Path dependency in formation of academic disciplines

The topic of the historicity of academic disciplines has come up numerous times in this forum. It is a conviction of mine that disciplines demonstrate a great deal of path dependency over time in their evolution. We can think of a discipline as being constituted at a time by some or all of these elements:

• a definition of important questions for research
• a definition of appropriate methods of research and analysis
• a model of explanation in the field
• some key examples of what theories and hypotheses ought to look like
• institutions for supporting, organizing, and directing research efforts
• institutions for validating and disseminating research findings
• institutions for training young researchers in the key elements of the discipline

This sounds a lot like Kuhn's idea of a paradigm, Lakatos's idea of a research community, or the definitions of scientific enterprise offered by historians and sociologists of science and researchers in the tradition of STS studies (link). An academic discipline is an assemblage of ideas, networks of individuals, institutions, and locations (libraries, laboratories, research institutes).

If this is a reasonable approximation to the social reality of an academic discipline, what does it suggest about contingency and path-dependency in the development of the discipline? For one thing, it suggests multiple sources of contingency both internal to the intellectual enterprise and external to it. Internally, a discipline like philosophy or a sub-discipline like the philosophy of mind is driven in part by a somewhat logical process of attack on existing problems -- what Kuhn referred to as "normal science", and partly by large, compelling breakthroughs by individuals or small groups (for example, the Vienna Circle). Externally, it is straightforward to identify political and institutional influences that shape the research agenda at various times in various disciplines -- the preference for positivism in sociology that was advanced by considerations of the Cold War, for example. And within the institutional setting of the disciplines there are contingencies as well -- for example, a strong editor of a leading journal or research laboratory can set the agenda for theory and methodology in a discipline for a generation. (Andrew Abbott describes this kind of influence in Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred.)

Almost every element in this list is itself visibly dependent on historical circumstances in multiple ways. Take the issue of defining the important questions for research. There are political and governmental influences on the definition of research problems -- witness the influence of the Cold War on the development of the social sciences, the role that is played by governmental funding agencies like the NSF or NIH, and the occasional intrusion of political pressure into scientific fields like environmental science and sociology.

Within the community of individuals currently pursuing the discipline or proto-discipline there is a range of levels of talent and innovation, on the one hand, and prestige and influence, on the other. (The two categories don't necessarily correlate perfectly.) One charismatic individual or local group (Wittgenstein, say) may exert influence over the direction of a sub-field through charisma and the power of his or her ideas. Another may exert influence over the strategic placement he or she occupies in the institutions of influence -- major graduate schools or prominent journals, for example. And in each case, the discipline moves to a new phase with new questions and ideas.

Bourdieu's theoretical construct of the field (link) is very relevant to these forms of influence on the development of a given academic discipline. By locating various individuals within the network of institutions, scholars, and funding sources it is possible to attempt to piece together the ways in which their own research agendas unfolded (responding to incentives created by their field) and the influence they exerted on other scholars. Neil Gross's sociological biography of Richard Rorty illustrates this kind of analysis (link), as does much of George Steinmetz's research on the development of sociology as a discipline in France, Germany, and the US.

What all of this seems to support is the idea that the academic disciplines are in fact highly contingent in their development, and that there is no reason to expect convergence around a single "best" version of the discipline. The history of disciplines should better be understood in analogy to the brachiation and differentiation associated with the evolution of species and sub-species over time -- lots of contingency, with a consequent specialization of the intermediate results to the demands of a particular point in time. This implies that a discipline like sociology or political science could have developed very differently, with substantially different ideas about research questions and methods. And this seems to be true for similar reasons in the humanities as well as the natural sciences and mathematics. Finally, this suggests that there is no end-point -- no "universal sociology," no "final philosophy," no "complete mathematics." Instead, every discipline in its search for knowledge and new ideas is charting new intellectual space.

International relations and complexity theory

Hilton Root has published some very interesting ideas about systems thinking in international relations theory in Dynamics among Nations: The Evolution of Legitimacy and Development in Modern States. Here he offers an approach to social, political, and economic change through a set of ideas that are not yet strongly integrated into IR theory — the perspective of complexity theory, worked out in a clear and useable form.

The three sources of theoretical argument which he introduces -- complexity theory, social network theory, and evolutionary ecology -- represent a significant innovation in comparative history. The novel approach Root takes consists of three large ideas: that social systems at all levels display “adaptive complexity”; that the structure of the social networks (governance systems, information systems, economic inter-dependencies) that are embedded in a specific society have important and unexpected consequences for the behavior of the system; and that complex social developments have much in common with “landscape ecology”, by which he means that there are multiple next steps that can be taken at any point leading to an improvement of performance.

His fundamental claim is that communities, states, and international systems need to be understood as dynamic systems with emergent properties. A society is not simply the linear sum of the behaviors of its component systems.

The system of international relations, like most complex ecosystems, such as the nervous system or a rain forest, is yielding to its rules of complexity. In complex systems, a central administrator rarely guides the collective behaviors that characterize development processes. The system itself has a collective behavior that depends on all its parts. Rather than convergence toward a dominant model, or “global optimum,” the interactive dynamics are coevolutionary; their interactions result in reciprocal and evolving change. (2)

One consequence of these ideas is that international relations and economic and political development processes show substantial path dependency and contingency. Another consequence is that some leading metaphors for large-scale historical change are implausible and misleading: in particular, modernization theory, “uniqueness of the West,” and “end of history.” Finally, Root argues that we should expect substantial variation in the strategies and structures that nations choose, given their own geopolitical environments.

Competition in highly interdependent global environments produces far greater local variation and diversity of structures and strategies than modernization theory ever anticipated. (3)

The book uses numerous episodes from the political, military, and economic histories of Europe and Asia to illustrate and validate the approach he takes. As a particularly interesting example of this, Root interprets Napoleon’s decision to invade Russia, not as folly, but as an intuition of the nodal character of the traditional European state system (126 ff.). He also makes repeated use of periods in Chinese imperial history to illustrate his notion that system dynamics and the structure of the governance network create very powerful obstacles to innovation and change.

So what does Root mean by “complexity”? His central concept is that of a “complex interactive adaptive system” (CIAS) within a heterogeneous environment. Here is a useful description of international relations through the lens of CIAS theory.

A network is comprised of agents. The agents interact according to shared and evolving rules of behavior that in turn define the larger environment or system. That behavior generates continuous feedback loops that enable agents to learn and to adjust their behaviors to others’ actions, thereby re-creating the system in which they operate. Complex adaptive systems are created by interactions and communications of self-adjusting agents. Continuous “feedback” motivates agents to re-evaluate their positions. Because agents are constantly reacting to other agents’ behaviors, nothing in the environment is ever fixed or finite. In order to fully understand the impacts of these agents, their behaviors must be understood as they interact with the broader system. (16)

A key analytical idea the author brings forward repeatedly is the notion of “co-evolution”. This concept captures one important aspect of a complex interactive adaptive system. CIAS’s show two types of unpredictability. First, the mutual interactions of the parts lead to “chaotic” courses of development of the system, as A, B, and C interact to produce unexpected outcome D. But second, the “adaptive” part introduces another kind of indeterminacy, as organisms, actors, and institutions change their characteristics in face of changes in the environment. So the properties of A, B, and C are not fixed over time; rather, selection and purposive adaptation lead to organisms and actors who respond differently over time to ecological opportunities and threats. 

Features of uncertainty, time framing, rule change, and novel behavior all contribute to a set of system characteristics: unpredictability, path dependency, and sensitivity to initial conditions. And Root believes that these factors have important implications about the feasibility of reducibility or micro- to macro- reconstruction:

When a state’s interactions shift from being locally based to being regionally or nationally based, its behaviors change across the network and the greater system. Thus a general theory of the system cannot be deduced from the properties of its constituent parts, just as the universe cannot be reconstructed from the fundamental laws of physics. (31)

Root's treatment of “New Institutional Economics” in Chapter 5 is important for several reasons. Most important, he demonstrates the harm that comes from incorporating a questionable theory of change into a comprehensive agenda for policy. The guiding idea of “creating institutions of good governance” as a panacea for slow economic growth and widespread poverty led policy makers to ignore other important causal factors, including locally rational but myopic strategies pursued by sub-actors. Root seems to agree with Dani Rodrik in concluding that NIC is limited when it comes to serving as a guide for positive policy design:

Assessing the legacy of new institutional economics, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik concludes that beyond “a very aggregate level of generality,” these ideas do not provide much policy guidance. (81)

Instead of looking for a general theory that can be used by centralized planning ministries to guide their economic and social policies, Root favors a more evolutionary approach: allow for a diversity of development experiments at the middle level of society, and then favor those experiments that appear to have the best results.

Chinese planners never attained the celebrity status of their Indian peers, but by trying multiple paths and starting with smaller interventions from the top, they found a better way to determine what worked. After Deng declared the opening of the Chinese economy, he instituted a multi-level process that facilitated both change and stability, and strengthened social organization and social learning through local experimentation. (108-109)

(Contrast this with the “single experiment” approach associated with land collectivization in the 1950s, resulting in massive agricultural failure and famine during the Great Leap Forward.)

Root's treatment of Imperial China’s history is intriguing but controvertible. His central premise is that China’s Imperial system was a hierarchical network of control, and systems like this are substantially less resilient and open to change than multi-nodal networks. The interpretation is reminiscent of the theory of Oriental despotism: an all-powerful imperial system suppressed both challengers and change-agents. But contemporary China historians would probably give the Imperial system more credit in terms of its degree of flexibility in face of challenges. Take peasant uprisings. The state was generally successful in its response to large peasant rebellions, even if the military response was often flat-footed. The Taiping Rebellion is an example that probably supports the author’s interpretation best, since it was local militias organized and funded by local gentry which were most successful in opposing the Taipings. But China’s history is littered with hundreds of peasant and ethnic uprisings, and its military eventually prevailed in most of them.

One way of reading Root’s book is as a guidebook for administrators in a time of complexity. Root correctly emphasizes the difficulty or impossibility of “solving” a set of social and political problems simultaneously, and the parallel difficulty of making confident predictions about medium- or long-term consequences of various policy interventions. Second best, in his account, is an evolutionary approach: try a diversity of approaches, and cautiously increase the volume of those approaches that seem to work best. But even this approach is uncertain; evolutionary processes lead to dead-ends that are unforeseen in earlier stages of the process.

(See this post about decision-making under conditions of deep uncertainty; link. And here is a series of earlier posts about social complexity; link.)

How the calendar matters

It is interesting to consider how the timing of a routine social event can have a major effect on outcomes. Malcolm Gladwell observes that the most talented Canadian hockey players in the NHL are disproportionately likely to have birthdays in the months of January or February in his recent book, Outliers: The Story of Success. Observers of the current US presidential election may speculate that, if the financial crisis of September had occurred in May, the outcome of the election might have been different. The generation of Americans born around 1915 are much like those born around 1945 -- except for the searing experience their generation had of the great depression.

The lesson to be drawn here might seem to be the obvious and trivial one -- context matters in human affairs. Because youth hockey leagues define the age of a player based on his age on December 31, the January children have a major advantage in size and physical development over the November children. And this advantage creates a small headstart that amplifies over time. The fact that the financial crisis of 2008 created a major disadvantage for the McCain ticket less than 60 days ahead of the election made it very difficult for the candidate to recover in the polls. The cohort experience of poverty and insecurity made the 1920 generation much more risk averse than the 1950 generation. So context and the timing of contextual events matters.

But perhaps the importance of the calendar goes deeper than this. In an earlier posting I discussed Victor Lieberman's discovery of an unexpected synchronicity of political change at the far ends of Eurasia, over the course of a millenium. We tried to understand this pattern in terms of hypothetical social mechanisms that might have produced these parallels. But what is striking about the example is not simply the fact that there must have been underlying causal mechanisms; it is that the result is a weakly synchronized system of events -- that is, a system of events with a regular temporal association -- that might never have been noticed.

What this suggests to me is that the social sciences can profitably give more attention to the temporal features of social phenomena -- the simultaneous experiences a group of people would have had in virtue of being part of the same age cohort, the temporal parallels that might exist between the rise of a mass ideology and the sales of particular books, the accidents of simultaneity that have major repercussions decades later. Causal analysis implicitly imposes a temporal structure on events (causes precede effects). But often the research goal is to strip away the particular timing and temporal context, and to treat causal structures purely abstractly. And this means deliberately taking causal pairs out of their particular temporal contexts and comparing them with temporally disconnected alternative examples.

Andrew Abbott takes up some aspects of these issues in "Conceptions of Time and Events in Social Science Methods" in Time Matters: On Theory and Method. And William Sewell's critique of some forms of causal reasoning in comparative historical sociology in "Three Temporalities" in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation is highly relevant as well.

Turning points

Are there turning points in history? How would we know if we're in the midst of one? Does the current financial crisis represent a turning point in the development of the US economy? Did the election of Ronald Reagan represent a turning point in American politics and government?

Often what is announced as a turning point eventually seems like a change without a difference -- an example of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, of changing drivers but not direction. Nguyen van Thieu takes office in Vietnam in 1967 and a new era is announced; but then the same old policies persist and Vietnam slides ever further towards Communist victory.

A turning point might be defined as an event, action, or choice, that profoundly alters the direction of a whole series of subsequent events. The New Deal is perhaps a candidate in the development of the political-social culture of the United States -- a new set of policies, laws, and strategies that set the United States on a new direction and that substantially constrained later choices by government. The notion of a turning point conveys the situation of contingency -- up until T things might have continued within the existing pattern P, but after T things shifted to P'. And it conveys the idea of path dependency as well -- now that the turning point has occurred and P' is embodied, it is much more difficult to return to P. So a turning point results from some contingent event that occurs within a system at a particular time and substantially inflects the future dynamics of development of the system. The idea turns on the background assumption that there are mechanisms or forces that sustain the development of the system, and that contingent events can "push" the system onto a different course for a while.

What sorts of things can have turning points? Can an individual have one? What about a family or a marriage? How about a business or a university? And how about a nation or a civilization? We might say that anything that has a recognizable and somewhat stable pattern of development can display a turning point. So each of these orders of human affairs can do so. An individual may be influenced by a traumatic event or a charismatic person and may change his ways; from that point forward he may behave differently -- more honestly, more cautiously, more compassionately. The event was a turning point on his development. A "velvet revolution" may be on a course that gives great importance to non-violent tactics. Then something happens -- a violent repression by the state, the emergence of a new clique of leaders more open to violence. The velvet revolution undergoes a turning point and becomes more violent in its strategies.

Schematically, the idea of a turning point involves an ontology something like this: system properties in a state of persistence > singular event > new system properties in a state of persistence.

So how could we know that we're at a turning point? The answer seems to be: we can't. Only the larger course of history can indicate whether contemporary changes will be large and persistent, or cosmetic and evanescent.

The idea of a "turning point" is perhaps one of the analytical categories that we use to characterize and analyze the sweep of history. It is a narrative device that highlights persistence, contingency, and direction. And, it would appear, we've got to wait until the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings before we can say with confidence when they occur.