Applied social research is political. In the light of what has gone before in this book that seems a pretty obvious statement but here I want to spell out exactly what it means. To say applied social research is political is to say:

• (1) that in complex advanced ‘post-democratic’ societies, applied social research is part of the whole political process because it:

• (a) is part of the administrative processes of governance as a whole since it provides crucial learning feedback into all governance systems in relation both to:

• (i) accounts of the actual nature and trajectories of all aspects of the social order – the survey function;

• (ii) accounts of the impact of policy and practice interventions – the evaluation function;

• (b) provides descriptions of the outcomes of the actions of governance systems which can be used to legitimate those governance systems in relation to a set of criteria which emphasise managerial competency rather than political ideology – the legitimation function;

• (c) plays a vital role in relation to processes of consultation and participation which are crucial mechanisms for resolving what Bang (2002) has described as the uncoupling problem for relations between political elites and the rest of us – the engagement function;

• (2) that it is necessarily engaged with the discourse-based politics of academic and professional life and work in relation to status, resources and overall power in those intersecting systems;

• (3) that it has the potential to be part of the basis of an emancipatory politics of social transformation in relation to the central issues which confront us in our lives in a global system in ecological and economic crisis, which dual crisis is reflected in all of the subsystems in which we lead our daily lives – the potential of (and necessity for) praxis.

The task of this conclusion is to see how these things hang together and how the issues raised under numbers (1) and (2) might come together to offer us some possibilities for developing effective praxis in relation to number (3). I am tempted to call (3) the pious exhortatory function since it is raised so often in relation to research practice as a prayer that it might do this without anything very much in the way of practical suggestion as to how it might do it: so a necessary cynicism or let us say pessimism of the intellect is in order.