Purists vs Pragmatists in driving social change: which is better?
The Stanford Social Innovation Review Fall 2007 had an interesting article called “Harnessing Purity and Pragmatism” (subscription required).
The point of the article was that people who work for social change tend to fall into two camps — the “work for change from the inside” folks (the pragmatists/compromisers) and the “work for change from the outside” folks (the purists/non-compromisers). The study looked at various NFPs along that spectrum of purity-pragmatism, to look for patterns of outcomes.
Outcomes: the pragmatists did in fact have a bigger measurable impact on the broader society. But, they could only do so thanks to the purists who defined the extreme edge and kept pushing the envelope.
The purists by themselves couldn’t successfully and broadly implement actual changes, because their extremism became self-defeating when applied to the practical situations that required implementation tradeoffs and deal-cutting among various constituencies.
Moderate “pragmatist” organizations tended to die off over time, because they had more trouble getting ongoing support (apparently “we’re moderates” is not a great rallying cry). Meanwhile the “extremist” organizations could always count on their small but devoted core of true believers, for whom “the cause” had almost religious intensity.
The point of the article seemed to be that we as a society need both types of organizations/people — and that we should develop an appreciation for a wide range of “successes” and “impacts” and the value of different approaches — rather than doing the typical human thing, which is to think that everybody who’s not doing it “my way” is wrong.
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