Epochs and the social actor

It was suggested in an earlier post that important aspects of an individual's mental furniture are influenced by the concrete historical and social circumstances in which he or she is raised (link). Let's try to get a little more specific about this idea. How does historical context influence the behavior of the individuals who come to adulthood during its scope?

There are several kinds of practical cognitive features that seem to be historically conditioned. By "practical cognition" I mean the processes through which actors conceptualize their social environments, make sense of the activities going on around them, process their own desires and goals, and set out with a plan or strategy of action.

I can think of at least four largely independent features of social and practical cognition that seem to be importantly dependent on the social and historical context in which the individual develops from childhood to adulthood: social frameworks of interpretation; social norms; practices and habits; and enduring features of character. Let's look at each of these in turn.

Framework of assumptions about the social world. We generally apprehend the social interactions that take place around us through stylized interpretive frameworks or models that we apply to the encounters we observe.  This seems to be particularly true when it comes to interpreting social interactions that involve power, gender, race, or ethnic identities. An observed social interaction between several actors does not bear its meaning on its sleeve; it is necessary for observers to tell themselves some kind of story about what the actions and interactions mean. And often enough those stories are couched in terms of a variety of stereotypes based on a small number of cues in the interaction.

Social norms of behavior. When individuals consider their routine choices in ordinary life, they are influenced by a range of norms and values that guide and constrain their actions.

Practices and habits. A key insight from pragmatist theory of action is the observation that much action is not deliberative and reasoned, but is rather the result of the application of one or more pertinent practices and habits. When a professor is challenged about a grade on a paper, he or she often slips into a routine set of answers. When a prosecutor approaches a defense witness he or she has a stock set of tactics and techniques for undermining the credibility of the witness. And when a politician faces a heckler, he or she likewise turns to familiar responses that have been fine-tuned in other similar circumstances.

Enduring features of character and personality.  One person is decisive, while another vacillates. One person has courage, while another is blocked by fear. One person has a strong sense of loyalty, while another is willing to jettison relationships when interests shift. In each case, the features of behavior and action that are described here seem to derive from enduring features of the individual's mental world, not simply opportunistic adjustments to circumstances. Decisiveness, loyalty, and courage are virtues of character that some people possess in great measure and others do not.

Two things seem evident as we work our way through this list.

First, it is logical to infer that differences across these dimensions of practical cognition results in differences in behavior. The individual who perceives the social world in terms of gender or racial inferiority will behave differently from the person whose basic framework highlights human equality. People who have internalized the norm, "treat people fairly," will act differently in an industrial strike than those who have not internalized this norm. The person who has internalized a set of practices that involve quick tit-for-tat response to perceived affront will behave differently from one whose practices and habits involve forbearance. And a person whose character includes a strong dose of decisiveness is likely to behave differently in a crisis from one who has difficulty deciding about what tie to wear in the morning.

Second, each of these features of social cognitive seem to be strongly shaped by the social experiences and social epistemology of the period. The assumptions we make about other people -- the social frameworks we use for making sense of the world -- are clearly learned through social experiences in our early years. A person immersed in an anti-Semitic or homophobic culture is likely enough to have fairly specific stereotypes in mind (frameworks) when trying to understand developments in the world he or she encounters. This is true for the social norms that we have internalized as well. The habits of interaction and response that we currently possess are surely the learned consequences of the interactions we have had with other people in the past, in a range of circumstances. And the habits of courage, truthfulness, and loyalty that we have embodied in our system of action and thought are likewise the learned consequences of important experiences in our early years.

These points highlight the importance of the individual's experiences in childhood and adolescence in a variety of contexts: family, school, neighborhood, juvenile detention center, literature, television, or church or mosque. But history comes into this story at this point: there are some events that are sufficiently dramatic and pervasive that we can make a case for holding that they have a seismic influence on the processes of socialization through which the actor takes shape. Sometimes history presents its generation with a single decisive blast -- Hiroshima or September 11. And sometimes the historical factor is prolonged and extended -- the deprivations of the Great Leap Forward for rural Chinese people, the terror created in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. And in each type of case, it seems credible that the mentality of the people of an epoch are influenced by these historical events and circumstances in very fundamental ways -- ways that give them distinctive modes of action and reaction.

Take the experience of coming to maturity in the Jim Crow South, as either a white man or a black woman. The Jim Crow South embodied a very specific set of ideas and norms about race and gender that were enforced, often with violence, when they were violated. Jim Crow society offered men and women, black and white, a bundle of modes of behavior for how to act in stylized circumstances. These are practices and habits. And surely some very distinctive features of personality and character emerged from the Jim Crow South as well, in both black and white southerners, and both women and men in the region.

So it seems reasonable to suggest that historical settings do have the power to affect the nature of social agency within their scope. Epochs create and shape actors within them.

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.

Crozier on actors and organizations

I ran across a book by Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedberg I hadn't read before in a Dijon bookstore, L'acteur et le système: Les contraintes de l'action collective (French Edition).  (Yes, in France they still have great academic bookstores!) It was the book's title that caught my eye -- "actor and system". Crozier and Friedberg's premise is that actors within organizations have substantially more agency and freedom than they are generally afforded by orthodox organization theory, and we can best understand the workings and evolution of the organization as (partially) the result of the strategic actions of the participants (instead of understanding the conduct of the participants as a function of the rules of the organization).

In fact, they appear to look at organizations as solutions to collective action problems -- tasks or performances that allow attainment of a goal that is of interest to a broad public, but for which there are no antecedent private incentives for cooperation. Organized solutions to collective problems -- of which organizations are key examples -- do not emerge spontaneously; instead, "they consist of nothing other than solutions, always specific, that relatively autonomous actors have created, invented, established, with their particular resources and capacities, to solve these challenges for collective action" (15). And they emphasize the inherent contingency of these particular solutions; there are always alternative solutions, neither better nor worse.

This is an appealing point of view to me for several reasons. First, it is consistent with the view I've advocated for at various points about the plasticity of institutions (link). Second, it seems to fit very well with the ideas associated with methodological localism (link): Crozier and Freidberg seem to add support to the view that we can best understand a range of extended social phenomena as the result of the actions and thoughts of the socially situated and socially constituted actors who make up its various locales. Finally, though, the degree of freedom the authors attribute to actors seems to contradict another aspect of organizational theory that I've incorporated into my own thinking: the idea that there are in fact strong microfoundations for the workings of the regulative framework of an organization. On my account these microfoundations take the form of internally realized enforcement mechanisms like auditors, supervisors, and discipline administrators. The freedom of the actors is reduced by the mechanisms of enforcement through which their performance of their roles is overseen.

The authors use the idea of the "narrowing the field of play" ("champs d'interaction aménagés") frequently to describe the workings of an organization. Essentially this seems to imply that an organization commonly succeeds in ruling out certain strategies for the participants while leaving open others. And perhaps this converges with the point just mentioned: organizations succeed in limiting the freedom of choice of participants, though not down to a singleton set. For example: a junior faculty person may choose a strategy of flattering the department chair to increase the likelihood of receiving tenure; but he/she cannot threaten the chair with bodily harm unless support is provided.

So the framework and theory that Crozier and Freidberg offer seems to provide a good illustration of several insights into the nature of the social that have emerged from my own efforts to formulate a better approach to the philosophy of social science.  This is, of course, a somewhat personal reason for favoring a theory, but it gives me a motive to work through the book more carefully.

Here are a few passages that capture some of the unique perspective they offer.

Bref, ce mode de raisonnement ne vise pas tant les organisations, comme objet social spécifique, que l'action organisée des hommes. Celle-là constitue la véritable sujet de ce livre. (10)

"In short, this method is not so much aimed at organizations as a specific kind of social thing, as at the organized actions of people. This is the true subject of this book."

"This essay is ultimately a reflection on the relationships of actor and system. It is in effect concerning the existence of these two opposing poles that determines the method we follow. The actor does not exist wholly outside of the system which defines his freedom and the rationality that he can use in his actions. But equally the system does not exist except through the actor who sustains it and gives it life, and who alone can change it. It is the juxtaposition of these two logics which gives birth to the constraints on organized action that our method reveals."

"The reader should not misconstrue the significance of this theoretical bet. We have not sought to formulate a set of general laws concerning the substance, the properties and the stages of development of organizations and systems. We do not have the advantage of being able to furnish normative precepts like those offered by management specialists who always believe they can elaborate a model of "good organization" and present a guide to the means and measures necessary to realize it. We present of series of simple propositions on the problems raised by the existence of these complex but integrated ensembles that we call organizations, and on the means and instruments that people have invented to surmount these problems; that is to say, to assure and develop their cooperation in view of the common goals." (11)

There are resonances in this text of other voices on the topic of the power of organizations. Foucault is mentioned only four times, and then only in footnotes; but the authoritarianism that Foucault attributes to modern institutions seems to be very much the point of view that Crozier and Friedberg want to refute. The book to which they refer is Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, a work that emphasizes the total control to which modern organizations aspire. Crozier and Friedberg reject this view in favor of one that emphasizes the agency and freedoms of the actors situated within the organization. And they take this to be an empirical fact, not a normative one.

The other voice that seems to be in the background in this argument is that of Bourdieu, who is mentioned not at all. Here the relationship is more ambiguous. The emphasis on agency within constraints that Crozier and Friedberg insist upon seems resonant with Bourdieu's theory of practice in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972). But Bourdieu also advocates for some of the themes of domination and control that Foucault highlights; and to this aspect C&F are equally opposed.

This isn't to say that C&F deny the facts of power and exploitation that are so important to Marxist theory as well as Foucault and Bourdieu; in fact, chapter two is dedicated to an analysis of power.

So they don't reject the facts of power and constraint. Rather, they reject the idea that these social systems of power leave actors with no alternative choices. In this respect I would put C&F in league with the position taken by James Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Agents are capable of forming their own perceptions of the social relations in which they find themselves; and they are capable of acting strategically in trying to gain advantage within those relations.

The final relationship that seems both important and somewhat invisible in the text is to Raymond Boudon, one of the primary advocates of rational choice theory in French sociology. C&T are interested in strategic action on the part of deliberative agents, and this brings their theorizing into a degree of alignment with game theory and the work of Boudon. This is not to say that they uncritically accept the premises of formal game theory. In fact they offer their own interpretation of the prisoners' dilemma, with a summary conclusion that it is an error to look at actors as socially disconnected individuals lacking ties to each other that would facilitate cooperation. But the broad framework suggests the importance of reasoning about the choices individual actors make, which leads to a degree of parallel with enlightened versions of rational choice theory.

In short, this is a highly stimulating book with complex relationships to other strands of contemporary French sociology. And its insights still seem important more than forty years after publication.

Character and personality

If we want to have a more adequate theory of the actor (link), we need to broaden our understanding of the factors and capacities that affect action.  The categories of personality and character are both relevant to the ways in which we understand how people behave in ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. So a theory of the actor ought to have a place for these concepts.

How are these concepts related? Both have to do with persistent features of behavior, but they seem to have somewhat distinct domains and have been approached by widely separated disciplines. In particular, character seems to be morally charged in ways that personality is not.

Here are some examples of characteristics that seem intuitively to fall into the two categories.

Personality	Character
Outgoing	Honest
Sociable	Capable of carrying out commitments
Introverted	Slippery
Shy	Deceptive
Perfectionist	Manipulative
Careless	Courageous
Ambitious	Pays attention to principles
Short-sighted	Opportunistic
Agreeable	Kind
Secure / insecure	Cruel
Curious	Self-directed

Both sets of characteristics go beyond (or below) rational calculation and utility. (In fact, we might say that the purely rational individual lacks both personality and character; his/her actions are dictated by current estimates of costs and benefits of various lines of action.) Both personality and character have to do with features of behavior that are non-purposive to an important extent. They have to do with who the actor is, not so much with what he/she wants to accomplish. Rational calculation is sometimes at odds with some of these features -- sometimes principles and commitments stand in the way of self interest, so character dictates a different course of action than prudence.

Personality falls within the domain of empirical psychology. There is a long tradition of research and theory in the area of personality psychology. Psychologists seem to favor to use the vocabulary of "personality traits" (Jerry Wiggins, "In Defense of Traits," Handbook of Personality Psychology, edited by Robert Hogan et al). And a central goal of personality psychology has been to discover a taxonomy of personality types that allow classification of all normal human beings. Along with such a taxonomy, the discipline has sought to create measurement tools that permit application of the scheme to ordinary human subjects.

The study of character has tended to be a preoccupation of philosophers, who approach the question in a more theoretical and apriori way.  Philosophers extending back to the ancient Greeks have attempted to identify the features of a person's inner life that enhance or diminish the person's moral worthiness. Part of the moral connotation of features of character is captured in the linguistic fact that many of the features we attribute to character are virtues (or vices). We praise people who possess a number of virtues, and we criticize them if they lack these virtues (or possess the contrary vice). This field of study might be called "moral psychology," but it has tended to be non-empirical. In the past two decades there has been a degree of convergence between the empirical study of behavior and the philosophical study of moral decision making, in the topic area of evolutionary moral theory (Moral Psychology: The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness (Volume 1), Moral Psychology: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (Volume 2)).  

There is academic and popular disagreement about the degree to which personality traits are acquired or innate.  Some argue, along the lines of the sociobiologists, that at least some features of social behavior are controlled by our evolutionary history. The underlying rationale for this hunch is the likelihood that personality traits have effects on reproductive success; individuals who have traits that allow them to be more successful in eliciting cooperation from others are more likely to reproduce successfully. (This is the underlying thought in Allan Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment.) And others maintain that the individual is highly plastic at birth, so the developmental environment is the primary causal factor in the development of personality.

We might try to draw a distinction between personality and character along these lines. Personality has to do with the psychological "hardware" with which the individual is equipped. Just as a snappy Mustang has great acceleration and so-so gas mileage (determined by the organization of its component systems), some individuals have affable, agreeable interactions with other people (determined by the organization of their affective systems). Character has to do with moral capacities in embodied human beings: the ability to keep a promise, tell the truth, or stand resolute in the face of threat. Character has to do with the ways we conceive of ourselves and sculpt our actions to fit our expectations; personality has to do with reactive features of our psychological systems.

And here is another possibility that might be considered: character traits (courage, truthiness) are themselves traits of personality. They are not a different psychological category. But not all personality traits have to do with character. Moreover, we might speculate that character traits have the additional feature that they can be deliberately cultivated, by oneself and by others. This approach has the advantage of simplifying our theory of the mental by one degree of complexity. Whether we are interested in personality or character is primarily a question of methodological perspective rather than mental ontology.

(Here is a very good essay on "Moral Character" by Marcia Homiak in the SEP; link.)

Domain of agent-based modeling methods

Agent-based modeling is an intriguing new set of tools for computational social science. The techniques permit us to project forward the system-level effects of a set of assumptions about agent behavior and a given environment. What kinds of real social phenomena are amenable to treatment by the techniques of agent-based modeling? David O'Sullivan and his co-authors offer an assessment of this question in their contribution to a valuable recent handbook, Heppenstall et al, Agent-Based Models of Geographical Systems. (Andrew Crooks and Alison Heppenstall provide a valuable and clear introduction to ABM methodology in their contribution to the volume.)

O'Sullivan and colleagues offer a basic taxonomy of different applications of ABM research.

• simple abstract models where the focus is on exploring the collective implications of individual-level decision making. 
• more detailed [accounts that] locate virtual model agents in a representation of the real world setting of interest. Typically, such models operate at a regional or landscape scale
• some of the most ambitious models aim at detailed ... representations of both the geographical setting and the processes unfolding in that setting (111-112)

This taxonomy depends on the degree of abstraction and realism that the model aspires to.

Here are a handful of research projects that are amenable to these techniques, most of which are illustrated in the Heppenstall volume.

• Land use patterns in peasant agriculture 
• Residential patterns -- urban and rural
• Patterns of burglaries
• Occurrence of interpersonal violence in civil war
• Traffic patterns -- pedestrian and vehicular

What do the clear examples have in common? They are situations where a number of independent individuals react to a social and natural environment with a set of goals; and they are usually situations where individuals influence each other through their actions. These are situations of dynamic interactive choices. O'Sullivan and colleagues put these points this way:

We consider the most fundamental characteristics of agents in spatial models to be goal-direction and autonomy.... However, more specific definitions of the concept may add any of flexibility, ‘intelligence', communication, learning, adaptation or a host of other features to these two. (115)

(Crooks and Heppenstall provide a similar list: autonomy, heterogeneity, and activity; 87.)

O'Sullivan et al also pose an important question about what the circumstances are where the features of agents makes a difference in the social outcome:

This argument focuses attention on three model features: heterogeneity of the decision-making context of agents, the importance of interaction effects , and the overall size and organization of the system. If agents are the same throughout the system, then, other things being equal, an aggregate approach is likely to capture the same signifi cant features of the system as an agent-based approach.

Essentially the point here is a simple one: if an aggregate outcome results from homogenous individuals making a decision about something on the same basis as everyone else, then we don't need an agent-based model. ABM techniques become valuable when heterogeneous agents interact with each other to bring about novel outcomes.

There are quite a few social situations that do not fit the terms of these models well. Some social processes are not simply the aggregate outcome of choices by a set of independent autonomous agents. For example, the flow of work through an architectural design studio is determined by the rules of the firm, not the independent choices of the employees, and the behavior of an army is largely determined by its general staff and command structure. O'Sullivan et al put the point this way:

A more important question may be, “what should the agents in an ABM of this system represent?” If the interactions among individual actors in the real world are substantially channelled via institutions or other social or spatial structures, perhaps it is those institutions or social or spatial structures that should be represented as agents in an ABM rather than the individuals of which they are formed. (120)

So a general question for ABM methodology is this: where do structural social factors come into ABM models? Here I am thinking of things like a system of regulation and law; a pattern of racialized behavior; the architecture of the transport system; a tax system; .... We might treat these as parameters in the environment of choice for the agents. They are beyond the control of the agents and are regarded as constraints and opportunities. (This is one place where the framework of "strategic interactive fields" disagrees, since the SIF approach looks at institutions themselves as part of the field of strategic interaction in that individuals strive to modify the rules to their own benefit.)

It seems reasonable to judge that ABM techniques are very useful when we are concerned with phenomena that are aggregates of strategic behavior by individual actors; but they are not pertinent to many of the questions sociologists pose. In particular, they do not seem useful for sociological inquiries that are primarily concerned with the dynamics and effects of large social structures where the behavior of individuals is routine, homogeneous, or largely determined exogenously. These are the circumstances where the premises of the ABM approach -- autonomy, heterogeneity, and activity -- are not satisfied.

Strategic action fields

Sometimes a rethinking of ontology and social categories results in an important step forward in social theory. This appears to be the case in some recent reflections on the relationships that exist between social movements theory and the sociology of organizations.  The presumption of existing writings on these fields is that they refer to separate but related phenomena.  One is more about social actors and the other is more about stable social structures.  What happens when we consider the possibility that they actually refer to the same kinds of social phenomena?

This is the perspective taken by Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam in a recent contribution to Sociological Theory, "Toward a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields"(link). (They develop these ideas more fully in A Theory of Fields.) In the Sociological Theory article they write:

We assert that scholars of organizations and social movements -- and for that matter, students of any institutional actor in modern society -- are interested in the same underlying phenomenon: collective strategic action. (2)

Fligstein and McAdam formulate their novel approach in terms of the idea of "strategic action fields." They put it forward that "strategic action fields … are the fundamental units of collective action in society" (3). Power and advantage play key roles in their construction: "We too see SAFs as socially constructed arenas within which actors with varying resource endowments vie for advantage. Membership in these fields is based far more on subjective 'standing' than objective criteria" (3).

Here are types of social items they include in this theory:

1. strategic action fields 
2. incumbents, challengers, and governance units 
3. social skill 
4. the broader field environment 
5. exogenous shocks, field ruptures, and the onset of contention 
6. episodes of contention 
7. settlement (2) 

This approach is importantly couched at the level of social ontology: what sorts of things should we identify and analyze as explanatory factors in our theories? The move to SAFs is a move against the idea of the fixity of social "structures," institutions, and organizations. For example, they write against the ontology of new institutionalism: "The general image for most new institutionalists is one of routine social order and reproduction" -- or in other words, a static set of rules and constraints within which action takes place. Their ontology, on the other hand, emphasizes the fluidity of the constraints and circumstances of action from the actors' points of view; so the field shifts as actors undertake one set of strategies or another. "This leaves great latitude for the possibility of piecemeal change in the positions that actors occupy" (5).

So both stability and change are incorporated into a single framework of analysis: actors react strategically to the field of constraints and positions within which they act, with results that sometimes reinforce current positions and other times disrupt those positions.

They account for what looks like institutional rigidity by calling out the power of some actors to maintain their positions in the social order: "Most incumbents are generally well positioned and fortified to withstand these change pressures. For starters they typically enjoy significant resource advantages over field challengers" (9). But institutions should not be expected to maintain their structures indefinitely: "The expectation is that when even a single member of the field begins to act in innovative ways in violation of field rules, others will respond in kind, precipitating an episode of contention" (9).

So what is intended by the idea of "strategic action" in this theory? Here is what they have to say on that subject:

We define strategic action as the attempt by social actors to create and maintain stable social worlds by securing the cooperation of others. Strategic action is about control in a given context. The creation of identities, political coalitions, and interests serves to promote the control of actors vis-a-vis other actors. (7)

Here is one other interesting ontological feature of this approach. Their language suggests some parallels with assemblage theory (link), in the sense that social constructs fit upwards and downwards into strategic action fields at a range of fields. "We conceive of all fields as embedded in complex webs of other fields" (8). This set of ideas seems to suggest an unexpected affinity to "actor-network theory" and the sociological ideas of Bruno Latour (ANT) (link). But at the other end of some obscure spectrum of theory differentiation, their account also seems to rub shoulders with rational-choice theory, where both actions and rules are subject to deliberation and change by prudential actors.

There are several features of this approach that seem promising to me. One is the fact that it directly challenges the tendency towards reification that sometimes blocks sociological thinking -- the idea that social "things" like states persist largely independently from the individuals who make them up. This new approach leads to a way of thinking about the social world that emphasizes contingency and plasticity (link, link) rather than rigid and homogeneous social structures. It also seems consistent with the thinking that leads to the idea of "methodological localism" -- the idea that social phenomena rest upon "molecules" of socially constructed, socially situated individuals (link). I also like the fact that their analysis is explicitly couched at the meso level -- neither macro nor micro.

One concern this approach raises, however, is suggested by the point mentioned above about its apparent proximity to some versions of rational choice theory -- the view that all social outcomes and processes are ultimately the consequence of prudential actors pursuing their interests. But this assumption -- which McAdam certainly does not share elsewhere in his writing (e.g. Dynamics of Contention) -- threatens to push out of consideration social realities like normative systems, social identities, and distributed systems of power that somehow or other seem to demand inclusion in our understanding of social processes.

Finally, we can ask whether this innovation provides a basis for more fruitful empirical research into concrete phenomena like how corporations and revolutionary parties function, how demonstrations against Islamophobia take shape, and how resistance to racial discrimination emerges.  If the theoretical innovation doesn't lead to richer empirical research, then it is reasonable to be skeptical about why we should adopt the new theoretical tools.

Actor-centered sociology and agent-based models

Actor-centered sociology (ACS) begins in the intuition that social processes begin in the interactions of socially constructed individuals, and it takes seriously the idea that actors have complex and socially inflected mental schemes of action and representation. So actor-centered sociologists are keen not to over-simplify the persons who constitute the social domain of interest. And this means that they are generally not content with sparse abstract schemata of actors like those proposed by most versions of rational choice theory.

Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a collection of aggregative techniques aimed at working out the aggregate consequences of the hypothetical choices of a number of individuals interacting in a series of social environments. ABM models generally represent the actors' motivations and decision rules very abstractly -- sometimes as economic actors, sometimes as local optimizers, sometimes as heuristically driven decision makers. An ABM model may postulate several groups of actors whose decision rules are different -- predators and prey, landlords and tenants, bandits and generals. The goal is to embody a set of behavioral assumptions at the actor level and then to aggregate the results of the actions and interactions of these actors at a macro level. (Stephen Railsback's Agent-Based and Individual-Based Modeling: A Practical Introduction provides an accessible introduction.)

My question here is a focused one: do these apparently similar approaches to explaining social outcomes actually have as much in common as they appear to at first glance? And the answer I'll suggest is -- not yet, and not enough. (Here are earlier discussions of the two frameworks; link, link.)

The sticking point between them is the issue of abstraction and granularity concerning the nature of the actors. ACS researchers are critical of the methodological move towards abstraction in the description of the actor. They believe that the socially embedded and rather specific features of deliberation and action that they investigate in various historical and cultural settings are crucial and are lost when we move to a more abstract desire-belief-opportunity (DBO) approach. ABM theorists argue that abstraction about the agent is necessary if a social situation is supposed to be tractable -- to model the behavior of a population of agents we need to be able to represent their decision rules in a reasonably compact and mathematically representable way. So if we take the view that each individual is a unique bundle of mental frameworks and action-practices, we will have to give up the enterprise of modeling their collective behavior.

However, some efforts to apply ABM techniques to real contemporary and historical problems -- for example, land use patterns in contemporary African agriculture -- have had disappointing results. The patterns predicted by the simulation diverge fairly significantly from the observed patterns on the ground. And some of these researchers believe that the problem lies not with the model but with the assumptions made about the actor. Those assumptions are basically Chicago-style rational choice assumptions, and researchers are coming to see that the actors -- farmers, herders, traders -- are operating on the basis of rules that are more nuanced. The actors are prudential and they make deliberative choices; but their reasoning doesn't reduce to an application of expected-utility calculation. So the researchers themselves are asking whether it would be better to incorporate more realistic assumptions about actors' motivations and reasoning frameworks.

This suggests that there is perhaps more fertile ground between the ACS and ABM frameworks than has yet been exploited. ACS focuses its attention on the question of refining our understanding of how actors are constituted, and ABM provides a rich set of techniques for transporting from assumptions about individual actors to the simulated result of aggregating these actors' behaviors onto a collective pattern.

The hybrid approach still requires abstraction about actors. But perhaps it is worth considering adjusting the focus, from "farmers in an environment" to "Kenyan farmers with X, Y, Z features of goals and reasoning schemes". Perhaps the disaggregation of types of actors needs to go even further. And perhaps the question of "what kinds of actors are involved in land use in Kenyan agriculture?" needs to be driven by empirical investigation rather than methodological fiat or computational convenience.

So maybe the great centers for complexity studies around the country would be well advised to begin including anthropologists and cultural sociologists within their research teams. And maybe the result will be a fertile marriage of modeling with greater cultural specificity.

Ostrom's central idea

Elinor Ostrom was a very important contributor to the theory of public rationality and the institutions that underlie cooperation, and she was most deserving of the recognition that accompanied her receipt of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009.  Her passing today is a sad loss for the academic world.

Her key contributions were included in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, a masterful book that presents a new theoretical framework and body of empirical evidence for conceiving of the ways in which human communities can handle common property resources -- forests, fishing grounds, grazing areas, water supplies. Anyone interested in the ways that collective action works in practice will want to read the book. (See also Baden and Noonan, Managing the Commons, Second Edition for an important set of perspectives on "managing the commons" and solving common property resource problems.)

Rational choice theory has been unfriendly to the idea that communities can self-regulate when it comes to public goods and public harms.  Garrett Hardin offered the theory of the "tragedy of the commons", in which he argues that rational egoists will inevitably overuse a common resource. And Mancur Olson offered similar arguments about the feasibility of collective action in an extended group in The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Against these views, Ostrom and her research collaborators demonstrated that human communities have actually created a number of informal institutional complexes for regulating access to common resources that succeed in creating a stable balance between use and resource renewal.

Here is how Ostrom casts the problem in Governing the Commons:

The term “common-pool resource” refers to a natural or man-made resource system that is sufficiently large as to make it costly (but not impossible) to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use. (30)

Instead of presuming that the individuals sharing a commons are inevitably caught in a trap from which they cannot escape, I argue that the capacity of individuals to extricate themselves from various types of dilemma situations varies from situation to situation. The cases to be discussed in this book illustrate both successful and unsuccessful efforts to escape tragic outcomes. (14; kl 306)

Institutions are rarely either private or public -- "the market" or "the state." Many successful CPR intitutions are rich mixtures of "private-like" and "public-like" institutions defying classification in a sterile dichotomy. By "successful," I mean institutions that enable individuals to achieve productive outcomes in situations where temptations to free-ride and shirk are ever present. A competitive market -- the epitome of private institutions -- is itself a public good. (14; kl 311)

Ostrom demonstrated, both theoretically and empirically, that legal regulation is not the only possible solution to public goods problems. Instead she documents community-based solutions to common property resource problems that have proved successful over multiple generations. These are quasi-voluntary arrangements through which a community of users (fishers, grazers, irrigators) are able to manage the resource collectively and control violators, in such a way as to preserve the resource over time. And she points out that these institutions can be self-maintaining, in that participants have an incentive to watch out for cheaters and shirkers.  In describing the Alanya inshore fishing system in detail she writes, "The process of monitoring and enforcing the system is, however, accomplished by the fishers themselves as a by-product of the incentive created by the rotation system" (19-20; kl 378).

Given that common property resource problems are ubiquitous, her policy recommendation are sensible ones:

An important challenge facing policy scientists is to develop theories of human organization based on realistic assessment of human capabilities and limitations in dealing with a variety of situations that initially share some or all aspects of a tragedy of the commons. (23; kl 436)

What is missing from the policy analyst's tool kit -- and from the set of accepted, well-developed theories of human organization -- is an adequately specified theory of collective action whereby a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts. Examples of self-organized enterprises abound. (24; kl 449)

Essentially her research comes down to this point: There are multiple possible property systems through which access to natural resources can be mediated. A simple Lockean theory of private property holds that all goods have individual private owners. It is possible, however, to conceive of forms of “social property” or community property through which at least some assets are held in common, and for which there are fair and well-defined procedures for providing rights of access to the use and enjoyment of the social property.

As Ostrom demonstrated in depth, there are socially feasible arrangements in which a “common property resource” such as a fish stock is exploited by a number of independent producers within the context of a stable community.  In this instance we have a combination of private property (nets and boats) and social property (the waterway and fish stock), and Ostrom documents several different sets of social rules that establish the terms of access and use that individuals will have to the common property resource.

There is extensive debate over the economic efficiency or viability of social property arrangements such as these. Concerning fisheries and traditional practices of forestry, for example, there is the familiar argument that rationally induced free-riding will eventually undermine the community-based rules of use. The point here not that social property regimes are superior, but rather that they are possible. And Ostrom's research illustrates a great variety of common-property resource regimes that appear to be efficient and stable.  It is therefore a matter of public debate which particular rules and institutions ought to govern the use of property. And there may be something in this finding that provides new ways of thinking about economic arrangements in the twenty-first century as well.

(I had an interesting exchange with Ostrom on the occasion of her receiving an honorary degree from the University of Michigan in 2006. I raised the topic of agriculture and food within the world economy and referred to a continuing debate I'd been having with my daughter about traditional farming versus largescale industrial agriculture.  My argument was that traditional farming was not productive enough to feed the world's population, and my daughter's view was that industrial agriculture is unsustainable and destructive of existing rural communities.  I asked Ostrom about her opinion.  Her response was: "you are both right." In hindsight, after rereading Governing the Commons, I'm inclined to interpret her response as expressing the idea that solutions to our large global problems need to be mixed solutions. Her work on self-governing community-based systems for making use of resources suggests that she would have some sympathy for the continuing significance of traditional farming systems within the larger context of the world agriculture system. But at the same time, she was always insistent that we need to be realistic about the assumptions about behavior that underly the solutions we recommend.)

The social world as morphogenesis

Critical realism has progressed far since Roy Bhaskar's early writings on the subject in A Realist Theory of Science.  One of the most important thinkers to have introduced new ideas into the debate is Margaret Archer. Several books in the mid-1990s represented genuinely original contributions to issues about the nature of social ontology and methodology, including especially Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach and Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory.

Archer's work addresses several topics of interest to me, including especially the agent-structure dichotomy. This is key to the twin concerns I have for "actor-centered social science" and "autonomous meso-level explanations".  Anthony Giddens offers one way of thinking about the relationship between agents and structures (link).  Archer takes issue with the most fundamental aspect of Giddens's view -- his argument that agents and structures are conceptually inseparable. Archer argues instead for a form of "dualism" about agents and structures -- that each pole needs to be treated separately and in its own terms.   (Chapter 5 provides a detailed discussion of both Bhaskar and Giddens on levels of the social.) She acknowledges, of course, that social structures depend on the individuals who make them up; but she doesn't believe that this basic fact tells us anything about how to analyze or explain facts about either agents or structures.  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)

Archer argues that the two primary approaches that theorists have taken -- methodological individualism and methodological holism -- are fundamentally inadequate.  They represent what she calls upward and downward conflation.  In the first case, "society" disappears and is replaced by some notion of aggregated individual action; in the second case "agents" disappear and the human individuals do no more than act out the imperatives of social norms and structures.  She associates the first view with J.S. Mill and Max Weber and the second view with Durkheim.  On her view, agents and structures are distinct, and neither is primary over the other.

She refers to her view as the "morphogenetic" approach.  Here is how she explains this concept:

The 'morpho' element is an acknowledgement that society has no pre-set form or preferred state: the 'genetic' part is a recognition that it takes its shape from, and is formed by, agents, originating from the intended and unintended consequences of their activities. (5)

Morphogenesis applies at all levels, from "the capitalist system" to "the firm" to "the actor" to personal identity and motivation.  And she believes that properties at various levels -- micro and macro -- have a degree of autonomy from each other, which she refers to as "emergence":

I want to maintain that 'micro' and 'macro' are relational terms meaning that a given stratum can be 'micro' to another and 'macro' to a third etc. What justifies the differentiation of strata and thus use of the terms 'micro' and 'macro' to characterize their relationship is the existence of emergent properties pertaining to the latter but not to the former, even if they were elaborated from it. (9)

Later in the book she amplifies this idea:

Autonomy is also temporal (and temporary) in the joint senses that such structural properties were neither the creation of contemporary actors nor are ontologically reducible to 'material existents' (raw resources) and dependent upon current acts of human instantiation (rule governed) for all their current effects. (138)

And this is where her theory exhibits its "realism": she asserts that the properties we identify at various levels or "strata" are real and causally powerful.

Thus in the course of this book, frequent references will be made to 'the societal'. Each time, this has a concrete referent - particular emergent properties belonging to a specific society at a given time. Both the referent and the properties are real, they have full ontological status, but what do they have to do with 'the big'? The society in question may be small, tribal and work on a face-to-face basis. Nor do they have anything to do with what is, relatively, 'the biggest' at some point in time. We may well wish to refer to certain societal properties of Britain (the 'macro' unit for a particular investigation) which is an acknowledged part of bigger entities, like Europe, developed societies, or the English speaking world. We would do so if we wanted to explain, for example, the role of the 'Falklands factor' in recent elections and in so doing we would also incidentally be acknowledging that people who go in for it take their nationalism far from 'impersonally', and that the 'site' of neo-colonialism may be far distant. (10)

 And she offers a different way of thinking about "micro" and "macro" -- not from small to large, but from interactional and local to systemic (11).

This all adds up to a social realism that is militant in affirming the reality of social properties as emergent properties.

Conversely social realism which accentuates the importance of emergent properties at the level of both agency and structure, but considers these as proper to the strata in question and therefore distinct from each other and irreducible to one another, replaces the terms of the traditional debate with entirely new ones. Irreducibility means that the different strata are separable by definition precisely because of the properties and powers which only belong to each of them and whose emergence from one another justifies their differentiation as strata at all. (14)

So what is Archer's central notion, the idea of morphogenesis?  It is the idea that processes of change occur for agents and social structures in interlocking and temporally complex ways.  Agents are formed within a set of social structures -- norms, language communities, power relationships.  The genesis of the agent occurs within the context of these structures.  On a larger time scale, the structures themselves change as a result of the activities and choices of the historically situated individuals who make them up.  She summarizes this ontology as a set of cycles with different time frames: structural conditioning => social interaction => structural elaboration (16).  This notion leads Archer to a conception of the social and the actor that reflects a fundamentally historical understanding of social processes. Formation and transformation are the central metaphors (154).

A final comment about Archer's philosophy of social science is relevant here.  She provides a theory which is abstract and philosophical -- ontology, debates about emergence and reduction, epistemology.  But she does so in consideration of her own detailed research on the history and development of an important aspect of social reality, educational institutions.  So her abstract philosophical ideas are grounded not only in philosophy but also in historical and sociological research.

Perhaps I'm over-interpreting, but it seems to me that Archer's realist theory of morphogenesis is highly complementary to the ideas about methodological localism that have been argued for here.  The idea that actors are socially constituted and socially situated (methodological localism) is a different way of expressing her point that actors are constituted by surrounding social structures. The idea that structures are themselves adapted and changed by active individuals doing things within them corresponds to her "social interaction" and "structural elaboration" phases of morphogenesis. The methodological insight that seems to come along with morphogenesis -- the idea that it is valuable to move both upwards towards more comprehensive social structures and downwards towards more refined understanding of action and interaction -- is certainly a part of the view associated with methodological localism and actor-centered sociology. Her view of the inherent "transformability" of society (1) parallels my own view of the heterogeneity and contingency of social arrangements.  Finally, her notion that social ontology must be addressed before we can make much progress on issues of methodology and explanation seems right to me as well.

Giddens on agents and structures

Anthony Giddens is one of the theorists whose ideas are most often invoked when the idea of social-structural explanation is in play. His 1979 collection of essays, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis, is a classic 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 refers some of these issues back to the tradition of American pragmatism, and the theories of George Herber Mead in particular (link).

Within more orthodox sociological traditions, symbolic interactionism has placed most emphasis upon regarding social life as an active accomplishment of purposive, knowledgeable actors; and it has also been associated with a definite 'theory of the subject', as formulated in Mead's account of the social origins of reflexive consciousness. (50)

Giddens faults this tradition for not being able to conceptualize the social-structural context with sufficient precision.  He finds, for example, that Durkheim's efforts to provide theoretical resources for describing the "external or objective" character of society were inadequate (51).  Generally his view here is that theorists have failed in their conceptualizations of structures and agents:

Parson's actors are cultural dopes, but Althusser's agents are structural dopes of even more stunning mediocrity. (52)

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.  His 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 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)

Actions take place in contexts; and the contexts include crucially the actions of other people and the constraints and opportunities created by social structures.  Giddens adds another component of action: the forms of knowledge that actors have on the basis of which they tailor their interventions.

So what about "structure"?  Giddens prefers to talk about "structuration" -- the temporally extended processes through which social constraints evolve and take hold.

I want to suggest that structure, system and structuration, appropriately conceptualised, are all necessary terms in social theory. (62)

What is a "structure"? Here is one effort at definition provided by Giddens:

The term 'social structure' thus tends to include two elements, not clearly distinguished from one another: the patterning of interaction, as implying relations between actors or groups; and the continuity of interaction in time. (62)

He refers to these two aspects as "syntagmatic" and "paradigmatic" dimensions of social structures.  And he summarizes the concept of structure in these terms: "the rules (and resources) that, in social reproduction, 'bind' time" (63). "Structures can be identified as sets or matrices of rule-resource properties" (63-64).  Here is a summary table:

source: Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, p. 66.

The activity of structuration is key to Giddens's theorizing agents and structures, because it represents the link between the two.

The concept of structuration involves that of the duality of structure, which relates to the fundamentally recursive character of social life, and expresses the mutual dependence of structure and agency. (69)

Knowledge plays a key role in structuration; it provides the basis on which agents both understand and transform the rules around them. Agents, in other words, are reflexive cognitive actors.

 Institutions involve signification, domination and legitimation (106). In "Institutions, Reproduction, Socialisation" Giddens talks about structures in terms of means of mediation and transformation within a collection of active participants.

I want to suggest that each of the three aspects of structure I have distinguished can be understood as ordered in terms of the mediations and transformations which they make possible in the temporal-spatial constitution of social systems.... Writing and other media of communication ... bind much greater distances in time and space. (103)

A distinction that comes up a lot in Giddens's work in this collection is that between synchronic and diachronic states of affairs.  We can think of a structure as a snapshot at a moment in time of a set of relations, beliefs, rules, and opportunities.  This would be a synchronic description of the structure; it is a static approach to a social structure. Or we can look at a structure as being in a process of generation, reproduction, and transformation; this would be a diachronic and dynamic way of thinking about structures.  Giddens's affinity to the idea of structuration suggests that he is especially interested in the dynamic questions -- the ways in which actors, roles, and rules interact over time, leading to changes in the snapshot.

What Giddens's treatment here doesn't adequately express, in my reading, is what we think structures and institutions really are.  Are they complexes of patterned activities by numbers of actors?  Are they ensembles of social practices? Is the IBM corporation simply a large set of social interactions?  Or is there an abiding abstract social reality -- division of labor and authority; segmentation of responsibilities; interlocking productive activities -- that can be identified as a social entity? What about the capitalist economic structure; is this a stable social entity, or is it simply an ensemble of patterns of relations of meaning and power?  It seems that these examples are the kinds of thing that Giddens wants to refer to as a "system"; but it's not clear.

So the concept of social structure still seems underdeveloped here. What about the idea that agent and structure are inseparable? This I understand in a fairly direct way: agents are always located in a web of social relationships that define them and define the opportunities they confront.  And structures are always constituted by individuals thinking, acting, and interacting in specific ways.  So we literally cannot separate agents and structures; they are mutually constitutive.

(Here is an intriguing dynamic network simulation of the spread of HIV infection based on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.  "Small differences in reported behavior can potentially explain the large racial disparities in HIV infection observed in the United States.")