Searle on social ontology

Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language made a big impression on the field of the philosophy of language when it appeared in 1969.  But its author, John Searle, thinks the theory of speech acts has a much broader scope than simply the philosophy of language; he thinks it provides a foundation for the philosophy of mind, and -- of particular interest here -- for the philosophy of society.   Two books in the past decade or so have pushed this programme forward -- The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010).  So -- how much insight into the social world can we get from the ideas underlying speech act theory?

Fundamentally, Searle's interest is in the nature of social ontology:

[The philosophy of society is] the study of the nature of human society itself: What is the mode of existence of social entities such as governments, families, cocktail parties, summer vacations, trade unions, baseball games, and passports? (MSW, kindle loc 161)

His answer is categorical and dogmatic; there is precisely one human intentional activity that underlies all of social reality:

Humans have the capacity to impose functions on objects and people where the objects and the people cannot perform the functions solely in virtue of their physical structure. [E.g. a five-dollar bill can't be physically transformed into a grande latte.] The performance of the function requires that there be a collectively recognized status that the person or object has, and it is only in virtue of that status that the person or object can perform the function in question. (kindle loc 194)

Status functions are fundamental, according to Searle, because they are the bearers of rights, obligations, and norms -- what he refers to as "deontic powers." As a member of the American Philosophical Association, I have a right to attend the annual conference, and this right is embodied in the states of intentionality of other actors who recognize that status and the associated right.  "So status functions are the glue that holds society together.  They are created by collective intentionality and they function by carrying deontic powers" (kindle loc 225).

Searle thinks that rules, institutions, and collective intentions are the fundamental "atoms" of social phenomena; and -- this is the dogmatic part -- he thinks that these all depend on one mental action, which he refers to as a Status Function Declaration.  He holds that we cannot understand the working of a rule, a socially embodied obligation, or a socially embodied right, without postulating a commonly recognized Status Function Declaration that establishes that practice.  And, sure enough -- a status function declaration is a form of a speech act.

All institutional facts, and therefore all status functions, are created by speech acts of a type that in 1975 I baptized as "Declarations".... With the important exception of language itself, all of institutional reality, and therefore, in a sense, all of human civilization, is created by speech acts that have the same logical form as Declarations.... Institutional facts are without exception constituted by language, but the functioning of language is especially hard to see. (kindle loc 253, 282, 1683)

So speech acts, and the linguistic intentionality that they express, are the foundation of all social phenomena.  "All of institutional reality is created by linguistic representation" (kindle loc 313).  Voila.

What this all seems to boil down to, is three points: (1) Social interactions always involve language, both internally in thought and externally in communication. (2) The idea of a norm is an inherently social idea that needs to be embodied in the beliefs and attitudes of the individuals in the group through linguistically framed mental representations. (3) Norms need to be shared and publicly articulated if they are to be socially real. Searle represents these three common ideas in a more technical vocabulary: individuals have individual and collective intentionality; individuals have deontic commitments; and deontic commitments result from status function declarations -- speech acts of a specific kind.

Let's consider each of the points. Is intentionality inherently linguistic? Of course adult human intentionality is -- we can always paraphrase a state of consciousness as a linguistic declaration of some sort, and it is common to think of "thought" as internal speech.  But is it possible to imagine purposiveness and intentionality in a non-linguistic species?  Can we find examples of non-human cooperation that appears to presuppose intentionality without language?  The answers to these two questions appear to be affirmative.  Examples of primate problem-solving, group hunting, and simple cooperation in which the behavior of members of a group are oriented to the behavior of others all appear in the animal behavior literature.  (Here is an earlier post on current research on human cooperation that appears to contradict the assumption that intentionality requires language; link.  The post draws on the work of Michael Tomasello and colleagues in Why We Cooperate.)

Is it possible for a group of humans to embody a set of norms of behavior that are not explicitly formulated in language? Again, it seems that we have good empirical and theoretical reasons for thinking that "implicit norms", conventions, and practices exist. Searle himself gives some attention to what we would call "norms by convention", but only to argue that these examples are on their way to full-fledged status function declarations ("pre-institutional examples of the same logical form") (kindle loc 404, 449). But David Lewis's extensive work on the topic in Convention: A Philosophical Study (which Searle does not discuss) gives substantial support for the idea that conventions can emerge within a human group without formal linguistic articulation, and they can persist as a basis for organizing group behavior without requiring "codification" through a speech act. Here is a simple example:

In my hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, until recently all local telephone calls were cut off without warning after three minutes. Soon after the practice had begun, a convention grew up among Oberlin residents that when a call was cut off the original caller would call back while the called party waited. Residents usually conformed to this regularity in the expectation of conformity by the other party to the call. In this way calls were easily restored, to the advantage of all caoncerned.  New residents were told about the convention [deontic speech act!] or learned it through experience [no deontic speech act required!]. It persisted for a decade or so until the cutoff was abolished. (43)

So, according to Lewis, coordination through tacit or implicit convention is a common feature of social life, and it does not require a deontic speech act for its effectiveness. (In fact, Lewis argues that the arrow points the other direction: language presupposes conventions rather than being a necessary condition to the possibility of a convention.) Lewis's analysis is responsive to condition (3) above as well; Lewis has demonstrated how a practice can become "common knowledge" and effective in regulating coordinative and cooperative behavior, without ever having been expressed through a deontic declaration.

So it seems that Searle's insistence on the inescapable role of language and performative speech acts goes beyond what is justified by the facts.  The social is not reducible to a set of logical characteristics of language. That said, it is of course true that human social life -- coordination, planning, strategizing, conspiring, cooperating, and competing -- is enormously dependent on our species' ability to use language to express our thoughts and intentions. But we don't gain very much by paraphrasing social action in the language of speech acts; the real challenge for the social scientist is to explain social outcomes, not to redefine them.

Most fundamentally, we would hope that the philosophy of society or the philosophy of social science will help to formulate better theories and better research questions in the social sciences. The hard part of the social sciences is not arriving at a logical analysis of how institutions and norms can be defined in terms of something else; it is rather the difficult challenge of sorting out real human behavior within a set of institutions and explaining outcomes on that basis. But because of its single-minded focus on a single logical hypothesis, Making the Social World doesn't really do that. It is a formal treatment of the supposed relationship between institutions and speech acts that unfortunately does not provide substantive insight into the workings of real social institutions or human behavior.

Spartacus, Kitty Genovese, and social explanation

What is most interesting in paying attention to social life is noticing the surprising outcomes that often materialize from a number of uncoordinated choices and actions by independent individuals. We want to understand why and how the aggregate-level social fact came to be: was it a set of features of the individual actors' preferences or decision-making?  Was it the unintended result of strategic choices by various actors?  Was it simply the path-dependent and contingent outcome of a serial interactive process?  Was it brought about by structural conditions -- power, wealth, race -- within the context of which actors made their choices?  And what were the mechanisms of constraint, aggregation, contagion, and escalation through which actions and processes at the more proximate level came together into the outcome at the distal level?

Consider a pair of examples. Kitty Genovese is attacked by an assailant over an extended period of time in a dense neighborhood in Queens, many people observe the crime, and no one intervenes.  The woman is eventually murdered.  The question here is, why was there a total absence of intervention by any individual or group in this crime?  And a parallel surprise: General Marcus Licinius Crassus, having trapped the rebellious slave army of Spartacus, announces that the slaves will be spared death if they give up Spartacus for crucifiction.  Spartacus rises to his feet to say, "I am Spartacus." And in minutes the army of men rise as well, all declaring "I am Spartacus."  Here the question is the reverse: why do these men expose themselves to death to stand in solidarity with Spartacus?  In each case, there is an occasion for action presented to a group of individuals, in which members of the group can attempt to save the life of another person.  The collective behavior is fundamentally different in the two cases.   Why so? What are the mechanisms, psychological and social, that led to non-intervention in the first case and fatal solidarity in the second?

We might form a number of hypotheses about both of these cases in order to explain the very different outcomes.  In the Kitty Genovese case, we might cite anomy and anonymity as possible causes of the lack of response by bystanders.  With a low level of civic bonds, perhaps city dwellers have such a low level of emotional involvement with each other that even the slightest effort is unjustified.  Or perhaps it is the fact that each potential responder is anonymous to the others that leads to the result; he/she can make the decision to refrain from offering aid without fear of criticism from others.  Or perhaps collective behavior is strongly influenced by the actions of the first few, with later observers mimicking earlier non-aiders.  So the outcome might have been highly different if the first or second witness had intervened; others might have followed suit.   In the case of Spartacus, we might hypothesize that the bonds of solidarity forged by a history of fighting the Roman army gave the soldiers the moral motivation to support Spartacus; or perhaps it is the publicity of the scene, or the early example of the first few supporters, that spread to the behavior of the others.  Or perhaps it is an expression of fundamental mistrust by the soldiers of the good faith of Marcus Crassus; "he will kill us anyway." With nothing to lose, the army makes its symbolic statement of rejection.  These are each social psychological hypotheses, concerning the ways that individuals choose to involve themselves in an emergency and a situation of potential sacrifice.

Each of these hypotheses represents a social mechanism that can be incorporated into a narrative explaining the aggregate outcome.  In order for such a story to be scientifically compelling, we need to have some way of using empirical evidence to evaluate whether the postulated mechanism actually works in the real world of human behavior.  Is there empirical evidence for a social psychology of mimicry?  Do we have evidence to suggest that members of a crowd are more likely to do X or Y if a few others have already done so?  Is there empirical support for a theory of solidarity as a social motivation: do combat teams, groups of deep-ground miners, or emergency room doctors develop a higher willingness to conform their behavior to the good of the group or of other individuals in the group?  These examples of social mechanisms all fall in the category of putative behavioral regularities, and it should be possible to investigate them experimentally and statistically.

The challenge of explanation for any social outcome, we might say, is that of constructing an interpretation of the states of minds of a set of actors; the constraints and opportunities within which they choose a course of action; and the interactions that are created as they act within a common environment, leading to the outcome in question.  This is what we can refer to as an aggregative explanation, and it lies at the heart of Thomas Schelling's methodology in Micromotives and Macrobehavior.  As Schelling points out, sometimes the explanation turns on specific features of agency (the actors' preferences or their modes of decision-making), and sometimes it turns on the specifics of the environment of choice (the fact that the outcome of action is a public good).  But in general, explanation proceeds by showing how agents with specific features, acting within a social and natural environment with specific characteristics, bring about specific kinds of outcomes.

This, in a nutshell, represents a simple but powerful statement of a philosophy of social explanation.  It also represents the rudiments of a social ontology: higher-level social features are composed of the actions and states of agency of a set of actors within the context of locally embodied rules, norms, and expectations.  This is what I refer to as "methodological localism":

This theory of social entities affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes. But it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals. The “molecule” of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rule. (link)

Social explanations derive their force from empirical research into the nature of the actor, the nature of the locally embodied social environment, and the processes of aggregation through which actions by multiple actors coalesce into social outcomes.  The explanation satisfies us when it demonstrates the pathways through which individuals, constituted as they are found to be, located in institutions of the sort described, contribute to collective outcomes of the kinds described.

Contentious politics in China

By official count, the incidence of popular protest in China has increased ten-fold in the past fifteen years.  Kevin O'Brien and Rachel Stern report that the Chinese state reported 8,700 "collective incidents" in 1993, and this number had grown to 87,000 by 2005 (12).  And the issues that have evoked protest have expanded as well: land seizures, egregious local corruption, lay-offs and labor mistreatment, ecological and environmental concerns, and the Sichuan earthquake and building collapses, for example.  (The photo above is drawn from a 2008 story on factory protests in Dongguan in the Telegraph (link).)  A recent volume by O'Brien and Stern, Popular Protest in China, is a collection of some of the best current work by China scholars on popular protest in contemporary China.  Contributors include some of the researchers who are doing the most detailed work on this topic today, including William Hurst (The Chinese Worker after Socialism), Kevin O'Brien (Rightful Resistance in Rural China), Guobin Yang (The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online), and Yongshun Cai (Collective Resistance in China: Why Popular Protests Succeed or Fail).  So the volume offers an excellent perspective on the state of the field.

(It is mildly ironic to note that the conference on which the volume is based was held in 2006 -- several years before the global financial collapse that threw millions of Chinese workers out of work.  The incidence and severity of factory protests has certainly increased in the intervening years.)

Sidney Tarrow frames the volume by observing that there has been a welcome recent convergence between China studies and the field of contentious politics.  The contributors to the volume have made productive use of some of the core concepts of the theories of contentious politics that have been developed in the past two decades -- resource mobilization, political opportunity, issue framing, social networks, issue escalation, etc., that have proven so productive in the analysis of a range of instances of contention and collective action.  And Tarrow poses a comparativist's challenge: to what extent is it possible to discern similar processes of mobilization and escalation in the China case?  Further, Tarrow points out that much of the theorizing about contentious politics has taken place in the context of more democratic regimes; so how much of a difference does the fact of China's authoritarian political system make for the occurrence and character of social contention?

One of the important insights offered by several of the contributors is the importance of disaggregating structures like "political opportunity," "actor," and "issue."  O'Brien and Stern put it this way in their introduction:

The essays in this volume show that political opportunity in China depends (at a minimum) on the identity of the participants, the region, the grievance at hand, and the level of government engaged. (14)

The Chinese state is not a "monolith" but a "hodge-podge of disparate actors," an "attractive, multidimensional target." (14, quoting O'Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China)

And, of course, we have to recognize the widely different circumstances facing potential contentious actors in different regions and segments of the country.  The point is an important one: we should not look to the intellectual framework of contentious politics research as a set of conceptual recipes for deductively explaining contention.  Rather, we are better off looking at the literature on contentious action as a toolbox of "mechanisms and processes" that recur across contexts and that aggregate differently in different circumstances.  (This is, of course, the methodology that Tarrow, McAdam, and Tilly advocate in Dynamics of Contention.)

Each chapter focuses, by and large, on a different thread within the current literature on contentious politics: framing (William Hurst), trust (Teresa Wright), transnational actors (Patricia Thornton), leadership (Feng Chen), networks (Yanfei Sun and Dingxin Zhao), repression (Yongshun Cai), communication (Guobin Yang), and opportunity (Yanfei Sun and Dingxin Zhao). As such, the volume also serves as something like a tutorial on current theories of contentious politics.

Liz Perry's concluding essay frames the argument around "rebellion" (protest against particular officials) versus "revolution" (protest against principles and structures of government). And she is inclined to think that the rise in protest in China today falls in the former category -- mostly harmless from the point of view of the power and structure of the regime. 

Despite its remarkable frequency, then, contention in contemporary China remains limited in size, scale, and scope.  With few exceptions, the social composition, territorial reach, and endurance of individual protests have all been highly circumscribed. (206)

But I'm inclined to think that this misses one of the most important implications of the contentious politics literature, and the import of its most important case. Small-scale mobilization and protest can escalate to fundamental and widespread demands for justice. And a broad movement can emerge that is not revolutionary -- devoted to the overthrow of the state -- and yet is persistently transformative: dedicated to the long, slow transformation of society and state in the direction of equality and dignity for all members of society. The great historical example of this -- the example that motivated some of the best work in the literature of contentious politics -- is the American civil rights movement. This movement demanded a fundamental change of law and of culture, and it succeeded. And we might say that this is what ordinary people in China today demand and deserve.  The demand for voice and legal protections of lawful activities that swims throughout the more specific claims currently being made has the potential of becoming a very widespread movement.

(There are a number of earlier posts on these issues, collected under the tag CAT_collective action.)

Protests in China

Carrefour protest in Beijing

China has witnessed a visible increase over the past ten years in the number of protests, demonstrations, and riots over a variety of issues. Areas of social problems that have stimulated collective protests include factory conditions, non-payment of wages, factory closures, environmental problems (both large and small), and land and property takeovers by developers and the state.

It isn't surprising that social conditions in China have given rise to causes of protest. Rapid growth has stimulated large movements of people and migrant workers, development has created massive environmental problems for localities, and opportunities for development have created conflicts between developers and local people over land and property rights. Following the terrible earthquake in Sichuan and the collapse of many buildings and schools with tragic loss of life, there was a wave of angry protests by parents against corrupt building practices. So there are plenty of possible causes for protest in China today.

What is more surprising, though, is that the state has not been successful so far in muzzling protest, or in keeping news of local protests from reaching the international public.

YouTube provides a surprisingly wide window on protests in China and other parts of the world. It is worth viewing a sampling of clips from YouTube that surface when one searches for Chinese protest.  The following clips were collected in January 2009.  But here is a sobering fact: most of these clips have disappeared from YouTube with a message indicating that they violate "terms of use."  One is forced to speculate about the pressures that brought this about.

Unemployment for Chinese migrant workers



Labor protest in Shanghai



Shoe factory protest for back wages



Environmental protest in Xiamen



Protest about water pollution in Xiamen



Parents protesting children's death in Sichuan



Will the sociology of the future be able to use the contents of YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook as an important empirical indicator of social change in societies such as China, Malaysia, or Russia?  One thing is evident from this small experiment: YouTube is not an archive, and researchers are well advised to capture and document the items they want to study.

Fair prices?

We live in a society that embraces the market in a pretty broad way. We accept that virtually all goods and services are priced through the market at prices set competitively. We accept that sellers are looking to maximize profits through the prices, quantities, and quality of the goods and services that they sell us. We accept, though a bit less fully, the idea that wages are determined by the market -- a person's income is determined by what competing employers are willing to pay. And we have some level of trust that competition protects us against price-gouging, adulteration, exploitation, and other predatory practices. A prior posting questioned this logic when it comes to healthcare. Here I'd like to see whether there are other areas of dissent within American society over prices.

Because of course it wasn't always so. E. P. Thompson's work on early modern Britain reminds us that there was a "moral economy of the crowd" that profoundly challenged the legitimacy of the market; that these popular moral ideas specifically and deeply challenged the idea of market-defined prices for life's necessities; and that the crowd demanded "fair prices" for food and housing (Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture). The moral economy of the crowd focused on the poor -- it assumed a minimum standard of living and demanded that the millers, merchants, and officials respect this standard by charging prices the poor could afford. And the rioting that took place in Poland in 1988 over meat prices or rice riots in Indonesia in 2008 are reminders that this kind of moral reasoning isn't merely part of a pre-modern sensibility.  (For some quotes collected by E. P. Thompson from "moral economy" participants on the subject of fair prices see an earlier posting on anonymity.)

So where do contemporary Americans show a degree of moral discomfort with prices and the market? Where does the moral appeal of the principles of market justice begin to break down -- principles such as "things are worth exactly what people are willing to pay for them" and "to each what his/her market-determined purchasing power permit him to buy"?

There are a couple of obvious exceptions in contemporary acceptance of the market. One is the public outrage about executive compensation in banking and other corporations that we've seen in the past year. People seem to be morally offended at the idea that CEOs are taking tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation -- even in companies approaching bankruptcy. Part of the outrage stems from the perception that the CEO can't have brought a commensurate gain to the company or its stockholders, witness the failing condition of many of these banks and companies. Part is a suspicion that there must be some kind of corrupt collusion going on in the background between corporate boards and CEOs. But the bottom line moral intuition seems to be something like this: nothing could justify a salary of $100 million, and executive compensation in that range is inherently unfair. And no argument proceeding simply along the lines of fair market competition -- "these are competitive rational firms that are offering these salaries, and therefore whatever they arrive at is fair" -- cuts much ice with the public.

Here is another example of public divergence from acceptance of pure market outcomes: recent public outcries about college tuition. There is the common complaint that tuition is too high and students can't afford to attend. (This overlooks the important fact that public and private tuitions are almost an order of magnitude apart -- $6,000-12,000 versus $35,00-42,000!) But notice that this is a "fair price" argument that would be nonsensical when applied to the price of an iPod or a Lexus. People don't generally feel aggrieved because a luxury car or a consumer device is too expensive; they just don't buy it. It makes sense to express this complaint in application to college tuition because many of us think of college as a necessity of life that cannot fairly be allocated on the basis of ability to pay. (This explains why colleges offer need-based financial aid.) And this is a moral-economy argument.

And what about that other necessity of life -- gasoline? Public complaints about $4/gallon gas were certainly loud a year ago. But they seem to have been grounded in something different -- the suspicion that the oil companies were manipulating prices and taking predatory profits -- rather than an assumption of a fair price determined by the needs of the poor.

Finally, what about salaries and wages? How do we feel about the inequalities of compensation that exist within the American economy and our own places of work? Americans seem to accept a fairly wide range of salaries and wages when they believe that the differences correspond ultimately to the need for firms to recruit the most effective personnel possible -- a market justification for high salaries. But they seem to begin to feel morally aggrieved when the inequalities that emerge seem to exceed any possible correspondence to contribution, impact, or productivity. So -- we as Americans seem to have a guarded level of acceptance of the emergence of market-driven inequalities when it comes to compensation.

One wonders whether deeper resentment about the workings of market forces will begin to surface in our society, as unemployment and economic recession settle upon us.

Transnational protest movements

We've seen a fairly large increase in the occurrence of large international protest movements in the past thirty years. The anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s drew a substantial following across Europe and to some extent North America. (Historian E. P. Thompson played a significant leadership role in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; see for example PROTEST AND SURVIVE.) Anti-globalization protests in Seattle, Washington, and Davos drew substantial support from international organizations and participants. Major anti-war protests occurred in numerous European cities after the onset of the US-led war on Iraq. And now protests in London against the G20 meeting and in Strasbourg against NATO have drawn supporters and groups around Europe (post). (Here is a current account of the Strasbourg protests in the Dernieres nouvelles d'Alsace.)

These movements are riveting in a number of ways, from the point of view of sociology and international politics. We can ask questions at every edge of the phenomena:

Power and influence. How effective are mass demonstrations at achieving their declared goals? Do mass demonstrations influence government and multinational policies in the direction intended by the organizers and followers? For that matter -- how much of an influence can a large demonstration in Rome have on a subsequent effort to mobilize over a similar issue in New York? What is the role of mass media in the timing, pace, and public impact of large demonstrations?

Mobilization. What processes of mobilization and organization are at work in these specific periods of mass mobilization? To what extent do modern transnational protests embody a significant degree of common purpose and political identity? (Here's a recent post on the difficulty of defining a group mentality.) What organizations have the most influence in determining the strategy and tactics of the mass political actions that are called for? What networks of leaders and counter-politicians can be discerned in the period of mobilization leading up to the mass event? What is the nature of the networks that exist within the various communities of interest -- environmentalists, anti-war activists, anti-globalization activists? What sorts of issues have proven most potent in mobilizing significant numbers of adherents and organizations from different countries? What motivates followers to heed the call and bring themselves to London or Strasbourg? What is the combination of commitment, identity, and adventure that results in involvement?

Internal politics. What factors internal to a movement -- whether environmentalist, anti-globalization, anti-war, anti-nuclear -- lead to cohesion and dissension within the movement? What factors lead to the occasional outbreaks of violence between protesters and police? (See an earlier post on this question.) Is violence a deliberate tactic on either side -- militants or forces of order? What role do organizations such as anarchist groups and other radical, rejectionist groups play within the broader movement? Is it possible for small groups of rejectionists to "hijack" the large demonstration for their own purposes?

These questions overlap several distinct areas of research: resource mobilization theory, social movements, international relations theory, and comparative politics. (This is a point that McAdam, Tilly, and Tarrow make in Dynamics of Contention: there is much to be gained by studying these contentious movements across the traditional areas of study.) And the questions are probably further complicated by the availability of internet-based forms of communication and mobilization.

Sidney Tarrow has turned his attention to international protest movements as a particularly interesting form of "contentious politics." His 2005 book, The New Transnational Activism, treats international protests and their movements from the point of view of the Tilly-McAdam-Tarrow framework of theory and analysis of contentious politics. Here are a few framing assumptions from the introduction:

Students of domestic movements long ago determined that collective action cannot be traced to grievances or social cleavages, even vast ones like those connected to globalization. Acting collectively requires activists to marshal resources, become aware of and seize opportunities, frame their demands in ways that enable them to join with others, and identify common targets. If these thresholds constitute barriers in domestic politics, they are even higher when people mobilize across borders. Globalization is not sufficient to explain when people will engage in collective action and when they will not.

Nor does combating globalization automatically give rise to "global social movements." For Charles Tilly, a "social movement" is "a sustained, organized public effort making collective claims on target authorities" that uses a well-hewn contentious repertoire on the part of people who proclaim themselves to be worthy, unified, numerous, and committed.

For one thing, forming transnational social movements is not easy. Sustaining collective action across borders on the part of people who seldom see one another and who lack embedded relations of trust is difficult. For another, repertoires of contention grow out of and are lodged in local and national contexts. Even more difficult is developing a common collective identity among people from different cultural backgrounds whose governments are not inclined to encourage them to do so.

Tarrow's central hypothesis about transnational protest movements comes back to the core idea of "opportunity structures." International organizations and networks have created a new set of opportunities for transgressive groups who have an interest in challenging the status quo.

Tarrow identifies several important types of sources of evidence and theory for his current work: international political economy, anthropologists and students of public opinion, specific studies of international protest events, studies of transnational networks and institutions, and theorists of the idea of "global civil society." He explicitly locates the book as falling squarely within the research program established in Dynamics of Contention; his goal is to make use of this ontology of social mechanisms and processes to provide a sociology of transnational protest.

What I'm eager to see is some of the concrete empirical work that this approach suggests: specific empirical studies of the networks, organizations, and dynamic processes through which major transnational protests have unfolded in the past decade or so. It would seem that some important new tools helpful for such study are now much more readily available -- essentially, using the internet to track organizations, announcements, and efforts at mobilization. Tarrow provides some of this research -- for example, in his summary of research on the networks and localism of participants in the "Battle of Seattle". But this level of analysis seems to be where the action needs to be at this point in the study of transnational social movements. But Tarrow is certainly right in thinking that this subject area is important, and it is one that follows very logically from the framework of analysis of social contention developed by himself, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly in the earlier Dynamics of Contention.

Social control of crowds

There is a pretty high level of social protest taking place in France today. Strikes and demonstrations are taking place in many cities, involving students, faculty, workers, and other ordinary people. (Here is a recent news roundup dated March 19, 2009, on strikes, demonstrations, and manifs in the past month or so, and here is a BBC report on a round of large strikes in January.) The demands largely have to do with the current economic crisis, unemployment, changes in the social security system, and proposed reforms to higher education. French people are demanding specific changes from the government, and the government does not seem to want to compromise.

These collective actions carry out a tradition of public protest in French political culture that goes back at least a century and a half (Charles Tilly, The Contentious French). And few politicians in France will have overlooked the fact that public protests have sometimes developed into even more confrontational forms of collective action and conflict -- in 1968, for example, and in the banlieue in 2005. So the current round of protests and mass demonstrations has a significance in French political history that raises the possibility of even more intense civil conflict in the next twelve months.

What is to prevent the possibility that large organized demonstrations and strikes may develop into more violent conflicts between the population and the state in the future? How can the state ensure that large-scale peaceful protest -- a basic democratic right -- doesn't turn into episodic rioting and civil unrest when political stalemate emerges or when economic and social conditions worsen?

The question is a pressing one, because very large demonstrations and protests are volatile and unpredictable. When there are tens of thousands of participants and a range of leading organizations in a large demonstration, it is possible for the actions of the crowd to develop in ways that were not intended or anticipated. A peaceful march down a central boulevard can proceed from beginning to end with a great deal of internal discipline, with organizations maintaining ranks and preserving order. Many of the photos of manifs in French cities are distinguished by the prominent signs and banners the protesters carry announcing the organizations they represent -- labor unions, student organizations, faculty groups. And these banners themselves are an indication of organization and discipline. So large, peaceful protests can be organized and carried out successfully.

But the same march can also degenerate into skirmishing and street fighting involving small groups of activists and police. A small splinter group of violent protesters may break away from the march to engage in acts of violence against property -- burning cars, smashing shop windows. And these acts may spread by contagion to other parts of the crowd. Or a group of activists may deliberately confront the police with stones or bottles, with the goal of provoking violent reaction and an escalation of conflict. (This appears to have happened repeatedly in Athens a few months ago, and it was an anarchist tactic in the anti-globalization protests that took place in many cities a few years ago.) Or a group of police may engage in a demonstration of power intended to intimidate the crowd, leading to police violence against members of the crowd; again, this violence may spread to other locations. Even an unfortunate accident can lead to an outburst of violence -- a frightened driver losing control of his car and injuring a group of demonstrators, for example, can lead to panic and escalation. And any of these small outbreaks of violence can spread through the larger crowd, leading to an uncontrollable spasm of action and reaction.

So how can the authorities in a democracy develop strategies for ensuring that peaceful protests avoid violent escalation? I suppose the most direct strategy is to consider the demands themselves and evaluate whether they legitimately call for changes of policy that ought to be enacted. Compromise over the central issues leading to mass protest presumably has some effect on the likelihood of violence and disorder. If the people are convinced that the government is acting unjustly, the government ought to at least consider whether there is some legitimacy in these complaints.

A second strategy is more tactical. Recognizing that protest is likely to occur, it makes sense for the authorities to work with the organizers and their organizations to arrive at agreements about the scope and nature of the protest. The route, location, duration, and other conditions of the protest can be negotiated. And the authorities are well advised to attempt to gain the support of the organizers in an agreement to maintain internal discipline within the demonstration -- to win the agreement of the organizations themselves to attempt to suppress possible outbursts of violence by minority elements within the crowd.

A third strategy involves, of course, policing. The authorities have both the ability and the obligation to use police powers to ensure public order. And this means that they need to plan intelligently for the disposition and behavior of police forces to contain possible violent outbursts. But the use of police force is a delicate political art. Heavy-handed, intimidating policing seems to be as likely to provoke violence as to suppress it. Police behavior that depends upon the conspicuous threat of force likewise is likely to be provocative -- a double line of police with truncheons and riot gear, with face shields providing a disturbing anonymity, is likely to provoke fear and aggression in the crowd that it confronts. And, of course, police behavior that crosses the line to overt acts of brutality is almost certain to provoke violent response, as news of police violence spreads through the crowd. But it is also possible to err on the side of insufficient police presence; forces that can be quickly overwhelmed create the situation of a sudden escalation of violence by a crowd that has suddenly realized that there is no barrier to further violent actions.

It would seem that the ideal prescription for a policing strategy is something like this: enough police force in the vicinity to respond quickly and decisively to acts of violence by members of the crowd; positioning of police forces in fairly inconspicuous locations so their presence is not itself a provocation; and well-trained police forces who can be trusted to refrain from unnecessary violence against protesters. (The "police riot" in Chicago in 1968 plainly led to rapid escalation of violence in that situation.)

What makes this question so complicated is the fact that it involves social actions, conflicts, and relationships at many levels: the basic conflict between organized groups with explicit demands and the state with its interest in enforcing its policies; the limited degree of control that protest organizers have over the behavior of followers; the fact that smaller groups and organizations within the protest movement may have goals that are more radical than those of the main organizations; the fact that the authorities have only limited control over the forces at their command; and the fact that there may not be acceptable compromises that successfully resolve the conflict between protesters and the state. These factors make the behavior of the crowd somewhat unpredictable, and they introduce major sources of contingency into the way in which a particular day of protest and season of dissent play out.

Bringing the discussion back to France in 2009, there seem to be several large possibilities for the coming year. The government may decide that it needs to adjust some of its policies in order to reduce the level of popular dissent and unrest; it needs to reach a social compromise. The government may hold firm but the dissenting organizations may grow fatigued or discouraged -- so that the current round of protest and strikes subsides. Both sides may hold firm but an equilibrium level of protest and response may be reached, with neither side escalating to a higher level of civil conflict and violence. Or, finally, both the government and the protest movement may hold firm and protests may spiral upward into greater levels of social conflict, with riots and violent protests ensuing. More and more force may be exerted through police repression, and this may lead to more widespread and more aggressive demonstrations in the following weeks. And, of course, all of these scenarios are likely to have consequences for electoral outcomes in the coming several years.

Acting as a group

What is involved in acting as a group? What is the difference between a crowd of pedestrians crossing Mass Ave in Cambridge when the light changes and a group of students marching into Harvard Hall in an attempt to initiate a protest? How about the difference between a group of history graduate students pursuing research simultaneously but separately on early New England diseases in Widener Library, and a research group of scientists collaborating to discover the mechanism of HIV transmission at the cellular level?

The intuitive answer to these questions is pretty clear. A group activity requires some level of collective intentions and purposes on the parts of the participants towards each other and towards the group itself. A group is more than an ensemble of individuals performing a similar set of actions (pedestrians, independent researchers). Rather, we want to see some indication that the individuals regard themselves as members of the group; that they embrace some conception of the action that members of the group propose to perform; and that they individually choose their plans of action out of consideration of this group or collective purpose. In a group's actions, the individuals who make up the group are oriented towards the group and its goals and purposes. In other words, groups are constituted by some form of group-oriented intentionality on the part of individual members, and group actions are performed by individuals who have adopted a set of beliefs and attitudes towards other members of the group and its collective purposes.

There are quite a few complications that arise here, however. Here is one: many collective activities involve participants with a wide range of affiliation with the collective purpose. There are core members who explicitly and emphatically declare adherence to the collective goal and plan. There are some who are willing followers without a clear idea of the purpose or plan. There are opportunistic joiners who have their own private reasons for joining the group project. And there may even be a degree of disagreement within the group about goals, strategies, and tactics -- with the result that many committed members nonetheless differ from each other with respect to their collective intentions. And these aren't sharp distinctions in most cases -- so a given collectivity may consist of a deeply mixed group of individuals with respect to their understandings, purposes, and affinities for the collective action.

Several philosophers have focused on this set of problems surrounding "group intentions". Margaret Gilbert thinks there is a sharp distinction between group intentions and individual intentions (On Social Facts). More recently, Raimo Tuomela refers to "we" intentions and "I" intentions in order to explain the defining characteristics of group behavior in The Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View. Both Gilbert and Tuomela seem to think that groups have intentions that are autonomous from the purposes and intentions of members of the group -- a sort of Durkheimian view of the autonomous reality of the mentality of groups. What these approaches have in common is a desire to postulate a strong distinction in levels between group intentions and individual intentions.

Gilbert’s primary contention is that the notion of a collectivity—individuals constituting a group—is the central feature of social ontology. And she maintains that this concept can best be analyzed by the idea of a “plural subject”—the referent of the first-person plural pronoun, “we”. The core of Gilbert’s theory of social groups involves the idea of the mutual recognition by a set of persons that they are engaged in some joint actions or beliefs. “A set of people constitute a social group if and only if they constitute a plural subject”; and a plural subject is “a set of people each of whom shares with oneself in some action, belief, attitude, or similar attribute” (p. 204). Gilbert argues that the pronouns “us” and “we” are the linguistic elements through which we refer to plural subjects in English. And she believes that plural subjects exist; they are not fictions or constructions, but agents which have beliefs, perform actions, and succeed or fail in carrying out their intentions. According to Gilbert, “social groups are plural subjects, collective beliefs are the beliefs of plural subjects, and social conventions are the ‘fiats’ of plural subjects” (p. 408). Gilbert argues against the individualism of Max Weber, by arguing that collectivities are the central subject of the social sciences, and that collectivities cannot be subsumed under individualist concepts. Thus Gilbert suggests that her theory offers support for holism over individualism (p. 3).

I don't find this collectivist approach to "individuals behaving as groups" at all convincing, for several reasons. One is the point mentioned above about the heterogeneity of individual motivations and purposes within a group activity. This seems to imply that there couldn't be a coherent, univalent group intention that stands separate from the individuals who constitute the group. Instead, there are only the somewhat polyglot collective intentions within agents, with some degree of within-group communication and shaping about their shared collective purposes.

Second, there is the general skeptical point about "spooky" social entities -- entities that are thought to have an existence independent from the states of agency and mind of the individuals who make up the social world. How could one possibly imagine that there is a collective intention associated with the Burmese monks in 2007, standing separate and independent from the beliefs, assumptions, loyalties, and adherences of many individual monks and networks of monks?

And here is a third puzzle. We need to have some idea of the concrete social processes through which group-oriented intentions are created at the individual level in particular social circumstances. We need to know something about the microfoundations of group formation. It doesn't help to simply postulate "collective intentions"; we need to have a concrete sociology of the ways in which individuals come to have group-oriented beliefs, values, and motives.

Finally, the "autonomous collectivity" view doesn't work very well when we try to use it to interpret the practice of gifted social scientists who attempt to explain collective action. E. P. Thompson, James Scott, Chuck Tilly, Doug McAdam, and William Sewell all devote a lot of their effort to explaining how specific social collectivities came to define themselves as "groups" and came to act in a collective way. But their approaches are invariably based on understanding the many threads of mobilization, structure, and meaning at the disaggregated level that eventually build up to a movement. Thompson's metal workers, Scott's Southeast Asian peasant rebels, Tilly's Vendeans, McAdam's civil rights activists and followers, and Sewell's Marseillaise craftsmen all reflect the variation and concrete historical construction of individual consciousness within concrete political movements that confirms the variability and agentic nature of social movements and group identity.

That said, there is still a crucial role for group-oriented thoughts and purposes at the level of at least some of the participants in a group. Without these group intentions at the individual level, we couldn't say that there is a group at all -- only a collection of individually oriented individual actors. Something like this must be true for at least some of the members of a group action:

• X regards a set of other individuals as constituting a group G to which he/she belongs;
• X believes that G has a common interest or need N;
• X is motivated to join in concert with others in G in such a way as to bring about N;
• X believes that some significant number of other members of the group share these collective thoughts, purposes, and motives;
• X believes that some significant number of G will act accordingly;
• and X has a consequent motivation to engage in the collective action.

One additional condition seems to be pragmatically required in order for these conditions to arise: there must be some tangible process of communication and mobilization through which the group-oriented intentional states mentioned here are created in the various individuals.

So there are mandatory group-oriented states of mind that are part of the constitution of a group. But notice this key fact: these features of beliefs, intentions, and motives that I have mentioned are all located at the level of the individual actors. There is no higher-level collectivity that possesses an independent "group intention". So a group is constituted by the states of intentionality and belief of its members, and the concrete processes of communication and mobilization through which a degree of group-orientedness and coherence emerges within the states of mind of the participants. Weber was right after all! Fundamentally, there are only three social-intentional states postulated here: affiliation, mutual recognition, and solidarity. And there is a postulate about the micro-social processes through which these are cultivated: mobilization, communication, and embodied social networks.

And this analysis in turn is entirely compatible with the perspective of methodological localism that I've mentioned several times here.

Social entrepreneurs

Social entrepreneurs are people who want to bring about non-routine projects, collaborations, or organizations where they didn't previously exist in order to solve a perceived social problem. This is very different from working within an existing organization and using its official resources to bring about a particular result. An example might be a community activist who conceives of a storefront operation providing financial advice to local homeowners facing foreclosure. In order to bring this about, he or she needs to secure financial commitments from some potential partners, recruit expert volunteers from others, and gain cooperation from community neighbors to trust and use the service. And, finally, the project needs to deliver a reasonable percentage of its promised benefits -- some number of troubled mortgage holders need to be successful in retaining their homes thanks to the service.

There are examples of highly successful social entrepreneurs everywhere -- think of Geoffrey Canada and the creation of the Harlem Children's Zone (link), Matt and Jessica Flannery and the creation of Kiva, a successful peer-to-peer micro-lending program (link), Father William Cunningham and Eleanor Josaitis and the founding of FocusHope in Detroit (link), or Millard and Linda Fuller, founders of Habitat for Humanity (link). And we don't have to turn to the high-profile cases to find great examples of skillful social entrepreneurship -- every city is home to community leaders and innovators who have created coalitions or organizations that have significantly contributed to solutions for important social problems.

It is interesting to notice that the idea of social entrepreneurship brings in the social in two different ways. Social entrepreneurs are involved in addressing social problems; so the object of the entrepreneurial activity is to enhance some aspect of the public good or to solve a social problem, rather than achieving a private "return on investment". But second, social entrepreneurship depends on putting together voluntary coalitions among a number of independent social actors in a sustained common effort. A purely private and self-financed effort to provide meals for homeless teenagers would be a laudable effort; but I'm not sure I would call it "social entrepreneurship." It doesn't confront the key problem of locating potential partners, engaging them in the project, and sustaining the collaboration over the long term. So a social entrepreneur involves social cooperation at the input side and public goods on the output side.

The question here is a simple one: what are some of the factors that permit some people to be successful in efforts at social entrepreneurship and others strikingly not? There are also other groups of people -- those who would never consider the idea of creating a new social project in any circumstances and those who look at social causes as a moment for personal gain, for example. But just consider the well-intentioned actors who undertake to put together a successful coalition for the public good -- what distinguishes between those who succeed and those who fail?

A couple of related concepts in the social sciences are immediately relevant to this question -- in particular, the concept of social capital and the idea of a social network. Putting the point very intuitively -- success in a project of social entrepreneurship is more likely if the agent has more social relationships of trust and confidence with other influential players to bring to bear in the effort. And likewise, he/she is more likely to succeed in some rough proportion to the depth and weight of the social networks within which the agent is located. (Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community is one place where the idea of social capital is applied to contemporary society.)

Crudely, the individual's capacity to make things happen is multiplied by the strength of the organizations he/she can call upon in support of the effort. This point segues to the point about social networks: if the agent is in a position to call upon the support and collaboration of other resource holders as a result of personal and professional relationships, then he/she is more likely to succeed in putting into place the elements needed for establishment of the project.

Let's apply these points to our community activist. Suppose this individual has developed strong relationships with regional foundations, businesses, semi-governmental organizations, and elected officials. And suppose that these relationships have resulted in a deep reservoir of trust in the activist's perseverance and integrity. Finally, suppose the agent has a well-developed plan for establishing and maintaining the center with high credibility of success. He/she has a good "business plan" for the social project.

It is believable that this actor is much more likely to succeed than his twin with very weak personal and organizational relationships. Our organizer will have a good chance of persuading these potential partners to make the financial commitments and commitments of engagement needed to put the financial counseling center in place. And if the center is successful over several years, it is also likely that the agent's fund of trust and confidence will deepen -- making the next project even more achievable.

This part of the story concerns the social location of the actor -- the networks and organizations the agent can turn to in seeking support for the project. What are the features of personality and character that support and deepen these elements of social capital?

Here are several. Trust and credibility are essential. This is true because the success of the enterprise requires the continuing cooperation of voluntary partners. The agent needs to inspire trust in the partners. And inspiring trust isn't just a fact about current behavior or a persuasive smile -- the agent needs to have a track record of behavior that validates that trust as well.

Second, credible competence is crucial as well. The agent needs to be able to make the case that the project can succeed and that he/she has the skills needed to carry it out. This too depends heavily on one's history -- the best evidence of future competence is demonstrated past competence.

This also implies a third characteristic -- a need to be able to communicate clearly and credibly. Simply being a good communicator isn't enough, but failing to communicate well certainly weakens the likelihood of success in bringing together a durable partnership.

And we can't overlook the characteristics of originality and imagination. Solving difficult social problems requires new ideas and innovative approaches. So the successful social entrepreneur probably needs to have a focused imagination that permits him/her to conceive of new potential solutions -- or at least recognize them when other people invent them.

One wonders, finally, if there is a dimension of empathy and emotional intelligence that plays an important differentiating role among different social actors in this kind of activity. How important is it for the social entrepreneur to be able to understand and express the human importance of the issue? And how important are these skills in sustaining coalitions once they have begun? It seems believable that this is very important indeed.

It appears that social entrepreneurship is ready for some serious academic study, along the lines of studies of private entrepreneurship over the past several decades. Here is a report of a preliminary study of Ashoka fellows in social entrepreneurship (link). And the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford Graduate School of Business offers some interesting examples as well (link).

Labor protest in China

C.K. Lee’s book, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt, is a very important contribution to the sociology of contemporary China. The field needs this kind of innovative and theoretically adept work. And one of the great strengths of the research is the fact that it takes the Chinese context seriously in a profound way; it is “China-centered” sociology. This stands in opposition to work that brings a theoretical perspective (often inspired by European experiences and theorists) and then attempts to “apply” the theory to the data of Chinese experience. C.K. does not make this mistake. The book is a major empirical and theoretical contribution to the effort to better understand current social realities in China. But it is also an important and innovative example of how to use sociological theories more generally to arrive at a sociology of urban 21st-century society and social change.

The book looks at the rising incidence of labor protests in post-reform China. Abrupt and profound social changes are occurring that have had a great impact on the condition of working people: privatization, dissolution of state safety net, new export factory system with labor supplied by rural immigrants. C.K. looks at two regions and two “situations”: Rustbelt (Liaoning in the northeast, where protests are stimulated by the loss of employment, unemployment benefits, medical care, unpaid pensions) and Sunbelt (Guangdong in the south, where protests are stimulated by discrimination, exploitation, and horrendous working conditions). These are conditions that Anita Chan documents in China's Workers Under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy. Towards the end of the book C.K. summarizes the two locales as representing “The death of socialism and the birth of capitalism” or words to that effect. The title is important: “Against the Law” captures both the central theme of protest – workers appealing to agencies and the central state for their legal rights – but also to the insurgent and often repressed status of their protests.

C.K. is interested in exploring the sociology of these labor worlds in an appropriately “local” way: what are the specific features of the Chinese economy, Chinese production, Chinese policy and law, and Chinese culture that produce two rather different patterns of protest and contention in two segments of the Chinese manufacturing economy?

Lee emphasizes the contingency of these developments and their dependency on rather proximate causal / social factors. She believes that the nature of the mobilizations and protests is affected by the way in which they are framed. Writing about Rustbelt protest: “My main concern … is to analyze how the characteristics and limits of worker protests are linked to the mode of state regulation of labor and the social reproduction of labor power” (71). Elsewhere she makes the point that Sunbelt protests have less mobilizational “staying power” because of the living situation of migrant workers: they return to their villages in times of distress, and their movement collapses. She distinguishes sub-types of Rustbelt protests by their underlying issue: nonpayment protests, neighborhood protests, bankruptcy protests. In other words, rather specific circumstances that set the context for life and work in the two regions and sectors have substantial effects on the nature of dissent and protest that results.

She also highlights the nuance and heterogeneity of the social realities she studies. “What strikes an outside observer as a homogeneous group confronting common economic predicaments growing out of structural reform is experienced from within the group as fragmented interests, unequal treatment, and mutual suspicion” (84). So she doesn’t make the mistake of assuming homogeneity of “workers” or other social categories.

So a particular strength of her approach is that it emphasizes the contingency, variation, and internal heterogeneity in social processes that we should expect. “Theory” is a help but not a blueprint.

A substantive and important point that C.K. arrives at is the “cellular” nature of labor protest in China today. She refers almost all of these protests as “cellular” – meaning they lack a larger regional base of organization. Also they are fairly spontaneous; not much local organization or planning is needed or provided. This cellularity derives from specific features of the social environments in which labor protests emerge in China today. “A confluence of institutional factors produce the prevailing pattern of cellular activism. State work units provide the physical sites of communication and coordination, organize workers’ interests, and define the boundary of the aggrieved community” (112). But state surveillance and repression prevents the incubation of organizations – such as independent labor unions – that might convey local activism to a broader regional level.

A second substantive point – perhaps her most fundamental point, and the inspiration for the title of the book – is the unusually central role that appeals to legal rights play in current examples of labor protest. Kevin O’Brien refers to this strategy as “rightful resistance” (Rightful Resistance in Rural China). C. K. makes the point clearly at the end of the book: “The centrality of the law and legalism is salient, and is perhaps a unique Chinese way of popular contention, triggered by the regime’s decentralized legal authoritarianism. Even without formal or conscious cross-class alliance against the state, the common and ferocious charge of ‘against the law’ is a powerful and haunting chorus to the Chinese regime” (261).

A third important characteristic of C. K.’s analysis is her insistence on the agency and subjectivity of the workers whose actions she considers. She pays attention to their consciousness and ideas and their need for self-respect and dignity – these all play important roles in the movements and activism she describes. She insists on seeing workers as agents, not victims: “Like the making of class, we cannot predict the outcome but can explain the trajectory of when and which ideological interpellation underlies what collective action” (122). And she emphasizes the “moral indignation” aspect of many protests. “I seek to understand the indigenous meanings, relations, and institutional context that come packaged with these terms when they are invoked in the rustbelt, often simultaneously” (114). This means that it is a sociologically important area of research, to attempt to provide a deeper understanding of the consciousness of the men and women who make up this history.

I am also appreciative of the methods of investigation and research that Lee uses. She makes skillful use of her sophisticated understanding of various relevant pieces of sociological theory and analysis; her deep and expert knowledge of the chronology of legal reforms and policy shifts that have affected industry and labor in China since 1980; and an expert command of the macro-level economic and political data that are available about industrial change and labor unrest. But these forms of theoretical and empirical knowledge constitute a foundation for a more qualitative kind of research: careful case studies of particular factories and disturbances based on her own fieldwork, along with interviews of participants that bring the book into the range of a kind of industrial ethnography. In other words, the arguments of the book are situated within a strong theoretical and empirical understanding, and are moved forward through synthesis of many of her own observations and interviews with participants. This combination gives the book a particularly acute flexibility when it comes to understanding the complexities of the social situations in Guangdong and Liaoning. Her analysis of the two situations is not merely an expression of her underlying theories; rather, it is a sensitive “portrait” of the nuanced series of developments that are found in the two regions.

Why does unrest spread?

Why does social unrest occur and spread?

This is a little bit of a trick question. It really implies three questions: What are the circumstances that make unrest in a population possible or likely? What circumstances need to occur in order to precipitate expressions of unrest in particular places? And what circumstances are conducive to spreading (or damping out) these local expressions?

First, how might we define the concept of "unrest"? To my ear the concept involves grievance and activism. Grievance involves the situation where individuals and groups feel that they have been badly treated by someone. Activism implies a disposition to act visibly and politically to protest or alleviate this mistreatment. Grievance can exist without activism, and there are instances of activism that stem from emotions other than grievance. But when these emotional and behavioral states come together we can refer to the resulting stew of behavior as "unrest".

So let's start with the causes of grievance. Power relations create the emotions of grievance: excessive conscription or taxation, insufficient attention to the interests of an ethnic minority, abusive and disrespectful treatment by the police. When individuals and groups believe they are being treated in ways that unfairly harm their interests or reduce their dignity, they are likely to feel aggrieved.

Grievance is a propositional emotion; it involves a subject, a harm, and a perpetrator. And this means that grievance is not simply a reaponse to suffering. Take a population that is experiencing dearth in the early stages of famine. Individuals and sub-groups may differ in their experience of grievance; they may hold different social actors responsible for their suffering (landlords, lenders, city people, the military, or the state, for example). And these differences have implications for how and when these groups may be aroused to protest and action.

What about "activism"? What kind of psycho-political state is this? It is a propensity to make the transition from political emotion to action -- to go from resentment of the state's behavior to the choice of joining a street demonstration; to go from anger about conscription to joining an anti-draft organization; to go from frustration about the landlord's unwillingness to restore the heat to joining with others in a rent strike. "Activism" appears to be a complex characteristic of individuals and groups. For one thing, it seems to have a substantial component of culture and tradition baked into it. Cultures seem to differ in their responses to mistreatment; some communities seem to have resources for activist mobilization that others lack. Second, there appears to be a substantial degree of social learning through imitation involved in becoming "activist." So it is likely that there is a degree of positive feedback involved in the spread of activist psychology.

So back to the original question: what causes the spread of unrest? There needs to be an issue that creates a grievance in a significant number of people. Something needs to happen to make this issue salient relative to other concerns. There needs to be a critical mass of people who share the grievance and possess the components of the social emotions of activism. And there needs to be a "spark" that allows activists to mobilize others.

Consider a hypothetical example -- a company with dozens of factories in different parts of the country that is imposing a unilateral change in its contributions to worker retirement accounts. Suppose each factory has several thousand workers; and suppose that there is a range of responses to the retirement changes in the various factories along these lines:

• Quiescence and grudging acceptance
• Widespread grousing but no organized action
• Wildcat strikes

What factors might account for these different responses to essentially the same event?

Several possible explanations might be considered:

• The presence/absence of effective rank-and-file leaders
• The presence/absence of effective local managers' countermeasures (persuasion, cooptation, threats)
• Strong/weak traditions of activism in different locations
• Alternative narratives about what the changes mean ("inevitable in this business climate", "better this than a lot of layoffs", "higher management is taking this opportunity to stiff us", ....)
• High/low impact of the management changes on the interests of workers in each location
• Strong/weak channels of communication among workers in different factories

It is, of course, a matter for empirical investigation to determine whether some or all of these factors played a causal role. But we can give good theoretical reasons for thinking that these are socially possible mechanisms that may underlie the observed differences in behavior.

We might speculate, then, that unrest is most likely to occur and spread when there is an abuse that affects a large number of people; there is a generally shared understanding of the nature of the abuse; there are effective local activists capable of arousing the indignation of the rank-and-file; there are accessible communication vehicles permitting the spreading of messages of dissent; the population has a tradition of activism; and the state's managers are ineffectual in damping down the occurrences of protest. These conditions appear most favorable for the dissemination of unrest.