Practical Pluralism in the Empirical Study of Social Investment

This chapter explores the empirical challenges of understanding the socioeconomic implications of social investment welfare reform. Such understanding is crucial to gauging the pay-offs and pitfalls of social investment, but is also extremely difficult, given the complex character of social investment and its multiple and interacting consequences for work and well-being. Such complexity, the chapter contends, yields an unusually strong tension between relevance and rigour that dooms any dialogue among social scientists and practitioners with clashing methodological commitments. The present study argues in favour of a practical pluralism to facilitate such dialogue. This pluralism entails combining and comparing empirical work across the full spectrum of relevance and rigour. The chapter illustrates the problems and pluralist solutions with a combination of macro-country-year and macro-individual-year analysis of how active labour-market policies (ALMP) affect the poverty of vulnerable citizens.