Are organizations emergent?

Do organizations have properties that are in some recognizable way independent from the behaviors and intentions of the individuals who inhabit them? In A New Social Ontology of Government I emphasized the ways in which organizations fail because of actor-level features: principal-agent problems, inconsistent priorities and goals across different working groups, strategic manipulation of information by some actors to gain advantage over other actors, and the like. With a nod to Fligstein and McAdam's theory of strategic action fields (link), I took an actor-centered approach to the workings (and dysfunctions) of organizations. I continue to believe that these are accurate observations about the workings of organizations and government agencies, but now that I've reoriented my thinking away from a strictly actor-centered approach to the social world (link), I'm interested in asking the questions about meso-level causes I did not ask in A New Social Ontology.

For example: 

(a) Are there relatively stable meso-level features of organizations that constrain and influence individual behavior in consistent ways that produce relatively stable meso-level outcomes? 

(b) Are there routine behaviors that are reproduced within the organization by training programs and performance audits that give rise to consistent patterns of organizational workings? 

(c) Are there external structural constraints (legal, environmental, locational) that work to preserve certain features of the organization's scheme of operations? 

It seems that the answer to each of these questions is "yes"; but this in turn seems to imply that organizations have properties that persist over time and through changes of personnel. They are not simply the result of the sum of the behaviors and mental states of the participants. These meso-level properties are subject to change, of course, depending on the behaviors and intentions of the individuals who inhabit the organization; but they are sometimes stable across extended periods of time and individual personnel. Or in other words, there seem to be meso-level features of organizations that are emergent in some moderate sense.

Here are possible illustrations of each kind of "emergent" property.

(a) Imagine two chemical plants Alpha and Beta making similar products with similar industrial processes and owned by different parent corporations. Alpha has a history of occasional fires, small explosions, and defective equipment, and it was also the site of a major chemical fire that harmed dozens of workers and neighbors. Beta has a much better safety record; fires and explosions are rare, equipment rarely fails in use, and no major fires have occurred for ten years. We might then say that Alpha and Beta have different meso-level safety characteristics, with Alpha lying in the moderate risk range and Beta in the low risk range. Now suppose that we ask an all-star team of industrial safety investigators to examine both plants, and their report indicates that Alpha has a long history of cost reduction plans, staff reductions, and ineffective training programs, whereas Beta (owned by a different parent company) has been well funded for staffing, training, and equipment maintenance. This is another meso-level property of the two plants -- production decisions guided by profitability and cost reduction at Alpha, and production decisions guided by both profitability and a commitment to system safety at Beta. Finally, suppose that our team of investigators conducts interviews and focus groups with staff and supervisors in the two plants, and finds that there are consistent differences between the two plants about the importance of maintaining safety as experienced by plant workers and supervisors. Supervisors at Alpha make it clear that they disagree strongly with the statement, "interrupting the production process to clarify anomalous temperature readings would be encouraged by the executives", whereas their counterparts at Beta indicate that they agree with the statement. This implies that there is a significant difference in the safety culture of the two plants -- another meso-level feature of the two organizations. All of these meso-level properties persist over decades and through major turnover of staff. Supervisors and workers come and go, but the safety culture, procedures, training, and production pressure persist, and new staff are introduced to these practices in ways that reproduce them. And -- this is the key point -- these meso-level properties lead to different rates of failure at the two plants over time, even though none of the actors at Alpha intend for accidents to occur. 

(b) This example comparing industrial plants with different safety rates also serves to answer the second question posed above about training and oversight. The directors and staff who conduct training in an industrial organization can have high commitment or low commitment to their work -- energetic and focused training programs or perfunctory and forgettable training programs -- and the difference will be notable in the performance of new staff as they take on their responsibilities. For example, training for control room directors may always emphasize the importance of careful annotation of the day's events for the incoming director on the next shift. But the training may be highly effective, resulting in informative documentation across shift changes; or it may be ineffective and largely disregarded. In most cases poor documentation does not lead to a serious accident; but sometimes it does. So organizations with effective training on procedures and operations will have a better chance of avoiding serious accidents. Alpha has weak training programs, while Beta has strong training programs (and each dedicates commensurate resources to training). Routine behaviors at Alpha lead to careless implementation of procedures, whereas routine behaviors at Beta result in attentive implementation, and as a result, Beta has a better safety performance record.

(c) What about the external influences that have an effect on the overall safety performance of an industrial plant? The corporate governance and ownership of the plant is plainly relevant to safety performance through the priorities it establishes for production, profitability, and safety. If the corporation's highest priority is profitability, then safety procedures and investments take the back seat. Local budget managers are pressed to find cost reductions, and staff positions and equipment devoted to safety are often the easiest category of budget reduction to achieve. On the other hand, if the corporation's guidance to plant executives is a nuanced set of priorities within which both production goals and safety goals are given importance, there is a better chance of preserving the investments in process inspectors, better measurement instruments, and on-site experts who can be called on to offer advice during a plant emergency. This differentiating feature of corporate priority-setting too is a meso-level property that contributes to the level of safety performance in a chemical plant, independent of the knowledge and intentions of local plant managers, directors, and workers.

These brief hypothetical examples seem to establish a fairly mundane form of "emergence" for organizational properties. They provide examples of causal independence of meso-level properties of organizations. And significantly, each of these meso-level features can be identified in case studies of important industrial failures -- the Boeing 737 Max (link), the Deepwater Horizon disaster (link), or the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion (link).

It may be noted that there are two related ideas here: the idea that a higher-level property is emergent from the properties of the constituent entities; and the idea that a higher-level feature may be causally persistent over time and over change of the particular actors who make up the social entity. The connection is this: we might argue that the causally persistent property at the meso-level is different in nature and effect from the causal properties (actions, behaviors, intentions) of the individuals who make up the organization. So causal persistence of meso-level properties demonstrates emergence of a sort.

A curious convergence between social ontology and process metaphysics

For the past six months or so I've been wrestling with how to reformulate my own thinking about the nature of the social world -- the nature of "social reality" (link). I've come to realize that the position I've defended for years -- ontological individualism -- is still too dependent on the view of "social entities sitting on top of individual actors", which is no longer convincing to me. And I've reformulated what I have to say about "actor-centered sociology" and "microfoundations" accordingly. I am now more satisfied with the position I've come to -- a diachronic view of intertwined and mutually influencing processes at the social level and the individual-actor level, and an associated view that suggests that both social arrangements and features of individual agency are fluid and "fluxy". Here are two key statements from "Rethinking Ontological Individualism" in its final draft:

Actors and structures are linked in inseparable loops of mutual influence over time, with both actors and structures dependent on the current ensemble of “actors-within-structures” within which they have developed, changed, and persisted. The social world is thus inherently indeterminate, reflecting unpredictable changes in all its elements over time.

...

This view has important ontological implications. For one thing, it implies that neither actors nor structures have “essential natures” or fixed and unchanging properties. Rather, the properties of social structures are influenced by the past and present actions and thoughts of actors and the prior characteristics of structures; while the mental characteristics of present actors are shaped by the ambient social arrangements within which they develop. (There is a biological precondition: human beings must be the kinds of “cognitive-practical machines” that can embody very extensive change; Gibbard 1990.) Further, actors are influenced by ambient structures (external causes); but a given generation of actors is capable of genuine innovation and creativity (internal causes). Susan B. Anthony was influenced by her suffragist predecessors and contemporaries, but she also brought her own innovative thinking to the struggle for full rights of citizenship for women in 1872. And likewise, structures are modified by generations of actors (external causes), but structures also create opportunities for structural innovation (internal causes).

What is striking to me now that this process of exploration and reformulation has come to something like a conclusion is how much the resulting position sounds like a version of "process metaphysics" -- the idea that processes of change rather than fixed underlying particles should be the fundamental ontological category. (The images above are selected to illustrate the two metaphysical perspectives: the orderly composition of a metal from its constituent atoms (substance metaphysics) and the contingent and entangled creation of a social movement (process metaphysics).) Process metaphysics is distinctly a minority position in analytical philosophy today, so it is striking to me that some of the basic intuitions of that view developed organically out of a consideration of how social structures, institutions, and actors interact to constitute the social world -- "social reality". I didn't begin with the premises of process metaphysics, but rather developed a conception that bore important similarities to process metaphysics.

What is process philosophy? Consider the opening sentences of Johanna Seibt’s treatment of process philosophy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Process philosophy is based on the premise that being is dynamic and that the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any comprehensive philosophical account of reality and our place within it. Even though we experience our world and ourselves as continuously changing, Western metaphysics has long been obsessed with describing reality as an assembly of static individuals whose dynamic features are either taken to be mere appearances or ontologically secondary and derivative. For process philosophers the adventure of philosophy begins with a set of problems that traditional metaphysics marginalizes or even sidesteps altogether: what is dynamicity or becoming—if it is the way we experience reality, how should we interpret this metaphysically? (link)

Substitute "the social world" for "being" and "reality" in this text and you have a statement about social ontology that is very similar to the reformulation I propose in reconsidering ontological individualism.

Seibt notes that process philosophy has important affinities with American pragmatism (as well as ancient Greek philosophy and continental philosophy). George Herbert Mead offers a particularly clear example in his theory of the self in Mind, Self, and Society (link). Here Mead takes a position on the nature of the self -- the "me" -- that is broadly suggestive of the premises of process philosophy:

Our contention is that mind can never find expression, and could never have come into existence at all, except in terms of a social environment; that an organized set or pattern of social relations and interactions (especially those of communication by means of gestures functioning as significant symbols and thus creating a universe of discourse) is necessarily presupposed by it and involved in its nature. (222)

The self is not a "substance", but rather a something in a continual process of change.

Process metaphysics may be considered by contemporary philosophers of science as an implausible account of the physical world. Copper atoms are not a "process of becoming"; rather, they have a (quantum mechanical) set of properties that are fixed over time. But perhaps physics and chemistry are bad models for thinking about metaphysics in general. Significantly, philosopher of biology John Dupré argues in Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology and elsewhere that process metaphysics is indeed well suited to the science of biology and evolution. And, like the arguments against "social kinds" and essentialism that result from the rethinking of ontological individualism, Dupré too rejects the idea of “biological essences” (The Metaphysics of Biology: 16-17):

Normally, essential properties pertain to a thing as members of a kind for which the property provides a condition of membership, and it is widely supposed that to be the same thing over time an entity must belong to, and continue to belong to, a particular kind. As I shall discuss in the next section, however, it is widely agreed that the empirical facts of biology are not consistent with there being any such essence-determined kinds.

So perhaps we might say that process metaphysics -- whatever its virtues in application to other areas of knowledge -- offers a reasonable description of the nature of the social world (and perhaps the biological world). This in turn suggests that philosophy should exercise a reasonable degree of modesty in the generality of the theories it formulates. Perhaps there is no "general and universal" basis for philosophical metaphysics. Rather, we need to formulate different metaphysical frameworks for different areas of knowledge and experience. This would indeed constitute a philosophical position of "metaphysics naturalized". (Here are some prior reflections on the grounds of metaphysical theorizing in philosophy; link, link.)

The diachronic social

An earlier post offered what is for me a fairly large change of orientation on fundamental questions of social ontology: a conviction that the concept of ontological individualism is no longer supportable. My concern there was that this phrase gives too much ontological priority to individual actors; whereas the truth about the social world is more complex. Individuals are indeed the substrate of social structures and entities, but social entities are in turn constitutive of individual social actors.

The implication is that our social ontology needs to give equal priority to both actors and structures. But how can we make sense of these three ideas in a non-paradoxical way:

• Structures are constitutive of actors
• Actors are the substrate of structures and give rise to their properties and powers
• Both actors and structures change their properties over time through both internal and external processes

The most compelling answer will sound a bit foreign to analytically-trained philosophers, but it seems inescapable: actors and structures are linked in an inseparable loop of mutual influence over time, with both actors and structures dependent on the current ensemble of “actors-within-structures” within which they have developed, changed, and persisted. The social world is thus inherently “fluxy”, reflecting unpredictable changes in all its elements at the same time. This implies a vision of the social world that is radically different from the ancient Greek idea of “atomism”, where unchangeable “atoms” constitute more complex wholes. In this view, both parts (actors) and ensembles (structures) take on their current properties as a result of the properties of actors and ensembles in the recent past. (That’s what makes this a diachronic view of social ontology.) I can imagine Heraclitus applauding, given his cryptic suggestions about flux and patterns.

This view has radical ontological implications. For one thing, neither actors nor structures have “essential natures” or fixed and unchanging properties. Rather, the properties of structures are determined by the past and present actions and thoughts of actors and prior characteristics of structures; while the mental characteristics of present actors are shaped by the ambient social arrangements within which they develop. (We must concede that there is a biological precondition: human beings must be the kinds of “cognitive-practical machines” that can embody very extensive change.) Further, actors are influenced by ambient structures (external causes); but a given generation of actors is capable of genuine innovation and creativity (internal causes). And likewise, structures are modified by generations of actors (external causes); but structures also create opportunities for structural innovation (internal causes).

A second implication is that neither form of simple conceptions of causal determination is at work: bare individuals do not “determine” the workings of structures, and abstract structures do not “determine” the features of social agency and identity possessed by a generation of actors at a time. Both actors and structures are influenced by features of the other; but influence is not the same thing as determination.

A third implication is that the fact of interaction over time (history) is crucial for understanding the nature of social change. At a given moment in time we find a (contingent) stock of actors and structures. Through their current mental frameworks, actions, and strategies, the actors influence the future development of the structures — whether by supporting their persistence or by introducing changes into their workings. Simultaneously the current structures influence the development of the mental frameworks, normative schemes, and practices of the actors — sometimes by largely reproducing the features of actors of the recent past, and sometimes by contributing to major shifts in identity, mental framework, and social dispositions.

For given explanatory purposes we can begin our analysis of actors-within-structures at a moment in time. So, for example, we can attempt to explain several centuries of change in the Roman Empire by beginning with Augustus; investigating the public and private mentality of Romans at the time; and investigating the specifics of the institutions of power that existed in public and military institutions at the time. But the story will then unfold with a dynamic interplay between changing institutional arrangements and changing mentalities. The processes of change described here are extended over time, and they imply a high degree of contingency in the directions of change and persistence that are induced. The extended “system” of actors-embedded-in-current-structures evolves in unpredictable ways. And this is an inherently diachronic process; it is crucial for social explanations to reflect the iterative process of influence that is at work over time.

These observations imply at least four pathways of social causation — none of which is prior to the others.

• STRUCTURES cause changes in ACTORS
• ACTORS cause changes in STRUCTURES
• ACTORS cause changes in ACTORS
• STRUCTURES cause changes in STRUCTURES

There is another important fact to keep in mind. This is the fact of heterogeneity of both structures and actors. Roman institutions were heterogeneous across space, and Roman mentalities were heterogeneous across social groups and other differentia. This point is worth emphasizing:

• Both STRUCTURES and ACTORS are heterogeneous across time and space.

The “Protestant Ethic” was not a single unitary social-cultural framework across the face of Europe, and capitalist economic practices were not the same in Sweden as in Italy. Likewise, the identities and mental frameworks of individual actors and populations of actors differ across time and space. So instead of a simple causal relationship — “The Protestant Ethic diffused Europe and produced economically rational actors” we have a complex causal relationship — “A range of instantiations of post-Catholic Christian daily culture existed across Europe and produced a range of instances of social actors”.

All of this is somewhat abstract. But it coheres well with the approach to institutions, actors, and change taken by Kathleen Thelen and other new institutionalists in historical sociology. The view of institutional change offered by Mahoney and Thelen in Explaining Institutional Change is instructive. For example:

Exactly what properties of institutions permit change? How and why do the change-permitting properties of institutions allow (or drive) actors to carry out behaviors that foster the changes (and what are those behaviors)? How should we conceptualize these actors? What types of strategies flourish in which kinds of institutional environments? What features of the institutions themselves make them more or less vulnerable to particular kinds of strategies for change? (3)

And the malleability of the actor herself is emphasized as well:

If institutions involve cognitive templates that individuals unconsciously enact, then actors presumably do not think about not complying. (10)

Is ontological individualism still a viable social ontology?

image: a flat social ontology: actors and structures

Over the years I've continued to advocate for the position of ontological individualism -- the idea that social entities, powers, and conditions are all constituted by the actions, thoughts, and mental frameworks of individual human beings, and nothing else. I'm no longer entirely confident that this is an adequate view of social ontology, because I also maintain that doing good social science requires researchers to work with a rich theory of the social actors who constitute the "substrate" of the social world. In particular, I maintain that we need to view social actors as "socially constituted" and "socially situated". This means, fundamentally, that individuals develop into actors through interaction and exposure with the communities and institutions with which they interact from childhood to adulthood -- thus coming to possess various features of motivation, cognition, and reasoning on the basis of which they act in the social world. Further, individuals exist within institutional, cultural, and normative settings that establish constraints, resources, opportunities, and limitations on their actions. Actors are "socially situated" in ways that profoundly affect their actions.

The diagram above represents a flat social ontology, with individuals and social entities in a range of locally instantiated relationships. As the arrows indicate, influence flows in all directions, from actors to structures and from structures to individual actors and between both structures and actors. (Here is a post from 2015 that considers the logic of a "flat social ontology"; link.)

So if individual actors depend on the local and historically particular social environments in which they exist -- environments that are themselves embodied by other actors -- then in what sense can we legitimately say that the individual level is more fundamental than the social level?

Two ideas seem to be true, and they are in tension with each other. On the one hand, most views about "priority of individuals" over social facts are unsupportable. Individuals are not temporally prior to social relations and influences; individuals are not causally prior to social influences (since each actor is formed and constrained by social relationships and practices); individuals cannot be characterized in terms that avoid "social" characteristics (semantic priority); and individuals are not explanatorily prior to social facts (since social facts must be invoked to describe and explain the individual's mentality and action).

But likewise, social structures, practices, and institutions are not strictly prior to individuals. Social influences on individuals at a time depend upon the actions, thoughts, and relationships of an indefinitely large group of individual actors. That is to say that social arrangements work through the actions and mentalities of the individuals who make them up. Further, social structures are not strictly speaking causally prior to individuals in any absolute sense -- it is not the case that social structures determine the actors, and in fact later iterations of social structures and institutions are changed as a result of the actions and non-actions of the actors themselves.

So it seems clear that individuals are shaped by social realities (practices, institutions, normative systems) and social realities are constituted, maintained, and changed by individuals. We cannot separate them into separate and independent causal factors.

This suggests that neither "individualism" nor "holism" will do as a basis for social ontology. Neither individual mentality and action nor the dictates and constraints of social facts persist by themselves. Instead, social actors depend upon existing social relationships and arrangements, and social facts depend upon individual actors which carry and transform them. We need to conceive of both individual actors and social arrangements as part of a single, iterative and diverse process of change and continuity. And, unfortunately, the label of ontological individualism does not capture the fullness of this set of processes.

Other theorists have tried to solve this problem. Anthony Giddens addresses this complexity through his effort to undermine the strict distinction between agent and structure. He challenges the framework itself -- the idea that "agents determine structures" and the idea that "structures determine agents". He introduces a new term to capture the complexity of the relationship between actors and structures, the idea of structuration. His 1979 collection of essays, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis, provides a statement of some of his views. Here is how he frames his core concern in a key essay, “Agency, Structure”:

The principal issue with which I shall be concerned in this paper is that of connecting a notion of human action with structural explanation in social analysis. The making of such a connection, I shall argue, demands the following: a theory of the human agent, or of the subject; an account of the conditions and consequences of action; and an interpretation of ‘structure’ as somehow embroiled in both those conditions and consequences. (49)

Giddens faults much of sociology for having failed to conceptualize the social-structural context with sufficient nuance. He finds, for example, that Durkheim’s efforts to provide theoretical resources for describing the “external or objective” character of society were inadequate (51). The problem is that neither individualists nor structuralists have succeeded in expressing the inherent interdependence of the two poles. Give primacy to structures and the agents are “dopes” — robots controlled by structural conditions. Give primacy to individuals, and structures and institutions seem to disappear. Giddens' own view is that the two poles of structure and agency must be considered from within a common formulation:

I shall argue here that, in social theory, the notions of action and structure presuppose one another; but that recognition of this dependence, which is a dialectical relation, necessitates a reworking both of a series of concepts linked to each of these terms, and of the terms themselves. (53)

Giddens also observes that action necessarily implies a temporal framework.

‘Action’ or agency, as I use it, thus does not refer to a series of discrete acts combined together, but to a continuous flow of conduct. We may define action … as involving a ‘stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of corporeal beings in the ongoing process of events-in-the-world’. (55)

This process view of actors-structures-actors is what Giddens refers to as "structuration".

Another fruitful attempt to approach social ontology along these lines has been advanced by Margaret Archer through her concept of morphogenesis. Here are the opening paragraphs of Realist Social Theory.

Social reality is unlike any other because of its human constitution. It is different from natural reality whose defining feature is self-subsistence: for its existence does not depend upon us, a fact which is not compromised by our human ability to intervene in the world of nature and change it. Society is more different still from transcendental reality, where divinity is both self-subsistent and unalterable at our behest; qualities which are not contravened by responsiveness to human intercession. The nascent ‘social sciences’ had to confront this entity, society, and deal conceptually with its three unique characteristics.

Firstly, that it is inseparable from its human components because the very existence of society depends in some way upon our activities. Secondly, that society is characteristically transformable; it has not immutable form or even preferred state. It is like nothing but itself, and what precisely it is like at any time depends upon human doings and their consequences. Thirdly, however, neither are we immutable as social agents, for what we are and what we do as social beings are also affected by the society in which we live and by our very efforts to transform it. (1)

This view too suggests an inseparable entwining of the social and the individual. Neither is primary, and neither is causally determined by the other. Rather, we must postulate a continuing process of interaction between actors and structures, a process that she calls "morphogenesis".

Is there a good label for this more nuanced view of social ontology? "Ontological individualism", even when carefully qualified, still seems to give unwarranted priority to the individual actor. "Ontological holism" is even worse, since it implies that social facts are autonomous after all. I've used the terms "actor-centered sociology" and "methodological localism" to capture the sociality of the individuals who make up the social world, but these phrases are not entirely intuitive. "Structuration" is the label that Giddens uses for his own theory of agent-structure, and his language of "social life as process" is intended to capture the idea of a temporally extended back-and-forth involving actors, structures, norms, and practices. Margaret Archer's theorizing about "morphogenesis" captures much of the back-and-forth nature of the relationship that exists between social arrangements and individual agency. James Coleman offers the idea of institutions as a "house of cards", depending upon the coordinated expectations and actions of individual participants for their relative stability. Other thinkers have used the idea of a "dialectical" relationship between individual and social arrangements, but the idea of dialectical relationships brings a lot of baggage. Zygmunt Bauman's concept of liquid modernity seems to point towards this "process" ontology as well, without offering much theoretical articulation beyond the central metaphor. Even the idea of a flat social ontology, mentioned above, captures some aspects of the more complex view of the social world that we seem to need.

At the moment I can't think of a simple phrase that would adequately capture a view of social ontology that encapsulates the complex nature of the "individuals-within-social-world" view of the social that seems most justified. Whatever scheme we choose, it is crucial to incorporate the diachronic nature of the interdependence of actors and structures into the view. The diagram at the top captures the multiple directions of influence at work in a social environment, and we might imagine a sequence of representations iterated over time, in which both social structures and socially constituted actors have changed over time. There is more to do in the field of social ontology.

Atomism versus holism in social ontology

Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit addressed the micro-macro question in an essay called "Structural Explanation in Social Theory" (link), included in Reduction, Explanation, and Realism (1992, ch. 4). Particularly interesting is the brief distinction that they draw between two senses of individualism: atomism versus holism, and individualism versus collectivism. They believe that these two distinctions are quite different, and yet are commonly conflated. 

The first distinction has to do with the logical characteristics of the properties of intentionality attributed to the actor. The atomist holds that the actor's beliefs, rationality, and intentionality are fundamentally independent of the other individuals in the groups to which he or she belongs, whereas the holist maintains that the individual's beliefs, rationality, and intentionality are inextricably connected to the mentality of the group. "How far, for example, do I depend on the convergent responses of my fellows for being able to form concepts and think thoughts involving those concepts? The atomist tradition says that logically I do not depend on this way on the other members of my society. The non-atomist or holist tradition says that I do" (127). I suppose that both Hobbes and Descartes illustrate this sense of atomistic individuals -- Hobbes with his characterization of the mentality of individuals in the state of nature and Descartes in his philosophical method of doubt.

The second distinction has to do with explanatory direction and autonomy for one level or the other. It revolves around the question of whether micro-explanations are more fundamental than macro-explanations. Do individuals in the aggregate determine the properties of the social world, or do the properties of the social world determine the actions of individuals? "The other significant question ... has to do with how far the members of society, whether they are conceived of atomistically or holistically, retain their apparent autonomy in the presence of higher-order social constraints" (127). Strict collectivists maintain that individuals "must" behave in the way prescribed by social structure; strict individualists maintain that individuals retain the ability to act otherwise than as prescribed by social constraint. 

Jackson and Pettit suggest that the first distinction has to do with "horizontal" issues concerning relations among individuals, whereas the second distinction has to do with "vertical" issues having to do with individuals and social structures. Both holism and collectivism are anti-reductionist, in the sense that they each deny that social facts can be derived from some set of purely individual facts; but they amount to different kinds of claims about the priority of the social world over the aggregate of individuals.

It is worth asking whether the concept of "atomistic" offered here is consistent with the way the concept is usually understood. On the common presentation, atomism maintains that there is a core set of purely psychological characteristics possessed by every human being, and that these characteristics are pre-social. These might include a preference for self-interest, a concern for survival, and an ability to calculate risks and benefits of various actions. In his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on methodological individualism, Joseph Heath paraphrases atomism in these terms: "The atomistic view is based upon the suggestion that it is possible to develop a complete characterization of individual psychology that is fully pre-social, then deduce what will happen when a group of individuals, so characterized, enter into interaction with one another" (section 1). The Jackson-Pettit account captures the idea that atomism assumes a pre-social individual with basic characteristics that do not logically entail anything about the social environment. But what is somewhat unclear here is their use of "logical" in this discussion. One way of understanding their meaning is that they mean to assert that, for the atomist, the "basic" psychological characteristics can be formulated in a way that does not imply anything about the social world. For example, if our scheme of the basic psychological characteristics included "an impulse towards reciprocity", then atomism would be false -- because reciprocity implies the existence of social relationships. But there are other relationships besides "logical" that might be invoked here: semantic or causal, for example. Are basic individual characteristics definable in terms that do not analytically (semantically) presuppose some facts about the social world? And are basic individual characteristics in principle wholly caused through processes of individual psychological development, or do they unavoidably involve the causal role of social interaction and structure?

Their explication of individualism and collectivism is noteworthy in a different sense: it is primarily framed around the question of the freedom or autonomy of the individual with regard to the social structures he or she inhabits. Individualism entails that individuals create / determine the social world through their actions; whereas collectivism entails that facts about social structure determine individual actions. This issue is intertwined in their discussion with the idea of explanatory primacy: is the micro-level primary with respect to the macro-level, is the macro-level primary with respect to the micro-level, or does causation flow in both directions? But these are really quite different questions. The philosophical question of "freedom of the actor" seems to have little real importance for the sociologist or the philosopher of social science; whereas the question of explanatory primary is indeed important for both.

Jackson and Pettit give some legitimacy to the idea of real causal efficacy for social structures with respect to social change (and individual behavior). Their preferred view of the explanatory force of a structural explanation of an event is what they refer to as the "program model". A structural factor contributes to the explanation of an event, not by identifying the proximate or instigating cause of the event, but by identifying the frame of circumstances in the context of which the event was likely to occur. Prolonged drought is a "program factor" for the occurrence of a forest fire, not because the drought caused the fire, but because it represented a structural circumstance in the context of which many different kinds of events could ignite the tinder. "The program explanation identifies a condition such that its realization is enough to ensure that there will be causes to produce the event explained: if not the actual causes, then some others" (119).

Jackson and Pettit concede that micro-level facts are "more fundamental" than macro-level facts; but they also give support to the position that Fodor called "relative explanatory autonomy" of higher-level structures in the social sciences, thought they do not refer to Fodor directly. "The third thing to say on the sider of collectivism is that the program model [their preferred interpretation] forces a break, not just with heuristic individualists, but also with those individualists who tolerate structural explanation but think that the micro-explanation of any social fact is always bound to be of more interest.... On the program model, structural explanation serves a different sort of interest from micro-explanation, as micro-explanation serves a different interest from detailed psychological aetiology, since it gives a different kind of information on the causal history of the event explained" (131). In other words, they support the idea that a structural explanation can be just as "interesting" and informative as a micro-explanation.

The program model works well enough for some kinds of social explanations -- for example, the outbreak of a race riot given the ambient racial disparities and patterns of police abuse. What is least satisfying about this article is the almost complete absence of an account of what "structural factors" look like in the social realm. The examples Jackson and Pettit give are almost always social patterns and correlations -- poverty causes delinquency, economic growth causes urbanization, etc. But there is no discussion of the idea of a social structure, a normative system, or an institution. And the causal mechanism linking micro to macro is also a simple one: "All such [social] facts seem to have at least this in common, that they obtain or largely obtain in virtue of the intentional attitudes -- the beliefs, desires, and the like -- of a number of people, and/or the effects of such attitudes: the actions which the attitudes occasion and the consequences of those actions" (97). This is largely an aggregative conception of the causation of "social facts" based on individual characteristics.

In particular, the analysis provided by Jackson and Pettit misses altogether the active causal powers that social structures can be said to possess. These are social features that are the object of study of organizational sociologists and institutional sociologists. And as researchers like Kathleen Thelen demonstrate (link), these kinds of social features link together into causal mechanisms constituting causal explanations in their own right. Surprisingly, their account is not very interested in "structural" explanation at all. For example, Southwest Airlines underwent a catastrophic failure during the winter holidays in 2022. (Zeynep Tufekci's article in the New York Times provides a valuable post mortem of the failure; link.) Southwest Airlines is a business corporation, an organization with leaders and individuals through whose functioning highly complex processes of coordination take place (assignments of aircraft and crews to airports at the right times and work schedules, management of investments over time). Southwest Airlines exists within a profit-driven environment in which quarterly revenue reports are highly consequential for the top executives. The coordination required of a large airline requires sophisticated computing support. But Tufekci reports that the software systems in use at Southwest were said to be woefully inadequate for several years, according to reports by insiders and labor unions, and the company delayed in upgrading these expensive systems. These are all facts about a social entity, a corporation in a specific environment, and the organizational features it possesses in virtue of which failure is likely. The result was a cascading series of thousands of flight cancellations in December that may cost the airline a billion dollars. Here we have a mechanism-based account of a major social failure that is much more complex and realistic than the context-and-influence model implied by Jackson and Pettit's arguments.

In the end, Jackson and Pettit draw a position that refrains from both methodological individualism and methodological holism, in favor of what we might call methodological pluralism:

The program model of structural explanation is not only a satisfactory account of how such explanation works. It also gives us a nice perspective on the debate between individualists and collectivists. It means that we can embrace the persuasive individualist claim that individuals are agent-autonomous. But it also allows us to understand the collectivist thesis that individuals often make little difference in the course of history and that the best way to study society is often from the top down, not from the bottom up. Those claims constitute the true and attractive core of collectivism. (131)

The conception of methodological localism that I have tried to develop over recent years avoids both atomism and individualism, in the distinctions clarified by Jackson and Pettit. Methodological localism represents the view that structures, institutions, normative schemes, and other social entities are created and embodied by social actors interacting with each other. So the structures of the social world depend on the actions and thoughts of existing individuals. But existing individuals are themselves socially enveloped. Methodological localism proposes a view of the social world in which individuals are "social constituted" and "socially situated"; so from the start, there is no hint of the idea of a pre-social individual. This entails that the view is not atomistic. But likewise, the view is "actor-centered", which implies that individuals act according to their own intentional schemes. These schemes are socially influenced, to be sure, but they are also heterogeneous and diverse; and my premise is that individuals are not determined by the ambient social values, cultures, identities, and institutions in which they live. So the view is not "collectivist" in the strong sense described by Jackson and Pettit. And, finally, the view argues that social arrangements have durable causal powers, both with respect to individuals and to other social arrangements, and that these powers do not need to be reduced to facts about individuals. This is the view of relative explanatory autonomy that Fodor introduced, and that seems very compelling in the context of the micro-macro debate.

So methodological localism is not atomistic; it supports an element of holism, in the limited sense that it asserts that social actors are formed and framed within specific social arrangements and institutions; it is not individualist, in that it does not insist that social outcomes must be explained solely through derivation from facts about individuals; it is individualist in another sense, in that it attributed "freedom" to the social actors; it is not collectivist, in the sense that it denies that social arrangements "determine" individual action; but it is sympathetic to one aspect of the collectivist view, the idea that social structures exercise real causal influence over individuals and other structures. Rather than endorsing a simple relationship between micro and macro, methodological localism posits an iterative relationship over time between "socially constituted individual" and "social structure", a view that has deep parallels with Margaret Archer's conception of morphogenesis (link).

Guest post: Varieties of realism by Jamie Morgan

[Jamie Morgan accepted my invitation to contribute a guest post to Understanding Society on the topic of the varieties of realism in the philosophy of social science. Jamie is Professor of Economic Sociology at Leeds Beckett University. He co-edits the Real-World Economics Review with Edward Fullbrook. He has published widely in the fields of economics, political economy, philosophy, sociology and international politics. Jamie is well positioned to provide this assessment. Thanks, Jamie!]

VARIETIES OF REALISM

BY JAMIE MORGAN

j.a.morgan@leedsbeckett.ac.uk

Scientific realism has many overlapping and parallel forms and one of the more prominent has been critical realism (CR). If we date from the original publication of Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science in 1975, then CR has endured for nearly half a century. Longevity, moreover, invites reflection in order to build institutional memory, and with this in mind the Critical Realist Network is engaged in a project to interview proponents, innovators and fellow travelers (link). Some, such as Tim Rutzou’s interview with Chris Smith, author of What is a Person? are available on YouTube. Others take a more longform ‘life and times’ approach and are published in the Journal of Critical Realism. Dan Little's is the latest in this ongoing process (link).

The interviews are a rich conceptual and bibliographic resource on CR as well as general issues in social theory, philosophy, history, methodology and social science, but in addition to this they serve a number of purposes. For those unfamiliar with CR, it tends to be most closely associated with Bhaskar’s work. However, many others have contributed to CR over the years. For example, in addition to Bhaskar’s transformational model of social activity (TMSA), CR associated thinkers have developed several different theorisations that deal with what is often described as the ‘agent-structure problematic’, but more broadly deal with the dynamics of social constitution. Readers are likely most familiar with the sociologist, Margaret Archer's structure, agency and culture (SAC), and morphostatic/morphogenetic (M/M) approach; but others include the political economist, Bob Jessop's strategic-relational approach (SRA), the economic philosopher, Tony Lawson's social positioning theory and the social theorist, Dave Elder-Vass's norm circles. As Dan notes in his interview, there are numerous points of convergence with his own advocacy of an actor-centred theory.

Dan Little, of course, is not merely a social theorist or philosopher, like many of those interviewed his work spans a variety of fields and numerous interests over the years. As Andrew Sayer, author of numerous influential books, such as Method in Social Science and Why Things Matter to People, notes in his interview, he has not found it necessary to always begin each thing he writes with an exhaustive list of CR concepts. They have often formed the background to how he approaches his work. Others, in contrast, have devoted most of their career to development of fundamental concepts. Since Bhaskar's untimely death, Ruth Groff, for example, has perhaps done more than any other within CR to develop realist conceptualizations of causation.

The interviews, then, establish that CR has a long history, is diverse and continues to develop. That said, most CR associated people subscribe to the triad of ontological realism, epistemological relativism and judgmental rationality, as well as use of concepts of depth realism, stratification, emergence, open system cumulative causation and identification of ontic and epistemic fallacies. As the interviews also establish, there is, however, a great deal of debate within CR and continual engagement with interlocutors. Regarding the former (disagreement), there are different takes on various concepts, but also argument focused on different lines of development. Alan Norrie (a leading figure in UK legal studies) and Priscilla Alderson (who has done seminal work on the rights of the child and patient rights in healthcare), for example, are advocates of dialectics, but by no means all CR proponents agree. Regarding the latter (engagement), there are, as the recent special issue of Journal of Critical Realism on pragmatism and a previous interview with Nicholas Rescher illustrate, numerous instances of productive interchange.

Moreover, as readers of this blog are no doubt aware, positions evolve and a great deal of debate has taken place in various threads within Understanding Society, written by Dan and others and taking in reference to and commentary from many of those interviewed and already mentioned, as well as George Steinmetz, Peggy Somers, Guus Duindam, Tuuka Kaidesoja, Justin Cruickshank, Mervyn Hartwig, Phil Gorski and Doug Porpora. Doug Porpora is currently President of the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) and is another who has been interviewed for the project. Mention of IACR, furthermore, is an important reminder that CR is a growing global community and the interviews conducted so far are no more than a snapshot, able to indicate something of the flavour of CR but not fully convey its organizational form, extent and significance. The Network provides access to various on-line courses and other educational resources, proponents can be found all over the world (from Scandinavia to Asia Pacific), works are available in many languages and the next IACR conference, organized by Johnny Go, is scheduled for August 2023 in Manila, the Philippines.

Finally, as the interviews and also Hubert Buch-Hansen and Peter Nielsen’s recent book Critical Realism makes clear, CR is not, to mix metaphors some ossified dogma, it is a living body of thought. CR at its best is philosophy and social theory to some purpose and advocates work on some of the most pressing issues of our time.

*****

Here is a list of interviews conducted by Jamie Morgan and published in Journal of Critical Realism:

Nicholas Rescher, Jamie Morgan, 2020. Philosophical purpose and purposive philosophy: an interview with Nicholas Rescher, JCR, 19:1, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2019.1695085

Margaret S Archer, Jamie Morgan, 2020. Contributions to realist social theory: an interview with Margaret S. Archer, JCR, 19:2, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2020.1732760

Douglas V Porpora, Jamie Morgan, 2020. American sociology, realism, structure and truth: an interview with Douglas V. Porpora, JCR, 19:5, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2020.1782708

Alan Norrie, Jamie Morgan, 2021. Realism, dialectic, justice and law: an interview with Alan Norrie, JCR, 20:1, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2021.1881274

Tony Lawson, Jamie Morgan, 2021. Cambridge social ontology, the philosophical critique of modern economics and social positioning theory: an interview with Tony Lawson, part 1, JCR, 20:1, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2020.1846009

Tony Lawson, Jamie Morgan, 2021. Cambridge social ontology, the philosophical critique of modern economics and social positioning theory: an interview with Tony Lawson, part 2, JCR, 20:2, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2021.1914904

Dave Elder-Vass, Jamie Morgan, 2022. 'Materially social' critical realism: an interview with Dave Elder-Vass, JCR, 21:2, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2022.2028233

Andrew Sayer, Jamie Morgan, 2022. A realist journey through social theory and political economy: an interview with Andrew Sayer, JCR, 21:4, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2022.2049078

Bob Jessop, Jamie Morgan, 2022. The strategic-relational approach, realism and the state: from regulation theory to neoliberalism via Marx and Poulantzas, an interview with Bob Jessop, JCR, 21:1, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2021.1995685

Daniel Little, Jamie Morgan, 2022. Understanding society: an interview with Daniel Little, JCR, Latest Articles, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2022.2134617

Ruth Porter Groff, Jamie Morgan, 2022. Philosophy, metaphilosophy and ideology-critique: an interview with Ruth Porter Groff, JCR, Latest Articles, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2022.2101342

Priscilla Alderson, Jamie Morgan, 2022. Realist by inclination, childhood studies, dialectic and bodily concerns: an interview with Priscilla Alderson, JCR, Latest Articles, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2022.2068261

Heikki Patomäki & Jamie Morgan, 2023. World politics, critical realism and the future of humanity: an interview with Heikki Patomäki, Part 1, Journal of Critical Realism, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2023.2188527

Heikki Patomäki & Jamie Morgan, 2023. World politics, critical realism and the future of humanity: an interview with Heikki Patomäki, Part 2, Journal of Critical Realism, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2023.2188541

Berth Danermark & Jamie Morgan, 2023. Applying critical realism in an interdisciplinary context: an interview with Berth Danermark, Journal of Critical Realism, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2023.2188710

Critical realism and ontological individualism

Most critical realists would probably think that their philosophy of social science is flatly opposed to ontological individualism. However, I think that this opposition is unwarranted.

Let's begin by formulating a clear idea of ontological individualism. This is the view that social entities, powers, and conditions are all constituted by the actions, thoughts, and mental frameworks of individual human beings, and nothing else. The social world is constituted by the socially situated individuals who make it up. This is not to question the undoubtable fact that individuals have social properties -- beliefs, values, practices, habits, and relationships -- that are integral to their consciousness and agency. But these properties themselves are the recursive effects of prior sets of socially constituted, socially situated individuals who have contributed to their formation as social actors. Fundamentally, then, social entities are constituted by individual actors; and individual actors have in turn been framed, shaped, and influenced by their immersion in prior stages of social arrangements and relationships.

Consider a trivial illustration of the kind of recursive individual-social-individual process that I have in mind here. Consider the habit and norm of queuing in waiting for a bus, boarding a plane, or buying a ticket to a popular music concert. Queuing is not a unique solution to the problem of waiting for something. It is also possible for individuals within a group of people to use their elbows and voices to crowd to the front in order to be served earlier. But in some societies or cultural settings children have been given the example of "waiting your turn", lining up patiently, and conforming to the norms of polite fairness. These norms are internally realized through a process of socialization and maturation, with the result that the adult in the queuing society has both the habit and the norm of waiting for his or her turn. Further, non-conformists who break into the queue are discouraged by comments, jokes, and perhaps a quick jab with a folded umbrella. In this case adults were formed in their social norms by the previous generation of teachers and parents, and they in turn behave according to these norms and transmit them to the next generation. (Notice that this norm and behavior differs from the apparently similar situation of bidding on a work of art at an auction; in the auction case, the individuals do not wait for their turn, but rather attempt to prevail over the others through the level, speed, and aggressiveness of their bids.) Here we might say that the prevailing social norms of queueing-courtesy are a social factor that influences the behavior of individuals; but it is also evident that these norms themselves were reproduced by the prior behaviors and trainings offered by elders to the young. Further, the norm itself is malleable over time. If the younger generation develops a lower level of patience through incessant use of Twitter and cell phones, rule breakers may become more common until the norm of queueing has broken down altogether.

This example illustrates the premises of ontological individualism. The queueing norm is promulgated, sustained, and undermined by the various activities of the individuals who do various things throughout its life cycle: accept instruction, act compliantly, instruct the young, deviate from the norm. And the source of the causal power of the norm at a given time is straightforward as well: parents and teachers have influence over the behavior of the young, observant participants in the norm have some degree of motivation towards punishing noncompliant individuals, and ultimately other sources of motivation may lead to levels of noncompliance that bring about the collapse of the norm altogether.

Several points are worth underlining. First, ontological individualism is fully able to attribute causal powers to social assemblages, without being forced to provide reductionist accounts of how those powers derive ultimately from the actions and thoughts of individuals. OI is not a reductionist doctrine. Second, OI is not "atomistic", in the sense of assuming that individuals can be described as purely self-contained psychological systems. Rather, individuals are socially constituted through a process of social formation and maturation. This person is "polite", that person is "iconoclastic", and the third person is deferential to social "superiors". Each of these traits of psychology and motivation is a social product, reflecting the practices and norms that influenced the individual's formation. (This isn't to say that there is nothing "biological" underlying personality and social behavior.)

Several points can be drawn from this account. First, OI is not a reductionist doctrine -- any more than is "physicalism" when it comes to having a scientific theory of materials. We do not need to derive the properties of the metal alloy from a fundamental description of the atoms that constitute it. Second, OI is not an atomistic doctrine; it does not postulate that the constituents of social things are themselves pre-social and defined wholly in terms of individual characteristics. In a perfectly understandable sense the socially constituted individual is the product of the anterior social arrangements within which he or she developed from childhood to adulthood. And third, OI does not compel us to take an "as-if" stance on the question of the causal properties of social assemblages. The causal powers that we discover in certain kinds of bureaucratic organization are real and present in the world -- even though they are constituted and embodied by the actions, thoughts, and mental frameworks of the social actors who constitute them.

Now let's turn to critical realism and the position its practitioners take towards "individualism" and the relationship between actors and structures. Roy Bhaskar addresses these issues in The Possibility of Naturalism.

First, the ontological question about the relationship between "actors" and "society":

The model of the society/person connection I am proposing could be summarized as follows: people do not create society. For it always pre-exists them and is a necessary condition for their activity. Rather, society must be regarded as an ensemble of structures, practices and conventions which individuals reproduce or transform, but which would not exist unless they did so. Society does not exist independently of human activity (the error of reification). But it is not the product of it (the error of voluntarism). Now the processes whereby the stocks of skills, competences and habits appropriate to given social contexts, and necessary for the reproduction and/or transformation of society, are acquired and maintained could be generically referred to as socialization. It is important to stress that the reproduction and/ or transformation of society, though for the most part unconsciously achieved, is nevertheless still an achievement, a skilled accomplishment of active subjects, not a mechanical consequent of antecedent conditions. This model of the society/ person connection can be represented as below. (PON, 39)

This is a complicated statement. It affirms society exists as an ensemble of structures that individuals "reproduce or transform" and that "would not exist unless they did so". This is the key ontological statement: society depends upon the myriad individuals who inhabit it. The statement further claims that "society pre-exists the individual" -- that is, individuals are always born into some set of social arrangements, practices, norms, and structures, and these social facts help to form the individual's agency.

Here is the diagram to which Bhaskar refers (PON 40):

The cyclical relationship between social arrangements and individual "socially constituted action" is represented by the rising and falling dashed lines.

It seems, then, that Bhaskar's view is fundamentally similar to the view of methodological localism developed in earlier posts (link, link, link). Methodological localism affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes. But it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals. The “molecule” of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rules. And these supra-individual structures and norms are, in turn, maintained by the actors who inhabit them.

Francesco Di Iorio addresses many of these points in his contribution to Research Handbook of Analytical Sociology through his analysis of the relationship between critical realism and methodological individualism. Much of Di Iorio's analysis seems entirely correct. But, following Bhaskar, Di Iorio seems to postulate the absolute (temporal) priority of the social over the individual; and this seems to be incorrect.

According to critical realists, MI cannot account for the fact that the social world and its bounds exist independently of the individual interpretation of this world, that is, independently of the individual’s opinion about what she is free or not free to do. (Di Iorio 141)

It seems apparent, rather, that the relationship between the social world and the particular constitution of human actors at a given time is wholly recursive: social arrangements at ti causally influence individuals at ti; actions and transformations of individuals at ti+1 lead to change in social arrangements in ti+1; and so on. So neither social arrangements nor individual constitution are temporally prior; each is causally dependent upon the other at an earlier time period.

So it seems to me that there is nothing in the core doctrines of critical realism that precludes a social ontology along the lines of ontological individualism. OI is not reductionist; rather, it invites detailed investigation into the ways in which social arrangements both shape and are shaped by individual actors. And these relationships are sufficiently complex and iterative that it may be impossible to fully trace out the connections between surprising features of social institutions and the underlying states of the actors who constitute them. As a practical matter we may have confidence about beliefs about the properties of a social structure or institution, without having a clear idea of how these properties are created and reproduced by the individuals who constitute them. In this sense the social properties are weakly emergent from the individual-level processes -- a conclusion that is entirely compatible with a commitment to ontological individualism (link).

One of the most prominent critics of ontological individualism is Brian Epstein. His arguments are considered in earlier posts (link, link, link). Here is the conclusion I draw from his negative arguments about OI in the supervenience post:

Epstein's analysis is careful and convincing in its own terms. Given the modal specification of the meaning of supervenience (as offered by Jaegwon Kim and successors), Epstein makes a powerful case for believing that the social does not supervene upon the individual in a technical and specifiable sense. However, I'm not sure that very much follows from this finding. For researchers within the general school of thought of "actor-centered sociology", their research strategy is likely to remain one that seeks to sort out the mechanisms through which social outcomes of interest are created as a result of the actions and interactions of individuals. If Epstein's arguments are accepted, that implies that we should not couch that research strategy in terms of the idea of supervenience. But this does not invalidate the strategy, or the broad intuition about the relation between the social and the actions of locally situated actors upon which it rests. These are the intuitions that I try to express through the idea of "methodological localism"; link, link. And since I also want to argue for the possibility of "relative explanatory autonomy" for facts at the level of the social (for example, features of an organization; link), I am not too troubled by the failure of a view of the social and individual that denies strict determination of the former by the latter. (link)

It is evident that the concept of microfoundations has a close relationship to ontological individualism. Here are several efforts at reformulating the idea of microfoundations in a more flexible way (link, link). And here are several effort to provide an account of "microfoundations" for practices, norms, and social identities (link, link). This line of thought is intended to provide greater specificity of the recursive nature of "structure-actor-structure" that is expressed in the idea of methodological localism.

Realism about social entities

Critical realism depends on the key notion that sociologists are justified in construing their statements about social entities as real, objective features of the social world — “intransitive” objects, in Bhaskar’s somewhat idiosyncratic vocabulary. But does a realist ontology actually require this assumption? Or are there realist interpretations of sociological theory that do not “reify” entities like social structures, ideologies, or normative systems? Could we be realist about the social analogues of atoms and forces but nominalistic about larger ensembles like proteins? In chemistry there would be no reason to ask this question; but in the composition of the social world, it is possible that the linkages between "micro" and "macro" are sufficiently loose as to make it plausible that the ensembles have less permanence and fixity than their components. It is possible that the social world is more akin to a jigsaw puzzle in which all the pieces are square and can be fitted together in countless different ways; so there is no reason to attribute "existence" to the various combinations that occur.

This probably sounds needlessly paradoxical. But I think there are problems in asserting the independent, objective reality of a social structure like “the US system of academic tenure” that do not arise with respect to the building blocks of social structures and institutions like incentives, group priorities, property relations, and so on.

The ontological problem about large social entities arises from the open boundaries, multiple dimensions, and heterogeneity characteristic of the great preponderance of social “structures”. Take “tenure”: there are some important features commonly associated with tenure, like “protection of academic freedom,” “peer review,” and “self-governance”. But there is a great range of institutional arrangements, institutional priorities, and processes that make multiple instances substantially different from each other. Harvard’s tenure process looks very different from that practiced at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. And this is not a statement about elitism and status, but rather a reflection of different institutional priorities, needs, and the path-dependency relating to the historical composition of the respective arrangements.

We might be more confident in “realist” reference to a sociological entity when we refer to the particular instances of structures and ideologies, in a time and place, rather than the class of entities. So we might say that both Harvard and Lowell have particular tenure arrangements that are stable and well-defined and that can be selected as social entities. The class of all tenure systems, on the other hand, should be understood nominalistically as referring to a group of substantially different individual systems.

A more fundamental approach a realist might take is to abandon realist interpretations of large social things altogether and choose instead to refer realistically to the mechanisms, modular organizations, and interests and actions that make up the large macro structures and systems. This would represent a social realism about underlying processes, forces, and constraints, while adopting a nominalistic view of the higher-level entities. This orientation seems to point back to the view that I call "methodological localism": the view that "the 'molecule' of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rules" (link, link). And it suggests that sociological realism is most clearly justified when applied to social circumstances at the micro- and meso-levels -- not the grand macro level.

This modest version of social realism preserves the key ideas of the objectivity, independence from the observer, and persistence and recurrence in the social world of the object of investigation. And this sustains the primary features of a realist understanding of social research and theorizing. On this more limited interpretation of realism, the social world exists independently from the researcher; causes, actions, incentives, and constraints exist, and social actors interact with each other in a variety of ways. Large structures, however, are too indefinite to count as "real" social entities. They have the shape-shifting status of the forest rather than the trees.

And what about the large structures that many of the critical realists care about the most -- capitalism, mode of production, economic structure, forces of production, bourgeois ideology, ...? It seems reasonable to construe these social things as conceptual constructs or ideal types rather than ontological entities. The "capitalist mode of production" is an intellectual construct, not an independent social reality. It is composed of real social actions, institutions, arrangements, and practices, all of which can be empirically investigated and which are independent from the observer. But when we think of the CMP along the lines of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Althusser, Deng Xiaoping, or Hayek, we are thinking of substantially different ways of conceptualizing the social and economic world. Further, the capitalisms in Britain, Germany, Japan, and post-Communist Poland all have important differences when it comes to their fundamental institutions and dynamics. The CMP is not a single abiding and theory-independent social reality.

Does the "economic structure of the United States" exist? It does, in that there are specific and empirically accessible institutions, relations, actions, and organizations that hang together and persist, and which we intellectually organize as the "economic structure". And yet it does not exist, if by "exist" we mean something solid, unchanging, and specific. As Marx once wrote, "all that is solid melts into air" (link).

(An earlier post considers a different kind of retreat from ambitious realism in the natural sciences, structural realism (link).)

Durkheim's social holism

Emile Durkheim is celebrated for many achievements in the founding of the discipline of sociology, but most striking is his endorsement of the autonomy and irreducibility of the social realm to individual motivation, action, or psychology. "Social facts are things, irreducible to individual psychology." Durkheim was, we are often told, a social holist. This is a tantalizing and puzzling position. Here is a description of social facts offered by Durkheim in Rules of Sociological Method:

Yet social phenomena are things and should be treated as such. To demonstrate this proposition one does not need to philosophize about their nature or to discuss the analogies they present with phenomena of a lower order of existence. Suffice to say that they are the sole datum afforded the sociologist. A thing is in effect all that is given, all that is offered, or rather forces itself upon our observation. To treat phenomena as things is to treat them as data, and this constitutes the starting point for science. Social phe­nomena unquestionably display this characteristic. (Rules, 69)

Social phenomena must therefore be considered in themselves, detached from the conscious beings who form their own mental representations of them. They must be studied from the outside, as external things" because it is in this guise that they present themselves to us. If this quality of externality proves to be only apparent, the illusion will be dissipated as the science progresses and we will see, so to speak, the external merge with the internal. (70)

Here, then, is a category of facts which present very special characteristics: they consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him. Consequently, since they consist of representations and actions, they cannot be confused with organic phenomena, nor with psychical phenomena, which have no existence save in and through the individual consciousness. Thus they constitute a new species and to them must be exclusively assigned the term social. It is appropriate, since it is clear that, not having the individual as their substratum, they can have none other than society, either political society in its entirety or one of the partial groups that it includes -- religious denominations, political and literary schools, occupational corporations, etc. Moreover, it is for such as these alone that the term is fitting, for the word 'social' has the sole meaning of designating those phenomena which fall into none of the categories of facts already constituted and labelled. (52)

Durkheim seems to be quite committed, then, to the full and complete separation between social facts and individual facts. His reasons are unconvincing, however. 

Notice first that these points are entirely apriori. They derive from the idea -- almost Aristotelian in its dogmatism -- that each science must have a distinct and independent domain of things to study; and therefore sociology demands that social facts are distinct from the objects of study of another science -- psychology.

What are those supposed social facts? There are several that Durkheim refers to repeatedly: social conscience or morality; social habits and mores; laws and traditions; political arrangements; and social sentiments such as patriotism. In the simplistic understanding of Durkheim's ontology, these sets of norms, beliefs, values, and practices exist above individuals and constrain and direct their behavior. They cause events at the individual level, but they are not caused by individual-level events or conditions. This is an untenable holism, however. Further, there are important statements in Durkheim's writings that undercut this extravagant holism. For example, consider these comments from the second preface to the Rules:

Yet since society comprises only individuals it seems in accordance with common sense that social life can have no other substratum than the individual consciousness. Otherwise it would seem suspended in the air, floating in the void. (39)

Here he concedes the point that the social world consists only of individuals; but he wants to draw an analogy with the "emergence" of the physical properties of physical ensembles to support the idea that "social facts" are different in kind from individual facts:

The hardness of bronze lies neither in the copper, nor in the tin, nor in the lead which have been used to form it, which are all soft or malleable bodies. The hardness arises from the mixing of them. (39)

By analogy, he suggests that it is plausible to propose that social ensembles -- social facts -- possess properties different in kind from the properties of their parts -- the consciousness and representations of the individuals who make them up.

One is forced to admit that these specific facts reside in the society itself that produces them and not in its parts -- namely its members. In this sense therefore they lie outside the consciousness of individuals as such, in the same way as the distinctive features of life lie outside the chemical substances that make up a living organism. They cannot be reabsorbed into the elements without contradiction. since by definition they presume something other than what those elements contain. (39-40)

This line of thought is unconvincing, however. One giveaway is the phrase "by definition they presume something ...". We cannot learn something substantive about the nature of the world based on our definitions of "social facts" or our delineation of the "scope of sociology". Further, what are these qualitatively and ontologically new properties of the social realm? Social facts are said to be objective, independent, and coercive. They are objective because they persist over time. They are independent, perhaps, because they do not depend on any one individual's psychological content. And they are coercive because it is either impossible or inconvenient for individuals to reject them (for example, the conventions of money and debt). But these are peculiarly easy characteristics to explain in a microfoundational way -- more so even than the physical chemistry of the properties of a metal alloy. Once it is established that one should not spit into his dinner napkin at a formal meal -- a social fact -- the social fact is enforced through the fact that his dinner companions share the aversion, they express their disgust at his behavior, and they take him off future dinner guest lists. The microfoundations for this social norm are straightforward.

Consider another important point stemming from his view in Rules of the education of children:

Moreover, this definition of a social fact can be verified by examining an experience that is characteristic. It is sufficient to observe how children are brought up. If one views the facts as they are and indeed as they have always been, it is patently obvious that all education consists of a continual effort to impose upon the child ways of seeing, thinking and acting which he himself would not have arrived at spontaneously. (Rules, 53)

This passage refers to exactly the feature of social actors that I refer to as being "socially constituted" in my formulation of methodological localism (link). Children are brought to instantiate the beliefs, practices, behaviors, and values of the adults around them, and they in turn become the vehicles for the "social facts" represented by those beliefs and practices in the next turn of the wheel. It is straightforward, then, to provide the microfoundations of the idea that "the rules of polite French Catholic behavior" represent an objective social fact external to the particular beliefs of the individuals of society; once individuals have learned these rules, they become coercive for other individuals in the future. But -- contrary to Durkheim's rhetoric at various points -- there is no fundamental ontological separation between the "social fact of French politesse" and the psychological realities of French individuals. The individuals are shaped by their formative immersion in these rules as instantiated by their elders, and in turn go on to shape the behavior of others.

Durkheim is explicit in rejecting this microfoundational interpretation of social facts:

Thus it is not the fact that they are general which can serve to characterise sociological phenomena. Thoughts to be found in the consciousness of each individual and movements which are repe­ated by all individuals are not for this reason social facts. If some have been content with using this characteristic in order to define them it is because they have been confused, wrongly, with what might be termed their individual incarnations. What constitutes social facts are the beliefs, tendencies and practices of the group taken collectively. (54)

But this is a purely semantic point. Durkheim is insistent that French politesse is a social fact that is distinct from the psychological facts of French individuals because it is a feature of the ensemble taken collectively, not simply a conjunction of facts about individual psychology. It is what we might call a "category mistake" to confuse the two levels. 

We might say anachronistically that Durkheim would have emphatically rejected the picture of the social world involved in Coleman's boat (link), and would also have rejected the idea that social statements require microfoundations. He might possibly have accepted ontological individualism (as the passage from the second preface suggests), but would have endorsed some kind of emergentism. Social characteristics are different in kind from individual psychological characteristics. But, as we have seen elsewhere, emergentism can be formulated in a weak and a strong version (link); and the strong version is fundamentally mysterious. The weak version maintains that higher-level properties are different from lower-level properties but can in principle be explained by the lower-level properties; the strong version denies that the higher-level properties can be explained by the lower-level properties at all. And this sounds very much like a sociological version of vitalism. Durkheim is not forced to defend strong emergentism.

In his substantive and insightful introduction to Rules Steven Lukes summarizes his own assessment of these issues in terms that still seem correct to me:

But the [holistic] view makes little sense as a positive methodological principle. Every macro-theory presupposes, whether implicitly or explicitly, a micro-theory to back; up its explanations: in Durkheim's terms, social causes can only produce these, rather than those, social effects, if individuals act and react and interact in these ways rather than those. (17)

These arguments seem to lead to a pair of conclusions. First, Durkheim's strenuous and repeated privileging of the independence of "social facts" should not be understood as a demonstration of the complete causal independence of social facts from individual representations; rather, his emphasis on this point seems to derive from his polemical goal of establishing sociology as an entirely independent science. But this is not a valid reason for drawing conclusions about ontology. Second, it is entirely possible to offer an account of the relationship between social-level and individual-level descriptions that joins them. Whether he would acknowledge the point or not, Durkheim's social ontology does not provide any basis for believing that claims about causation at the social level cannot be instantiated through some account of the actions and representations of individual actors at a time and place. We can put the point more strongly: Durkheim's sociology no less than Weber's or Marx's requires a theory of the micro-macro connection. Further, Durkheim sometimes appears to acknowledge this point (for example, in his treatment of education of children). Therefore Durkheim does not provide a basis -- philosophical, theoretical, or empirical -- for defending social holism.