Saskia Sassen on austerity and social exclusion

The previous post summarized some of Kathleen Thelen's thinking about the prospects for a more egalitarian capitalism in our future. Saskia Sassen offers a more negative view of the direction of the development of European capitalism in her most recent book, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy.

Here is a post in Open Democracy in which Sassen summarizes her current thinking. Her view is that there is something new in the political economy of liberalization and austerity -- the systematic exclusion and expulsion of a significant portion of the population from the economy altogether. She writes:

Low growth, unemployment, inequality, and poverty are no longer reliable markers for capturing the 'economic cleansing' afflicting European institutions and societies throughout Europe. This 'works' on the backs of all those who have simply been expelled.

This seems pretty descriptive in the urban environment in which I live in Detroit metro. The factors Sassen highlights -- high unemployment, even higher rates of discouraged workers, and high rates of foreclosure and abandonment fit the Detroit experience very well. The most recent development -- water shutoff notices to tens of thousands of Detroit residents -- only reinforces the point of exclusion.

Thanks, Saskia, for providing the link!

Thelen on the prospects for egalitarian capitalism

source: Kathleen Thelen, Varieties of Liberalization (kl 3310)

There is a version of economic historical thinking that we might label as "capitalist triumphalism" -- the idea that the institutions of a capitalist economy drive out all other economic forms, and that they tend towards an ever-more pure form of unconstrained market society. "Liberalization," deregulation, and reduction of social rights are seen as economically inevitable. On this view, the various ways in which some countries have tried to ameliorate the harsh consequences of unconstrained capitalism on the least well off in society are doomed -- the welfare state, social democracy, extensive labor rights, or universal basic income (link). Through a race to the bottom, any institutional reforms that impede the freedom and mobility of capital will be forced out by a combination of economic and political pressures.

The graphs above demonstrate the current structural differences among Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, and USA when it comes to training and income support for the unemployed and underemployed. It is visible that the four European economies devote substantially greater resources to support for the unemployed than the United States. And on the triumphalist view, the states demonstrating more generous benefits for the less-well-off will inevitably converge towards the profile represented by the fifth panel, the United States.

Kathleen Thelen is a gifted historical sociologist who has studied the institutions of labor education and training throughout the past twenty years. Her book How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan is an important contribution to our understanding of these basic economic institutions, and it also sheds important light on the meta-issues of stability and change in important social institutions. With James Mahoney she also edited the valuable collection Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power on this topic.

Thelen's most recent book, Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity addresses the question of capitalist triumphalism. (That isn't a term that she uses, but it seems descriptive.) She locates her analysis within the "varieties of capitalism" field of scholarship, which maintains that there is not a single pathway of development for capitalist systems. "Coordinated" capitalism and neoliberal capitalism represent two poles of the space considered by the VofC literature.

From the beginning, the VofC literature challenged the idea that contemporary market pressures would drive a convergence on a single best or most efficient model of capitalism. (kl 228)

Thelen is interested in assessing the prospects for what she calls "egalitarian" capitalism -- the variants of capitalist political economy that feature redistribution, social welfare, and significant policy support for the less-well-off. She focuses on several key institutions -- industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market institutions, and she argues that these are particularly central for the historical issue of the development of capitalism towards harsher or gentler versions.

Different varieties of liberalization occur under the auspices of different social coalitions, and this has huge implications for the distributive outcomes in which many of us are ultimately interested. (kl 243)

This point is key to her view of the plasticity and path-dependency of basic economic institutions: these institutions change as a result of economic imperatives and the strength of various social groups who are in a position to influence the form that change takes. "The conclusions I reach here are based on a view of institutions that emphasizes the political-coalitional basis on which they rest" (kl 259). But there is no simple calculus proceeding from power group to institutional outcome; instead, the results for institutional change are a dynamic consequence of strategy, coalition, and constraint.

I suggest that the institutions of egalitarian capitalism survive best not when they stably reproduce the politics and patterns of the Golden Era, but rather when they are reconfigured -- in both form and function -- on the basis of significantly new political support coalitions. (kl 330)

A key finding in Thelen's analysis is that "coordinated" capitalism and "egalitarian" capitalism are not the same. Coordinated capitalism corresponds to the models associated with social democracies of the 1950s and 1960s, the "Nordic" model. But Thelen holds that egalitarian capitalism can take more innovative and flexible forms and may be a more durable alternative to neoliberal capitalism.

Is a more "egalitarian" capitalism possible? The data on labor markets that Thelen presents shows that there are major differences across OECD economies when it comes to wage inequality. Here is a striking chart:

Source: Thelen, Figure 3.3. Share of Employees in Low-Wage Work, 2010

Fully a quarter of US workers are employed in low-wage work in 2010. This is about double the rate of Denmark and quadruple the rate of low-wage workers in Sweden. Plainly this reflects a US economy that is creating substantially greater numbers of low-income people than any other OECD country. And yet all of these countries are capitalist economies, some with rates of growth that are higher than the United States. This demonstrates that there are institutional and policy choices available that are consistent with the imperatives of a capitalist market economy and yet that give rise to more egalitarian outcomes than we observe in the US, Canada, and the UK.

A key element in common among the more egalitarian labor outcomes that Thelen studies (Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany) is the expansion of part-time work, mini-jobs, and "flexi-curity". This phenomenon reflects a combination of liberalization (relaxation of work rules and requirements of long labor contracts), with a set of arrangements that allows a smoother allocation of labor to jobs and an improvement in income and security for the lower end of the labor market. This trend is part of what Thelen calls a strategy of "embedded flexibilization", which she regards as the best hope for a pathway towards equitable capitalism.

Thelen closes with a realistic observation about the uncertain coalitional basis that is available in support of the policies of embedded flexibilization. Xenophobic tendencies in countries like the Netherlands and Denmark have the potential for destroying the social consensus that currently exists for this model, and the leaders of nationalistic anti-immigrant parties have made this a key to their efforts at political mobilization (kl 5541). Maintenance of these policies will require strong political efforts on the part of progressive coalitions in those countries, and organized labor is key to those efforts.

This analysis is deeply international and comparative, but it has an important consequence for the political economy of the United States: where are the coalitions that can help steer our economy towards a more egalitarian form of capitalism?

(Readers may be interested in an earlier discussion of the Nordic model; link.)

Differences in leadership qualities across professions

My university work involves quite a bit of interaction with leaders in different sectors of society — non-profits, elected officials, community organizations, business, law enforcement, and education, for example. Over the years I have noticed some striking differences in profile across sectors in terms of the qualities of mind and character that leaders in these sectors display. We might imagine a small number of traits with scales that are relevant to assessing leadership effectiveness -- perhaps along these lines:

• Sociability
• Persistence
• Strategic ability
• Ability to motivate a team
• Problem-solving ability
• Independence
• Intellectual focus
• Integrity

It strikes me that leaders in different sectors have very different mixes of qualities like these. (Within each sector there is also a wide distribution of character traits as well, of course.) A profile for several cohorts of leaders might look something like this:

On this set of assumptions, elected officials are high on sociability and team motivation but low on independence and intellectual focus; accounting CEOs are high on persistence, problem-solving ability, intellectual focus, and integrity, but low on team motivation and independence; police chiefs are high on persistence, motivational ability, and integrity, and low on sociability, intellectual focus, and independence; and community leaders are low on strategic ability, problem-solving ability, and focus, but high on the other attributes of leadership. In other words, each group of leaders shows a very different mix of skills and abilities.

(It should be understood that this graph is purely notional. I've assigned impressionistic values to the eight qualities for the four professions, but there is no real empirical measurement involved here. The graph is just intended to illustrate the idea. I am imagining that data for a graph like this would come from personality studies of randomly selected individuals who serve as leaders in the four professions.)

What explains the distinctiveness of leadership profiles in various sectors? The book I like best on the sociology of the professions is Andrew Abbott's The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. But Abbott's treatment doesn't address this specific question -- how are individuals socialized into the various professions? So how can we begin to think about the question?

A priori there seem to be at least three relevant mechanisms: selection, training, and peer emulation.

Selection works at several levels in most occupations, including entry and promotion. Individuals enter the sector with specialized training and a wide range of features of personality. The training that is provided for an accountant or a physician inculcates a fairly specific set of mental habits which the young professional brings with him or her into the professional setting. Young practitioners then begin to move up in their organizations. They advance within the organization according to the judgment of more senior managers about their suitability for higher levels of leadership and management. Those judgments are an important source of the specialization of traits of leaders that occurs within organizations. If senior managers believe that good leaders are quick and decisive, then the individuals they promote will tend to have these characteristics. So the “folk” wisdom within a sector or industry about what makes a good manager is itself an important driver of the composition of the leadership corps.

Sometimes senior leaders are selected through a more complex process involving search consultants and a search committee. This is the model for the selection of most senior university leaders. Here we often find a more complicated mix of selection criteria — committee members who favor academic achievement, others who favor administrative effectiveness, yet others who favor communications skills and vision. So we might expect that such a process would lead to a more heterogeneous leadership corps. And the selection process for elected officials is more complicated yet. The qualities that lead to success are those that allow the candidate to quickly evoke support from a broad range of potential voters. Some of these qualities have to do with the candidate's public priorities and values; but others have to do with communications and skills and sociability.

Take law enforcement agencies as an example. The qualities that make for a particularly effective street officer or sergeant may allow a given individual to rise through the ranks to a certain level. But the qualities that make for an effective police chief or commander may be somewhat different from the mix for the street-level officer. Perhaps these factors include broad vision of the department’s mission, an exceptional ability to communicate with the public and other public officials, and a special ability to inspire commitment from the men and women in service in the organization. An officer who is a great investigator or a great community policing officer may lack these other broader characteristics. And this means that the selection process for a chief may be one that cultivates the very small percentage of individuals who have the plus factor, even though these individuals' performance at the street or sergeant level is no better than that of their peers.

(Or if you watch The Wire and its depiction of the police command structure of Baltimore, you may think that the traits for which leaders are selected are less high-minded: an ability to curry favor from other powerful people, a willingness to act deceitfully, a willingness to bully subordinates, and an ability to look good in a press conference. Who could be a fan of Deputy Commissioner Bill Rawls in The Wire?)

The training associated with profession or industry is another important source of distinctiveness in leaders in a sector. Human resources professionals undergo professional development and training throughout their careers, from first hire to their most senior appointments. And these training processes build a set of mental frameworks and practices that become ingrained in most or all of the professionals in this field -- including those who go on to positions of senior leadership. The same is true of law enforcement, banking, and medicine. The foundational training for professionals in these fields -- police academy, MBA, medical school -- itself promotes particular ways of thinking about the world and one's responsibilities that are quite distinct across professions. Doctors think differently from police officers. And these differences are deepened by the training experiences each of these professionals have within their own organizations. We may speculate that doctors and architects deepen their professional habitus through their working lives in hospitals and architectural firms, and that these experiences make a significant difference when they become CEOs of organizations in their sectors.

Peer emulation seems to be a third important factor influencing the personality and style of leadership and management of the leaders in a sector or industry. Deans and provosts see a few university presidents in action, and they model their own behavior and aspirations accordingly (to some extent). Bankers, from junior to senior, observe the actions and motivations of their peers, and their own behavior adapts to what they observe. At a recent conference in Stockholm Ernst Fehr presented interesting research using the techniques of experimental economics to probe the mores and character traits of professionals in the banking industry. The research suggests a powerful effect from the environment of a financial institution to the character and behavior of its professionals in a fairly brief period of time. It will be interesting to discuss this research here when it is published.

So perhaps it isn't surprising that police chiefs, mayors, foundation heads, and community leaders have quite distinctive styles do thinking and acting, and make leadership decisions that look fairly different across these different professions. They have been selected and trained in widely different ways, they have been exposed to the practice of other professionals in their field over a range of settings, and they have observed the choices and behavior of leaders whom they either admire or dislike. In the terms that Bourdieu introduced, they occupy a field of practice where behaviors and dispositions are shaped by the activities of others in the field and the latent incentives and messages contained in the field.

Readers -- is there an area of personality psychology (or organizational psychology) that has studied this question in detail? Suggestions are invited.

A catalogue of social mechanisms

In an earlier post I made an effort at providing the beginnings of an inventory of social mechanisms from several areas of social research. Here I’d like to go a little further with that idea in order to see how it plays into good thinking about social-science methodology.

Some Types of Social Mechanisms CONTENTION Escalation Brokerage Diffusion Coordinated action Social appropriation Boundary activation Certification Framing Competition for power COLLECTIVE ACTION Prisoners' dilemma Free rider behavior Convention Norms Selective benefits Selective coercion Conditional altruism Reciprocity ORGANIZATIONAL ENFORCEMENT Audit and accounting Supervision Employee training Morale building Leadership NORMS AND VALUES Altruistic enforcement Person-to-person transmission Imitation Subliminal transmission Erosion Charisma Stereotype threat

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY Market Auction Ministry direction Contract Market for lemons Democratic decision making Producers' control Soft budget constraint GOVERNMENT Agenda setting Cyclical voting Log rolling Regulatory organizations Influence peddling STATE REPRESSION Secret police files Informers Spectacular use of force Propaganda Deception Control of communications systems SOCIAL COMMUNICATIONS Interpersonal network Broadcast Rumor Transport networks SYSTEM EFFECTS Flash trading Interlocking mobilization Overlapping systems of authority (Brenner) Non-linear networks

These mechanisms have been collected from a wide range of social scientists and researchers -- Charles Tilly, Robert Axelrod, Elinor Ostrom, George Akerlof, Robert Bates, Mancur Olson, Mayer Zald, John Ferejohn, Janos Kornai, Claude Steele, and Charles Perrow, to name a few.

There are at least two kinds of questions we need to ask about a collection like this.

First, where do the entries come from? What kinds of scientific inquiry are required in order to establish that things like these are indeed mechanisms found in the social world?

The most general answer to this question concerning discovery is that much research in the various disciplines of the social sciences is specifically directed at working out the contours of mechanisms like these. Political scientists who focus on legislatures and the US Congress have become expert on identifying and validating the institutional and voting mechanisms through which legislative outcomes come to effect. Organizational sociologists study the inner workings of a range of organizations and are able to identify and validate a wide range of mechanisms at work within these organizations. Economic anthropologists and theorists study the ways in which economic transactions are conducted in a range of human settings. Social psychologists identify many of the ways that individuals acquire normative beliefs and transmit them to other individuals. The greatest difficulty in constructing a table like this is not at the level of identifying mechanisms that might be included; it is the problem of limiting the number of mechanisms identified to a more or less manageable number. There is some reason to fear that social scientists have identified thousands of mechanisms in their research, not dozens.

And second, what role does a table like this play in the conduct of research in the social sciences?

In In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences Craver and Darden argue that biologists often approach novel phenomena with something like this table in the backs of their heads -- an inventory of known causal mechanisms in the domain of biology. From there they attempt to solve the puzzle: what combination of known mechanisms might be concatenated in order to reproduce the observed phenomenon?

Strikingly enough, this description of a heuristic for arriving at an explanatory analysis of a situation has a lot in common with the way that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly proceed in Dynamics of Contention. (Here is a more developed analysis of their mechanisms-based approach; link.) MT&T argue that there is a relatively manageable list of social mechanisms that can be observed in many cases of social contention. And they approach new instances with the idea that we may be able to understand the dynamics of the case by teasing out the workings of some of those mechanisms. It seems that MT&T are involved in both parts of the inquiry -- discovery and isolation of recurring mechanisms of contention, and application of these discoveries to the explanation of specific episodes of contention.

For example, they introduce their case studies in Part III of the book in these terms:

Part III of the study takes up three distinct literatures regarding contention -- revolution, nationalism, and democratization -- in view of the paths our quest has followed. The goal of that concluding section is to emphasize the commonalities as well as the differences in those forms of contention through an examination of the explanatory mechanisms and political processes we have uncovered in Parts I and II. (kl 511)

And a few paragraphs later:

Let us insist: Our aim is not to construct general models of revolution, democratization, or social movements, much less of all political contention whenever and wherever it occurs. On the contrary, we aim to identify crucial causal mechanisms that recur in a wide variety of contention, but produce different aggregate outcomes depending on the initial conditions, combinations, and sequences in which they occur. (kl 519)

Here is how they summarize their attempt to explain particular episodes of social contention. They focus on a "number of loosely connected mechanisms and processes":

• A mobilization process triggered by environmental changes and that consists of a combination of attribution of opportunities and threats, social appropriation, construction of frames, situations, identities, and innovative collective action.
• A family of mechanisms still to be elucidated around the processes of actor and identity constitution and the actions that constitute them.
• A set of mechanisms often found in trajectories of contention that recurs in protracted episodes of contention, competition, diffusion, repression, and radicalization. (kl 941)

And this body of social mechanisms is taken to provide a basis for historically grounded explanations of the forms of contention observed in specific cases.

This seems to parallel fairly closely the intellectual process that Craver and Darden describe in the case of biology: create an inventory of common causal mechanisms and analyze new cases by trying to see to what extent some of those known mechanisms can be discerned in the new material.

This account of an important type of social science research resonates well with a broad range of social science disciplines. It aligns with Robert Merton's notion of "theories of the middle range" in the social sciences, and the idea of developing a toolbox of patterns of social behavior on the basis of which to explain specific episodes. Rather than looking for general theories on the basis of which to unify wide swaths of the social world under a deductive explanatory system, this mechanisms-based approach suggests coming at social explanation piecemeal: finding the components and sub-processes of observed social ensembles, on the basis of which we can explain some aspects of the behavior of those ensembles.

We might usefully consider two additional questions. First, is there a theoretically useful way of classifying social mechanisms (formation of the individual actor, collective action, communication, repression, collective decision making, ...)? Can our catalogue provide content-relevant "chapters"? We might argue that a good taxonomy of social mechanisms actually provides a way of theorizing the main dimensions of social activity and organization. And second, are there more fundamental things we can say about how some or many of these mechanisms work? Does a good theory of the actor and a good theory of social organizations suffice to account for the workings of a great many of these mechanisms? If we respond affirmatively to this question, then once again we may have made a small degree of progress towards offering a somewhat more general theory of the social world.

Craver on mechanisms methodology

Carl Craver and Lindley Darden provide in In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences an extensive treatment of what a mechanisms-based methodology looks like. Their work originates in study of the biological sciences, but I find that much of what they have to say is very helpful in the philosophy of social science as well.

Craver and Darden argue that the biological sciences have largely adopted a mechanisms-centered view of the nature of their science. So what is a mechanism, on their view?

Mechanisms are how things work, and in learning how things work we learn ways to do work with them. Biologists try to discover mechanisms because mechanisms are important for prediction, explanation, and control.... Mechanisms are entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular changes from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions. (kl 581)

Fundamentally Craver and Darden  argue that a search for mechanisms is frequently a guided and constrained process, involving an attempt to match the observed activities of the system with a concatenation of known mechanism components. They want to provide a more granular account of the process of research and discovery in science, and they take issue with the idea of a flash of inspiration as the source of scientific insight. Instead, they see the process of a great deal of scientific research as one in which a methodical effort at puzzle-solving takes place, trying out different combinations of known mechanisms to see whether they may serve to explain the phenomenon in question.

In short, one often begins the search for mechanisms with a ready-made layout of the space of possible mechanisms, and the goal is to use empirical findings to eliminate regions of that space. The nature of the phenomenon and the store of accepted mechanism types thus work together to frame the discovery problem: to reveal the layout of the space of possible mechanisms and perhaps to tell one how to decide among them. (kl 1595)

They don't mean to say that there is no place for novelty or originality in scientific research; but they argue for a kind of cumulative process for much of the scientific work of discovery that builds upon the prior discovery of mechanisms and components of mechanisms.

Although occasionally biology calls upon a Darwin or a Harvey to introduce an altogether novel kind of mechanism, most episodes of mechanism discovery play out within the space of known mechanism types within a scientific field. (kl 1604)

There are many interesting and useful contributions offered in the book. One is represented in the following figure (5.1), in which Craver and Darden point out that there are multiple ways in which mechanisms are invoked in scientific research, not just one. The most common way in which we think of mechanisms is as "producers" of outcomes -- the first panel of the figure. But there are several other valid uses as well. There is the "X underlies Y" relation (panel 2), in which we provide a set of mechanisms X as an explanation of how the properties of Y are constituted; and there is the "X maintains Y" relation, in which we provide a set of mechanisms X as an explanation of the homeostasis of Y (the feedback loops and corrective mechanisms that return Y's properties to equilibrium after a period of drift or change).

 

 

Another interesting observation that C-D develop is the idea of "modular subassembly". 

This process, modular subassembly, involves reasoning about how mechanism components might be combined in surprising ways. One hypothesizes that a mechanism consists of (either known or unknown) modules or types of modules. One cobbles together different modules to construct a hypothesized how-possibly mechanism, guided by the goal of finding modules to fill all the gaps in a productively continuous mechanism. In doing so, scientists draw upon their knowledge of the store of types of entities and activities and modules (i.e., interconnected entities and activities that have a particular function). (kl 1726)

This description invokes the idea of realistic inquiry into the subprocesses that give continuous action to the mechanism. Essentially this invokes the idea of opening the black box of the mechanism and asking how the mechanism itself works. And the ontological assumption is that the mechanism consists of discrete sup-processes.

 

A third valuable idea that is advanced in this work is the idea of multi-level mechanisms. 

Biological mechanisms typically span multiple levels. Scientists working at higher levels work on ecosystems, populations, and the behaviors of organisms within their environments. Others study mechanisms within organisms, such as the nervous or circulatory systems, and mechanisms within organs and cells, and, ultimately, mechanisms with smaller entities, such as macromolecules, small molecules, and ions. Different fields of biology are often (to a first approximation) associated with different levels. (kl 688)

This is an important point for social scientists as well, given the common tendency to bifurcate into "macro" and "micro" features of the social world. Instead, C-D give further grounds for insisting that there is a wide and continuous range of levels of aggregation in the social world, and that it is perfectly legitimate to formulate representations of mechanisms that span these levels. 

 

A key feature of C-D's view of biological research is the notion that researchers make use of a wide but known stock of existing mechanisms in their efforts to understand novel phenomena. What are some of those mechanisms? Here is a very interesting table of miscellaneous biological mechanisms that Craven and Darden provide:

 

 

This table is useful exactly because it is not intended to be comprehensive or exhaustive. Rather, it is intended to provide a list of concrete mechanisms that have been observed and investigated in the biological sciences. And, as Craver and Darden argue, a large available base of known mechanisms provides a starting point for researchers who are confronting a novel phenomenon.

A collection of social mechanisms along these lines would also be valuable for researchers in the social sciences. Here is my own beginning of a table of social mechanisms:

Some Types of Social Mechanisms CONTENTION Escalation Brokerage Paramilitary organizations COLLECTIVE ACTION Prisoners' dilemma Free rider behavior Convention Norms Selective benefits Selective coercion ORGANIZATIONAL ENFORCEMENT Audit and accounting Supervision Employee training Morale building Leadership SOCIAL COMMUNICATIONS Interpersonal network Broadcast Rumor Transport networks

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY Market Auction Ministry direction Contract Democratic decision making Producers' control GOVERNMENT agenda setting Log rolling Regulatory organizations STATE REPRESSION Secret police Informers Spectacular use of force Propaganda Deception SYSTEM Flash trading Interlocking mobilization Overlapping systems of authority (Brenner)

How applicable is the Craver-Darden view of mechanism thinking when we turn to various areas of social research? There are obvious differences between the domains of biology and the social sciences, and this seems to be true when it comes to mechanisms.

One visible difference is the relative precision with which we can describe the workings of mechanisms in the two domains. The mechanism of "mismatch repair" mentioned in the C-D table under DNA Repair Mechanisms can be described in a great deal of precision, and this mechanism generally works in the same way in all settings. Compare that with the mechanism of "Audit and accounting" under Organizational Enforcement in my table above. This is also a "repair" function. But the audit function in an organization can be implemented in many different ways with varying degrees of coercion and voluntary compliance. So there is a much wider range of activities encompassed by "audit and accounting" than by "mismatch repair".

There is another kind of precision mismatch that seems to exist between biology and social science as well -- the idea that a mechanism produces the same results in a wide range of settings. Because of the molecular biology that underlies most of the mechanisms that C-D consider, these mechanisms perform like clock-work. Each tick leads to the same advancement of the wheel. But in the social world, the precision of relationship between input to a mechanism and output from the mechanism is much more slack. When a group of workers are called upon to support a wildcat strike, we may hypothesize that the free-rider mechanism will be invoked in this social setting. But free-riding may be so extensive as to cripple the strike, and it may be so limited as to barely influence the outcome at all. We can learn more about the social factors that differentiate these two outcomes. But the key point is that the mechanism is in play in both scenarios, but with very different effects.

One special strength of In Search of Mechanisms is the fact that it is a work of philosophy of science that is highly detailed in its treatment of some of the scientific content of a specific field. We cannot resolve the question of whether mechanisms are a good way of organizing scientific inquiry on the basis of apriori reasoning alone. Rather, we need to see how mechanisms-based reasoning is expressed in a range of scientific areas of inquiry. And this is exactly what Craver and Darden do in this book for a range of biological disciplines.

Ontology and methodology

Part of the dispute between analytical sociology and critical realists comes down to a complicated interplay between ontology and methodology. Both groups have strong (and conflicting) ideas about social ontology, and both think that these ideas are important to the conduct of social-science research. Analytical sociologists tend towards an enlightened version of methodological individualism: social entities derive from the actions and nature of the individuals who constitute them. Critical realists tend toward some version or another of emergentism: social entities possess properties that are emergent with respect to the individual activities that constitute them.

Both groups tend to design social science methodologies to correspond to the ontological theories that they advance. So they tacitly agree about what I regard as a questionable premise -- that ontology dictates methodology.

I want to argue for a greater degree of independence between ontology and methodology than either group would probably be willing to countenance. With the analytical sociologists I believe that social facts depend on the availability of microfoundations at the level of ensembles of individuals. This is an ontological fact. But with the critical realists I believe that it is entirely appropriate for social scientists to examine the causal and structural properties of social entities without being forced to attempt to provide the microfoundations of these properties. This is an observation about the locus and nature of explanation. There are stable structural and causal properties at the social level, and it is entirely legitimate to investigate these properties in full empirical detail. Sociologists, organizational theorists, and institutional researchers should be encouraged to investigate in detail the workings, arrangements, and causal properties of the regimes that they study. And this is precisely the kind of investigation that holds together researchers as diverse as Michael Mann, Kathleen Thelen, Charles Perrow, Howard Kimmeldorf, and Frank Dobbin. (Use the search box to find discussions of their work in earlier posts.)

What this implies is that sociologists can legitimately pursue meso- and macro-level inquiries into the nature of the social entities that most interest them. Organizational theory is an especially good example. We can approach the study of organizations from a number of points of view. But one perfectly legitimate approach is to attempt to discover some of the dynamic and causal properties of organizations with specified features. This takes the form of trying to discover what propensities a given organizational form has when embedded into a given institutional or social context. And this is a form of causal inquiry that is analogous to metallurgy or materials science: what are the properties of conductivity, thermal expansion, ductility, etc., of metals or ceramics of a given structural composition?

This means in turn that the ontology of individualism does not imply very much about methodology and research strategies. Ontology is not irrelevant to methodology; but it provides only weak constraints on the nature of the methodologies social scientists may choose in their pursuit of better understanding of the social world.

Can we say more about how ontological confidence about the nature of social entities is consistent with methodological pluralism? One part of the answer derives from the idea of the relative autonomy of various levels of the natural and social world. This is the argument that Jerry Fodor put forward with respect to the "special sciences" like psychology. Fodor argued persuasively that psychologists are entitled to investigate psychological properties without being obliged to reduce these properties to facts about the central nervous system. The rationality of science does not force us to be reductionist. Instead, it is legitimate to examine the properties of the system-level structures of a domain without attempting to say how these properties derive from more fundamental features of the stuff. And this has equally compelling implications for sociology as it does for other special sciences.

The upshot of this set of considerations is important for the conduct of social science. The ontological truism that social phenomena are constituted by individual-level activities does not imply that social science methodology must proceed along the lines of reductionism or aggregative explanation (vertical explanations, reproducing the struts of Coleman's boat). We can be individualist in ontology and macro-ist in our methodology.

The constraint of the ontological truism of microfoundationalism has really only two significant implications:

1. We need to be confident in general terms that there are microfoundations for a social property or power, even though we do not need to reproduce those micro foundations.
2. In special cases we may find that a reductionist or aggregativist strategy leads to a particularly straightforward explanation of a social-level fact (along the lines of Thomas Schelling's many examples).

But generally speaking, all of this suggests that we should be methodological pluralists in the social sciences -- make use of the research strategies that seem most promising for understanding a specific range of phenomena without a lot of concern for how the method aligns with our most refined ontological thinking.

Public attitudes towards market fundamentalism

Several recent posts have raised the question, what would be needed to move US public policy towards a more equitable treatment of the bottom 75% of American society? Conditions for much of this super-majority of society have gradually declined in the past several decades, and public programs designed to ameliorate conditions of health, education, nutrition, and housing have come under severe attack from the right. Why have public policies turned away from active efforts towards improving the life conditions of the lower portion of society? And can we learn anything useful from international comparisons of attitudes on social welfare policies?

One key factor in understanding the politics of inequality in a country is the distribution of social attitudes across the population. How do Americans feel about government policies aimed at helping the less-well-off? How do we feel about the "social contract" that we have with each other over an economically, racially, and regionally diverse country?

The Pew Research Center has done a lot of research on this family of questions, and some recent results are summarized by Bruce Stokes in "Public Attitudes Toward the Next Social Contract" (link). Here are a few basic facts. The US spends a substantially lower share of its GDP on social expenditures than other OECD countries (19.4% versus 28.2% (Sweden) and 26.2% (Germany) (1)). And, as is now well familiar, wealth and income are highly unequal in the. US -- the top 1% gained 38.3% of all wealth growth in the US in the period 1983-2010, and the bottom 60% lost ground in wealth ownership (2).

So how do Americans feel about a social safety net? Consider this basic statement: "It is the responsibility of the government to take care for those who can't take care of themselves." A Pew Global Attitudes survey in 2007 found that 56% of Swedes and 52% of Germans strongly agreed with this statement, whereas only 28% of Americans as a whole strongly agreed with the statement (6). Moreover, this is one area where American society is most polarized. The percentage of people who identify as Republicans who agreed with a somewhat broader statement in 1987 was 62%; in 2012 this percentage had dropped to 36%. By contrast, Democrats have remained fairly constant in their support for this statement (75%).

Stokes closes with this summary statement:

Americans do have a social contract with each other and with their government. But this bond is currently under great strain. Americans' conflicting values and goals and deep partisan divisions over the specifics of the social safety net, along with worries about how to pay for it, suggest that the tensions surrounding the social contract will continue for some time. (13)

So how have American public attitudes about the key elements of the social safety net changed in the past fifteen years? Support has both polarized and declined. Here is a graph from the Pew study:

Now contrast this situation with that of Sweden. Stefan Svallfors provides an analysis of social attitudes in Sweden between 1981 and 2010, and he finds high and unwavering support for Sweden's extensive welfare state (link). His work is based on analysis of the Swedish Welfare State Surveys, replicated five times since 1981. Here is the most dramatic summary table.

Support for additional public spending on health care increased from 45% to 66% in 2010. Increased support for the elderly went from 30% who favored additional public support to 70%. Support for more spending on schooling increased from 26% to 60%. And support for increasing social assistance went from 16% to 22%. What this documents is strong and rising support for using public moneys to provide public benefits to all members of Swedish society, poor and rich alike. And that in turn demonstrates a very strong commitment to the social contract. Here is Svallfors' conclusion:

In conclusion, what may be said about the state of Swedish attitudes towards the welfare state? First, there are absolutely no signs of any decreasing public support for welfare policies. Overall, there is a large degree of stability in attitudes, and where change is registered, it tends to go in the direction of increasing support. More people state their willingness to pay higher taxes for welfare policy purposes; more people want collective financing of welfare policies; and fewer people perceive extensive welfare abuse in 2010 than was the case in previous surveys. Class patterns change so that the salaried and the self-employed become more similar to workers in their attitudes. (819)

Finally, here is a summary of recent research on Swedish attitudes towards immigrants (link).

Here too the bonds of social solidarity remain strong. The summary finding is that Swedes strongly support their country's rising ethnic diversity. 74% of Swedes expressed a positive attitude towards rising ethnic diversity in 2013, up six points from the prior year. Unlike other European countries where rising nationalist parties are cultivating an ugly anti-immigrant politics, Swedish society is strongly supportive of the increases in diversity that it is witnessing.

These are striking data for both societies. People in the United States show significantly lower (and declining) support for the social safety net than in many other countries, while the Nordic populations have sustained and even increased their high level of support for these public programs. The difficult political question is this: what sorts of things need to happen in order to inflect American attitudes and values in a more positive direction when it comes to empathy and social solidarity?

Polanyi's substantive theory of a decent society

Karl Polanyi is underrated as a theorist of capitalist modernity. Margaret Somers and Fred Block's latest book, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique aims to correct this failure and to work out in some detail the analysis and critique that Polanyi provided between the wars. The book is an important contribution to the history of economic thought in the twentieth century. But even more important, it is also a substantive contribution to the role that Polanyi's thinking might play in efforts to formulate a progressive basis for mass politics in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 8 provides what might serve as a freestanding statement of their interpretation of Polanyi's thought. Here they encapsulate Polanyi's thinking into three related ideas about the role of markets (and theories about markets) in the modern world (219).

i. The first part is the idea that, while markets are necessary for organizing society, they also represent a fundamental threat to social order and human wellbeing.
ii. The second dimension of our conceptual framework is that the self-regulating invoked by market fundamentalists exists only in ideology; in reality, markets are always and everywhere embedded in social structures of politics, law, and culture.
iii. The final dimension of our conceptual framework probes into the special appeal of the free-market doctrine; after all, despite all its notable and self-evident harms, it still endures beyond all expectations.

Once we think through this analysis of Polanyi's core theory, we can see that it has a deeply important relationship to the economic and political development of a number of European societies since the 1930s. In particular, these ideas position the Nordic model of social democracy at the center of the story: a decent society will involve both markets and politics, both self-interested striving by individuals and companies and organized struggles by groups and organizations aimed at securing social protections from the pathologies of markets. In Esping-Anderson's phrase, a decent society involves both markets and politics, with the state taking the responsibility of regulating and supplementing markets in support of the wellbeing of its citizens (Politics against Markets). And this amounts in the end to a form of social democracy. (Here is an earlier discussion of the "Nordic" model; link.)

It is striking to see how powerfully this framework works as a diagnostic for the politics and dominant ideologies of the current era. The ideology of the market is in the position of complete ascendancy while the politics of mobilization around organized self-defense of ordinary working people from the excesses of the market are at their nadir. Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor speak militantly about the moral primacy of the market and the bankruptcy of the "welfare state." Ayn Rand and Von Hayek are raised to the status of omniscient prophets. And the social supports that were introduced to ameliorate the worst excesses of unconstrained markets are being eviscerated -- SNAP support for food supplement, extended unemployment benefits, conservative attacks on Pell grants.

Block and Somers identify what Polanyi takes to be the central cleavage in modern society:

On the one side, the forces of laissez-faire justify an ever-expanding process of commodification by invoking the utopian promise of a fully self-regulating market society free of politics. On the other, multiple social movements mobilize in opposition to defend society against market domination by establishing institutional protections.... [Polanyi] is above all committed to democratically-motivated procedures to manage markets. (220)

And this statement once again underlines the striking anomaly of our time: the virtual absence of effective popular mobilization in support of efforts to manage the worst effects of unconstrained markets. Most visible is the protracted struggle over the Affordable Care Act and the choice by many Republican governors and legislatures to block extension of Medicaid eligibility to millions of their most vulnerable citizens. The fact of massive numbers of Americans without access to health insurance is both a consequence and an indictment of the failure of market society to provide effectively for one of the most fundamental dimensions of quality of life, decent access to healthcare. It is plain that this market failure demands state intervention. And yet the very modest reforms established by President Obama have been resisted with a virulence not often seen in this country. But most surprising, there is little by way of effective popular demand for preservation of these much-needed reforms, even by those who most benefit from them.

Block and Somers attempt to understand this anomaly in terms of a central failure of Polanyi's social theory: his expectation that a new set of ideas about the proper role of government would emerge and would permanently shift the terms of debate. This did not happen post-war. Instead, there was a resurgence of free-market fundamentalism in the 1970s that has gained ground ever since (220).

So the Polanyian question is perhaps a key question for us in the twenty-first century as well: where is the foundation for large scale political mobilization to reassert the state's role in moderating the effects of unconstrained markets in everything?

Basic social institutions and democratic equality

We would like to think that it is possible for a society to embody basic institutions that work to preserve and enhance the wellbeing of all members of society in a fair way. We want social institutions to be beneficent (producing good outcomes for everyone), and we want them to be fair (treating all individuals and groups with equal consideration; creating comparable opportunities for everyone).  There is a particularly fundamental component of liberal optimism that holds that the institutions of a market-based democracy accomplish both goals.  Economic liberals maintain that the economic institutions of the market create efficient allocations of resources across activities, permitting the highest level of average wellbeing. Free public education permits all persons to develop their talents. And the political institutions of electoral democracy permit all groups to express and defend their interests in the arena of government and law.

But social critics cast doubt on all parts of this story, based on the role played by social inequalities within both sets of institutions. The market embodies and reproduces a set of economic inequalities that result in grave inequalities of wellbeing for different groups. Economic and social inequalities influence the quality of education available to young people. And electoral democracy permits the grossly disproportionate influence of wealth holders relative to other groups in society.  So instead of reducing inequalities among citizens, these basic institutions seem to amplify them.

If we look at the fundamentals of social life in the United States we are forced to recognize a number of unpalatable realities: extensive and increasing inequalities of income, wealth, education, health, and quality of life; persistent racial inequalities; a growing indifference among the affluent and powerful to the poverty and deprivation of others; and a political system that is rapidly approaching the asymptote of oligarchy. It is difficult to be optimistic about our political future if we are particularly concerned about equality and opportunity for all; the politics of our time seem to be taking us further and further from these ideals.

So how should progressives think about a better future for our country and our world? What institutional arrangements might do a better job of ensuring greater economic justice and political legitimacy in the next fifty years in this country and other democracies of western Europe and North America?

Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson’s recent collection, Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond contains an excellent range of reflections on this set of problems, centered around the idea of a property-owning democracy that is articulated within John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. A range of talented contributors provide essays on different aspects and implications of the theory of property-owning democracy. The contributions by O'Neill and Williamson are especially good, and the volume is a major contribution to political theory for the 21st century.

Here is one of Rawls's early statements of the idea of a property-owning democracy in A Theory of Justice:

In property-owning democracy, ... the aim is to realize in the basic institutions the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal.  To do this, those institutions must, from the outset, put in the hands of citizens generally, and not only of a few, sufficient productive means for them to be fully cooperating members of society on a footing of equality. (140)

One thing that is striking about the discussions that recur throughout the essays in this volume is the important relationship they seem to have to Thomas Piketty’s arguments about rising inequalities in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty presents rising inequality as almost unavoidable; whereas the advocates for a property-owning democracy offer a vision of the future in which inequalities of assets are narrowed. The dissonance disappears, however, when we consider the possibility that the institutional arrangements of POD are in fact a powerful antidote to the economic imperatives identified by Piketty. And in fact the editors anticipate this possibility in their paraphrase of Rawls's reasons for preferring POD over welfare state capitalism:

Because capital is concentrated in private hands under welfare state capitalism, it will be difficult if not impossible to provide to call "the fair value of the political liberties"; that is to say, capitalist interests and the rich will have vastly more influence over the political process than other citizens, a condition which violates the requirement of equal political liberties. Second, Rawls suggests at points that welfare state capitalism produces a politics that tends to undermine the possibility of tax transfers sufficiently large to correct for the inequalities generated by market processes.(3)

These comments suggest that Rawls had an astute understanding of the ways that wealth and power and influence are connected; so he believed that a more equal prior distribution of assets is crucial for a just society.

The primary aim of this public activity is not to maximize economic growth (or to maximize utility) but rather to ensure that capital is widely distributed and that no group is allowed to dominate economic life; but Rawls also assumes that the economy needs to be successful in terms of conventional measures (i.e., by providing full employment, and lifting the living standards of the least well off over time). (4)

The editors make a point that is very incisive with respect to rising economic inequalities.

The concentration of capital and the emergence of finance as a driving sector of capitalism has generated not only instability and crisis; it also has led to extraordinary political power for private financial interests, with banking interest taking control in shaping not only policies immediately affecting that sector but economic (and thereby social) policy in general. (6)

In other words, attention to the idea of a property-owning democracy is in fact a very substantive rebuttal to the processes identified in Piketty's analysis of the tendencies of capital in the modern economy. As the editors put the point, the idea of a property-owning democracy provides a rich basis for the political programs of progressive movements in contemporary politics (5).

Two questions arise with respect to any political philosophy: is the end-state that it describes a genuinely desirable outcome; and is there a feasible path by which we can get from here to there? One might argue that POD is an appealing end-state; and yet it is an outcome that is virtually impossible to achieve within modern political and economic institutions. (Here is an earlier discussion of this idea; link.) These contributors give at least a moderate level of reason to believe that a progressive foundation for democratic action is available that may provide an effective counterweight to the conservative rhetoric that has dominated the scene for decades.