How does Bourdieu meet history?

Pierre Bourdieu's sociology has influenced a broad range of sociologists (and philosophers) since the appearance of Outline of a Theory of Practice in 1972 (with an English translation in 1977). Generally speaking his work seems to fall on the synchronic rather than diachronic side of the social sciences -- more about "reproduction" than "transformation", in Phil Gorski's words. Moreover, interest in Bourdieu's work has often been more about the theories and concepts he offers and less about the concrete sociological analysis he provides. Ironically, though, many of the researchers who have been most influenced by Bourdieu are themselves historical sociologists. In Bourdieu and Historical Analysis Phil Gorski and a number of high-profile collaborators propose to consider the relevance of Bourdieu's theories and explanatory practices for historical sociology. The volume is exceptionally interesting. Particularly stimulating are contributions by George Steinmetz, Charles Camic, Craig Calhoun, and Jacques Defrance; but all of the contributions are of high quality and originality.

Gorski provides three essays for the volume, including an introduction, an essay on nationalism, and a conclusion. What is described as the conclusion for the volume ("Bourdieusian Theory and Historical Analysis: Maps, Mechanisms, and Methods") might as well be read first as a substantive introduction to the topic, since it provides an excellent discussion of some of Bourdieu's central concepts and shows how these have been developed in detail by various historical sociologists.

The key concepts that Gorski focuses on are field, capital, and habitus. This chapter provides an especially clear explication of Bourdieu's concepts. In his treatment of each of these key categories Gorski demonstrates how concrete empirical research arrives at reasonably objective knowledge about underlying social structures and relationships.

In other works Gorski defends critical realism as a philosophy of science.  Here Gorski argues that each of Bourdieu's central concepts invites a realist approach. This chapter does not mention critical realism explicitly. But in fact, it is an important place where Gorski provides more substance for his longstanding affirmation of the relevance and importance of critical realism for the practices of sociology. The exposition makes it clear (to me, anyway) how Gorski might view this approach to social research as a kind of applied critical realism. He shows that Bourdieu's use of the key concepts presupposes that there are discernible social realities underlying each of these sociological constructs. So Bourdieu is a realist when it comes to sociology; or that is Gorski's view. As I read the chapter, it provides a good illustration of how Gorski thinks that some of the central intuitions of critical realism play out in concrete sociological research.

Gorski shows that Bourdieu's use of these concepts invites the researcher to trace out "maps" of social relationships that constitute the field or the domain of social capital. This is a realist exercise in itself -- it carries out the work needed to meet the challenge of discovering empirically the relationships that exist in the social world surrounding a specific topic or field.

How can the field concept be used to map processes of change? Or ... what sorts of change become visible on a map of fields? I begin, again, as Bourdieu usually does, by looking at objective changes, by which I mean changes in objective relations, either in the structure of positions within fields or in relations between fields. In what follows, I will discuss five forms of field change: genesis, autonomy, size, shape, and boundaries. (kl 6960)

Gorski's account of "drift of a habitus" is very interesting, and I think it aligns with a theme in Understanding Society that emphasizes the malleability and heterogeneity of the social world. (Here is an earlier post on technical practices and the concrete and material ways in which we should expect practices to vary over time and space; link).

The daughter of a peasant family who became a salesclerk in a small city occupies a position in social space similar to her parents', at least in absolute terms, but she would have a rather different habitus, nonetheless. Here, one might speak of intergenerational drift in the habitus. (kl 7384)

Here is the key point: "habitus" is not an abstract generalization that needs simply to be analyzed conceptually. It is a concrete social and personal reality that can be investigated and mapped empirically.

Gorski's approach here is receptive to the social-mechanisms approach to social explanation.

I will argue that Bourdieu's approach to sociological explanation is dialectical and dialogical and that his approach to historical transformation is conjunctural and mechanismic. (kl 6927)

However, it appears that Gorski intended to do more with mechanisms in this chapter than space or time permitted. Though he promises to return to the topic in a section titled "Methods and Mechanisms," the section does not appear. Instead the counterpart section is titled "Explaining Sociohistorical Change: A Dialectical and Dialogical Approach", which discusses the conjunctural part of the formula but gives only cursory treatment of mechanisms. Here is what he has to say about mechanisms:

Another model [of social explanation], inspired by realist philosophy of science, rejects the search for laws and makes the identification of underlying processes the evaluative standard (Gorski 2007). From this perspective a satisfactory explanation is one that identifies the causal mechanisms that produced a give outcome, mechanisms being understood here as patterns or sequences of events that recur across different contexts. (kl 7556)

Note that this paraphrase of the concept of "mechanism" makes the mechanisms approach indistinguishable from Humean philosophy of science, in the sense that a mechanism too is no more than a regularity. Here it seems that Gorski erases the post-positivist realist alternatives that exist within contemporary discussions of social mechanisms and powers (link).  Many mechanisms theorists (including myself) reject the Humean interpretation and believe that mechanisms identify real causal powers. There is certainly more to say on this subject, and it would be very interesting to see how Gorski understands at least part of Bourdieu's research strategy as being an attempt to identify concrete social mechanisms.

So the central idea here is that Bourdieu's theories provide a useful basis for concrete research in historical sociology. How might that research proceed? Jacques Defrance's essay, "The Making of a Field with Weak Autonomy", is a nice example of a rigorous effort to do the empirical and historical research necessary to map out a specific field -- in this case, the sports field in France in the first half of the twentieth century. The essay is detailed and absorbing. He notes that Bourdieu was explicit in analyzing the research steps needed to map a field (kl 6458):

1. locate the field within the broader field of power
2. map the positions of the agents who compete within the field
3. analyze the patterns of action (habitus) of the actors

And this is how Defrance structures his own research into the field of French sports.  (In what is perhaps a surprising juxtaposition, Defrance also relates his analysis to Nelson Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking.)

Here is a chronological table summarizing the results of his research; a handful of aspects of the "field" of sports (activities, club, federations, ...) are tracked through several transformations over time. In this way we get an analysis of the field that is both structured at a time and viewed in a process of transformation over time. This represents a trajectory from formation (loose and unlinked activities) to autonomy (or at least semi-autonomy) within the broader context of French society.

Here is how Defrance describes the historical process he has documented in the formation of "sport" as a field in French society:

The model prompts us to ask about the production and reproduction of a field, the integration and coherence of which are not natural things. Produced by a first phase of the integration of different kinds of physical activities, the field was outlined around 1900 but remained dominated by divisions reflected in the classifications of sporting activities, which were thought of as diverse but which could be gathered into a whole named sport. (kl 6826)

I find this to be a very elegant and specific instance of field analysis. It provides a detailed understanding of what kinds of method and inquiry are needed in order to give substance to the idea that various activities in society are organized within the context of what Bourdieu refers to as "fields." And it gives substance to the idea that Bourdieu's concepts and theories have an important role to play in the inquiries of historical sociologists.

Institutional logics -- actors within institutions

Why do people behave as they do within various social contexts -- the workplace, the street, the battlefield, the dinner table? These are fundamental questions for sociologists -- even when they are ultimately interested in the workings of supra-individual entities like organizations and structures. And generally speaking, sociology as a research tradition has perhaps not paid enough attention to this level of the social world.

Patricia Thornton, William Ocasio, and Michael Lounsbury describe an important theoretical development within the general framework of new institutionalism in The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process. And this body of research promises to shed more light on the ways in which individual social behavior is shaped and propelled. (Here is a summary description of the institutional-logics approach in a chapter in The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism; link.)

What I find particularly appealing about this approach are four related things: it provides a deliberate effort to offer a more nuanced theory of the social actor, it recognizes heterogeneity across institutions and settings, it is deliberately cross-level in its approach, and it focuses on a search for the mechanisms that carry out the forms of influence postulated by the approach.

Here is how Thornton and Ocasio describe their goals:

Our aim is not to revive neoinstitutional theory, but to transform it. Recognizing both its strengths, the original insights on how macro structures and culture shape organizations, and its weaknesses--limited capacity to explain agency and the micro foundations of institutions, institutional heterogeneity, and change--the institutional logics perspective provides a new approach that incorporates macro structure, culture, and agency, through cross-level processes (society, institutional field, organization, interactions, and individuals) that explain how institutions both enable and constrain action….  We are excited by the opportunities for contributions from multiple disciplines and by the progress in moving institutional theory forward in multiple directions that conceptualize culture, structure, and process; restoring the sensibilities of the role of actors and structures while revealing multi- and cross-level processes and mechanisms. (vi-vii)

Here is how they define their understanding of "institutional logic":

... as the socially constructed, historical patterns of cultural symbols and material practices, including assumptions, values, and beliefs, by which individuals and organizations provide meaning to their daily activity, organize time and space, and reproduce their lives and experiences. (2)

The institutional logics perspective is a metatheoretical framework for analyzing the interrelationships among institutions, individuals, and organizations in social systems. It aids researchers in questions of how individual and organizational actors are influenced by their situation in multiple social locations in an interinstitutional system, for example the institutional orders of the family, religion, state, market, professions, and corporations. Conceptualized as a theoretical model, each institutional order of the interinstitutional system distinguishes unique organizing principles, practices, and symbols that influence individual and organizational behavior. Institutional logics represent frames of reference that condition actors' choices for sensemaking, the vocabulary they use to motivate action, and their sense of self and identity. The principles, practices, and symbols of each institutional order differentially shape how reasoning takes place and how rationality is perceived and experienced. (2)

This is a dense set of ideas about what the metatheory of institutional logics is intended to provide. But the key is perhaps the focus on the shaping of the actor's frame by the institution. This parallels the idea of "cognitive/emotional frames" that has been discussed in earlier posts (link, link). And this makes it a valuable contribution to the richer theory of the actor that I've argued for earlier (link). The idea seems to be that one's inculcation into a set of religious practices or an occupation produces a distinctive set of attitudes, emotions, beliefs, and processes of reasoning through which individuals perceive and act upon their environment. And these frames are not generic and interchangeable. (The researchers refer to Bourdieu's notion of practice in this context, which is consistent with the interpretation I'm offering. And they link their ideas to those of Fligstein and McAdam in their development of strategic action fields; link.)

In the SAGE chapter mentioned above (link) Thornton and Ocasio offer five principles that underlie the institutional logics approach (103 ff.):

1. Embedded agency -- interests, identities, values, and assumptions of individuals and organizations are embedded within prevailing institutional logics
2. Society as an inter-institutional system -- [draws on Friedland and Alford (link); individuals are located within a diverse range of high-level institutions like family, market, religion, ...; ]
3. The material and cultural foundations of institutions -- each of the institutional orders in society has both material and cultural characteristics
4. Institutions at multiple levels -- institutional logics may develop at a variety of different levels... This flexibility allows for a wide variety of mechanisms to be emphasized in research and theoretical development
5. Historical contingency -- [the approach emphasizes the ways in which institutions at every level take shape as a result of historically contingent events and actions]

The institutional-logics approach is intended to serve both as metatheory and as methodology. It suggests avenues of research for sociologists and it poses questions that require empirical answers. Accordingly, Thornton and Ocacio illustrate the linkages postulated by institutional logics between level by specifying a few mechanisms that do the relevant work: for example, the formation of collective identities, competition for status, social classification (a cognitive mechanism), and salience and attention (SAGE, 111-114). These are reasonably concrete cognitive and social mechanisms through which institutions influence behavior.

Research presented by Ernst Fehr at a workshop in Stockholm this summer is very relevant to the institutional-logics approach. Using some of the tools of behavioral economics, Fehr demonstrated that people (bankers, in the case he presented) behave very differently when presented with opportunities for gain through deception depending upon which frame has been made salient for them -- the professional frame of the bank or the personal frame of the home life.

Thornton and her collaborators lay open the possibility of this kind of setting-specific behavior in The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process:

Individuals and organizations, if only subliminally, are aware of the differences in the cultural norms, symbols, and practices of different institutional orders and incorporate this diversity into their thoughts, beliefs, and decision making. That is, agency, and the knowledge that makes agency possible, will vary by institutional order. (4)

What is important from an institutional logics perspective is that more micro processes of change are built from translations, analogies, combinations, and adaptations of more macro institutional logics. (4)

This approach strikes me as providing a useful toolkit of ideas and proposed mechanisms that serve a very important methodological need: to help sociologists and other social scientists identify the mechanisms that underlie important social processes and events. It is a valuable contribution to both sociological theory and methodology.

(I think that Erving Goffman would have a lot to say about the photo from the bank above: the identical smiles on the faces of the female tellers, the politely queued customers, the business suits and handbags of the people waiting in line, the woman holding her child. Each of these bits of behavior, caught in the 1/60th of a second of the frame, says a lot about the rules and norms that govern behavior in the institution and the setting. One suspects that the customers aren't flashing the same bright smiles -- because there is nothing in their role as customers that requires them to. In fact, the gentleman on the upper right is distinctly not smiling at all. Gender, workplace, commerce, sales -- all have inflected the behaviors of the individuals captured in the frame.)

Tyler Cowen on global inequality

Tyler Cowen sounds a bit like Voltaire's Pangloss when he argues, as the New York Times headline puts it, that we are living "all in all, [in] a more egalitarian world" (link). Cowen acknowledges what most people concerned about inequalities believe: "the problem [of inequality] has become more acute within most individual nations"; but he shrugs this off by saying that "income inequality for the world as a whole has been falling for most of the last 20 years." The implication is that we should not be concerned about the first fact because of the encouraging trend in the second fact.

Cowen bases his case on what seems on its face paradoxical but is in fact correct: it is possible for a set of 100 countries to each experience increasing income inequality and yet the aggregate of those populations to experience falling inequality. And this is precisely what he thinks is happening. Incomes in (some of) the poorest countries are rising, and the gap between the top and the bottom has fallen. So the gap between the richest and the poorest citizens of planet Earth has declined. The economic growth in developing countries in the past twenty years, principally China, has led to rapid per capita growth in several of those countries. This helps the distribution of income globally -- even as it worsens China's income distribution.

But this isn't what most people are concerned about when they express criticisms of rising inequalities, either nationally or internationally. They are concerned about the fact that our economies have very systematically increased the percentage of income and wealth flowing to the top 1, 5, and 10 percent, while allowing the bottom 40% to stagnate. And this concentration of wealth and income is widespread across the globe. (Branko Milanovic does a nice job of analyzing the different meanings we might attach to "global inequality" in this World Bank working paper; link.)

This rising income inequality is a profound problem for many reasons. First, it means that the quality of life for the poorest 40% of each economy's population is significantly lower than it could and should be, given the level of wealth of the societies in which they live. That is a bad thing in and of itself. Second, the relative poverty of this sizable portion of society places a burden on future economic growth. If the poorest 40% are poorly educated, poorly housed, and poorly served by healthcare, then they will be less productive than they have the capacity to be, and future society will be the poorer for it. Third, this rising inequality is further a problem because it undermines the perceived legitimacy of our economic system. Widening inequalities have given rise to a widespread perception that these growing inequalities are unfair and unjustified. This is a political problem of the first magnitude. Our democracy depends on a shared conviction of the basic fairness of our institutions. (Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson also argue that inequality has negative effects on the social wellbeing of whole societies; link.)

The seeming paradox raised here can be easily clarified by separating two distinct issues. One is the issue of income distribution within an integrated national economy -- the United States, Denmark, Brazil, China. And the second is the issue of extreme inequalities of per capita GDP across national economies -- the poverty of nations like Nigeria, Honduras, and Bangladesh compared to rich countries like Sweden, Germany, or Canada. Both are important issues; but they are different issues that should not be conflated. It is misleading to judge that global inequality is falling by looking only at the rank-ordered distribution of income across the world's 7 billion citizens. This decline follows from the moderate success achieved in the past fifteen years in ameliorating global poverty -- a Millenium Development Goal (link). But it is at least as relevant to base our answer to the question about the trend of global inequalities by looking at the average trend across the world's domestic economies; and this trend is unambiguously upward.

Here is a pair of graphs from The Economist that address both topics (reproduced at the XrayDelta blog here). The left panel demonstrates the trend that Cowen is highlighting. The global Gini coefficient has indeed leveled off in the past 40 years. The right panel indicates rising inequalities in US, Britain, Germany, France, and Sweden. As the second panel documents, the distribution of income within a sample set of national economies has dramatically worsened since 1980. So global inequalities are both improving and worsening -- depending on how we disaggregate the question.

The global Gini approach is intended to capture income inequalities across the world's citizens, not across the world's countries. Essentially this means estimating a rank-order of the incomes of all the world's citizens, and estimating the Lorenz distribution this creates.

We get a very different picture if we consider what has happened with inequalities across the world's national economies. Here is a graph compiled by Branko Milanovic that represents the Gini coefficient for GDP per capita for a large set countries over time (link):

This graph makes the crucial point: inequalities across nations have increased dramatically across the globe since 1980, from a Gini coefficient of about .45 to an average of .54 in 2000 (and apparently still rising).

Finally, what about inequalities within nations? This OECD report provides comparative data for 27 countries during the period 1975 and 2010 (link). They find that income inequalities increased in most of the countries studied. This report does not cover all countries, of course; but the findings are suggestive. Here is their summary finding:

And this is the most important point: most of these countries are suffering the social disadvantages that go along with the fact of rising inequalities. So we could use the OECD report to reach exactly the opposite conclusion from the one that Cowen reaches: in fact, global inequalities have worsened since 1980.

Thomas Piketty's name does not occur once in Cowen's short piece; and yet his economic arguments about capitalism and inequality in Capital in the Twenty-First Century are surely part of Cowen's impetus in writing this piece. Ironically, Piketty's findings corroborate one part of Cowen's point -- the global convergence of inequalities. Two French economists, François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson, made a substantial effort to measure historical Gini coefficients for the world's population as a whole (link). Their work is incorporated into Piketty's own conclusions and is included on Piketty's website. Here is Piketty's summary graph of global inequalities since 1700 -- which makes the point of convergence between developed countries and developing countries more clearly than Cowen himself:

So what about China? What role does the world's largest economy (by population) play in the topic of global economic inequalities? China's per capita income has increased by roughly 10% annually during that period; as a population it is no longer a low-income economy. But most development economists who study China would agree that China's rapid growth since 1980 has sharply increased inequalities in that country (link, link). Urban and coastal populations have gained much more rapidly than the 45% or so of the population (500 million people) still living in backward rural areas. A recent estimate found that the Gini coefficient for China has increased from .30 to .45 since 1980 (link). So China's rapid economic growth has been a major component of the trend Cowen highlights: the rising level of incomes in previously poor countries. At the same time, this process of growth has been accompanied by rising levels of inequalities within China that are a source of serious concern for Chinese policy makers.

Here are charts documenting the rise of income inequalities in China from the 2005 China Human Development Report (link):

So rising global income inequality is not a minor issue to be brushed aside with a change of topic. Rather, it is a key issue for the economic and political futures of countries throughout the world, including Canada, Great Britain, the United States, Germany, Egypt, China, India, and Brazil. And if you don't think that economic inequalities have the potential for creating political unrest, you haven't paid attention to recent events in Egypt, Brazil, the UK, France, Sweden, and Tunisia.

[revised 4:00 pm 7/21/14 to correct interpretation of Milanovic graph. Thanks to Graham Webster for catching the mistake.]

Entropic social mechanisms

Many of the examples of mechanisms that we turn to in the social sciences are purposive, agental, and designed. But there is a fundamental feature of the natural world that seems to have relevance to the social world as well that is distinctly non-purposive -- the workings of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics holds that the overall entropy (disorder) of the universe increases, and it requires an input of energy to maintain local structure against disorder. The discovery of Brownian motion was the impetus to this fundamental insight into the natural world: random, stochastic forces constantly interact with all levels of physical systems, leading to unpredictable disturbances and gradual decay of orderly structures (link).

This basic fact about the natural world seems applicable to the social world as well. In place of the heat-induced motions of particles in a solution we have the fact of multitudes of individuals choosing to act in a variety of ways, impinging on the social structures and rules that surround them. These "bumps" lead to local changes, and sometimes these changes accumulate to a process of drift in the structures upon which they impinge. A small group of racists begin demonstrating their beliefs in a small Kansas town, and somehow they manage to disrupt the prior racial harmony. This is an example of path dependency. And it is an example of how small random events can have large outcomes.

So are there features of social process that we might refer to as entropic mechanisms?

It would seem that there are. Take the idea of "the fog of war." The basic idea here is that generals like to think of the conduct of war as a purposive, intelligent marshaling of forces to secure clear goals against the adversary. But those who highlight the fog of war emphasize two fundamental facts: it is difficult to collect information during war, and it is difficult to mount coherent focused action in these circumstances. Warfare is a complex activity involving hundreds of leaders, thousands of combatants, scores of unforeseen circumstances, and a practical inability to gather accurate information rapidly enough to control one's forces effectively. The fog of war impedes control in both directions. It makes intelligence gathering difficult, but it also makes the direction of force and tactics difficult as well. By the time French generals in the Franco-Prussian War realized they needed to concentrate forces in Sedan, the disorder in the rail system made it impossible to do so (link).

Or take another basic idea of thermodynamics, the fact of friction. Friction is the interaction between an object and its environment that causes it to lose energy, momentum, and direction. The hockey puck on ice follows the course predicted by classical mechanics from stick to goal. But the same puck when slapped on asphalt or grass pursues a dramatically different course. It slows rapidly to a stop.

Friction can be thought of as a countervailing force. But more generally, it is an expression of the world's stickiness in response to change. Systems rarely perform exactly as pure theory would predict (classical mechanics or rational choice theory). And this is true in the social world as well. Take a large agency like the Veterans Administration. Top executives may declare that long waiting lists for seriously ill veterans are no longer acceptable, and they may put in place a set of institutional reforms designed to reduce the average wait. Six months later we may examine the system as a whole and find that some hospitals have quickly implemented the reforms; others have attempted to do so but have failed; and yet others have not taken any action. How can we explain this mix of outcomes? The facts of friction and delay in the system are key factors. Transmission of commands and reforms through an institutional system is always a partial affair, and an unavoidable interference with intention that is a combination of organizational rigidity, resistance, and imperfect communication is the result.

Or take the decline of a religious or ideological movement as a third example. Maintaining a high level of passionate commitment to the movement's ideas and values takes the expenditure of organizational resources. Individual followers have a range of other motivations that compete with their ideological fervor. And this is particularly true when there is a cost associated with activism. So we should expect a gradual decay of activist mobilization unless there is a powerful countervailing force -- effective grassroots mobilization efforts that keeps the faithful fired up.

Each of these seem to be recognizable social tendencies or processes that have a lot in common with entropy in physical systems. Stochastic events, friction, and loss of focused energy are all familiar in the social world. And these factors have a distinct flavor of thermodynamics.

(I've really posed two questions here: is there such a thing as social entropy? And are some features of entropy reasonably classified as mechanisms? It is possible that the examples I've mentioned here do in fact succeed in identifying entropic features of the social world but do not identify entropic mechanisms.)

Kathleen Tierney on disaster and resilience

The fact of large-scale technology failure has come up fairly often in Understanding Society (link, link, link). There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that our society is highly technology-dependent, relying on more and more densely interlinked and concentrated systems of production and delivery that are subject to unexpected but damaging forms of failure. So it is a pressingly important problem for us to have a better understanding of technology failure than we do today. The other reason that examples of technology failure are frequent here is that it seems pretty clear that failures of this kind are generally social and organizational failures (in part), not simply technological failures. So the study of technology failure is a good way of examining the weaknesses and strengths of various organizational forms -- from the firm or plant to the vast regulatory agency. I have highlighted the work of Charles Perrow as being especially useful in this context, especially Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies and The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters.

Kathleen Tierney has studied disasters very extensively, and her recent The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience is an important contribution. Tierney is both an academic and a practitioner; she is an expert on earthquake science and preparedness and serves as director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado. The topics of disaster and technology failure are linked; natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunami, hurricanes) are often the cause of ensuing technology failures of enormous magnitude. Here is Tierney's over-riding framework of analysis:

The general answer is that disasters of all types occur as a consequence of common sets of social activities and processes that are well understood on the basis of both social science theory and empirical data. Put simply, the organizing idea for this books is that disasters and their impacts are socially produced, and that the forces driving the production of disaster are embedded in the social order itself. As the case studies and research findings discussed throughout the book will show, this is equally true whether the culprit in question is a hurricane, flood, earthquake, or a bursting speculative bubble. The origins of disaster lie not in nature, and not in technology, but rather in the ordinary everyday workings of society itself. (4-5)

This is one of Tierney's key premises -- that disasters are socially produced and socially constituted. Her other major theme is the notion of resilience -- the idea that social characteristics exist that make one set of social arrangements more resilient  than another to harm in the face of natural catastrophe. Features of resilience involve --

preexisting, planned, and naturally emerging activities that make societies and communities better able to cope, adapt, and sustain themselves when disasters occur, and also to develop ways of recovering following such events. (5)

Tierney is often drawn to the alliteration of "risk and resilience". "Risk" is the possibility of serious disturbance to the integrity of a system. "Risk" is a compound of likelihood of a type of disturbance and the damage created by that eventuality. Here is Tierney's capsule definition:

Risk is commonly conceptualized as the answer to three questions: What can go wrong? How likely is it? And what are the consequences? (11)

"Resilience", by contrast, is a feature of the system in response to such a disturbance. So the concepts of risk and resilience do not operate on the same level. A more apt opposition is fragility and resilience. (Tierney sometimes refers to brittle institutions.)  Some institutional arrangements are like glass -- a sharp tap and they fall into a mound of shards. Others are more like a starfish -- able to recover form and function following even very damaging encounters with the world. Both kinds of systems are subject to risk, and the probability of a given disturbance may be the same in the two instances. The difference between them is how well they recover from the realization of risk. But the damage that results from the same disturbance is much greater in a fragile system than a resilient system. And Tierney makes a crucial point for all of us in the twenty-first century: we need to be exerting ourselves to create social systems and communities that are substantially more resilient than they currently are.

A very important example of non-resilient trends in twenty-first century life is the spread of ultra-tall buildings in global cities. There are a variety of reasons why developers and urban leaders like ultra-tall structures -- reasons that largely have to do with prestige. But Tierney points out in expert detail the degree to which these buildings are unreasonably fragile in face of disaster: they shed vast quantities of glass, they concentrate people and business in a way that invites terrorist attack, they exist in vulnerable systems of electricity and water that are crucial to their hour-to-hour functioning. A major earthquake in San Francisco has the potential to leave the buildings standing but the populations living within them stranded without light or elevators, and the emergency responders one hundred flights of stairs away from the emergencies they need to confront (63ff.).

The most fundamental and intractable source of hazard for our society that Tierney highlights is the likelihood of failure of government regulatory and safety organizations to carry out their stated missions of protecting the safety and health of the public. Like Perrow in The Next Catastrophe, she finds instance after instance of cases where the public's interest would be best served by a regulation or prohibition of a certain kind of risky activity (residential and commercial development in flood or earthquake zones, for example) but where powerful economic interests (corporations, local developers) have the overwhelming ability to block sensible and prudent regulations in this space. "Economic power on this scale is easily translated into political power, with important consequences for risk buildup" (91). Tierney offers the case of the Japanese nuclear industry as an example of a concentrated and powerful set of organizations that were able to succeed in creating siting decisions and safety regulations that served their interests rather than the interests of the general public.

As nuclear power emerged as a major source of energy in Japan, communities were essentially bribed into accepting nuclear plants, with the promise of jobs for young workers and support for schools and community projects; also, extensive propaganda efforts were launched.... Then, once government and industry succeeded in getting communities to accept the presence of nuclear plants, the natural tendency was to locate multiple reactors at nuclear sites to achieve economies of scale and to avoid having to repeat costly charm offensives in large numbers of communities. (92)

In Tierney's view, the problem of regulatory capture by the economically powerful is perhaps the largest obstacle to our ability to create a rational and prudent plan for managing risks in the future (94). (Here is an earlier post on the quiet use of economic power; link.)

The Social Roots of Risk is rich in detail and deeply insightful into the sociology of risk in a large democratic corporation-centered society. The hazards she identifies concerning the failure of our institutions to devise genuinely prudent policies around foreseeable risks (earthquake, hurricane, flood, terrorism, nuclear or chemical plant malfunction, train disaster, ...) are deeply alarming. The public and our governments need to absorb these lessons and design for more resilient societies and communities, exactly as Tierney and Perrow argue.

Mechanisms thinking in international relations theory

source: Alex Cooley, "America and Empire" (link)

One of the most fundamental ideas underlying the philosophy of social science expressed here and elsewhere is the view that social explanations should seek out the causal mechanisms that underly the social phenomena of interest. So now we need to be able to say a lot more about what social mechanisms are, and how they relate to each other. Quite a bit of my own thinking has been devoted to this subject, and in a recent post I proposed that it would be useful to begin to compile an inventory of social mechanisms currently in use in the social sciences (link). There I suggested that it would be useful to find a motivated way of classifying the mechanisms that we discover.

Interest in mechanisms is taking hold in some sub-disciplines of political science. An especially clear statement of the appeal of the mechanisms theory of explanation for political science is offered by Andrew Bennett in "The Mother of All Isms: Causal Mechanisms and Structured Pluralism in International Relations Theory" (link). (Bennett is also co-author with Alexander George of the excellent book on case-study methodology, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences.) In the current article Bennett reviews the progression that has occurred in IR theory from positivism and the covering law model, to the idea of high-level "paradigms" of explanation, to the idea of a diverse set of causal mechanisms as the foundation of explanation in the field. He calls the latter position "analytic eclecticism", and he argues that it is a powerful and flexible way of thinking about the processes and research questions that make up the subject matter of IR theory.

In order to advance the value of mechanisms theory for working political scientists, Bennett argues that it will be helpful to attempt to classify the large number of mechanisms currently in use in IR theory in terms of a small number of dimensions. He proposes two dimensions in terms of which to analyze social mechanisms, which can be summarized as content and structure. The content dimension asks the question, what substantive social entities or properties are invoked by the mechanism? And the structure dimension asks the question, what is the nature of the relationship invoked by the mechanism? He proposes three large types of content: material power, functional efficiency, and legitimacy. And he suggests that there are four basic structures that can be formed: agent to agent, structure to agent, agent to structure, and structure to structure. (Notice that this corresponds exactly to the four arrows in Coleman's boat, including the Type 4 "structure to structure" connection.) Here is how Bennett motivates this classification scheme:

This tripartite division of categories of mechanisms usefully mirrors the three leading ‘isms’ in the IR subfield: (neo)realism (with a focus on material power); (neo)liberalism (institutional efficiency); and constructivism (legitimacy). It thereby provides a bridge to the vast literature couched in terms of the isms, preserving this literature’s genuine contributions toward better theories on mechanisms of power, institutions, and social roles. (472)

Here is the resulting classification of social mechanisms that Bennett offers:

Others have found this approach to be promising. Here is an elaboration on Bennett's classification by Mikko Huotari at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin:

(Thanks for sharing this classification, Mikko.)

I agree with Andrew in thinking that it is useful to find a non-arbitrary way of classifying mechanisms. It is quite worthwhile to make a start at this project. I'm not yet fully persuaded, however, by either of the axes that he proposes.

First, the content axis seems arbitrary -- legitimacy, material power, functional efficiency. Why choose these substantive characteristics rather than a dozen other possible content features? Is it simply that these correspond to the three primary "isms" of IR theory -- neorealism, neoliberalism, and constructivism (as he suggests earlier; 472)? But the thrust of the first part of the paper is that the "isms" are an unsatisfactory basis for guiding explanation in international relations theory; so why should we imagine that they serve to identify the crucial distinctions in content among social mechanisms? Would the content categories look different if we were taking our examples from feminist sociology, the sociology of organizations, or theories of legislatures? Bennett doesn't assert that these content categories are exhaustive; but if they are not, then somehow the tabulation needs to indicate that there is an extensible list on the left. And are these categories exclusive? Can a given mechanism fall both into the legitimacy group and the functional efficiency group? It would appear that this is possible; but in that case classification is difficult to carry out.

Second, the structure axis. Why is it crucial to differentiate mechanisms according to their place within an agent-structure grid? Why is this an illuminating or fundamental feature of the mechanisms that are enumerated? Would this dimension explode if we thought of social organization as a continuum from macro to meso to micro (along the lines of Jepperson and Meyer (link), as well as several earlier posts here (link))?

An early question that needs answer here is this: What do we want from a scheme of classification of social mechanisms? Should we be looking for a strict classification with exhaustive and mutually exclusive groupings? Or should we be looking for something looser -- perhaps more like a cluster diagram in which some mechanisms are closer to each other than they are to others?

We do have several other examples to think about when it comes to classifying mechanisms. In an earlier post I discussed Craver and Darden's account of mechanisms in biology, and highlighted the table of mechanisms that they provide (link). It is evident that the Craver-Darden table is much less ambitious when it comes to classification. They have loosely grouped mechanisms into higher-level types -- adaptation, repair, synthesis, for example; but they have not tried to further classify mechanisms in terms of the levels of the entities that are linked by the mechanism. So they offer one dimension of classification rather than two, and they leave it entirely open that there may be additional types to be added in the future. This is a fairly unexacting understanding of what is needed for a tabulation of mechanisms.

In Dynamics of Contention McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly offer a sort of classification of their own for the kinds of mechanisms they identify. They propose three types of mechanisms -- environmental, cognitive, and relational (kl 375):

• Environmental mechanisms mean externally generated influences on conditions affecting social life. Such mechanisms can operate directly: For example, resource depletion or enhancement affects people's capacity to engage in contentious politics (McCarthy and Zald, ed. 1987).
• Cognitive mechanisms operate through alterations of individual and collective perception; words like recognize, understand, reinterpret, and classify characterize such mechanisms. Our vignettes from Paris and Greenwood show people shifting in awareness of what could happen through collective action; when we look more closely, we will observe multiple cognitive mechanisms at work, individual by individual. For example, commitment is a widely recurrent individual mechanism in which persons who individually would prefer not to take the risks of collective action find themselves unable to withdraw without hurting others whose solidarity they value - sometimes at the cost of suffering serious loss.
• Relational mechanisms alter connections among people, groups, and interpersonal networks. Brokerage, a mechanism that recurs throughout Parts II and III of the book, we define as the linking of two or more previously unconnected social sites by a unit that mediates their relations with one another and/or with yet other sites. Most analysts see brokerage as a mechanism relating groups and individuals to one another in stable sites, but it can also become a relational mechanism for mobilization during periods of contentious politics, as new groups are thrown together by increased interaction and uncertainty, thus discovering their common interests.

This too is a one-dimensional classification. And it appears to be intended to be exhaustive and mutually exclusive. But it isn't clear to me that it succeeds in classifying all the mechanisms we might want to bring forward. Once again, this strikes me as a good beginning but not an exhaustive grouping of all social mechanisms.

My own preliminary grouping of mechanisms has even less structure (link). It groups mechanisms according to the subject matter or discipline from which they have emerged. But this does not serve to shed light on how these examples are similar or different from each other -- one of the key purposes of a classification.

I think this is a very useful research activity, and Andrew Bennett has done a service to the theory of social mechanisms in putting forward this effort at classification. Let's see what other schemes may be possible as well. A good scheme of classification may tell us something very important about the nature of how causation works in the social world.

What drives organizational performance?

We have a pretty good idea of the characteristics that support very high individual performance in a variety of fields, from jazz to track to physics to business. An earlier post discussed some of the different combinations of features that characterize leaders in several different professions (link). And it isn’t difficult to sketch out qualities of personality, character, and style that make for a great teacher, researcher, entrepreneur, a great soccer player, or an exceptional police investigator. So we might imagine that a high-performing organization is one that has succeeded in assembling a group of high-performing individuals. But this is plainly untrue — witness the New York Yankees during much of the 2000s, the dot-com company WebVan during the late 1990s, and the XYZ Orchestra today. (Here is a thoughtful Mellon Foundation study of quality factors in symphony orchestras; link.) In each case the organization consisted of high-performing stars in their various disciplines, but somehow the ensemble performed poorly. The lesson from these examples is an obvious one: the performance of an organization is more than the sum of the abilities of its component members.

In fact, it seems apparent that organizational performance, like physical health, is a function of a number of separate parameters:

• clarity about mission
• appropriateness of internal functional specialization
• quality of internal communication and collaboration across units and individuals
• quality and intensity of individuals  
• quality of internal motivation
• quality of leadership

We might say that an organization is like a physical mechanism in the sense that its overall performance depends on the quality of the design, the appropriate interconnections among the parts, and the quality of the individual components.

So what else goes into determining great organizational performance besides the quality of the individuals who make it up? A few things are obvious. Of course it is true that having individual participants who have the right kinds of talents is crucial. A technology company needs excellent engineers and designers. But it also needs highly talented marketing professionals, financial experts, and strategic planners. And it needs these talented specialists in a number of critical areas. Why did Xerox PARC fail in spite of the excellence of its scientists and engineers, and the innovativeness of the products that they created? Because the organization lacked the ability — and the individuals — to turn those ideas and innovations into products that the public wanted to buy. (Here is Malcolm Gladwell's take on Xerox PARC in the New Yorker; link.)

A key aspect of the problem of designing and tuning an organization’s features to ensure high performance is being able to determine with precision what the mission of the organization is. What is the organization fundamentally established to bring about? If the Red Cross is an organization that is intended to deliver resources and assistance to communities that have suffered extensive disasters, that implies one set of functional needs to be satisfied by divisions and specialists within the organization. If it is primarily a fund-raising and marketing organization aimed at raising public awareness and generating large amounts of public donations to be used for disaster relief, that implies a different set of internal specialists. So being clear about the overall mission of the organization is crucial for the designers, so they can skillfully design a set of divisions, specialists, and work processes that can work together effectively to carry out the tasks necessary to succeed in achieving the mission.

This point highlights the fact that an organization needs to have a functional structure in which the activities of individuals or departments carry out specialized tasks. These sub-units depend upon the high-level work of other departments or individuals, and the functional structure of the organization can be more or less appropriate to the task. The organization succeeds to the extent that its component parts succeed in identifying the needs and opportunities facing the organization and in carrying out their roles in responding to those needs and opportunities. Poor performance in one department can have the effect of ruining the overall success of the organization to carry out its mission — even if other departments are highly successful in carrying out their tasks. Charles Perrow highlights this kind of organizational deficiency in Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies.

Here is another important variable in bringing about organizational effectiveness: the procedures within the organization that are designed to encourage high-quality effort and results on the parts of the individuals who occupy roles throughout the organization. One line of response to this issue flows through a system of supervision and assessment. This approach emphasizes measurement of performance and positive and negative incentives to motivate satisfactory performance. Supervisors are tasked to ensure that employees are exerting themselves and that their work product is of satisfactory quality.

But a different response proceeds through a theory of internal motivation. Leaders and supervisors encourage high-quality effort and achievement by expressing the valuable goals that the organization is pursuing and by offering the reward of participation in effective work that one cares about to employees. This positive motivational feature is strengthened if the organization visibly maintains its commitment to treat its employees fairly and decently. If an employee is proud to work for Ben and Jerry’s, he or she is strongly motivated to make the best contribution possible to the work of the company. In a nutshell this is the theory that underlies the very interesting literature of positive organizational scholarship (Kim Cameron and Gretchen Spreitzer, The Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship).

A fifth facet of organizational performance plainly has to do with internal communication, coordination, and collaboration. The eventual success or failure of an organizational initiative will depend on the activities of individuals and units spread out throughout the organization. The work of various of those units can be made more effective or less effective by the ease and seriousness with which they are able to communicate with each other. Suppose a car company is designing a new model. Many units will be involved in bringing the design to fruition. If the body designers, the power train designers, and the manufacturing engineers haven’t talked to each other, there is a likelihood that solutions chosen by one set of specialists will create major problems for the other specialists. (The Saab 900 of the late 1970s was a beautiful and high-performing vehicle; but because the design process had not taken into account the need for convenient servicing, it was necessary to remove the engine to carry out some common kinds of repair.) Thomas Hughes provides an excellent analysis of the organizational deficiencies of the design process used in the United States military aerospace sector in the 1950s and 1960s in Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World. Here is his comparison of good and bad organizational forms:

The top diagram is entirely hierarchical, with decision-makers at the top deciding the flow of work below and essentially no communication across sub-units. The bottom diagram, by contrast, involves a great deal of internal communication, allowing for adjustment of design and timing decisions so that the eventual plan has the greatest likelihood for success. The latter permits the implementation of systems engineering rather than component engineering. Here is Hughes's depiction of what happens when an organization lacks good internal communication and coordination:

What this implies is that improving organizational performance is a bit like tuning a piano: we need to continually adjust the factors (motivation, collaboration, mission, leadership, specialization) in such a way as to create a joint system of activity that succeeds at a high level in creating the desired results.

(I used images of musical ensembles to open this topic. But how good is the analogy? Actually, it is not a particularly good analogy. The issue of the quality of the players is obviously relevant, and quality of leadership has an exact parallel in the symphony orchestra. But the task of giving an excellent performance of Dvorak's ninth symphony is much simpler than that of bringing about a successful intervention by FEMA in response to a hurricane. There is a score for the musicians; there is a central conductor who keeps them in step with each other; and most crucially, there is no uncertainty about what to do once the third movement is finished; the musicians turn the page and move on to the fourth movement. Perhaps the jazz ensemble pictured above is a slightly better metaphor for a complex organization in that it leaves room for improvisation by the players. But even here, the activity is orders of magnitude simpler and easier to coordinate than a large organization whose actions take place over months or years, dispersed over thousands of miles and multiple sites of activity. So organizational effectiveness is a more complex process than musical coordination and performance.)

(I emphasize here the importance of collaboration as a variable in organizational effectiveness. This suggests examples drawn from team activities like soccer or a research laboratory. But some experts doubt the idea that teams are always superior to more hierarchical structures. Here is J. Richard Hackman on the positives and negatives of teams (link).)

Getting inside people's frames

It seems clear that human beings bring specific frameworks of thought, ideas, emotions, and valuations to their social lives, and these frameworks affect both how they interpret the social realities they confront and the ways that they respond to what they experience. Human beings have "frames" of cognition and valuation that guide their experiences and actions. The idea of a practical-mental frame is therefore a compelling one, and it should be a possible subject for empirical sociological investigation.

The notion of a frame seems to originate (in sociology anyway) in the writings of Erving Goffman. Here is how he formulates the idea in Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience:

When the individual in our Western society recognizes a particular event, he tends, whatever else he does, to imply in this response (and in effect employ) one or more frameworks or schemata of interpretation of a kind that can be called primary. I say primary because application of such a framework or perspective is seen by those who apply it as not depending on or harking back to some prior or 'original' interpretation; indeed a primary framework is one that is seen as rendering what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of the scene into something that is meaningful.... Whatever the degree of organization, however, each primary framework allows its user to locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences defined in its terms. He is likely to be unaware of such organized features as the framework has and unable to describe the framework with any completeness if asked, yet these handicaps are no bar to his easily and fully applying it.... Social frameworks ... provide background understanding for events that incorporate the will, aim, and controlling effort of an intelligence, a live agency, the chief one being the human being.... Taken all together, the primary frameworks of a particular social group constitute a central element of its culture, especially insofar as understandings emerge concerning principal classes of schemata, the relations of these classes to one another, and the sum total of forces and agents that these interpretive designs acknowledge to be loose in the world. (21-22, 27)

The term "cultural sociology" is sometimes used to try to capture those research efforts that try to probe the meanings and mental frameworks that people bring to their social interactions. We can postulate that human beings are processors of meanings and interpretations, and that their frameworks take shape as a result of the range of experiences and interactions they have had to date. This means that their frameworks are deeply social, created and constructed by the social settings and experiences the individuals have had. And we can further postulate that social action is deeply inflected by the specifics of the mental and emotional frameworks through which actors structure and interpret the worlds they confront. At least a part of the disciplinary matrix of cultural sociology might be understood as the field of inquiry that tries to probe those frameworks as they are embodied in specific collectivities -- working class people, women, African Americans, American Muslims, or college professors, for example. (Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel might be viewed as progenitors of this aspect of the sociology discipline; link, link.)

Wendy Griswold addresses part of this viewpoint on sociological research in her very good overview of the field in Cultures and Societies in a Changing World.

Most sociologists now view people as meaning makers as well as rational actors, symbol users as well as class representatives, and storytellers as well as points in a demographic trend. Moreover, sociology largely has escaped its former either/or way of thinking. The discipline now seeks to understand how people's meaning making shapes their rational action, how their class position molds their stories—in short, how social structure and culture mutually influence one another. (kl 195)

So how have sociologists attempted to investigate these kinds of subjective realities? Here is how Al Young describes his research goals in The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances:

I wanted to get a sense of whether poor black men looked beyond their immediate surroundings and circumstances when thinking about the future. Hence, the story told here is about how these men think about themselves as members of a larger social world -- not just their communities and neighborhoods, but American society. (lc 134)

Part 2, "Lifeworlds," explores the men's own accounts of their past and contemporary circumstances. It is here that the experiences and situations that have positioned them as poor, urban-based black men are explored. Chapter 2 provides a vision of the social contexts that circumscribe these men's lives and shape the comments and opinions that they shared with me. (lc 195)

In order to answer these questions Young conducted several dozen interviews with young black men on the south side of Chicago, and his interpretation and analysis of the results is highly illuminating.

Or take as another example the highly interesting work of sociologist Michele Lamont in Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. Here Lamont studies the mentalities of high-status white men in the United States and France. Her question is a fairly simple one: how do these men formulate their judgments of success and failure in themselves and others? What features do they admire in others and which do they dislike? She conducts interviews with 160 men in four cities in France and the United States, and makes a sustained effort to discern the profiles of culture and value that she finds among these individuals.

I compare competing definitions of what it means to be a 'worthy person' by analyzing symbolic boundaries, i.e., by looking at implicit definitions of purity present in the labels interviewees use to describe, abstractly and concretely, people with whom they don't want to associate, people to whom they consider themselves to be superior and inferior, and people who arouse hostility, indifference, and sympathy. Hence, the study analyzes the relative importance attached to religion, honesty, low moral standards, cosmopolitanism, high culture, money, power, and the likes, by Hoosiers, New Yorkers, Parisians, and Clermontois. (kl 179)

This kind of research is inherently interesting because of the light it sheds for readers about the lives and experiences of others. Reading Al Young or Michele Lamont offers the reader a window into the experience and meaning frameworks of people whose lives and experiences have been substantially different from our own; it helps us understand the ways in which these various individuals and members of groups understand themselves and their social worlds. All by itself this is a valuable kind of research. (Why did so many African Americans respond differently to the acquittal of OJ Simpson than their white counterparts and peers?)

But this kind of research becomes especially interesting if we find that the mental frameworks and systems of meanings that actors bring with them actually make substantial differences to their social actions and the choices that they make. In this case we can actually begin to create explanations and interpretations of social outcomes that interest us a great deal. (Why are some extremist militants so ready to put on suicide vests in actions that are almost certain to bring about their own deaths?)

A key issue with this kind of inquiry is methodological. How should we investigate and observe the subjective characteristics of thought and feeling that this work entails? What are appropriate standards of validity on the basis of which to assess assertions in this area? Sociologists like Alford Young and Michele Lamont have often chosen a methodology that centers on open-ended unstructured interviews -- very much the kind of thing that Studs Terkel was so good at. What these sociologists add to the approach of a Studs Terkel or an Ira Glass is an effort to analyze and generalize from the interviews they collect in order to arrive at mid-level statements about the mentality and symbolic frameworks of this group or that. And both Young and Lamont succeed in providing portraits of their subjects that are highly insightful and sociologically plausible -- we can understand the mechanisms through which these frameworks take hold and we can see some of the meso-level consequences that follow from them in specific social settings.

In a number of prior posts I've argued for an actor-centered sociology (link). And I've argued that we need to have better and more fully articulated theories of the actor if an actor-centered sociology is to be valuable.  What I am calling cultural sociology here is one way for the discipline of sociology to get down to business in providing more nuanced theories of the actor.

(I should note that the description provided here of cultural sociology makes the field seem highly actor-centered; but this isn't entirely accurate. There are macro and meso zones of research in cultural sociology that are distinctly uninterested in the mental frameworks of the individual actors. Wendy Griswold captures this multi-level division of the field by referring to a "cultural diamond", and the actor-centered aspect that I've described here is probably the smallest in terms of the volume of research conducted in the field. Here is Griswold's description of the diamond:

I use the device of the "cultural diamond" to investigate the connections among four elements: cultural objects -- symbols, beliefs, values, and practices; cultural creators, including the organizations and systems that produce and distribute cultural objects; cultural receivers, the people who experience culture and specific cultural objects; and the social world, the context in which culture is created and experienced. (kl 218)

In fact, the actor-centered dimension of the field gets relatively little spotlight in Griswold's Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. If anything, one might argue that there should be more attention to the interface between frame and actor, so that individuals are not viewed as simply the passive bearers of this cultural icon or that.)