Bad behavior

How do we explain the occurrence of anti-social behavior that we witness in everyday life? For that matter, how do we explain the more common occurrence of good behavior?

There are numerous extreme examples of anti-social behavior. But more prosaic examples are more interesting.

• A passenger on a jet airliner becomes enraged at being denied additional alcohol; screams at and punches flight attendants; attempts to open the hatch at 20,000 feet.
• A couple continue to talk loudly on their cellphones -- during a blacktie dinner, interfering with the keynote speaker's presentation. When asked to be quiet, they say indignantly, "this is important."
• A business traveler marches to the front of the security line and squeezes in front, saying, "I'm in a rush."
• A parent enters a crowded elevator with a three-year-old child and stands by as the child presses all 15 buttons.

Most people are "polite". Most people treat others with consideration and respect. Most recognize the limits imposed on their behavior by the needs, wants and rights of others. But some do not -- they behave badly.

I'm mostly interested here in the minor forms of bad behavior -- disturbing or endangering others, confronting others with aggressively rude behavior, taking more than a reasonable amount of "space" in public settings. Behaving boorishly is what I'm talking about -- noisy, intrusive, rude, and self-centered actions that impose on others or that greatly privilege one's own immediate wants. This is the kind of behavior that once was attributed to American tourists, though today it seems to be the monopoly of no particular nationality. (I've just been on vacation, so I've been exposed to a lot of it.)

So now to hypotheses. Perhaps people behave badly because --

• They don't see how their behavior affects other people.
• They haven't internalized the norms defining appropriate behavior in public.
• They reason that the norms don't apply to them in these circumstances.
• They overvalue their own importance in a social setting. "My needs are more important than yours."
• They think "I deserve this -- I've worked for it and these other people can take it or leave it."

What these hypotheses amount to is either a failure to recognize the nature of one's behavior in the circumstances, a failure to have adequately internalized the relevant social norms of behavior, an inability to recognize the legitimate and normal wants of others, or combinations of all these.

This subject is relevant to "understandingsociety" because it fundamentally has to do with social behavior, norms, and the cognitive-practical frameworks through which people generate their actions. In order to understand this behavior we need to know how people understand their own presence within a social setting. We need to know how they construct an ongoing representation along these lines "What's going on here? What's my role in this social encounter? What's expected of me? How much entitlement do I have to shape the encounter, versus the others present?" And we need to know how important conformance to local norms is to them. The oilman talking too loudly in the dining room at the Paris Ritz-Carlton may not know that local standards call for more decorous conversation, he may be thinking he's in his own private club back in Houston -- or he may just not care about the standards and the peace and quiet of the other guests.

Seen properly, then, this is an occasion for verstehen -- interpretation of the puzzling actions of others in terms of an extended hypothesis about the states of mind and motive from which the action emanated and "makes sense". And there is a lot of social cognition -- or failures of cognition -- that goes into bad behavior.

China's many revolutions

It is worth reflecting a bit on how absolutely tumultuous China's history has been since the Communist Revolution in 1949. The Great Leap Forward and consequent famine -- 1958-60, in excess of 20 million famine deaths. The Cultural Revolution -- 1966-1976, in excess of 1.5 million deaths by violence, many times that number of maimed and ruined lives. The Democracy movement and Tiananmen Square and its dramatic suppression -- 1989, unknown thousands of victims. And since the early 1980s, economic reforms, rapid growth, and a substantial degree of social transformation.

If you consider these events in terms of age cohorts, the historical experience of almost every generation has been a traumatic one. Chinese men and women born in 1930 were teenagers during the Revolution and experienced famine, chaos, civil violence, and economic reform in the remainder of their lives. The generation born in 1950 experienced the GLF famine as children, they were the teen-aged militants in middle school who formed the Red Guards, they experienced years of rustication in the countryside in the 1970s, they returned to universities after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, they participated in or observed the tumult of Tiananmen Square as they approached their forties, and they participated in China's economic reforms in their forties and fifties. This is my own age cohort in the United States, and I am just amazed to consider the rapidity and depth of history this generation has lived through.

The children of the 1950 generation were born in 1970. These children largely escaped the violence of the Cultural Revolution. Tiananmen Square was a reality for them in their teens. Their generation has been at the center of the dynamism of entrepreneurial China, with broadened opportunities in education and business. They have some of the expertise and comfort with the Internet that allows them to bridge to the China if the twenty-first century. And their standard of living -- for urban people anyway -- is dramatically improved over that of the previous generation.

And of course the generation of 1990 is the youth generation of today. This is the generation that will set China's course for the next half century, and it appears to be quite different from previous cohorts. In a conversation with four graduate students at Tsinghua University I gained a very vivid sense of the generational change that is occurring today. Three were born in 1980 and one was born five years later. I asked them about some of the values and cultural expectations of young Chinese people. The three older students laughed and said, "we don't understand him at all! Even the music he likes makes no sense to us."

These generations surely created vastly different mentalities for themselves -- different ideas about politics, equality, morality, and social stability. The ideologies of each generation were shaped and burned by the super-heated political struggles through which they passed. And surely their thoughts about what China should become, what standards of fairness should be respected, and how they should live their lives, are very deeply affected by their generational experiences.

Rising income inequality in China

Allan Wheatley writes an important article in Reuters this week about the situation of rising income inequalities in China as part and parcel of the booming economic growth the country has witness for the past two decades.  Several key facts emerge from the piece: While spectacular affluence is emerging at the top end of China's economic hierarchy, 204 million people lived on less than $1.25 per day in 2005.  China's Gini coefficient of income inequality rose from 40.7 in 1993 to 47.4 in 2004, according to an Asian Development Bank report -- a remarkably steep and rapid rise.   (This compares to a Gini coefficient of income inequality in India of only 36.2.)  And inequalities of income between urban and rural people continue to rise.  Wheatley indicates that some experts believe that this phenomenon is the result of both rapid economic growth and a set of policies by the Chinese government that favor efficiency over equity.  And some experts believe that these rising inequalities are a significant source of risk for social stability in future decades.

Wheatley bases most of his article on the recent work of the World Bank's chief economist, Justin Yifu Lin, formerly a leading professor at Peking University.  Lin and colleagues have published a collection of papers titled China's Dilemma, which attempts to identify the economic policies that have resulted in this sustained rise in income inequality.  (The volume was co-published by Australian National University and Asian Pacific Press and the table of contents is available online.)  As Wheatley summarizes the findings, the Chinese government's policies concerning economic growth have favored "efficiency" and corporations over "equity" and workers.  And Lin argues that state policies actually protect and subsidize corporations, resulting in a massive transfer of wealth and income to the most affluent.

All of this suggests to me the importance of returning to some of the important discussions of poverty and growth that were so dynamic in the 1970s.  Development theorists such as Hollis Chenery (Redistribution with Growth) and Irma Adelman (Economic growth and social equity in developing countries) gave careful analysis to the institutional context of economic growth, and put forward a strong argument for the idea that poverty alleviation needs to be built into the growth strategy from the beginning.  Both focused their attention on the institutions through which income is generated -- largely property holdings in land for peasants -- and argued that redistribution of property entitlements needed to be a structural feature of equitable economic growth.  

It was neglect, not factual or policy weakness, that led to the eclipsing of this line of thought in development circles and World Bank thinking.  The Washington Consensus essentially put aside the idea that there are alternative pathways of economic growth, some of which are more favorable to equity than others.

China's current theory of economic development seems closer to neo-liberal orthodoxy than it does to a progressive "poor-first" policy mix that would have the most sustained impact on China's poor.

(There is more discussion of the poverty-first approach to development thinking in an unpublished paper on my research site, Putting the Poor First.)

Action and its causes

What is an action? And, eventually, what role does action play in history?

There is a large philosophical arena that focuses on the first part of this question. And basically, it comes down to "persons intervening intentionally". Persons commit actions. Persons have beliefs, desires, intentions, plans, and goals; they have reasons for what they do; they have emotions and aversions; they have habits. Persons also have freedom: they have the ability to choose to act or not to act, in typical circumstances.

These components all support the idea of the agent as a conscious, intentional intervener: the agent intervenes in the world in some way, in order to bring about an outcome that he/she desires or intends, based on her beliefs about the causal relationships that exist between the intervention and the outcome. Purpose, beliefs, freedom to choose, and selected intervention fit together as an integrated ideal type of "action".

This construction fits together into the Aristotelian idea of purposive action, or rational-intentional action.  But consider a few variations of individual behavior that seem to cut in a different direction: behavior following a script, reflexive or instinctive behavior, impulsive behavior, self-destructive behavior, self-deceptive behavior, possessed behavior, coerced behavior.  In each instance we lose an element that plays a key role in the purposive/intentional description of action above: self-direction, intentionality, self-control, rational goals and purposes, and freedom. We might take these instances to describe cases of behavior that fall short of "action"; or we might hold that there is a range of degrees of intentionality associated with action, from fully free and deliberative choice to programmed or impulsive behaviors.

So the traditional rational-intentional theory of action remains a partial view.  In addition to rational-intentional action and its variants, we can think of a range of other varieties that have little in common with this goal-directed model: expressive action, role-driven action, dramaturgical action, emotional action, ....  (I believe that Bourdieu's conception of habitus falls in this general domain.)  Here we have a number of paradigms of action that we can observe in everyday life, that provide an intelligible understanding of "what is she doing, and why?", and that appear to have a fundamentally different structure from the rational-intentional model. These actions express or enact rather than aim; or if they have an aim, it is to create a certain effect in the viewer.

We thus need to broaden the definition of action.  We might say more generally that "action" is a particular construction of "behavior" -- it is an event of individual behavior that derives from a person's mentality (as opposed to a conditioned response, a reflex, or a Manchurian candidate device).  But the facts about mentality that can underlie an action are diverse: purposes, goals, allegiances, passions, features of identity, a sense of history, and aspects of role self-ascription, for example.

Now turn to the question of interpretation.  The wide range of possible mental contexts of behavior means that the task of interpretation is a challenging one.  The intellectual task of interpretation is to arrive at an understanding of the agent's behavior as action.  This means arriving at a theory or construction attributing mental states to the actor that come together in such a way as to produce the action that was performed.  Perhaps we might interpret Richard Nixon's final year in office as the resultant of several distinct mental activities and states: self-deception, rational calculation, an emotional unwillingness to be defeated, and a degree of weakness of the will.  Or consider Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's interpretation of the actions of dozens of people in a massacre in Romans in 1580 in Le Carnaval De Romans De La Chandeleur. The actions seem prima facie incomprehensible; so the historian's task is to arrive at an interpretation of the beliefs, impulses, group dynamics, and practices that existed at the time in the context of which the actions "make sense." (See Paul Ricoeur and John Thompson's Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation.)

If we take the view that social outcomes are ultimately the result of the actions of individuals, then we plainly need to have a more nuanced and satisfactory framework of analysis within which to understand "action".  Rational-choice theory is one such framework; Aristotelian theory of deliberation is a somewhat broader framework.  But it is plain that the origins, motives, dynamics, and meanings of individual actions are broader and more heterogeneous than these rational-intentional theories would suggest.  Purposive action is an important part of the story of social action -- but it is only a part.

Literary tradition and social identity

Literary traditions are sometimes thought to have an underlying interconnectedness and coherence that makes them more than simply a group of works sharing geography or group. Irish poetry and drama, for example, extend over several centuries, involving writers with a range of voices and preoccupations; and yet it is often thought that they are distinctively "Irish." How should we conceptualize this notion? And how does it relate to the concept of a social identity?

One might speculate that the continuity of a literary tradition derives from two social factors: first, that authors directly and indirectly respond to the writings of other authors in their tradition; and second, that writers express themes in their work that derive from a cultural tradition that they hold in common with other writers in this literary tradition. If, for example, there is a long oral tradition of popular songs and poetry that would have been a formative part of most Irish writers' experience as children, then it would be understandable if the cadences and phrases of this oral tradition infused their literary writings. If there are historical moments in the history of the Irish people -- Easter 1916, perhaps -- that are focal points for cultural meanings and historical turning points for ordinary Irish people -- then, once again, we might expect that themes surrounding these historical moments will recur in the production of Irish literature. And, of course, once a Goldsmith, Joyce, Yeats, or Heaney has created his poetry -- this constitutes an exemplar within the literary tradition itself that influences other Irish writers.

So there are a couple of social mechanisms that we can cite as providing "microfoundations" for the production of a national literary tradition. However, there are dimensions of variation and dissent that make the idea of a coherent and guiding literary tradition more difficult to sustain. It is recognized within most literary traditions that there are different streams of influence, with diverging literary styles and presentations. It is also recognized at a point in time that some great writers offer a literature that is strikingly at odds with the tradition from which they emerge. And it must also be recognized that large literary traditions -- the literature of India, American literature, Caribbean literature -- represent the confluence of different voices and different cultural experiences. And often these voices are deeply at odds with each other and with the dominant social order -- Jack London's novels represent a very different perspective on the United States than those of Henry James.

Within the literature of the United States -- what is often called "American literature" in US college English courses -- we can find a diversity of influences at almost every level of scale: the New England novel, African-American songs and stories, women's novels and journals, ... And within each we can discern important variations with cross-cutting influences -- the African-American voice of the deep south is evidently different from that of Chicago or Harlem or Los Angeles.

So we would certainly want to recognize that great writers are more than simply an expression of their literary or social tradition; rather, they find their voice and perspective through a dense interaction with culture, history, daily experience, race, gender, poetry, song, and dozens of other influences. And their products are often both innovative and "traditional". The novels of James Baldwin capture and embody many aspects of African-American experience and literature; they in turn contribute to the meaning of African-American literature post-Baldwin; but in the end they transcend the framework of a fixed formula. Baldwin's novels are original and particular -- not simply an expression of "the African-American tradition."

So from this point of view it seems that the idea of a literary tradition recedes from the metaphor of a compact, tightly bunched set of texts, to a meandering confluence of many cultural traditions and voices. This suggests that we need a metaphor that captures the diversity of voice and influence better than the idea of a river or stream.

This set of questions is relevant to the idea of a social identity as well. First is the obvious connection: if there is such a thing as "Irish social identity," it is plausible that this identity plays into the production of Irish literature. But the points raised here about diversity of experience and the non-reducibility of one writer's literature to a formula are also valid when we consider ascriptions of social identities. Rather than imagining that a person embodies the social identity of her own group, we should recognize that each person's social identity is a complicated mix of influences and commitments. Rather than "Sally is catholic", we might be better to observe that: "Sally is a mid-western Catholic with a feminist bent and a taste for punk music."

This suggests to me that we encounter in both traditions and identities, a kind of social construct that in a sense disappears as we increase the resolution of study; through closer study we come to see the variations as much as the commonalities within a group of people or a group of texts. Does this imply that identities and traditions do not exist? It does not. Both function as real social causes and influences. But both need to be understood as fluid, heterogeneous compounds rather than as essential, abiding realities.

Intellectual leaders

In 2005 the Nouvel Observateur published a special issue devoted to "25 grands penseurs du monde entier" -- 25 great global thinkers. (The issue was published separately as Le monde selon les grands penseurs actuels.) The selection of thinkers was excellent: Stanley Cavell, Souleymane Diagne, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Sudhir Kakar, Vladimir Kantor, José Gil, Ian Hacking, Candido Mendes, Slavoj Zizek, Jon Elster, Kwame Appiah, Giorgio Agamben, Axel Honneth, Martha Nussbaum, Carlos Maria Vilas, Simon Blackburn, Toni Negri, Charles Taylor, Peter Sloterdijk, Richard Rorty, Philip Petitt, Daniel Innerarity, Jaakko Hintikka, Amartya Sen, and Michael Walzer. The volume consists of smart articles about each thinker offering a brief but meaningful précis of the thinker's main contributions, followed usually by a short impromptu interview with the subject.  (Here is a brief description available online.)

The volume begins with these words:

A l'heure oú l’on parle d’une communauté intellectuelle mondiale virtuelle, on pourrait croire que ce que la planète compte de penseurs originaux est connu de tous ou, à tout le moins, accessible et disponsible à tous. Et pourtant, le provincialisme intellectuel sévit un peu partout, ainsi qu’en témoigne chez nous le germanopratisme de la classe intello-médiatique. On continue d’écrire et de réfléxir ici dans l’ignorance la plus totale de ce que d’éminents penseurs étrangers ont produit là.

A very strong impression of polyglot global intellect emerges from a reading of the whole issue. The collection as a whole is a great antidote to the various forms of parochialism to which the intellectual world is prone -- national assumptions, disciplinary assumptions, north-south assumptions. These thinkers are original, innovative, and usually boundary-crossing. And they are most frequently concerned with issues that are front and center in the task of understanding and improving the global world we collectively inhabit.

There are quite a few cross-cutting themes that recur across various groups of these thinkers. (It would be a very interesting exercise to "tag" each of these thinkers with a handful of topics and then map the relationships among them.) And certainly this is true: we will collectively do a better job of understanding and improving our global world, if we find ways of engaging with the thinking, issues, and frameworks of observers throughout the world. Sociology and philosophy both require new ideas -- and a deep and sustained international conversation can be a source of ideas and corrections to old ideas.

It is very interesting to take stock of the ways that the Internet can now facilitate these international conversations. YouTube is a good example; mixed among the millions of videos of pets and birthday parties are invaluable snippets of insight from the world's most innovative thinkers. Certainly it would be possible to conduct a transformative advanced seminar in social theory -- perhaps online! -- based on materials and videos available on YouTube. But it is interesting as well what we can't yet find on YouTube: selections from intellectuals and theorists from the developing world. It is substantially more difficult to locate web-based resources documenting the thinking of intellectuals from Africa, Latin America, or China.

Here are some YouTube resources on several of the thinkers included in the Nouvel Obs list. Roughly half of the people on the list are featured with snippets of lectures or interviews on YouTube. Think of this posting as a "mash-up" of great ideas and critical thinking.

Amartya Sen, March, 2005

Martha Nussbaum, 2006

Slavoj Zizek - Rules, Race, and Mel Gibson 2006 1/8, European Graduate School

Anthony Appiah, commencement speech at Dickinson College, 2008

Tony Negri, 2008

Stanley Cavell, 2002

Candido Mendes

Giorgio Agamben

Peter Sloterdijk

Richard Rorty

Daniel Innerarity

Safety as a social effect

Some organizations pose large safety issues for the public because of the technologies and processes they encompass. Industrial factories, chemical and nuclear plants, farms, mines, and aviation all represent sectors where safety issues are critically important because of the inherent risks of the processes they involve. However, "safety" is not primarily a technological characteristic; instead, it is an aggregate outcome that depends as much on the social organization and management of the processes involved as it does on the technologies they employ. (See an earlier posting on technology failure.)

We can define safety by relating it to the concept of "harmful incident". A harmful incident is an occurrence that leads to injury or death of one or more persons. Safety is a relative concept, in that it involves analysis and comparison of the frequencies of harmful incidents relative to some measure of the volume of activity. If the claim is made that interstate highways are safer than county roads, this amounts to the assertion that there are fewer accidents per vehicle-mile on the former than the latter. If it is held that commercial aviation is safer than automobile transportation, this amounts to the claim that there are fewer harms per passenger-mile in air travel than auto travel. And if it is observed that the computer assembly industry is safer than the mining industry, this can be understood to mean that there are fewer harms per person-day in the one sector than the other. (We might give a parallel analysis of the concept of a healthy workplace.)

This analysis highlights two dimensions of industrial safety: the inherent capacity for creating harms associated with the technology and processes in use (heavy machinery, blasting, and uncertain tunnel stability in mining, in contrast to a computer and a red pencil on the editorial offices of a newspaper), and the processes and systems that are in place to guard against harm. The first set of factors is roughly "technological," while the second set is social and organizational.

Variations in safety records across industries and across sites within a given industry provide an excellent tool for analyzing the effects of various institutional arrangements. It is often possible to pinpoint a crucial difference in organization -- supervision, training, internal procedures, inspection protocols, etc. -- that can account for a high accident rate in one factory and a low rate in an otherwise similar factory in a different state.

One of the most important findings of safety engineering is that organization and culture play critical roles in enhancing the safety characteristics of a given activity -- that is to say, safety is strongly influenced by social factors that define and organize the behaviors of workers, users, or managers. (See Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies and Nancy Leveson, Safeware: System Safety and Computers, for a couple of excellent treatments of the sociological dimensions of safety.)

This isn't to say that only social factors can influence safety performance within an activity or industry. In fact, a central effort by safety engineers involves modifying the technology or process so as to remove the source of harm completely -- what we might call "passive" safety. So, for example, if it is possible to design a nuclear reactor in such a way that a loss of coolant leads automatically to shutdown of the fission reaction, then we have designed out of the system the possibility of catastrophic meltdown and escape of radioactive material. This might be called "design for soft landings".

However, most safety experts agree that the social and organizational characteristics of the dangerous activity are the most common causes of bad safety performance. Poor supervision and inspection of maintenance operations leads to mechanical failures, potentially harming workers or the public. A workplace culture that discourages disclosure of unsafe conditions makes the likelihood of accidental harm much greater. A communications system that permits ambiguous or unclear messages to occur can lead to air crashes and wrong-site surgeries.

This brings us at last to the point of this posting: the observation that safety data in a variety of industries and locations permit us to probe organizational features and their effects with quite a bit of precision. This is a place where institutions and organizations make a big difference in observable outcomes; safety is a consequence of a specific combination of technology, behaviors, and organizational practices. This is a good opportunity for combining comparative and statistical research methods in support of causal inquiry, and it invites us to probe for the social mechanisms that underlie the patterns of high or low safety performance that we discover.

Consider one example. Suppose we are interested in discovering some of the determinants of safety records in deep mining operations. We might approach the question from several points of view.

• We might select five mines with "best in class" safety records and compare them in detail with five "worst in class" mines. Are there organizational or techology features that distinguish the cases?
• We might do the large-N version of this study: examine a sample of mines from "best in class" and "worst in class" and test whether there are observed features that explain the differences in safety records. (For example, we may find that 75% of the former group but only 10% of the latter group are subject to frequent unannounced safety inspection. This supports the notion that inspections enhance safety.)
• We might compare national records for mine safety--say, Poland and Britain. We might then attempt to identify the general characteristics that describe mines in the two countries and attempt to explain observed differences in safety records on the basis of these characteristics. Possible candidates might include degree of regulatory authority, capital investment per mine, workers per mine, ...
• We might form a hypothesis about a factor that should be expected to enhance safety -- a company-endorsed safety education program, let's say -- and then randomly assign a group of mines to "treated" and "untreated" groups and compare safety records. (This is a quasi-experiment; see an earlier posting for a discussion of this mode of reasoning.) If we find that the treated group differs significantly in average safety performance, this supports the claim that the treatment is causally relevant to the safety outcome.

Investigations along these lines can establish an empirical basis for judging that one or more organizational features A, B, C have consequences for safety performance. In order to be confident in these judgments, however, we need to supplement the empirical analysis with a theory of the mechanisms through which features like A, B, C influence behavior in such a way as to make accidents more or less likely.

Safety, then, seems to be a good area of investigation for researchers within the general framework of the new institutionalism, because the effects of institutional and organizational differences emerge as observable differences in the rates of accidents in comparable industrial settings. (See Mary Brinton and Victor Nee, The New Institutionalism in Sociology, for a collection of essays on this approach.)

Texts, ideas, and "about"

Harvard philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote a series of articles in the 1970s on the subject of "about" (PROBLEMS AND PROJECTS).  It was an interesting effort by a deeply gifted philosopher to get a handle on what a text is "about", without simply restating the content that the article or text includes.  In hindsight Goodman's interest was prescient, and it points forward to current interest in the "semantic" web and search technology.

There is an interesting tool provided by Wordle that provides an intriguing way of extracting a sense of what a blog or other text is "about" by generating a word cloud based on the frequencies of words used.  Included below are the results for a number of interesting blogs; I think they give a surprisingly nuanced picture of the main preoccupations of the bloggers.

understandingsociety 

duckofminerva

themonkeycage

rustbeltintellectual

changingsociety 

accursedshare 

Any ideas about what this one might be "about"?

It is Martha Stewart's blog!

Public versus hidden faces of organizations

Think of a range of complex organizations and institutions -- police departments, zoning boards, corporations, security agencies, and so on indefinitely. These organizations all have missions, personnel, constituencies, and policies and practices. They all do various things -- they affect individuals in society and they bring about significant social effects. And, in each case there are at least three aspects of their realities -- the ways they publicly present themselves, the ways their behaviors and effects are perceived by the public, and the usually unobservable reality of how they actually behave. Usually the public persona of the institution is benign, fair, and public- spirited. But how close is this public persona to the truth? In many of our basic institutions, the answer seems to be, not very. We are daily confronted with cases of official corruption, corporations that abuse their power, legislators who take advantage of insider status, and the like. So how can we conceptualize the task of getting a reasonably accurate perception of the hidden workings of our major institutions and organizations?

First, let's consider whether it is possible to specify a minimum charter of good organizational behavior in a democratic society. This would be a partial answer to a part of our question: what defines the conditions of a socially acceptable and publicly defensible organization? Consider these aspirations --

• The organization should have goals that are compatible with enhancing the public good.
• The organization should have appropriate policies about behavior towards employees and the public.
• The organization should genuinely incorporate a commitment of compliance to law and regulation.
• The corporation should embody a faithful commitment to exerting its efforts on behalf of its stated mission and stakeholders.
• The organization should be committed to transparency and accountability.

Bad business practices and corruption can often be traced to a violation of one or more of these principles. The most offensive practices by powerful organizations -- predatory behavior, asset stripping, the use of coercion and threat to achieve organizational goals, fraud, deception, illegal behavior, toxic waste dumping, evasion of regulations, and bribery -- all fall within the categories identified here.

So how are we to determine whether our existing organizations and institutions satisfy these minimal conditions? We might imagine a routine "scan" of major institutions and organizations that asks a small set of questions along these lines:

• What are the real operational goals and priorities of the organization?
• What are the operational policies that govern corporate action?
• How do agents of the organization actually treat members of the public in carrying out their tasks?
• To what extent are there discrepancies between policy and practice?
• To what extent do powerful leaders and managers use their positions to favor their own private interests? (conflict of interest)
• To what extent do business crimes occur -- accounting fraud, investor deception, evasion of regulations for health and safety?
• And, most generally, to what extent is there a discrepancy between the official story about the organization and its actual practices?

It is very easy to think of examples of bad organizational behavior illustrating each of these questions -- waste management companies fronting for organized crime groups, pharmaceutical companies producing defective generic drugs, police officers accepting bribes from speeding drivers, mining companies hiring "security workers" to evict "squatters." And it would be a very interesting exercise to try to provide brief but accurate answers to each of these questions for a number of organizations. Based on the answers to questions like these that we are able to establish, we could then make an effort to answer the question of how great a discrepancy there is between the benign public persona of major institutions and their actual workings.

In theory we might say that answering these questions is no more difficult than putting a man on the moon -- costly but straightforward. However, as was said twenty years ago in the context of anti-ballistic missile technology, the difference is that the moon doesn't fight back. Organizations -- particularly large governmental and corporate organizations -- are very adept at covering their tracks, concealing bad behavior, and re-telling the story in their own interests. So the investigative challenge is a huge one -- we might speculate that corruption multiplies geometrically, while investigative capacity multiplies arithmetically (a sort of Malthusian theory of misbehavior). Any given abuse can be uncovered in the New Yorker or on the 6 o'clock news -- but bad behavior outstrips investigative resources.

So the task of understanding this aspect of modern society amounts to finding effective ways of shining a light on the real practices and priorities of important organizations and institutions. And the practical interest we have in controlling bad organizations -- controlling corruption, ensuring good environmental and labor practices, eliminating coercion and violence -- comes down to the challenge of enhancing the ability of democracies to investigate, regulate, and publicize the standards and outcomes of behavior that are required.

(Earlier posts have addressed aspects of this issue, including comments on corruption and publicity.)

Discipline, method, hegemony in sociology

An earlier post referred to the "Perestroika" debate within political science. There are similar foundational debates within other social science disciplines, including especially sociology. What is particularly striking is not that there are deep disagreements about the methodology and epistemology of sociology -- this has often been true within sociology, going back to the methodenstreiten that divided the German-speaking social sciences around the turn of the twentieth century, but rather the degree to which these disagreements have been so divisive and polarizing within the discipline in the U.S. in the past forty years.

Several interesting books that focus on some of these debates within sociology include George Steinmetz, The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others; Immanuel Wallerstein, The End of the World As We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century; Craig Calhoun, Sociology in America: A History; and Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. Andrew Abbott's Chaos of Disciplines is also a very interesting treatment of the sociology of the social science disciplines and the mechanisms through which a discipline defines its boundaries and maintains "discipline".

In sociology it is possible to map the main fault lines within the discipline in several ways. First, we can distinguish quantitative-statistical research from both qualitative-ethnographic approaches and comparative-historical approaches. (It's worth observing that this results in a tripartite division of methods rather than the simpler bipolar "quantitative-qualitative" divide. Historical and comparative studies are distinct from statistical studies, but they are also distinguishable from ethnographic interpretations.) Or we can characterize this space in terms of "large-N, small-N, single-N" studies. And we can distinguish broadly among positivist and anti-positivist perspectives; causal and interpretive perspectives; realist and anti-realist perspectives; critical and orthodox perspectives; and there are probably other important dimensions of disagreement as well. In addition to these large divisions among methodological approaches, there are also a large number of frameworks of thought that involve a combination of method and theory -- for example, feminist sociology, post-structuralist sociology, critical theory, and post-colonial sociology.

The disputes between these methodological frameworks seem to continue to create large, fractious divides within graduate sociology departments, with advocates for one method or the other claiming virtually exclusive legitimacy. And this struggle for methodological primacy appears to extend to the editorial policies of major sociology journals, association programs, and tenure deliberations. Until fairly recently -- the 1990s, let us say -- the quantitative-statistical faction held sway as the hegemonic methodological doctrine. Inspired by positivism and the example of the natural sciences and perhaps guided by governmental and foundation funding priorities, quantitative studies were considered most scientific, most rigorous, most objective, and most explanatory. Historical and interpretive studies were treated as "ideographic" or anecdotal -- not well suited to discovering important social regularities. And yet it seems apparent that many problems of sociological interest are not amenable to quantitative or statistical research.

Let's consider for a moment how these issues ought to work -- how method, theory, and the world ought to be related. In any area of science there is a range of phenomena that we want to understand. So we need to have tools for investigating the real, empirical characteristics of this stuff, and we aim to arrive at theories that explain the more interesting features of this domain of real phenomena. Finally, we need some intellectual resources on the basis of which to arrive at the desired knowledge -- we need some methods of inquiry, some models of theory, and some ideas about the underlying ontology of the phenomena we are studying. So the world exists; we want to gain knowledge and understanding of this world; and we need some tools for investigating and theorizing this world.

But here is the key point: the central focus here is knowledge, not method. Method is a tool for helping us to arrive at knowledge. For any given empirical question there will be a variety of methods on the basis of which to investigate this problem. And ideally, we should select a set of tools that are well suited to the particular characteristics of the problem at hand.

In other words, analysis of the situation of knowledge producers would suggest methodological pluralism. We should be open to a variety of tools and methods, and should design research in a way that is closely tailored to the nature of the empirical problem. And therefore young sociologists -- graduate students -- should be encouraged to be eclectic in their reading and thinking; they should be exposed to many of the approaches, perspectives, and methods through which imaginative sociologists have addressed their problems of research and explanation.

This general recommendation in favor of pluralism in sociology is strengthened when we consider the fact of the inherent heterogeneity of the social world. (See an earlier posting on this subject.) There is not one single kind of social process, for which there might conceivably be a uniquely best kind of method of inquiry. Rather, the social world consists of a deeply heterogeneous mix of processes, some of which are better suited to an ethnographic or comparative approach, just as other processes may be best studied quantitatively. If one is interested in the topic of corruption, for example -- he/she will need to be informed about institutions, culture, principal-agent problems, social psychology, and many other potentially relevant sociological factors. And these researches may well require a combination of statistical analysis, comparison across a select group of cases, and ethnographic investigation in a small number of specific cases and individuals.

In other words, there are very deep arguments supporting the value and epistemic suitability of methodological pluralism. And this in turn suggests that sociology departments are well advised to incorporate a variety of methods and frameworks into their doctoral programs.

Fortunately, it appears that this rethinking is now taking place in a number of top sociology departments in the U.S., and the formerly hegemonic position of quantitative methods is now being challenged by a more pluralistic treatment of methods and frameworks. And this is all to the good: the result will be a better sociology and a better understanding of the heterogeneous, novel, and rapidly changing world in which we find ourselves.