The wisdom of Dusty Springfield

Image: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0819778/

Several years ago I was better known among my friends for my singing voice rather than my research endeavours! I have had the priviledge of singing at a number of weddings and wedding receptions, and Dusty Springfield’s song ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ would periodically feature on the set list. There’s a great line in the middle 8 which says ‘learning from each other’s knowin’ and I’ve been doing a lot of that these last couple of weeks.

To start with I discovered that a chap called Peter Beresford had published a book called ‘Participatory Ideology – from exclusion to involvement‘ which seemed like it might be relevant to my research. Bristol University Press did a podcast which I listened to, where Beresford talked about the notion that people have ideologies (values/beliefs and associated actions) which shape how they perceive and engage with the world. In my mind, that lines up nicely with Haltung in Social Pedagogy which is how someone’s underlying set of values/beliefs/ethics underpins how they might work with people. Now, I knew about Haltung, but for some reason I hadn’t considered that ideologies might impact how participation works or is facilitated by someone. I don’t know why I hadn’t connected the dots on that, but I have now!

Oxford Languages (who provide the English dictionary services for Google) defines ideology as being ‘a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.’ So it’s not just thoughts and opinions, but something which shapes or facilitates those thoughts into actions and activities.

This means that what someone thinks about another person – whether conciously and knowingly, or unconciously and thus unknowingly – will shape how they treat them, what they believe that person is capable of, what they assume their values, morals and behaviour to be and even whether that person is worthy of their time and attention.

I appreciate that all sounds very obvious, but the impact of someone’s ideology on their work could be profound if they’re not aware of it. For example: let’s say that Bob works in a charity that works with people who are homesless or vulnerably housed. His organisation requires him to treat their clients with dignity and respect, which he does. But Bob’s ideology or beliefs about homeless people are heavily informed by his father’s beliefs: people who become homeless just aren’t capable of managing the demands of a normal life. It’s not their fault exactly, but they just don’t ‘have it in them’ to cope with rent, bills etc.

Bob hasn’t recognised this underpinning ideology or set of beliefs, so while he’s very nice and supportive to the people he works with, underneath it all he doesn’t actually believe that they are capable of sustaining positive change in their lives. This means that he doesn’t spot the signs or signals that someone is prepared to set up up or take small risks to make big changes, because he he’s either not looking for them, assumes it’s just talk, or that they’ll relapse anyway. So he doesn’t support that opportunity for change…instead he simply helps them maintain the status quo, because that’s all he believes his clients are capable of.

Our ideology or underpinning beliefs and values can have a huge impact on what we do and how we do it. It’s actually the same place where unconcious bias sits – views that we hold, which affect our actions, but which we’re not aware of.

OK, so that’s the first thing – hold that thought.

The second thing was another podcast, this time hosted by Adam Grant which comes from the ‘Re-thinking’ series. In this episode he interviews Merve Emre about emotional intelligence and how it may have become used as a tool for corporate control, which follows on from a piece she wrote for The New Yorker. Emre did a review of Daniel Goleman’s book ‘Emotional Intelligence’ which burst on to the scene in 1995. The reprinted book, unchanged from its original form, included examples of good and poor uses of emotional intelligence, which Goleman attributes to poor emotional control or ‘mean-spiritedness’. Unhappy with the extreme examples offered by Goleman, Emre sought to research the original sources and found that some key information had been omitted: the social context of the incidents which Goleman had cited as defining examples of poor emotional control.

Looking up Goleman’s sources, one soon discerns a pattern in what has been left out. The father who shot his daughter? At the time, in 1994, he was living in West Monroe, Louisiana; the state had the highest rate of poverty in the country, and the city’s residents were telling reporters that they couldn’t even visit a shopping mall without the fear of being robbed in the parking lot. The chief deputy on duty that night, interviewed by the Associated Press after the shooting, said that it revealed “how scared people are in their homes these days.” The heroin addict who killed the two young women? The example is an older one, from 1963, and a more familiar story than Goleman lets on. The heroin addict, who was white, was not caught for more than a year, while the police arrested and extracted a confession from a young Black man, George Whitmore, Jr.; the Supreme Court later called the case the country’s “most conspicuous example” of police coercion. And the boy who stabbed his physics teacher? He was a Jamaican immigrant living in southern Florida who allegedly tried to kill himself along with his teacher. A judge found the boy to be temporarily insane owing to “his obsession with academic excellence” and his conviction that he would rather die than fail to attend Harvard Medical School. American élite higher education remained, for him, the key that would unlock the good life.

Social context i.e. people’s life experience, had not been taken into account as a contributing factor when Goleman was assessing emotional intelligence.

In the podcast, Grant adds that the famous marshmallow experiment by Walter Mischel from Stanford University had also not taken social context into account; indeed his first cohort of test subjects came from the University’s nursery. Interestingly, further research was done with a much larger cohort from more diverse backgrounds:

A replication attempt with a sample from a more diverse population, over 10 times larger than the original study, showed only half the effect of the original study. The replication suggested that economic background, rather than willpower, explained the other half.

Again, we find that social context has a bearing on children’s ability to, in the case of the marshmallow experiment, delay gratification, or perhaps from Goleman’s point of view, exercise emotional control.

“How does this relate to Dusty Springfield?” I hear you ask, absentmindly reaching for a marshmallow…

Well, it comes back to that line in the song: “Learnin’ from each other’s knowin’”. I feel like I’m discovering bits of jigsaw pieces in all sorts of places and drawing them together to make a new picture. I went along to the first Restorative Practice – Community of Inquiry session for 2025 this morning, and John Swindell was talking about Restorative Leadership. During the discussion after his talk, a group of us around the table were reflecting on the challenges of establishing restorative leadership and practice in an organisation if everyone doesn’t buy into it. “It’s a cultural thing,” someone said, “The culture is the underpinning thing which makes it possible, because if everyone believes in it, then it’ll work.”

And so we come full-circle to ideology again.

I haven’t created it yet, but in my mind is a fuzzy out-of-focus venn-diagram which shows: ideology | beliefs | values | social context | self-awareness | emotional intelligence all floating around and overlapping with each other. These and other factors impact the way in which people respond to different situations, how good they are at interpreting those situations* and how they then choose to respond to them.

And as practitioners working with people in the community, we need to have all of this floating in the back of our minds when we’re running engagement sessions or focus groups, because all of these elements are in play, whether we know them all or not….

I think I’ll end this post with a great quote from Brene Brown:

…we’re not talking about soft skills here. This is not soft skills, this is some of the hardest, if not the hardest work we’ll ever do in our lives…

It comes from the first ever ‘Dare to Lead’ podcast in 2020, and you can listen or read the transcript here.

*This relates in a way to resilience. It’s the difference between “Why does this always happen to me/us?” and “Sigh. Ok, that’s another thing to add to the pile on my plate.” The extent to which people are ‘destined’ to have bad-luck and therefore it’s personal, compared to ‘S**t happens, but it could have happened to anyone, so we’ll just roll with it’.