Of Meaning and Metrics

Why perspective matters more than you think.

For many of the most important and challenging endeavors that organizations social sector face, the question is not just what’s happening? but why is this happening? and how does it feel to live this way? This is, i think, the true power of an ethnographic approach. Policy briefs and metrics can tell us what people lack—but not what they value, how they find meaning, or why certain forms of resilience endure when others collapse. That kind of understanding requires more than data. It requires an exploration of different perspectives that is, in many cases, only possible through immersive participant observation research.

The ethnography Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, by sociologist Loïc Wacquant, is one of the most compelling case studies of what happens when a researcher chooses to fully inhabit the world he’s trying to understand, and it changed the way I think about social challenges.

To understand the lives of young black men on Chicago’s South Side, Wacquant joined a gym in the area and literally became a boxer. For three years, he trained and fought alongside the men whose lives he sought to document—seeing the world through their eyes as they navigated poverty, systemic exclusion, and the thin line between survival and collapse. The gym wasn’t just a training ground; it was a moral world full of meaning, ritual, and discipline.

Wacquant describes a moment when he tries to offer the coach’s chair to another fighter, noticing that the man is limping and clearly in pain. The fighter declines, saying he’s too sweaty. But Wacquant realizes he hasn’t been training—he’s not sweaty at all. The excuse is a pretext. Anthropologically speaking, the chair is sacred space that represents coach’s authority. It’s a source of order in an otherwise chaotic world.

This level of contextual understanding illuminates a subtle but powerful source of social change: we often try to address social problems head-on and from the outside, rather than building on localized knowledge and the cultural scaffolding that produces it. The gym on Chicago’s South Side provides social goods that no external intervention could. It is the kind of emergent solution that can be recognized and supported, but not really manufactured.

I have come to think of this like the difference between fertilizing a lawn and improving soil quality—the former may be more straightforward and even produce a more immediate impact, but it requires repeated interventions. The latter, on the other hand, is subtler, more complex, and changes the very nature of the system to produce positive results indefinitely.

Interventions are common, but sustainable change is rare. One of the most misunderstood realities of social sector work is that nobody knows the problem better than those experiencing it, and they often have solutions already in place just waiting to be supported. But you can’t solve problems on local terms without understanding local perspectives.