UnderstandingSociety

Are social networks fundamental?

2009-11-09T12:15:00.007-05:00

There are several natural starting points when we begin thinking seriously about the social world and how it works. For example, we can begin with individual agents and try to understand social patterns as the expression of common features of reasoning and motivation by stylized agents. This is roughly the strategy underway in rational choice theory, neoclassical economics, game theory, and methodological individualism. Or we might begin with an account of group attributes -- race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion. This is roughly the way in which Durkheim, Giddens, and Du Bois begin -- with a kind of macro-social set of categories in terms of which we attempt to understand social structure and behavior.

The concept of a social network doesn't fit neatly into either category. It is larger than a collection of individuals, in that we have to specify a set of relationships among individuals in order to define a social network. But it is much more concrete and agent-based than the super-categories of race, class, or gender turn out to be. So my question here is a fundamental one: Is the concept of a social network one of a very small number of concepts that must be invoked in virtually every kind of social explanation? As such, is the concept of a social network, and the associated concepts of concrete social relationships it brings with it, a fundamental component of any satisfactory social ontology? And does the concept of a social network define a crucial space between the micro and the macro? (A good recent effort to link social networks theory to an important area of social science research is Mario Diani and Doug McAdam, Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action.)

A couple of points are pretty obvious. One is that social networks do in fact constitute a key causal mechanism underlying many social processes. We can explain important features of social and political life by identifying the concrete social networks that exist within the population: the transmission of ideas, knowledge, and styles through a population; the selection of important leaders in government and industry; the effective reach of the state; the course of mobilization within a community around an important issue; and the effectiveness of a terrorist group, to name a few examples. A second point is that networks have specific features of topology and functioning that have causal consequences that are largely independent from the personal characteristics of the people who constitute it. For example, information may travel more quickly through a network of people containing many midsized nodes than one containing just a few mega-hubs. And this structural fact may suffice to explain some social outcomes: for example, this rebellion succeeded (because of rapid transmission of information) whereas that one petered out (because of ineffective communications).

Consider two very different examples of group behavior: synchronized cheering in a stadium and the spread of boycotts in Alabama in the early 1960s. The first case involves no social network at all. Cheerleaders stationed around the field initiate the chant as the noise moves to their part of the stadium, and many fans respond when called. Fan behavior is explained by the fan's observation of the behavior of other fans and the motions of the cheerleader. The boycotts had a different dynamic. Organizations emerged which set about to mobilize support for the strategy of boycott. Some of this effort took the form of public calls to action. But a larger part of the mobilization occurred through the workings of extended networks of engaged people -- ministers, union activists, student organizations, and civil rights groups. And the effectiveness and pattern of dissemination of the call to action depended critically on the scope and structure of each of these networks of networks -- networks among leaders of diverse organizations and subordinate networks clustered around each leader. (Doug McAdam describes these processes in detail in Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970.)

These examples seem to lead to a couple of observations. One is that social networks are not critical for every form of social action. But the exceptions are pretty simple cases of spontaneous coordination. And second, the example of civil rights mobilization illustrates very clearly why we should expect that social networks are usually crucial. The reason is straightforward: almost all social outcomes require a degree of coordination, communication, and mobilization. A social network is not the only way of bringing these factors about -- cheerleaders and television stations can do it too. But the causal importance of social networks is likely to be great in many cases. And for this reason it seems justified to conclude that social networks are in fact fundamental to social explanation. Likewise, it appears correct to say that they function as bridging mechanisms from micro to macro, in that they help to convey the actions of local agents onto larger social outcomes (and back!).

(Several earlier posts are relevant to this topic: agent-based modeling, transnational protest, ethnic strife.)

Singular and generic causal assertions

2009-11-06T20:40:00.121-05:00

It is worthwhile to notice that we can ask causal questions at two extremes of specificity and generality. We can ask why the Nicaraguan Revolution occurred—that is, what was the chain of circumstances that led to the successful seizure of power by the Sandinistas? This is to invite a specific historical narrative, supported by claims about causal powers of various circumstances. And we can ask why twentieth-century revolutionary movements succeeded in some circumstances and failed in others—that is, we can ask for an account of the common causal factors that influenced the course of revolution in the twentieth century. In the first instance we are looking to put forward a causal hypothesis about a particular event; in the latter we are seeking a causal explanation concerning the behavior of a class of events.

Take the idea that the outbreak of hostilities in World War I was caused by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914. This claim might be supported by identifying a chain of events that proceeded from the assassination, to decisions in various capitals, to the mobilization of troops, to the outbreak of fighting. The assassination was the spark that led to the conflagration. But this is a purely singular chain of events, and there is no regular connection between occurrences of this set of events and the outbreak of war. The sequence of causal links in this story involves pure contingency at many stages. Assassinations don't generally cause wars; sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. Events in the category of "political assassination" do in fact have a set of causal powers -- through the influence that a political assassination can have on powerful decision-makers and public opinion. But there is no single mechanism that links assassinations to the outbreak of war.

Consider an analogy with professional basketball. We might ask the question, "What circumstances permitted the Pistons to defeat the Celtics in Game Seven of the NBA playoffs?" And the answer may include a mix of general and particular factors: their guards were quicker, their center shut down the lane, the Piston's coach had a great game plan; as well as the entirely contingent events: two Celtics players collided at a critical moment, a three-point shot at the buzzer banged off the rim, there was a clock malfunction that gave the Pistons a breather. The former types of factors are the sorts of things that might be used to attempt to explain basketball success over the course of a season and a full range of teams; these are common causal factors explaining success and failure. The latter types of factors are fundamentally contingent and non-repeatable. These are random events with respect to a basketball season.

Much inquiry in the social sciences has to do with singular causal processes (historical outcomes): individual revolutions, specific experiences of modernization and development, specific histories of collective action. Charles Tilly‘s career-long treatment of the collective political behavior of the French is a case in point; Tilly attempts to identify a characteristic tradition of French political action, and attempts to identify the historical occurrences which gave this tradition its specificity (Tilly 1986). But Tilly is also interested in identifying common social mechanisms of contention; and this allows him to identify general causes as well as singular causes.

Historical investigation and "process tracing" permit us to analyze particular singular causal sequences—for example, "a floating iceberg caused the sinking of the Titanic." This kind of singular historical analysis permits discovery of the causal mechanisms and contingent happenings that were involved in the production of the event to be explained.

A general hypothesis about causation is based on a discovery of a pattern across a number of similar cases. For example, Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China attempts to discover causal regularities leading to the occurrence of revolution that emerge from study of a small number of particular revolutions, and Jeffrey Paige's Agrarian Revolution offers a large-N study of cases of revolution and rebellion to attempt to discover common causal conditions. And through either type of study we might arrive at evidence supporting general causal claims like these: "the occurrence of subsistence crises is a causal factor in the occurrence of rebellion," "a strong state inhibits the occurrence of rebellion," and "international crises make rebellions more likely."

To assert that A’s are causes of B’s is to assert that there is a typical causal mechanism through which events of type A lead to events of type B. Here, however, we must note that there are rarely single sufficient conditions for social outcomes; instead, causes work in the context of causal fields. So to say that revolutions are causally influenced by food crisis, weak states, and local organization, is to say that there are real causal linkages from these conditions to the occurrence of revolution in specific instances. If we have enough cases, then these causal mechanisms will also produce some regularities of association between the hypothesized causal factors and the outcome; but without a large number of cases these regularities will be difficult or impossible to discern.

To what extent is such a causal analysis of a unique event explanatory, rather than merely true? The account is explanatory if it identifies influences that commonly exert causal power in a variety of contexts, not merely the case of the French in 1848 or Russia in 1917. And a case study that invokes or suggests no implications for other cases, falls short of being explanatory.

I will put it forward as a methodological maxim that a causal assertion is explanatory only if it identifies a causal process that recurs across a family of cases. A historical narrative is an answer to the first sort of question (“why did this particular event come about?”); such a narrative may or may not have implications for more general causal questions. A true causal story is not always explanatory.

There is another issue raised by this topic of general and particular causal hypotheses, which has to do with the idea of "over-determination." Return to the case of World War I. It might be argued that there were broad structural forces at work that were steadily increasing the likelihood of war throughout 1912-1914 -- deepening economic and geographical conflicts of interest among the great powers, large-scale military planning by various governments, and a worsening arms race, for example; so war was "inevitable" with or without the spark created by the assassination of the Archduke. If this event had not occurred, some other instigating event would have cropped up; so the conflagration was inevitable. On this interpretation, the assassination of the Archduke was a critical part of the actual pathway leading to the outbreak of war; but there were many other hypothetical pathways that would have led to the same result. So it is the background structural conditions that were the real and substantive causes of World War I -- not the contingent and accidental fact of the assassination in 1914.

A modern world-system?

2009-11-03T22:07:00.001-05:00

Source : Minard’s Map of Port and River Tonnage

Immanuel Wallerstein created a huge stir in the 1970s with the publication of The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (1974). The book is an intellectual masterpiece, synthesizing a vast range of fundamental literature on the economic history of Europe and the world. You could look at the book as the first serious and extended effort to theorize globalization -- a term that barely existed at the time of publication. Or you could look at it as a general theory of colonialism -- an account of the pathways and influences through which the metropole dominated and exploited the periphery. It is worth looking back at this work today to tease out some of the guiding assumptions about history, sociology, and globalization it reflected.

The concept of "world system" is itself a key component of our current understanding of globalization, in that it captures the idea of causal interconnectedness across the globe among major organizations, firms, populations, and states. Wallerstein observes that earlier social scientists had usually centered their analysis at the level of the political unit -- the nation-state; whereas his own approach is different:

This book makes a radically different assumption. It assumes that the unit of analysis is an economic entity, the one that is measured by the existence of an effective division of labor, and that the relationship of such economic boundaries to political and cultural boundaries is variable, and therefore must be determined by empirical research for each historical case. Once we assume that the unit of analysis is such a "world-system" and not the "state" or the "nation" or the "people", then much changes in the outcome of the analysis. (xi)

But what, more exactly, did he mean by a system? Did he imagine something analogous to a mechanical system in which the relations among the parts were governed by a few simple laws? He seems to suggest this possibility when he asks the question, "What do astronomers do? As I understand it, the logic of their arguments involves two separate operations. They use the laws derived from the study of smaller physical entities, the laws of physics, and argue that ... these laws hold by analogy for the system as a whole. Second, they argue a posteriori. If the whole system is to have a given state at time y, it most porrobably had a certain state at time x" (7). Here he seems to suggest that social systems are tied together by the working of governing laws -- a particularly unconvincing starting point.

But Wallerstein's practice as a sociologist is far more defensible than this language would suggest. He was in fact sensitive to causal heterogeneity, contingency, and variation in the systemic relations he meant to capture -- particularity as well as universality. So he doesn't actually treat the modern world system as if it were analogous to a set of gravitational objects governed by fixed laws of nature.

I think the clue to an answer to his working definition of a system is found in his definition of scope in terms of an "effective division of labor": a set of regions constitute a system in his framework if there is significant exchange and dependence among various of the regions for products, people, knowledge, skills, and resources from other regions. If Europe, Asia, or the Americas had been "autarkic" in 1700 -- that is, if one or more of these continental regions had been a closed economy and society making no substantial use of products, knowledge, resources, or people from other regions -- then there would not have been one "world system" but rather several independent macro-regional systems. And Wallerstein explicitly affirms this point late in the book:

By saying that in the sixteenth century there was a European world-economy, we indicate that the boundaries are less than the earth as a whole. But how much less? We cannot simply include in it any part of the world with which "Europe" traded. In 1600 Portugal traded with the central African kingdom of Monomotapa as well as with Japan. Yet it would be prima facie hard to argue that either Monomotapa or Japan were part of the European world-economy at that time. And yet we argue that Brazil (or at least areas of the coast of Brazil) and the Azores were part of the European world-economy. (199)

So in postulating the concept of world system as a framework for analysis of the modern period (let's say 1700), Wallerstein is laying a few important cards on the table; he is indicating his judgment that there was significant and necessary exchange among virtually all accessible places on the planet. There were economically meaningful movements of resources, people (emigrants and slaves), crops (cotton, sugar), finished products, and ideas throughout the system of places defining the system of transport and trade. This in turn implies that we cannot properly understand the workings of the regional economy without taking into account its exchange relations with other regions -- or in other words, we need to place the regional economy into the system of international division of labor in which it is located. And in fact, historians like Ken Pomeranz make a substantial case for the empirical accuracy of that judgment (see for example The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy and The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, And the World Economy, 1400 to the Present).

If we begin with this assumption -- the idea of the substantial interdependence of continental regions in the early modern period -- then we are naturally drawn to the question, what were the terms of trade? Was exchange among regions mutually beneficial, as trade theory would have it? Or was it extractive and exploitative, as the theory of colonialism would have it? This is where Wallerstein makes substantial use of the core-periphery framework in his analysis.

The periphery of a world-economy is that geographical sector of it wherein production is primarily of lower-ranking goods ... but which is an integral part of the overall system of the division of labor, because the commodies involved are essential for daily use. The external arena of a world-economy consists of those other world-systems with which a given world-economy has some kind of trade relationship ... what was sometimes called the "rich trades." (199-200)

Wallerstein was particularly interested in interconnections between places that were the expression of power and commerce. Core and periphery are linked by relations of subordination -- military and economic domination, leading to the persistent disadvantage of the latter in favor of the former. These features define the "general attributes of a colonial situation" (5).

This analysis lays a theoretical and historical foundation for a theory of globalization. Wallerstein writes late in the book:

One of the persisting themes of the history of the modern world is the seesaw between "nationalism" and "internationalism." I do not refer to the ideological seesaw ... but to the organizational one. At some points in time the major economic and political institutions are geared to operating in the international arena and feel that local interests are tied in some immediate way to developments elsewhere in the world. At other points of time, the social actors tend to engage their efforts locally, tend to see the reinforcement of state boundaries as primary, and move toward a relative indifference about events beyond them. (147)

Where has the effort to theorize globalization gone in the thirty-five years since Wallerstein's book appeared? A particularly important contemporary voice on this subject is that of Saskia Sassen. Her recent A Sociology of Globalization (2007) represents a current cutting-edge effort to provide a vocabulary and set of theoretical premises in terms of which to understand the global interconnectedness that characterizes the contemporary world. And she wants to provide a sociology of these processes -- that is, she wants to provide a theoretical vocabulary and a set of hypotheses about the causal mechanisms that are involved that are adequate to the problem of describing and explaining the workings of this system. One thing this means is providing a framework within which the empirical details and structures of global networks can be investigated. Another key point in her approach is her attention to differentiation across institutions and mechanisms.

A deeply important part of her analysis is her effort to overturn the assumption of "linearity" and hierarchy among levels of analysis -- the line of thought that assumes that neighborhoods are encompassed by cities, which fall within regions, which fall within states, which fall within international relations. She argues repeatedly and effectively that this linear scheme doesn't work for today's global relationships. The local neighborhood may be implicated in extra-national relations of immigration, crime, and trade that make it a global place. More importantly, what she calls "global cities" have crucial relationships at many levels in these supposed hierarchies -- local, national, and supra-national. So the question of scale cannot be defined within a simple hierarchy of relationships of locality, nationality, and globality. (Significantly, Wallerstein opens his treatment of the modern world system by wrestling with this issue -- a discussion that he frames in terms of the idea of the appropriate unit of analysis in considering colonialism.)

Sassen is particularly interested in the networks of communication, finance, and service organizations that constitute the fabric joining what she calls "global cities" (link; see also an earlier posting on regional interdependence). But in this book Sassen broadens considerably the angle of view in order to consider social networks at many levels of scale, including sub-national as well as supra-national.

Sassen makes an important point about international economic power that has a Wallerstein-like feel to it but that would probably not have been true in 1700 or 1970. This is her view that there has been an important process of "de-nationalization" that has removed traditional powers of the state and placed them in the scope of international economic and finance institutions that are significantly controlled by large economic actors and firms. We sometimes refer to this process as one of "liberalization"; Sassen makes the point that the construction of the new supra-national regulatory regimes is an extended historical process that can be studied in detail. She refers to the result of this process as the global corporate economy. One of Wallerstein's key arguments is that nations in the periphery were dominated and controlled by an economic system run by European nations. Sassen argues for the reality of a world system of regulatory arrangements that subordinates the sovereignty of even previously hegemonic nations to a non-democratic set of institutions and rules that implicitly favor one set of economic actors over others. But Sassen's inference from this fact about international economic power is less about north-south exploitation and more about the rising likelihood of global exploitation of all ordinary citizens by powerful extra-national economic forces that are beyond the reach of democratic processes (what she refers to as the "democratic deficit").

Sassen's book warrants a close reading. It proposes a significantly different way of conceptualizing the meaning of globalization, and one that will suggest many new research agendas.

(The Minard trade map above is borrowed from the fascinating blog Cartographia. The blog has many great discussions of some very interesting maps.)

Assurance game

2009-11-01T13:56:00.003-05:00

How does a group of people succeed in coming together to contribute to a collective project over an extended period of time? For example, what leads a group of unemployed workers to travel to the capital to lobby for an extension of unemployment benefits, or a group of expatriate Burmese people in London to attend demonstrations against the junta? What motivations are relevant at the individual level? And what circumstances are most conducive to creating and sustaining collective action?

Purely self-interested egoists won't make it -- that is the message of Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods. The maximizing egoist will reason that the activity will either succeed or fail independent of his/her own participation. If it succeeds then he will enjoy the benefits of cooperation; and if it fails he will have avoided the wasted costs of participation. Either way the egoist does better by refraining from participation. So collective action in pursuit of a public good is all but impossible within a society of rationally disinterested egoists. As Amartya Sen observes in "Rational Fools" (link), "The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron."

But we know that this conclusion does a bad job of describing real social life. People in villages, communities, political parties, religious organizations, public television audiences, and ethnic groups do in fact often succeed in getting themselves organized and mobilized in pursuit of a public good for the group. Often the level of mobilization is below the level that would be optimal for production of the good for the population; often it is fairly straightforward to identify the symptoms of incipient free-riding; but ordinary social experience and history alike are replete with examples of voluntary collective action.

Many theories can be articulated in order to account for the spontaneous occurrence of collective action. People may be irrational; they may be motivated entirely by non-utility considerations; they may be governed by norms of solidarity beyond their rational control; they may be disciplined by grassroots organizations that punish defectors; there may be an evolutionary basis hard-wired into the human cognitive-deliberative system that favors cooperation; or, for that matter, there may be a hard-wired impulse towards punishing defectors from common projects that tips the balance of utility calculation for would-be free-riders.

But here is a factor that seems to be a credible observation about social motivation and that still makes sense of the behavior in deliberative terms. Many real social actors seem to be what might be called "conditional altruists": they are willing to contribute some effort or personal resource to a collective project if they have grounds for confidence that a reasonable number of other members of the group will contribute as well. (Jon Elster explores the idea in The Cement of Society: A Survey of Social Order.) And it isn't that these actors make a calculation error along the lines of the fallacy of unanimity -- "I want the benefits of the collective action, and it won't occur without me." Instead, they seem to reason in ways that would please a communitarian: "I'm a member of this group, I believe that other members will do what's good for the group, and I'm willing to do my part as well." This is a fairly explicit willingness to sacrifice the benefits of free riding. But the conditional part is important as well: the conditional altruist is calculating about the likelihood of success in the collective undertaking, and is willing to participate only if he/she judges that enough other people will contribute as well to make the undertaking feasible.

Conditional altruism thus attributes a common moral psychology to social actors, which we might refer to as the "fairness factor." Individuals are willing to factor collective goods into their calculation of the costs and benefits of action, and they have some degree of motivation to act in accordance with a proposed collective action that would benefit them even if they could evade participation. They are disposed to act fairly: "If I benefit from the action, I should take my fair share of creating the benefit." (Allan Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment offers an effort to bring together the evolutionary history of the species with a philosopher's analysis of moral reasoning.)

If fairness or conditional altruism are real components of human agency (for all or many human beings), then we can identify a few factors that are likely to increase the likelihood of cooperation and collective action. Measures that increase the actor's assurance of the behavior of others will have the effect of eliciting higher levels of collective action. And it is possible to think of quite a few social circumstances that have this effect. A shared history of success in collective action is clearly relevant to current actors' level of assurance about future cooperation. Shared history can be made more powerful in the present through the currency of songs, stories, and performances that highlight earlier successes (Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty). Researchers who study peasant village communities emphasize the importance of face-to-face relations among villagers; individuals know a good deal about the past behavior of their neighbors, which can provide a better basis for predicting their future cooperative behavior (Robert Netting, Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture). And members of small, stable communities also know that they will need to interact with each other long into the future -- increasing the cost of non-cooperation today (Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition).

What is particularly interesting about this topic is the fact that actual social outcomes show a wide range of variations in the degree of self-interest and fairness that seems to be present. Some groups seem to act more like Mancur Olson egoists; others (like Welsh coal miners) seem to act as though they have a very high "solidarity and fairness" quotient. So no single answer to the question of collective action seems to work: "people are rational egoists," "people are altruists," or "people are conditional altruists." Rather, a given opportunity for collective action seems to display a mix of all these styles of reasoning. These variations could be the result of several independent factors: differences in the formation of individuals' moral psychology (emphasizing individualism or community from infancy); differences in current institutional settings (arrangements that make future interactions seem more likely to each participant); even potentially differences in personality or the genetic basis of decision-making across individuals.

I'm sure that there is work in experimental economics that probes the boundaries of this feature of practical reasoning. Ordinary social experience informs us that people have different levels of willingness to undertake sacrifice for a group's projects. And having a more nuanced empirical understanding of how people behave in the settings of potential cooperation and collective action would help refine our understanding of the thought-processes and styles of reasoning through which individuals decide what to do. Here is an interesting paper by Ernst Fehr and Klaus Schmidt titled "The Economics of Fairness, Reciprocity and Altruism – Experimental Evidence and New Theories."

Causal realism for sociology

2009-10-30T12:42:00.002-04:00

The subject of causal explanation in the social sciences has been a recurring thread here (thread). Here are some summary thoughts about social causation.

First, there is such a thing as social causation. Causal realism is a defensible position when it comes to the social world: there are real social relations among social factors (structures, institutions, groups, norms, and salient social characteristics like race or gender). We can give a rigorous interpretation to claims like "racial discrimination causes health disparities in the United States" or "rail networks cause changes in patterns of habitation".

Second, it is crucial to recognize that causal relations depend on the existence of real social-causal mechanisms linking cause to effect. Discovery of correlations among factors does not constitute the whole meaning of a causal statement. Rather, it is necessary to have a theory of the mechanisms and processes that give rise to the correlation. Moreover, it is defensible to attribute a causal relation to a pair of factors even in the absence of a correlation between them, if we can provide evidence supporting the claim that there are specific mechanisms connecting them. So mechanisms are more fundamental than regularities.

Third, there is a key intellectual obligation that goes along with postulating real social mechanisms: to provide an account of the ontology or substrate within which these mechanisms operate. This I have attempted to provide through the theory of methodological localism (post) -- the idea that the causal nexus of the social world is constituted by the behaviors of socially situated and socially constructed individuals. To put the claim in its extreme form, every social mechanism derives from facts about institutional context, the features of the social construction and development of individuals, and the factors governing purposive agency in specific sorts of settings. And different research programs target different aspects of this nexus.

Fourth, the discovery of social mechanisms often requires the formulation of mid-level theories and models of these mechanisms and processes -- for example, the theory of free-riders. By mid-level theory I mean essentially the same thing that Robert Merton meant to convey when he introduced the term: an account of the real social processes that take place above the level of isolated individual action but below the level of full theories of whole social systems. Marx's theory of capitalism illustrates the latter; Jevons's theory of the individual consumer ss a utility maximizer illustrates the former. Coase's theory of transaction costs is a good example of a mid-level theory (The Firm, the Market, and the Law): general enough to apply across a wide range of institutional settings, but modest enough in its claim of comprehensiveness to admit of careful empirical investigation. Significantly, the theory of transaction costs has spawned major new developments in the new institutionalism in sociology (Mary Brinton and Victor Nee, eds., The New Institutionalism in Sociology).

And finally, it is important to look at a variety of typical forms of sociological reasoning in detail, in order to see how the postulation and discovery of social mechanisms play into mainstream sociological research. Properly understood, there is no contradiction between the effort to use quantitative tools to chart the empirical outlines of a complex social reality, and the use of theory, comparison, case studies, process-tracing, and other research approaches aimed at uncovering the salient social mechanisms that hold this empirical reality together.

Fair prices?

2009-10-28T19:30:00.011-04:00

We live in a society that embraces the market in a pretty broad way. We accept that virtually all goods and services are priced through the market at prices set competitively. We accept that sellers are looking to maximize profits through the prices, quantities, and quality of the goods and services that they sell us. We accept, though a bit less fully, the idea that wages are determined by the market -- a person's income is determined by what competing employers are willing to pay. And we have some level of trust that competition protects us against price-gouging, adulteration, exploitation, and other predatory practices. A prior posting questioned this logic when it comes to healthcare. Here I'd like to see whether there are other areas of dissent within American society over prices.

Because of course it wasn't always so. E. P. Thompson's work on early modern Britain reminds us that there was a "moral economy of the crowd" that profoundly challenged the legitimacy of the market; that these popular moral ideas specifically and deeply challenged the idea of market-defined prices for life's necessities; and that the crowd demanded "fair prices" for food and housing (Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture). The moral economy of the crowd focused on the poor -- it assumed a minimum standard of living and demanded that the millers, merchants, and officials respect this standard by charging prices the poor could afford. And the rioting that took place in Poland in 1988 over meat prices or rice riots in Indonesia in 2008 are reminders that this kind of moral reasoning isn't merely part of a pre-modern sensibility. (For some quotes collected by E. P. Thompson from "moral economy" participants on the subject of fair prices see an earlier posting on anonymity.)

So where do contemporary Americans show a degree of moral discomfort with prices and the market? Where does the moral appeal of the principles of market justice begin to break down -- principles such as "things are worth exactly what people are willing to pay for them" and "to each what his/her market-determined purchasing power permit him to buy"?

There are a couple of obvious exceptions in contemporary acceptance of the market. One is the public outrage about executive compensation in banking and other corporations that we've seen in the past year. People seem to be morally offended at the idea that CEOs are taking tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation -- even in companies approaching bankruptcy. Part of the outrage stems from the perception that the CEO can't have brought a commensurate gain to the company or its stockholders, witness the failing condition of many of these banks and companies. Part is a suspicion that there must be some kind of corrupt collusion going on in the background between corporate boards and CEOs. But the bottom line moral intuition seems to be something like this: nothing could justify a salary of $100 million, and executive compensation in that range is inherently unfair. And no argument proceeding simply along the lines of fair market competition -- "these are competitive rational firms that are offering these salaries, and therefore whatever they arrive at is fair" -- cuts much ice with the public.

Here is another example of public divergence from acceptance of pure market outcomes: recent public outcries about college tuition. There is the common complaint that tuition is too high and students can't afford to attend. (This overlooks the important fact that public and private tuitions are almost an order of magnitude apart -- $6,000-12,000 versus $35,00-42,000!) But notice that this is a "fair price" argument that would be nonsensical when applied to the price of an iPod or a Lexus. People don't generally feel aggrieved because a luxury car or a consumer device is too expensive; they just don't buy it. It makes sense to express this complaint in application to college tuition because many of us think of college as a necessity of life that cannot fairly be allocated on the basis of ability to pay. (This explains why colleges offer need-based financial aid.) And this is a moral-economy argument.

And what about that other necessity of life -- gasoline? Public complaints about $4/gallon gas were certainly loud a year ago. But they seem to have been grounded in something different -- the suspicion that the oil companies were manipulating prices and taking predatory profits -- rather than an assumption of a fair price determined by the needs of the poor.

Finally, what about salaries and wages? How do we feel about the inequalities of compensation that exist within the American economy and our own places of work? Americans seem to accept a fairly wide range of salaries and wages when they believe that the differences correspond ultimately to the need for firms to recruit the most effective personnel possible -- a market justification for high salaries. But they seem to begin to feel morally aggrieved when the inequalities that emerge seem to exceed any possible correspondence to contribution, impact, or productivity. So -- we as Americans seem to have a guarded level of acceptance of the emergence of market-driven inequalities when it comes to compensation.

One wonders whether deeper resentment about the workings of market forces will begin to surface in our society, as unemployment and economic recession settle upon us.

Comparative life satisfaction

2009-10-24T11:54:00.001-04:00

We tend to think of the past century as being a time of great progress when it comes to the quality of life -- for ordinary people as well as the privileged. Advances in science, technology, and medicine have made life more secure, predictable, productive, educated, and healthy. But in what specific ways is ordinary life happier or more satisfying for ordinary people in 2000 compared to their counterparts in 1900 or 1800 -- or the time of Socrates, for that matter?

There are a couple of things that are pretty obvious. Nutrition is one place to start: the mass population of France, Canada, or the United States is not subject to periodic hunger, malnutrition, or famine. This is painfully not true for many poor parts of the world -- Sudan, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh, for example. But for the countries of the affluent world, the OECD countries, hunger has been largely conquered for most citizens.

Second, major advances in health preservation and the treatment of illness have taken place. We know how to prevent cholera, and we know how to treat staph infections with antibiotics. Terrible diseases such as polio have been eradicated, and we have effective treatments for some kinds of previously incurable cancers. So the basic health status of people in the affluent twenty-first century world is substantially better than that of previous centuries -- with obvious consequences for our ability to find satisfaction in life activities.

These advances in food security and public health provision have resulted in a major enhancement to quality of life -- life expectancy in France, Germany, or Costa Rica has increased sharply. And many of the factors underlying much of this improvement are not high-tech, but rather take the form of things like improvement of urban sanitation and relatively low-cost treatment (antibiotics for children's ear infections, for example).

So living longer and more healthily is certainly an advantage in our quality of life relative to conditions one or two centuries ago.

Improvements in labor productivity in agriculture and manufacturing have resulted in another kind of enhancement of modern quality of life. It is no longer necessary for a large percentage of humanity to perform endless and exhausting labor in order to feed the rest of us. And because of new technologies and high labor productivity, almost everyone has access to goods that extend the enjoyment of life and our creative talents. Personal computing and communications, access to the world's knowledge and culture through the Internet, and ability to travel widely all represent opportunities that even the most privileged could not match one or two centuries ago.

But the question of life satisfaction doesn't reduce to an inventory of the gadgets we can use. Beyond the minimum required for sustaining a healthy human body, the question of satisfaction comes down to the issue of what we do with the tools and resources available to us and the quality of our human relationships. How do we organize our lives in such a way as to succeed in achieving goals that really matter?

Amartya Sen's economic theory of "capabilities and realizations" supports a pretty good answer to these questions about life satisfaction (Development as Freedom). Each person has a bundle of talents and capabilities. These talents can be marshalled into a meaningful life plan. And the satisfying life is one where the person has singled out some important values and goals and has used his/her talents to achieve these goals. (This general idea underlies J. S. Mill's theory of happiness as well in Utilitarianism.)

By this standard, it's not so clear that life in the twenty-first century is inherently more satisfying than that in the eighteenth or the second centuries. When basic needs were satisfied -- nutrition, shelter, health -- the opportunities for realizing one's talents in meaningful effort were no less extensive than they are today. This is true for the creative classes -- obviously. The creative product of J. S. Mill's or Victor Hugo's generation was no less substantial or satisfying than our own. But perhaps it is true across the board. The farmer-gardener who shapes his/her land over the course of a lifetime has created something of great personal value and satisfaction. The mason or smith may have taken more pride and satisfaction in his life's work than does the software programmer or airline flight attendant. The parent who succeeded in nurturing a family in 1800 County Cork may have found the satisfactions as great or greater than parents in Boston or Seattle today. (Richard Sennett explores some of these satisfactions in The Craftsman.)

So we might say that the chief unmistakable improvement in quality of life in the past century is in the basics -- secure nutrition, improved health, and decent education during the course of a human life. And the challenge of the present is to make something meaningful and sustaining of the resources we are given.

Cooperation

2009-10-22T17:06:00.002-04:00

How important is cooperation in a market society?

First, what is cooperation? Suppose a number of individuals occupy a common social and geographical space. They have a variety of individual interests and things they value, and they have outcomes they'd like to bring about. Some of those outcomes are purely private goods, and some can be brought about through private activities by each individual. These are the circumstances where private market-based activity can bring about socially optimal outcomes.

But some outcomes may look more like public or common goods -- for example, greater safety in the neighborhood or more sustainable uses of resources. These are outcomes that no single individual can bring about, and -- once established -- no one can be excluded from the enjoyment of these goods. (Public choice theorists sometimes look at other kinds of non-private goods such as "club goods"; see Dennis Mueller, Perspectives on Public Choice: A Handbook.)

Further, some outcomes may in fact be private goods, but may be such that they require coordinated efforts by multiple individuals to achieve them efficiently. An example of this is traditional farming: it may be that the yield on one individual's plot is greater if a group of neighbors provide concentrated labor on weeding this plot today and the neighbor's plot tomorrow than if each of us do all the weeding on our individual plots. The technical conditions surrounding traditional agriculture impose a cycle of labor demand that makes cooperation an efficient strategy.

This is where cooperation comes in. If a number of the members of a group agree to contribute our efforts to a common project we may find that the total results are greater -- for both common goods and private goods -- than if we had each pursued these goods through individual efforts. Cooperation can lead to improvement in the overall production of a good for a given level of sacrifice of time and effort. This description uses the word "agree"; but Robert Axelrod (The Evolution of Cooperation) and David Lewis (Convention: A Philosophical Study) observe that many examples of cooperation depend on "convention" and tacit agreement rather than an explicit understanding among participants.

So cooperation can lead to better outcomes for a group and each individual in the group than would be achievable through entirely private efforts.

Cooperation should be distinguished from altruistic behavior; cooperation makes sense for rationally self-interested individuals if appropriate conditions are satisfied. A cooperative arrangement can make everyone better off. So we don't have to assume that individuals act altruistically in order to account for cooperation.

So why is cooperation not ubiquitous? It is in fact pretty widespread. But there are a couple of important obstacles to cooperation in ordinary social life: the rational incentive that exists to become a freerider or easy rider when the good in question is a public good; and the risk that cooperators run that the endeavor will fail because of non-contribution from other potential contributors. There is also often a timing problem: it is common for the contribution and the benefit to be separated in time, so contributors are even more concerned that they will be denied the benefits of cooperation. If Mr Wong is asked to weed today in consideration of assistance from Mr Li in harvesting the crop four months from now, he may be doubtful about the future benefit.

The basic logic of this situation has stimulated a mountain of great social science research and theory. Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" (Managing the Commons) and Mancur Olsen's The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups set the negative case for thinking that cooperation is all but impossible to sustain. Elinor Ostrom's Nobel-prize winning work on common property resource regimes documents the ways in which communities have solved these cooperation dilemmas (Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action). Douglas North essentially argues that only private property and binding contracts can do the job (The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History). And Robert Axelrod has made the case for the rational basis of cooperation in The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition. He argues that there are specific conditions that enhance or undermine cooperation and reciprocity; essentially, participants need to be able to reidentify each other over time and they need to have a high likelihood of continuing to interact with each other over an extended time. (His analysis is based on a series of experiments involving repeated prisoners' dilemmas.)

A market can "simulate" cooperation through enforceable contracts; so, for example, a peasant farming community could create a legally binding system of labor exchange among households. And organizations can create quasi-binding agreements for cooperation through "memoranda of understanding" and "inter-governmental agreements" -- written agreements that may not be enforceable through legal remedies but nonetheless create a strong incentive for each party to fulfill the obligations of cooperation. However, quite a bit of the opportunities for cooperation seem to fall outside the sphere of these formal and semi-formal mechanisms for binding agreements.

Informal cooperation needs some kind of institutional or normative setting that encourages compliance with the cooperative arrangement. So there has been an energetic debate in the past twenty years over the feasibility of non-coercive solutions to cooperation problems; this is an area where the new institutionalism has played a key role. And in the real world, we do in fact find numerous sustainable examples of informal cooperation. Individuals work in community gardens; foundations join together in supporting urban renewal projects; villagers create labor-sharing practices. But it is an interesting question to consider: are there institutional reforms that we could invent that would allow us as a society to capture more of the benefits of cooperation than we currently realize?

Paying for health

2009-10-19T19:57:00.000-04:00

A person's income determines his/her access to many things he wants and needs: food, clothing, transportation, housing, entertainment, and the internet, for example. And people who have higher income are able to consume more of all of these categories than people with lower income, if they choose to. More affluent people shop for food at Papa Joe's or Whole Food; live in larger and more luxurious homes; buy their clothing from boutiques rather than Penny's or the thrift shop; and drive multiple handsome cars. Poor people can't afford the luxury end of these forms of consumption. And in some way our culture has judged that these sorts of inequalities of consumption are a legitimate and fair part of a market economy; if you judge that inequalities of income are justifiable (perhaps with some limits on extremes), then you pretty much have to support the idea of inequalities of consumption as well.

But what about goods that have a price but that are essential to living a decent human life? Food certainly falls in this category; if 30% of society could literally not afford to purchase enough calories to provide 2200-2900 calories per day for adults and 1800 calories for children, then we would probably have a different idea about the fairness of a market for food -- the principle that says "to each according to his/her earning capacity" doesn't seem very convincing in circumstances where it leads to malnutrition or starvation. In other words, if the normal workings of a market economy left a significant segment of the population without the ability to purchase enough food for subsistence, we would surely judge that this isn't a fair or socially just way of distributing income and food. And there is an important point to be noted here: there is hunger in America, and the system of producing goods and income isn't fully satisfying the subsistence needs of the whole population. (This is exactly what makes it compelling that our government needs to provide food assistance for the very poor, through food stamps or targeted income supplements.) So there is an important issue about the justice of current actual distributions of such basic goods as food, clothing, or shelter across the U.S. population.

But push a little deeper and consider the "market for health care". Supporting one's current healthy status is a costly effort; repairing the body in times of traumatic injury or serious illness is even more costly; and our society leaves a lot of the allocation of health care services to private purchasing power. Health insurance is the primary vehicle through which many Americans provide financially for their health care needs. Some people have insurance provided or subsidized through their employers; some families purchase health insurance through the private market; and many families lack health insurance entirely. Upwards on 47 million Americans are uninsured, including 20% of adults and 9% of children (CDC link). And this includes a wide range of Americans, from the extremely poor to the working poor to the solidly middle class.

It is clear that access to doctors, hospitals, nurses, and prescription drugs is a critical need that everyone faces at various points in life. It is obvious as well that one's future ability to live and work productively and to enjoy a satisfying life is conditioned by one's ability to gain access to health care when it is needed. It is also clear that uncertainty about the availability of health care is a major source of anxiety for many, many people in U.S. society today. So it is self-evident that decent health care is one of our most basic and unavoidable needs.

So what do people do when they lack health insurance and serious illness or injury occurs? This isn't a mystery anymore; families go into debt to doctors and hospitals, they face bankruptcy, they find some limited sources of free care (free clinics, pro bono doctors' services), and they forego "optional" treatments that may well extend the length or quality of life. And it is evident that this pattern results in very serious harms and limitations for people in these groups. People who have the least access to health care through our basic institutions may be expected to live shorter lives and to suffer more.

And what about people at the high end of the income spectrum? How do they relate to the problems of health? Here too the answers are fairly well known: they are able to seek out the best (and most expensive) specialists, travel to national centers for specialized treatment, and undergo advanced diagnostic tests that are not covered by insurance. (Here is a news story from CNN on boutique health care.) The affluent aren't able to assure their health through expenditure -- but they can certainly improve their odds.

In other words, ability to pay influences the quality and extent of health care that an individual or family is able to gain access to; and the health status of the family is affected by these variations in quality and access. So, to some meaningful extent, our social system places health care in the category of a market good.

But here is the question I'm working around to: what does justice require when it comes to health care? Is it right to look at health care as just another consumption good like shoes -- affluent people wear Gucci and poor people wear Dollar Store, but everyone has his/her feet covered? Or is health care in a special category, too closely linked to living a full human life to allow it to be distributed so unequally? (Norm Daniels has spent most of his career looking at this issue, from the points of view of philosophy and concrete policy reform. See Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly for some of his findings.)

It seems a bitter but unavoidable truth that there are very substantial inequalities in the provision of health care in our society. One person's likelihood of surviving a devastating cancer may be significantly less than another person's chances, simply based on the second person's ability to pay for premium health care services. Further, it seems unavoidable that these extreme inequalities are flatly unjust in any society that believes in the equal worth of all human beings. And where this seems to lead is to the conclusion that some system of universal health insurance is a fundamental requirement of justice.

Demystifying social knowledge

2009-10-17T15:01:00.000-04:00

There seem to be a couple of fundamentally different approaches to the problem of "understanding society." I'm not entirely happy with these labels, but perhaps "empiricist" and "critical" will suffice to characterize them. We might think of these as styles of sociological thinking. One emphasizes the ordinariness of the phenomena, and looks at the chief challenges of sociology as embracing the tasks of description, classification, and explanation. The other highlights the inherent obscurity of the social world, and conceives of sociology as an exercise in philosophical theory, involving the work of presenting, clarifying and critiquing texts and abstract philosophical ideas as well as specific social circumstances.

The first approach looks at the task of social knowing as a fairly straightforward intellectual problem. It could be labeled "empiricist", or it could simply be called an application of ordinary common sense to the challenge of understanding the social world. It is grounded in the idea that the social world is fundamentally accessible to observation and causal discovery. The elements of the social world are ordinary and visible. There are puzzles, to be sure; but there are no mysteries. The social world is given as an object of study; it is partially orderly; and the challenge of sociology is to discover the causal processes that give rise to specific observed features of the social world.

This approach begins in the ordinariness of the objects of social knowledge. We are interested in other people and how and why they behave, we are interested in the relationships and interactions they create, and we are interested in institutions and populations that individuals constitute. We have formulated a range of social concepts in terms of which we analyze and describe the social world and social behavior -- for example, "motive," "interest," "emotion," "aggressive," "cooperative," "patriotic," "state," "group," "ethnicity," "mobilization," "profession," "city," "religion." We know pretty much what we mean by these concepts; we can define them and relate them to ordinary observable behaviors and social formations. And when our attention shifts to larger-scale social entities (states, uprisings, empires, occupational groups), we find that we can observe many characteristics of each of these kinds of social phenomena. We also observe various patterns and regularities in behavior, institution, and entity that we would like to understand -- the ways in which people from different groups behave towards each other, the patterns of diffusion of information that exist along a transportation system, the features of conflicts among groups in various social settings. There are myriad interesting and visible social patterns which we would like to understand, and sociologists develop a descriptive and theoretical vocabulary in terms of which to describe and explain various kinds of social phenomena.

In short, on this first approach, the social world is visible, and the task of the social scientist is simply to discover some of the observable and causal relations that obtain among social actors, actions, and composites. To be sure, there are hypothetical or theoretical beliefs we have about less observable features of the social world -- but we can relate these beliefs to expectations about more visible forms of social behavior and organization. If we refer to "social class" in an explanation, we can give a definition of what we mean ("position in the property system"), and we can give some open-ended statements about how "class" is expected to relate to observable social and political behavior. And concepts and theories for which we cannot give clear explication should be jettisoned; obscurity is a fatal defect in a theory. In short, the task of social science research on this approach is to discover some of the visible and observable characteristics of social behavior and entities, and to attempt to answer causal questions about these characteristics.

This is a rough-and-ready empiricism about the social world. But there is another family of approaches to social understanding that looks quite different from this "empiricist" or commonsensical approach: critical theory, Marxist theory, feminist theory, Deleuzian sociology, Foucault's approach to history, the theory of dialectics, and post-modern social theory. These are each highly distinctive programs of understanding, and they are certainly different from each other in multiple ways. But they share a feature in common: they reject the idea that social facts are visible and unambiguous. Instead, they lead the theorist to try to uncover the hidden forces, meanings, and structures that are at work in the social world and that need to be brought to light through critical inquiry. Paul Ricoeur's phrase "the hermeneutics of suspicion" captures the flavor of the approach. (See Alison Scott-Baumann's Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion for discussion.) Neither our concepts nor our ordinary social observations are unproblematic. There is a deep and sometimes impenetrable difference between appearance and reality in the social realm, and it is the task of the social theorist (and social critic) to lay bare the underlying social realities. The social realities of power and deception help to explain the divergence between appearance and reality: a given set of social relations -- patriarchy, racism, homophobism, class exploitation -- give rise to systematically misleading social concepts and theories in ordinary observers.

Marx's idea of the fetishism of commodities (link) illustrates the point of view taken by many of the theorists in this critical vein: what looks like a very ordinary social fact -- objects have use values and exchange values -- is revealed to mystify or conceal a more complex reality -- a set of relations of domination and control between bosses, workers, and consumers. With a very different background, a book like Gaston Bachelard's The Psychoanalysis of Fire makes a similar point: the appearance represented by behavior systematically conceals the underlying human reality or meaning. The word "critique" enters into most of Marx's titles -- for example, "Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy." And for Marx, the idea of critique is intended to bring forward a methodology of critical reading, unmasking the assumptions about the social world that are implicit in the theorizing of a particular author (Smith, Ricardo, Say, Quesnay). So Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy is a book about the visible realities of capitalism, to be sure; but it is also a book intended to unmask both the deceptive appearances that capitalism presents and the erroneous assumptions that prior theorists have brought into their accounts.

The concepts of ideology and false consciousness have a key role to play in this discussion about the visibility of social reality. And it turns out to be an ambiguous role. Here is a paragraph from Slavoj Zizek on the concept of ideology from Mapping Ideology:

These same examples of the actuality of the notion of ideology, however, also render clear the reasons why today one hastens to renounce the notion of ideology: does not the critique of ideology involve a privileged place, somehow exempted from the turmoils of social life, which enables some subject-agent to perceive the very hidden mechanism that regulates social visibility and non-visibility? Is not the claim that we can accede to this place the most obvious case of ideology? Consequently, with reference to today's state of epistemological reflection, is not the notion of ideology self-defeating? So why should we cling to a notion with such obviously outdated epistemological implications (the relationship of 'representation' between thought and reality, etc.)? Is not its utterly ambiguous and elusive character in itself a sufficient reason to abandon it? 'Ideology' can designate anything from a contemplative attitude that misrecognizes its dependence on social reality to an action-orientated set of beliefs, from the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure to false ideas which legitimate a dominant political power. It seems to pop up precisely when we attempt to avoid it, while it fails to appear where one would clearly expect it to dwell.

Zizek is essentially going a step beyond either of the two positions mentioned above. The empiricist position says that we can perceive social reality. The critical position says that we have to discover reality through critical theorizing. And Zizek's position in this passage is essentially that there is no social reality; there are only a variety of texts.

So we have one style that begins in ordinary observation, hypothesis-formation, deductive explanation, and an insistence on clarity of exposition; and another style that begins in a critical stance, a hermeneutic sensibility, and a confidence in purely philosophical reasoning. Jurgen Habermas draws attention to something like this distinction in his important text, On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967), where he contrasts approaches to the social sciences originating in analytical philosophy of science with those originating in philosophical hermeneutics: "The analytic school dismisses the hermeneutic disciplines as prescientific, while the hermeneutic school considers the nomological sciences as characterized by a limited preunderstanding." (This text as well as several others discussed here are available at AAARG.) Habermas wants to help to overcome the gap between the two perspectives, and his own work actually illustrates the value of doing so. His exposition of abstract theoretical ideas is generally rigorous and intelligible, and he makes strenuous efforts to bring his theorizing into relationship to actual social observation and experience.

A contemporary writer (philosopher? historian? sociologist of science?) is Bruno Latour, who falls generally in the critical zone of the distinction I've drawn here. An important recent work is Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, in which he argues for a deep and critical re-reading of the ways we think the social -- the ways in which we attempt to create a social science. The book is deeply enmeshed in philosophical traditions, including especially Giles Deleuze's writings. The book describes "Actor-Network-Theory" and the theory of assemblages; and Latour argues that these theories provide a much better way of conceptualizing and knowing the social world. Here is an intriguing passage that invokes both themes of visibility and invisibility marking the way I've drawn the distinction between the two styles:

Like all sciences, sociology begins in wonder. The commotion might be registered in many different ways but it's always the paradoxical presence of something at once invisible yet tangible, taken for granted yet surprising, mundane but of baffling subtlety that triggers a passionate attempt to tame the wild beast of the social. 'We live in groups that seem firmly entrenched, and yet how is it that they transform so rapidly?' ... 'There is something invisible that weights on all of us that is more solid than steel and yet so incredibly labile.' ... It would be hard to find a social scientist not shaken by one or more of these bewildering statements. Are not these conundrums the source of our libido scindi? What pushes us to devote so much energy into unraveling them? (21)

What intrigues many readers of Latour's works is that he too seems to be working towards a coming-together of critical theory with empirical and historical testing of beliefs. He seems to have a genuine interest in the concrete empirical details of the workings of the sciences or the organization of a city; so he brings both the philosophical-theoretic perspective of the critical style along with the empirical-analytical goal of observational rigor of the analytic style.

Also interesting, from a more "analytic-empiricist" perspective, are Andrew Abbott, Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences, and Ian Shapiro, The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences. Abbott directly addresses some of the contrasts mentioned here (chapter two); he puts the central assumption of my first style of thought in the formula, "social reality is measurable". And Shapiro argues for reconnecting the social sciences to practical, observable problems in the contemporary world; his book is a critique of the excessive formalism and model-building of some wings of contemporary political science.

My own sympathies are with the "analytic-empirical" approach. Positivism brings some additional assumptions that deserve fundamental criticism -- in particular, the idea that all phenomena are governed by nomothetic regularities, or the idea that the social sciences must strive for the same features of abstraction and generality that are characteristic of physics. But the central empiricist commitments -- fidelity to observation, rigorous reasoning, clear and logical exposition of concepts and theories, and subjection of hypotheses to the test of observation -- are fundamental requirements if we are to arrive at useful and justified social knowledge. What is intriguing is to pose the question: is there a productive way of bringing insights from both approaches together into a more adequate basis for understanding society?

Food security

2009-10-16T16:00:00.003-04:00

Food security is a crucial aspect of life, both for a population and a household. By "food security" specialists often mean two different things: the capacity of a typical poor household to secure sufficient food over a twelve-month period (through farm work, day labor, government entitlements, etc.); and the capacity of a poor country to satisfy the food needs of its whole population (through direct production, foreign trade, and food stocks). This involves both food availability and the ability to gain access to food (through entitlements).

A representative description of food security is offered by Shlomo Reutlinger in Malnutrition and Poverty: Magnitude and Policy Options:

Food security ... is defined here as access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life. Its essential elements are the availability of food and the ability to acquire it. Conversely, food insecurity is the lack of access to sufficient food and can be either chronic or transitory. Chronic food insecurity is a continuously inadequate diet resulting from the lack of resources to produce or acquire food. Transitory food insecurity, however, is a temporary decline in a household’s access to enough food. It results from instability in food production and prices or in household incomes. The worst form of transitory food insecurity is famine.

Here is how Sen formulates his "capabilities" understanding (developed, for example, in Hunger and Public Action):

The standard of adequacy is best understood functionally: a person, household, or population has food security if it has sufficient access to food to permit full, robust human development and realization of human capacities.

There is an obvious connection between the two definitions at the household and country levels; but from a human point of view it seems more useful to focus on household food security rather than national food security. A country may in principle have more than sufficient resources to satisfy the food needs of its population, but fail to do so because of internal inequalities. Thus achieving household food security in the less‑developed world requires both equity and growth. Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze have made major contributions on hunger and famine in the developing world, and their work can almost always be linked back to the household level. Here is a good source on their writings: The Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze Omnibus: (comprising) Poverty and Famines; Hunger and Public Action; India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity.

Michael Lipton has also been an important voice on this set of topics. His central task in Poverty, Undernutrition, and Hunger is an attempt to provide criteria for distinguishing between the poor and the ultra-poor. The ultra-poor have incomes and entitlements that are absolutely below that required to gain access to 80% of 1973 FAO/WHO caloric requirements. Below this level is likely to lead to undernutrition (the failure of food security). Lipton constructs a "food adequacy standard" as a way of measuring the incidence in a given country of absolute poverty. Here is his statement of a food adequacy standard:

Income or outlay, just sufficient on this assumption to command the average caloric requirement for one’s age, sex and activity group (ASAG) in a given climatic and work environment, will be taken as meeting the poverty FAS; this is income or outlay on the borderline of poverty, indicating a risk of hunger. Income or outlay, just sufficient to command 80% of this average requirement, will be taken as meeting the ultra-poverty FAS; this is income or outlay at the borderline between poverty and ultra-poverty, indicating a risk of undernutrition and a severe risk of important anthropometric shortfalls. (Lipton 1983): 7.)

Food security can be put at risk in a variety of ways. Natural conditions can lead to a shortfall of grain production -- flood, drought, or other natural disasters can reduce or destroy the crop across a wide region, leading to a shortfall of supply. Population increase can gradually reduce the grain-to-population ratio to the point where nutrition falls below the minimum required by the population or household. And, perhaps most importantly, prices can shift rapidly in the market for staple foods, leaving poor families without the ability to purchase a sufficient supply to assure the nutritional minimum. It is this aspect of the system that Amartya Sen highlights in his study of famine (Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation). And it is the circumstance that is most urgent in developing countries today in face of the steep and rapid rise in grain prices over the past year.

The results of a failure of food security are dire. Chronic malnutrition, sustained over months and years, has drastic effects on the health status of a population. Infant and child mortality increases sharply. Often the gender differences in health and mortality statistics widen. And economic productivity falls, as working families lack the strength and energy needed to labor productively. Famine is a more acute circumstance that arises when food shortfalls begin to result in widespread deaths in a region. The Great Bengal famine, the Ethiopian famine, the Great Leap Forward famine, and the famines in North Korea offer vivid and terrible examples of hunger in the twentieth century.

So what is needed to maintain food security in a poor nation? Some developing countries have aimed at food self-sufficiency -- to enact policies in agriculture that assure that the country will produce enough staples to feed its population. Other countries have relied on a strategy of purchasing large amounts of staple foods on international markets. Here the strategy is to generate enough national income through exported manufactured goods to be able to purchase the internationally traded grain. This is the strategy recommended by neoliberal trade theory. If agriculture is a low value-added industry and the manufacture of electronic components is high value-added, neoliberals reason, then surely it makes sense for the country to generate the larger volume of income through the latter and purchase food with the proceeds.

This logic has given rise to several important problems, however. First is the vulnerability it creates for the nation in face of sharp price shocks. This is what we have seen in many countries over the past year. And the second is the reality of extensive income inequalities in most developing countries -- with the result that the "gains of trade" may not be sufficiently shared in the incomes of the poorest 40% to permit them to maintain household food security.

These considerations suggest the wisdom for developing countries to expend more resources on agricultural development (which often has an income-inequality narrowing effect) and a greater emphasis on national and regional food self-sufficiency.

If Marx had been born in Shanghai

2009-10-10T10:18:00.005-04:00

Is Marx's vision still relevant in the twenty-first century world?

At bottom, Marx's biggest ideas were "critique," "exploitation," "alienation," "ideology," and "class." He also constructed a fairly specific theory of capitalism and capitalist development -- a theory that has historical pluses and minuses -- and a theory of socialism that can be understood along more democratic and more authoritarian lines. We might say that his theory of capitalism was too deeply grounded in the observed experience of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, and his theory of socialism paid too little attention to the crushing possibilities of power wielded by a future socialist state. Too much economics, too little politics in his worldview -- and too much of a Hegelian "necessitarianism" in his expectations about the future.

History has shown us a few things that Marx too would have recognized, with the benefit of another century of experience. History does not conform to a necessary logic of development. Capitalism is not one thing, but a set of institutions that have proven fairly malleable. There is no single "logic of capitalist development." Compromises and institutional accommodations are possible between contending economic classes. Social democracy, democratic socialism, Stalinist communism, fascist dictatorship, and liberal democracy are all feasible political institutions governing "modern" economic development.

So we might take a deep breath, take a step back, and ask a big counterfactual: How might Marx, with his critical eye for inequality and power and his acute sensibilities as a sociologist -- how might this social critic and theorist have processed the social realities of China in Shanghai in the 1980s?

The question forces a lot of refocusing for historical particulars. China was a "proletarian and peasant" state under the governance of a Communist Party. The Great Leap Forward had taken place, massive famine had occurred during agricultural collectivization, the Cultural Revolution had recently ended with great violence throughout -- and the beginnings of a new direction in economic life were starting. Private incentives and market forces were beginning to find a place in the economy. The "family responsibility system" in agriculture was beginning to demonstrate major improvements in productivity in farming. Similar reforms were beginning in industrial ownership and management.

Given these large differences between China and Birmingham -- what sorts of analysis might Marx have arrived at? What would Capital have looked like?

Here are a few possibilities. Given the pre-eminence of politics in China's affairs, the book would have been less exclusive in its focus on the "economic mode of production" and might have offered analysis of the instruments and institutions of coercion. It would have given less prominence to the labor theory of value, even as it would have retained some scheme for tracking value and wealth. Political institutions, and the forms of power associated with office and position, would have been a prominent part of the analysis. The role and dynamics of great cities would have come in. The book would have paid much more attention to international economic relations -- Marx would surely have had much to say about globalization. (Why? Because Marx was an astute and nuanced social observer; and these are crucial factors in metropolitan China in the 1980s-2000.)

But a distinctly Marxist analysis could nonetheless have emerged. The Chinese version of Capital would have emphasized some of the same human and social circumstances that are highlighted in Capital: coercion, inequality, exploitation, domination, and human suffering as a result of social institutions; the leverage provided for the personnel of the state; population movement; and the alienation of ordinary people from their species being. Marx surely would have examined very carefully the large social effects of official corruption, as a system of surplus extraction. The result would have been a different theory, emphasizing different social mechanisms; but giving primacy to many of the same large social characteristics of inequality, domination, and exploitation; perhaps more about the full social order and less of a microscopic view of the economic relations of "capitalism."

This small counterfactual experiment perhaps underlines something else too: that there are important threads of Marx's social theory and social critique that continue to be relevant as we try to analyze and diagnose the fundamental social realities of contemporary societies. And we might also draw this hypothetical impression as well: Marx would probably have been as unwelcome to the authorities of the CCP in China as he was to the rulers of the Prussian state.

Rebuilding employment

2009-10-09T16:49:00.007-04:00

The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago hosted a two-day conference in Detroit this week on the subject of work force adjustment (link). It was convened by the Federal Reserve Bank, the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, and the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program. This is one of the many efforts underway to attempt to address the unemployment crisis we now face in the industrial Midwest. Participants included state and federal jobs officials, foundation leaders, and a few academic specialists.

Are there strategies that a region can pursue that will result in significant jobs creation? To grow employment in a region there are only a couple of possibilities: to expand employment in existing companies, to stimulate the creation of new businesses, and to recruit relocation of existing businesses from other regions. In each case the business owner or entrepreneur needs to be confident that he/she can add marginal revenue to the company by hiring the additional worker. This requires that the worker has knowledge and skills whose use will contribute to a saleable product. The product needs to have features of quality and utility that consumers want. Finding the workers who have the right kinds of talent, skill, and knowledge is a key challenge for the business owner. And availability of talented prospective workers is a key aspect of the company's decision to locate or grow in the region.

So what options do these pathways suggest for policy intervention to increase employment? It might be the case that there is latent labor demand out there in existing industries, where employers would hire more workers if they could find people with the right qualifications. In this case, remedial and transformative training could lead to new jobs, shifting workers from old industries to new industries. Second, there may be identified areas of potential expansion of employment where there are specific skills missing in the workforce. Maybe specialized bakeries could sell more products if they could only hire more qualified pastry chefs. Here too it is credible that we could devise specialized training programs that fill in the missing skills. There are specific community college programs that were developed for this reason, responding to the specialized needs of existing employers. But third, we can imagine a region preparing itself for a new surge of business creation and job growth in new industries and sectors. And this requires raising the number of college-educated adults in the region. This constitutes a talent pool that will encourage the expansion of businesses and overall employment.

And sure enough -- this conference focused on "talent" and "entrepreneurship." The industrial Midwest needs more of both; it is pretty well recognized that revitalization requires enhancement of the talent base of the region, and it is recognized that recovery requires the creation of vast numbers of new small businesses.

But what I find interesting and worrisome is the level of skill development that gets most of the attention in these discussions. There is a very clear focus on training rather than higher education. Much of the focus in this conferences was on targeted jobs training at a pretty low level -- training programs that provide new skills for unemployed and underemployed workers, with emphasis on laid-off auto workers in Ohio and Michigan. Several speakers emphasized that training programs need to tailor their educational programs closely to the specific needs of regional employers. The key words are skills and training --not creativity, innovation, and the bachelor's or master's degree.

But this seems wrong-headed to me; surely the most valuable asset a region can have is a significant population of well-educated, creative, and innovative people who have been challenged and stretched by a demanding university education. So shouldn't there be a lot of priority given to the complicated challenge of sustaining high-quality universities and making sure that a high percentage of high school graduates attend them?

In fact, people like Richard Florida at CreativeClass sound a very consistent drumbeat when they talk about the twenty-first century economy, emphasizing innovation and the college-educated workforce. Creativity and invention are the central components of future economic success. But the jobs-training orthodoxy points in a different direction. They emphasize vocational training and community college programs -- the message conveyed by President Obama in his July announcements at Macomb Community College relating to investments in the US community college system. (Perhaps the President's position was influenced by the findings of the 2009 Economic Report to the President, which is worth reading in detail; post.)

It seems to me that Richard Florida is surely right about the medium- and long-term story: our economy needs to constantly move towards greater innovation and greater concentration on knowledge-based sectors. So the goal of increasing the percentage of baccalaureate-level adults in a region is a crucial element of our future economic success. The ability to offer innovative ideas, to provide new kinds of problem-solving, and to work well in nimble teams -- these are crucial "skills" that emerge most frequently from a college-educated workforce. And they are crucial for vibrant business and job growth.

This means that states really need to recognize the crucial role that their universities play in their economic potential for the future. And we need to work hard in seeking out ways of allowing talented young adults to complete their college degrees -- including those 25-34 year-olds who have done some college without completing a degree. Unfortunately, public universities are suffering from fiscal crisis almost everywhere in the country. This implies that we are likely to fall even further behind in creating the highly qualified talent pools that our regional and national economies need in order to thrive in conditions of global competition. And this in turn is likely to impede the growth of employment that we all want to see.

Technology innovation in Chinese agriculture

2009-10-06T13:12:00.011-04:00

It is a commonplace in world history to observe that China had achieved a high level of sophistication in science, medicine, and astronomy by the Middle Ages, but that some unknown feature of social organization or culture blocked the further development of this science into the expansion of technology in the early modern period. Chinese culture was "blocked" from making significant technological advances during the late Ming and early Qing periods -- in spite of its scientific advantage over the West in medieval times; or so it is believed in a standard version of Chinese economic history.

A variety of hypotheses have been offered to account for this supposed fact. For example, Mark Elvin argues that China's social and demographic system created conditions for a "high-level equilibrium trap" in the early modern period in The Pattern of the Chinese Past. According to Elvin, Chinese social arrangements favored population growth; innovative and resourceful farmers discovered all feasible refinements of traditional agricultural techniques to refine a highly labor-intensive system of agriculture; and population expanded to the point where the whole population was at roughly the subsistence level while consuming virtually the whole of the agricultural product. There was consequently no social surplus that might have been used to invest in discovery of major innovations in agricultural technology; so the civilization was trapped. (Here is a more developed discussion of Elvin's argument.)

Other historians have speculated about potential features of Confucian culture that might have blocked the transition from scientific knowledge to technology applications. The leading Western expert on Chinese science is Joseph Needham (1900-1995), whose multi-volume studies on Chinese science set the standard in this area (Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 1: Introductory Orientations; Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West). And Needham attributes China's failure to continue to make scientific progress to features of its traditional culture.

But here is a more fundamental question: is the received wisdom in fact true? Was Chinese technology unusually stagnant during the early-modern period (late Ming, early Qing)? Agriculture is a particularly important aspect of traditional economic life; so we might reformulate our question a bit more specifically: what was the status of agricultural technology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (late Ming, early Qing)? (See an earlier posting on Chinese agricultural history for more on this subject.)

Economic historian Bozhong Li considers this question with respect to the agriculture of the lower Yangzi Delta in Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620-1850. And since this was the most important agricultural region in China for centuries, his findings are important. (It was also the major cultural center of China; see the concentration of literati in the map above.) Li makes an important point about technological innovation by distinguishing between invention and dissemination. An important innovation may be discovered in one time period but only adopted and disseminated over a wide territory much later. And the economic effects of the innovation only take hold when there is broad dissemination. This was true for Chinese agriculture during the Ming period, according to Li:

The revolutionary advance in Jiangnan rice agriculture technology appeared in the late Tang and led to the emergence and development of intensive agriculture composed of double-cropping rice and wheat. But this kind of intensive agriculture in pre-Ming times was largely limited to the high-fields of western Jiangnan. In the Ming this pattern developed into what Kitada has called the 'new double-cropping system' and spread throughout Jiangnan, but only in the late Ming did it become a leading crop regime. Similar were the development and spread of mulberry and cotton farming technologies, though they were limited to particular areas and cotton technology's advances came later because cotton was introduced later. Each had its major advances in the Ming. Therefore, technology advances in Ming Jiangnan agriculture were certainly not inferior to those of Song times which are looked at as a period of 'farming revolution'. (40)

Li also finds that there was a significant increase in the number of crop varieties in the early Qing -- another indication of technological development. He observes, "The later the date, the greater the number of varieties. For example, in the two prefectures of Suzhou and Changzhou, 46 varieties were found in the Song, but the number rose to 118 in the Ming and 259 in the Qing" (40). And this proliferation of varieties permitted farmers to adjust their crop to local soil, water, and climate conditions -- thus increasing the output of the crop per unit of land. Moreover, formal knowledge of the properties of the main varieties increased from Ming to Qing periods; "By the mid-Qing, the concept of 'early' rice had become clear and exact, and knowledge of 'intermediate' and 'late' strains had also deepened" (42). This knowledge is important, because it indicates an ability to codify the match between the variety to the local farming environment.

Another important process of technology change in agriculture had to do with fertilizer use. Here again Li finds that there was significant enhancement, discovery, and dissemination of new uses of fertilizer in the Ming-Qing period.

A great advance in fertilizer use took place in Jiangnan during the early and mid-Qing, an advance so significant that it can be called a 'fertilizer revolution'. The advance included three aspects: (a) an improvement in fertilizer application techniques, centring on the use of top dressing; (b) progress in the processing of traditional fertilizer; and (c) an introduction of a new kind of fertilizer, oilcake. Although all three advances began to appear in the Ming, they were not widespread until the Qing. (46)

And the discovery of oilcake was very important to the increases in land productivity that Qing agriculture witnessed -- thus permitting a constant or slightly rising standard of living during a period of some population increase.

There were also advances in the use of water resources. Raising fish in ponds, for example, became an important farming activity in the late Ming period, and pond fish became a widely commercialized product in the Qing. Li describes large-scale fishing operations in Lake Tai in Jiangnan using large fishing boats with six masts to catch and transport the fish (62).

So Li's estimate of agricultural technology during the Ming period is that it was not stagnant; rather, there was significant diffusion of new crops, rotation systems, and fertilizers that led to significant increases in agricultural product during the period. "In sum, in the Jiangnan plain, land and water resources were used more rationally and fully in the early and mid-Qing than they had been in the late Ming" (64).

Two points emerge from this discussion. First, Li's account does in fact succeed in documenting a variety of knowledge-based changes in agricultural practices and techniques that led to rising productivity during the Ming-Qing period in Jiangnan. So the stereotype of "stagnant Chinese technology" does not serve us well. Second, though, what Li does not find is what we might call "science-based" technology change: for example, the discovery of chemical fertilizer, controlled experiments in rice breeding, or the use of machinery in irrigation. The innovations that he describes appear to be a combination of local adaptation and diffusion of discoveries across a broad territory.

So perhaps the question posed at the start still remains: what stood in the way of development of empirical sciences like chemistry or mechanics that would have supported science-based technological innovations in the early modern period in China?

Kuhn's paradigm shift

2009-10-04T07:43:00.014-04:00

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) brought about a paradigm shift of its own, in the way that philosophers thought about science. The book was published in the Vienna Circle's International Encyclopedia of Unified Science in 1962. (See earlier posts on the Vienna Circle; post, post.) And almost immediately it stimulated a profound change in the fundamental questions that defined the philosophy of science. For one thing, it shifted the focus from the context of justification to the context of discovery. It legitimated the introduction of the study of the history of science into the philosophy of science -- and thereby also legitimated the perspective of sociological study of the actual practices of science. And it cast into doubt the most fundamental assumptions of positivism as a theory of how the science enterprise actually works.

And yet it also preserved an epistemological perspective. Kuhn forced us to ask questions about truth, justification, and conceptual discovery -- even as he provided a basis for being skeptical about the stronger claims for scientific rationality by positivists like Reichenbach and Carnap. And the framework threatened to lead to a kind of cognitive relativism: "truth" is relative to a set of extra-rational conventions of conceptual scheme and interpretation of data.

The main threads of Kuhn's approach to science are well known. Science really gets underway when a scientific tradition has succeeded on formulating a paradigm. A paradigm includes a diverse set of elements -- conceptual schemes, research techniques, bodies of accepted data and theory, and embedded criteria and processes for the validation of results. Paradigms are not subject to testing or justification; in fact, empirical procedures are embedded within paradigms. Paradigms are in some ways incommensurable -- Kuhn alluded to gestalt psychology to capture the idea that a paradigm structures our perceptions of the world. There are no crucial experiments -- instead, anomalies accumulate and eventually the advocates of an old paradigm die out and leave the field to practitioners of a new paradigm. Like Polanyi, Kuhn emphasizes the concrete practical knowledge that is a fundamental component of scientific education (post). By learning to use the instruments and perform the experiments, the budding scientist learns to see the world in a paradigm-specific way. (Alexander Bird provides a good essay on Kuhn in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

A couple of questions are particularly interesting today, approaching fifty years after the writing of the book. One is the question of origins: where did Kuhn's basic intuitions come from? Was the idea of a paradigm a bolt from the blue, or was there a comprehensible line of intellectual development that led to it? There certainly was a strong tradition of study of the history of science from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century; but Kuhn was the first to bring this tradition into explicit dialogue with the philosophy of science. Henri Poincaré (The Foundations of Science: Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, Science and Methods) and Pierre Duhem (The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory) are examples of thinkers who brought a knowledge of the history of science into their thinking about the logic of science. And Alexandre Koyré's studies of Galileo are relevant too (From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe); Koyré made plain the "revolutionary" character of Galileo's thought within the history of science. However, it appears that Kuhn's understanding of the history of science took shape through his own efforts to make sense of important episodes in the history of science while teaching in the General Education in Science curriculum at Harvard, rather than building on prior traditions.

Another question arises from the fact of its surprising publication in the Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia project was a fundamental and deliberate expression of logical positivism. Structure of Scientific Revolutions, on the other hand, became one of the founding texts of anti-positivism. And this was apparent in the book from the start. So how did it come to be published here? (Michael Friedman takes up this subject in detail in "Kuhn and Logical Positivism" in Thomas Nickles, Thomas Kuhn (link).) George Reisch and Brazilian philosopher J. C. P. Oliveira address exactly this question. Oliveira offers an interesting discussion of the relationship between Kuhn and Carnap in an online article. He quotes crucial letters from Carnap to Kuhn in 1960 and 1962 about the publication of SSR in the Encyclopedia series. Carnap writes,

I believe that the planned monograph will be a valuable contribution to the Encyclopedia. I am myself very much interested in the problems which you intend to deal with, even though my knowledge of the history of science is rather fragmentary. Among many other items I liked your emphasis on the new conceptual frameworks which are proposed in revolutions in science, and, on their basis, the posing of new questions, not only answers to old problems. (REISCH 1991, p. 266)
I am convinced that your ideas will be very stimulating for all those who are interested in the nature of scientific theories and especially the causes and forms of their changes. I found very illuminating the parallel you draw with Darwinian evolution: just as Darwin gave up the earlier idea that the evolution was directed towards a predetermined goal, men as the perfect organism, and saw it as a process of improvement by natural selection, you emphasize that the development of theories is not directed toward the perfect true theory, but is a process of improvement of an instrument. In my own work on inductive logic in recent years I have come to a similar idea: that my work and that of a few friends in the step for step solution of problems should not be regarded as leading to “the ideal system”, but rather as a step for step improvement of an instrument. Before I read your manuscript I would not have put it in just those words. But your formulations and clarifications by examples and also your analogy with Darwin’s theory helped me to see clearer what I had in mind. From September on I shall be for a year at the Stanford Center. I hope that we shall have an opportunity to get together and talk about problems of common interest. (REISCH 1991, pp.266-267)

Against what Oliveira calls "revisionist" historians of the philosophy of science, Oliveira does not believe that SSR was accepted for publication by Carnap because Carnap or other late Vienna School philosophers believed there was a significant degree of agreement between Kuhn and Carnap. Instead, he argues that the Encyclopedia group believed that the history of science was an entirely separate subject from the philosophy of science. It was a valid subject of investigation, but had nothing to do with the logic of science. Oliveira writes,

Thus, the publication of Structure in Encyclopedia could be justified merely by the fact that the Encyclopedia project had already reserved space for it. Indeed, it is worth pointing out that the editors commissioned Kuhn’s book as a work in history of science especially for publication in the Encyclopedia.

Also interesting is to consider where Kuhn's ideas went from here. How much influence did the theory have within philosophy? Certainly Kuhn had vast influence within the next generation of anti-positivist or post-positivist philosophy of science. And he had influence in fields very remote from philosophy as well. Paul Feyerabend was directly exposed to Kuhn at UCLA and picks up the anti-positivist thread in Against Method. Imre Lakatos introduces important alternatives to the concept of paradigm with his concept of a scientific research programme. Lakatos makes an effort to reintroduce rational standards into the task of paradigm choice through his idea of progressive problem shifts (The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Volume 1: Philosophical Papers). An important volume involving Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Lakatos came directly out of a conference focused on Kuhn's work (Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge: Volume 4: Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965). Kuhn's ideas have had a very wide exposure within the philosophy of science; but as Alexander Bird notes in his essay in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there has not emerged a "school" of Kuhnian philosophy of science.

From the perspective of a half century, some of the most enduring questions raised by Kuhn are these:

What does the detailed study of the history of science tell us about scientific rationality?
To what extent is it true that scientific training inculcates adherence to a conceptual scheme and approach to the world that the scientist simply can't critically evaluate?
Does the concept of a scientific paradigm apply to other fields of knowledge? Do sociologists or art historians have paradigms in Kuhn's strong sense?
Is there a meta-theory of scientific rationality that permits scientists and philosophers to critically examine alternative paradigms?
And for the social sciences -- are Marxism, verstehen theory, or Parsonian sociology paradigms in the strong Kuhnian sense?

Perhaps the strongest legacy is this: Kuhn's work provides a compelling basis for thinking that we can do the philosophy of science best when we consider the real epistemic practices of working scientists carefully and critically. The history and sociology of science is indeed relevant to the epistemic concerns of the philosophy of science. And this is especially true in the case of the social sciences.

Reference
Reisch, George (1991). Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism? Philosophy of Science, 58.

Internal migration

2009-10-02T16:46:00.006-04:00

People move around in most modern societies. Recent graduates of most universities often compete in national job markets, and large engineering, accounting, and consulting firms recruit at elite universities throughout the country. So there is a certain amount of location churning created by the need for talent that draws talented young people from one region to another. (In fact, it would be interesting to try to quantify this fact of geographical mobility: for example, what percentage of college graduates from New York or Florida take their first job in another state or economic region?)

But this kind of career-based mobility isn't quite what we mean when we refer to internal migration. Intuitively, we mean significant numbers of people relocating from their home region to another region for economic reasons. Internal migration leads to enduring population shifts across regions of the country.

We've seen periods of this kind of population relocation several times in our own history: the westward movement from the east coast of poor and working people in the mid-nineteenth century, the mass migration of African-Americans from the rural south to northern cities in the 1920s, and the exodus of the Tom Joad family and their generation from Oklahoma to California in the 1930s. We might even put the flow of people from Michigan to the sunbelt in the 1980s into this category, and perhaps the displacement of poor people from New Orleans by Katrina and its aftermath reaches the threshold as well.

So here is my question for the moment: is the United States on the verge of another period of significant internal migration, as workers downsized in Detroit or Akron make the painful decision to relocate in Houston or Phoenix? Are we about to see a significant shift of population from the rustbelt to the sunbelt? And what consequences would this have for Illinois, Ohio, or Michigan?

Think about the situation that faces young people in these states today. What is the best strategy for 25-year-olds in Akron or Detroit? One is to maximize their twenty-first century source of wealth and well-being -- their education and talent levels. But the second is to relocate to a place where there are the largest number of economic opportunities available to them at their existing levels of skills. And today that means a certain number of cities and much of the sunbelt. Chicago looks good, Houston looks good, and maybe Salt Lake City looks good.

If these are the primary choices available to young people in the industrial midwest, what should we expect about their behavior? And what consequences do these incentives give rise to? First, this situation seems to imply a surge in university enrollments (a good thing); rationally, we would imagine that young people would invest their time, energy, and resources towards getting a good education. But second, these considerations also seem to imply a surge in out-migration to more dynamic regions once it becomes clear that current conditions are likely to persist (a bad thing). So current economic conditions in the midwest seem to increase the chances that significant internal migration will occur in the next few years.

One way of thinking about the likelihood of significant population movement from one economic region to another is to consider the economic capacity of a state or region to support a certain level of income for a given population size. Industrial states in the Midwest were strong economic engines in the 1950s through the 1980s. Steel, cars, and chemicals generated a great deal of revenue every year, and this supported a large and relatively prosperous population. But two things happened: these industries were forced into lower costs and higher productivity -- so the demand for labor fell even when demand for cars remained high. And global competitors appeared on the scene to capture part of the market for these products -- reducing even further the demand for labor. Moreover, both processes led to a premium on skilled labor, thus further reducing the demand for one segment of the workforce.

There is an important implication here: it seems to imply that the basis for a high quality of life for 10 million people in Michigan or Ohio has basically disappeared. If technology and market conditions don't change, then Michigan and Ohio will either lose population or adjust to a permanently reduced standard of living.

We would prefer to believe that we'll find a way out of the box. But looking at things dispassionately, what seems equally likely is a restructuring of population around the new realities of America's economic macroregions. (Texas alone gained 700,000 jobs during the period of 2000-2009.) And this would mean large-scale internal migration, with a "right-sizing" of the population sizes of states and regions around their current economic capacities. (Basically, this is the central theorem of the theory of labor markets: we should expect migration from one region to another up to the point where employment prospects and wages are equal in the two regions.) For Michigan this might imply a loss of population of one or two million people, as workers and their families seek to improve their prospects. Moreover, there is a great risk that among the first to go will be the best educated and most innovative young people; these are the people who have the greatest options throughout the national labor market. And they are precisely the people who will be needed if Michigan or Ohio are to succeed in nurturing a "New Economy."

This scale of internal migration would have enormous consequences on both ends. Communities would be significantly disrupted, as families exit their locations in the social networks of their local communities. This magnitude of loss of population would mean a shift of political representation; for example, Michigan would lose roughly 10-20% of its Congressional seats (depending on the population results for the rest of the country). Michigan's public schools, community colleges, and universities would lose a significant number of students and would need to downsize. The state's fiscal equation would change on both expenditures and revenues. Tax revenues would fall as a result of fewer taxpayers, less business activity, and less aggregate demand and sales tax revenue. But the volume and cost of public services would also fall. So managing change and rationalizing the delivery of public services could actually improve the state's fiscal situation. The ultimate result would be a fundamental transformation of the cultural and social life of the state -- and not in a direction that most people would willingly choose.

Is this just a worst-case scenario? Maybe not. Here is a well researched Detroit News story by Ron French and Mike Wilkinson in April 2009. The story estimates that Michigan has lost 465,000 people since 2001 -- and the number continues to rise. Moreover, French and Wilkinson offer data that confirm that there is a disproportionate number of talented, skilled professionals in the mix -- with substantial costs to the Michigan economy with their departure. Ohio State University economist Mark Partridge is quoted in the article in these words (webpage):

Migration is good for the migrants but bad for the state they're leaving. It's a vicious downward cycle; the best and brightest leave; entrepreneurs don't come to the state because the best and brightest are elsewhere; as more people leave, that leaves fewer people to pay for services. Neither one will make Michigan a very appealing place.

There is a happier alternative, of course -- the creation of a New Economy for the rustbelt. This is what governors like Jennifer Granholm in Michigan and Ted Strickland in Ohio are advocating. Elected officials, economic development experts, and business leaders call for the creation of new and diversified industries for the rustbelt economy. Some experts and politicians point to a new green economy based on alternative energy technologies; others point to the prosperity possible by producing and selling innovations in biological and medical products. And yet others pin their hopes on the encouragement of large numbers of innovative, nimble companies that generate wealth, jobs, and prosperity. Let's hope that some of these strategies will succeed on a large scale. But, as noted in an earlier posting, the challenge is a great one. New economic activities need to create a hundred thousand jobs a year if we are to recover the ground we've lost in Michigan. And that is a large number.

A Michigan job loss tsunami

2009-09-30T14:12:00.007-04:00

The whole country knows that unemployment is very high in Michigan, and most people also know that the automotive manufacturing industry has taken a nose dive in the past five years. But the situation is even worse than most people imagine. Bureau of Labor statistics indicate several important facts. In 2000 the total private sector employment in the United States was 110,798,000; by August 2009 this number had dropped to 109,540,000 -- a net loss of 1,258,000 jobs nation-wide. This is a 1.1% drop. In 2000 the number of private sector jobs in Michigan was 3,996,000; this number dropped to 3,213,000 by August 2009 -- a drop of 783,000 jobs (19.6%). This is a shocking number -- one out of five jobs in Michigan has disappeared since 2000.

Other Midwestern manufacturing states also had significant job losses during the period. Ohio lost 9.8% of its 4,840,000 jobs since 2000, and Illinois lost 6.6% of its 5,205,000 jobs since 2000. But Michigan's losses dwarf every other state by a large margin. Among the fifty states and the District of Columbia there were winners and losers; 25 states gained private sector jobs during these years, with Texas the big winner (700,000 new jobs). Altogether 1,952,000 new jobs were created in 25 states and 3,207,000 jobs were lost in 25 states and DC. But consider this: fully 24% of all private sector job losses nation-wide occurred in Michigan during this time period. Think of that: one out of four of all private-sector job losses in the country during these years occurred in one state, Michigan. This could reasonably be called a one-state depression. It is as if a slow-moving Katrina had hit the state, and no one noticed.

So what is needed in order for Michigan to regain its economic wellbeing?

Plainly a 20-30% unemployment rate is unacceptable. So if the state maintains its current population, then the communities, businesses, and government of the state need to stimulate substantial job growth. And we can put some numbers on this obvious truth. If the population remains constant then it would take eight years for the state to recover to the 2000 level if jobs grow at 3% per year. And this would require the creation of about 100,000 new private sector jobs each year.

What would be needed in order to get to 100,000 new jobs per year in Michigan? Here is one pathway: succeed in attracting or creating --

two large firms of 5,000 workers,
10 firms of 1000 workers,
50 firms of 500 workers,
400 firms of 100 workers,
1500 small businesses of 10 workers, and
2000 small businesses that expand by three workers.

That gets us to 106,000 new jobs. And it means creating or attracting two large firms, almost 2,000 small and medium businesses, and expanding another 2,000 small businesses. And this needs to happen every year for eight years.

Is this feasible? Is it possible for a state of about 10 million people to create new businesses and jobs on this scale? That is the crucial question for the state of Michigan. And there are many organizations and incubators devoted to this goal in the state of Michigan -- Ann Arbor SPARK, TechTown, Automation Alley, Detroit Renaissance, Michigan Economic Development Corporation, and the Detroit Regional Chamber, to name a few. Further, the universities are doing everything possible to help provide the talented graduates and the new innovations that will be needed for the creation of successful new businesses. But ultimately it is very hard to see how this kind of business creation and job growth can occur year after year.

So Michigan's problem is also a crucial challenge for the nation as a whole. The plain truth is that Michigan has born the largest burden of the decline of manufacturing jobs in the past decade, and the solutions may be beyond the grasp of the state itself. This situation may require intelligent and substantial Federal solutions.

Alternative economists

2009-09-29T20:19:00.000-04:00

Traditional neoclassical economics has missed the mark quite a bit in the past two years. There is the financial and banking crisis, of course; neoclassical economists haven't exactly succeeded in explaining or "post-dicting" the crisis and recession through which we've traveled over the past year and more. But perhaps more fundamentally, neoclassical economics has failed to provide a basis for understanding the nuance and range of our economic institutions -- nationally or globally. Contemporary academic economics selects a pretty narrow range of questions as being legitimate subjects for economists to study; so topics such as hunger, labor unions, alternative economic institutions, and the history of economic thought generally get fairly short shrift. Don't expect to see the perspectives of Steven Marglin or Samuel Bowles in Economics 101 in most U.S. universities! The profession has a pretty narrow conception of what "economics" is.

And yet, when intelligent citizens think about the key problems of economics in a broader sense -- the problems that we really care about, the problems that will really influence our quality of life -- we certainly think of something broader than the mathematics of supply and demand or the solution of a general equilibrium model. We're ultimately not as interested in the formalisms of market equilibrium as we are in an analysis of the institutions that define the context of economic activity. We want to know more about the ways in which features of economic organization and the basic institutions of our economy influence individual behavior; we are curious about how our institutions create distributive outcomes that fundamentally affect people's lives differently across social groups. We would like to have a clearer understanding of some of the ways that non-economic factors -- race, gender, age, city -- influence people's economic outcomes. We want to know how the institutions and incentives defined by our economic system bring about effects on the natural environment. And we are often curious about how it might be possible to reform our basic economic institutions in ways that are more favorable to human development. In other words, we are often brought to think along the lines of some of the great dissenters in the economics tradition -- Polanyi, Dobb, Marx, Sen, McCloskey, and Dasgupta (An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution), for example. (In a very contemporary and topical way, Richard Florida takes on a lot of these issues; see his blog, the Creative Class.)

It is therefore pleasing to find that some publishers like Routledge are bringing out serious academic works in what they refer to as "social economics". The Routledge series, Advances in Social Economics, has a list of titles representing recent work that is rigorous and insightful but that explores other points of the compass within the field of political economy. I certainly hope that university libraries around the world are paying attention to this series; these are titles that can add a lot to the debate.

One book in the series in particular catches my eye. My colleague Bruce Pietrykowski raises an important set of "alternative" economic issues in his recent book, The Political Economy of Consumer Behavior: Contesting Consumption. (Here is a preview of the book from Routledge.) The book is a valuable contribution and very much worth reading.

Pietrykowski has two intertwined goals in the book. First, he wants to provide a broader basis for understanding consumer behavior and psychology than is presupposed by orthodox economists. And second, he wants to help contribute to a broader understanding of the scope, methods, and content of political economy than is provided by mainstream economics departments today.

Here is his preliminary statement of his goal:

I argue that in order to arrive at a more compelling account of consumer behavior we need to transform the discipline of economics by opening up the borders between economics and sociology, geography, feminist social theory, science studies and cultural studies. (2)

The fact of consumption is a crucial economic reality in any economy. How do individuals make choices about what and how to consume? Pietrykowski makes the point that consumption behavior shows enormous heterogeneity across groups defined in terms of ethnicity, gender, region, and time -- a point made here as well (post). So a single abstraction representing the universal consumer won't do the job. The standard economic assumption of the rationally self-interested consumer with consistent and complete preference rankings is seriously inadequate; instead, we need to develop a more nuanced set of views about the psychological and social factors that influence consumer preferences and choices.

So it is important to develop alternative theoretical tools in terms of which to analyze consumer psychology. Here Pietrykowski draws on ideas from Karl Marx (fetishism of commodities), Amartya Sen, and other political economists who have attempted to provide "thick" descriptions of economic behavior. The point here is not that we cannot usefully investigate and theorize about consumer behavior; rather, Pietrykowski is looking for an analytical approach that operates at the "middle range" between complete formal abstraction and the writing of many individual biographies.

Second, Pietrykowski is interested in contributing to a "re-mapping" of the knowledge system of economic thought, by exploring some of the alternative constructions that have been bypassed by the profession since World War II. (These arguments are largely developed in Chapter Two.) Pietrykowski begins with the assumption that the discipline and profession of economics is itself socially constructed and contingent; it took shape in response to a fairly specific set of theoretical and methodological ideas, it was subject to a variety of social and political pressures, and there were viable alternatives at every turn. Here is how he formulates the social construction perspective:

The claim that economic knowledge is socially constructed allows for an understanding of the field as the outcome of interpretation, negotiation and contestation over the constituents of economic knowledge and the legitimacy of particular practices, methods, and techniques of analysis. (19)

Like Marion Fourcade, Pietrykowski argues that there is a great deal of path dependence in the development of economics as a discipline and profession; and there are identifiable turning points where we can judge with confidence that themes that were eliminated at a certain time would have led to a substantially different intellectual system had they persisted. Pietrykowski's analysis of the fifty years of development of professional economics in the first half of the twentieth century is a very nice contribution to a contemporary history of science, and very compatible with Fourcade's important work in Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s.

The discipline of "home economics" in the 1920s and 1930s is the example that Pietrykowski examines in detail. "This task ... of defining economics as a distinct professional discipline involved both recruitment and exclusion" (28). Here is how Pietrykowski describes home economics:

Departments of home economics were quite diverse in the early twentieth century. Commonly associated with maintaining and preserving the cult of domesticity, home economics programs emerged from multiple sources including progressive political reform of public health, labor conditions, and household management. (35)

And, of course, home economics did not long remain a part of the professional discipline of economics. Pietrykowski looks in detail at the way in which home economics developed as an academic discipline at Cornell University; and he documents some ways in which the discipline of economics was constructed in a gendered way to exclude this way of understanding scientific economics: "The decision was made that women involved in the emerging field of home economics were to be excluded from the AEA.... Economics was to be concerned neither with women's activities in the home nor with women's activities in the workplace" (28-29).

Pietrykowski develops his full analysis of consumption by focusing on three heterodox approaches to understanding consumption: home economics and feminist analysis, psychological and behavioral research on consumer behavior (George Katona), and Fordism and the theory of mass consumption. He also gives some attention to the emerging importance of experimental economics as a tool for better understanding real economic decision-making and behavior (20-25).

After discussing these heterodox theories, Pietrykowski illustrates the value of the broader framework by examining three fascinating cases of consumption: the complex motivations that bring consumers to purchase the Toyota Prius, the motivations behind the Slow Food movement, and the choice that people in some communities have to engage in a system of alternative currency. These are each substantial examples of arenas where consumers are choosing products in ways that make it plain that their choices are influenced by culture, values, and commitments no less than calculations of utilities and preferences.

Between the theories and the cases, Pietrykowski offers a remarkably rich rethinking of how people choose to consume. He makes real sense of the idea that consumption is socially constructed (drawing sometimes on the social construction of technology (SCOT) literature). He demonstrates that models based on the theory of the universal consumer are not likely to fit well with actual economic outcomes. And he makes a strong and persuasive case for the need for academic economics to expand its horizons.

I find it interesting to notice that Pietrykowski's account of the ascendency of neoclassical economics since the 1950s converges closely with prior postings on positivist philosophy of science. One of the explicit appeals made by neoclassical economists was a methodological argument: they argued that their deductive, formal, and axiomatic treatments of economic fundamentals were more "scientific" than case studies and thick descriptions of economic behavior. So many of the failings of mainstream economic thought today can be traced to the shortcomings of the positivist program for the social sciences that was articulated in the middle of the twentieth century.

Neo-positivist philosophy of social science

2009-09-27T13:40:00.001-04:00

The 1960s witnessed the development of a second generation of analytic philosophy of science inspired broadly by logical positivism and the Vienna Circle (post, post). The "received view" of the 1950s and 1960s, as expressed by philosophers such as Carl Hempel, Ernest Nagel, and Israel Scheffler (and others pictured above), presented a view of scientific knowledge as consisting of theories, general laws, observational predictions, and a logic of confirmation according to which theories are evaluated by their observational consequences (Patrick Suppes, The Structure of Scientific Theories). There was a largely unquestioned assumption that all scientific theories have the same logical structure (the unity of science doctrine; post); so physics, economics, or evolutionary biology could equally be represented as a system of theoretical terms and statements, a set of general laws, and a set of observational or experimental consequences that can be empirically evaluated. Here is an illustration of the idea in the natural sciences; the black line is the theoretical calculation of ferromagnetic properties, and the colored lines are the observed behavior of metals under difference conditions.

This general view of the logic of scientific knowledge was applied to the social sciences by some philosophers of science, and the result was a neo-positivist philosophy of social science. Richard Rudner was an important player in the formation of the received view in the 1960s, and he served as editor-in-chief of the core journal, Philosophy of Science, from 1959 to 1975. (His collected papers are held at Washington University, and the breadth of his correspondence gives some idea of his centrality in discussions of neo-positivist philosophy of science.) His 1966 textbook, Philosophy of social science, represents the high-water mark of neo-positivist philosophy of social science. So let's review the main features of Rudner's representation of social-scientific knowledge. (May Brodbeck's 1968 Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences is a fairly direct complement to Rudner's book, in that it provides a fairly definitive representation of the philosophy of social science in the late 1960s.)

Several core assumptions about the social sciences are advanced in Rudner's book.

unity of science and naturalism; all sciences should resemble physics
emphasis on the distinction between the context of discovery and context of justification
insistence on the symmetry of explanation and prediction
insistence on the essential role of lawlike generalizations in explanation
fundamental reliance on a strict distinction between observation and theory
advancement of "formalizability" as a desirable characteristic of a theory

Here is Rudner's definition of a theory:

A theory is a systematically related set of statements, including some lawlike generalizations, that is empirically testable.... Accordingly, to the extent that a theory has been fully articulated in some formulation, it will achieve an explicit deductive development and interrelationship of the statements it encompasses. (10-11)

This formulation doesn't yet make explicit the notion that "theory" is non-observational, or that theoretical concepts lack direct criteria of application to observational experience. Rather, Rudner emphasizes the characteristic of formalizability and deductive consequences. And this takes him in the direction of non-observational concepts; they are the concepts that are introduced into a scientific system as formal "place-holders" without explicit definition. Instead, their meaning is determined by the deductive consequences that the sentences in which they appear give rise to. The intended analogy here is with the axioms of geometry; the concepts of "point," "line," and "plane" are introduced as primitives without further definition, and their meaning is defined simply by the role they play in the full deductive system of geometry. So, notably, Rudner treats the problem of theory formation in the sciences as entirely analogous to the problem of creating a formal mathematical system -- number theory or topology, for example. All concepts are either primitive -- introduced without definition; or defined -- introduced with strict logical definitions in terms of other concepts that already exist in the theoretical vocabulary. (It is interesting to note that Carl Hempel's contribution to the Vienna Circle International Encyclopedia of Unified Science is on this subject; Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science (International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol 2 No 7) .)

Notice how foreign this approach is to actual theoretical work by social scientists. Weber or Durkheim do not attempt to strip away "connotation" or ordinary associations from their theoretical concepts; rather, they make full use of the complexity and open-endedness of concepts like capitalism or solidarity as a way of allowing them to describe and theorize complex social realities. Rudner's approach seems to reflect the program of logical positivism, attempting to utilize the apparatus of formal logic to clarify scientific reasoning. But it misses the mark in application to the actual reasoning of path-breaking social thinkers such as Durkheim, Weber, Tocqueville, or Marx.

Rudner turns to the observation-theoretic distinction in short order. First, he describes observational concepts or predicates in these terms: "One set of primitives should be comprised of observational, or as we shall sometimes say, experimental terms (i.e., that such predicates should refer to observable features of the universe)" (21). And second, he introduces theoretical concepts: "The latter refer to nonobservable or nonmanifest characteristics of nonobservable entities. Thus, theoreticals include terms such as 'electron,' 'superego,' 'institutional inertia,' 'cultural lag,' which do not or are not (when the appropriate theories come to be formulated) likely to apply to observable entities at all" (23).

This is the standard view of the observation-theoretic distinction within the "received view" of neo-positivist philosophy of science. It was recognized that it is not possible to achieve the scientific goals of physics or chemistry if we are restricted to a purely observational vocabulary. We evidently need to refer to hypothetical entities and forces if we are to be able to explain observable phenomena. So hypothetical constructs must be permitted. But their "empirical content" is exhausted by their observational consequences.

Rudner attempts to provide a positivistic interpretation of Weber's concept of ideal types. He writes, "Our concern is with the logical character of idealizations and their methodological uses. In this latter respect, concepts that happen to be idealizations have, as we shall see, no special methodological role--regardless of the heuristic or suggestive value they may have in leading theorists to form hypotheses or frame theories about related phenomena" (56). This is a surprising exercise, since it involves the requirement that the social scientist provide a precise specification of the scope and implications of the term. I've always understood Weber's emphasis to be on the open-endedness of ideal-type concepts; and certainly Weber's use of ideal-type concepts did not remotely resemble the axiomatic, formalistic use that Rudner attributes to scientific concepts generally.

So what is the logic of scientific explanation in the social sciences, according to Rudner? His answer is straight from Hempel's covering law theory:

The formal structure of a scientific explanation of some particular event has three parts: first, a statement E describing the specific event to be explained; second, a set of statements C1 to Cn describing specific relevant circumstances that are antecedent to, or otherwise causally correlated with, the event described by E; third, a set of lawlike statements L1 to Ln, universal generalizations whose import is roughly 'Whenever events of the kind described by C1 through Cn take place, then an event of the kind described by E takes place.' (60)

Perhaps the key philosophical assumption that Rudner defends is the idea that the logic of science is everywhere the same. Concept formation, deduction, confirmation, and explanation all involve the same formalizable operations. A theory should be formalized as a first-order deductive system with primitive terms and defined terms; some of its terms should have criteria of application to observable outcomes; explanation proceeds by deriving a description of the explanandum from the theory; and the theory should be tested by evaluating the truth or falsity of its observational consequences.

In addition to these extended discussions of the putative logic of social-science reasoning, Rudner also addresses the topics of "objectivity" in social-science research and the concepts of functionalism and teleology in the social sciences.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to the philosophy of the social sciences? The strength of the book is also its debilitating weakness: it is an exceptionally clear exposition and development of the central ideas of logical positivism in application to social-science theorizing. Unfortunately, this approach proves to be singularly unhelpful when it comes to actually understanding and criticizing the social sciences as they actually exist. It has the effect of attempting to force a style and form of reasoning onto social researchers that deforms the ways in which they attempt to theorize and explain the social world.

Key weaknesses include these points.

First, this formulation pays virtually no attention to the actual content and methods of existing social science disciplines. The foundational premise is that all sciences have the same fundamental logic. So it isn't necessary to examine sociology, political science, or economics in detail in order to trace out the particular characteristics of inquiry, explanation, and theory in these disciplines. Either the social-science disciplines conform to the received view, or they do not and for that reason show themselves to be defective as science. So the philosophy of a special science is simply the special case of the more general theory of scientific knowledge represented by the received view. This is a bad way of beginning the philosophical study of any science, whether the social sciences or the biological sciences.

Second, by highlighting the issues that are central to the exposition of the received view -- for example, the observation-theoretic distinction -- the neo-positivist philosopher of social science is drawn away from consideration of other, more substantive problems to which philosophers could make a useful contribution. For example, the assumptions of purposive rationality underlie many explanations in areas of political science and economics; and it turns out to be very productive to examine the intricacies that arise when we try to give a careful explanation of the concept of rationality and to link this assumption to particular areas of social explanation. The intellectual disposition created by the neo-positivist view is to reduce this question to a simple matter of "concept formation." "Rationality" becomes simply another theoretical construct to be introduced into scientific theories. But as Sen, Harsanyi, Margolis, and dozens of other philosophers and social scientists have demonstrated, we need to spend quite a bit of intellectual energy to the task of unpacking the theory of rationality if it is to be of use in the social sciences.

Third, this approach imposes an inappropriate simplification on the social sciences when it comes to empirical evaluation of social-science hypotheses. It presupposes the comprehensive generality of the hypothetico-deductive model of confirmation theory. Once again, the intellectual error derives from the assumption that the logic of scientific reasoning must be the same in every area of science. The social sciences sometimes involve the sorts of theoretical systems that are found in physics; but more commonly a social science analysis is comprised of a number of relatively independent models and mechanisms -- theories of the middle range -- that are amenable to piecemeal evaluation. Social science analyses are not generally not unified theoretical systems along the lines of the theory of thermodynamics or genetics. And there are other ways of providing empirical evaluation and support for these sorts of analyses -- for example, process-tracing, piecemeal empirical evaluation, and applying the logic of comparative causal analysis.

In hindsight, the neo-positivist paradigm for analyzing the social sciences just didn't go very well. It pushed an esoteric theology of logical analysis onto the enterprise of understanding society that really didn't conform very well to the reasoning and explaining that talented sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists were creating for themselves. And it did not succeed in focusing productive attention by philosophers on the difficult problems of theory construction and explanation that social scientists really confronted.

Neurath on sociology

2009-09-20T17:09:00.002-04:00

Otto Neurath was one of the central figures in the Vienna Circle in the 1930s and 1940s. And he was the most important figure in the group to consider the social sciences within the "unified sciences" of the twentieth century. As noted in an earlier post, the Vienna Circle set the stage for a powerful tradition of "logical empiricism" as the received view in the philosophy of science in the 1950s and 1960s; and many of these ideas played back into the explicit methodologies of various areas of the sciences as well (physics and behaviorist psychology, for example).

Here I want to focus on the assumptions that some of the Vienna Circle thinkers made about the social sciences. Neurath contributed an article to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science on the foundations of the social sciences (Foundations of the Social Sciences; 1944), and this is the most extensive commentary on social science methodology that was issued by Vienna Circle thinkers. So it warrants a close reading. Neurath was trained in political economy, and he served as a centralized economic planning official in the German Social Democratic Party in Munich. He was also a key member and leader of the Vienna Circle, and his writings and editorial work for the group were highly influential.

So how does Neurath understand the social sciences? And what does he recommend by way of methodology? Neurath begins by treating the subject matter of sociology empirically rather than definitionally: what do social scientists actually study?

I shall speak of sociological statements as members of one big family of statements which may be found in volumes filled with results of research on the behavior of tribes, on the behavior of customs and languages as they spread through mankind, on the behavior of whole nations, on the growing-up of the fine arts in human societies, on the behavior of human groups and representative individuals (e.g., of artists, priests, statesmen, pirates, peasants, workers, and other people in various societies), on the patterns of cities, on the behavior of markets and administration, and on the various ways of personal life within various societies. (1)

In other words, Neurath is taking the content of a wide range of existing social-science studies of human behavior and society as constituting the domain of "social science" -- rather than beginning with an abstract or theoretical definition of the scope and methods of the social sciences. This approach is consistent with the over-arching Vienna Circle attitude of respect for the content and conduct of the various areas of science as they were currently practiced.

And what does he take to be the scientific goal of such research? He isn't entirely explicit, but here is a preliminary statement:

All the techniques for making well-arranged descriptions, finding correlations, and preparing predictions belong to the field of scientific practice with which I have to do here. ... Up to now we have met an overwhelming number of expressions dealing with social matters. (1-2)

So a fundamental goal of social-science research and thinking, on this approach, is providing a conceptual system -- a vocabulary -- in terms of which to describe social matters. Social scientists then use those concepts to describe the social data that they discover, and they attempt to discover correlations and make predictions based on the statements they have arrived at. Along the lines of Vienna Circle thinking about "criteria of significance," Neurath suggests that sociological concepts need to have clear and specific criteria of application to observable behavior. He refers to this kind of work as "terminological analysis." And the goal, evidently, is to create a uniform and logically specified language for the conduct of social science research and analysis: "Not only the unification of the sociological language is at stake, but a much more comprehensive unification and orchestration, which leads us to a lingua franca of unified science" (2). The resulting concepts need to have "observation content" -- that is, the researcher needs to be able to specify the connection the concept has to the observation of behavior. It is necessary to provide criteria of application based on observation.

But this is where Neurath's criticisms come in. Not all writings in the social or historical sciences conform to this ideal of conceptual clarity and empirical applicability. Neurath offers as a negative example of a social concept, the idea of the "spirit of nations." He suggests that this concept appears to be incapable of being connected to specific observable facts about social behavior; it functions as a speculative postulate of something inherently unobservable; and it should be avoided. "I suggest that it would be better not to discuss these remarks further within logical empiricism, because I see no way of transforming them into physicalist statements" (4). This corresponds to a very basic prescription for sociologists: make sure that the concepts one uses are logically clear and have explicit connections to observation.

We see how perplexing anthropological and historical analyses sometimes appear to be, because the phraseology is anything but consistent. It will not bolster up any argument to add that something belongs to the "mental world" or that there are "motives behind an action" instead of using a simple correlation phraseology. Generalities, such as "factors of social change," even when they are connected with empiricist statements, do not seem to further descriptions or predictions; they often serve as a kind of healing balsam." (17-18)

Several points in this passage warrant comment. First, there is the requirement of "consistency" of language. Here Neurath is reaffirming the goal of arriving at a universal language for social science research. Second is the rejection of mentalistic vocabulary. The point, I believe, is that the scientist cannot provide any observational criteria for applying the mental term to the individual. He/she may be able to provide behavioral criteria for the mental term; but in that case the mental term can be eliminated in terms of a feature of behavior. Instead of: "Berty broke the glass because he was angry," we can replace the sentence with: "Berty broke the glass; Berty displayed a, b, c features of angry-behavior; angry-behavior is commonly associated with things like breaking glasses." This leads us immediately to behaviorism as a methodological requirement for psychology. And the problem with "factors of social change," evidently, is that the phrase is entirely abstract and vacuous -- and therefore does not help with description or prediction. If, on the other hand, the "factor" were specified more concretely -- say, "rising population density as a factor of social change" -- then presumably Neurath would be satisfied. It would then be possible to study a number of societies; evaluate them for population density and social unrest; and arrive at testable statements about the correlation between the two factors.

Consider an example that I think will illustrate Neurath's point here. Suppose we say that "capitalism exists because of a pre-existing spirit of Calvinism." (Neurath begins to consider this example, understanding both concepts in terms of a set of "human attitudes"; p. 16. His use of the example obviously indicates that he is thinking of Max Weber, but he doesn't explicitly mention Weber.) Neurath would require that we be able to answer a series of questions: what are the criteria by which we apply the concept of capitalism to a specific society or group? What are the criteria by which we apply "Calvinism" to a population of people? And what observations and deductive arguments exist that would allow us to assess the truth or falsity of the claim of causation? If we are unable to answer any of these questions, then the statement is not yet an acceptable sociological assertion. Ultimately Neurath argues that we should refrain from making causal claims (21); but if we have clear criteria of application for C and P, then we can arrive at acceptable statements like "All C societies are P societies" or "Some P societies are not C societies". In other words, we can discover observational correlations in the occurrence of C and P across a range of societies or groups.

Neurath gives attention to the topic of "corroborating and supporting hypotheses" (25 ff.) -- what he refers to as "assaying" the statement (19). Here he takes a Duhemian view (Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory), according to which a scientific account of a phenomenon consists of a network of hypotheses that jointly (not singly) have implications for observation. "We look at a network of hypotheses only, and we cannot say from which hypotheses certain difficulties arise." He denies that "crucial experiments" exist that permit the scientist to refute a single hypothesis based on a single experimental outcome. Instead, the system of hypotheses as a whole gains empirical support through positive findings, and loses empirical credibility through negative findings. "I should therefore say we may 'shake' or 'corroborate' the assertion of a hypothesis and finally prefer some hypothesis; but I should not suggest saying that we may 'confirm a sentence more and more,' because even this 'weak' statement deals at least with some 'limit'" (25).

What I do not find in this essay is a clear conception of a "theoretical construct" or theoretical concept -- that is, a scientifically useful concept that does not have criteria of empirical application. Theoretical concepts in physics are thought to be "non-observational" -- that is, there are no direct criteria for applying the concept of a quark to a specific observable thing in a specific time-space location. Instead, theoretical terms are employed in theoretical hypotheses along with "bridge laws" that permit us to relate the theory to the range of observable evidence. The observation-theoretic distinction becomes a crucial one in later analytic philosophy of science; but it doesn't seem to be explicit here in Neurath's essay. (He does refer to the Newtonian concept of gravity; but he doesn't specifically describe the logic of this concept and how it relates to observation; 26.)

Neurath also advocates caution in the search for predictions about social behavior and social processes: "As social scientists, we have to expect gulfs and gaps everywhere, together with unpredictability, incompleteness, and one-sidedness of our arguing, wherever we may start" (27). He reinforces this point with a strikingly modern-sounding point about the non-linearity of social processes: a small deviation at one end can lead to a major deviation at the other end (28).

So the main elements of a logical empiricist philosophy of sociology are here, in the form of a number of prescriptions:

logical specification of concepts
specification of empirical criteria of application of concepts to observations
description of social phenomena in terms of this conceptual system
observational assessment of statements
discovery of regularities among descriptive statements
avoidance of claims of causation
disregard of theoretical concepts

And these prescriptions, in turn, seem to lead to a particular model of sociology research -- one that appears to have guided the conduct of quantitative-statistical sociological research for several decades at mid-century. This is a variant of positivist philosophy of science that most strongly encourages general descriptive concepts, strong empirical procedures, and the discovery of statistical regularities among variables. It is what Andrew Abbott refers to as the "variables" paradigm.

Did the Vienna Circle view of the social sciences have any influence on working sociologists in the 1940s and 1950s? Or, more generally, did the writings of logical positivism influence the development of the methodologies and theories of sociology? One direct form of influence can be traced through the priority that behavioral scientists gave to "concept formation" and operationalizability -- for example, Carl Hempel's Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science (International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol 2 No 7) (1952) or P. W. Bridgman's The logic of modern physics (1927). The requirement of testability certainly recurs throughout much methodological writing by sociologists in the 1950s and 1960s. The insistence on discovering regularities among social facts plays directly into more sophisticated efforts to understand sociology as a statistical/quantitative science. The idea that the social sciences should avoid using "cause-effect" vocabulary seems to resonate with methodologists who insist that "we discover regularities but cannot assess causal relationships." So there does appear to be a fairly high degree of fit between the views that Neurath advances concerning sociology, and the content of positivist sociological methodology a few decades later.

A final question is this: how should science and philosophy interrelate? Do philosophical findings about scientific method imply that the scientific enterprise needs to start over? In response to this question, the book closes with one of Neurath's most famous passages -- the description of what is now known as "Neurath's raft".

Imagine sailors who, far out at sea, transform the shape of their clumsy vessel from a more circular to a more fishlike one. They make use of some drifting timber, besides the timber of the old structure, to modify the skeleton and the hull of their vessel. But they cannot put the ship in dock in order to start from scratch. During their work they stay on the old structure and deal with heavy gales and thundering waves. In transforming their ship they take care that dangerous leakages do not occur. A new ship grows out of the old one, step by step -- and while they are still building, the sailors may already be thinking of a new structure, and they will not always agree with one another. The whole business will go on in a way we cannot even anticipate today. That is our fate. (47)

This is his metaphor for the reconstruction of the sciences along the lines of logical empiricism and terminological empiricism: gradual reconstruction of the enterprise while underway in the business of performing scientific research.

The Vienna Circle on interdisciplinary science

2009-09-19T16:22:00.013-04:00

Image: in place of a network map of the contributors to the Vienna Circle

One of the central projects of the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 1930s was an ambitious one: to create an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science that would demonstrate the crucial unity of all the empirical sciences -- including sociology and psychology (INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF UNIFIED SCIENCE. VOLUME I; 1938). The Vienna Circle group included a distinguished number of philosophers and scientists, including Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Rudolph Carnap, and Charles W. Morris; and non-Circle members Niels Bohr, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell lent their names to the project as well. Their central intellectual commitments constituted the cutting edge of positivist empiricism in the early part of the twentieth century; they advocated for the unity of science, inter-theoretic coherence, and the aspiration to a comprehensive empirical-logical method of scientific knowledge validation. This group was highly influential in the development of subsequent analytic philosophy of science (e.g., Herbert Feigl, Ernest Nagel, and Carl Hempel); in fact, Neurath's description of "logical empiricism" is one that pretty well describes the philosophy of science of the 1940s through the early 1960s. This was a very important stage in the development of twentieth-century thinking about the sciences, and some of the most incisive thinkers in the world were involved in the project. (See Thomas Uebel's article on the Vienna Circle in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

The positions and interpretations of Vienna Circle thinkers are particularly important here because these philosophers and scientists concentrated their thoughts on the question, what is science? And how do the various areas of scientific research relate to each other? And their writings have the advantage of a close acquaintance with some of the most important advances in a wide range of the sciences in the first several decades in the twentieth century, including physics, biology, psychology, and economics. So their writings have one of the characteristics that I think is most important in doing the philosophy of science: they formed their views in close engagement with particular areas of scientific research. These were brilliant thinkers; they were, on the whole, not dogmatic in their assumptions and judgments; they were sensitive to nuance in the doing of science; and they were deeply respectful of scientific work across a range of areas.

The first part of the Encyclopedia appeared in 1938, and it set the stage for the work that this international group of scientists and philosophers proposed to do (International Encyclopedia of Unified Science ; Volume 1 Part 2). Otto Neurath edited this volume, and his opening sentences in the initial essay set the stage:

Unified science became historically the subject of this Encyclopedia as a result of the efforts of the unity of science movement, which includes scientists and persons interested in science who are conscious of the importance of a universal scientific attitude. (1)

A bit later he links the work of the "unity of science" movement of his time to the writings of John Stuart Mill (discussed in an earlier post):

Modern scientific empiricism attained very late in its development a comprehensive work which analyzes empirical procedure in all scientific fields: John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. Mill does not question the fact that astronomy and social science, physics and biology, are sciences of the same type. ... Mill's work influenced modern empiricism despite the fact that many of his particularly statements were criticized. (9)

The central thrust of the Vienna Circle position on scientific knowledge is a joining of "empiricism" -- the view that all knowledge depends on empirical observations -- with "logicism" -- the idea that it is possible to give exact and rigorous interpretation of the idea of a valid inference. So the sciences are the ways in which we attempt to logically organize and express the facts of observations and the inferences we draw from these observations. And the work of the great logicians around the turn of the 20th century on the foundations of arithmetic -- Piano, Frege, Tarski, Russell -- gave the Vienna Circle thinkers a great deal of confidence in the power that is brought to scientific knowledge by formal systems of deductive logic.

The most extreme version of empiricism -- "knowledge consists of statements based on observations and deductively valid inferences from those statements" -- doesn't quite do the job, because it was quickly recognized that hypotheses and theories are not deductively entailed by a set of facts of observation. Consequently it is necessary to formulate a formal logic of confirmation (the task that Carl Hempel picked up with his hypothetico-deductive model of confirmation). In other words, empiricism needs something like an inductive logic in order to get the enterprise of science going. But the main elements of scientific knowledge are here: observation and inference.

The project of the Encyclopedia is to investigate how the various areas of existing science fit into this conception of scientific knowledge, and how they relate to each other. And the collaborators in the project think that there is a common scientific attitude -- respect for the empirical facts and logical deductions -- that extends across all the sciences.

It is interesting to notice the fact that Neurath's version of the unity of science does not imply reduction of all science to one super-theory:

Science itself is supplying its own integrating glue instead of aiming at a synthesis on the basis of a "super science" which is to legislate for the special scientific activities. The historical tendency of the unity of science movement is toward a unified science departmentalized into special sciences, and not toward a speculative juxtaposition of an autonomous philosophy and a group of scientific disciplines. (20)

Some of these observations make me think that it might be worth rethinking the import of the Vienna Circle. We're inclined to caricature the Vienna Circle as reductionist, positivist, and hyper-empiricist; and we tend to think of the movement as eliding the important differences across scientific disciplines. But there is a strong strand of scientific pluralism that flows through the project that is at odds with the reductionist reputation the movement has.

One might almost be inclined to call the Encyclopedia project one that emphasizes the value of inter-disciplinary collaboration, rather than a reductionist programme that seeks to impose a single set of principles and methods on all sciences. And in fact, Neurath seems to go out of his way to disavow the hope of reducing the special sciences to some single core science. Here is how Charles H. Morris ends his contribution in this opening volume with the title, "Scientific Empiricism":

This Encyclopedia, reflecting this inclusive standpoint, rightfully sounds the roll call of those distinguished logicians, scientists, and empiricists whom the traditional history of ideas has so shamefully neglected. But basically it aims to present through extensive co-operation the existing status and the unrealized possibilities for the integration of science. Its existence signalizes the union of scientific and philosophic traditions in a common task. (74-75)

And the scientific value of cross-disciplinary collaboration that the Vienna Circle members shared is reflected in the international group of scholars they gathered together in the 1930s. Here is the International Committee of the International Congresses for the Unity of Science (International Encyclopedia of Unified Science ; Volume 1 Part 2, p. 26):

N. Bohr, M. Boll, H. Bonnet, P. W. Bridgman, E. Brunswik, R. Carnap, E. Cartan, J. Clay, M. R. Cohen, J. Dewey, F. Enriques, P. Frank, M. Frechet, F. Gonseth, J. Hadamard, P. Janet, H. S. Jennings, J. Joergensen, E. Kaila, T. Kotarbinski, A. Lalande, P. Langevin, K. S. Lashley, C. I. Lewis, J. Lukasiewicz, G. Mannoury, R. von Mises, C. W. Morris, O. Neurath, C. K. Ogden, J. Perrin, H. Reichenbach, A. Rey, C. Rist, L. Rougier, B. Russell, L. S. Stebbing, J. H. Woodger

Later volumes add several additional names to the list of the membership of the Advisory Committee:

Herbert Feigl, Clark Hull, Waldemar Kaempffert, Victor Lenzen, William M. Malissoff, Ernest Nagel, Arne Naess, Alfred Tarski, Edward C. Tolman (1944)

Out of the 46 individuals listed, 11 are from France; 15 are located in the United States; and only one is located in Austria. The disciplines of philosophy, psychology, physics and logic are the largest groups, and there are a few economists included as well. It would be very interesting to extend this into a map of networks of influence in the next generation.

Here are the tables of contents for Volumes I and II. There are a few surprises on the contents for the second volume.

Volume 1

Encyclopedia and Unified Science / Otto Neurath et al
Foundations of the Theory of Signs / Charles Morris
Foundations of Logic and Mathematics / Rudolph Carnap
Linguistic Aspects of Science / Leonard Bloomfield
Procedures of Empirical Science / Victor Lenzen
Principles of the Theory of Probability / Ernest Nagel
Foundations of Physics / Phillipp Frank
Cosmology / E. Finlay-Freundlich
Foundations of Biology / Felix Mainx
The Conceptual Framework of Psychology / Egon Brunswik

Volume 2

Foundations of the social sciences / Otto Neurath
Structure of scientific revolutions / Thomas Kuhn
Science and the structure of ethics / Abraham Edel
Theory of valuation / John Dewey
Technique of theory construction / J. H. Woodger
Methodology of mathematical economics / Gerhard Tintner
Fundamentals of concept formation in empirical science / Carl Hempel
Development of rationalism and empiricism / Giorgio De Santillana and Edgar Zilsel
Development of logical empiricism / Jorgen Jorgensen
Bibliography and index / Herbert Feigl and Charles Morris

History of sociology as sociology

2009-09-17T22:41:00.005-04:00

I find the history of various approaches to sociology to be an interesting subject. When we look at the history of the Chicago School of sociology or the positivist-quantitative paradigm of the American 1950s and 1960s, we see a very particular set of intellectual problems and theories; we see personalities and universities; and we see specific prominent social problems that come in for study. And the resulting frameworks of assumptions about topics, scope, and method are very different. So there is a lot of contingency and path-dependency involved in the development of a sociological research tradition. I've commented on differences in national approaches to sociology in earlier postings (French sociology, Chinese sociology). Here I'd like to reflect a bit on some of the complexities involved in doing a history of a particular sociological tradition.

Craig Calhoun's Sociology in America: A History illustrates much of what I find interesting about this subject; the contributors have generally provided fascinating and nuanced insights into some of the main currents of American sociological thinking over the past century or so. George Steinmetz's contribution, "American Sociology Before and After World War II" is particularly interesting, in that it is both empirical and epistemic. "The burden of my argument in this chapter is to track the postwar narrowing of sociology's intellectual diversity or, more precisely, the shift from a relative equality between nonpositivist and positivist orientations in terms of scientific prestige to a condition in which positivism as defined here was clearly dominant" (315-6). Andrew Abbott and James Sparrow look at the impact of massive social events on the development of American sociology -- the events of World War II. And they treat this question in a rigorously sociological fashion; they examine the institutions, the demography, and the funding mechanisms that influenced the development of sociology in the United States between 1940 and 1955. And Doug McAdam provides a really fascinating and insightful examination of how the social context of the 1960s affected the discipline of sociology. Altogether, the collection represents the best historical sociology of the disciplines of sociology that I've seen.

A key foundational question in considering this subject is this: what is the historian of sociology trying to accomplish? What does he/she hope to discover? There are a range of possible questions: Where did the fundamental concepts and methods come from? How were the founders influenced in their theories and methods by prior intellectual frameworks? How did institutions and funding mechanisms influence the particular directions that were taken in the research tradition? How did individual innovators and pathbreakers impose their own innovations into the emerging tradition? How do the concepts and methods reflect background social conditions and events? These are all questions of causation and genesis, and they can be treated empirically -- even sociologically.

What is the intellectual standing of this sort of inquiry? What does a good history of the Annales school or the Chicago school tell us? Here are a couple of possibilities.

First, a good history of a concrete sociological tradition may lay out some of the intellectual influences that stimulated thinkers through the formative period--the ideas about science and knowledge, the ideas about what the interesting historical questions are, and even what's involved in being an iconoclast in the current state of the broader discipline. In the case of the Annales school, the history will likely drill down on the concrete influence wielded by Durkheim, Mauss, and their tradition on the Annales founders; and it will highlight what the founders were reacting against in defining their approach -- perhaps the towering influences of Ranke and Michelet. And the history will be attentive to detail -- not just the broad brush, but the specific controversies and influences that shaped the development of the field at various points. This aspect of the work converges with the methods and content of intellectual history more generally.

Second, the history of a sociological tradition may give a lot of attention to uncovering the specific institutions of knowledge validation and dissemination that set the context for the founders -- the universities, journals, state institutions, funding sources, and academic associations that promoted or impeded the creation of new knowledge. This is core sociology of science, reflecting the recognition that science is a social product and is deeply influenced by the concrete institutions that exist or are subsequently created.

A third component of a history of a sociological tradition might be an account of the historical and social environment in which the tradition takes shape. In the case of the Annales school, the fact that it emerged in the immediate aftermath of the Great War is surely relevant; Marc Bloch's experience of war and the French army surely had some influence on his development as an historian. Likewise, the Frankfurt school's development within the jaws of emerging fascism must be relevant to understanding of the social theorists of the school (and of the New School in New York!). And the buoyant optimism of America in the 1950s must play a role in the development of American sociology (e.g. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties).

But now we're brought face to face with the crucial questions of validity and truth. We want our sociologies to shed real light on the nature of various social settings. We want sociological results to be validated by empirical investigation. We want sociologists to be in a position to create genuinely innovative ideas and representations of the social world -- ideas that genuinely increase our ability to understand society. And therefore we want to avoid any sort of determinism in the realm of scientific inquiry; we want it not to be the case that the sociologist is trapped in the "prison-house" of ideas and social context that surround him/her. Marx's simple formula, "the hand-mill gives you the feudal lord" (German Ideology) makes scientific knowledge impossible; likewise with Karl Mannheim's deterministic sociology of knowledge (Ideology And Utopia).

Here is the picture I favor in understanding the evolution of the various traditions of social knowledge (post). There is no such thing as comprehensive social knowledge; there is no general "first theory" that we might aspire to as a universal sociology. Rather, social knowledge takes the form of an indefinite series of sometimes overlapping domains and definitions of knowledge. Some of these give us a better understanding of social factors like race or caste; others focus on agency and constraint; yet others try to discover quantifiable patterns within the social world. So social knowledge is a dynamic and expanding tool box of theories and approaches, each of which adds something to our overall understanding of society.

And if this is our view of social knowledge, then the history of sociology has a very substantial role to play in helping us understand the intellectual and practical path that brought us to various sociological approaches, without undermining the epistemic status of those traditions. There is a lot of contingency in the story; there is an unavoidable incompleteness in the composite mosaic of traditions of inquiry and knowledge; but there are straightforward intellectual strategies that permit us to empirically evaluate the theories and traditions. Criticism, validation, and knowledge are consistent with the fact that specific historical paths led us to the theories we currently possess. Of course, we need to recognize that those traditions could have emerged significantly differently.

This understanding of the relationship between sociology and the history of sociology means, in turn, that we can treat a sociological tradition simultaneously in terms of ...

the specific sociological and institutional pathways through which it developed and
the degree of truth, justification, and insight that it has as a partial representation of the social world.

In other words, an historical sociology of sociology can be both empirical and institutional, and at the same time epistemic and critical. It can shed light on how we got where we are, and on the question of how good are our current understandings of the social world.

Agrarian history -- the Weber edition

2009-09-15T13:28:00.015-04:00

One of Max Weber's early areas of research was what might be called "macro agrarian history". This was a field of research that Weber himself largely invented. He undertook to document and explain the large patterns of economic development in the ancient world, including especially the social systems surrounding farming and animal husbandry. Weber's cases include Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Rome. How did the fundamental material activities of farming, trading, and consuming contribute to the development of major civilizations? This research culminated in several important manuscripts, including in particular Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations (1909; translated and edited by R. I. Frank in 1976). Weber was particularly interested in the causal and structural features of the specific forms of property relations, labor, trade, taxation, and consumption that characterized the social economies of the ancient world. And he tries to show how certain features of the agrarian system influenced the emergence of certain political and legal forms.

The title "Agrarverhältnisse in Altertum" is translated as "Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations"; but this is a little misleading. It's not so much a work of sociology as it is a work of economic and political history at a civilizational level. The essay is offered as an account of the history and particularity of the rural economies of the ancient world -- closer to economic history than sociology.

Weber's treatment of ancient Greece is particularly detailed. So let's inventory some of the main components of his account to get a flavor of his approach. This will give us a better idea of how he set about trying to understand and explain the social world that is presented through ancient Greek literature. Here are the first few paragraphs of his description of the agrarian society of "historic Greece" -- the contemporary society of Homer, or roughly 1000 BCE:

The Greeks raised spelt, barley, and wheat, alternating this in each field with grass (hence leases were for an even number of years). This system continued to be followed except in those areas specializing in a particular crop. Occasionally, it seems, the three-field system was used, but there was no change of crops, except that legumes were grown on fallow land. The use of manure is mentioned in Homer (but green manure was not used until later times); in general, however, agricultural techniques were stabilized at a rather primitive level and thereafter did not develop.

Thus the main features of Greek agriculture continued to be ploughing with a hooked plough (for long entirely of wood) drawn by oxen, sowing seed in furrows, hacking and weeding the grain fields, and harvesting with sickle and threshing board. Hence labour intensity was considerable, and since virgin land was no longer available, it was difficult to shift from subsistence agriculture to market production, even though grain prices were high in later times.

Cattle raising does not seem to have been much reduced in extent by farming until the age of the tyrants, who favoured the peasantry. The Homeric epics indicated a diet based mainly on cheese, milk, and -- among aristocrats -- meat. Clothing was made of wool and skins. (147)

So -- crops, technology and practice, labor productivity, and consumption patterns. And what about the social relationships within which these farm activities took place?

In historical times the prevalent form of living unit was the patriarchal nuclear family. Women and children were in much the same position as among Semitic peoples: women could be bought or else married with dowry; husbands had the right to send away their wives, and could sell, rent, expel, or kill their children. Later the laws governing legitimacy, and the feeling for kin ties cultivated among the great families combined to reduce these powers of the father over his children; by the time when the Gortyn Code was first framed these changes had all taken place. (148)

But whereas the masses lived in nuclear families, nobles and kings -- at first the same -- lived as elsewhere in large households including agnates of a clan (genos). The purpose of this was to preserve the unity of inheritable landed estates. Thus both separate and group inheritance are mentioned in the Homeric epics; see the homosipuoi of Charondas, equivalent to the homogalaktes of Attic law. (148)

Here we have some social detail: the family, property in land, inheritance, and a "class" distinction between the farmer class and the elite families. And we have regular reminders of the primary historical sources underlying these descriptions: the Homeric epics and other surviving texts from Greek literature and history.

Weber quickly identifies social inequality in ancient Greek society and points to a system of wealth extraction from the masses to the elite families:

Those people who did not belong to a numerous and economically established clan, who were in short without land, found themselves forced to enter the clientele of one or another aristocrat. This was a later development, as the supply of new land declined and differences in wealth developed; originally membership of the community and ownership of land each presupposed the other. (149)

What about politics -- the use of military force to extract resources and compel population behavior?

The Dorian cities were fundamentally military states, and so everywhere they maintained the same three tribes. Elsewhere there was great variety, but everywhere and always the formal division of a community into tribes signified one thing: that a people had constituted itself as a polis ready for war at any time. It should be noted here that the proper word for a tribe in a non-urbanized community was ethnos, as is shown by the documents of the Delphic Amphictyone. (151)

More precise information is not available for the political and social structures of autonomous communities in early times. If, however, we rely on analogies with other peoples, then we can assume that in each community the position of ruler (anax) came to be hereditary in a family made prominent by wealth in cattle and marked out as favoured by the gods by success in war and equity in judgment. (151)

When he moves on to the later period in ancient Greek history he extends the list of concepts used to characterize society; he describes the development of cities, the extension of long-distance trade, the social and cultural influence of Asia Minor, and the growth of political power wielded by aristocratic kings.

This is just a small snapshot of Weber's historical reasoning in Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations. The book is methodical, and it moves through an orderly series of objective concepts of social organization in order to provide a description of the historically given society.

So the text is full of interesting claims and details about the agrarian regimes of human society 3,000 years ago. But here is the question that needs posing in the context of UnderstandingSociety: What is Weber trying to accomplish in this piece of writing? And how does his analysis shed light on his intuitive views of social and historical knowledge? What can we discover about Weber's sociological imagination from this book? Several summary comments seem fairly clear.

First, much of the intellectual work here is devoted to de-coding the social and economic implications of surviving Greek literature, including particularly the Homeric poems. Weber is trying to piece together a coherent story of the modes of farming, technology, property, family, kinship, and kingship that are implied in the many small clues about social life contained in the Homeric corpus. So there is a large part of the work that is intended to be conceptual and descriptive.

Second, Weber lays bare one of his own interests in his construction of the text: a concern for viewing large social formations -- civilizations or social-economic regimes -- and discovering some of the material and situational factors that influence their development. This introduces an explanatory ambition to the work; Weber wants to be able to explain how some developments are the causal result of other developments.

Third, there is an important element of comparison involved in the book. Weber is plainly interested in noticing the differences as well as the similarities in the agrarian regimes he describes in Egypt, Greece, or Rome.

Fourth, there is not much attention given to the role of ideas or ideologies in this book -- in contrast to the central role that ideas play in his comparative religion research some years later. And there is no trace of "interpretive" inquiry in this book either. Weber is trying to discover an objective vocabulary in terms of which to describe the material and social arrangements that are implied by the Homeric corpus, without attempting to say how the agents experienced or represented these social relations. This is not a "hermeneutic" book; if anything, it more resembles an ethnographically sensitive materialism. We might even say that the book is Weber's, but it is something other than Weberian.

Finally, the topic of power returns repeatedly throughout the book. Weber demonstrates his recurring interest in the role that coercion and military force play in the organization of society and the concentration of wealth.

Several generations later, the great classical historian M. I. Finley undertook a parallel investigation of the agrarian economies of Greece and Rome in The Ancient Economy (1973). Finley's work is more clearly organized by the goal of showing how the material, technical, and social relations he describes constitute an economic system -- a system of production and reproduction. And it reflects a modest kind of Marxism in its effort to describe the forces and relations of production in the ancient world. Certainly the body of historical data that was available to Finley about the social arrangements of the ancient world was much greater than what was available to Weber; in this sense we are likely to judge that Finley's account is more likely to be accurate in detail. But it is very interesting to read the two books side-by-side; they have a lot in common. And each presents an ambitious view of what is involved in knowing how ancient societies worked.

(It is interesting to discover that M. I. Finley and R. I. Frank, the translator and editor of Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, had a bit of a dust-up in the New York Review of Books in 1970 over a review that Finley wrote of several books on the Roman Empire.)

Why the corporation?

2009-09-13T13:43:00.004-04:00

image: Diego Rivera mural of Rouge Plant, Detroit Institute of the Arts

Recently I posted about C. Wright Mills and his analysis of power elites in America (post). A major theme in Mills's book is the new power associated with the American corporation following World War II. Charles Perrow's Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism (2002) offers an historical account of how this system of power came into being. Perrow is a historical sociologist, and he focuses his analysis on the structural features of the organizations he considers; the historical and social factors that favored the emergence of these kinds of organizations; and the role that they now play within the complex social and political system of modern America.

The topic is particularly relevant today, when the Supreme Court is considering whether "corporations have a right to free speech", and therefore a right to further deepen their influence on political directions and policies through their funding of political messages.

Perrow gives close empirical attention to the evolution of the institutions through which the American economy functioned from the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth century. Textiles and railroads play key roles in this early history. Perrow tells the story of how the American economy came to feature the large corporation as its central business organization -- an outcome that was far from inevitable. He argues that the large corporation is a historically contingent creation; other forms of enterprise activity could have emerged. And he teases out of this account a pretty compelling set of conclusions that are very supportive of Mills's basic line of thought concerning the disproportionate power that is wielded by corporations and their officers. Here's his summary statement:

Our economic organizations -- business and industry -- concentrate wealth and power; socialize employees and customers alike to meet their needs; and pass off to the rest of society the cost of their pollution, crowding, accidents, and encouragement of destructive life styles. In the vaunted "free market" economy of the United States, regulation of business and industry to prevent or mitigate this market failure is relatively ineffective, as compared to that enacted by other industrialized countries. (1-2)

Perrow notes that organizations do not have to be large to be effective and efficient; along with Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin (World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization) and Philip Scranton (Endless Novelty), he argues that "networks of small firms can drive innovation and distribute wealth and power more equitably" (2). So large, hierarchical organizations are not mandated by the technical demands of modern economic life. In fact, innovation, flexibility, and community responsiveness are more likely to be associated with networks of small organizations rather than solitary large organizations, and these types of organizations were abundant in our economic history. "Many conditions were in place to grow a society of well-regulated and moderate-sized firms focused upon regional economic development; at various points in the century many citizens argued for this" (19). But that is not what we got; instead, the large organization and the corporation became the central unit of economic activity.

So why did large organizations and corporations come to have the central and dominating role that they have had in economic and social life since the early twentieth century in the United States? Perrow's answer to this represents a synthesis of the best thinking to date on the role that corporations play. He refers to his approach as a "society of organizations" approach, involving these key elements:

History is path-dependent, accidental, only partially developmental
structure and environment rather than entrepreneurship explain success / failure
technologies are chosen to fit preferred structure / ideology
culture shapes and is shaped by organization; the latter is emphasized
labor process is shaped in part by workers' resistance and can occasionally be a key factor, but acquiescence in dependency, and tradeoffs in benefits, are more often the common lot of employees
bureaucracy (formalization, standardization, centralization, hierarchy) is the best unobtrusive control device that elites ever had (19)

The point about labor process is an important one. Perrow notes that the central challenge of how to discipline and regularize a labor force in textiles or other mass-production industries itself led to the early development of bureaucratic and hierarchical rules within emerging organizations. For example, "uniform work rules for all mills in Philadelphia including Manayunk were established at meetings of the owners in the early 1830s" (55). (Michael Burawoy explores this role of the corporation throughout his work; Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism.)

Perrow also gives quite a bit of attention to the legal and policy environment in the United States as a key variable in the specific pathway that American business took. The enactment of legislation permitting incorporation was an important step, in that it provided significant rights and powers to corporations (36 ff.). And Perrow notices that the development of railroads and their business organizations in the United States took a very different course than counterparts in Europe because of significant differences in political values and culture in the United States (a point that leads Perrow to intersect with Frank Dobbin's analysis in Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age, discussed here.)

What is the upshot? Perrow argues that in the United States the national political economy was led to create a system that gave enormous and very lightly regulated power to large organizations and corporations; that, once established, these organizations were very capable of defending their rights and freedom of action; and that the corporations exercise power at every level in American society. Corporations and large organizations wield micro-power over the tens of millions of Americans who work within them, meso-power over the environmental status of communities and regions and the consumption patterns of individuals, and macro-power over the direction that legislation and policy takes. And this degree of power is now deeply entrenched:

Belatedly, the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century sought to redress the power imbalances and the costly externalities for workers and communities. But the organizational infrastructure of the nation was not to be seriously disturbed or even ideologically challenged, up to the present. A society with small- and modest-sized firms, regional rather than national markets, and with civic welfare provisions that are a right of citizenship rather than a benefit of employment--a society with wealth and power distributed widely--is now out of the question. Large bureaucratic organizations, public and private, will be our fate for the foreseeable future. It might have been otherwise. (228)

And finally, Perrow argues that this system was not economically or technologically inevitable. Networks of smaller firms and organizations could satisfy the needs for efficient production and innovation that a robust and dynamic economy presents. And a substantially less centralized political economy would be favorable to democracy and modern quality of life.

(Perrow's most recent book is also very timely and worth reading (The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters). Here Perrow returns to the subject of catastrophe and its prevention. He outlines the very significant possibilities of catastrophic failure that are inherent in our current industrial and economic organization, and offers some ideas about how we might reduce these vulnerabilities. There is a connection between the two books; the wide scope of the corporation as the basic unit of economic organization directly implies the concentration of dangerous industrial processes that a more decentralized network of smaller producers would have avoided. Try a sample chapter on the Kindle.)

What is the Burmese junta doing?

2009-09-09T08:17:00.007-04:00

Burma has been a cauldron of surprising news in the past two years or so. The generals have taken a series of actions in a number of areas: brutal repression of the monks' demonstrations in 2007, prosecution and conviction of Aung Sun Suu Kyi (ASSK) in a bizarre show trial, a major rainy season assault on the Karen militias and villages, increasing pressure on the Kachin Independence Organization, brutal assault on the Kokang cease-fire group on the Chinese border. And don't forget the mystery tunnel construction (link) and the phantom North Korean ship (link) a few months ago. (Here is a list of recent news items concerning events in Burma and the rest of southeast Asia, and here is a map displaying some of those items. Follow the UnderstandingSociety twitter feed for updates.) Is there an underlying logic to these actions? What is the junta's strategy? What are they trying to accomplish, and how do these actions fit into any sort of rational plan? (See an earlier post on the Burmese dictatorship.)

Here's a sketchy analysis about the junta's goals: to maintain the decisive military and political power of the Burmese army; to gain full control of national territory, including particularly the states with independence movements and armed militias; to retain the ability to crush any possible opposition movement; to keep the wealth-production machine going for the benefit of the generals and the military system; and to preserve diplomatic support from China. And one important date is looming: the junta's promise to conduct elections in 2010. The elections are plainly designed to leave decisive control in the hands of the army and to present a thin semblance of "democracy". And the junta is determined to manage this process so as to lead to an outcome that leaves their power unchallenged.

So what do they need in order to accomplish these goals? They need arms; they need trading partners; they need on-the-ground control of the population; and they need to retain control of Burma's resources and economy. How do recent actions conform to these goals? Is the junta merely reactive, or is it following a longterm strategy?

The trial of Aung San Suu Kyi fits into this set of goals fairly obviously. ASSK is the most charismatic leader that Burmese society possesses. She leads the National League for Democracy (NLD), the most persistent opposition group in Burma today and the overwhelming winner of the elections of 1990 (link). And her name is one of the most celebrated in Burma's post-colonial history. Her father Aung San was the hero of Burmese independence and his assassination in 1947 was a turning point in Burma's modern history. ASSK has the potential to mobilize a powerful pro-democracy movement, and the generals fear her. Moreover, there seems to be a streak of emotion in the generals' attitudes toward her; there seems to be a powerful hatred of ASSK that goes beyond rational fear. But the evident determination of the junta to keep ASSK under house arrest and out of politics through the 2010 elections makes a cruel kind of sense.

The recent military campaigns against the Karen and Kokang groups and the increasing pressure on Kachin and Shan movements also fit fairly clearly into the goals mentioned here. The generals appear to have come to the conclusion that they have a realistic opportunity to change the balance of forces between the army and the ethnic organizations. They appear to have undertaken a determined effort to do so, beginning with the Karen. This seems to be motivated by both the long-standing effort to control the non-Burmese populations and the goal of managing the 2010 elections.

The international trade strategies of the junta also appear to be directly linked to the commercial interests of the regime. Gas contracts, timber and jade sales, and exploitation of Burma's other economic assets show an aggressive but strategic effort at increasing Burma's foreign exchange revenues. The relationship with North Korea appears to represent a source of military technology not otherwise available to Burma (the mystery ship?). And western economic sanctions don't seem to dampen Burma's trade opportunities significantly. In other words, the junta appears to have created an alternative world trading system that leaves it fairly immune to western criticism and sanctions.

Burma's foreign relations also seem fairly successful in the realpolitik sense. Burma has managed to avoid much pressure from ASEAN nations; it has preserved the diplomatic support of China in the United Nations; and it maintains acceptable relations with India and Bangladesh. Its assault on the Karen areas has ruffled relations with Thailand because of the influx of refugees across the Thai border their military campaign created. And the assault on the Kokang group had strained relations with China because of the large number of refugees into Yunnan province and the mistreatment of Han people in Shan State. But so far the Chinese haven't offered much pressure to the Burmese junta either.

So it seems that there is actually a fairly coherent underlying set of goals and strategies that appear to be driving the junta's actions. The common view in the western media of the junta as mysterious, secretive, reactive, paranoid, and ineffective doesn't seem to be accurate. The junta seems to be a more dangerous enemy to the people of Burma than this description would suggest. The generals have developed bureaucracies and plans that allow them to pursue their aims fairly effectively. And this is bad news for a democratic Burma. The junta has entrenched a brutal, violent, and exploitative regime that is fundamentally unconcerned about the welfare of the people of Burma; and their military government seems pretty effective in preserving its power and pursuing its political goals.

It is interesting to note how many areas of the social sciences need to be consulted in order to deal with this question: political science (how can we explain the regime's behavior?), organizational behavior (how do the bureaucratic agencies of the Burmese state function?), military sociology (how is the army recruited and managed?), and social movements theory (how do the various oppositional groups in Burma seek to mobilize?). So Burma represents something of a laboratory for social science research and theory formation.