construction and engineering to urban planning and aesthetics, requires a combination of general principles and rules and close attention to context and materials, and at its best closely involves the people who will inhabit the spaces being shaped.

·      Finally, Chapter 11 draws some of the threads together and describes how exploration can once again become a common sense for social scientists. 

At a time when we badly need better designs and strategies for the future, we face a paradoxical situation where the people with the deepest knowledge of fields are discouraged from systematic and creative exploration of the future, while those with the appetite and freedom to explore often lack the necessary knowledge.   As a result, we are living in a golden age of diagnosis but sometimes a dark age when it comes to imaginative prescription, a world of scholarship that is ‘problem-rich, solution-poor.’

The work of preparing a major film or TV series, or a new building, involves years of work, sometimes costs millions of dollars, and draws on the expertise of huge multi-disciplinary teams.  By contrast the work of social design is typically much more casual and thinly funded, even though the stakes are vastly higher.  This cannot be wise.