The alternative enriches and sustains "objective" economic analysis by addressing analytical blindspots in traditional theorizing

(Sandra, Can Feminist Thought Make Economics More Objective, Feminist Economics 1:1)

Feminists in the social sciences encounter a double burden in justifying their claims.' As Janet Seiz (1993: 190) puts the point: [F]eminist historians of thought seeking to demonstrate that gender bias has had serious consequences in economics can expect to meet with a double resistance: one, a resistance to feminist characterizations of gender relations and calls for change, and two, a resistance to any arguments about the role of external values in economic inquiry. The two issues are related since those who care about supporting women's values and interests are often perceived by the disciplines to be intruding damaging political elements into research that is presumed otherwise to be value-free. Should social values and interests play a role in economic inquiry? Here feminist researchers confront the fact that widely recognized problems with the old, self-confident "logics of explanation" for the natural sciences are still largely unrecognized or ignored in those mainstream social sciences that model their research processes on those of the natural sciences. It is dear now that the natural sciences always have been and, indeed, must be saturated not only with such science-wide, "constitutive" values as desires for accuracy, comprehensiveness and preserving the data, but also with more local, "contextual" values such as, for example, a fascination with scarcity, competition, hierarchy and accumulating power over others, or with plenitude, cooperation, equality, and distributing power as widely as possible.2 Everyone has always recognized the importance of the constitutive values and interests in advancing the growth of knowledge, for some such set is necessary to get sciences under way at all. It is only the contextual ones that have been thought problematic. According to the conventional philosophies of science, the methods of the sciences are supposed to eliminate these contextual kinds of normative elements from the results of research, leaving only "information" that is neutral ("positive") to those social, psychological, political and economic normative commitments that make societies culturally distinctive.3 However, feminists have joined other critics of the older philosophies of science in pointing out that contextual values, such as androcentrism, in fact function as constitutive ones (as Helen Longino, 1990, put the point) in all of the social sciences and biology, constructing scientific projects that express and serve the projects only of the dominant institutions from the design and direction of which women have systematically been excluded (cf. DonnaJ. Haraway 1989; Sandra Harding 1986, 1991; Evelyn Fox Keller 1985; Carolyn Merchant 1980). Parallel arguments have long been made about bourgeois, racist and Eurocentric values and interests (cf. Susantha Goonatilake 1984; StephenJay Gould 1981; Haraway 1989; Harding 1993; Ashis Nandy 1990; Joseph Needham 1969; Patrick Petitjean et al. 1992; Sardar Sardar 1988). Moreover, feminists have also shown that at least some of the constitutive values and interests, ones such as simplicity, comprehensiveness, and preserving the data, have political effects in the very same senses that contextual values do; thus they are not only "internal" or apolitical at all (cf., e.g., Longino, forthcoming). Finally, it has become clear that some contextual values and interests, instead of deteriorating the quality of research in the natural sciences, improve it (cf. Thomas S. Kuhn 1970; Needham 1969). Thus neutrality, in the sense of freedom from aU social values and interests, is neither possible nor desirable. If this is true for the natural sciences, on what grounds could it still be claimed possible and desirable to exclude all values and interests from social research? How ironic if the "positivist" philosophy now increasingly regarded as misleading for the natural sciences were to remain dominant only in the social sciences. The social sciences would benefit from more vigorously examining how for their research, too, these findings hold. First, economics research cannot achieve value- and interest-neutrality for it must be saturated not only with constitutive but also contextual values and interests. Second, contextual values and interests, ones that "intrude" from the social communities within which economics research occurs, often function as constitutive ones. And third, constitutive ones, themselves supposedly only internal to economics research and, therefore, neutral to contested external values and interests, in fact are not neutral in this way for they "take sides" with "external" value/interest positions. In economics, feminists have identified numerous androcentric values and interests that have shaped the fundamental concepts and analytic methods of economics. For example, Julie Nelson argues that the dominant definition of economics as dealing with "choice in the face of scarcity" reflects gender bias: Defining the subject of economics as individual choice makes the detached cogito, not the material world or real persons in the material world, the center of study. Nature, childhood, bodily needs, and human connectedness, cut off from 'masculine' concern in the Cartesian split, remain safely out of the limelight. (Nelson 1993a: 26; see also Nelson 1993b) Sociologist Paula England also argues that the archetypical rational economic man pervading economic theory is generated from an androcentric "separative model" of human nature. Consequently, economic models are likely both to represent men's life-experiences better than those of women and to serve men's interests at the expense of women's (England 1993). Diana Strassmann examines ways in which economists' seemingly neutral prescriptions regarding analytic method limit "the kinds of explanations that the discipline can provide" and constrain "the pattern of acceptable disagreement" in ways which make it extremely difficult for feminists and others working for social justice to be heard in the profession (Strassmann 1993a: 54-5; see also Strassmann 1993b). Nancy Folbre (1991) has traced the history of economists' concepts of labor and national income, showing how women's unwaged work in the home came not to be counted as part of what society counted as labor, and how the fruits of this work came to be excluded from society's "national product." In other work (e.g. 1982) she criticizes both neoclassical and Marxian economists for their unduly "rosy view" of economic relations between women and men in the household. (See also Heidi Hartmann 1981.) And Seiz (1992) discusses arguments about how the standard analytic techniques of mainstream economics obscure the exercise of power. (See also Seiz 1993.) These thinkers are arguing that an exclusive centering of those values and interests important to the dominant institutions can provide only a partial and distorted account of how economic relations actually work. In order to generate economic theory that is more comprehensive and accurate, research must value - be interested in - nature, childhood, bodily needs, human connectedness, women's work in the household, the gender-differing values and interests within every household and gendered power relations more generally. The neutrality ideal (ideal of "positivity") itself, they are arguing, has been shown to limit the empirical and theoretical adequacy of economic theories. However, in spite of feminism's undeniable challenges to conventional assumptions, feminist research can nevertheless still be justified in ways that are perfectly reasonable from the perspective even of those very same conventional philosophies of science, as Seiz and others have argued. In other words, the conventional philosophies of science contain conflicting assumptions about how to arrive at reliable knowledge claims; feminist projects force some of these conflicts to come to our attention. In periods of "normal research," to borrow a contrast from Thomas Kuhn's work, researchers don't have to pay much attention to such philosophical issues (Kuhn 1970). "If it's working well, don't fix it" is an economical way to distribute a research community's energies! But whenever challenges arise to the general adequacy of a field's knowledge claims rather than only to some specific claim, then researchers sooner or later find that they have to go back and re-examine the adequacy of the general assumptions they are making about such issues as the standards for objectivity, good method and the like. My project here is to show how the ideal of objectivity is one of those conventional resources that can be recovered for understanding how feminist research successfully addresses central concerns of the older philosophies of science as well as of feminist theory. However, it would be equally accurate to say that I am concerned to show how feminist research makes an important contribution to achieving more accurate, comprehensive, realistic and useful philosophies of sciences and research methods. The three decades of social studies of science referred to earlier (including feminist work) made clear that the neutrality ideal has weakened standards for maximizing objectivity, for it precludes actively seeking socially marginalized locations or vantage points - "standpoints" - from which to generate analyses capable of identifying and critically examining such culture-wide assumptions as Eurocentric or androcentric ones. The solution is not to abandon the goal of objectivity as many mainstream and some feminist theorists have argued, but to strengthen its standards. Standards for maximizing objectivity can and should be strengthened so that they are more useful for achieving the greater accuracy and comprehensiveness of scientific accounts that are not beholden to power. (7-11)