Levels of the social

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organizations and strategic action fields

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is "critical" about critical realism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New thinking about social systems

There is a great deal of important international work underway today within the philosophy of social science on the general topic of social ontology. How do social structures relate to the actions of socially situated actors? How does causation work in the social realm? Can we say anything rigorous about the nature of "levels" of the social world -- micro, meso, and macro? And is there such a thing as an "emergent" social property or entity?

Sociologists and philosophers in Germany, Scandinavia, the UK, Belgium, France, Italy, and North America have undertaken serious work on these topics, and they constitute a dynamic network of thinking and debating. Some of the longstanding dualities in philosophy and sociology are questioned: individualism versus holism, micro versus macro, analytic versus continental, structure versus agent. Sociologists whose dispositions incline towards the importance of social structures are convening with rational choice theorists and game theorists; analytic sociologists are debating ontology with emergentists; and the field is displaying an energetic and productive degree of ferment.

The people whose work I am thinking of here are a motley group: Peter Hedstrom, Hans Joas, Petri Ylikoski, Bert Leuridan, Margaret Archer, Gianluca Manzo, Philippo Barbera, Pierre Demeulenaere, Julian Reiss, Rainer Greshoff, Dave Elder-Vass, Jeroen Van Bouwel, Mohamed Cherkaoui, ... And it is roughly as challenging to keep clearly in mind the manifold debates that are unfolding as it is to watch the Indianapolis 500 as the cars rocket by at 200 miles an hour. Some of these contributors are long-established scholars with huge reputations; others are young scholars with wickedly sharp minds and awesome work habits. And frankly, I'm at least as impressed with the younger generation as the elder.

One recent book that stands out as a key contribution that permits a degree of geolocation within these tangled debates is Poe Wan's Reframing the Social: Emergentist Systemism and Social Theory. Wan seems to have read every word of the debates, and he is ready to help interested parties take stock of the various theoretical perspectives.

The key axis in Wan's work -- here and elsewhere -- is that defined by Niklas Luhmann and Mario Bunge on the topic of emergent social systems. Wan is persuaded that social properties are "emergent" in some important sense, and he also seems to believe that the ideas of system and complexity are important components of our vocabulary for social ontology. But how should we understand these ideas? Luhmann's theory tends towards the position of holism, whereas Bunge's position allows that there is an intelligible connection between upper-level properties and micro-level facts and he focuses his theory of explanation on finding underlying mechanisms of various social outcomes. Wan refers to Bunge's approach as "rational emergentism" (68). Wan is respectful towards each of these theories, but he clearly favors that put forward by Bunge. Like Bunge, Wan too favors the focus on mechanisms; he admires Bunge's insistence on paying attention to the details of existing research in the natural and social sciences; and most importantly, he endorses Bunge's view that our theories of "emergent" social phenomena must be grounded in a theory of the actor.

Here is how Wan characterizes Bunge's systems theory and its relationship to a theory of the actor:

Bunge's emergentist systemism is best construed as a version of action-systems theory ..., because Bunge states explicitly that "the features of a social system depend upon the nature, strength, and variability of social relations, which in turn are reducible to social actions." (6)

And Wan believes that Bunge's approach provides a robust way of conceptualizing the nature of the social realm:

In Chapter 5 I argue for a systems approach that is ontologically sound (that is to say, transcending both holism [macro-reductionism] and individualism [micro-reductionism]), with due consideration given to the role of human factors and their actions in designing, maintaining, improving, repairing or dismantling social systems. (10)

Wan also believes that Bunge's CESM model is a helpful one for thinking about social ontology and explanation.  This model incorporates composition, environment, structure, and mechanisms. For a given social entity we want to know what it is composed of; what are the features of the environment within which it functions; how is it arranged internally; and how does it work (55).

Another important part of Wan's approach is his affinity with the social theories of the critical realists -- Bhaskar, Archer, Elder-Vass. Fundamentally this comes down to the view that social structures have real causal powers, along the lines of Rom Harre's meaning of this term (110, 119, 121).

Reframing the Social is an important contribution to current debates about the nature of the social. And I agree with him that the question of social ontology is a fundamental one; perhaps more so than the issues of the epistemology of the social sciences that have generally played first violin. Further, Wan does a good job of showing how these debates are relevant to the emerging framework of analytical sociology -- sometimes in ways that cast doubt on some of the guiding presuppositions of that field. In particular, the aggregative strategy of explanation that is favored by AS is questionable once we give credence to the idea that social structures possess autonomous causal powers. Along with Dave Elder-Vass's The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency, this book stands as an important alternative to Hedstrom's Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology.

Here is a nice passage from the preface to the second edition of Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method that Wan quotes on the subject of emergence:

Whenever elements of any kind combine, by virtue of this combination they give rise to new phenomena. One is therefore forced to conceive of these phenomena as residing, not in the elements, but in the entity formed by the union of these elements. The living cell contains nothing save chemical particles, just as society is made up of nothing except individuals. Yet it is very clearly impossible for the characteristic phenomena of Iife to reside in atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. For how could living movements arise from amidst non-living elements? Furthermore, how would biological properties be allocated amongst these elements? They could not be found equally in them all, since they are not of the same nature: carbon is not nitrogen and thus cannot possess the same properties or play the same part. It is no less unacceptable for every facet of life, for each of its main characteristics, to be incorporated in a distinct group of atoms. Life cannot be split up in this fashion. It is one, and consequently cannot be located save in the living substance in its entirety. It is in the whole and not in the parts. It is not the non-living particles of the cell which feed themselves and reproduce – in a word, which live; it is the cell itself and it alone. And what we maintain regarding life could be reaffirmed for every possible kind of synthesis. 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. The liquidity of water, its sustaining and other properties, are not in the two gases of which it is composed, but in the complex substance which they form by coming together. 

Let us apply this principle to sociology. If, as is granted to us, this synthesis sui generis, which constitutes every society, gives rise to new phenomena, different from those which occur in conscious­nesses in isolation, 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. Thus yet another reason justifies the distinction we have established later between psychology proper — the science of the individual mind ­ and sociology. Social facts differ not only in quality from psychical facts; they have a different substratum, they do not evolve in the same environment or depend on the same conditions. (Rules of Sociological Method (S. Lukes, ed.) 1982:39-40)

(It is noteworthy that the passage raises many difficult questions, including the vitalism that Durkheim presupposes.)

Supervenience of the social?

I have found it appealing to try to think of the macro-micro relation in terms of the idea of supervenience (link).  Supervenience is a concept that was developed in the context of physicalism and psychology, as a way of specifying a non-reductionist but still constraining relationship between psychological properties and physical states of the brain. Physicalism and ontological individualism are both ontological theories about the relationship between higher and lower levels of entities in several different domains. But neither doctrine dictates how explanations in these domains need to proceed; i.e., neither forces us to be reductionist in either psychology or sociology.

The supervenience relation holds that --

• X supervenes on Y =df no difference in X without some difference in the states of Y

Analogously, to say that the "social" supervenes upon "the totality of individuals making up a social arrangement" seems to have a superficial plausibility, without requiring that we attempt to reduce the social characteristics to ensembles of facts about individuals.

I'm no longer so sure that this is a helpful move, however, for the purposes of the macro-micro relationship.  Suppose we are considering a statement along these lines:

• The causal properties of organization X supervene on the states of the individuals who make up X and who interact with X.

There seem to be quite a few problems that arise when we try to make use of this idea.

(a) First, what are we thinking of when we specify "the states of the individuals"? Is it all characteristics, known and unknown? Or is it a specific list of characteristics? If it is all characteristics of the individual, including as-yet unknown characteristics, then the supervenience relation is impossible to apply in practice. We would never know whether two substrate populations were identical all the way down. This represents a kind of "twin-earth" thought experiment that doesn't shed light on real sociological questions.

In the psychology-neurophysiology examples out of which supervenience theory originated these problems don't seem so troubling. First, we think we know which properties of nerve cells are relevant to their functioning: electrical properties and network connections. So our supervenience claim for psychological states is more narrow:

• The causal properties of a psychological process supervene on the functional properties of the states of the nerve cells of the corresponding brain. 

The nerve cells may differ in other ways that are irrelevant to the psychological processes at the higher level: they may be a little larger or smaller, they may have a slightly different content of trace metals, they may be of different ages. But our physicalist claim is generally more refined than this; it ignores these "irrelevant" differences across cells and specifies identity among the key functional characteristics of the cells. Put this way, the supervenience claim is an empirical theory; it says that electrical properties and network connections are causally relevant to psychological processes, but cell mass and cell age are not (within broad parameters).

(b) Second and relatedly, there are always some differences between two groups of people, no matter how similar; and if the two groups are different in the slightest degree -- say, one member likes ice cream and the corresponding other does not -- then the supervenience relation says nothing about the causal properties of X. The organizational features may be as widely divergent as could be imagined; supervenience is silent about the delta to epsilon relations from substrate to higher level. It specifies only that identical substrates produce identical higher level properties. More useful would be something like the continuity concept in calculus to apply here: small deviations in lower-level properties result in small deviations in higher-level properties. But it is not clear that this is true in the social case.

(c) Also problematic for the properties of social structures is an issue that depends upon the idea of path dependence. Let's say that we are working with the idea that a currently existing institution depends for its workings (its properties) on the individuals who make it up at present. And suppose that the institution has emerged through a fifty-year process of incremental change, while populated at each step by approximately similar individuals. The well-established fact of path dependence in the evolution of institutions (Thelen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan) entails that the properties of the institution today are not uniquely determined by the features of the individuals currently involved in the institution in its various stages. Rather there were shaping events that pushed the evolution of the institution in this direction or that at various points in time. This means that the current properties of the institution are not best explained by the current properties of the substrate individuals at present, but rather by the history of development that led this population to this point.

It will still be true that the workings of the institution at present are dependent on the features of the individuals at present; but the path-dependency argument says that those individuals will have adjusted in small ways so as to embody the regulative system of the institution in its current form, without becoming fundamentally different kinds of individuals. Chiefly they will have internalized slightly different systems of rules that embody the current institution, and this is what gives the institution its characteristic mode of functioning in the present.

So explanation of the features of the institution in the present is not best couched in terms of the current characteristics of the individuals who make it up, but rather by an historical account of the path that led to this point (and the minute changes in individual beliefs and behaviors that went along with this).

These concerns make me less satisfied with the general idea of supervenience as a way of specifying the relation between social structures and substrate individuals. What would satisfy me more would be something like this:

• Social structures supervene upon the states of individuals in the substrate described at a given level of granularity corresponding to our current theory of the actor.
• Small differences in the substrate will produce only small differences in the social structure.

These add up to a strong claim; they entail that any organization with similar rules of behavior involving roughly similar actors (according to the terms of our best theory of the actor) will have roughly similar causal properties. And this in turn invites empirical investigation through comparative methods.

As for the path-dependency issue raised in comment (c), perhaps this is the best we can say: the substrate analysis of the behavior of the individuals tells us how the institution works, but the historical account of the path-dependent process through which the institution came to have the characteristics it currently has tells us why it works this way. And these are different kinds of explanations.

The heterogeneous social?

image: screenshot from video, "A Bird Ballet"

I've argued in several places that we need to think of the social world as being radically heterogeneous (link, link, link). There are multiple processes, things, structures, and temporalities at work, and what we perceive at a moment in time in the social world is a complex composite of these various things. The social world is not a unified system; it is not a manifestation of a unified underlying process; it is not a unity at all.

What does this claim about the social world mean in concrete terms? And what are the implications for the social sciences? Consider a few examples of complex social wholes:

• the industrial revolution, 1700-1850
• the rise of Al Qaeda, 1970-2001
• urbanization in China, 1600-1700
• Chicago as a functioning city, 2000
• the University of Illinois, 1971
• being Muslim in Toronto, 1990 

These examples are themselves heterogeneous. Some are extended historical processes; others are synchronic sets of social facts; others are institutions and social environments at a time; yet others are states of social identities at a time. But the fact about heterogeneity that I want to focus on here is internal: for each social phenomenon, there are heterogeneous components and sub-processes that make it up and that generally have their own dynamics and properties.

First, where is the heterogeneity in these examples?

The industrial revolution is not one thing; it is rather a confluence of developments in technology, markets, habitation, ideology, labor practices, scientific institutions, natural resources, and numerous other social features that change over time. And the outcomes of "industrial revolution" are not uniform over regions, nations, sectors, or industries. Different parts of Britain had different experiences; and these experiences and outcomes are in turn different from those in Sweden or Italy.

Likewise, early-modern urbanization of Chinese cities is a the result of a complex ensemble of processes. We can summarize the outcome by a measure of the percentage of people living in cities greater than 100,000 at a certain moment in time. But the causes, processes, environmental factors, and institutions through which this transformation took place were highly diverse; and the cities that resulted were diverse as well. (G. William Skinner charts out much of this diversity in a number of works; The City in Late Imperial China.)

Or take Chicago in 2000. The social whole is a composite of population, institutions, political processes, demographic transitions, transportation networks, employment systems, and policing practices -- and many other factors I haven't mentioned. And if we were to ask a question along these lines -- why did Chicago come to function in 2000 in the fashion that it did? -- we would have to consider all of these processes and their composite effects, and their interactions with each other. There is no single answer to the question, "what is Chicago and how does it work?".

Being Muslim at a time and place is likewise deeply heterogeneous. Individuals, families, sub-groups, and institutions differ -- from Iowa to Ontario, and within communities and across mosques. Individuals differ in ways that are both personal and institutional. So there is no single identity that is "Muslim in Toronto"; rather, there is an ensemble of people, groups, and social organizations which in the composite represent "the many identities of Muslims in Toronto."

In fact, it seems to me that heterogeneity comes into each of these examples in a variety of ways. There are:

• multiple causes at work
• multiple expressions of ethnic / cultural identity
• multiple purposes and understandings on the parts of participants
• multiple sub-institutions with different profiles and dynamics
• multiple outcomes or macro-characteristics that are denoted by the term

So the constitution and dynamics of social phenomena reflect diverse kinds of things and processes.

So where does "science" come into this picture? Is it possible to have a scientific understanding of a heterogeneous phenomenon?

Here is one possible strategy. We might hope that the sub-components of heterogeneous entities might have separable dynamics of development; so even though the city simpliciter does not have an inherent dynamic of development or functioning, its subsystems do. In this case we might say that a scientific analysis of the whole involves a separate scientific theory of the components and a synthetic effort to show how they interact.

But this approach is perhaps too generous to the power of analysis; it seems to presuppose that we can disassemble a complex and heterogeneous whole into a discrete set of reasonably homogeneous components, each of which can be treated scientifically and separately. The thesis above, though, was fairly comprehensive: "all social phenomena are heterogeneous". So that seems to imply that the results of analysis lead us to a set of components that are themselves heterogeneous -- a heterogeneity regress! And this paradoxical conclusion actually seems to be true in a very practical sense: when we disaggregate "Chicago" into "political institutions," "policing institutions," "economic institutions / market system", and the like -- we again encounter social units that have internal variation and heterogeneity.

Could we at least argue that analysis reduces complexity to a certain extent, and that the components are more amenable to scientific and causal theorizing than the whole? This more modest claim does seem to be defensible. Take the processes underlying "industrial revolution". It is possible to offer a reasonably rigorous study of the development of scientific knowledge and the institutions through which knowledge is created and disseminated, in ways that are less complex that the whole with which we began. Likewise, we can offer specialized study of the "making of the English working class" that includes some of the factors that influenced labor and politics during the period -- thereby making a contribution to a better understanding of the complex whole, industrial revolution.

In an odd way this line of thought seems to bring us back to one of the oldest debates in the history of philosophy going back to the pre-Socratic philosophers: does "nature" have a "nature"? The atomists believed that the complexity of the observed world depended ultimately on the simple properties of the components; whereas philosophers like Heraclitus maintained that nature consisted of "flux" all the way down.

(The  video mentioned at the top, "A Bird Ballet," is beautiful and surprising. But I'm not certain that it fully illustrates the point I'm making about the social world. The ensemble of starlings depicted here shows a startling reality of shifting shapes and motions over time. The viewer is led to ask, how did this ensemble of thousands of organisms come to have this graceful and shifting dynamic?" So far it is a good analogy to the social. But an animal behavior specialist is likely to be able to give us a pretty simple explanation of how the individual-level flight behavior interacts across birds in flight, and results in the swarming behavior documented here. In this respect the swarm is simpler than the "heterogeneity all the way down" picture that I'm putting forward for complex social phenomena. Still, it is a powerful example of "wholes" that are less unified than they first appear.)

Rationale for the philosophy of social science

The philosophy of social science is one of the smaller sub-disciplines of philosophy, and many universities have only a single course in the subject. In contrast to larger fields such as ethics or epistemology, the philosophy of social science involves a much smaller part of the intellectual spectrum and audience within the field of philosophy. So how is this discipline defined by scholars who help to constitute it today? What are some of the intellectual challenges that drive the field forward?

One way to proceed in trying to answer these questions is to take a quick look at the descriptions of the field offered by other philosophers in recent books and collections. There has been a lot of activity in the field in the past decade, so we have a lot to work with.

Here is how Daniel Steel and Francesco Guala motivate the subject in their 2011 collection, The Philosophy of Social Science Reader:

Social science studies topics -- such as economic growth, employment, crime, social inequality, cultural conflicts, and so on -- matter to almost everyone, and philosophy is important to social science. For example, there is little consensus across the social sciences as to basic methods, aims, and fundamental assumptions about human beings, and disputes on such topics are inevitably linked to long-standing discussions in philosophy. The answer to the second question [why to publish a new anthology] is that the philosophy of social science has changed quite dramatically over the last two decades. So a new anthology is required to keep track of the best research, and to map the moving boundaries of this important subfield of philosophy. (1)

They single out four major themes to characterize how the field has moved in the past two decades -- disunity, interdisciplinary, naturalism, and values. And their volume is organized around seven parts: "Values and social science," "Causal inference and explanation," "Interpretation," "Rationality and choice," "Methodological individualism," "Norms, conventions, and institutions," and "Cultural evolution."

In his more specialized collection in 2009, Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and Scientific Practice, Chris Mantzavinos offers this description of the field:

Philosophy of science examines "scientific knowledge." It tries to illuminate the specific characteristics of science, the way it is produced, the historical dimensions of science, and the normative criteria at play in appraising science…. The philosophy of the social sciences, on the other hand, traditional deals with such problems as the role of understanding (Verstehen) in apprehending social phenomena, the status of rational choice theory, the role of experiments in the social sciences, the logical status of game theory, as well as whether there are genuine laws of social phenomena or rather social mechanisms to be discovered, the historicity of the social processes, etc.  (1)

Mantzavinos's organizing topics include: "Basic problems of sociality," "Laws and explanation in the social sciences," and "How philosophy and the social sciences can enrich each other." The first has to do with social ontology; the second has to do with explanation; and the third has to do with cross-over problems that affect both social science and philosophy (cooperation; virtuous behavior; and the hermeneutic circle).

Mantzavinos correctly emphasizes the importance of linking the work of philosophers on these topics to the practices of working social scientists:

The enterprise is motivated by the view that the philosophy of the social sciences cannot ignore the specific scientific practices according to which scientific work is being conducted in the social sciences and will only be valuable if it evolves in constant interaction with the theoretical developments in the social sciences. (1)

 Ian Jarvie and Jesus Zamora-Bonilla's very interesting 2011 collection, The SAGE Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences, is another important recent compendium in the philosophy of social science. Jarvie describes the discipline in more encompassing terms in his introduction to the volume:

As a set of problems, the philosophy of the social sciences is wide-ranging, untidy, inter-disciplinary and constantly being reconfigured in response to new problems thrown up by developments in the social sciences; in short, disorderly. As an institutionalised discipline, by contrast, philosophy of the social sciences emerged from the academic division of labour that fosters specialization and professionalization, that is, order and discipline. There is always a tension between the unruliness of intellectual inquiry and the urge towards order and discipline. (1)

Jarvie offers some interesting observations of the historical path that the discipline of the philosophy of social science has taken. He provides a perspective that is intermediate between philosophy and sociology of science; he is interested in characterizing both the intellectual influences that pushed the field and some of the institutions within which the field developed.

The field is already big enough to be fragmented. Three rough divisions would be: literatures deriving from economics and politics; from psychology and from sociology, anthropology and history. Those interested in economics lay much stress on testability, methodological individualism and rational choice. By contrast the latter group is much given to discussing causation in history and society, the nature of social wholes, problems of meaning and the social construction of reality. Psychology is an area where much of the discussion we might think of as philosophy of the social sciences is carried out in the pages of its own journals. (5)

Jarvie also provides a very interesting table of topics are they are represented in anthologies in the philosophy of social science from 1953 to 2007 (Table 1.2).

It is interesting to observe that scholars in other fields have tried to understand the history of the logic of the social sciences in quite different terms than those adopted by philosophers. George Steinmetz is a good example. He is a highly talented and innovative historical sociologist who has made very important contributions to issues about methodology and theory within sociology. (A particularly interesting journal article is "Odious Comparisons: Incommensurability, the Case Study, and 'Small N's' in Sociology"; link.) Steinmetz's 2005 collection on the influence of positivism in the social sciences, The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others, is well worth considering as a sociologist's version of the philosophy of social science anthologies considered above. And the gist of the volume and the methodologies pursued are quite different. Here is Steinmetz's description of the purpose of the volume:

This collection explores the vicissitudes of positivism and its epistemological others in the contemporary human sciences. The volume's overarching goal is to provide a mapping of the contemporary human sciences from the standpoint of their explicit and especially their implicit epistemologies, asking about the differences and similarities among and within these disciplines' epistemological cultures. Taken together, the essays provide a portrait of epistemology and methodology (writ large) in the contemporary social sciences. (1)

So the volume is about the logic and epistemology of the social sciences. But it is also about the concrete sociological history of the development of the social science disciplines:

This book also offers the rudiments of a comparative historical narrative of these disciplinary developments since the beginning of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the period beginning with World War II. Recent writing has pointed not just to the present-day conjuncture of epistemological uncertainty but also to the middle decades of the twentieth century as critical moments in the transformation of the social sciences' deep culture. (1)

There is also a substantive final goal for the volume: to lay the conceptual space necessary to conceive of alternatives to the positivist framework for social science theorizing.

The other overarching aim of this book is to survey the landscape of alternatives to positivism in the human sciences. (2)

The volume provides a number of interesting perspectives by very talented sociologists on these topics, including especially contributions by Margaret Somers, William Sewell, Andrew Collier, Michael Burawoy, Sandra Harding, and Andrew Abbott. Each of them turns our attention a quarter-turn away from highly abstract conceptual research, to a nuanced effort to understand how ideas, institutions, and frameworks have played out in the social sciences in the past fifty years.

Here is my own statement of why the philosophy of social science is important, included in my contribution "Philosophy of Sociology" in Fritz Allhoff's 2010 collection, Philosophies of the Sciences: A Guide:

The importance of the philosophy of social science derives from two things: first, the urgency and complexity of the challenges posed by the poorly understood social processes that surround us in twenty-first century society, and second, the unsettled status of our current understanding of the logic of social science knowledge and explanation. We need the best possible research and explanation to be conducted in the social sciences, and current social science inquiry falls short. We need a better-grounded understanding of the social, political, and behavioral phenomena that make up the modern social world. Moreover, the goals and primary characteristics of a successful social science are still only partially understood. What do we want from the social sciences? And how can we best achieve these cognitive and practical goals? There are large and unresolved philosophical questions about the logic of social science knowledge and theory on the basis of which to arrive at that understanding. And philosophy can help articulate better answers to these questions. So philosophy can play an important role in the development of the next generation of social science disciplines. (295)

It appears that there are important differences in the approaches to understanding the role of the philosophy of social science contained in these various passages. There is a fairly traditional "history of thought" approach, that attempts to document the way in which this sub-discipline took shape within the larger discipline of philosophy. There is a "sociology of ideas" approach that tries to link certain research traditions to a given set of research institutions and larger social priorities. And there is a philosophical approach that tries to work out what questions really are most pressing when we consider the challenges of the social sciences.

(The graphics at the top illustrate several very different ways of trying to make sense of a disparate set of related academic disciplines.)

Social embeddedness and methodological localism

Methodological localism emphasizes two ways in which actors are socially embedded. Actors are socially situated and socially constituted.

Socially situated. In any given situation individuals are embedded within a set of social relations and institutions that create opportunities and costs for them. They have friends and enemies, they have bosses and workers, they have neighbors and co-religionists, they have families. All of these relations and institutions serve to constitute the environment within which they make plans and perform their actions. This complex setting of opportunities and regulative systems falls at the center of research for the new institutionalism (Brinton and Nee 1998, The New Institutionalism in Sociology; Ostrom 1990, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action ). And, as the new institutionalists rightly insist, there are very important variations across social space in the details of the workings of institutions and social networks. Two adjacent California counties may have slightly different rules of livestock liability; and these rule differences will lead to different patterns of behavior by ranchers (Ellickson 1986, "Of Coase and Cattle"; link). We might call this the "structure" factor.

Socially constituted. The second form of social embeddedness is deeper and more persistent. The individual’s values, commitments, emotions, social ideals, repertoires of action, scripts of behavior, and ways of conceiving of the world are themselves the products of a lifetime of local social experiences. Individuals are socialized throughout their childhoods and adult lives into specific ways of thinking and acting, and the mosaic of these experiences serves to constitute the moral, emotional, and practical characteristics of the individual’s social-cognitive system. The way the individual thinks about the social world is itself a feature of his/her social setting. Moreover, the mechanisms of socialization—schools, religious institutions, military experience, playgrounds, families—are themselves concrete social phenomena that are amenable to empirical sociological investigation, and they too are locally embodied. If we want to know why affluent Pakistani teenagers applauded on Facebook the murder of Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer for his opposition to harsh blasphemy laws, then we need to look in detail at the ways in which the political and religious attitudes of this segment of Pakistani society took shape (link). We might call this the "identity" factor.

These two aspects of embeddedness provide the foundation for rather different kinds of social explanation and inquiry.  The first aspect of social embeddedness is entirely compatible with a neutral and universal theory of the agent -- including rational choice theory in all its variants.  The actor is assumed to be configured in the same way in all social contexts; what differs is the environment of constraint and opportunity that he or she confronts.  This is in fact the approach taken by most scholars in the paradigm of the new institutionalism, it is the framework offered by James Coleman in Foundations of Social Theory, and it is also compatible with what analytical sociologists refer to as "structural individualism". It also supports the model of "aggregative" explanation -- explain an outcome as the result of the purposive actions of individuals responding to opportunities and constraints.

The second aspect, by contrast, assumes that human actors are to some important degree "plastic", and they take shape in different ways in different social settings.  The developmental context -- the series of historically specific experiences the individual has as he/she develops personality and identity -- leads to important variations in personality and agency in different settings. So just knowing that the local social structure has a certain set of characteristics -- the specifics of a share-cropping regime, let us say -- doesn't allow us to infer how things will work out. We also need to know the features of identity, perception, motivation, and reasoning that characterize the local people before we can work out how they will process the features of the structure in which they find themselves. This insight suggests a research approach that drills down into the specific features of agency that are at work in a situation, and then try to determine how actors with these features will interact socially and collectively.

If both actors and structures differ substantially across social settings, then there are many possible pathways that interactions and processes can take. Suppose for the sake of example that there are three "types" of actors:

1. prudent, self-interested, calculating
2. strongly attached to religious duty
3. strongly attached to norms of social solidarity and perceived fairness

Now suppose we are interested in working out the likely consequences of a certain social situation -- let us say, a call for a workers' strike in resistance to the company's cutting wages. Mancur Olson's classic argument in The Logic of Collective Action considers exactly this kind of case based on assumptions reflecting the first form of agency, and he concludes that collective action will fail. So the prediction is that the call for a strike will fail. But what if a significant number of workers are type-3 actors? In this case the likelihood of successful collective action is much greater, because organizers can demonstrate that all workers are better off if the group maintains solidarity, and that it is unfair to withhold support while others are coming forward. This argument doesn't affect the type-1 actor; but it does motivate the type-3 actor.

So what are the social circumstances in which we are likely to find type-3 actors rather than type-1 actors? It has sometimes been maintained that miners have a high degree of solidarity relative to other groups of workers. They have shared circumstances of risk underground that make them viscerally aware of their dependence on the support of others; they have a culture of songs and stories that favor solidarity; and they have a history of successful collective action. So the argument is that children who grow up in this environment confront a converging set of influences that amplify the "solidarity" functions of agency and damp down the "me-first" functions. Miner communities, then, cultivate a particular kind of actors. (A book that tries to do a more careful job of evaluating miners' solidarity is Roy Church and Quentin Outram, Strikes and Solidarity: Coalfield Conflict in Britain, 1889-1966, reviewed here.)

Methodological localism and actor-centered sociology

I've advocated in earlier posts for two related ideas: the idea of actor-centered sociology and the idea of methodological localism. The first idea recommends that sociologists couch their research and theories in terms of more specific and nuanced theories of the actors whose thoughts and actions make up the social processes of interest. The second idea is an alternative to the equally unappealing doctrines of methodological individualism and holism. According to methodological localism, the "molecule" of the social world is the socially constituted, socially situated actor in ongoing relationships with other social actors. This is a conception of social reality that is social all the way down; it conceives of the individual actor within a set of social relationships as the basic unit of social phenomena.

Examination of some important work in sociology and neighboring fields in the past several decades shows that the actor-centered approach corresponds pretty well to the research approach taken by a number of innovative investigators. Here are a few examples: C. K. Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt; Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing; George Steinmetz, The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa; Al Young, The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances; Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Each of these research projects makes significant use of more nuanced theories of the actor as an important part of the analysis and explanations offered.

These examples validate the usefulness of several of the key imperatives of the doctrine of methodological localism: in particular, emphasis on the centrality of the socially situated and socially constructed actor within more complex social processes. Methodological localism implies that we need to be cautious about over-simplifying the mentality of the actor—not simply a utility maximizing egoist, not simply a norm-driven robot, not simply an adherent of a religious worldview.

Instead, it is often useful to pay attention to the details and the differences that we find in the historical setting of important social processes and outcomes and the forms of mentality these create: the specific forms of education received by scientists, the specific social environment in which prospective administrators were socialized, the specific mental frameworks associated with this or that historically situated community. These details help us to do a much better job of understanding how the actors perceived social situations and how they chose to act within them.

And likewise, it is often useful to pay attention to the regulative and incentive-generating context within which actors constructed their actions. This is the role that the intellectual and policy field plays in Steinmetz’s account; it is also the role that specific property and contract arrangements play in the new institutionalism and Elinor Ostrom. And both Bourdieu and the new institutionalists are right that small differences in the institutional setting can result in large differences in outcome, as actors respond to institutions and incentives to pursue their ends. So paying close and detailed attention to the particulars of the institutions of career, economic opportunity, family, power, and prestige allows us to perceive the causes of important differences in outcomes.

In short, it seems that sociology has a lot to gain by paying more attention to the specifics of the actors whose thinking and actions constitute the social processes of interest to them. This advice does not imply reductionism; it is entirely legitimate for sociologists to make use of causal claims at a variety of levels. But it does imply that there is substantive and valuable work to be done in almost every field of sociology at the level of the actor. Sociology gains when researchers attempt to gain a more nuanced understanding of the constitutions and situations of the actors with whom they are concerned.

To be sure, not all research in sociology takes this approach. And in fact there is very good recent work in sociology that doesn't pay much attention to the actor. A good example of this category is Robert Sampson's Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect.  Sampson's approach has everything to do with the behavior of particular actors in particular circumstances. He wants to show that we can identify certain patterns of causation that exist in urban street-scapes that are amenable to quantitative investigation.  But his research is not particularly socio-ethnographic; no interviews, no attempt to capture the states of mentality of the urban young people who make up the neighborhoods he studies.  The level of analysis that he has chosen is largely higher than the individual actors -- the meso-level environmental and organizational features that appear to have an effect on collective behavior. And one of his main methodological contributions is to oppose the idea that urban phenomena can be derived from facts about the individuals who make up a neighborhood or city. So Sampson's research and explanations are evidently not "actor-centered." But I think that Sampson's work is compatible nonetheless with the thesis of methodological localism, though this is less clear. Sampson insists that the neighborhood-level characteristics have causal consequences that do not disaggregate into individual-level patterns. But this can be understood in the "relative explanatory autonomy" interpretation offered elsewhere (link): microfoundations exist for these effects, but it isn't necessary to trace them through in order to validate the causal linkage at the neighborhood level.

These observations suggest that the status of these two big ideas is rather different. The idea of "actor-centered" sociology shouldn't be understood as a general prescription for all sociological research, but rather as simply a promising line of investigation as we try to shed light on various social processes and outcomes.  The idea of methodological localism, on the other hand, is a fairly general ontological claim about what the social world is made up of, and it is intended as a general premise for how we think about all social phenomena.  It doesn't entail a particular theory of explanation, but it does provide a general account of the constitution of social phenomena. And it has implications for how we should think about the micro-composition of social causation.

Simon on complexity

Herbert Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial - 3rd Edition provided an alternative model for thinking about society. We can think of social institutions as partially designed and selected for their organizational properties; so they are different from proteins and planetary systems.  Simon is also an important contributor to the study of complexity. So his new chapter in the 1996 edition of the book, "Alternative Views of Complexity," is worth reading carefully. Here is how he motivates this new chapter in SA:

The preceding chapters of this book have discussed several kinds of artificial systems. The examples we have examined -- in particular, economic systems, the business firm, the human mind, sophisticated engineering designs, and social plans -- range from the moderately to the exceedingly complex (not necessarily in the order in which I have just listed them). These final two chapters address the topic of complexity more generally, to see what light it casts on the structure and operation of these and other large systems that are prominent in our world today. (169)

It turns out that there isn't much new in the 1996 chapter, however. In fact, most of its content is taken from his pathbreaking 1962 article, "The Architecture of Complexity" (link). The new chapter 7 and renumbered chapter 8 largely incorporate the content and sometimes the language of the 1962 article. And this is interesting, because it implies that Simon's primary ideas about reduction, composition, and inter-level interactions were largely already formed in 1962.

There are a few ideas and themes that are new to the 1996 version. One is a more specific periodization of thinking about complexity theory in the twentieth century.  The 1996 version identifies three phases of theorizing about complexity and "whole systems".

1. Biological emergence theory (post World War I)
2. Cybernetics and systems theory (post World War II)
3. Contemporary complexity theory (post 1960s)

Simon is skeptical about the tendency towards irreducible holism that was associated with the earlier two phases of thinking in both versions; in the 1996 chapter he favors a "weak" interpretation of emergence: a commitment to ...

... reductionism in principle even though it is not easy (often not even computationally feasible) to infer rigorously the properties of the whole from knowledge of the properties of the parts. In this pragmatic way, we can build nearly independent theories for each successive level of complexity, but at the same time, build bridging theories that show how each higher level can be accounted for in terms of the elements and relations of the next level down. (172)

This "pragmatic holism" is already contained in the 1962 version (link). So this doesn't represent new ground in 1996. But Simon's use of this idea to criticize several false starts in the field of complexity research is valuable.

Simon finds some of the central concepts of the third phase to be more promising for the study of social phenomena. The mathematics and physics of chaotic behavior (where simple low-level processes can aggregate to wildly variant higher-level outcomes), simulations of evolution through computational models (genetic algorithms), and the exploration of cellular autonoma (the game of life) all come in for favorable comments. (The Lorenz attractor illustrated here is a common example of chaotic behavior.)

One idea that is not contained in the 1962 version is that of causal non-linearity. Non-linearity is a problem for the "near decomposability" view that Simon wanted to take of complexity in the 1962 version, because it casts doubt on the ability to disentangle causal influences deriving from inter-connected subsystems. Small differences in initial conditions can lead to large differences in outcome. This is a key aspect of chaos theory and the varieties of turbulent phenomena that provide the best examples of chaotic systems. And this casts some doubt on one of the central conclusions of the 1962 paper:

The fact, then, that many complex systems have a nearly decomposable, hierarchic structure is a major facilitating factor enabling us to understand, to describe, and event to "see" such systems and their parts. Or perhaps the proposition should be put the other way round. If there are important systems in the world that are complex without being hierarchic, they may to a considerable extent escape our observation and our understanding. (477)

This is a decidedly pre-chaos understanding of the nature of complex systems. I have the impression that many contemporary complexity theorists would reject the idea that social processes are commonly the result of "nearly decomposable, hierarchic structures". So it is a genuine change for the mathematics of chaos theory to be included in the 1996 version. Complexity research has moved forward since 1962, and Simon recognizes this in the 1996 chapter.

What we don't find here is any discussion of whether actual social processes and systems display chaotic behavior in this well defined sense. And we don't see Simon shifting his position on "nearly decomposable" systems.

Are there examples of social processes and phenomena that display chaotic characteristics over time? Take the occurrence of massive street demonstrations as an example; are there aspects of chaos in the technical sense involved in the outbreak of street mobilization? Do small, apparently random events have large effects on the eventual outcome?

It would appear that this is the case when we look at the cases of uprising and passivity in different cities during the Arab Spring of 2011. Some social scientists have tried to understand the likelihood of uprising as an increasing function of economic crisis, regime weakness, and regime brutality. This implies a linear assumption about the causal role of these three forces. But it seems plausible to speculate that random events like a broken phone chain, an Internet outage, or the defection of a key leader could push the process of mobilization into a different direction. Moreover, it seems that contemporary research on social complexity pays a lot of attention to non-linearity, path-dependency, and sequential processes of social mobilization -- leaving a lot of room for the kinds of turbulent effects that are observed in traffic flow, storm generation, and water dripping from a leaking tap. This is the kind of work that is described in Scott Page and John Miller, Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life.

So oddly enough, it seems that one could fairly say that Simon's views of social complexity -- as expressed in the 1996 third edition of  The Sciences of the Artificial as well as in his groundbreaking "Architecture of Complexity" in 1962 -- are significantly incomplete, given the way that complexity theorists are now thinking about social processes. Simon did not incorporate the guiding assumptions of "complex adaptive systems theory" into his own thinking, and remained convinced of the adequacy of the ideas of hierarchical systems and nearly decomposable systems as late at 1996.  His own approach to social complexity remains a phase two approach, not a phase three approach.

(The graph at the top of this post is offered as an interpretation of a highly path-dependent social process. The reader is asked to consider each path as a hypothetical development from a common origin, with small stochastic variations in the situation occurring over time. Imagine the starting position is "large city, economic hardship, weak state, lots of repression", time is the x axis, and the y axis measures civil unrest. Some of those variations push the path towards a high outcome (blue), and some towards a low outcome (magenta). The great majority of outcomes fall within a short distance of the starting position. So the most likely outcome is "not much change", but there are unlikely but diametrically different outcomes possible as well.)

New metaphors for the social

The social world is not like the natural world. Nature is composed of things, forces, and geometries that have strong determining regularities whose interactions can be formulated with mathematical precision. There are problems of indeterminacy in physics, of course; but fundamentally we can rely on the material properties of steel, the magnetic properties of the sun, or the curvature of space-time to continue to work as expected. Nature constitutes a system of interactions. And this is because, fundamentally, nature consists of atoms and forces -- as some of the pre-Socratic philosophers thought 2,500 years ago.

The social world is different. It is not a system, but rather a patchwork, a mixture, an ensemble, a Rube Goldberg machine, a collage, or a jumble. Its properties arise from the activities, thoughts, motivations, emotions, and interactions of socially situated persons. Outcomes are influenced by a hodgepodge of obstacles and slopes that crop up more or less randomly -- leading to substantial deviations in the way we might have expected things to work out. Agents are not fully predictable or comprehensible; and their actions and interactions are indeterminate as well. We discover that people usually compare costs and benefits when they make choices, and we invent rational choice theory and microeconomics. But these are simply abstract models of one aspect of human behavior and choice, and it is rare indeed to find large social processes that are governed exclusively by this aspect of agency. We see large, somewhat stable social structures that persist over time -- patterns of habitation and social exchange (cities),  patterns of racial or ethnic discrimination, rising and falling rates of violent crime -- and we believe there are social causes and influences that help to explain these dynamic configurations. But we should never imagine that social outcomes and patterns are the manifestation of an underlying abstract social order, analogous to laws of nature. Social causes are heterogeneous, probabilistic, exception-laden, and inter-connected -- with the result that we can't hope to have a full model of the workings of a social system.

The heterogeneity and contingency associated with the social world suggested by this set of ideas do not imply that social scientific research and knowledge are unattainable. It implies, rather, that we need to understand the limits on representation, abstraction, and prediction that are implied by the fundamental nature of social things.  Our knowledge of any particular snapshot of social reality is inherently partial and incomplete.

A number of sociologists and philosophers have put their fingers on this important problem of social ontology. Here is Bruno Latour in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory:

The argument of this book can be stated very simply: when social scientists add the adjective 'social' to some phenomenon, they designate a stabilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that, later, may be mobilized to account for some other phenomenon. There is nothing wrong with this use of the word as long as it designates what is already assembled together, without making any superfluous assumption about the nature of what is assembled. (1)

Here is Norbert Elias in The Society of Individuals:

 Society is understood either as a mere accumulation, an additive and unstructured collection of many individual people, or as an object existing beyond individuals and incapable of further explanation. In this latter case the words available to us, the concepts which decisively influence the thought and action of people growing up within their sphere, make it appear as if the single human being, labelled the individual, and the plurality of people conceived as society, were two ontologically different entities. (vii)

What kind of formation is it, this "society" that we form together, which has not been intended or planned by any of us, or even all of us together? It only exists because a large number of people exist, it only continues to function because many individual people want and do certain things, yet its structure, its great historical transformations, clearly do not depend on the intentions of particular people. (3)

What we lack -- let us freely admit it -- are conceptual models and an overall vision by which we can make comprehensible in thought what we experience daily in reality, by which we could understand how a large number of individuals form with each other something that is more and other than a collection of separate individuals -- how they form a "society", and how it comes about that this society can change in specific ways, that it has a history which takes a course which has not been intended or planned by any of the individuals making it up. (7)

And now Manuel Delanda in A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity:

Is there, for example, such a thing as society as a whole? Is the commitment to assert the existence of such an entity legitimate? And, is denying the reality of such an entity equivalent to a commitment to the existence of only individual persons and their families? The answer to all these questions is a definitive no, but several obstacles must be removed before justifying this negative response. Of all the obstacles standing in the way of an adequate social ontology none is as entrenched as the organismic metaphor. (8)

So we should not think of the social world in analogy with examples drawn from what we know about the natural world.  We should not think of society as a "thing" or a unified system. The ontological properties of the the natural and social realms are substantially different.  This is the primary reason I find some of the basic ideas of assemblage theory appealing: because these theories and theorists deliberately question the naturalistic approach to the social world, and they attempt to advance strikingly different and original concepts for characterizing the social world. They emphasize heterogeneity and composition over uniformity and subsumption.

It is striking to consider the parallel that emerges between this way of thinking about the "social" and some post-Cartesian ways of thinking about the "self". Some philosophers and psychoanalysts have argued that we should question the idea of the unified self that has governed the philosophy of mind since Descartes.  Instead, we should consider the notion that the self is not a unified center of consciousness and will, but rather a loose and contingent collage of psychological, physiological, and neurophysiological processes; that the impression of a unified self is a post-facto illusion; and that acting, thinking individuals are coalitions of a heterogeneous and often conflicting group of cognitive, emotional, and practical processes. These are radical challenges to the rationalist theory of the unified self. And they bear a striking similarity  to the assemblage challenge to the idea of society as a law-governed  structural-functional system.

Here is a word cloud of descriptors that seem accurate in application to the social world.

Readers -- what sociologists or philosophers do you think do a good job of characterizing the nature of the social world? What metaphors and concepts do you find most helpful in thinking about the social world?

Simulating social mechanisms

A key premise of complexity theory is that a population of units has "emergent" properties that result from the interactions of units with dynamic characteristics. Call these units "agents".  The "agent" part of the description refers to the fact that the elements (persons) are self-directed units.  Social ensembles are referred to as "complex adaptive systems" -- systems in which outcomes are the result of complex interactions among the units AND in which the units themselves modify their behavior as a result of prior history.

Scott Page's Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life provides an excellent introduction. Here is how Page describes an adaptive social system:

Adaptive social systems are composed of interacting, thoughtful (but perhaps not brilliant) agents. It would be difficult to date the exact moment that such systems first arose on our planet -- perhaps it was when early single-celled organisms began to compete with one another for resources.... What it takes to move from an adaptive system to a complex adaptive system is an open question and one that can engender endless debate. At the most basic level, the field of complex systems challenges the notion that by perfectly understanding the behavior of each component part of a system we will then understand the system as a whole. (kl 151)

Herbert Simon added a new chapter on complexity to the third edition of The Sciences of the Artificial - 3rd Edition in 1996.

By adopting this weak interpretation of emergence, we can adhere (and I will adhere) to reductionism in principle even though it is not easy (often not even computationally feasible) to infer rigorously the properties of the whole from knowledge of the properties of the parts. In this pragmatic way, we can build nearly independent theories for each successive level of complexity, but at the same time, build bridging theories that show how each higher level can be accounted for in terms of the elements and relations of the next level down. (172).

This formulation amounts to the claim of what I referred earlier to as "relative explanatory autonomy"; link. It is a further articulation of Simon's view of "pragmatic holism" first expressed in 1962 (link).

So how would agent-based models (ABM) be applied to mechanical systems? Mechanisms are not intentional units. They are not "thoughtful", in Page's terms. In the most abstract version, a mechanism is an input-output relation, perhaps with governing conditions and with probabilistic outcomes -- perhaps something like this:

In this diagram A, B, and D are jointly sufficient for the working of the mechanism, and C is a "blocking condition" for the mechanism. When A,B,C,D are configured as represented the mechanism then does its work, leading with probability PROB to R and the rest of the time to S.

So how do we get complexity, emergence, or unpredictability out of a mechanical system consisting of a group of separate mechanisms? If mechanisms are determinate and exact, then it would seem that a mechanical system should not display "complexity" in Simon's sense; we should be able to compute the state of the system in the future given the starting conditions.

There seem to be several key factors that create indeterminacy or emergence within complex systems. One is the fact of causal interdependency, where the state of one mechanism influences the state of another mechanism which is itself a precursor to the first mechanism.  This is the issue of feedback loops or "coupled" causal processes. Second is non-linearity: small differences in input conditions sometimes bring about large differences in outputs. Whenever an outcome is subject to a threshold effect, we will observe this feature; small changes short of the threshold make no change in the output, whereas small changes at the threshold bring about large changes. And third is the adaptability of the agent itself.  If the agent changes behavioral characteristics in response to earlier experience (through intention, evolution, or some other mechanism) then we can expect outcomes that surprise us, relative to similar earlier sequences. And in fact, mechanisms display features of each of these characteristics. They are generally probabilistic, they are often non-linear, they are sensitive to initial conditions, and at least sometimes they "evolve" over time.

So here is an interesting question: how do these considerations play into the topic of understanding social outcomes on the basis of an analysis of underlying social mechanisms? Assume we have a theory of organizations that involves a number of lesser institutional mechanisms that affect the behavior of the organization. Is it possible to develop an agent-based model of the organization in which the institutional mechanisms are the units? Are meso-level theories of organizations and institutions amenable to implementation within ABM simulation techniques?

Here is a Google Talk by Adrien Treuille on "Modeling and Control of Complex Dynamics".

The talk provides an interesting analysis of "crowd behavior" based on a new way of representing a crowd.