UnderstandingSociety

Levels of the social

2013-05-20T21:51:00.000-04:00

We can examine social life at many levels of granularity -- from ordinary individual social behavior to small groups to cities and regions to the global system of communication and extraction. Is there any basis for thinking one level is better than another for the social sciences?

There are two kinds of considerations that might be used as grounds for answering this question. One is about scientific feasibility and the other is about explanatory scope.

The feasibility line goes this way. It might be that higher level social phenomena are substantially less orderly than lower level phenomena. This means that we might be able to arrive at more confident and comprehensible analysis at the lower level than the higher level. Features of indeterminacy, contingency, and complexity might mean that we can't expect to have strong and empirically well supported analyses of ensembles like cities or trading systems. And we might find that studies of individual-level social behavior are more tractable and empirically defensible.

The explanatory scope consideration cuts in the opposite direction. We would like to be able to explain processes like urbanization, ethnic conflict, and the social role of religion. These processes are very interesting, and they are consequential as well. So we would like to have some reliable hypotheses about some of the causal dynamics that animate them. And studies that focus on individual-level processes may not shed much light on these higher-level processes.

So tractability perhaps pushes us towards the lower level, while an appetite for explanatory scope pushes us towards theorizing and investigating higher levels.

There is something appealing about a definition of the social sciences that tries to answer the actor-level kind of question: what are the drivers of real social behavior, in a variety of settings? What are the springs of individual action? How do environment and experience influence people's actions? This approach would fall within the sociological theory of the actor; it would largely overlap with social and developmental psychology, with a scoop of ethnomethodology on the side.

And this approach wouldn't be wholly limited to the individual. Some of the learning we do about cooperation, aggression, and social cognition might well provide a basis for explanation of high-level social phenomena such as ethnic conflict or the spread of agricultural practices.

But it also seems credible that we can learn some important things about the higher-level processes and structures as well. Political scientists have some robust ideas about how institutions work. Economists have succeeded in identifying some of the dynamics of trading systems and technology change. Urban sociologists are able to discern some of the processes of neighborhood transformation. So it is clear that there are higher level social processes, structures, and systems that are amenable to empirical and theoretical study.

A nice conjunction of research projects that illustrate this point can be found in the study of modern cities. Al Young (The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances) and Loic Wacquant (Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality) provide ground-level studies of the actors who make up the inner city. Robert Sampson's Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect offers a meso-level account of how neighborhoods work, and some of the causal relations that can be discerned at the level of the neighborhood. Thomas Hughes' Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 demonstrates how a major technology like electric power is both structured and structuring within the urban systems in which it is introduced. And Saskia Sassen's The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo provides an account of systematic interrelations among cities in a global network. Each of these studies sheds light on how cities work; they do so at different levels of granularity; and each study brings with it an admirable degree of empirical and theoretical rigor. Each of them tells us something novel and non-trivial about how cities function. (There are prior postings on each of these authors: Young, Wacquant, Hughes, Sassen.)

This suggests something pretty moderate and pluralistic: that there is valid and important social research to be done at many levels of social organization. We won't find a unifying science of everything. But we can do social science research at many levels in ways that respect the heterogeneity of the social world while also shedding light on the workings of some important social and causal processes. There is no privileged level of research to which we should limit our social-science gaze.

Observing character traits

2013-05-19T21:13:00.000-04:00

The key idea of moral character is that the actions individuals choose are influenced by enduring features of their mentality. Unlike the situationist who looks at each situation of choice as a solution to achieving goals given current circumstances (Gilbert Harman, "Moral philosophy meets social psychology" link; John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior), a character theory maintains that choice derives in part by perduring features of the self. We might say that an individual's choices over time reflect a "style" of action that corresponds to these underlying features of personality and character.

An example will be helpful. Let's say that fidelity is the virtue of honoring one's commitments. A person who has acquired the habit of fidelity will be more likely to keep promises even in circumstances where there are short-term advantages in breaking them. So fidelity is a motivational counterweight to impulse and opportunism. There are other counterweights that also work -- for example, what Elster describes as foresight is also a bulwark against myopic opportunism. The foresightful person is able to take longterm interests into account and thereby avoid the error of myopia. But an embodied habit of fidelity does the work well.

This brief example suggests two kinds of questions. First, do individuals actually demonstrate the workings of such a virtue in their actual behavior, and are there observable differences in the strength of this factor across individuals and groups? And second, how does this character trait develop in the course of maturation in typical individuals? What circumstances or experiences either strengthen or weaken the trait?

Personality psychology and social psychology offer experimental means for exploring the first set of questions. Much of this research takes the form of behavioral experiments along the lines of the Milgram experiment, apparently demonstrating that human beings are more ready to behave badly than we would have expected. (This experiment is described in the Harman article mentioned above.) These experiments involve selection of a set of volunteer subjects and a carefully designed task that will probe their behavioral dispositions. Here is a study that attempts to measure the distribution of trust across a population; link.

A different approach is offered by David Winter, a personality psychologist who studies personality traits at a distance -- historical figures and political leaders. Winter offers an accessible summary of his research in "Things I've Learned About Personality From Studying Political Leaders at a Distance" (link). Here is how he describes the "distance" point:

Denied direct access, those who study political leaders, past and present, have had to develop a variety of indirect means for measuring personality ‘‘at a distance'' (see, for example, the recent collections of articles in Feldman & Valenty, 2001, and Valenty & Feldman, 2002). Some researchers look for patterns in known bio-graphical facts (Post, 2003), perhaps using formal systems of clinical diagnostic categories (Immelman, 1993, 2002). Others ask experts to rate leaders by using standard personality rating scales (Rubenzer, Faschingbauer, & Ones, 1996, 2000) or Q-sorts (Kowert, 1996). There is, however, one kind of data from political leaders that is produced and preserved in abundance—namely, words. Thus, many at-a-distance researchers do content analyses of leaders' verbal or written texts: speeches, interviews, and even government documents (see Winter, 1992). It is thereby possible to measure a wide variety of personality characteristics of otherwise inaccessible people: for example, integrative complexity (Suedfeld & Rank, 1976), explanatory style (Satterfield & Seligman, 1994), nationalism, and internal control of events (Hermann, 1980)

The second question has been treated in very different ways. One aspect of character formation, we sometimes believe, stems from the strong experiences we have had in our lives. Another view is that our character took shape through exposure to the actions of role models. An interesting current approach to this question is provided by an interesting recent book in naturalistic ethics by Mark Alfano, Character as Moral Fiction. Alfano repeats a call for what I refer to as a theory of the actor:

The clarion call of the revival of virtue ethics was Elizabeth Anscombe's feisty "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958). She claimed that it is not worthwhile to do ethics until we possess a proper philosophy of psychology -- one that provides a theory of reasons, motives, and dispositions inter alia. (17)

He takes a provocative view on the status of virtues in real human actors. He argues that virtues are shaped in the individual by the commendations and criticisms that are offered by the individual's proximate community during development and adulthood.

Traits like callousness, courage, greed, dishonesty, generosity, and tact are dispositions to act and react in characteristic ways. (2-3)

I shall argue that though most people do not think, feel, and act in ways that traditional normative theory would describe as virtuous ..., we should still attribute the virtues ... to one another because these attributions tend to function as self-fulfilling prophecies. Calling someone honest ... will lead him to think, feel, and act more honestly in the future. (9) When this happens, I call it factitious virtue. (10)

What is clear is that there is a very large domain for empirical research that is created around the moral psychology associated with character and virtue, and that this research is important for the purpose of refining our theory of the actor. Philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists have an interest in arriving at the most illuminating research in this area possible.

What about Marx?

2013-05-16T20:36:00.003-04:00

At various points since the death of Karl Marx in 1883 his work has been regarded as a dead issue -- no longer relevant, too ideological, methodologically flawed, too rooted in the nineteenth century. And yet each of these periods of extinction has been followed by a resurgence of interest in Marx's ideas, as new generations try to make sense of the tough and often cruel social conditions in which they find themselves. What are the important dimensions of theory that Marx presented through his writings? And how can any of these be considered valuable in trying to come to grips with the global, capitalist, turbulent, unequal, violent world that we now inhabit?

We might say that there are a small handful of key theoretical frameworks that Marx advocated.

Materialism as a methodology for social science. Social change is driven by material circumstances, the forces and relations of production. This encompasses the property system and the ensemble of technologies present in a given level of society. Materialism denies that ideas and thought drive social change; so religion, patriotism, nationalism, and ideologies of patriarchy are epiphenomena rather than originating causes.

Emphasis on the primacy of property and class. Sociologists and historians want to explain processes of social change. Marx puts it forward that the economic interests created by the property system in a given society create powerful foundations for collective social action. Those who occupy positions of advantage within a given set of property relations want to do what they can to preserve those relations; and those who are disadvantaged by the property relations have a latent interest in mobilizing to change those relations. Persons who share a location in the property system constitute a class, and their interests are systematically different from those in other such positions.

A sketch of a theory of consciousness and culture. Institutions of consciousness and culture play a role in stabilizing and attacking the most important relations of domination in a society. Educational institutions, it is argued, prepare young people for their specific roles in society -- workers, managers, elites, sub-proletarians. So struggles over the content and form of the institutions of enculturation can be expected to be polarized along class lines. Less directly, Marxists like Gramsci have postulated that worldviews reflect life experiences; so elites create cultural worlds that are quite distinct from those imagined by subordinate groups.

A diagnosis of social ills including exploitation, alienation, and dehumanization of social relations. Exploitation has to do with the flow of wealth and material goods through the property system from producers to property-owners. Alienation has to do with the loss of autonomy and self-control that individuals have within a capitalist structure. Marx's distinctive addition to this idea is that this loss of autonomy has psychic consequences -- disaffection, lack of self-respect, depression. The dehumanization of social relations follows from the structure of the capitalist workplace -- workers and bosses, each related to the other through the workings of a command system. Wittgentstein got it right when he described the "slab" language game: the boss says "slab", and the worker produces a slab. There is nothing "I-thou" about this relation (Buber, I and Thou).

A theory of several distinct modes of production. Marx believes that history takes the form of a succession of separable and structurally distinct modes of production: ancient slavery, feudalism, and capitalism differ by the structure of the production system, the property system, and the technologies that each embodied. Marx's most extensive analysis of social formations is his treatment of the capitalist mode of production in Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy and the writings that were posthumously edited and published as volumes 2 and 3 of Capital.

A common thread through these framing ideas is the perspective of critique: a critical intelligence trying to understand why modern society produces such human misery. But even from the perspective of critique -- the perspective that tries to diagnose and understand the systemic flaws of contemporary society -- Marxism leaves quite a bit of terrain untouched: gender relations, racism, nationalism, and religious hatred, for example. Marxism doesn't do a good job of explaining a regime of sexual violence (rape in India); it doesn't have much to contribute to the rise of fascism; it doesn't have resources for understanding Islamo-phobia and hatred. So Marxism is not a comprehensive theory of modern social failings; and we might say that its emphasis on economic conflict eclipses other forms of domination in ways that are actually harmful to our ability to improve our social relations.

Geoff Boucher takes up the issue of the continuing relevance of Marx in the contemporary world in Understanding Marxism. Here is how he opens the book:

Today, radical thinking about social alternatives stands under prohibition. According to defenders of the neoliberal transformation of every facet of human existence into a market, Marxism has failed…. Marx is dead; Marxism is finished -- and it must stay that way. (1)

But Boucher rejects this neoliberal consensus.

Marxism as an intellectual movement has been one of the most important and fertile contributions to twentieth-century thought. The influence of Marxism has been felt in every discipline, in the social sciences and interpretive humanities, from philosophy, through sociology and history, to literature. (2)

Here are the core reasons that Boucher offers for thinking that Marxism is still relevant in the twenty-first century:

Marxism is the most serious normative social-theoretical challenge to liberal forms of freedom that does not at the same time reject the modern world.
Marxism is the most sustained effort so far to think the present historically and to reflexively grasp thought itself within its socio-historical context. (2)

And later:

Marxism is a distinctively historical theory that normatively challenges liberalism in a way no other modern theory does. (3)

Much of Boucher's book contributes to one of two intellectual aims: to give a clear exposition of the most important of Marx's theoretical ideas; and to explicate the several "Marxisms" that followed in the twentieth century. The successive Marxisms take up the bulk of the book, with chapters on Classical Marxism, Hegelian Marxism, The Frankfurt School, Structural Marxism, Analytical Marxism, Critical Theory, and Post-Marxism. So the book provides very extensive explication of the theoretical ideas and developments that have grown out of the Marxist tradition.

What Boucher doesn't really provide is a clear rationale, based on contemporary sociology and history, for the conclusions he wants us to share about the continuing utility of Marxism as a framework for understanding the present and future. We don't get the reasoning that would support the affirmative ideas expressed above. The best rebuttal to the neoliberal triumphalism mentioned above is a compelling collection of sociological studies grounded in the perspectives mentioned above. Michael Burawoy's sociology of factories is a good example (e.g. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism). But this isn't an approach that Boucher chooses to pursue.

So what about it? Is Marxism relevant today? Yes, if we can avoid the dogmatism and rigidity that were often associated with the tradition. Power, exploitation, class, structures of production and distribution, property relations, workplace hierarchy -- these features certainly continue to be an important part of our social world. We need to think of Marx's corpus as a multiple source of hypotheses and interpretations about how capitalism works. And we need to recognize fully that no theoretical framework captures the whole of history or society. Marxism is not a comprehensive theory of social organization and change. But it does provide a useful set of hypotheses about how some of the key social mechanisms work in a class-divided society. Seen from that perspective, Marxist thought serves as a sort of proto-paradigm or mental framework in terms of which to pursue more specific social and historical investigations.

RFP: Research on "understanding"

2013-05-16T19:27:00.000-04:00

Here is an exciting RFP for researchers in psychology, philosophy, and religious studies who are interested in "understanding".

Funding Opportunity

Fordham University invites proposals for the “New Perspectives on the Philosophy of Understanding” funding initiative.

Our aim is to encourage research from both new and established scholars working on projects related to understanding in its many forms. This $500,000 RFP is intended to support work in the philosophy of science, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and hermeneutics, among other areas. Proposals can request between $40,000 and $100,000 for projects not to exceed one year in duration. We intend to make 7-8 awards.

For more information, please visit: www.varietiesofunderstanding.com

Letter of Intent Deadline: November 1st, 2013.

The Varieties of Understanding project is supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, with additional support from the Henry Luce Foundation, Fordham University, and the University of California-Berkeley.

Hirschman on the passions

2013-05-14T19:53:00.000-04:00

Numerous previous posts have emphasized the importance of having a theory of the actor when we do social science or history. Are people impulsive, emotional, envious, prudent, or moral -- or a mix of all of these things in different settings? We need to have some explicit and fact-based ideas about how and why people act as they do. This is not a new discovery for philosophers, and in fact much of the history of Western philosophy has wrestled with this question -- Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Hegel included.

Albert Hirschman is an important social theorist, generally classified as an economist, who often placed the varieties and sources of action at the center of his writings. (Here is an appreciation of Hirschman by Cass Sunstein in the New York Review of Books; link.) This interest in the actor is particularly evident in Hirschman's book, The Passions and the Interests (1977) -- with an interesting twist. The book is a contribution to the history of ideas rather than contemporary social theory. Hirschman wants to know how the pursuit of personal gain came to be viewed as the central human virtue, the foundational assumption of much of the social sciences, and the foundation of the liberal ideal of society. And implicitly, he wants to know if we can arrive at a more adequate theory of the good society by reconsidering some of those assumptions.

One way of characterizing Hirschman's leading intuition in this book is the question of whether different kinds of society reflect different mentalities at the level of the ordinary actors within them. Is there a "spirit" of capitalism, a characteristic set of motives and ways of thinking that its denizens possess? Is this spirit different from those associated with feudalism or the socioeconomic system of the ancient world? And how would various passions be linked to various features of the social order? Here is a revealing passage from Vico that Hirschman thinks captures much of this agenda:

Out of ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the three vices which lead all mankind astray, [society] makes national defense, commerce, and politics, and thereby causes the strength, the wealth, and the wisdom of the republics; out of these three great vices which would certainly destroy man on earth, society thus causes the civil happiness to emerge. This principle proves the existence of divine providence: through its intelligent laws the passions of men who are entirely occupied by the pursuit of their private utility are transformed into a civil order which permits men to live in human society. (kl 240)

On this line of thought, we might say that greed and self-interest are the spirit of capitalism, honor is the spirit of feudalism, and power is the spirit of the ancient world. And it turns out that each of these ideas corresponds to a passion in traditional philosophy of action (greed for material wealth, quest for glory, thirst for power).

The central problem, according to Hirschman, was how to control the passions in action. Some theorists came to believe that the only way to control the passions was through the workings of other passions. Here is Spinoza on this idea:

An affect cannot be restrained nor removed unless by an opposed and stronger affect. (kl 294)

So how have reflective people (philosophers, social theorists) thought about the springs of human action in different epochs? Hirschman's essay offers a careful history and review of one important strand of thinking about action, the extended debate that has existed over the nature and role of the passions in human action. He looks at this idea through a careful reading of thinkers like Augustine, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Montesquieu, the Duke of Rohan, and others. He tries to piece together the meaning that the ideas of passions and interests possessed in medieval and modern thought, how the concept of interest changed over time, and how the ideals concerning society and government were refracted as a consequence. Hirschman goes into exegetical detail about how a series of thinkers in the history of philosophy have thought about the virtues and passions, and how these were thought to contribute to various kinds of society. Here he makes the historical point linking ideas to social forms:

With or without such sophisticated justification [as offered by St. Augustine], striving for honor and glory was exalted by the medieval chivalric ethos even though it stood at odds with the central teachings ... of a long line of religious writers, from St. Thomas Aquinas to Dante, who attacked glory-seeking as both vain and sinful. (kl 186)

It is Hirschman's view that there was a very interesting evolution in thought about the passions during the early modern period. The heroic ideal was replaced by the idea that it is best for people to follow their own best interests. And this transition occurred, in part, through the swing towards positive science in the treatment of the world as expressed by Galileo and Hobbes.

Eventually self-interest came to be thought of as the antidote to arbitrary, capricious action based on more unruly passions. David Hume plays a central role in Hirschman's account. Hume advocated for restraining the "love of pleasure" by the "love of gain" (kl 321). And "Hume similarly uses the terms 'passion of interest' or the 'interested affection' as synonyms for the ' avidity of acquiring goods and possessions' or the 'love of gain'" (kl 424). (It is significant to recall that Hume and Adam Smith were neighbors and friends in the Scottish Enlightenment.)

So the transition is more or less complete; the vice of avarice has become the virtue of the pursuit of self-interest.

Once money-making wore the label of "interests" and reentered in this disguise the competition with other passions, it was suddenly acclaimed and even given the task of holding back those passions that had long been thought to be much less reprehensible. (kl 459)

It appears that the case for giving free rein and encouragement to private acquisitive pursuits was both the outcome of a long train of Western thought and an important ingredient of the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (kl 679)

The pursuit of gain (commerce) becomes the hidden hand that guides individual activities towards the collective good. And this idea does not originate with Adam Smith. Here is Montesquieu in the Spirit of the Laws on the advantages of commerce as a foundation for society:

The spirit of commerce brings with it the spirit of frugality, of economy, of moderation, of work, of wisdom, of tranquility, of order, and of regularity. In this manner, as long as this spirit prevails, the riches it creates do not have any bad effects. (kl 697)

And here is James Steuart about the advantages of a market society for the quality of government:

The statesman looks about with amazement; he who was wont to consider himself as the first man in the society in every respect, perceives himself eclipsed by the lustre of private wealth, which avoids his grasp when he attempts to seize it. This makes his government more complex and more difficult to be carried on; he must now avail himself of art and address as well as of power and authority. (kl 793)

The advantages that this shift in the theory of the actor made possible, according to Hirschman, were predictability and constancy (kl 520). Theorists like Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hume, and Smith argued that a science of man was possible if we postulate that action derives from an assessment of self-interest. And that science is -- political economy. And the social ideal that corresponds to it is what Hegel and Marx referred to as "civil society", where individuals pursued their own interests in their own ways. It is a liberal market society where the maximum amount of social coordination occurs through market mechanisms.

On this genealogy, interest started out as one of the three primary passions -- love of power, lust, and avarice. The passions were thought to produce bad behavior; so a recurring question was how to harness the passions in more socially constructive ways. And many thinkers came to the conclusion that only the passions themselves could serve to regulate the passions -- not pure reason. In particular, it was maintained that a strong regard for one's own interests could lead to self-regulation. But the most interesting part of the evolution of meanings is that interests came to be normatively favored, and they came to be understood to be distinct from the passions.

We might call this the intellectual history of economic liberalism as a political ideology. And it is an ideology that Hirschman finds ultimately flawed. So did Tocqueville:

A nation that demands from its government nothing but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the bottom of its heart; it is the slave of its well-being, and the man who is to chain it can arrive on the scene. (kl 1141)

More generally, the anti-capitalist critiques associated with Marx, Durkheim, and the anarchists were powerful: the pure pursuit of gain has resulted in a society in which poverty, coercion, and anomie have become the lot of the majority of society.

This is very interesting work in the history of ideas and ideology. And Hirschman engages in the work for a very serious reason: to try to discern some of the sources of the systemic flaws in modern market-based society. In this regard it is interesting to compare Hirschman's analysis of the development of the theory of the actor based on self-interest with C. B. Macpherson's analysis of the development of the theory of "possessive individualism". Here is a discussion of Macpherson's theory (link).

(Here is Thomas Carlyle as anti-capitalist critic from the conservative side, on the topic of market society. He is contrasting the social order of aristocracy with the market order created by capitalism:

It was [Aristocrats'] happiness that, in struggling for their own objects, they had to govern the Lower Classes, even in this sense of governing. For, in one word, Cash Payment had not then grown to be the universal sole nexus of man to man; it was something other than money that the high then expected from the low, and could not live without getting from the low. Not as buyer and seller alone, of land or what else it might be, but in many senses still as soldier and captain, as clansman and head, as loyal subject and guiding king, was the low related to the high. With the supreme triump of Cash, a changed time has entered; there must a changed Aristocracy enter. We invite the British reader to meditate earnestly on these things. (Chartism, 58)

Carlyle is anti-liberal in more senses than one; he is reactionary and hierarchical, and he is a fierce critic of the ideal of a cash-driven market society.)

Elster on Tocqueville

2013-05-12T07:16:00.000-04:00

Jon Elster is one of the people whose thinking about society and the social sciences has made a consistently important contribution to the philosophy of social science. So Elster's treatment of Tocqueville as a social scientist in Alexis de Tocqueville, the First Social Scientist will be of interest to anyone who wants to know how we have come to analyze societies in the terms we have.

Elster demonstrates a deep familiarity with Tocqueville's writings, though he focuses in this book on L'Ancien regime and Democracy in America. So Elster's Tocqueville is textually well supported. At the same time, Tocqueville is not really a theoretical writer. Instead, it is necessary to infer his theoretical ideas from the comments he makes about historical events and actors. So Elster is forced to engage in a fair amount of rational reconstruction of the theories that underlay a variety of Tocqueville's observations about the politics of France and America.

There are several elements of Elster's interpretation of Tocqueville that seem particularly significant. One is Elster's view that Tocqueville operated on the basis of a conception of social explanation that depended on social mechanisms rather than general laws. Elster believes that the most important feature of Tocqueville's claim to being a sociologist is his consistent search for causes. The other key to Elster's analysis of Tocqueville is his focus on features of the actor -- reason, interests, and passions, or what Tocqueville refers to as "habits of the heart".

Among the social mechanisms that Elster focuses on are those that surround preference formation. This question is plainly key to having a theory of political psychology: why do people make the choices that they do? He singles out three distinct psychological mechanisms that Tocqueville alludes to: the spillover effect, the compensation effect, and the satiation effect (kl 292). Preference formation is a topic that has consistently interested Elster, and he spends much time on the question in his early writings, including the formal question of time preferences.

What is "enlightened self-interest"? Elster finds that Tocqueville contrasts "egoism" with "enlightened self-interest" as well as with altruism. Egoism means an exclusive attention to one's own interests in the moment. So it is opposed both to altruism (concern for the interests of others) and foresight (concern for one's future interests) (kl 1113). (This bears out Amartya Sen's comment in "Rational Fools" that the purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron; link.)

Elster is particularly interested in Tocqueville's treatment of the passions. He specifically discusses Envy, Fear, Hatred , Enthusiasm, Contempt, and Shame as emotions (passions) that often drive behavior in opposition to both interests and reason. This brings his discussion into intersection with that of Albert Hirschman in The Passions and the Interests. (The Kindle edition includes a very interesting introduction by Amartya Sen; link.) Hirschman's book looks at the ways that early political economists and philosophers such as Smith and Hume thought about the relationships among reason, passion, and interest, with a view toward the generally moderating effects of interests on behavior in many historical settings. Elster finds a very similar line of thought in Tocqueville.

Elster addresses the topic of the micro-macro relationship in the conclusion. He finds that Tocqueville is interested in both directions of influence -- from micro to macro and from macro to micro. He provides a diagram that looks a lot like an inverted version of Coleman's boat:

Elster doesn't put his views in these terms, but much of what he has to say about Tocqueville can be put in the category of piecing together Tocqueville's theory of the actor: why people behave as they do. His discussions of preferences, individualism, norms, and passions all fall in the domain of a theory of the actor.

Elster's treatment of Tocqueville is of interest in part because of its direct relevance to the explication of Tocqueville's thought. But I find it more interesting for what it shows about Elster's own thinking about sociological investigation. It is plain that Elster favors an actor-centered sociology. In some writings he explicitly describes his view as methodological individualism. Here the approach is somewhat more tolerant of schemes of explanation that are not directly reductionist. But it is focused on the varieties and sources of human action, and the ways that these features of action compound into unexpected social outcomes.

(Here is an earlier post where I discussed Tocqueville's status as a founding sociologist; link.)

Urban futures

2013-05-03T09:20:00.000-04:00

I recently spent a half day visiting Detroit with some very perceptive university colleagues. We visited the university's center on Woodward Avenue, the Riverfront Conservancy, and the Madison Building -- all places where exciting signs of change are underway. Along the way we heard a lot of enthusiasm about the progress Detroit is making: more professional jobs downtown, residential and commercial real estate at 95%+ occupancy, entrepreneurial companies, $75 million invested in a spectacular river walk along the Detroit River, some very talented high school students coming out of several of Detroit's best high schools.

The most common reaction in the group to what we saw was a positive one. Detroit is better off than the media portrays it. There are powerful processes of renewal underway that will change the future of the city for all its inhabitants for the better. The reinfusion of businesses and middle-class residents will improve the tax base and the city's fiscal sustainability. And somehow these benefits will trickle out to the neighborhoods.

Or not. Like others, several of us noticed that these developments in downtown Detroit (Campus Martius, the Woodward Corridor) have had very little effect on the neighborhoods where 80-90% of the city lives. The sports, arts, and dining destinations are great -- but they don't have much to do with Detroit's blighted neighborhoods. Unemployed high school dropouts aren't going to be offered jobs in the high tech startups.

So what is the future for the impoverished and undereducated youth of this city? The theory I was testing in my mind was Loic Wacqant's concept in Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality of fundamental marginalization--a sub-population of people with no avenues of opportunity and no hope for the future (link). This view implies that the segregated urban enclaves of American cities like Chicago, Washington, or Detroit offer virtually no prospect of social mobility for the young men and women who grow up there. Is that too bleak? Does it overlook or underestimate pathways of mobility that can bring substantial improvement for life expectations for this community after all? Or is permanent impacted poverty and disaffection the more likely outcome?

I talked with two other participants in this visit who disagreed with the "permanent marginalization" view in interesting ways. Both of these people were African-American men who had grown up in metro Detroit. One, born in 1970, took issue with the youth-hopelessness part of the picture. His view is that Detroit is significantly different from Chicago (the city Wacquant studied most closely), because Detroit is a majority black city. So he thinks teenagers in Detroit have an optimism their counterparts in Chicago lack. He also thinks the lower residential density of Detroit is an advantage. Young people are less oppressed by racism because they are part of a population that governs the city. By contrast, he argues that the black population of Chicago looks at the city as a white city and they feel powerless. So urban despair is deeper in Chicago.

The other person in the conversation had what is in someways a view even bleaker than mine. He is a distinguished social scientist born in 1940. He too grew up in the Detroit metro area. He commented that the developers' vision is really a picture of a white city. "This is a white vision of Detroit's future." He predicted that in 25 years the black population of Detroit will be largely gone, replaced by a more affluent white population. Wow!

One thing that came out of the evening is an intriguing idea: invite a group of Detroit 18-year-olds, some in high school and some dropouts, to have a conversation about the future of their neighborhoods and their city, and what they think about their own futures. These are the kinds of conversations Al Young reports in The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances. This would shed some light on all the major theories of urban futures. And conversations like these would be an important reality check for people who think that there is a general process of improvement that is going to bring everyone up through some kind of hidden-hand process of market successes.

The "permanent marginalization" view is a dark one, but it is not passive. Rather, it undergirds the idea that the structures of race and segregation still present in our society have embodied enduring and intractable inequalities, and only deliberate, sustained, and committed efforts will allow us to resolve these problems. Our cities need structural change and substantial public investment, deliberately aimed at breaking the circles of poverty, race, inferior education, and disaffection, and sustained over decades rather than years.

The developments we looked at during our visit are certainly important steps forward for the city. And the business leaders who are stimulating these developments are committed to improving Detroit's future. But I'm not yet convinced that these developments can lead by themselves to the transformation of the lives of the whole population of the city, black and white, without other initiatives that are directly aimed at breaking down the barriers of race and poverty that imprison so many of Detroit's young people.

("Imprison" is probably the right word in this context, given the epidemic of incarceration our cities have witnessed in the past thirty years. Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness documents the harm done to urban communities by the mass incarceration of young black men.)

Skilled work

2013-05-01T08:30:00.000-04:00

Watch an active construction site for a few minutes and you will see some amazing examples of skilled work and deft problem solving. That was true today in Ann Arbor where I happened to see one complicated step in the construction of a new wing of a five-storey building. The problem was this. A fifty-foot girder was lifted by crane to its intended location within the vertical steel frame. Already I was impressed with the skill of the crane operator, who deftly maneuvered the beam into position where two steel workers were waiting on the existing beam. The crane suspended the beam in place and the steel workers bolted the near end to the frame. So far so good. But the far end was to attach to an isolated vertical beam fifty feet away, and I couldn't picture how that end would be attached. The steel worker answered that question quickly. He scuttled the length of the beam to the isolated vertical while the beam was suspended by the crane cable and the attached end. But now the resistance of the material world intervened -- the beam was a little too long to fit. The worker used two crow bars he'd brought with him to lever it into place -- no good. It was just half an inch too long given the position of the vertical. So are we stymied? Need to send it back? No. The worker stood up on the beam and started gently rocking the vertical. After two or three oscillations he was able to lever the beam into place, and quickly bolted it down.

It's not a completely amazing instance of problem solving on the job, but it is impressive nonetheless. Certainly the users' manual doesn't have a section on what to do in this circumstance. But given his prior training, experience, and embodied skills, the worker was able to come up with a solution that worked.

Richard Sennett describes this kind of artisanal intelligence in The Craftsman. He describes craftsmanship as "the skill of making things well" (8). Further,

The Craftsman explores these dimensions of skill, commitment, and judgment in a particular way. It focuses on the intimate connection between hand and head. Every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding. The relation between hand and head appears in domains seemingly as different as bricklaying, cooking, designing a playground, or playing the cello— but all these practices can misfire or fail to ripen. (9)

A part of the interest of Sennett's work here is the help it provides in redressing the idea that mental work is professional and cognitive, while manual work is repetitive and rote. Sennett gives many contemporary examples of work that is both head and hand, both cognitive and skilled, both creative and manual. Sennett gives many examples of this kind of artisanal intelligence. Here is one from the construction of a large shopping mall in Atlanta.

The lighting in these aboveground car-houses turned out to be uneven in intensity, dangerous shadows suddenly appearing within the building. Painters had added odd-shaped white strip lines to guide drivers in and out of irregular pools of light, showing signs of improvising rather than following the plan. The craftsmen had done further, deeper thinking about light than the designers. (44-45)

Sennett's point here is that the implementation of a complex space is not simply the translation of a computer-generated architectural drawing into material form. Rather, it is a process that requires real workers to find solutions to the inevitable fact of gaps and inconsistencies in the plan--in this case, the fact that the lighting didn't fully illuminate the space, leading to risks for pedestrians and drivers.

A dominant tradition of philosophy identifies our human essence with our ability to think and reason. Descartes represents this line of thought ("cogito ergo sum"). But there is another tradition that places labor and our capacity to transform the material world at the center of the human essence. Hegel represented this line of thought, as did Marx. It is the homo faber tradition -- man the creator -- and all in all, it seems to do a better job of defining us. Labor and skilled intelligence lie at the core of human capacities. And that is a good thing to remember on May 1, the international day celebrating labor.

Life quality across structural change

2013-04-29T21:48:00.001-04:00

Periods of rapid structural change are particularly likely to lead to decline in the quality of life of some sections of the affected population. Change creates winners and losers; and it is common that the gains and losses are channeled into very distinct groups of people. This is true during periods of large-scale migration, technology change, and structural change within an economy. Important components of life quality include health, nutrition, education, economic wellbeing, economic security, and security from violence and coercion. Each of these properties is affected by several important dimensions of social life:

legal and political institutions
institutions of economic production and distribution
economic opportunities and income
public provision of income supplements
public provision of food subsidies
public provision of health care resources
household support provided by family and community

When a society's governmental and economic institutions are enmeshed in a period of rapid change, many of the components of life quality are likely to be affected -- positively or negatively. The basic institutions of a society determine the value of the private and public assets individuals and households control on the basis of which to support their pursuit of a decent life; this is what Amartya Sen refers to as "entitlement bundles". (Sen applies his entitlement theory to the study of famine in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation; link.) And shifts in the composition of the entitlement bundle are likely to lead to abrupt worsening of the conditions of the least-well-off.

For example: It is likely that the austerity policies of the Spanish or Greek governments will have a negative effect on the health and nutritional status of the bottom half of those societies. Working people will have lower incomes and they will have reduced access to the social safety net; health status is likely to decline. As another example: Life expectancy in the former Soviet Union declined measurably following the collapse of the Soviet system (link). One part of that decline was the disappearance of the social security net created by state-owned industry -- the smashing of the "iron rice bowl".

This concern is particularly relevant in the context of the rural-urban transformation currently underway in China. Since 1980 China's rural sector has been subject to at least two major kinds of structural change. One has to do with the economic and political institutions that governed daily life for rural households, from communes to market institutions. And the other has to do with the rapid structural transformation of China's economy from agriculture to export-led manufacturing. The first set of changes led to a withdrawal of forms of "social insurance" that had been associated with the commune system, including healthcare and old-age care. The second has led to mass migration of younger workers from villages and towns to factories in cities. This migration leaves the remaining population in the countryside older, poorer, and less economically secure.

These observations have several important implications. Foremost among these is the crucial importance of maintaining effective systems for monitoring and measuring life quality across the society. It is important to have good measures of health status, nutritional status, educational status, and old age life quality across regions and sub-populations. So national governments need to create and fund the social research activities necessary to measure health and other quality of life properties across the population. (Here is a recent post on a spatial study of quality of life in China based on 1982 data; link.) Sen argues that it was the availability or lack of availability of information about famine conditions that explained the difference in outcomes between China during the Great Leap Forward and post-independence India; Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation.

Second, when it turns out that there are large numbers of "losers" in a large social process of change, it is important for the state and non-governmental actors to find institutions and resources that will help to improve their outcomes. "Winners" need to help to fund the amelioration of harms created by the processes that led to their gains. If NAFTA led to the increase of overall national income for Canada, Mexico, and the United States, but also led to the displacement of workers in a significant set of industries -- then it makes sense to tax part of those gains to compensate the losers. And in fact, the NAFTA agreements were premised on such compensation, though this has not occurred reliably (link). This means redistribution across sectors and regions; and it is justified by the fact that the overall gains created by the transformation would not have been possible without imposing these losses on the disadvantaged sector or region.

What might this kind of redistributive policy look like in the context of China's rural-to-urban transformation? It would seem that public moneys will be needed for several types of problems:

Maintenance of income and quality of life and health for the elderly
Investments that increase the productivity of labor and the level of employment in rural areas
Investments that work to ameliorate the negative environmental effects of rapid change
Investments in the institutions of public health -- clinics, hospitals, and medical personnel

It might be asked, "Why should developing nations concern themselves with this issue?" There are several answers. Basic justice and fairness entails that the wealth of a society should be distributed in ways that allow all segments of society to improve their quality of life and wellbeing. A society's wealth and income is a joint product of its entire population; so fairness dictates that everyone should benefit from improvements in productivity. But prudence lines up with this answer as well. A society that ignores the widening of the gaps between rich and poor, and does not concern itself about improving the wellbeing of the poor, is likely to suffer a rising level of social strife as well. It can either go the route of creating gated communities for the rich, or it can use its resources to create fair life outcomes and fair access to opportunity for all its people. Everyone is better off in the long run with the second choice.

In The Paradox Of Wealth And Poverty: Mapping The Ethical Dilemmas Of Global Development I argued that a developing nation should choose an economic development strategy that spreads the benefits of growth over a broader population, over a strategy with a higher growth rate but with substantially greater inequality. I still think this is the right answer to the question. And this approach has the best likelihood of improving the quality of life of the poorest segment of society. The graphs below make the case based on three stylized strategies:

NL neo-liberal growth: choose those policies and institutional reforms that lead to the most rapid growth: unfettered markets, profit-maximizing firms, minimal redistribution of income and wealth
PF poverty-first growth: choose those policies and institutional reforms that lead to economic growth favorable to the most rapid growth in the incomes flowing to the poorest 2 quintiles
WF immediate welfare improvement: direct as much social wealth as possible into programs that immediately improve the welfare of the poor (education, health, food subsidies, housing subsidies)

The neo-liberal strategy consistently maximizes GDP; but the poverty-first strategy, which is more redistributive from the start, leads to consistently better improvement for the income for the bottom 40% of the economy. It embodies the idea that Hollis Chenery advocated forty years ago in Redistribution with Growth: Policies to Improve Income Distribution in Developing Countries in the Context of Economic Growth.

Urban marginality

2013-04-24T20:50:00.002-04:00

If you live within the reach of a major American city -- and most Americans do -- then you know what "marginality" is. It is the sizable sub-population of metropolitan America of young men and women who have been locked out of what we think of as the indispensable mechanisms of social mobility: decent education, healthcare resources, job opportunities, and safe neighborhoods. It is the young people of inner-city Baltimore depicted by The Wire. (Take a look at Richard Florida's detailed analysis of the spatial class structure of Detroit and a number of other cities; link.) The facts of compacted poverty and lack of opportunity, and the disaffection of young people that goes along with these absences, represent one of the most pressing social problems we face.

How should we go about studying and changing this appalling social reality? Alford Young's The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances is one striking approach, using extended interviews to gain insight into the minds, worldviews, and social realities of some of these young people. (Here is an earlier discussion of Young's work; link.) Another approach is the large body of mainstream poverty research in the social sciences and policy studies. (Here is a penetrating critique of some of the assumptions of this research by Alice O'Connor; Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History.) But an important and original voice on these issues is that of Loïc Wacquant, and particularly important is Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (2008).

Wacquant's Ph.D. work was done at the University of Chicago (like Young's), and he too immersed himself in the street-level realities of segregated, impoverished Chicago. Wacquant's approach was a novel one: he took up boxing in an inner city boxing club to gain access to the ordinary lives of the young men of the neighborhoods. His ethnography of this experience was published in the fascinating book, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer.

Wacquant is French and comparativist; he is interested in investigating the experience of marginality in the United States and comparing it with equally marginalized neighborhoods in France, the banlieue of Paris. (Here is an earlier post on the banlieue and the sociological research of Didier Lapeyronnie's Ghetto urbain; ségrégation, violence, pauvreté en France aujourd'hui.) In each instance modern cities are found to have large populations of apparently permanently marginalized under-class people. Here is how Wacquant frames the issue in "The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Notes on its Nature and Implications" (link) (1996):

The resurgence of extreme poverty and destitution, ethnoracial divisions (linked to the colonial past) and public violence, and their accumulation in the same distressed urban areas, suggest that the metropolis is the site and fount of novel forms of exclusionary social closure in advanced societies. (121)

But Wacquant's summary finding is perhaps a surprising one: he finds that the "Black Belt" in Chicago and the "Red Belt" of Paris are substantially different social phenomena. Rather than a homogeneous social reality of "ghetto" extending from Chicago to London to Amsterdam to Paris, he finds a differentiated social reality:

A paired comparison between neighborhoods of relegation in Chicago's 'Black Belt' and the Parisian 'Red Belt' shows that the declining French metropolitan periphery and the Afro-American ghetto remain two sharply distinct sociospatial constellations. And for good reason: they are heirs to different urban legacies, produced by different logics of segregation and aggregation, and inserted in different welfare state and market frameworks, all of which result in markedly higher levels of blight, segregation, isolation, and distress in the US ghetto. (122)

Wacquant introduces the idea of "advanced marginality" to describe the social reality of isolation and deprivation created by advanced capitalism in the rich cities of the North. Here are the criteria he offers for a social system embedding advanced marginality:

the growing internal heterogeneity and desocialization of labor,
the functional disconnection of neighborhood conditions from macro-economic trends;
territorial fixation and stigmatization; spatial alienation and the dissolution of place;
the loss of a viable hinterland; and
the symbolic fragmentation of marginalized population (121)

An element that Wacquant finds to be in common across advanced marginality in modern cities is what he calls "territorial fixation" -- the confinement of the marginal in specific neighborhoods of the city.

Rather than being diffused throughout working class areas, advanced marginality tends to concentrate in well-identified, bounded, and increasingly isolated territories viewed by both outsiders and insiders as social purgatories, urban hellholes where only the refuse of society would accept to dwell. (125)

In Urban Outcasts Wacquant provides a much more developed comparative sociology of marginalized urban populations. It is significant that he begins his treatment of marginality with the topic of riot and uprising -- a recurring social reality in the United States (Chicago, Watts, Detroit, ...), London, Strasbourg, and Paris. This seems significant, because it seems like a logical correlate with the deprivation and stigmatization associated with advanced marginality.

Most of the disorders, big and small, that have shaken up the French working-class banlieues, the British inner city and adjacent barrios of North American have involved chiefly the youths of impoverished, segregated and often dilapidated urban neighbourhoods caught in a spiral of decline; they appear to have been fuelled by growing ethnoracial tensions in and around those areas. (20)

And Wacquant thinks these uprisings stem from three large social causes: mass unemployment, relegation to decaying neighbourhoods, and heightened stigmatization in daily life of the marginalized young people (25). He quotes a young man from Bristol:

I don't have a job and I'll never have one. Nobody wants to help us get out of this shit. If the government can spend so much money to build a nuclear submarine, why not for the inner cities? If fighting cops is the only way to get heard, then we'll fight them. (31)

This is a superb piece of sociology, making use of multiple means of inquiry (ethnographic, comparison, statistical) to arrive at credible theories of the causes of urban marginality. And, contrary to the critique offered by O'Connor of mainstream poverty studies, there is not an ounce of "blaming the poor" in this study. Wacquant wants to understand the social processes that create and reproduce the urban spatial reality of marginality. And in doing this, he aims to provide some of the understanding we will need to begin to take this system apart.

Excerpt The Wire

Actor-centered history

2013-04-23T21:14:00.000-04:00

It is easy enough to ask the question, "How can we best explain the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of German fascism, or the Industrial Revolution in England?" And we often want to paraphrase questions like these along causal lines: "What were some of the causes of the fall of Rome, what were the causes of the rise of fascism, what were the causes of the Industrial Revolution?"

But are these really good questions? Is this really the right way of thinking about historical explanation? What if we think that there is an overwhelming amount of contingency and path dependency in history? What if we think that the language of "cause" doesn't work particularly well in the context of history? For that matter, what if we take most seriously the idea that history is the result of the actions and thoughts of vast numbers of actors, so it is a flow of action and knowledge rather than a sequence of causes and effects? Do these alternative thoughts about history force us to ask different questions about large historical changes?

We might consider this alternative way of thinking of history: think about "social conditions and processes" rather than discrete causes; couch historical explanations in terms of how individual actors (low and high) acted in the context of these conditions; and interpret the large outcomes as no more than the aggregation of these countless actors and their actions. Think about history as a stream or river, whose flow is influenced by the topography of the land through which it moves and the obstacles and barriers it encounters in its course.

This picture probably needs broadening in at least one important respect: our account of the "flow" of human action eventuating in historical change needs to take into account the institutional and structural environment in which these actions take place. Part of the "topography" of a period of historical change is the ensemble of institutions that exist more or less stably in the period: property relations, political institutions, family structures, educational practices. So historical explanations need to be sophisticated in their treatment of institutions and structures.

In Marx's famous contribution to the philosophy of history, he writes that "men make their own history; but not in circumstances of their own choosing." And circumstances can be both inhibiting and enabling; they constitute the environment within which individuals plan and act. It is an important circumstance that a given time possesses a fund of scientific and technical knowledge, a set of social relationships of power, and a level of material productivity. It is also an important circumstance that knowledge is limited; that coercion exists; and that resources for action are limited. Within these opportunities and limitations, individuals, from leaders to ordinary people, make out their lives and ambitions through action.

On this line of thought, history is a flow of human action, constrained and propelled by a shifting set of environmental conditions (material, social, epistemic). There are conditions and events that can be described in causal terms: enabling conditions, instigating conditions, cause and effect, ... But here my point is to ask the reader to consider whether this language of cause and effect does not perhaps impose a discreteness of historical events that does not actually reflect the flow of history very well. History is continuous and analog; causal structures are discontinuous and digital.

Consider how Karl Dietrich Bracher approaches the problem of explaining the rise of National Socialism in The German dictatorship: The origins, structure, and effects of national socialism (1970).

Inherent in all these [prior] studies is the question of how a dictatorial regime of such dimensions could come to power so quickly and with so little or no resistance in a country with Germany's traditions and cultural heritage…. Yet the question does remain why Germany, which after a century-long battle for democratic government had constructed, in the Weimar Republic, a seemingly perfect constitutional structure, capitulated unresistingly and within so short a period before so primitive a dictatorship as Hitler's. (3-4)

Bracher's own account is fundamentally couched in terms of the currency and transmission of sets of ideas and philosophies: nationalism, etatism, anti-Semitism, anti-liberalism. He gives an account of how various elements of these ideas were favored through European and German history from the early 19th century, through the revolutions of 1848, through Germany's defeat in World War I, into the strife of the Weimar period.

It was against this background [of ideological conflict in the Weimar period] that National Socialism took shape as a new type of integrating force. Being a specifically German manifestation of European antidemocratism, it was completely attuned to the German situation and even less of an export article than Italian Fascism. This is yet another example of the limits of the conception of a universal fascism. The nationalist foundation makes for profound differences from country to country. Nor is there any monocausal explanation, whether it be based on economic, political, or ideological premises. National Socialism, like Hitler, was the product of World War I, but it was given its shape and force by those basic problems of modern German history which marked the painful road of the democratic movement. Among these were the fragility of the democratic tradition and the powerful remnants of authoritarian governmental and social institutions before and after 1848. (46)

And here is a more psychological dimension of Bracher's explanation:

Among the special factors of the early days of National Socialism was the tremendously important part played by the spectacular rise and near-religious veneration of a Fuhrer. The organizational structure and activities of this new type of movement were based completely on the leader principle. In terms of social psychology, he represented the disenfranchised little man eager to compensate for his feelings of inferiority through militancy and political radicalism. (47)

...

In the final analysis, Hitler came to power as a result of a series of avoidable errors. He was neither elected freely by a majority of the German people nor were there compelling reasons for the capitulation of the Republic. However, in the end, the democratic forces were in the minority vis-a-vis the totalitarian, ditatorial parties of the National Socialists and the Communists. And in this situation a large portion of Germany's top echelons went over to Hitler after 1933. (49)

So far Bracher has focused on the problem of origins: how did National Socialism come to prevail in Germany? But he also spends time on showing how this dictatorship ruled, and this is a simpler story. Having gained the levers of power -- police, military, bureaucracy -- the Nazi state was able to implement the ideology and values that brought it to power.

So Bracher's narrative is ultimately one that has mostly to do with beliefs, knowledge systems, ideologies, and actors pursuing their purposes. It isn't a causal narrative, but rather an interpretive analysis of mass psychology within specific historical conditions. There are large elements of the history of ideas (the ways in which antidemocratic ideologies developed in Germany and other European countries after 1848, for example) as well as elements of meaningful and purposive human action (deciding to follow, deciding to lead, deciding to mobilize).

What all of this suggests to me is an alternative way of thinking about history that has a different structure from the idea of history as a stream of causes and effects. This approach might be called "actor-centered history": we explain an epoch when we have a story about what people thought and believed; what they wanted; and what social and environmental conditions framed their choices. It is a view of history that sounds more like composing a biography of a complex individual than it does telling the story of a bridge collapse. And it is a view that gives close attention to states of knowledge, ideology, and agency, as well as institutions, organizations, and structures.

Mohamed Cherkaoui on the micro-macro debate

2013-04-20T14:09:00.002-04:00

The eminent French sociologist Mohamed Cherkaoui addresses the problem of delineating the micro-macro distinction in several works. Since Cherkaoui's empirical research on social stratification and the educational system seems often to bridge between micro and macro, his views are of interest.

Cherkaoui's analysis is presented in English primarily in three places, "The individual and the collective" (European Review 11:4 (2003)), "Macrosociology-microsociology" (International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Elsevier (2001), 9117-22), and "Micro-Macro Transitions: Limits of Rational Choice Theory in James Coleman's 'Foundations of Social Theory'" (link).

First, here is his paraphrase of the distinction as it is usually interpreted:

In essence, microsociology refers to the sociology of the individual, in isolation from his interactive groups. The macro level refers to the generality of persons in a situation. (I-C, 489)

A sociologist operates on the micrological level when he seeks to set up empirically the existence and measure the strength of the relation between the educational attainment and the occupational status of individuals. Whatever statistical analysis is used, this statement remains on the micro level inasmuch as it assumes that individuals are independent from each other in the same way that educational levels and professions are independent. (I-C, 490)

Fundamentally, he is asserting that "micro" is equated with "isolated purposive individual." Cherkaoui is critical of this approach to sociological research because it deliberately ignores "interdependence" -- the fact that individuals and their social properties are related to the behavior and properties of other individuals. Individuals must be treated in context; they should not be "de-contextualized" by sociological studies.

This criticism seems to be valid for a subset of social theorists, including especially those who proceed on the basis of the assumptions of rational choice theory (including James Coleman; see Cherkaoui's critique of Coleman here). But it is not valid for another important group of "micro-sociologists", including especially Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel and advocates of ethnomethodology. These sociologists look at the individual; but they are fully committed to doing so in a thick and contextualized way. We don't find any isolated individuals in Goffman and Garfinkel; rather, we find waiters, inmates, jurors, professors, and disaffected young people; and we find careful sociological observation of their behavior within specific institutional and normative contexts. An actor-centered sociology does not have to be based on a rational-choice model of the actor, and it isn't forced to ignore interactions and relationships among actors as they go through their social lives. So one quick rebuttal to Cherkaoui's argument is that "micro"-sociology does not equate to "isolated individual"-sociology. (This is the point of my own construct of "methodological localism", looking at individuals as socially situated and socially constituted; link.) Actor-centered sociology is not the same as decontextualized methodological individualism (link).

Now let's turn to the more extensive treatment is the entry in the International Encyclopedia.

Macrosociology generally refers to the study of a host of social phenomena covering wide areas over long periods of time. In contrast, microsociology would rather focus on specific phenomena, involving only limed groups of individuals such as family interactions or face-to-face relations. The theories and concepts of macrosociology operate on a systemic level and use aggregated data, whereas those of microsociology are confined to the individual level. (M-M, 9117)

In this essay Cherkaoui identifies three basic approaches to the micro-macro relation.

V1. The first is macro-centered; sociology looks for causal relations between one set of macro facts and another. "[The first approach] ... consists of analyzing the relations between a given social phenomenon and indepdendent social factors" (9117). This approach tends to disregard the micro; it is oblivious to the need for micro-foundations and lower-level mechanisms.

V2. The second attempts to explain macro characteristics on the basis of the aggregate effects of the micro characteristics. "The second procedure consists of collecting observations at an infrasystemic level and developing hypotheses on the basis of such units (individuals, groups, institutions), with the purpose of explaining systemic relations through an appropriate synthesis of these observations" (9118). This approach conforms to the logic represented by Coleman's Boat. It presents the problem of social explanation as one of aggregation of social phenomena from the behavior of rational actors at the micro level.

V3. The third is what we might call "formal-structural": it explains characteristics at the macro level by analyzing the structure and organization of the macro system. Here it is the nature and topology of the positions within the social structure that are of interest. "The third approach ... is to analyze the effects due to the nature of the positions and distributions of certain variables on the behavior of the system's component units without formulating hypotheses about individuals" (9118). This is reminiscent of what Thomas Schelling referred to as the "mathematics of musical chairs" in Micromotives and Macrobehavior. It is the characteristics of the workings (functioning) of the social system that provide the basis of social explanation.

Cherkaoui sums up his view of the relation between micro-sociology and macro-sociology in these terms:

The macrostructuralist project [V1] is limited to certain aspects of social reality. It cannot, any more than any other theory, offer a solution to the problem of the links between the micro and the macro. While the rational choice theory [V2] presents an undeniable advantage over other theories, it cannot serve as a universal solution: presenting it as unconditionally valid makes it vulnerable to the same dangers other theories have encountered. As for functionalism [V3], its error was to yield to the temptation of hegemony; it claimed the title of general theory of social systems, when some of its principles are only valid for particular, tightly circumscribed domains. This means that there is a right way of using functionalism and normative theories, just as there is a wrong way of using such strong, all-encompassing theories. There can be no single solution to the problem of the links between micro- and macrosociology, any more than there can be a single mode for explaining all phenomena (the first of these problems being only an aspect of the second). (9120)

Cherkaoui's critique of Coleman is also relevant to this issue, since Coleman proceeds with explanations moving from micro to macro; or from rational actors to social properties.

My third and last remark is that in Coleman's thinking, as in that of many rational choice theorists, explanation remains purely speculative. With a few exceptions, such as the historical example of "live and let live" borrowed from Ashworth, we do not have sufficient empirical data on the social processes leading to norm emergence. Suppose we acknowledge that norms are intentionally produced and that individuals, who initiate and maintain them, benefit from behaving in compliance with norms for fear of punishment; suppose that the externalities produced by actions are among the conditions for norm emergence; suppose further that we acknowledge that bilateral exchange or the market are not able to regulate behavior. All these conditions, and the theorem of norm existence, are still no more than primitive propositions for a simulation model that could only generate theoretical data. (98)

An important implication of this passage, and the analysis offered in the first two articles, is that there is no simple answer to the question, what is the relation between micro and macro in the social world? Here is Cherkaoui's alternative to Coleman's Boat in application to Weber's theory of the Protestant Ethic. This diagram indicates a substantially more complex relationship between macro and micro causal factors. And it stipulates causal processes that move back and forth between higher and lower levels of social organization and action.

(Here is an interesting interview with Cherkaoui conducted by Hamid Berrada (in French).)

Mais encore avec Mohamed Cherkaoui by 2mtv

Epochs and the social actor

2013-04-15T22:14:00.000-04:00

It was suggested in an earlier post that important aspects of an individual's mental furniture are influenced by the concrete historical and social circumstances in which he or she is raised (link). Let's try to get a little more specific about this idea. How does historical context influence the behavior of the individuals who come to adulthood during its scope?

There are several kinds of practical cognitive features that seem to be historically conditioned. By "practical cognition" I mean the processes through which actors conceptualize their social environments, make sense of the activities going on around them, process their own desires and goals, and set out with a plan or strategy of action.

I can think of at least four largely independent features of social and practical cognition that seem to be importantly dependent on the social and historical context in which the individual develops from childhood to adulthood: social frameworks of interpretation; social norms; practices and habits; and enduring features of character. Let's look at each of these in turn.

Framework of assumptions about the social world. We generally apprehend the social interactions that take place around us through stylized interpretive frameworks or models that we apply to the encounters we observe. This seems to be particularly true when it comes to interpreting social interactions that involve power, gender, race, or ethnic identities. An observed social interaction between several actors does not bear its meaning on its sleeve; it is necessary for observers to tell themselves some kind of story about what the actions and interactions mean. And often enough those stories are couched in terms of a variety of stereotypes based on a small number of cues in the interaction.

Social norms of behavior. When individuals consider their routine choices in ordinary life, they are influenced by a range of norms and values that guide and constrain their actions.

Practices and habits. A key insight from pragmatist theory of action is the observation that much action is not deliberative and reasoned, but is rather the result of the application of one or more pertinent practices and habits. When a professor is challenged about a grade on a paper, he or she often slips into a routine set of answers. When a prosecutor approaches a defense witness he or she has a stock set of tactics and techniques for undermining the credibility of the witness. And when a politician faces a heckler, he or she likewise turns to familiar responses that have been fine-tuned in other similar circumstances.

Enduring features of character and personality. One person is decisive, while another vacillates. One person has courage, while another is blocked by fear. One person has a strong sense of loyalty, while another is willing to jettison relationships when interests shift. In each case, the features of behavior and action that are described here seem to derive from enduring features of the individual's mental world, not simply opportunistic adjustments to circumstances. Decisiveness, loyalty, and courage are virtues of character that some people possess in great measure and others do not.

Two things seem evident as we work our way through this list.

First, it is logical to infer that differences across these dimensions of practical cognition results in differences in behavior. The individual who perceives the social world in terms of gender or racial inferiority will behave differently from the person whose basic framework highlights human equality. People who have internalized the norm, "treat people fairly," will act differently in an industrial strike than those who have not internalized this norm. The person who has internalized a set of practices that involve quick tit-for-tat response to perceived affront will behave differently from one whose practices and habits involve forbearance. And a person whose character includes a strong dose of decisiveness is likely to behave differently in a crisis from one who has difficulty deciding about what tie to wear in the morning.

Second, each of these features of social cognitive seem to be strongly shaped by the social experiences and social epistemology of the period. The assumptions we make about other people -- the social frameworks we use for making sense of the world -- are clearly learned through social experiences in our early years. A person immersed in an anti-Semitic or homophobic culture is likely enough to have fairly specific stereotypes in mind (frameworks) when trying to understand developments in the world he or she encounters. This is true for the social norms that we have internalized as well. The habits of interaction and response that we currently possess are surely the learned consequences of the interactions we have had with other people in the past, in a range of circumstances. And the habits of courage, truthfulness, and loyalty that we have embodied in our system of action and thought are likewise the learned consequences of important experiences in our early years.

These points highlight the importance of the individual's experiences in childhood and adolescence in a variety of contexts: family, school, neighborhood, juvenile detention center, literature, television, or church or mosque. But history comes into this story at this point: there are some events that are sufficiently dramatic and pervasive that we can make a case for holding that they have a seismic influence on the processes of socialization through which the actor takes shape. Sometimes history presents its generation with a single decisive blast -- Hiroshima or September 11. And sometimes the historical factor is prolonged and extended -- the deprivations of the Great Leap Forward for rural Chinese people, the terror created in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. And in each type of case, it seems credible that the mentality of the people of an epoch are influenced by these historical events and circumstances in very fundamental ways -- ways that give them distinctive modes of action and reaction.

Take the experience of coming to maturity in the Jim Crow South, as either a white man or a black woman. The Jim Crow South embodied a very specific set of ideas and norms about race and gender that were enforced, often with violence, when they were violated. Jim Crow society offered men and women, black and white, a bundle of modes of behavior for how to act in stylized circumstances. These are practices and habits. And surely some very distinctive features of personality and character emerged from the Jim Crow South as well, in both black and white southerners, and both women and men in the region.

So it seems reasonable to suggest that historical settings do have the power to affect the nature of social agency within their scope. Epochs create and shape actors within them.

Gradual institutional change

2013-04-10T12:53:00.000-04:00

Here are some very fundamental questions that we can ask about social institutions -- the relatively durable sets of rules, practices, and norms through which a variety of human social activity is conducted.

How are institutions formed?
How do they work -- what are the enforcement mechanisms that exist within institutions that induce participants to conform to the rules?
What factors support the stability of an institution over time?
What kinds of processes lead to change within institutions over time?
And why are institutions sometimes swept away and replaced wholesale?

These are among the most fundamental questions that theories of institutions need to answer: how do they start, how are they sustained, and how do they change.

James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen undertake to provide a basis for answering the fourth question here -- the question of gradual change. Their volume, Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power, provides a simple but compelling answer: institutions change when position holders within them find circumstances in which they have both an opportunity and an incentive to change or reinterpret the rules in ways that serve their interests.

The issue of the internal processes of change within an institution is of interest here for several reasons. But central among them is the idea of plasticity that has been described in earlier posts (link, link, link). The basic idea of plasticity is that institutions and organizations are the product of various kinds of structured human action, and that they can change over time. So we shouldn't think of institutions as having fixed characteristics, or as though they were equilibrium systems that tend to return to their original states after perturbances. Mahoney and Thelen's volume demonstrates some of the ways in which this plasticity emerges; they prove an account of the mechanisms of gradual institutional change. And this approach makes plain the high degree of path-dependency that institutions display.

Here is how Mahoney and Thelen frame their research problem:

A growing body of work suggests that important changes often take place incrementally and through seemingly small adjustments that can, however, cumulate into significant institutional transformation. (preface)

Once created, institutions often change in subtle and gradual ways over time. Although less dramatic than abrupt and wholesale transformations, these slow and piecemeal changes can be equally consequential for patterning human behavior and for shaping substantive political outcomes. (1)

We have good theories of why various kinds of basic institutional configurations -- constitutions, welfare systems, and property right arrangements -- come into being in certain cases and at certain times. And we have theories to explain those crucial moments when these institutional configurations are upended and replaced with fundamentally new ones. But still lacking are equally useful tools for explaining the more gradual evolution of institutions once they have been established. (2)

The theory they offer of gradual institutional change is an actor-centered theory. Incremental change occurs as the result of the opportunistic and strategic choices made by a range of actors within the institution. In this respect it resembles the theories discussed earlier of Fligstein and McAdam (link) and Crozier and Friedberg (link). Consider the following series of comments:

We argue that institutional change often occurs precisely when problems of rule interpretation and enforcement open up space for actors to implement existing rules in new ways. (4)

But institutional outcomes need not reflect the goals of any particular group; they may be the unintended outcome of conflict among groups or the result of "ambiguous compromises" among actors who can coordinate on institutional means even if they differ on substantive goals. (8)

Given a view of institutional stability that rests not just on the accumulation but also on the ongoing mobilization of resources, one important source of change will be shifts in the balance of power. (8)

We propose that the basic properties of institutions contain within them possibilities for change. What animates change is the power-distributional implications of institutions. However, where we expect incremental change to emerge is precisely in the "gaps" or "soft spots" between the rule and its interpretation or the rule and its enforcement. (13)

These descriptions conform very well with the description of organizations offered by Fligstein and McAdam in their theory of strategic action fields (link). The theory of change offered by Mahoney and Thelen is an agent-centered view, and therefore has strong affinities with the strategic action field theory and the view of organizations offered by Crozier and Friedberg.

Institutions are generally thought of as "shaping" factors on human action and choice; individuals construct their actions and strategies within the context of the rules and norms of various institutions. But how do the rules of an organization actually constrain behavior? Mahoney and Thelen do not take compliance within an institution as a given; instead, they look for the interests and opportunities of various agents within the organization or institution that interlock to secure compliance. This sounds a lot like "governance units" in the Fligstein and McAdam theory of strategic action fields.

If, instead, we break with a view of institutions as self-reinforcing (through whatever mechanism) and put distributional issues front and center, compliance emerges as a variable, and a variable that is crucially important to the analysis of both stability and change. The need to enforce institutions carries its own dynamic of potential change, emanating not just from the politically contested nature of institutional rules but also, importantly, from a degree of openness in the interoperation and implementation of these rules. (10)

Much of the content of the book takes the form of case studies of particular complexes of institutions in the midst of historical change. Particularly interesting is Dan Slater's analysis of the autocratic institutions of governance crafted by Suharto throughout his regime (1966-1998) ("Altering Authoritarianism: Institutional Complexity and Autocratic Agency in Indonesia"). This period is often treated as a homogeneous block of authoritarian military rule, but Slater argues that there was substantial institutional change throughout the period.

Ostensibly a model of long-term stability, the Suharto regime in fact experienced a gradual but significant transformation of its core institutional features. What started as a system of oligarchic military rule evolved into a highly personalized regime, backed in nearly equal measure by military and civilian organizations. (132)

The upshot was the gradual transformation of a collectivistic military-dominated regime (or "junta") into a highly personalized regime, perched atop a mixed party-military infrastructure (or a "strongman" regime with pronounced elements of "bossism"). (139)

Slater analyzes the strategic situations of the primary political players: Suharto, the mass political parties, and the military. And he understands the transition described here as one that followed from the strategic moves made by these players, with Suharto's hand being the most influential. But this is a key point: Suharto was not able to simply command the changes he sought, and the outcomes reflected the agency of other important social actors as well.

Alan Jacobs' treatment of the U.S. Social Security Program is also very interesting, as is Tulia Falleti's account of health care reforms in Brazil between 1964 and 1988. Each case study provides just what Mahoney and Thelen call for in their introduction: careful, detailed studies of institutions in a process of change.

It is worth noting that all the examples treated in this collection are concerned with large institutions -- the Brazilian policy arena, the Suharto dictatorship, the U.S. Social Security Program. It makes the reader wonder whether similar results would emerge when more meso-level institutions and organizations are studied: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the IBM Corporation, or the Michigan Department of Human Services. Do the observations about the strategic interactions of primary players within the institution play an equally important role in change within institutions at this level of scale? I drew a parallel between the Mahoney-Thelen approach to institutional change and the theories of Fligstein and McAdam, as well as Crozier and Friedberg. But this appears to be a salient difference -- the scale of the institutions to which the analysis is applied. The latter two theories seem to be developed with primary emphasis on smaller-scale institutions and organizations.

Are there online solutions to rising college costs?

2013-04-07T11:49:00.001-04:00

There are many, many voices offering observations and criticisms of universities in face of rising costs and tuitions. But none is more qualified than Bill Bowen to address these issues. He is the preeminent economist and analyst of the institutions of American universities, and he was a long-serving president of Princeton University. So it is a treat to read his recent set of Tanner lectures on this topic, Higher Education in the Digital Age. (The Kindle edition became available today; link.)

On the cost side, Bowen has a very clear and reasonable understanding of why university costs tend to rise more rapidly than inflation. Universities are very labor-intensive organizations, and the largest component of their workforce are highly skilled and nationally competitive faculty. But highly skilled professionals on university faculties are linked to employment markets outside of academia, and salaries in those external markets continue to rise healthily. To maintain excellence in research and teaching, universities need to increase compensation annually, and often at rates that are moderately higher than inflation. There are other cost drivers that Bowen doesn't discuss -- i.e. rising healthcare costs -- but competition for the best faculty is key. (It is unfortunate that he uses the phrase "cost disease," which implies that the rising cost structure in higher education is somehow a chronic failure within the sector, rather than an inherent feature of the nature of the work.)

Moreover, Bowen correctly notes that processes leading to productivity gain in other parts of the economy have not been possible in the teaching and research environment. Teaching undergraduates is a time-consuming activity for skilled professors, and reducing the time per student means lowering the quality of learning that occurs.

The basic idea is simple: in labor-intensive industries such as the performing arts and education, there is less opportunity than in other sectors to increase productivity by, for example, substituting capital for labor. (3)

Bowen quotes Robert Frank who observed that "it still takes four musicians nine minutes to perform Beethoven's String Quartet No. 4, just as it did in the nineteenth century" (4).

To be sure, universities need to continue to improve productivity in the routine business and management of the institution, and most universities have become very adept at this effort. But the compensation costs of maintaining a nationally competitive faculty generally outweigh these savings, so the cost of instruction per student continues to rise slightly ahead of inflation. (Bowen and others estimate this premium at about one percent; 4.)

Bowen also spends some effort on analyzing "productivity" in the context of universities. Some aspects of university outcomes are easily quantified -- degrees awarded, time to degree, performance on standardized tests. But Bowen makes a key point when he observes that perhaps the most important outcome -- educational quality -- is not measurable; and yet leaders, faculty, and managers of universities must remain committed to maintaining and enhancing the quality of the education they provide. And quality has a cost. Bowen makes interesting use of a New England Journal of Medicine article on IT innovations and productivity; link. Here is a relevant publication from the National Academy Press authored by Teresa Sullivan and others, Improving Measurement of Productivity in Higher Education (link).

In order to fundamentally change the cost structure of a university education, it would be necessary to do one of two possible things: either significantly increase the number of students for whom a single faculty member is responsible (greatly increasing the student-faculty ratio), or increase the number of lower-paid instructors whose job responsibilities are more limited than the current system (full responsibility of all details of a single course, research activity, participation in departmental affairs, ...). Both of these pathways seem like significant steps away from the learning intimacy that Bowen extolls in the experience of a residential college. "Flipping the classroom" and maintaining or increasing the amount of faculty contact with students sounds like a great learning solution -- but it doesn't reduce costs.

What is most interesting about the book is the second lecture, "Prospects for an Online Fix." Since many breathless voices have started to argue that online education and MOOCs are a breakthrough technology for universities and colleges that will render the traditional classroom obsolete, Bowen's take on this question is an important one. His overall assessment is a measured one. He thinks that there is some reason to expect that blended pedagogy and curriculum may in fact be possible in ways that enhance learning and reduce the cost curve. But he also points out that there are only a limited number of rigorous studies of learning outcomes for online and face-to-face instruction, and these studies do not support a clear advantage for either modality. Essentially the most common findings are that learning outcomes are roughly similar in online and face-to-face classes. More importantly, though, he finds that there is very little rigorous research available to evaluate the possibility of cost savings through online instruction. And without significant (and growing) cost savings, the technology shift does not affect the cost curve.

So where does Bowen's current cautious optimism about online and blended instruction come from? Several things seem to have influenced him since his Romanes Lecture at Oxford in 2000, which was significantly more dubious about the prospects for cost-reducing, effective online university instruction. One is the cluster of innovations in software-based quizzing, coaching, and tutoring that have occurred in the past ten years. Another is the finding of some studies that faculty and online course designers are beginning to get the hang of how to use the online medium to greater pedagogical effect than simply placing a traditional course online with existing materials and techniques. And a third, on the learning-outcomes side, is the educational payoff that may result from "flipping the classroom" -- relieving the faculty member from lectures and using face-to-face time for discussion, coaching, and probing of learning quality.

The kinds of courses that are most frequently studied in research about online education are generally on the technical side of the curriculum: statistics, accounting, and calculus have been studied for learning outcomes by both approaches. We might imagine that entry-level courses in the sciences, engineering, and business might fall in the same general scope. But what about courses in humanities, human resources, marketing, ethnography, history, or sociology? Are there online pedagogies that would offer an effective base for learning in these fields? How can we be assured that the abstract cognitive and analytical skills associated with art history, philosophy, or computer design are actually being developed in the students who take these kinds of courses online?

Here is the vision that Bowen ultimately offers of the "university in the digital world":

Can we imagine a university in which

Faculty collaborate more on teaching (with technology serving as the forcing function)?
Faculty devote more of their time to promoting "active learning" by their students and are freed from much of the tedium of grading and even giving essentially the same lecture countless times?
Students receive more, and more timely, individualized feedback on assignments?
Instruction is guided by evidence drawn from massive amounts of data on how students learn, what mistakes students commonly make, and how misunderstandings underlying those mistakes can be corrected ("adaptive learning")?
Technology is used to bring the perspectives of a more diverse student body onto its campus through its capacity to engage students from around the world?
Technology extends the educational process throughout one's life through the educational equivalent of booster shots? And ideally:
A university in which institutional costs and tuition charges rise at a slower rate? (44)

And Bowen now seems to think that this favorable outcome is possible, using new tools available to faculty and academic leaders:

I am today a convert. I have come to believe that now is the time. Far greater access to the Internet, improvements in Internet speed, reductions in storage costs, the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated mobile devices, and other advances have combined with changing mindsets to suggest that online learning, in many of its manifestations, can lead to at least comparable learning outcomes relative to face-to-face instruction at lower-cost. (45)

What is surprising to me about Bowen's current optimism is that it seems premature, given Bowen's own commitment to rigorous measures of quality and costs. As he points out repeatedly in the lecture, the high-quality studies of educational effectiveness are not yet available in sufficient volume to permit confident conclusions; and studies of the cost structure of online and blended instruction are even less detailed.

But more concerning is the issue of defining more adequately the kinds of intellectual and social maturation we most want to stimulate with an undergraduate education, and whether the pedagogies that emerge in online education are effective in creating those forms of development. It is one thing to help a student learn the central doctrines of Descartes, Hume, and Kant as a list of propositions; it is quite another to help him or her to think critically, creatively, empathetically, and innovatively about the philosophical developments and social context that stimulated these ideas about rationalism and empiricism.

A related concern is the problem of generating student engagement in learning. The best classes I have had in my career as a philosophy professor have been those in which students gained an excitement and engagement with the issues which led them to want to learn more about the subject. They wanted to discuss ideas in the class and outside the class; they were happy to be steered towards additional readings; they took on the subject matter as their own. How does this form of intellectual engagement emerge from an online class? How does the learning become personal? How does the student acquire a stake in the learning and an intellectual passion for taking it further? Bowen recognizes the importance of direct contact with professors in generating this kind of engagement (67-68); but he suggests, somehow, that this personal contact will be increasingly the province of the richer institutions. "The mix will vary by institutional type, and relatively wealthy liberal arts colleges and selective universities can be expected to offer more in-person teaching than can many less privileged institutions" (68). But what if the in-person contact is actually the secret sauce -- the ingredient that makes the recipe work?

I still remember taking the GRE in philosophy as a senior philosophy student at the University of Illinois in 1971. It struck me as being no more than a scholastic joke, probing for the student's knowledge about names and key doctrines in the history of philosophy without any real ability to assess philosophical cognitive skills. This standardized exam had nothing whatsoever to do with real philosophical thinking, or the skills of reasoning and questioning that begin to contribute to one's being a capable philosopher. I fear that online education in philosophy and other areas of the humanities would be vulnerable to exactly this fatal weakness: emphasizing facts and formal structures of doctrines, but giving short shrift to development of the critical skills that are needed to make sense of the issues in the field. Could we imagine Wittgenstein without Frege and Russell?

(Here is an excellent survey of current research on online education by Bowen and Kelly Lack; link.)

Organizations and strategic action fields

2013-04-05T07:50:00.004-04:00

image: Hierarchical modularity of nested bow-ties in metabolic networks, Jing Zhao, Hong Yu, Jian-Hua Luo, Zhi-Wei Cao and Yi-Xue Li (link)

Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam provide a full exposition of their theory of strategic action fields in A Theory of Fields. As observed in an earlier post, this theory presents an innovative way of thinking about the composition of the social.

The basic idea is that the fundamental structure of social life is "agents behaving strategically within a field of resources and other agents." Here is a preliminary description of strategic action fields.

A strategic action field is a constructed mesolevel social order in which actors (who can be individual or collective) are attuned to and interact with one another on the basis of shared (which is not to say consensual) understandings about the purposes of the field, relationships to others in the field (including who has power and why), and the rules governing legitimate action in the field. A stable field is one in which the main actors are able to reproduce themselves and the field over a fairly long period of time. (1)

Fligstein and McAdam do not give fundamental ontological status to structures or organizations, and they do not presuppose a dichotomy between agents and structures. Instead, organizations and institutions are ensembles of agents-in-fields, at a range of levels. Here is what they have to say about firms, which can be extended to organizations more generally:

Firms are nested strategic action fields in which there are hierarchical dependent relationships between the component fields. Each plant and office is a strategic action field in its own right. Typically firms are organized into larger divisions in which management controls resource allocation and hiring. (59)

This theory possesses microfoundations; this is the thrust of the second chapter in the book. Their account is largely organized around the idea of social skill at the level of the actor. What I want to explore here, though, is the "macro-sociology" of the theory. In particular, how do our concepts of meso-level social structures like institutions and organizations get parsed when we use the language of strategic action fields? And substantively, how can we account for the relative level of stability that organizations and institutions possess, if they are simply composites of strategically motivated actors? This description suggests a high degree of fluidity, as strategies and coalitions shift. But instead, we observe a high level of stability in organizations much of the time, persisting over multiple generations of actors.

The answer seems to derive from the idea that F&M introduce of "internal governance units."

In addition to incumbents and challengers, many strategic action fields have internal governance units that are charged with overseeing compliance with field rules and, in general, facilitating the overall smooth functioning and reproduction of the system. (13)

Organizations are configured around incumbents who are assigned roles and powers that give them both an interest and an ability to maintain the workings of the organization. So stability is not a primitive quality of an organization; instead, it is a consequence of the specific interlocking assignments of interests and powers within the various networks of agents that make up the organization. Stability is a dynamic feature of the organization, reproduced by the actions of incumbents. And change in the organization occurs when there is significant alteration in those interests and powers.

Field stability is generally achieved in one of two ways: the imposition of hierarchical power by a single dominant group or the creation of some kind of political coalition based on the cooperation of a number of groups. (14)

On this approach, then, stability is a consequence of the configuration of a given system of strategic fields, rather than an axiomatic property of the organization.

There is a great deal of consonance between this theory and the ideas about organizations and actors put forward by Crozier and Friedberg some forty years ago in Actors and Systems: The Politics of Collective Action; here is an earlier post on their work. Crozier and Friedberg too looked at organizations as arenas of strategic and opportunistic action by agents. They too emphasized the role of cooperation and alliances within organizations. And they too looked at organizations as solutions to problems of collective action. There is no indication that Fligstein and McAdam were directly influenced by Crozier, and indeed the research communities including both are fairly distinct. So this looks like a case of independent discovery of a new idea rather than sequential development of this idea. It looks more like the case of Wallace and Darwin in the discovery of natural selection, than Darwin and Huxley in the development of that idea.

Moral intuitions as evolutionary modules

2013-04-01T22:04:00.002-04:00

People have moral reactions to the situations they observe around themselves -- within the work environment, in the family, on the street, or in international affairs. This is a psychological fact that is prior to moral philosophy. How should we understand this feature of ordinary human consciousness and cognition?

Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist who has some fairly original ideas on this subject. His most recent book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, attempts to lay out a theory of moral psychology that puts moral intuition and judgment ahead of conscious moral reasoning, and independent from the content of what we refer to as moral philosophy.

Moral philosophers often take their cue from Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy, according to which moral judgment is a conscious process of reasoning. Haidt suggests a very different way of understanding our moral reactions -- as intuitions more similar to sensations of taste than considered rational judgments based on principles and facts. In fact, he identifies six "moral taste receptors": harm, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity (kl 103). Essentially, our moral intuitions about a complex situation stem from the degree to which these "receptors" are triggered by features of the situation. And the moral reaction comes first, whereas the moral reasoning and arguments come after the fact.

Haidt also works within the intellectual framework of evolutionary biology -- the idea that the enduring traits of a species are the result of a long process of innovation, selection, and adaptation, governed by the selective reproductive success created by the trait. This puts him in roughly the same intellectual space as the sociobiologists; but his approach has much greater sensitivity to the nuances of moral intuitions and dispositions than scientists like E. O. Wilson have shown (On Human Nature: Revised Edition). (It should be noted that Haidt praises Wilson's work on human nature and evolutionary psychology; kl 655.)

I've used the term "moral emotions" here, but Haidt actually prefers something else: moral intuitions. He describes his view as "social intuitionism." Intuitions are the quick judgments we come to about situations before we have time to think them through in a cognitive fashion. Disgust is a paradigm intuition: the quick revulsion we have at the idea of drinking a glass of blended cockroaches and fruit juice is prior to any rational concerns we might eventually have about health effects. The basic premise is this:

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. (kl 989)

Haidt offers six principles of moral intuition and thought based on experimental findings:

Brains evaluate instantly and constantly.
Social and political judgments are particularly intuitive.
Our bodies guide our judgments.
Psychopaths reason but don't feel.
Babies feel but don't reason.
Affective reactions are in the right place at the right time in the brain.

If moral reactions have an intuitive-cognitive basis, then it is natural to ask how these reactions are structured and classified. Haidt offers this interesting preliminary classification of the "moral modules" and their triggers in our moral intuition system:

This is a very interesting presentation of the dimensions of moral intuition: care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; and sanctity/degradation. Each pair has a potential role to play in the early evolutionary history of hominids as social organisms: protecting and caring for children, securing cooperation with others, forming coalitions, forming hierarchies, and avoiding toxic contamination. And, finally, Haidt suggests how these characteristics relate to a set of virtues: kindness, fairness, loyalty, deference, and temperance, for example. (Only "liberty" is omitted from his original list of the moral receptors provided above.)

This topic is of interest here for several reasons. One is the straightforward interest that we all have in understanding better where moral reactions come from. But the other is a more theoretical interest: to have a broader set of ideas about how consciousness and action work in real human beings. Haidt offers a clear and in some ways testable theory of how moral emotions and intuitions interact with rational deliberation, and this is a valuable contribution to the theory of the actor that we so plainly need in the social sciences.

Critical theory in the Frankfurt School

2013-03-30T18:50:00.002-04:00

An earlier post raised the question of the meaning of the word "critical" in Roy Bhaskar's theory of critical realism. The most extensive discussions of the epistemology of critical theory occurred in the post-Marxist debates within the Frankfurt School, and Raymond Geuss presents those debates with great clarity in The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (1981).

Here is the general definition that Geuss offers:

A critical theory, then, is a reflective theory which gives agents a kind of knowledge inherently productive of enlightenment and emancipation. (2)

Critical theories aim at emancipation and enlightenment, at making agents aware of hidden coercion, thereby freeing them from that coercion and putting them in a position to determine where their true interest lie. (55)

The idea of enlightenment here is related to achieving accurate knowledge of one's place in the world -- "to determine what [one's] true interests are". And emancipation in this context means having the epistemic tools necessary to make one free -- to change the world and the structure of governing social relations in ways that increase one's ability to live and develop freely. So critical theory is a body of knowledge that permits people to move in the direction of greater autonomy and self-definition. And it is a body of knowledge that penetrates through the obstacles and forms of mystification that prevent individuals in dominating social relations to accurately perceive their situation.

The paradigm case of a critical theory, according to Frankfurt School theorists, is Marx's presentation of the political economy of capitalism. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy provides a basis for understanding how exploitation takes place within the ostensibly free social relations of capitalism; how the class system works; how the fetishism of commodities works to systematically obscure th exploitation and inequality inherent in the property relations of capitalism; and how the dynamics of capitalist competition lead to central tendencies in capitalist society (industrial reserve army, falling rate of profit, immiseration).

The critique of ideology is a core function of critical theory. Ideologies are the systems of ideas and belief that class societies have developed to redescribe and conceal the real workings of the social order. Individuals in every historical period require mental frameworks in terms of which to understand and represent the social structures and relations within which they live. Human beings are reflective, cognitive actors. They need to make sense of the things that influence their lives -- the powers of others, the access they have to material resources, the forms of respect or disrespect that characterize interpersonal relations. Marx and the theorists of the Frankfurt School described these mental frameworks as ideologies; and they worked on the assumption that ideologies are tilted in favor of specific powerful groups in society. Religion and myth serve ideological functions; but so do large, pervasive social assumptions about how things work. In the United States there are certainly ideological systems of belief in terms of which many people understand immigration, race relations, and urban-rural inequalities.

Geuss provides a very careful and illuminating discussion of the nuanced ideas about ideology that were constructed by Frankfurt School theorists, including Jürgen Habermas. This is useful for a number of reasons. First, the concept of ideology is often brought forward without a very specific meaning, and Geuss's analysis is useful in this context. But Geuss's analysis is also a valuable contribution to an issue that has come up frequently in earlier posts in UnderstandingSociety: the need to have more nuanced and adequate theories of the subjectivity of the actor. The social frameworks of knowledge through which individuals make sense of their social relations are certainly an important component of this topic.

Critique of ideology is an essential part of critical theory in the definition offered above. When individuals are preoccupied with social beliefs and expectations that conform badly to the real nature of their social relations, they achieve neither enlightenment nor emancipation. Here is Geuss's analysis of ideological critique as developed by the FS.

Radical criticism of society and criticism of its dominant ideology are inseparable; the ultimate goal of all social research should be the elaboration of a critical theory of society of which ideology critique would be an integral part.
Ideology critique is not just a form of "moralizing criticism," i.e. an ideological form of consciousness is not criticized for being nasty, immoral, unpleasant, etc. but for being false, for being a form of delusion. Ideology critique is itself a cognitive enterprise, a form of knowledge.
Ideology critique (and hence also the social theory of which it is a part) differs significantly in cognitive structure from natural science, and requires for its proper analysis basic changes in the epistemological views we have inherited from traditional empiricism (modeled as it is on the study of natural science). (26)

Geuss raises a key question about critical theory: what is the epistemic status of such theories? To what extent can evidence and logic allow us to argue for the truth or falsity of a given critical theory?

If a critical theory is to be cognitive and give us knowledge, it must be kind of thing that can be true or false, and we would like to know under what conditions it would be falsified and under what conditions confirmed. (75)

In other words, critical theories are aimed at furthering a set of fundamental human values (freedom, emancipation, enlightenment); but they are intended to have rational epistemic force as well. It is expected that theorists and users of theory will give an honest allegiance to evidence and logic, and will be prepared to abandon aspects of their theories if they are refuted. And Geuss admits that this set of epistemic values are in some tension with the democratic and enlightenment values embodied in the critical theory (78).

There is one more idea associated with the general definition provided above, the idea of a reflective theory. Here the idea is that a critical theory needs to pay attention to its subject matter; but it also needs to pay attention to the conditions of knowledge that surround the theory as well. The critical theory should give us some idea of how it could be arrived at in normal social circumstances.

A critical theory is structurally different from a scientific theory in that it is "reflective" and not a "objectifying", that is, it is not just a theory about some objects different from itself, it is also a theory about social theories, how they arise, how they can be applied, and the conditions under which they are acceptable. (79)

So reflective here means "attentive to the conditions and processes through which the theory itself is discovered and assessed".

This is an important set of ideas that helps the problem of better understanding and changing society. One way of thinking about the Frankfurt School is that they were post-positivist and provided some new ideas about how to think about social science and social theory in ways not chained to the assumptions of positivist philosophy of science. But many of these theorists presented ways of framing the nature of contemporary society that were post-Marxist as well. They continued to be concerned with key Marxian ideas like exploitation, alienation, and false consciousness. But they also sought out theoretical frameworks that went beyond economics and historical materialism.

Michael Mann on power

2013-03-27T19:18:00.001-04:00

In 1986 Michael Mann began a strikingly ambitious project -- to give a theoretical and historical account of the history of power in human history. This effort came to closure in the past few months with the publication of volume 3 (The Sources of Social Power: Volume 3, Global Empires and Revolution, 1890-1945) and volume 4 (The Sources of Social Power: Volume 4, Globalizations, 1945-2011). (Two other titles were published as offshoots of this project, Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing.)

This is an amazing corpus, and I think it throws important light on both the theory and the history. It is historical sociology on a macro-scale; and yet Mann also provides careful, almost ethnographic details at the level of individual actors -- fascists, ethnic paramilitaries, legislators, colonial administrators. So I think Mann also offers a great example of a sociologist who is not prisoner to a single methodology or a single avenue of approach to these supremely complex social processes.

Another admirable dimension of Mann's approach to this long sweep of history is his insistence on the contingency and conjunctural character of that history.

We shall see that these structural crises had multiple causes and stages cascading on top of each other in unexpected and unfortunate ways. They were contingent because different causal chains, eacho f which we can trace and explain quite well, came together in a way that we cannot explain in terms of either of them, yet which proved timely for the outcome. (V3, 3)

This attention to contingency and heterogeneity of social processes is to be found through all four volumes. Here is an extensive statement of these ideas at the beginning of Volume 1:

Societies are not unitary. They are not social systems (closed or open); they are not totalities. We can never find a single bounded society in geographical or social space. Because there is no system, no totality, there cannot be "sub-systems," "dimensions," or "levels" of such a totality. Because there is no whole, social relations cannot be reduced "ultimately," "in the last instance," to some systemic property of it -- like the "mode of material production," or the "cultural" or "normative system," or the "form of military organization." Because there is no bounded totality, it is not helpful to divide social change or conflict into "endogenous" and "exogenous" varieties. Because there is no social system, there is no "evolutionary" process within it. (The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760, 1)

Mann doesn't try to reduce any of the periods he considers to a simple organizing theme -- "modernization," "colonialism," "resistance." Instead, he recognizes the degree to which the historical process is heterogeneous across space and time. Fascism had different dynamics in Spain than in Germany; and both were distinct from the fascist ideologies of France between the wars.

But this recognition of the contingency of historical processes does not mean that explanation and generalization are impossible. Instead, Mann takes an approach that is familiar from the social mechanisms approach, though on a more macro scale: he looks to trace causal mechanisms and sequences to show how various social structures and circumstances led to specific kinds of changes in the social order.

One of the generalizing frameworks that he uses throughout all four volumes is what he refers to as the "IEMP model" of social power: ideological, economic, military, and political. He believes that these aspects of social reality are largely independent sets of institutions and processes, and they create different though complementary sources of power for individuals and groups within a given state of society. Here is the thumbnail he offers for each of these four high-level features of social power in Volume 3:

Ideological Power derives from the human need to find ultimate meaning in life, to share norms and values, and to participate in aesthetic and ritual practices with others. (V3, 6)

Economic Power derives from the human need to extract, transform, distribute, and consume the products of nature. Economic relations are powerful because they combine the intensive mobilization of labor with very extensive circuites of capital, trade, and production chains, providing a combination of intensive and extensive power and normally also of authoritative and diffused power. (V3, 8)

Military Power. Since writing my previous volumes, I have tightened up the definition of military power to "the social organization of concentrated and lethal violence." (V3, 10)

Political Power is the centralized and territorial regulation of social life. The basic function of government is the provision of order over this realm. (V3, 12)

Empire and globalization are central topics in the final two volumes of the work. This reflects Mann's historical judgment that the past century or so has been structured by the internationalizing pressures of economic and military interest to create broader systems of control.

I'm looking forward to reading these final two volumes carefully. In the meantime, though, I'm struck by an interesting parallel between Mann's approach to this set of histories and that offered by Eric Hobsbawm a generation earlier.

The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848

The Age of Capital: 1848-1875

The Age of Empire: 1875-1914

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991

Hobsbawm was not a sociological theorist. But he was responsive to many of the same large issues as those raised by Mann: class, capitalism, state, colonialism, revolution, and war. And certainly Hobsbawm no less than Mann was very clear about the role that social power played throughout this global history.

One other observation that strikes me in looking through the four volumes as a group is that the books do not give much spotlight to Asia. The Japanese empire is a central topic, and the Chinese Revolution comes in for some attention. But a key insight that historians of Eurasia like Bin Wong, Ken Pomeranz, and Prasannan Parthasarathi have arrived at, is that Asian history and politics need to be considered in their own terms. The institutions, politics, and ideologies of India, China, Burma, or Japan are not just pale versions of European equivalents; rather, they have their own logics and historical distinctiveness. So as large as this four-volume corpus is, it is still importantly incomplete. And it is a very interesting question to consider whether the IEMP framework that Mann develops works well as a basis for understanding the major turns of historical development in India or China over a comparable sweep of time.

What is "critical" about critical realism?

2013-03-24T11:59:00.000-04:00

Critical realism is an approach to the philosophy of social science advocated centrally by Roy Bhaskar. Other contributors include Margaret Archer and Andrew Collier. What, precisely, does this phrase mean?

The "realism" part of the label is fairly straightforward. Bhaskar maintains that the social sciences (sometimes, often, once in a while) succeed in discovering and describing the real properties and causal powers of social structures and systems. Social entities have real causal powers, and sociology can discover the details of these powers. The approach is anti-positivist, anti-covering-law, and anti-reductionist.

So far this is the familiar position of scientific realism, applied to the social sciences. Rom Harré laid out a version of this in his causal realism theory (Causal Powers: Theory of Natural Necessity). If there is a controversial part of the theory, it is the attribution of reality to higher-level social structures like states, modes of production, and classes; but this isn't in fact very controversial.

This realist theme about knowledge of the social world is also familiar from the "causal mechanisms" approach to social explanation, where theorists argue that there are real (though often unobservable) social causal mechanisms that constitute the motive force of social change.

The more difficult problem is to say what "critical" means in this context. And surprisingly, neither Bhaskar nor his circle is very explicit about this question. The idea of "critical" realism does not appear at all in Bhaskar's first major book, A Realist Theory of Science (1975). The idea of critical philosophy is important and prominent in his second book, The Possibility of Naturalism: A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences (1979). But it isn't used to qualify "realism" but rather "naturalism."

Here is how Bhaskar introduces the idea of critical naturalism in the preface to the first edition of PN:

The upshot of the analysis is a new critical naturalism, entailing a transformational model of social activity and a causal theory of mind. The transformational model necessitates a relational conception of the subject-matter of sociology and a series of ontological, epistemological and relational limits on (or conditions for) a naturalistic science of society." (kl 145)

When Bhaskar comes to qualify the "realism" of RTS later in his work, he uses the phrase "transcendental realism" to describe this formulation of his theory. The idea of "transcendental realism" is derived from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, where a transcendental argument is introduced as one that seeks the conditions of the possibility of a certain kind of knowledge. What must be true of the social world and social actors in order that they may constitute the object of empirical knowledge? Bhaskar's specific question is this:

To what extent can society be studied in the same way as nature? (kl 180)

Bhaskar and Tony Lawson explain this transcendental terminology in Critical Realism: Essential Readings:

Bhaskar sustains a metaphysical realism as a way of elaborating an account of what the world 'must' be like for those scientific practices accepted ex posteriori as successful, to have been possible. (3)

This all gives a strong clue to the reader that Bhaskar's intentions are philosophical and ontological from the start; he deliberately chooses to adopt the language of Kant's critical philosophy of knowledge for his own study of the social sciences.

So, again, what might be implied by attaching "critical" to "realism"?

Critical thinking as emancipatory. In the Marxist tradition the word "critical" has a fairly specific meaning. This meaning is reflected in Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. "The philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it." Critical science is engaged science, committed science, emancipatory science. Critical science is committed to constructing bodies of knowledge that have substantial impact on the link long term best interests of humanity.

Critique as illusion-destroying. Another dimension of the idea of criticism in the Marxist tradition is the idea of "critique" -- focused intellectual effort to uncover the implicit (and misleading) assumptions of various schemes of thought and policy. Marx's Capital is subtitled "A Critique of Political Economy", and this phrase is found in many other of his titles as well. This brings in the idea of laying bare the implicit (often dominating) assumptions of various systems of thought. Laying bare the partisan assumptions underlying ideology and false consciousness is an exercise of critique.

Critique as self-creation. Finally, there is a third connotation of "critical" that pertains to its use in the social sciences: the constant reminder that the social world is not independent and separate from "us". This involves the feature of "reflexiveness" that obtains in the social world. We constitute the social world, for better or worse. And the forms of knowing that we gain through the social sciences also give rise to forms of creating of new social forms -- again, for better or worse. So it is crucial to pay attention to the plasticity of the social relations in which we live, and the innovations we create in those relations through our own processes of knowing and doing. Margaret Archer refers to this fundamental aspect of the relationship between actors and the social world as "morphogenesis" (link).

I think each of these elements is involved in Bhaskar's evolving conception of "criticial" philosophy. In the preface to the Second Edition of PN Bhaskar makes most of the points highlighted above. He refers to the importance of critique of "philosophical ideologies," including positivism, where critique is understood in roughly the sense mentioned above. (An intended second volume of PN was planned but not completed, which would have been called Philosophical Ideologies.) And in the Preface to the First Edition of PN he makes reference to ideas originally expressed in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach mentioned above, but this time quoted in Capital (part iv, section 10, p. 505), in explaining why sociology is important to epistemology: "Sociology is necessary if we are to avoid 'that kind of criticism which knows how to judge and condemn the present, but not how to comprehend it'" (kl 136).

The emancipatory character of Bhaskar's conception of the social sciences emerges as well in his critiques of the fact-value dichotomy in science. He rejects the idea that the scientist must remain ethically neutral with respect to the social and historical processes he or she studies.

But none of this amounts to a systematic exposition of what "critical" philosophy is. At most it gives the reader some clues about the features of thinking, reasoning, and acting that Bhaskar seems to have in mind when he advocates for critical realism as an approach to the philosophy of sociology.

So it seems that Bhaskar has chosen to allow connotation to replace analysis when it comes to explaining "critical". He is a careful and explicit philosopher in much of his writing; but on the subject of "critical" method, he is surprisingly elliptical. And to me, this suggests that the import of Bhaskar's system is more on the side of "realism" than its "critical" methodology.

Mechanisms of racial disparities

2013-03-18T14:05:00.001-04:00

A fundamental fact about American society is the persistence of disparities between African-American and European-American populations. These disparities are manifest in the most important aspects of social life: income, wealth, education levels, health status, and incarceration rates. And several of these areas of disparity persist even when we control for income. Most observers interpret these disparities as the continuing legacy of facts of racial discrimination and oppression, including the racial system of the Jim Crow South. But often the mechanisms that perpetuate racial disparities are less visible and less intentional than they were in the 1940s and 1950s.

Here I want to consider what some of those mechanisms are in contemporary America. Chief among these is the continuing fact of residential segregation based on race. Elizabeth Armstrong makes this point strongly in The Imperative of Integration, and so did Massey and Denton in American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Access to social goods in the United States is highly dependent on where you live. And cities in the United States continue to be highly segregated by race. If poverty, crime, and poor schools are likewise concentrated, then it follows that the opportunities available to black Americans will be, on average, distinctly inferior to those available to white Americans. This is most evident in quality of schooling. But it also shows up in access to nutritional food, health services, and jobs, and vulnerability to heightened rates of crime. A young person's life prospects are very much affected by where he or she grows up. (Here is a good study by DataDrivenDetroit on the availability of grocery stores in Detroit; link.)

These intuitive observations are very consistent with the arguments about neighborhood effects that Robert Sampson has put forward (link). Sampson documents that neighborhoods have significant effects on the behavior and outcomes of the people who live there. When we combine this finding with the facts of segregation in most American cities and the generally poor status of many inner city neighborhoods, once again we come to the conclusion that black individuals and families are likely to have lessened prospects relative to their white counterparts.

One of the most troubling and persistent disparities along racial lines is in the area of health status, including disease rates, infant mortality, and longevity. Black individuals have higher rates of disease and morbidity than their white counterparts. And these differences across racial groups persist even when we control for income, so they are not simply a secondary effect of poverty. There has been a great deal of research in schools of public health as to why this is so. Some factors are obvious -- differential rates of health insurance, different levels of access to hospitals and clinics, and different levels of quality of neighborhood healthcare resources. But given that even affluent segments of the black community have higher rates of various diseases than their white counterparts, there must be more to the story. One possibility is that there are differential patterns of treatment by health providers across racial groups. Do black women receive mammograms at the same rates as white women? Not everywhere. Another possible mechanism is the factor of stress as a determinant of health. Some public health scholars have explored the possibility that daily lives for black people within a highly racialized society incorporate a background level of personal stress that impairs health (link).

Some observers attempt to explain the persistence of racial inequalities on the basis of cultural differences across white and black communities. Different attitudes towards education, family, and work have been cited as causes of racial disparities across communities. These explanations, generally from a conservative political position, claim that there is a "culture of poverty" that holds back young black men and women from striving for success in school and work. Here is an earlier post on the pro's and con's of this approach (link). Generally speaking, I don't find it impossible that there are cultural factors that play a role in social inequalities; but it is too easy for conservatives to slide from this apriori possibility into a single-factor rant that absolves the structure of American society from continuing involvement in racial inequality. And yet it seems obvious that the situation of white and black America would be fundamentally different if educational and employment opportunities were genuinely equal for white and black young people -- which they are not. A much better approach to this complex of hypotheses about culture and structure in racial outcomes is that taken by Alford Young in his research on the ideas and horizons of young black men in The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances (link).

What about inequalities of employment opportunities for white and black workers? Here there are at least three important mechanisms. First is proximity to where the jobs are, and the availability of public transit. Second is the educational qualifications of the workforce. And third is the workings of discrimination at the point of hiring and evaluation. Each of these dimensions places poor black workers at a disadvantage. If transit from the inner city to the jobs in the suburbs is poor, then inner-city workers will have a harder time gaining access to those jobs. If the quality of education provided for inner city black students is poor, these young people will be disadvantaged when it comes to finding a job as well. And, of course, if black applicants are treated differently -- either consciously or unconsciously -- by the hiring process, they will be underrepresented as well. (Here is a review of the sociology of discrimination by Devah Pager and Hana Shepherd, sociologists at Princeton; link.) All these factors appear to be involved in the current disparities that exist when it comes to employment across racial groups.

In short, there seem to be a great number of mechanisms of racial differentiation that are at work in American society that don't generally presuppose explicit racial antagonism, but that work to channel black individuals into worse outcomes than their white counterparts. These are structural factors that the population faces, not personal factors; and they have pronounced effects when it comes to generating racial disparities in a number of crucial social dimensions.

Here is an earlier post that documents some current research on inter-generational social mobility for the black community (link).

Moral emotions

2013-03-16T07:50:00.000-04:00

Why do people act morally? Why do people act altruistically, keep their promises, or act fairly? It is sometimes held that a part of the answer is that people have "moral emotions", and these emotions play a key role in the creation of moral actions.

What is a moral emotion? I'm sure that there are specialists who would offer different definitions of this concept; but I suggest that a moral emotion is a feeling or affect that is responsive to the situation of other living beings. Sympathy, compassion, humor, affection, and respect are all examples of moral emotions; but so are antipathy, rivalry, envy, and racial animosity. This inventory shows that what I'm calling "moral emotions" are not necessarily "moral" -- taking pleasure in the suffering of others is morally unattractive, but falls in the category of a feeling that is responsive to the situation of the other.

There is a related category of emotion that philosophers sometimes refer to as "cognitive emotions." These are feelings that are dependent on possessing certain kinds of beliefs. Feeling grateful is a cognitive emotion; it doesn't make sense to attribute this mental state to someone without also attributing to the person some set of factual beliefs about what has occurred in light of which being grateful makes sense. (Andrew Ortony, Gerald Clore, and Allan Collins provide some theoretical discussion of this topic in The Cognitive Structure of Emotions.)

These two categories do not fully overlap. There are moral emotions that have a cognitive basis. But there are also moral emotions that do not have a cognitive foundation -- for example, the emotional response most people have to a smiling infant. And there are cognitive emotions that do not have a social component -- for example, fear of illness.

It is clear that normal human beings experience these kinds of emotions and feelings. How should we factor them into our theory of action? How do emotions affect behavior? Some emotions seem to have an immediate causal power to create dispositions to specific kinds of action (dispositions that can nonetheless be overridden by higher functions of self-control). An angry person is disposed to lashing out at others. A person experiencing sympathy is disposed to providing aid to people in immediate need. A frightened person is disposed to retreat from the frightening situation. A person experiencing sadness may be inhibited from any kind of action. So emotions have a fairly direct relationship to action.

It is a short step from recognizing the fact of these kinds of emotions, to asking whether there is an evolutionary basis for them. Were social emotions like sympathy psychological capacities that conferred reproductive advantage on early primates? Did these emotions create the possibility of forms of cooperation that permitted primates and early humans to achieve greater success in their environments than would otherwise have been possible? This is a topic that Allan Gibbard explores in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment.

Some philosophers of action (e.g. David Hume) have wanted to understand the emotions as the primary or even sole motivating forces that drive actions, and reason serves only to permit the actor to tailor action to circumstance. Others (e.g. Aristotle) have looked at reason as the master of the emotions: the rational being decides what to do no matter what emotions he or she is experiencing. The "passions" are not trustworthy guides to action, on this philosophy. Kant represented the extreme version of the reason-centric theory of action: only actions motivated by the recognition of duty are morally worthy.

Some philosophers have held that the moral emotions are a necessary ingredient of morally generated behavior. These emotions take the individual out of his/her particular interests and provide a basis for other-regarding action. The moral emotions are thought to provide the motive power underlying altruism, benevolence, and sympathy. Lacking these emotions, it is thought that the actor would be unmoved by the needs and cares of others. The most noteworthy exception to this line of thought is that provided by Tom Nagel in The Possibility of Altruism, where he argues that the cognitive act of recognizing the reality of other persons is sufficient to generate altruistic behavior.

These ideas highlight once again the point made in earlier posts: that a theory of action needs to be complex and needs to take into account the several ways in which consciousness drives behavior. It seems apparent that we do not yet have a theory of action that does justice to the nuance of thought and behavior. Habit, emotion, character, rules, and deliberation all play roles in the creation of actions, but we do not yet have good models for how they work together.

Here is a diagram offered by Ortony, Clore and Collins to help to classify emotions (19).

(Quite a few earlier posts are relevant to this topic. Searching for relevant keywords including altruism, sentiment, reciprocity, and cooperation will lead to some of these discussions.)

What became of Detroit?

2013-03-09T16:04:00.002-05:00

As Detroit approaches a new turn in its difficult journey over the past several decades, the imposition of an Emergency Financial Manager by the governor of Michigan (link), many people are asking a difficult question: how did we get to this point?

The features that need explanation all fall within a general theme -- the decline of a once-great American city. The city's population is now roughly 40% of its peak of almost two million residents in 1950 (link); the tax revenues for city government fall far short of what is needed to support a decent level of crucial city services; the school system is failing perhaps half of the children it serves; and poverty seems a permanent condition for a large percentage of the city. The decline is economic; it is political; it is demographic; it is fiscal; and it is of course a decline in the quality of life for the majority of the residents of the city. The poverty, unemployment, poor housing, poor health, and high crime that characterize the city must surely have an explanation.

There are several standard lines of interpretation that Michiganders offer each other -- the decline of manufacturing and the auto industry; the workings of race and white flight; the uprising of 1967; ineffective and corrupt city management; and a long and debilitating contagion of rustbelt-itis in common with Cleveland, Peoria, and Gary. Each of these has a role to play in the explanation, but it is complicated to see how these factors may have intertwined in the half-century of change that led to the Detroit of 2013.

The decline of manufacturing employment in Detroit and its inner suburbs is certainly a contributing factor to the economic decline of the city of Detroit, but these changes by themselves do not account for the major contours of Detroit's economic decline. In a careful review article on manufacturing employment in Michigan (link), Richard Block and Dale Belman show that the decline of vehicle manufacturing employment for the state of Michigan as a whole was measurable but slow between 1980 and 2001 (152). The loss of jobs has been much more significant since the beginnings of the 2007 recession; but Detroit's decline was well underway by 2007.

What about race and white flight? Certainly Detroit is a much more racially segregated city than it was in 1960, and this increase reflects the relocation of a substantial part of the white population to the affluent suburbs. So white flight is a fact. This racial demographic shift is often attributed to the aftermath of the 1967 uprising. But Tom Sugrue documents very convincingly that this process was already well underway by 1967. White flight predates the occurrence of the uprising by at least a decade (The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit). This transformation of racial demography seems to reflect the vicious circle of urban change that characterizes several of the processes mentioned here. People care about the urban environment in which they live, and if they are unsatisfied and financially able, they will relocate to neighborhoods that provide better quality of life for them. But often their relocation leads to a slight worsening of the environment for others in the neighborhood, leading to a growing flow outward of the more affluent residents. Unfortunately in Detroit's history (like that of many other Midwestern cities) some of those preferences have to do with the racial composition of a neighborhood, resulting in out-migration that is disproportionately white and affluent. But this process has important consequences. Sustained shifting of patterns of residence that result in increasingly impoverished neighborhoods in the central city lead to decline quality of life and declining tax revenues for the city, and another round of relocation.

Another vicious circle in Detroit concerns schooling. The funding of the Detroit Public School system depends on the enrolled student count. Each year for at least the past ten years this count has been lower than the prior year. This means a continuing fiscal crisis for the schools, and a continuing downward spiral of funding and school population. Parents perceive lower quality as a result of reduced funding; they find alternative schools for their children; and the count declines further. But crucially, the quality of schools is a key determinant of the quality of life of a city and its attractiveness as a destination for young families. So declining school quality reinforces population loss.

Another important factor is the quality of housing and neighborhoods in the city. The city has a legacy of blight and decay that is very costly to deal with. The precipitous decline of population has left large parts of the city very sparsely populated, with a high number of abandoned buildings and vacant lots. This low density residential pattern makes it costly to deliver basic urban services like police, fire, sanitation, and infrastructure maintenance. So in addition to a declining tax base, the city has to deal with the challenge that its urban geography implies that services will cost more per capita than they do in more densely populated cities.

So what about the creation of new jobs as a way of combatting these downward spirals? Employers need a well educated workforce. Detroit's ability to educate its children and young adults is impaired; rates of basic literacy are low; and therefore it is difficult to persuade employers to establish new activities in the city. So it is predicable that job growth in the city will be slow.

Finally, what about waste, mismanagement, and fraud in city government? Is this a primary cause of Detroit's decline? Certainly there are examples of each of these problems in Detroit's history. The current trial of former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick lifts the veil from some of these practices. But the current mayor's administration has a good reputation, and it hasn't been possible for the city to make progress on its fiscal crisis during his administration either. Bringing the volume of waste, mismanagement, and fraud down to "normal" levels won't solve the city's fiscal crisis.

If I had to single out a single fact out of this complicated story as the most important factor that led to these toxic changes, I would identify the mechanisms of racial residential segregation that Detroit has embodied for almost a century. For decades Eight Mile represented a key racial division in the city, and a plethora of mechanisms of exclusion conspired to maintain this division. If the city could have settled into a racially and economically mixed pattern of residence in the 1940s, much of this story would have been different. Population exit would not have reached crisis proportions; businesses would have been less likely to relocate out of the city; and a schooling system that was very successful in the 1950s could have maintained its effectiveness. This implies that Detroit is victim to the continuing tragedy of America's inability to heal its racial divisions and antagonisms. Doug Massey and Nancy Denton got it right in their important book, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass:

Segregation increases the susceptibility of neighborhoods to these spirals of decline. During periods of economic dislocation, a rising concentration of black poverty is associated with the simultaneous concentration of other negative social and economic conditions. Given the high levels of racial segregation characteristic of American urban areas, increases in black poverty such as those observed during the 1970s can only lead to a concentration of housing abandonment, crime, and social disorder, pushing poor black neighborhoods beyond the threshold of stability. (13)

So how can Detroit imagine reversing this downward spiral? It's easy to say, though not easy to implement. If Detroit could improve its ability to provide decent, effective education for its children through graduation from high school, and if it could create a process through which tens of thousands of new jobs were created for young people every year, then much of the rest of the picture would change as well. Detroit's young people need education and opportunity; with these assets, they can make their city sing again.

Crozier on actors and organizations

2013-03-07T18:54:00.000-05:00

I ran across a book by Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedberg I hadn't read before in a Dijon bookstore, L'acteur et le système: Les contraintes de l'action collective (French Edition). (Yes, in France they still have great academic bookstores!) It was the book's title that caught my eye -- "actor and system". Crozier and Friedberg's premise is that actors within organizations have substantially more agency and freedom than they are generally afforded by orthodox organization theory, and we can best understand the workings and evolution of the organization as (partially) the result of the strategic actions of the participants (instead of understanding the conduct of the participants as a function of the rules of the organization).

In fact, they appear to look at organizations as solutions to collective action problems -- tasks or performances that allow attainment of a goal that is of interest to a broad public, but for which there are no antecedent private incentives for cooperation. Organized solutions to collective problems -- of which organizations are key examples -- do not emerge spontaneously; instead, "they consist of nothing other than solutions, always specific, that relatively autonomous actors have created, invented, established, with their particular resources and capacities, to solve these challenges for collective action" (15). And they emphasize the inherent contingency of these particular solutions; there are always alternative solutions, neither better nor worse.

This is an appealing point of view to me for several reasons. First, it is consistent with the view I've advocated for at various points about the plasticity of institutions (link). Second, it seems to fit very well with the ideas associated with methodological localism (link): Crozier and Freidberg seem to add support to the view that we can best understand a range of extended social phenomena as the result of the actions and thoughts of the socially situated and socially constituted actors who make up its various locales. Finally, though, the degree of freedom the authors attribute to actors seems to contradict another aspect of organizational theory that I've incorporated into my own thinking: the idea that there are in fact strong microfoundations for the workings of the regulative framework of an organization. On my account these microfoundations take the form of internally realized enforcement mechanisms like auditors, supervisors, and discipline administrators. The freedom of the actors is reduced by the mechanisms of enforcement through which their performance of their roles is overseen.

The authors use the idea of the "narrowing the field of play" ("champs d'interaction aménagés") frequently to describe the workings of an organization. Essentially this seems to imply that an organization commonly succeeds in ruling out certain strategies for the participants while leaving open others. And perhaps this converges with the point just mentioned: organizations succeed in limiting the freedom of choice of participants, though not down to a singleton set. For example: a junior faculty person may choose a strategy of flattering the department chair to increase the likelihood of receiving tenure; but he/she cannot threaten the chair with bodily harm unless support is provided.

So the framework and theory that Crozier and Freidberg offer seems to provide a good illustration of several insights into the nature of the social that have emerged from my own efforts to formulate a better approach to the philosophy of social science. This is, of course, a somewhat personal reason for favoring a theory, but it gives me a motive to work through the book more carefully.

Here are a few passages that capture some of the unique perspective they offer.

Bref, ce mode de raisonnement ne vise pas tant les organisations, comme objet social spécifique, que l'action organisée des hommes. Celle-là constitue la véritable sujet de ce livre. (10)

"In short, this method is not so much aimed at organizations as a specific kind of social thing, as at the organized actions of people. This is the true subject of this book."

"This essay is ultimately a reflection on the relationships of actor and system. It is in effect concerning the existence of these two opposing poles that determines the method we follow. The actor does not exist wholly outside of the system which defines his freedom and the rationality that he can use in his actions. But equally the system does not exist except through the actor who sustains it and gives it life, and who alone can change it. It is the juxtaposition of these two logics which gives birth to the constraints on organized action that our method reveals."

"The reader should not misconstrue the significance of this theoretical bet. We have not sought to formulate a set of general laws concerning the substance, the properties and the stages of development of organizations and systems. We do not have the advantage of being able to furnish normative precepts like those offered by management specialists who always believe they can elaborate a model of "good organization" and present a guide to the means and measures necessary to realize it. We present of series of simple propositions on the problems raised by the existence of these complex but integrated ensembles that we call organizations, and on the means and instruments that people have invented to surmount these problems; that is to say, to assure and develop their cooperation in view of the common goals." (11)

There are resonances in this text of other voices on the topic of the power of organizations. Foucault is mentioned only four times, and then only in footnotes; but the authoritarianism that Foucault attributes to modern institutions seems to be very much the point of view that Crozier and Friedberg want to refute. The book to which they refer is Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, a work that emphasizes the total control to which modern organizations aspire. Crozier and Friedberg reject this view in favor of one that emphasizes the agency and freedoms of the actors situated within the organization. And they take this to be an empirical fact, not a normative one.

The other voice that seems to be in the background in this argument is that of Bourdieu, who is mentioned not at all. Here the relationship is more ambiguous. The emphasis on agency within constraints that Crozier and Friedberg insist upon seems resonant with Bourdieu's theory of practice in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972). But Bourdieu also advocates for some of the themes of domination and control that Foucault highlights; and to this aspect C&F are equally opposed.

This isn't to say that C&F deny the facts of power and exploitation that are so important to Marxist theory as well as Foucault and Bourdieu; in fact, chapter two is dedicated to an analysis of power.

So they don't reject the facts of power and constraint. Rather, they reject the idea that these social systems of power leave actors with no alternative choices. In this respect I would put C&F in league with the position taken by James Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Agents are capable of forming their own perceptions of the social relations in which they find themselves; and they are capable of acting strategically in trying to gain advantage within those relations.

The final relationship that seems both important and somewhat invisible in the text is to Raymond Boudon, one of the primary advocates of rational choice theory in French sociology. C&T are interested in strategic action on the part of deliberative agents, and this brings their theorizing into a degree of alignment with game theory and the work of Boudon. This is not to say that they uncritically accept the premises of formal game theory. In fact they offer their own interpretation of the prisoners' dilemma, with a summary conclusion that it is an error to look at actors as socially disconnected individuals lacking ties to each other that would facilitate cooperation. But the broad framework suggests the importance of reasoning about the choices individual actors make, which leads to a degree of parallel with enlightened versions of rational choice theory.

In short, this is a highly stimulating book with complex relationships to other strands of contemporary French sociology. And its insights still seem important more than forty years after publication.

Decline of French universities

2013-03-03T17:08:00.000-05:00

France has 83 state-supported universities and well over a million undergraduate students in university. After visits over several years to one of these universities and conversations with faculty and students, however, I have come away with some troubling impressions, especially in the humanities. The crux of the apparent problem is a pervasive lack of concern for undergraduate students' learning outcomes on the part of the universities and many of the regular faculty.

Part of this problem derives ultimately from a chronic lack of funding for the universities. Facilities on many campuses are decrepit, and the ratio of students to faculty is quite high. Students are admitted to the university and are charged very low tuition; but sufficient public resources are not made available to allow the university to offer them a high-quality, challenging education.

Another part of the problem is an over-emphasis on research over teaching. Research achievement is certainly an important national goal. But there is a degree of research fetishism that seems sometimes to overwhelm the other values of the university in France, including quality of teaching and learning. This over-emphasis on research within the university is found at the level of the ministry. And it seems to percolate downward as well, to individual campus administrations and to individual faculty. The impression one gets is that only research accomplishment is valued, and there is very little value given to effective teaching, either institutionally or individually. High-prestige research publications are the ticket for career advancement for the faculty member; and nationally visible research achievement is the coin of the realm for university leaders. This value scheme leaves out the undergraduate student almost entirely. But this gives woefully short shrift to the project of creating the next generation of creative, skilled, rigorous thinkers who will constitute the main source of innovation and new knowledge in the France of tomorrow. Currently the universities do not appear to be succeeding in focusing on this crucial task.

And then there is the problem of the turbo prof. This is a very broad phenomenon in the university world of France today that was largely created by the extension of the TGV network of fast trains connecting many secondary cities to Paris with 90 minute journeys. This has helped create the phenomenon of the "turbo prof" -- academics who live in Paris and commute to Tours, Dijon, Strasbourg, or other regional centers. There is a long history of French academics preferring Paris to the regional cities. But now it is possible to live in Paris and spend a day and a half on the regional campus where the academic has an academic appointment.

This phenomenon would not be troubling if the turbo prof kept up his or her part of the bargain: committed teaching, adequate time on campus to advise and assist students, and a reasonable degree of involvement in the intellectual and institutional life of the university. But this is all too often not the case, it appears. Instead, the amount of time spent on the university campus is often reduced to a two-day period of intensive lecturing. The prof travels from Paris on a Monday morning; reaches the campus by 11:00 am; lectures six hours on Monday; stays in a pied-a-terre or hotel room Monday night; lectures another six hours on Tuesday; and returns to Paris in time for dinner on Tuesday evening. It is easy enough to forget about those undergraduates in Tours, Strasbourg, or Dijon by the time the TGV slides into the Gare de Lyons or the Gare de Montparnasse or the Gare de l'Est.

This is very worrisome for the economic and civic future of France. University is a time during which students need to be stretched, challenged, and deepened in their intellectual capacities. But this isn't likely to happen when they have essentially zero contact with faculty, very limited writing assignments, and a very low sense of accountability for their progress on the part of the university.

This is also a hazardous reality for the permanent faculty of these universities. If it becomes apparent that their very limited efforts in their teaching roles make almost no difference in the process of development and maturation that their students achieve, then it is a very short step to concluding that their services are not needed. The few who are genuinely important research scholars may find alternative employment in research institutes, of which France has a fair number. But the idea of a teacher-scholar will be dead. And the next rank of less accomplished researchers will need to look for work outside of academia -- not a very encouraging prospect in France today.

The institutions governing higher education in France need to take these problems seriously. Universities need to refocus their attention on effective, transformative undergraduate education. Faculty need to be re-enculturated to give sincere adherence to the importance of their teaching responsibilities and contact with students. The turbo profs need to extend their work weeks on their regional campuses to a reasonable level -- at least three full days and preferably four. And the Ministry of Higher Education and Research needs to impose real standards of accountability on universities and departments, along the lines of the accreditation processes that exist in North America. And it goes without saying -- those accountability standards need to be focused on the primary values of the university, not the market value of this degree or that.

It is ironic to me that the sociology of education is a much more prominent part of the sociology profession in France than it is in the United States. Much attention has been given to the effects that the educational system has on class stratification, beginning with Bourdieu and Passeron, Les Heritiers: Les etudiants et la Culture, and extending through Mohamed Cherkaoui's École et société : Les paradoxes de la démocratie (French Edition). And yet I haven't been able to locate anything that focuses on the question of educational quality, the educational progress that undergraduates make, and the institutional and individual practices that interfere with educational progress in the universities.

Here is an OECD quality assessment report compiled in cooperation with Universite Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg (link). This document has many of the dimensions of an accreditation report in North America. And it illustrates several of the problems mentioned above. The report gives substantially more attention to research activities than teaching effectiveness; the university's response to this issue when raised in 1985 was essentially nil; and the one effort at implementing measures of teaching quality assessment that was undertaken -- student surveys of educational satisfaction -- was evidently discontinued. The report highlights continuing issues having to do with the effectiveness of undergraduate education: "the excellence of teaching in the postgraduate cycle and the shortcomings of the other cycles, with emphasis on the lack of performance indicators, especially as regards graduate employment; ...".

Here is a recent news story on the funding issues in French universities (link).

French readers -- what are your observations about undergraduate education in French universities?