Mechanisms thinking in international relations theory

source: Alex Cooley, "America and Empire" (link)

One of the most fundamental ideas underlying the philosophy of social science expressed here and elsewhere is the view that social explanations should seek out the causal mechanisms that underly the social phenomena of interest. So now we need to be able to say a lot more about what social mechanisms are, and how they relate to each other. Quite a bit of my own thinking has been devoted to this subject, and in a recent post I proposed that it would be useful to begin to compile an inventory of social mechanisms currently in use in the social sciences (link). There I suggested that it would be useful to find a motivated way of classifying the mechanisms that we discover.

Interest in mechanisms is taking hold in some sub-disciplines of political science. An especially clear statement of the appeal of the mechanisms theory of explanation for political science is offered by Andrew Bennett in "The Mother of All Isms: Causal Mechanisms and Structured Pluralism in International Relations Theory" (link). (Bennett is also co-author with Alexander George of the excellent book on case-study methodology, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences.) In the current article Bennett reviews the progression that has occurred in IR theory from positivism and the covering law model, to the idea of high-level "paradigms" of explanation, to the idea of a diverse set of causal mechanisms as the foundation of explanation in the field. He calls the latter position "analytic eclecticism", and he argues that it is a powerful and flexible way of thinking about the processes and research questions that make up the subject matter of IR theory.

In order to advance the value of mechanisms theory for working political scientists, Bennett argues that it will be helpful to attempt to classify the large number of mechanisms currently in use in IR theory in terms of a small number of dimensions. He proposes two dimensions in terms of which to analyze social mechanisms, which can be summarized as content and structure. The content dimension asks the question, what substantive social entities or properties are invoked by the mechanism? And the structure dimension asks the question, what is the nature of the relationship invoked by the mechanism? He proposes three large types of content: material power, functional efficiency, and legitimacy. And he suggests that there are four basic structures that can be formed: agent to agent, structure to agent, agent to structure, and structure to structure. (Notice that this corresponds exactly to the four arrows in Coleman's boat, including the Type 4 "structure to structure" connection.) Here is how Bennett motivates this classification scheme:

This tripartite division of categories of mechanisms usefully mirrors the three leading ‘isms’ in the IR subfield: (neo)realism (with a focus on material power); (neo)liberalism (institutional efficiency); and constructivism (legitimacy). It thereby provides a bridge to the vast literature couched in terms of the isms, preserving this literature’s genuine contributions toward better theories on mechanisms of power, institutions, and social roles. (472)

Here is the resulting classification of social mechanisms that Bennett offers:

Others have found this approach to be promising. Here is an elaboration on Bennett's classification by Mikko Huotari at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin:

(Thanks for sharing this classification, Mikko.)

I agree with Andrew in thinking that it is useful to find a non-arbitrary way of classifying mechanisms. It is quite worthwhile to make a start at this project. I'm not yet fully persuaded, however, by either of the axes that he proposes.

First, the content axis seems arbitrary -- legitimacy, material power, functional efficiency. Why choose these substantive characteristics rather than a dozen other possible content features? Is it simply that these correspond to the three primary "isms" of IR theory -- neorealism, neoliberalism, and constructivism (as he suggests earlier; 472)? But the thrust of the first part of the paper is that the "isms" are an unsatisfactory basis for guiding explanation in international relations theory; so why should we imagine that they serve to identify the crucial distinctions in content among social mechanisms? Would the content categories look different if we were taking our examples from feminist sociology, the sociology of organizations, or theories of legislatures? Bennett doesn't assert that these content categories are exhaustive; but if they are not, then somehow the tabulation needs to indicate that there is an extensible list on the left. And are these categories exclusive? Can a given mechanism fall both into the legitimacy group and the functional efficiency group? It would appear that this is possible; but in that case classification is difficult to carry out.

Second, the structure axis. Why is it crucial to differentiate mechanisms according to their place within an agent-structure grid? Why is this an illuminating or fundamental feature of the mechanisms that are enumerated? Would this dimension explode if we thought of social organization as a continuum from macro to meso to micro (along the lines of Jepperson and Meyer (link), as well as several earlier posts here (link))?

An early question that needs answer here is this: What do we want from a scheme of classification of social mechanisms? Should we be looking for a strict classification with exhaustive and mutually exclusive groupings? Or should we be looking for something looser -- perhaps more like a cluster diagram in which some mechanisms are closer to each other than they are to others?

We do have several other examples to think about when it comes to classifying mechanisms. In an earlier post I discussed Craver and Darden's account of mechanisms in biology, and highlighted the table of mechanisms that they provide (link). It is evident that the Craver-Darden table is much less ambitious when it comes to classification. They have loosely grouped mechanisms into higher-level types -- adaptation, repair, synthesis, for example; but they have not tried to further classify mechanisms in terms of the levels of the entities that are linked by the mechanism. So they offer one dimension of classification rather than two, and they leave it entirely open that there may be additional types to be added in the future. This is a fairly unexacting understanding of what is needed for a tabulation of mechanisms.

In Dynamics of Contention McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly offer a sort of classification of their own for the kinds of mechanisms they identify. They propose three types of mechanisms -- environmental, cognitive, and relational (kl 375):

• Environmental mechanisms mean externally generated influences on conditions affecting social life. Such mechanisms can operate directly: For example, resource depletion or enhancement affects people's capacity to engage in contentious politics (McCarthy and Zald, ed. 1987).
• Cognitive mechanisms operate through alterations of individual and collective perception; words like recognize, understand, reinterpret, and classify characterize such mechanisms. Our vignettes from Paris and Greenwood show people shifting in awareness of what could happen through collective action; when we look more closely, we will observe multiple cognitive mechanisms at work, individual by individual. For example, commitment is a widely recurrent individual mechanism in which persons who individually would prefer not to take the risks of collective action find themselves unable to withdraw without hurting others whose solidarity they value - sometimes at the cost of suffering serious loss.
• Relational mechanisms alter connections among people, groups, and interpersonal networks. Brokerage, a mechanism that recurs throughout Parts II and III of the book, we define as the linking of two or more previously unconnected social sites by a unit that mediates their relations with one another and/or with yet other sites. Most analysts see brokerage as a mechanism relating groups and individuals to one another in stable sites, but it can also become a relational mechanism for mobilization during periods of contentious politics, as new groups are thrown together by increased interaction and uncertainty, thus discovering their common interests.

This too is a one-dimensional classification. And it appears to be intended to be exhaustive and mutually exclusive. But it isn't clear to me that it succeeds in classifying all the mechanisms we might want to bring forward. Once again, this strikes me as a good beginning but not an exhaustive grouping of all social mechanisms.

My own preliminary grouping of mechanisms has even less structure (link). It groups mechanisms according to the subject matter or discipline from which they have emerged. But this does not serve to shed light on how these examples are similar or different from each other -- one of the key purposes of a classification.

I think this is a very useful research activity, and Andrew Bennett has done a service to the theory of social mechanisms in putting forward this effort at classification. Let's see what other schemes may be possible as well. A good scheme of classification may tell us something very important about the nature of how causation works in the social world.

What drives organizational performance?

We have a pretty good idea of the characteristics that support very high individual performance in a variety of fields, from jazz to track to physics to business. An earlier post discussed some of the different combinations of features that characterize leaders in several different professions (link). And it isn’t difficult to sketch out qualities of personality, character, and style that make for a great teacher, researcher, entrepreneur, a great soccer player, or an exceptional police investigator. So we might imagine that a high-performing organization is one that has succeeded in assembling a group of high-performing individuals. But this is plainly untrue — witness the New York Yankees during much of the 2000s, the dot-com company WebVan during the late 1990s, and the XYZ Orchestra today. (Here is a thoughtful Mellon Foundation study of quality factors in symphony orchestras; link.) In each case the organization consisted of high-performing stars in their various disciplines, but somehow the ensemble performed poorly. The lesson from these examples is an obvious one: the performance of an organization is more than the sum of the abilities of its component members.

In fact, it seems apparent that organizational performance, like physical health, is a function of a number of separate parameters:

• clarity about mission
• appropriateness of internal functional specialization
• quality of internal communication and collaboration across units and individuals
• quality and intensity of individuals  
• quality of internal motivation
• quality of leadership

We might say that an organization is like a physical mechanism in the sense that its overall performance depends on the quality of the design, the appropriate interconnections among the parts, and the quality of the individual components.

So what else goes into determining great organizational performance besides the quality of the individuals who make it up? A few things are obvious. Of course it is true that having individual participants who have the right kinds of talents is crucial. A technology company needs excellent engineers and designers. But it also needs highly talented marketing professionals, financial experts, and strategic planners. And it needs these talented specialists in a number of critical areas. Why did Xerox PARC fail in spite of the excellence of its scientists and engineers, and the innovativeness of the products that they created? Because the organization lacked the ability — and the individuals — to turn those ideas and innovations into products that the public wanted to buy. (Here is Malcolm Gladwell's take on Xerox PARC in the New Yorker; link.)

A key aspect of the problem of designing and tuning an organization’s features to ensure high performance is being able to determine with precision what the mission of the organization is. What is the organization fundamentally established to bring about? If the Red Cross is an organization that is intended to deliver resources and assistance to communities that have suffered extensive disasters, that implies one set of functional needs to be satisfied by divisions and specialists within the organization. If it is primarily a fund-raising and marketing organization aimed at raising public awareness and generating large amounts of public donations to be used for disaster relief, that implies a different set of internal specialists. So being clear about the overall mission of the organization is crucial for the designers, so they can skillfully design a set of divisions, specialists, and work processes that can work together effectively to carry out the tasks necessary to succeed in achieving the mission.

This point highlights the fact that an organization needs to have a functional structure in which the activities of individuals or departments carry out specialized tasks. These sub-units depend upon the high-level work of other departments or individuals, and the functional structure of the organization can be more or less appropriate to the task. The organization succeeds to the extent that its component parts succeed in identifying the needs and opportunities facing the organization and in carrying out their roles in responding to those needs and opportunities. Poor performance in one department can have the effect of ruining the overall success of the organization to carry out its mission — even if other departments are highly successful in carrying out their tasks. Charles Perrow highlights this kind of organizational deficiency in Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies.

Here is another important variable in bringing about organizational effectiveness: the procedures within the organization that are designed to encourage high-quality effort and results on the parts of the individuals who occupy roles throughout the organization. One line of response to this issue flows through a system of supervision and assessment. This approach emphasizes measurement of performance and positive and negative incentives to motivate satisfactory performance. Supervisors are tasked to ensure that employees are exerting themselves and that their work product is of satisfactory quality.

But a different response proceeds through a theory of internal motivation. Leaders and supervisors encourage high-quality effort and achievement by expressing the valuable goals that the organization is pursuing and by offering the reward of participation in effective work that one cares about to employees. This positive motivational feature is strengthened if the organization visibly maintains its commitment to treat its employees fairly and decently. If an employee is proud to work for Ben and Jerry’s, he or she is strongly motivated to make the best contribution possible to the work of the company. In a nutshell this is the theory that underlies the very interesting literature of positive organizational scholarship (Kim Cameron and Gretchen Spreitzer, The Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship).

A fifth facet of organizational performance plainly has to do with internal communication, coordination, and collaboration. The eventual success or failure of an organizational initiative will depend on the activities of individuals and units spread out throughout the organization. The work of various of those units can be made more effective or less effective by the ease and seriousness with which they are able to communicate with each other. Suppose a car company is designing a new model. Many units will be involved in bringing the design to fruition. If the body designers, the power train designers, and the manufacturing engineers haven’t talked to each other, there is a likelihood that solutions chosen by one set of specialists will create major problems for the other specialists. (The Saab 900 of the late 1970s was a beautiful and high-performing vehicle; but because the design process had not taken into account the need for convenient servicing, it was necessary to remove the engine to carry out some common kinds of repair.) Thomas Hughes provides an excellent analysis of the organizational deficiencies of the design process used in the United States military aerospace sector in the 1950s and 1960s in Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World. Here is his comparison of good and bad organizational forms:

The top diagram is entirely hierarchical, with decision-makers at the top deciding the flow of work below and essentially no communication across sub-units. The bottom diagram, by contrast, involves a great deal of internal communication, allowing for adjustment of design and timing decisions so that the eventual plan has the greatest likelihood for success. The latter permits the implementation of systems engineering rather than component engineering. Here is Hughes's depiction of what happens when an organization lacks good internal communication and coordination:

What this implies is that improving organizational performance is a bit like tuning a piano: we need to continually adjust the factors (motivation, collaboration, mission, leadership, specialization) in such a way as to create a joint system of activity that succeeds at a high level in creating the desired results.

(I used images of musical ensembles to open this topic. But how good is the analogy? Actually, it is not a particularly good analogy. The issue of the quality of the players is obviously relevant, and quality of leadership has an exact parallel in the symphony orchestra. But the task of giving an excellent performance of Dvorak's ninth symphony is much simpler than that of bringing about a successful intervention by FEMA in response to a hurricane. There is a score for the musicians; there is a central conductor who keeps them in step with each other; and most crucially, there is no uncertainty about what to do once the third movement is finished; the musicians turn the page and move on to the fourth movement. Perhaps the jazz ensemble pictured above is a slightly better metaphor for a complex organization in that it leaves room for improvisation by the players. But even here, the activity is orders of magnitude simpler and easier to coordinate than a large organization whose actions take place over months or years, dispersed over thousands of miles and multiple sites of activity. So organizational effectiveness is a more complex process than musical coordination and performance.)

(I emphasize here the importance of collaboration as a variable in organizational effectiveness. This suggests examples drawn from team activities like soccer or a research laboratory. But some experts doubt the idea that teams are always superior to more hierarchical structures. Here is J. Richard Hackman on the positives and negatives of teams (link).)

Getting inside people's frames

It seems clear that human beings bring specific frameworks of thought, ideas, emotions, and valuations to their social lives, and these frameworks affect both how they interpret the social realities they confront and the ways that they respond to what they experience. Human beings have "frames" of cognition and valuation that guide their experiences and actions. The idea of a practical-mental frame is therefore a compelling one, and it should be a possible subject for empirical sociological investigation.

The notion of a frame seems to originate (in sociology anyway) in the writings of Erving Goffman. Here is how he formulates the idea in Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience:

When the individual in our Western society recognizes a particular event, he tends, whatever else he does, to imply in this response (and in effect employ) one or more frameworks or schemata of interpretation of a kind that can be called primary. I say primary because application of such a framework or perspective is seen by those who apply it as not depending on or harking back to some prior or 'original' interpretation; indeed a primary framework is one that is seen as rendering what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of the scene into something that is meaningful.... Whatever the degree of organization, however, each primary framework allows its user to locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences defined in its terms. He is likely to be unaware of such organized features as the framework has and unable to describe the framework with any completeness if asked, yet these handicaps are no bar to his easily and fully applying it.... Social frameworks ... provide background understanding for events that incorporate the will, aim, and controlling effort of an intelligence, a live agency, the chief one being the human being.... Taken all together, the primary frameworks of a particular social group constitute a central element of its culture, especially insofar as understandings emerge concerning principal classes of schemata, the relations of these classes to one another, and the sum total of forces and agents that these interpretive designs acknowledge to be loose in the world. (21-22, 27)

The term "cultural sociology" is sometimes used to try to capture those research efforts that try to probe the meanings and mental frameworks that people bring to their social interactions. We can postulate that human beings are processors of meanings and interpretations, and that their frameworks take shape as a result of the range of experiences and interactions they have had to date. This means that their frameworks are deeply social, created and constructed by the social settings and experiences the individuals have had. And we can further postulate that social action is deeply inflected by the specifics of the mental and emotional frameworks through which actors structure and interpret the worlds they confront. At least a part of the disciplinary matrix of cultural sociology might be understood as the field of inquiry that tries to probe those frameworks as they are embodied in specific collectivities -- working class people, women, African Americans, American Muslims, or college professors, for example. (Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel might be viewed as progenitors of this aspect of the sociology discipline; link, link.)

Wendy Griswold addresses part of this viewpoint on sociological research in her very good overview of the field in Cultures and Societies in a Changing World.

Most sociologists now view people as meaning makers as well as rational actors, symbol users as well as class representatives, and storytellers as well as points in a demographic trend. Moreover, sociology largely has escaped its former either/or way of thinking. The discipline now seeks to understand how people's meaning making shapes their rational action, how their class position molds their stories—in short, how social structure and culture mutually influence one another. (kl 195)

So how have sociologists attempted to investigate these kinds of subjective realities? Here is how Al Young describes his research goals in The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances:

I wanted to get a sense of whether poor black men looked beyond their immediate surroundings and circumstances when thinking about the future. Hence, the story told here is about how these men think about themselves as members of a larger social world -- not just their communities and neighborhoods, but American society. (lc 134)

Part 2, "Lifeworlds," explores the men's own accounts of their past and contemporary circumstances. It is here that the experiences and situations that have positioned them as poor, urban-based black men are explored. Chapter 2 provides a vision of the social contexts that circumscribe these men's lives and shape the comments and opinions that they shared with me. (lc 195)

In order to answer these questions Young conducted several dozen interviews with young black men on the south side of Chicago, and his interpretation and analysis of the results is highly illuminating.

Or take as another example the highly interesting work of sociologist Michele Lamont in Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. Here Lamont studies the mentalities of high-status white men in the United States and France. Her question is a fairly simple one: how do these men formulate their judgments of success and failure in themselves and others? What features do they admire in others and which do they dislike? She conducts interviews with 160 men in four cities in France and the United States, and makes a sustained effort to discern the profiles of culture and value that she finds among these individuals.

I compare competing definitions of what it means to be a 'worthy person' by analyzing symbolic boundaries, i.e., by looking at implicit definitions of purity present in the labels interviewees use to describe, abstractly and concretely, people with whom they don't want to associate, people to whom they consider themselves to be superior and inferior, and people who arouse hostility, indifference, and sympathy. Hence, the study analyzes the relative importance attached to religion, honesty, low moral standards, cosmopolitanism, high culture, money, power, and the likes, by Hoosiers, New Yorkers, Parisians, and Clermontois. (kl 179)

This kind of research is inherently interesting because of the light it sheds for readers about the lives and experiences of others. Reading Al Young or Michele Lamont offers the reader a window into the experience and meaning frameworks of people whose lives and experiences have been substantially different from our own; it helps us understand the ways in which these various individuals and members of groups understand themselves and their social worlds. All by itself this is a valuable kind of research. (Why did so many African Americans respond differently to the acquittal of OJ Simpson than their white counterparts and peers?)

But this kind of research becomes especially interesting if we find that the mental frameworks and systems of meanings that actors bring with them actually make substantial differences to their social actions and the choices that they make. In this case we can actually begin to create explanations and interpretations of social outcomes that interest us a great deal. (Why are some extremist militants so ready to put on suicide vests in actions that are almost certain to bring about their own deaths?)

A key issue with this kind of inquiry is methodological. How should we investigate and observe the subjective characteristics of thought and feeling that this work entails? What are appropriate standards of validity on the basis of which to assess assertions in this area? Sociologists like Alford Young and Michele Lamont have often chosen a methodology that centers on open-ended unstructured interviews -- very much the kind of thing that Studs Terkel was so good at. What these sociologists add to the approach of a Studs Terkel or an Ira Glass is an effort to analyze and generalize from the interviews they collect in order to arrive at mid-level statements about the mentality and symbolic frameworks of this group or that. And both Young and Lamont succeed in providing portraits of their subjects that are highly insightful and sociologically plausible -- we can understand the mechanisms through which these frameworks take hold and we can see some of the meso-level consequences that follow from them in specific social settings.

In a number of prior posts I've argued for an actor-centered sociology (link). And I've argued that we need to have better and more fully articulated theories of the actor if an actor-centered sociology is to be valuable.  What I am calling cultural sociology here is one way for the discipline of sociology to get down to business in providing more nuanced theories of the actor.

(I should note that the description provided here of cultural sociology makes the field seem highly actor-centered; but this isn't entirely accurate. There are macro and meso zones of research in cultural sociology that are distinctly uninterested in the mental frameworks of the individual actors. Wendy Griswold captures this multi-level division of the field by referring to a "cultural diamond", and the actor-centered aspect that I've described here is probably the smallest in terms of the volume of research conducted in the field. Here is Griswold's description of the diamond:

I use the device of the "cultural diamond" to investigate the connections among four elements: cultural objects -- symbols, beliefs, values, and practices; cultural creators, including the organizations and systems that produce and distribute cultural objects; cultural receivers, the people who experience culture and specific cultural objects; and the social world, the context in which culture is created and experienced. (kl 218)

In fact, the actor-centered dimension of the field gets relatively little spotlight in Griswold's Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. If anything, one might argue that there should be more attention to the interface between frame and actor, so that individuals are not viewed as simply the passive bearers of this cultural icon or that.)

Saskia Sassen on austerity and social exclusion

The previous post summarized some of Kathleen Thelen's thinking about the prospects for a more egalitarian capitalism in our future. Saskia Sassen offers a more negative view of the direction of the development of European capitalism in her most recent book, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy.

Here is a post in Open Democracy in which Sassen summarizes her current thinking. Her view is that there is something new in the political economy of liberalization and austerity -- the systematic exclusion and expulsion of a significant portion of the population from the economy altogether. She writes:

Low growth, unemployment, inequality, and poverty are no longer reliable markers for capturing the 'economic cleansing' afflicting European institutions and societies throughout Europe. This 'works' on the backs of all those who have simply been expelled.

This seems pretty descriptive in the urban environment in which I live in Detroit metro. The factors Sassen highlights -- high unemployment, even higher rates of discouraged workers, and high rates of foreclosure and abandonment fit the Detroit experience very well. The most recent development -- water shutoff notices to tens of thousands of Detroit residents -- only reinforces the point of exclusion.

Thanks, Saskia, for providing the link!

Thelen on the prospects for egalitarian capitalism

source: Kathleen Thelen, Varieties of Liberalization (kl 3310)

There is a version of economic historical thinking that we might label as "capitalist triumphalism" -- the idea that the institutions of a capitalist economy drive out all other economic forms, and that they tend towards an ever-more pure form of unconstrained market society. "Liberalization," deregulation, and reduction of social rights are seen as economically inevitable. On this view, the various ways in which some countries have tried to ameliorate the harsh consequences of unconstrained capitalism on the least well off in society are doomed -- the welfare state, social democracy, extensive labor rights, or universal basic income (link). Through a race to the bottom, any institutional reforms that impede the freedom and mobility of capital will be forced out by a combination of economic and political pressures.

The graphs above demonstrate the current structural differences among Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, and USA when it comes to training and income support for the unemployed and underemployed. It is visible that the four European economies devote substantially greater resources to support for the unemployed than the United States. And on the triumphalist view, the states demonstrating more generous benefits for the less-well-off will inevitably converge towards the profile represented by the fifth panel, the United States.

Kathleen Thelen is a gifted historical sociologist who has studied the institutions of labor education and training throughout the past twenty years. Her book How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan is an important contribution to our understanding of these basic economic institutions, and it also sheds important light on the meta-issues of stability and change in important social institutions. With James Mahoney she also edited the valuable collection Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power on this topic.

Thelen's most recent book, Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity addresses the question of capitalist triumphalism. (That isn't a term that she uses, but it seems descriptive.) She locates her analysis within the "varieties of capitalism" field of scholarship, which maintains that there is not a single pathway of development for capitalist systems. "Coordinated" capitalism and neoliberal capitalism represent two poles of the space considered by the VofC literature.

From the beginning, the VofC literature challenged the idea that contemporary market pressures would drive a convergence on a single best or most efficient model of capitalism. (kl 228)

Thelen is interested in assessing the prospects for what she calls "egalitarian" capitalism -- the variants of capitalist political economy that feature redistribution, social welfare, and significant policy support for the less-well-off. She focuses on several key institutions -- industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market institutions, and she argues that these are particularly central for the historical issue of the development of capitalism towards harsher or gentler versions.

Different varieties of liberalization occur under the auspices of different social coalitions, and this has huge implications for the distributive outcomes in which many of us are ultimately interested. (kl 243)

This point is key to her view of the plasticity and path-dependency of basic economic institutions: these institutions change as a result of economic imperatives and the strength of various social groups who are in a position to influence the form that change takes. "The conclusions I reach here are based on a view of institutions that emphasizes the political-coalitional basis on which they rest" (kl 259). But there is no simple calculus proceeding from power group to institutional outcome; instead, the results for institutional change are a dynamic consequence of strategy, coalition, and constraint.

I suggest that the institutions of egalitarian capitalism survive best not when they stably reproduce the politics and patterns of the Golden Era, but rather when they are reconfigured -- in both form and function -- on the basis of significantly new political support coalitions. (kl 330)

A key finding in Thelen's analysis is that "coordinated" capitalism and "egalitarian" capitalism are not the same. Coordinated capitalism corresponds to the models associated with social democracies of the 1950s and 1960s, the "Nordic" model. But Thelen holds that egalitarian capitalism can take more innovative and flexible forms and may be a more durable alternative to neoliberal capitalism.

Is a more "egalitarian" capitalism possible? The data on labor markets that Thelen presents shows that there are major differences across OECD economies when it comes to wage inequality. Here is a striking chart:

Source: Thelen, Figure 3.3. Share of Employees in Low-Wage Work, 2010

Fully a quarter of US workers are employed in low-wage work in 2010. This is about double the rate of Denmark and quadruple the rate of low-wage workers in Sweden. Plainly this reflects a US economy that is creating substantially greater numbers of low-income people than any other OECD country. And yet all of these countries are capitalist economies, some with rates of growth that are higher than the United States. This demonstrates that there are institutional and policy choices available that are consistent with the imperatives of a capitalist market economy and yet that give rise to more egalitarian outcomes than we observe in the US, Canada, and the UK.

A key element in common among the more egalitarian labor outcomes that Thelen studies (Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany) is the expansion of part-time work, mini-jobs, and "flexi-curity". This phenomenon reflects a combination of liberalization (relaxation of work rules and requirements of long labor contracts), with a set of arrangements that allows a smoother allocation of labor to jobs and an improvement in income and security for the lower end of the labor market. This trend is part of what Thelen calls a strategy of "embedded flexibilization", which she regards as the best hope for a pathway towards equitable capitalism.

Thelen closes with a realistic observation about the uncertain coalitional basis that is available in support of the policies of embedded flexibilization. Xenophobic tendencies in countries like the Netherlands and Denmark have the potential for destroying the social consensus that currently exists for this model, and the leaders of nationalistic anti-immigrant parties have made this a key to their efforts at political mobilization (kl 5541). Maintenance of these policies will require strong political efforts on the part of progressive coalitions in those countries, and organized labor is key to those efforts.

This analysis is deeply international and comparative, but it has an important consequence for the political economy of the United States: where are the coalitions that can help steer our economy towards a more egalitarian form of capitalism?

(Readers may be interested in an earlier discussion of the Nordic model; link.)

Differences in leadership qualities across professions

My university work involves quite a bit of interaction with leaders in different sectors of society — non-profits, elected officials, community organizations, business, law enforcement, and education, for example. Over the years I have noticed some striking differences in profile across sectors in terms of the qualities of mind and character that leaders in these sectors display. We might imagine a small number of traits with scales that are relevant to assessing leadership effectiveness -- perhaps along these lines:

• Sociability
• Persistence
• Strategic ability
• Ability to motivate a team
• Problem-solving ability
• Independence
• Intellectual focus
• Integrity

It strikes me that leaders in different sectors have very different mixes of qualities like these. (Within each sector there is also a wide distribution of character traits as well, of course.) A profile for several cohorts of leaders might look something like this:

On this set of assumptions, elected officials are high on sociability and team motivation but low on independence and intellectual focus; accounting CEOs are high on persistence, problem-solving ability, intellectual focus, and integrity, but low on team motivation and independence; police chiefs are high on persistence, motivational ability, and integrity, and low on sociability, intellectual focus, and independence; and community leaders are low on strategic ability, problem-solving ability, and focus, but high on the other attributes of leadership. In other words, each group of leaders shows a very different mix of skills and abilities.

(It should be understood that this graph is purely notional. I've assigned impressionistic values to the eight qualities for the four professions, but there is no real empirical measurement involved here. The graph is just intended to illustrate the idea. I am imagining that data for a graph like this would come from personality studies of randomly selected individuals who serve as leaders in the four professions.)

What explains the distinctiveness of leadership profiles in various sectors? The book I like best on the sociology of the professions is Andrew Abbott's The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. But Abbott's treatment doesn't address this specific question -- how are individuals socialized into the various professions? So how can we begin to think about the question?

A priori there seem to be at least three relevant mechanisms: selection, training, and peer emulation.

Selection works at several levels in most occupations, including entry and promotion. Individuals enter the sector with specialized training and a wide range of features of personality. The training that is provided for an accountant or a physician inculcates a fairly specific set of mental habits which the young professional brings with him or her into the professional setting. Young practitioners then begin to move up in their organizations. They advance within the organization according to the judgment of more senior managers about their suitability for higher levels of leadership and management. Those judgments are an important source of the specialization of traits of leaders that occurs within organizations. If senior managers believe that good leaders are quick and decisive, then the individuals they promote will tend to have these characteristics. So the “folk” wisdom within a sector or industry about what makes a good manager is itself an important driver of the composition of the leadership corps.

Sometimes senior leaders are selected through a more complex process involving search consultants and a search committee. This is the model for the selection of most senior university leaders. Here we often find a more complicated mix of selection criteria — committee members who favor academic achievement, others who favor administrative effectiveness, yet others who favor communications skills and vision. So we might expect that such a process would lead to a more heterogeneous leadership corps. And the selection process for elected officials is more complicated yet. The qualities that lead to success are those that allow the candidate to quickly evoke support from a broad range of potential voters. Some of these qualities have to do with the candidate's public priorities and values; but others have to do with communications and skills and sociability.

Take law enforcement agencies as an example. The qualities that make for a particularly effective street officer or sergeant may allow a given individual to rise through the ranks to a certain level. But the qualities that make for an effective police chief or commander may be somewhat different from the mix for the street-level officer. Perhaps these factors include broad vision of the department’s mission, an exceptional ability to communicate with the public and other public officials, and a special ability to inspire commitment from the men and women in service in the organization. An officer who is a great investigator or a great community policing officer may lack these other broader characteristics. And this means that the selection process for a chief may be one that cultivates the very small percentage of individuals who have the plus factor, even though these individuals' performance at the street or sergeant level is no better than that of their peers.

(Or if you watch The Wire and its depiction of the police command structure of Baltimore, you may think that the traits for which leaders are selected are less high-minded: an ability to curry favor from other powerful people, a willingness to act deceitfully, a willingness to bully subordinates, and an ability to look good in a press conference. Who could be a fan of Deputy Commissioner Bill Rawls in The Wire?)

The training associated with profession or industry is another important source of distinctiveness in leaders in a sector. Human resources professionals undergo professional development and training throughout their careers, from first hire to their most senior appointments. And these training processes build a set of mental frameworks and practices that become ingrained in most or all of the professionals in this field -- including those who go on to positions of senior leadership. The same is true of law enforcement, banking, and medicine. The foundational training for professionals in these fields -- police academy, MBA, medical school -- itself promotes particular ways of thinking about the world and one's responsibilities that are quite distinct across professions. Doctors think differently from police officers. And these differences are deepened by the training experiences each of these professionals have within their own organizations. We may speculate that doctors and architects deepen their professional habitus through their working lives in hospitals and architectural firms, and that these experiences make a significant difference when they become CEOs of organizations in their sectors.

Peer emulation seems to be a third important factor influencing the personality and style of leadership and management of the leaders in a sector or industry. Deans and provosts see a few university presidents in action, and they model their own behavior and aspirations accordingly (to some extent). Bankers, from junior to senior, observe the actions and motivations of their peers, and their own behavior adapts to what they observe. At a recent conference in Stockholm Ernst Fehr presented interesting research using the techniques of experimental economics to probe the mores and character traits of professionals in the banking industry. The research suggests a powerful effect from the environment of a financial institution to the character and behavior of its professionals in a fairly brief period of time. It will be interesting to discuss this research here when it is published.

So perhaps it isn't surprising that police chiefs, mayors, foundation heads, and community leaders have quite distinctive styles do thinking and acting, and make leadership decisions that look fairly different across these different professions. They have been selected and trained in widely different ways, they have been exposed to the practice of other professionals in their field over a range of settings, and they have observed the choices and behavior of leaders whom they either admire or dislike. In the terms that Bourdieu introduced, they occupy a field of practice where behaviors and dispositions are shaped by the activities of others in the field and the latent incentives and messages contained in the field.

Readers -- is there an area of personality psychology (or organizational psychology) that has studied this question in detail? Suggestions are invited.

A catalogue of social mechanisms

In an earlier post I made an effort at providing the beginnings of an inventory of social mechanisms from several areas of social research. Here I’d like to go a little further with that idea in order to see how it plays into good thinking about social-science methodology.

Some Types of Social Mechanisms CONTENTION Escalation Brokerage Diffusion Coordinated action Social appropriation Boundary activation Certification Framing Competition for power COLLECTIVE ACTION Prisoners' dilemma Free rider behavior Convention Norms Selective benefits Selective coercion Conditional altruism Reciprocity ORGANIZATIONAL ENFORCEMENT Audit and accounting Supervision Employee training Morale building Leadership NORMS AND VALUES Altruistic enforcement Person-to-person transmission Imitation Subliminal transmission Erosion Charisma Stereotype threat

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY Market Auction Ministry direction Contract Market for lemons Democratic decision making Producers' control Soft budget constraint GOVERNMENT Agenda setting Cyclical voting Log rolling Regulatory organizations Influence peddling STATE REPRESSION Secret police files Informers Spectacular use of force Propaganda Deception Control of communications systems SOCIAL COMMUNICATIONS Interpersonal network Broadcast Rumor Transport networks SYSTEM EFFECTS Flash trading Interlocking mobilization Overlapping systems of authority (Brenner) Non-linear networks

These mechanisms have been collected from a wide range of social scientists and researchers -- Charles Tilly, Robert Axelrod, Elinor Ostrom, George Akerlof, Robert Bates, Mancur Olson, Mayer Zald, John Ferejohn, Janos Kornai, Claude Steele, and Charles Perrow, to name a few.

There are at least two kinds of questions we need to ask about a collection like this.

First, where do the entries come from? What kinds of scientific inquiry are required in order to establish that things like these are indeed mechanisms found in the social world?

The most general answer to this question concerning discovery is that much research in the various disciplines of the social sciences is specifically directed at working out the contours of mechanisms like these. Political scientists who focus on legislatures and the US Congress have become expert on identifying and validating the institutional and voting mechanisms through which legislative outcomes come to effect. Organizational sociologists study the inner workings of a range of organizations and are able to identify and validate a wide range of mechanisms at work within these organizations. Economic anthropologists and theorists study the ways in which economic transactions are conducted in a range of human settings. Social psychologists identify many of the ways that individuals acquire normative beliefs and transmit them to other individuals. The greatest difficulty in constructing a table like this is not at the level of identifying mechanisms that might be included; it is the problem of limiting the number of mechanisms identified to a more or less manageable number. There is some reason to fear that social scientists have identified thousands of mechanisms in their research, not dozens.

And second, what role does a table like this play in the conduct of research in the social sciences?

In In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences Craver and Darden argue that biologists often approach novel phenomena with something like this table in the backs of their heads -- an inventory of known causal mechanisms in the domain of biology. From there they attempt to solve the puzzle: what combination of known mechanisms might be concatenated in order to reproduce the observed phenomenon?

Strikingly enough, this description of a heuristic for arriving at an explanatory analysis of a situation has a lot in common with the way that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly proceed in Dynamics of Contention. (Here is a more developed analysis of their mechanisms-based approach; link.) MT&T argue that there is a relatively manageable list of social mechanisms that can be observed in many cases of social contention. And they approach new instances with the idea that we may be able to understand the dynamics of the case by teasing out the workings of some of those mechanisms. It seems that MT&T are involved in both parts of the inquiry -- discovery and isolation of recurring mechanisms of contention, and application of these discoveries to the explanation of specific episodes of contention.

For example, they introduce their case studies in Part III of the book in these terms:

Part III of the study takes up three distinct literatures regarding contention -- revolution, nationalism, and democratization -- in view of the paths our quest has followed. The goal of that concluding section is to emphasize the commonalities as well as the differences in those forms of contention through an examination of the explanatory mechanisms and political processes we have uncovered in Parts I and II. (kl 511)

And a few paragraphs later:

Let us insist: Our aim is not to construct general models of revolution, democratization, or social movements, much less of all political contention whenever and wherever it occurs. On the contrary, we aim to identify crucial causal mechanisms that recur in a wide variety of contention, but produce different aggregate outcomes depending on the initial conditions, combinations, and sequences in which they occur. (kl 519)

Here is how they summarize their attempt to explain particular episodes of social contention. They focus on a "number of loosely connected mechanisms and processes":

• A mobilization process triggered by environmental changes and that consists of a combination of attribution of opportunities and threats, social appropriation, construction of frames, situations, identities, and innovative collective action.
• A family of mechanisms still to be elucidated around the processes of actor and identity constitution and the actions that constitute them.
• A set of mechanisms often found in trajectories of contention that recurs in protracted episodes of contention, competition, diffusion, repression, and radicalization. (kl 941)

And this body of social mechanisms is taken to provide a basis for historically grounded explanations of the forms of contention observed in specific cases.

This seems to parallel fairly closely the intellectual process that Craver and Darden describe in the case of biology: create an inventory of common causal mechanisms and analyze new cases by trying to see to what extent some of those known mechanisms can be discerned in the new material.

This account of an important type of social science research resonates well with a broad range of social science disciplines. It aligns with Robert Merton's notion of "theories of the middle range" in the social sciences, and the idea of developing a toolbox of patterns of social behavior on the basis of which to explain specific episodes. Rather than looking for general theories on the basis of which to unify wide swaths of the social world under a deductive explanatory system, this mechanisms-based approach suggests coming at social explanation piecemeal: finding the components and sub-processes of observed social ensembles, on the basis of which we can explain some aspects of the behavior of those ensembles.

We might usefully consider two additional questions. First, is there a theoretically useful way of classifying social mechanisms (formation of the individual actor, collective action, communication, repression, collective decision making, ...)? Can our catalogue provide content-relevant "chapters"? We might argue that a good taxonomy of social mechanisms actually provides a way of theorizing the main dimensions of social activity and organization. And second, are there more fundamental things we can say about how some or many of these mechanisms work? Does a good theory of the actor and a good theory of social organizations suffice to account for the workings of a great many of these mechanisms? If we respond affirmatively to this question, then once again we may have made a small degree of progress towards offering a somewhat more general theory of the social world.

Craver on mechanisms methodology

Carl Craver and Lindley Darden provide in In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences an extensive treatment of what a mechanisms-based methodology looks like. Their work originates in study of the biological sciences, but I find that much of what they have to say is very helpful in the philosophy of social science as well.

Craver and Darden argue that the biological sciences have largely adopted a mechanisms-centered view of the nature of their science. So what is a mechanism, on their view?

Mechanisms are how things work, and in learning how things work we learn ways to do work with them. Biologists try to discover mechanisms because mechanisms are important for prediction, explanation, and control.... Mechanisms are entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular changes from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions. (kl 581)

Fundamentally Craver and Darden  argue that a search for mechanisms is frequently a guided and constrained process, involving an attempt to match the observed activities of the system with a concatenation of known mechanism components. They want to provide a more granular account of the process of research and discovery in science, and they take issue with the idea of a flash of inspiration as the source of scientific insight. Instead, they see the process of a great deal of scientific research as one in which a methodical effort at puzzle-solving takes place, trying out different combinations of known mechanisms to see whether they may serve to explain the phenomenon in question.

In short, one often begins the search for mechanisms with a ready-made layout of the space of possible mechanisms, and the goal is to use empirical findings to eliminate regions of that space. The nature of the phenomenon and the store of accepted mechanism types thus work together to frame the discovery problem: to reveal the layout of the space of possible mechanisms and perhaps to tell one how to decide among them. (kl 1595)

They don't mean to say that there is no place for novelty or originality in scientific research; but they argue for a kind of cumulative process for much of the scientific work of discovery that builds upon the prior discovery of mechanisms and components of mechanisms.

Although occasionally biology calls upon a Darwin or a Harvey to introduce an altogether novel kind of mechanism, most episodes of mechanism discovery play out within the space of known mechanism types within a scientific field. (kl 1604)

There are many interesting and useful contributions offered in the book. One is represented in the following figure (5.1), in which Craver and Darden point out that there are multiple ways in which mechanisms are invoked in scientific research, not just one. The most common way in which we think of mechanisms is as "producers" of outcomes -- the first panel of the figure. But there are several other valid uses as well. There is the "X underlies Y" relation (panel 2), in which we provide a set of mechanisms X as an explanation of how the properties of Y are constituted; and there is the "X maintains Y" relation, in which we provide a set of mechanisms X as an explanation of the homeostasis of Y (the feedback loops and corrective mechanisms that return Y's properties to equilibrium after a period of drift or change).

 

 

Another interesting observation that C-D develop is the idea of "modular subassembly". 

This process, modular subassembly, involves reasoning about how mechanism components might be combined in surprising ways. One hypothesizes that a mechanism consists of (either known or unknown) modules or types of modules. One cobbles together different modules to construct a hypothesized how-possibly mechanism, guided by the goal of finding modules to fill all the gaps in a productively continuous mechanism. In doing so, scientists draw upon their knowledge of the store of types of entities and activities and modules (i.e., interconnected entities and activities that have a particular function). (kl 1726)

This description invokes the idea of realistic inquiry into the subprocesses that give continuous action to the mechanism. Essentially this invokes the idea of opening the black box of the mechanism and asking how the mechanism itself works. And the ontological assumption is that the mechanism consists of discrete sup-processes.

 

A third valuable idea that is advanced in this work is the idea of multi-level mechanisms. 

Biological mechanisms typically span multiple levels. Scientists working at higher levels work on ecosystems, populations, and the behaviors of organisms within their environments. Others study mechanisms within organisms, such as the nervous or circulatory systems, and mechanisms within organs and cells, and, ultimately, mechanisms with smaller entities, such as macromolecules, small molecules, and ions. Different fields of biology are often (to a first approximation) associated with different levels. (kl 688)

This is an important point for social scientists as well, given the common tendency to bifurcate into "macro" and "micro" features of the social world. Instead, C-D give further grounds for insisting that there is a wide and continuous range of levels of aggregation in the social world, and that it is perfectly legitimate to formulate representations of mechanisms that span these levels. 

 

A key feature of C-D's view of biological research is the notion that researchers make use of a wide but known stock of existing mechanisms in their efforts to understand novel phenomena. What are some of those mechanisms? Here is a very interesting table of miscellaneous biological mechanisms that Craven and Darden provide:

 

 

This table is useful exactly because it is not intended to be comprehensive or exhaustive. Rather, it is intended to provide a list of concrete mechanisms that have been observed and investigated in the biological sciences. And, as Craver and Darden argue, a large available base of known mechanisms provides a starting point for researchers who are confronting a novel phenomenon.

A collection of social mechanisms along these lines would also be valuable for researchers in the social sciences. Here is my own beginning of a table of social mechanisms:

Some Types of Social Mechanisms CONTENTION Escalation Brokerage Paramilitary organizations COLLECTIVE ACTION Prisoners' dilemma Free rider behavior Convention Norms Selective benefits Selective coercion ORGANIZATIONAL ENFORCEMENT Audit and accounting Supervision Employee training Morale building Leadership SOCIAL COMMUNICATIONS Interpersonal network Broadcast Rumor Transport networks

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY Market Auction Ministry direction Contract Democratic decision making Producers' control GOVERNMENT agenda setting Log rolling Regulatory organizations STATE REPRESSION Secret police Informers Spectacular use of force Propaganda Deception SYSTEM Flash trading Interlocking mobilization Overlapping systems of authority (Brenner)

How applicable is the Craver-Darden view of mechanism thinking when we turn to various areas of social research? There are obvious differences between the domains of biology and the social sciences, and this seems to be true when it comes to mechanisms.

One visible difference is the relative precision with which we can describe the workings of mechanisms in the two domains. The mechanism of "mismatch repair" mentioned in the C-D table under DNA Repair Mechanisms can be described in a great deal of precision, and this mechanism generally works in the same way in all settings. Compare that with the mechanism of "Audit and accounting" under Organizational Enforcement in my table above. This is also a "repair" function. But the audit function in an organization can be implemented in many different ways with varying degrees of coercion and voluntary compliance. So there is a much wider range of activities encompassed by "audit and accounting" than by "mismatch repair".

There is another kind of precision mismatch that seems to exist between biology and social science as well -- the idea that a mechanism produces the same results in a wide range of settings. Because of the molecular biology that underlies most of the mechanisms that C-D consider, these mechanisms perform like clock-work. Each tick leads to the same advancement of the wheel. But in the social world, the precision of relationship between input to a mechanism and output from the mechanism is much more slack. When a group of workers are called upon to support a wildcat strike, we may hypothesize that the free-rider mechanism will be invoked in this social setting. But free-riding may be so extensive as to cripple the strike, and it may be so limited as to barely influence the outcome at all. We can learn more about the social factors that differentiate these two outcomes. But the key point is that the mechanism is in play in both scenarios, but with very different effects.

One special strength of In Search of Mechanisms is the fact that it is a work of philosophy of science that is highly detailed in its treatment of some of the scientific content of a specific field. We cannot resolve the question of whether mechanisms are a good way of organizing scientific inquiry on the basis of apriori reasoning alone. Rather, we need to see how mechanisms-based reasoning is expressed in a range of scientific areas of inquiry. And this is exactly what Craver and Darden do in this book for a range of biological disciplines.

Ontology and methodology

Part of the dispute between analytical sociology and critical realists comes down to a complicated interplay between ontology and methodology. Both groups have strong (and conflicting) ideas about social ontology, and both think that these ideas are important to the conduct of social-science research. Analytical sociologists tend towards an enlightened version of methodological individualism: social entities derive from the actions and nature of the individuals who constitute them. Critical realists tend toward some version or another of emergentism: social entities possess properties that are emergent with respect to the individual activities that constitute them.

Both groups tend to design social science methodologies to correspond to the ontological theories that they advance. So they tacitly agree about what I regard as a questionable premise -- that ontology dictates methodology.

I want to argue for a greater degree of independence between ontology and methodology than either group would probably be willing to countenance. With the analytical sociologists I believe that social facts depend on the availability of microfoundations at the level of ensembles of individuals. This is an ontological fact. But with the critical realists I believe that it is entirely appropriate for social scientists to examine the causal and structural properties of social entities without being forced to attempt to provide the microfoundations of these properties. This is an observation about the locus and nature of explanation. There are stable structural and causal properties at the social level, and it is entirely legitimate to investigate these properties in full empirical detail. Sociologists, organizational theorists, and institutional researchers should be encouraged to investigate in detail the workings, arrangements, and causal properties of the regimes that they study. And this is precisely the kind of investigation that holds together researchers as diverse as Michael Mann, Kathleen Thelen, Charles Perrow, Howard Kimmeldorf, and Frank Dobbin. (Use the search box to find discussions of their work in earlier posts.)

What this implies is that sociologists can legitimately pursue meso- and macro-level inquiries into the nature of the social entities that most interest them. Organizational theory is an especially good example. We can approach the study of organizations from a number of points of view. But one perfectly legitimate approach is to attempt to discover some of the dynamic and causal properties of organizations with specified features. This takes the form of trying to discover what propensities a given organizational form has when embedded into a given institutional or social context. And this is a form of causal inquiry that is analogous to metallurgy or materials science: what are the properties of conductivity, thermal expansion, ductility, etc., of metals or ceramics of a given structural composition?

This means in turn that the ontology of individualism does not imply very much about methodology and research strategies. Ontology is not irrelevant to methodology; but it provides only weak constraints on the nature of the methodologies social scientists may choose in their pursuit of better understanding of the social world.

Can we say more about how ontological confidence about the nature of social entities is consistent with methodological pluralism? One part of the answer derives from the idea of the relative autonomy of various levels of the natural and social world. This is the argument that Jerry Fodor put forward with respect to the "special sciences" like psychology. Fodor argued persuasively that psychologists are entitled to investigate psychological properties without being obliged to reduce these properties to facts about the central nervous system. The rationality of science does not force us to be reductionist. Instead, it is legitimate to examine the properties of the system-level structures of a domain without attempting to say how these properties derive from more fundamental features of the stuff. And this has equally compelling implications for sociology as it does for other special sciences.

The upshot of this set of considerations is important for the conduct of social science. The ontological truism that social phenomena are constituted by individual-level activities does not imply that social science methodology must proceed along the lines of reductionism or aggregative explanation (vertical explanations, reproducing the struts of Coleman's boat). We can be individualist in ontology and macro-ist in our methodology.

The constraint of the ontological truism of microfoundationalism has really only two significant implications:

1. We need to be confident in general terms that there are microfoundations for a social property or power, even though we do not need to reproduce those micro foundations.
2. In special cases we may find that a reductionist or aggregativist strategy leads to a particularly straightforward explanation of a social-level fact (along the lines of Thomas Schelling's many examples).

But generally speaking, all of this suggests that we should be methodological pluralists in the social sciences -- make use of the research strategies that seem most promising for understanding a specific range of phenomena without a lot of concern for how the method aligns with our most refined ontological thinking.