Chaos and coordination in social life

Much social behavior is chaotic, in that it simply emerges from the independent choices of numerous agents during a period of time. It is analogous to Brownian motion -- particles in a liquid moving in random motions as a result of innumerable bumps and pushes at the molecular level.

However, there are also many patterns that become visible in social behavior -- examples of what I would like to call "coordinated social action": stock market panic selling, holiday travel, rumors, style, riots, pickpockets in train stations. And we can identify many causes of coordination of individual behavior into larger patterns: commands, regulations, institutions, customs, conventions, collective plans, shared beliefs about social behavior, common sources of information, and common changes in the environment of choice, for example.

What I mean by "coordination" here is the opposite of chaos -- something analogous to the coherence of photons associated with the laser effect. In a laser a set of photons are stimulated to fire coherently with each other, resulting in a beam of light that possesses focus and parallel propagation that is different in kind from the scattered diffusion of photons from an incandescent bulb. "Coordinated" social action is a set of actions that possess synchronicity or regularity in their occurrence, resulting in an observable regularity of behavior over time and space. A crucial problem for social inquiry is to provide an explanation of the mechanisms that underlie the instances of coordinated social action that we can identify.

Examples of coordinated social action can easily be offered, and specific mechanisms can be identified that produce these forms of social coordination. An army moves in concert across a landscape (command). People drive on the right in North America (regulation). People send their children to school (institution). People greet each other with a polite "good morning" (custom). Villagers come together to fish as a group in the morning (convention). People discuss a spontaneous demonstration in front of the mayor's office on Wednesday, and many appear (collective plans). Drivers choose Route 3 rather than Route 1 because they expect a lot of traffic on Route 1 (shared beliefs). People buy a large number of batteries and chocolate, anticipating an approaching hurricane (common environmental change).

These are all mechanisms that create a degree of coordination or synchronization of behavior among independent agents. There seem to be several large categories of mechanisms here: hierarchical coordination (command, regulation); common response coordination (each individually responds to the same signal); communications and network coordination (individuals exchange messages to secure coordination); and strategic coordination (each intends to behave in a way that will be desirable given his/her expectation of actions by others). Might we try out the thought that all forms of regularities of social behavior derive from one or another of these forms of coordination? This thought is probably somewhat too strong a claim. For example, there are probably social regularities that derive from our biology and evolutionary histories -- limitations of memory, bonds of intra-group loyalty, kin altruism. But the impulse is a sound one: when we are able to observe patterns of social behavior, there must be a cause of those regularities that works its way through influence on the individual actors who constitute the domain of action. And there are only so many mechanisms that might serve.

These sorts of regularities and mechanisms constitute part of the regularity of social life, but perhaps only part. It may be that they don't capture other kinds of more "structural" regularities -- for example, "racial discrimination increases health disparities," "feudal political systems are slow to respond to external aggression", "capitalist market systems are more innovaative than planned economies". But there is an important aspect of social explanation that centers exactly on this question: what are the social mechanisms that bring a degree of coherence and coordination among the actions of a population of independent actors?

Prejudice and social framing

People bring highly contingent assumptions, beliefs, and frames to their reading of their social worlds. These framing assumptions are presumably the effect of prior life experiences and learning -- this is what we can refer to as the social psychology of social perception.

(It is possible there is some degree of biology here as well; we can't exclude the possibility that there is a natural-selection basis to a neurophysiology of social perception, as argued by the sociobiologists. The case is not resolved at present. Are there any social impulses that are hard-wired through our evolutionary history?)

Another thing we know about social cognition is that human beings are great storytellers. We can take a small detail and weave it into an orderly narrative. And we are likely to tell stories that play out our expectations, fears, or hopes. We interpret the events and behavior around us in ways that go vastly beyond the slender facts that we observe.

(There is probably a developed area of research on this particular feature of social cognition, analogous to the study of reading or pattern recognition, though I am unaware of such research. But it would go something like this: assemble a set of video clips of people acting and interacting without much explicit context, and ask the subjects to briefly describe what is going on. Insert various social cues and see how that changes the stories subjects construct -- for example, change the actor's clothing or adornments slightly.)

Now let's see what the point is. I suggest that these features of human social cognition make prejudice and discriminiation a very common feature of social cognition. Take a small dimension of mistrust of strangers; add to this a slight propensity for being uncomfortable with difference; add the usual fact of the information sparsity available in most social interactions; and fold in the degree of fictionalizing and narrative construction that social cognition normally involves -- and what are you likely to get? It seems credible that the resulting stories will often enough represent the other in terms that support prejudice, discrimination and fear. And it seems credible that these internalized stories, and the actions and consequences they produce, will reinforce and proliferate the prejudicial stories and behaviors.

This suggests a basis for expecting mechanisms of social cognition that are xenophobic, racist, homophobic, and sexist. It is an unpleasant possibility.

It also suggests that when we advocate for a society based on assumptions of trust, equality, and mutual respect -- that we need to be considering as well how to create a learning environment that creates these cognitive habits. We shouldn't assume that trust and equality are "natural" states of mind, but rather a set of cognitive habits that need to be specifically cultivated.

If this has some credibility, it probably gives some indications of what a non-xenophobic pedagogy ought to look like. It ought to work to provide more background knowledge about human differences -- to fill in part of the data gap. It ought to work specifically to defuse the
origins of "stranger anxiety" -- to work against the background of fear that structures many human interactions. And it ought to affirmatively make the case for equality among persons -- to counteract a tendency for the group superiority stories to emerge.

In other words, a just and equalitarian society needs to be created. It isn't an accident.

How does regional economic development work?

Countries, states, regions, and cities are interested in stimulating economic development in their jurisdictions. Various possible strategies are often mentioned:

• encourage entrepreneurship
• improve the talent base
• enhance the attractiveness of the region to outsiders with creative talents
• create a legal, fiscal, and regulatory environment that encourages new businesses
• create larger pools of venture capital
• attract out-of-region businesses through regional business-attraction centers
• encourage research and development in local universities
• facilitate the movement of inventions from the lab to the business plan

The primary question here is a causal one: what strategies actually work, and how would we use empirical research to evaluate alternative policy interventions by governmental and non-governmental organizations? How would we decide which policies to invest in?

In order to begin to answer this question, we need to get a little more specific about what we mean by "regional economic development." I'll just stipulate an answer to this:

Regional economic development entails the creation of new businesses and expansion of existing businesses, in a way that expands the total number of jobs and results in a rising average wage.

So regional economic development aims at creating more employment and a rising standard of living in the region, and it seeks to do this through causing expansion of profitable business activity in the region. And, in order to create higher-paid jobs, the businesses created or expanded need to be on the high-value-added end of the spectrum; this often means skill- or knowledge-intensive industries. New jobs in low-productivity manufacturing or service businesses will not increase the average wage.

(The last statement isn't necessarily true in a region with persistent unemployment. A new low-productivity factory with a low average wage will raise the average standard of living if it significantly reduces unemployment. However, it seems perverse to have the goal of stimulating the growth of low-productivity sectors and businesses rather than higher-wage opportunities.)

There are several ideas that arise from these simple statements and questions. One concerns the limits that exist on the ability of state or local governments to actually influence the rate of growth of business activity, jobs, and wages at all. It is an open question whether a state or region that has done an optimal job of aligning its policies and investments will actually have a higher probability of growth in these outcomes than one that has no strategies, bad strategies, or poorly aligned strategies. This is because the decisions made by investors and entrepreneurs are influenced by many other factors besides the policy tools available to the municipal or state governments. And the success or failure of business choices is determined by events outside the policy arena. The best way of capturing this thought is to recognize that the causal influence of good policies may still be small relative to other non-policy factors.

Second, though, we might have strong theoretical reasons for thinking that one policy choice is likely to have larger effects on the desired outcome than another. If we can demonstrate a theoretical basis in economics or organizational theory, for example, for concluding that factors X, Y, and Z are favorable for producing the outcomes we want, even if they are not decisive, then it is logical that we should try to identify the most influential of these factors; design a coherent package of policies that enhance these factors (i.e. avoid combinations that are self-defeating), and make the effort possible to implement this package of policies. That is, there may be a basis in social science theory for judging that policy X should have a positive effect on the probability of desired outcome Y. The reasoning may be economic (businesses will have an incentive to locate in regions where they can have a high confidence of recruiting a qualified workforce) or perhaps logistical (businesses will choose locations where transport is convenient) or fiscal (firms will take careful account of the total cost of doing business in Michigan versus California or North Carolina). But if we can demonstrate on theoretical grounds that X should positively influence Y, then we have reason to implement X even if we don’t have direct empirical evidence of X’s effectiveness.

This is the role of theory in justifying the choice of a policy package: a set of antecedent theoretical reasons for believing that this set of policies will work to increase the outcomes we are interested in achieving. There is another more empirical basis for assessing alternative policies, based on comparison of cases: look at a number of cases in which X is present or not present, and measure the status of Y. From a social science point of view, this inquiry is feasible but difficult. If we select six cities for comparison and find that the cities with a high percentage of college grads have high growth while those with low college grad percentages have low growth -- does that demonstrate that "talent causes economic growth"? Not exactly; the observed correlation could be spurious, accidental, collateral, or reversed. And likewise with the large-N version of the study. Suppose we find either that Y is positively correlated with X or that Y is not correlated with X, based on the values of X and Y over a large number of cases. Does the first finding demonstrate that “X causes Y”, and does the second case demonstrate that “X does not cause Y”? Neither conclusion is justified on the basis of just these facts. The non-correlation finding may be the result of a genuine causal influence masked by a number of disturbing influences; and the positive correlation may be the result of a common cause that is influencing both X and Y. So, as econometricians and epidemiologists know very well, the design of empirical studies that sort out the causal impact of various treatments is challenging.

In addition to these issues having to do with our ability to assess the causal weight of various policy treatments, we also have to consider the ratio of costs and benefits associated with various bundles of policies. Policy makers are forced to arrive at some estimate of the relative costs and benefits of the available policy options in order to make sensible choices among them. But here too there are the same problems of estimation: it is difficult to estimate either the probability of success of a given policy or the net value of the success of the policy.

The upshot of this short reflection, if there is one, is that it is very difficult to arrive at solid, precise, and rigorous estimates of either the economic impact of various policy choices or of their likelihood of success. And yet the policymaker does not have the luxury of indecision; economic development is a crucially important component of the wellbeing of a region's population. So it seems unavoidable that the best we can do is to assess policies on the basis of their likely contribution to economic growth, based on available economic and social theories, and be ready to finetune our choices as experience indicates.

Concepts and the world

What is the relation between concepts and the world? And how do we arrive at a conceptual scheme that provides a perspicuous way of representing reality?

This way of putting the question invokes one of the central polarities that has defined modern philosophy, including the traditions of Locke, Descartes, and Kant. It is the contrast of representation and reality; the polarity between the structures of mentation through which we conceptualize and represent the world, and the world itself, the given, the objective features of reality independent from our schemes of representation. Richard Rorty's title, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, expresses his skepticism about this polarity and about the conception of the relation between knower and the known that it corresponds to. But the intellectual conundrums these questions raise are unavoidable.

One of the views that we can take on the relation between mind and world is "realism": the idea that, for a given range of stuff, the stuff is independent from the ways in which we represent it. So we can be realist about fish or electrons, for example; and what this means is that we think there are real fish and electrons, and that their properties are objective and independent of the ways in which we conceive or represent them. But there is a huge problem with this view -- even as much as I want to defend a form of realism. It is the problem that "properties" are not objective features of the world, but are rather attributes singled out by concepts. And concepts are part of our mental schemes -- not inherent or objective features of the world that we are representing. So properties are not objective features of reality. "Facts" are similarly representation-dependent: we can't express a fact about the world except on the basis of a set of concepts. So we can't say that properties and facts are independent of the scheme of representation. And this seems to lead to the conclusion that naive realism is untenable.

The alternatives to realism include idealism and conceptualism -- the view that the properties of "stuff" are constituted by the mental schemes that we bring to the study of "stuff". But idealism is intellectually unpalatable, in its Berkeleian version anyway: in the idea that there is no objective, material world, but only a set of subjective mental representations conforming to an orderly succession in the mind. A particular version of conceptualism is the Whorf hypothesis, according to which different cultures inhabit different worlds because of the fundamental and incommensurable differences that exist between their conceptual schemes (Benjamin Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality). And there is the Kantian version of these ideas -- the view that empirical reality cannot be recognized except through an organizing set of concepts or categories; so naive realism is ultimately incoherent. There is nothing we can say about a "noumenal" world -- a world as it really is beyond the categories of empirical experience.

So we might cautiously admit to the correctness of "conceptualism" -- that anything we say about the objective or real features of the world in inevitably couched within a set of concepts or categories, and there is no uniquely best set of concepts on the basis of which to analyze experience. This doesn't take us to idealism, however. It doesn't say that the world is subjective or constituted by consciousness; it doesn't say that the world lacks an independent status from the mind. What it says is that knowledge and representation of the world are inherently conceptual -- and this is an act of mentation rather than simply a reflection of the objective features of the world.

Within this conceptualism, we might say that the best we can do is to acknowledge that the world of stuff interacts with the knower; the knower brings a set of concepts to his/her interactions with stuff; and knowledge and the world are the joint product of this interaction. This view isn't necessarily idealist in the Berkeley sense -- according to which reality is simply an ensemble of mental representations. But it is non-objectivist when it comes to the facts about the world: the facts are dependent upon a scheme of concepts within the context of which we characterize states of affairs. And, at the same time, it permits us to assert that there are objective facts of the matter once we have settled on a conceptual scheme.

This set of issues has special relevance to the philosophy of social science; I'll have to return to the topic in another posting.

Koestler's twentieth century

Arthur Koestler is most celebrated for his historical novel about the Moscow show trials, Darkness at Noon. And the book is indeed a deeply revealing look at the heart of totalitarianism in the twentieth century -- the more so if you do a side-by-side reading of the trial of the fictional Rubashov and the transcripts of the trial of the historical Bukharin (Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites: Heard Before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court). Koestler caught the psychology and history of the period exactly right -- and he did it more or less as a contemporary observer, not an archival historian with leisurely access to the archives after the fact.

But in some ways I find his autobiographical books even more gripping, and none more so than The invisible writing; An autobiography, published in 1954.

The Invisible Writing is an amazing window onto some of the most important events of the twentieth century: the rise of Hitler, the struggles between Communists and Nazis in the streets of Berlin, the gradual decapitation of all forces of the left in Germany in the 1930s, the great famine in the Ukraine, and the cruelty of the Spanish Civil War. Here is a telling description of a moment in time: "With the constant dismissals at Ullstein's [the publisher], and the shadow of Hitler lying across the country like a monster-shaped cloud, our motley little crowd of intellectuals was too scared to be capable of any clear thought. It was easy to win their sympathy for Russia, but almost impossible to make them take a determined stand for their own interests in Germany. The liberals in Germany -- and elsewhere -- have rarely understood that there are situations in which caution amounts to suicide."

Koestler was situated in such a way as to be a participant-eyewitness in these world-historical events. A few snapshots from this period -- street fighting in Berlin in 1932 between Communist workers and Nazi thugs; a train journey through the Ukraine during the worst of the deliberate war of famine that Stalin waged against the peasantry; Koestler's own denunciation of a loved one for a trivial suspicion; and a series of narrow escapes in fascist Spain (including a period of three months in a Franco prison under a sentence of death).

Koestler's political adulthood witnessed his own movement from Communist journalist and activist in Berlin in the 1930s to a committed anti-Communist in the 1950s. And his anti-Communism derived from his own honest willingness to confront the terrible truths of Stalinism -- Comintern's betrayal of the Spanish republicans, the Moscow show trials, the deliberate policy of famine as a tool of social war, and the repression and brutality of the Soviet state against its own citizens.

The book provides absorbing, valuable reading. And it offers deep lessons for us today -- about politics, about personal integrity, about the relationship between individuals and the state, and about the terrible power that ideology has wielded over humanity.

What Koestler learned from his part of the twentieth century, and was able to express so evocatively in his writings, was a series of brutal facts about power: the power of a fascist state to destroy all organizations that might challenge its grip on society, the power of propaganda to conceal and falsify evident social realities, and the power of ideology to blind intellectuals to the meaning of the events unfolding around them. Lies and coercion were the central realities of the state and the party -- both in Germany and in the Soviet Union.

Koestler describes the central paradox of the Moscow show trials in these terms:

To the western mind, unacquainted with the system and the rules, the confessions in the Trials appeared as one of the great enigmas of our time. Why had the Old Bolsheviks, heroes and leaders of the revolution, who had so often braved death that they called themselves 'dead men on furlough', confessed to these absurd and hair-raising lies? If one discounted those who were merely trying to save their necks, like Radek; and those who were mentally broken like Zinoviev; or trying to shield their families like Kameniev, who was said to be particularly devoted to his son--then there still remained a hard core of men like Bukharin, Piatakov, Mrachkovsky, Smirnov, and at least a score of other with a revolutionary past of thirty, forty years behind them, the veterans of Czarist prisons and Siberian exile, whose total and gleeful self-abasement remained inexplicable. It was this 'hard core' that Rubashov was meant to represent.

Here is a final, amazing twentieth century irony. The lead prosecutor in the Moscow show trials (1936-38) -- the person who established the jurisprudence of coercion, intimidation, and the crushing subordination of the individual to the overwhelming power of the state, was Andrei Vyshinsky. It was he who stage-managed the shameful miscarriage of justice that led to the executions of Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev, and other leading Bolsheviks. And it was the very same Andrei Vyshinsky who was the Soviet Union's chief delegate in 1949 in the drafting of ... the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here, surely, we find a person with a fine understanding of human rights.

Micro cultures?

Is there such a thing as a "micro"-culture -- a culture that is somewhat distinctive of a particular community in a specific time and place, and different from the culture of similar communities in other places?

The sorts of communities I'm thinking of might include sports teams, university faculties, union locals, church congregations, street gangs, or rural villages. Is it possible that Village X is a friendlier place than Village Y? Or that Local W is more militant than Local Z? Or that Gang S is less willing to use violence against younger brothers of rivals than Gang T is? And is it possible that these differences are real, persistent, and self-reinforcing through mechanisms that constitute a basis for dynamic cultural continuity?

Take the Boston Celtics. The players and coaches are all recruited in a national and international labor market; they generally are well acquainted with each other through their high-profile college basketball careers, camps, and leagues; and the NBA spends a lot of money in cultivating a national NBA culture rather than a micro-culture for particular teams. So you might imagine that every team would be simply a generic expression of national basketball culture. And yet it's possible that the Boston Celtics are a distinctive team, in terms of a number of characteristics. They might have more of a team ethic than, say, the Los Angeles Lakers; they might have some traditions that play out in practices and games; they might have a lore about the Celtics greats of the past -- Havliceck, Bird, Dennis Johnson, and they might conceivably have a style of play that persists through changes of coaches and players. So here the question is whether the national culture of NBA basketball is the key, or whether there are important differences in behavior, values, practices, and style that persist for specific teams over time. This speculation raises two sorts of questions: How would we attempt to determine whether there are such differences? And what sorts of social mechanisms would serve to preserve and reproduce such cultural specifics?

The basketball version of this story is pretty speculative on my part -- few of us have the close acquaintance with professional sports to have an opinion on the subject of local team cultures. But university faculties -- that's a different story. Here I feel more confident in asserting that there are indeed significant differences of culture across institutions, even institutions that are otherwise very similar. Among select liberal arts colleges, for example, there are wide variations on different campuses about the value of "university citizenship" (service on college committees, for example); the expectations and duties associated with teaching undergraduate students (high commitment versus low commitment to spending time with students; a felt obligation to provide meaningful commentary on student writing assignments); and probably differences around the standards of what is acceptable in gender relations (for example, the acceptability of romantic relationships between faculty and students or senior faculty and junior faculty). A little less tangibly -- it seems to me that there are visible differences on different college faculties concerning the depth and extent of social relationships among faculty members. Some faculties are tight-knit, with a lot of socializing independent from official functions; and others are more distant, with few serious friendships among faculty members. Some faculties give an impression of welcoming newcomers; others give a more standoffish or even unfriendly impression. (As a young faculty member on the job market years ago I was very aware of the reputations that different philosophy departments had for the way in which they conducted interviews with prospective assistant professors. One department was legendary for positioning the members of the search committee in a semi-circle surrounding the candidate, so that the candidate couldn't actually see everyone at once.)

One way of rephrasing the question here is this: is the climate and culture of a place (a university or a basketball team) just the net result of the personalities and idiosyncracies of the group of people who happen to have been recruited into the group; or does the culture of the group have a certain normative persistence, capable of transmission to new arrivals? The example of university faculties seems to support the second interpretation. And in fact it seems possible to identify some of the social mechanisms through which this transmission occurs: for example, imitation, coaching and mentoring, social discipline, and the transmission of narratives of "who we are at University X or College Y". The behaviors that are valorized through existing group members' practices and observations serve as a prescriptive model for the behaviors of more junior people. And of course, these processes of transmission are imperfect and malleable. The culture of a place changes over a period of several decades.

So I am tempted to think that small communities do in fact make their own cultures over an extended period of time, and that these cultures -- values, practices, modes of inter-personal interaction, experiences of commitment -- have some degree of durability. They do in fact succeed in changing the new recruits that come into the community, often enough to allow the mix of values and experiences that characterize the micro-culture to persist across multiple generations.

Paired comparisons

Sidney Tarrow is a gifted and prolific student of comparative politics. (Listen to my interview with Professor Tarrow.) He has spent much of his career trying to understand social movements, contentious politics, and the causes of differences in political behavior across national settings. And one of his special contributions is his ability to think clearly about the methods that social scientists use.

Tarrow attaches a lot of weight to the idea of "paired comparisons" as a method of research and discovery: Locate a few cases that are broadly similar in many respects but different in a way that is important, interesting, or surprising. Then examine the cases in greater detail to attempt to discover what explains the difference between the two cases. (One of his early books that employs this method is From center to periphery: Alternative models of national-local policy impact and an application to France and Italy.)

Nothing special turns on "pairs" here; what Tarrow is describing is really the logic of small-N comparative research. The point about the broad similarity that is the basis for choosing the cases follows from the logic of causation: if we presuppose that the outcome P is caused by some set of antecedent social and political conditions and we know that C1 and C2 have different outcomes -- then the more factors we can "control" for by finding cases in which these factors are constant, the better. This is so, because it demonstrates that none of the constant factors in the two cases are the cause of variation in outcome. And this limits our investigation of possible causes to the factors in which the cases differ.

If this sounds like Mill's methods of similarity and difference, that's appropriate -- the logic is the same, so far as I can see. Here is Mill's method of difference:

A B C D -E => P
A B -C D -E => -P

And in this case -- making the heroic assumption that A,B,C,D,E exhaust all possible causes of P, and that the cause of P is deterministic rather than probabilistic -- then we can infer that the presence of C causes P.

This reasoning doesn't take us to a valid conclusion to the effect that C is the only factor that is causally relevant to the occurrence of P; it is possible, for example, that there is a third case along these lines:

-A B -C D -E => -P

This would demonstrate that A is a necessary condition for the occurrence of P; withhold A and P disappears. And each of the other factors might also play a role as a necessary condition. So it would be necessary to observe as many as 32 cases (2^5) in order to sort out the status of A through E as either necessary or sufficient conditions for the occurrence of P. (The logic of this kind of causal reasoning is explored more fully in my essay, "An Experiment in Causal Reasoning," which is also published in Microfoundations, Methods, and Causation.)

But I don't think that Tarrow is intending to advance the method of paired comparison as a formal method of causal inference, along the lines of inductive or deductive logic. Instead, I think he is making the plausible point that this method should be understood as a part of an intelligent research strategy. Social processes are complex. We are interested in explaining variation across cases. And we probably have the best likelihood of discovering important causal relationships if we can reduce the number of moving parts (the other kinds of variation that occur across the cases).

Tarrow gives an example of the application of the method of paired comparisions in the context of his early study of the political fortunes of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the south of Italy. In this case the paired comparison involves northern Italy and southern Italy. Both are subject to the same national political structures; both populations speak Italian; both populations have an Italian national identity. However, the PCI was fairly successful in mobilizing support and winning elections based on a militant political program in the north, and was persistently unsuccessful in doing these things in the south. What explains the difference?

As Tarrow explains his reasoning, his expectation in conducting the research was a "structural" one. He expected that there would be large structural factors in post-war Italy -- features of economic and political institutions -- that would explain the difference in outcome for PCI political activism. And there were indeed large structural differences in social organization in the two regions. Northern Italy possessed an economy in which industrial labor played a key role and constituted a substantial part of the population. Southern Italy was agrarian and backward, with a large percentage of exploited peasants and only a small percentage of industrial workers.

But, very significantly, Tarrow now believes that these "structural" expectations are probably too "macro" to serve as the basis of social explanation. Instead, he favors the importance of looking at the dynamics of social processes and the specific causal mechanisms that can be discovered in particular social-historical settings. This means looking for causal factors that work at a more strategic and meso level. In terms of the southern Italian PCI outcome that he was interested in explaining thirty years ago -- he now believes that the causal mechanism of "brokerage" would have shed much more light on the political outcomes that were of interest in Italy. (This is the heart of the approach that he takes, along with Doug McAdam and Chuck Tilly, in Dynamics of Contention.)

This finding doesn't invalidate the heuristic of paired comparisons. But it probably does invalidate the expectation that we might discover large "structure-structure" patterns of causation through such comparisons. Instead, what the method facilitates is a more focused research effort on the part of the comparativist, in the context of which he/she can search out the lower-level causal mechanisms and processes that are at work in the various settings under study.

Is network analysis inconsistent with agent-centered explanation?

Quite a few researchers who study dynamic social processes are making use of some of the tools of network analysis. And it is sometimes maintained that this approach is inconsistent with an agent-centered approach to social processes. Some of these researchers take the view that "it's not what is in the heads of various actors, but rather their relationships in networks that provide the causal underpinnings of social change." And they sometimes maintain that the actor's psychological states can't even be identified in isolation from his/her social relationships. So, once again, explanation cannot rest upon facts about individuals alone. And this sort of finding is thought to cast doubt on methodological individualism in particular, and agent-centered explanatory strategies more generally. (Chuck Tilly and co-authors sometimes take a view along these lines; for example, Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention.)

There is something right about the intuition that we can't ground social explanations on assumptions that are too narrowly confined to features of individual psychology. Individuals are socially constucted and socially developed, and our explanations of social processes need
to reflect this fact. This is why I prefer the phrase "methodological localism" to "methodological individualism." But both ontologies are agent-centered. So the question remains: does the causal salience of social networks demonstrate that agent-centered accounts are inherently incomplete -- or even worse, inherently unworkable (because we can't even specify the individual agent's powers and motives independently of his/her networks)?

I don't think so, for several reasons. First, what is a network but a set of socially constructed agents in concrete relations with each other -- communication, coordination, power, subordination, and recognition? The facts about the network are exhausted by a description of the social beliefs of the relevant actors and their material relations to each other.

Second, it is certainly true that an agent's possibilities for exercising power are a function of facts beyond his/her own psychological characteristics. So Albert, the peasant activist in the tiny Breton village, is much more empowered than his psychological twin across the border in Normandy, by the fact that he alone has strong relationships with leaders in both the Catholic Church and the wine-growers' guild. His social networks permit him to amplify the scope of action and effect he may attempt. What this means is that Albert's social networks are a causal component in his ability to wield influence. In this sense it is reasonable as well to attribute causal status to the network and to characterize this standing as being independent of Albert as an individual.

But it remains true that all of the causal powers associated with the network depend on the states of agency of the many persons who make it up. We therefore need to be able to provide an agent-centered account of the network's causal powers, distributed over the many agents who make it up. We must have "microfoundations" for the claim that the network exercises social influence. If the actors who constitute nodes within the network didn't have the right mental frameworks, motivational dispositions, or bodies of knowledge, then they would not in fact behave in a way that was sustaining of the network's social-causal properties.

So, it seems inescapable that, when we say that "Albert's power as a peasant activist depends upon the social fact that he is part of such-and-so networks" -- that we have only uncovered another field of research where more agent-centered research is needed. The network's social-causal properties must themselves disaggregate onto a set of facts about the agents who constitute the network. The current causal properties of the network and the agents who make it up are the complex and iterative result of many inter-related actions and alliances of prior generations of agents.

And this in turn demonstrates that network analysis is by no means inconsistent with an agent-centered approach to social explanation.

(See "Levels of the social" for more on this subject.)

The flea market analogy

Is the flea market a helpful analogy for understanding the social world ("The Dis-unity of Science")? Does it serve to provide a different mental model in terms of which to consider the nature of social phenomena?

What it has going for it is heterogeneity and contingency, and an obvious share of agent-dependency. The people who show up on a given Saturday are a contingent and largely disorganized mix of humanity. And the products that wind up on the jumble tables too are highly disorderly and random. Each has its own unique story for how it got there. There is no overall guiding design.

But there is also a degree of order underlying the apparent chaos of the jumble tables. All is not random in a flea market. The participants, for example: there are regular vendors, street people, police officers, health inspectors, jugglers, and pickpockets -- as well as regular shoppers, tourists, school children, and occasional shoppers looking for a used toaster or a single kitchen chair. In most cases there are reasons they are there -- and the reasons are socially interesting. Moreover, the ethnographer of the flea market is likely enough to spot some seasonal or social patterns in the products and people present in a certain month or time of year. So -- a blend of chaos and order.

But the order that can be discerned is the result of a large number of overlapping, independent conditions and processes -- not the manifestation of a few simple forces or a guiding system of laws.

Both accident and order are characteristic of the larger social world as well. The helter-skelter of the flea market is in fact highly analogous to many aspects of social phenomena -- army recruitment, incidents of crime, mortgage defaults. But it is also true that there are other social phenomena that aren't so accidental. So the jumble sale is perhaps less good as an analogy for highly organized and managed social processes -- a tight administrative hierarchy, an orchestrated campaign event, or a coordinated attack in battle.

This addresses the "accidental conjunction" part of the analogy. What about the "composite order" part of the analogy? This element too works pretty well for many examples of social phenomena. When students of the professions discover that there are interesting patterns of recruitment into accountancy or the officer corps, or discover that there are similarities in the organizations of pharmacists and psychotherapists -- they also recognize that these patterns result from complex, intertwined patterns of strategic positioning, organizational learning, and economic circumstances. In other words, the patterns and regularities are themselves the result of multiple social mechanisms, motives, and processes. And these processes are in no way analogous to laws of nature.

So, all considered, the analogy of the flea market works pretty well as a mental model for what we should expect of social phenomena: a degree of accident and conjunction, a degree of emerging pattern and order that results from many independent but converging social processes, and an inescapable dimension of agent-dependency that refutes any hope of discovering an underlying, law-governed system.

The "dis"-unity of social science

One of the central goals of Vienna Circle philosophy of science was the idea of the unity of science. The idea included at least two separable parts: methodological unity and unity of content under a single system of laws. On the methodological side there was the idea that the logic of explanation and confirmation should be the same in all the empirical sciences. If there were to be differences across disciplines, these should be heuristic rather than epistemic differences. (Jordi Cat provides an extensive discussion of the unity of science doctrine in an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

The more basic goal for unity was the idea of a single comprehensive theory that would, in principle, provide the foundation for the theories of all the special sciences. Physics was the intended foundation, and the goal was to demonstrate that all the fields of the natural sciences could be derived in principle from the laws of physics. For example, the hope was that the properties and laws of chemical elements and molecules should be derivable from fundamental physics.

The reasons for wanting to see a unified physical theory were a preference for parsimony and simplicity and a metaphysical conviction that all of nature must really derive from a single set of fundamental laws.

The fate of the unity of science doctrine can be pursued elsewhere. Here the question is whether there is a similar aspiration for the social sciences. The parallel principle could be stated along these lines: there should be some set of basic facts about individuals in social interactions that is sufficient to permit one to derive all varieties of social behavior, given relevant knowledge about context and boundary conditions.

The attractions of such a unified social science are the same as in the natural science case: parsimony, simplicity, and comprehensiveness. And, in fact, unifying theories for social explanation are sometimes advanced. The most thorough-going attempt is the effort by rational choice theory and microeconomics to unify all social action as the consequence of preference-maximizing individual rationality within constraints.

Attractive as this effort might be from an abstract or aesthetic perspective, it is profoundly misguided when if comes to understanding society. Social phenomena are not the law-governed consequences of a few underlying facts and features of individuals. Rather, they are the contingent and mixed results of an inherently heterogeneous set of motives, psychologies, and institutions. The fundamental problem is that the social world is not a system at all in the natural science sense. Instead, it is the contingent and dynamic sum of a variety of shifting processes and contexts.

A better metaphor for the social world -- better than the metaphor of a table of billiard balls governed by the laws of mechanics -- is a large urban flea market. The wares on sale on a particular Saturday are simply the sum of the accidents of circumstance that led a collection of sellers to converge on that particular day. There are some interesting regularities that emerge over time -- in the spring one finds more used lawnmowers and in times of dearth one finds more family treasures. These regularities require explanation. But they do not derive from some governing "law of flea markets" that might be discovered. Instead, the flea market and the larger society are, alike, simply the aggregate result of large numbers of actions, motives, circumstances, and structures that turn kaleidoscopically and produce patterned but non-lawlike outcomes.

So where does this take us with regard to "unified social science"? It leads us to expect something else entirely: rather than unity, we should expect eclectic theories, piecemeal explanations, and a patchwork of inquiries at a range of levels of description. Some explanatory theories will turn out to be more portable than others. But none will be comprehensive, and the social sciences will always remain open-ended and extensible. Instead of theoretical unification we might rather look for a more and more satisfactory coverage, through a range of disciplines and methods, of the aspects of the social world we judge most interesting and important. And these judgments can be trusted to shift over time. And this means that we should be skeptical about the appropriateness of the goal of creating a unified social science.

(See an earlier posting on "Coverage of the Social Sciences" for more relevant comments on this topic.)