Neil Gross on mechanisms

Neil Gross offers a friendly amendment to the growing literature on social mechanisms within sociology in "A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms" (link). He offers general support for the framework, but criticizes the main efforts at specifying what a social mechanism is. (James Mahoney makes a major effort to capture the main formulations in "Beyond Correlational Analysis"; link. Mahoney identifies 24 statements, all somewhat different.) Gross argues that the existing formulations are too tightly wedded to the metaphor of a physical mechanism -- for example, the cogs, gears, and springs of a clock. And the existing frameworks are too dependent on the assumption of rational actors, rather than a more fluid and relational understanding of social action. In some respects his arguments converge with those of Andrew Abbott considered in an earlier post.

The account of social mechanisms that Gross puts forward is a "pragmatist" theory. Here is how he puts the point in the paper's abstract.

Building on the insight increasingly common among sociological theorists -- that action should be conceptualized in terms of social practices -- I mobilize ideas from the tradition of classical American pragmatism to develop a more adequate theory of mechanisms. (358)

Gross praises the mechanisms approach for its ability to go beyond positivism in the philosophy of social science -- the general idea that social explanations depend on discovering strong social laws.  But he finds the literature to be amorphous when it comes to definitions.  He identifies five main themes:

1. Mechanisms as not necessarily observable structures or processes
2. Mechanisms as observable processes that do not require the positing of motives
3. Mechanisms as lower-order social processes
4. Mechanisms as triggerable causal powers
5. Mechanisms as transforming events (359-361)

Out of these themes Gross extracts a degree of consensus:

1. Social mechanisms are causal in that they mediate between cause and effect.
2. Social mechanisms unfold in time.
3. Social mechanisms are general, although in varying degrees.
4. Because a social mechanism is an intermediary process, it is necessarily composed of elements analyzed at a lower order of complexity or aggregation than the phenomenon it helps explain. (361-363)

He believes these four points capture the "theoretical consensus" that exists among the main expositions of the idea of a social mechanism.  He then identifies several points of difference among these accounts:

1. Methodological individualism versus social ontologism.
2. Formal versus substantive mechanisms.
3. Analytical versus realist models. (363-364)

Now, finally, his own specific definition:

A social mechanism is a more or less general sequence or set of social events or processes analyzed at a lower order of complexity or aggregation by which -- in certain circumstances -- some cause X tends to bring about some effect Y in the realm of human social relations.  This sequence or set may or may not be analytically reducible to the actions of individuals who enact it, may underwrite formal or substantive causal processes, and may be observed, unobserved, or in principle unobservable. (364)

A key part of Gross's critique of existing expositions of the social mechanisms approach, largely within the framework of analytical sociology, is the reliance these researchers make on the framework of rational choice theory.  Gross believes this is too narrow an understanding of human action, and therefore serves poorly as a foundation for our thinking about real social mechanisms.  Gross prefers a "pragmatist" understanding of action and actors, one that is closer to the field of symbolic interactionism than to economics.  This approach links action to "practices" and habits more fundamentally than to means-end rationality and goal-seeking behavior.  "Pragmatists maintain that instrumental rationality itself, when it does appear, is a kind of habit, a way that some humans can learn to respond to certain situations, and that we should be as interested in the historical processes by which the habit of rationality -- in its various forms -- develops and is situationally deployed as we should be in its effects" (367).

Gross brings these ideas about action and practice into the mechanisms framework with this basic idea.

Pragmatists would view social mechanisms as composed of chains or aggregations of factors confronting problem situations and mobilizing more or less habitual responses. (368)

This approach understands action as more fluid and interactive than deliberative and pre-planned.  And it emphasizes the contingency of interactions with other actors that influence the development and unfolding of the swirl of activity and the constitution of the actor him/herself.

Fundamentally Gross's critique comes down to a plea for a better understanding of social action itself, and of the actor, than the mechanisms approach is inclined to offer.  And the framework within which to conceptualize action that he prefers is one that derives from inter-action, spontaneity, and adjustment as much as (more than?) the deliberative and calculating processes postulated by rational-actor models.

I think that Gross's approach is fairly consonant with that taken by Chuck Tilly and Doug McAdam in various places.  McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly emphasize the "relational" nature of social action in Dynamics of Contention.  And here is a nice statement of McAdam's summary view of social action in Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970.

One of the virtues of the perspective sketched here is that it is as amenable to the analysis of routine as to that of contentious politics.  Too often analysts have reified the distinction between routine politics and social movements, revolutions and the like, and have wound up proposing separate theories to account for the two phenomena.   Since I see the latter as almost always growing out of and often transforming the former, I am motivated to propose a framework that is equally adept at explaining both. (xvii)

The account of contentious politics that McAdam favors considers four ideas:

1. Exogenous change processes.
2. Interpretive processes and the collective attribution of opportunity/threat.
3. Appropriation of existing organizational space and routine collective identities.
4. Innovative collective action and the onset of contention. (xvii-xxviii)

This account emphasizes much of Gross's agenda as well: adaptiveness, contingency, a fluid definition of action through inter-action with other actors, and the significance of culture and identity in action.

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Posted in: analytical sociology,mechanism

Social things, kinds and meso causes

Consider a social entity -- say the IBM corporation -- and consider the group of individuals who currently make up the entity. What is the relation between the social entity and the individuals? There are several things that are plainly true: the entity is composed of the individuals. The behavior of the entity supervenes upon the individuals. But other issues are less clear. Does the corporation have causal properties of its own? Is this corporation an instance of a broader class of social entities with similar properties? Do we need to explain the corporation by deriving its properties from the properties of its constituents?

There are analogous issues in other areas of the "special" sciences. Take weather, for example. We have a fairly complex vocabulary of weather ontology and causation: El Nino, warm front, high pressure cell, hurricane, windshear, etc. Two things seem evident. First, weather phenomena are composed of lower-level physical components: bodies of water at a range of temperatures, non-homogeneous gases (atmosphere), inputs of energy (sunlight), and the like. Weather phenomena are "nothing but" ensembles of micro-cells of gases, water, land masses, and energy. Weather states might be exhaustively described as a set of micro-states with no reference to weather vocabulary; we could, if we wanted, reduce weather statements to micro physical statements. At the same time, we can legitimately describe weather phenomena at the meso or macro levels -- storms, etc. There is no compelling scientific reason to insist on reduction or elimination. And we can explain weather outcomes in terms of causal statements that invoke other meso factors. The fact that there are no autonomous weather phenomena does not mean there are no autonomous weather explanations.

There isn't much of a problem in defining or identifying entities at the level of social aggregates. The IBM corporation is no more ontologically suspect than Hurricane Irene. Both are high-level entities composed of lower level things and processes. What is more problematic is when we consider whether there are "kinds" of social entities; whether there are law-like generalizations that are true of those kinds of things; and whether kinds of social things have distinctive causal properties and processes.

Candidate social kinds might include armies, bureaucracies, and religions. I take the view, however, that none of these concepts identifies a set of social entities that have enough in common to call them a kind. They are heterogeneous in all the ways that have made them intriguing to historical sociologists. Caesar's army, Rommel's army, and Ho Chi Minh's army had some things in common; but they also had enormously important differences at the level of organization, technology, and leadership structure. So it isn't plausible to look at them as constituting a kind of social entity.

This high degree of heterogeneity among the items classified under social concepts also provides the basis for a negative answer to the question about laws as well. Armies are not like metals; they don't have a common set of generating processes, and they don't give rise to significant regularities. We can't say things like "all armies fight to exhaustion within 12 months."

We can, however, identify common processes and challenges that confront all armies, and we can consequently tease out some causal mechanisms and processes that recur across armies in a wide range of contexts. This is the thrust of McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly's analysis of mechanisms underlying contention.

This discussion illustrates three rather different points. First, there is the level of descriptive concepts we choose to use. Second is the issue of whether explanations need to proceed from more fundamental to more complex. And third is the issue of the ontological status of composite entities.

These topics have been addressed under the rubric of inter-theoretic reduction for almost forty years. Jerry Fodor's "Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis" (1974) (link) and "Special Sciences: Still Autonomous After all These Years" (1997) (link) present core arguments for the autonomy of the special sciences. He distinguishes between token-token identity and type-type identity, pointing out that it might be the case that the first kind of identity obtains while the second does not. His central argument is that the possibility of multiple functional realizability demonstrates that it will not be possible to reduce higher-level laws to lower-level laws.

Jaegwon Kim has addressed the issue of physicalism throughout his career, most recently in Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. He holds that the concept of supervenience provides a basis for finessing the demand for reduction from higher kevel to lower level. Julie Zahle raises some of these problems in her contribution to Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology: A Volume in the Handbook of the Philosophy of Science Series, "Holism and Supervenience."

My general intuition is that the issue of inter-theoretic reduction and an insistence on a strong version of methodological individualism are much less important to the philosophy of social science than they have appeared to be. Once we have sufficiently understood the ways that individuals, institutions, networks, and values work at the local level, we are in a good position to characterize meso-level social entities like organizations and value systems. And we are intellectually empowered to try to discover the dynamic properties of these systems of actors and social arrangements. So meso level causal properties seem entirely legitimate in the social sciences.

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_epistemology,holism,mechanism

Steinmetz on colonialism

George Steinmetz offers a comparative sociology of colonialism in The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa.  More specifically, he wants to explain differences in the implementation of "native policy" within German colonial regimes around the turn of the twentieth century.  He finds that there are significant differences across three major instances of German colonialism (Samoa, Qingdao, Southwest Africa), and he wants to know why. (For example, the Namibia regime was much more violent than the Samoa or Qingdao examples.) This is a causal question, and Steinmetz is one of the most talented sociologists of his cohort in American sociology. So it is worth looking at his reasoning in detail.

One reason this is interesting to me is that it seems to represent a hard case for the perspective of analytical sociology (link, link), with its goal of providing an overarching model of all valid sociological explanations. On its face, Steinmetz's analysis doesn't look much like Coleman's boat -- identify a macro pattern of interest, look for the actors whose behavior gives rise to the pattern, and try to identify individual-level circumstances that cause the pattern through the individuals' actions.  So let's look in a little bit of detail at the explanations that Steinmetz offers.

Here are the guiding research goals for Steinmetz's study.

Social theorists have often treated colonialism as a monolithic object, a uniform condition. Yet even a cursory overview of the historical literature indicates that colonialism is actually an extremely capacious category, encompassing everything from pillage and massacre in the Spanish conquest of the New World to the peaceful coexistence between British rulers and Chinese subjects in late colonial Hong Kong. The colonies that made up the German overseas empire, which lasted from 1884 until the end of World War I, exemplify the enormous variability even within the more delimited category of modern colonialism. This specifically modern variant of European colonialism, as opposed to the early modern (or earlier) forms, is my focus in this book.  I have selected three colonies to illustrate the wide spectrum of colonial native policy, which I will argue below, was the core activity of the modern colonial state.  These colonies are German Southwest Africa, forerunner of modern-day Namibia; German Samoa, precursor of the contemporary nation-state of Samoa; and Kiaochow, a colony that consisted of the city of Qingdao and its surrounding hinterland in China's Shandong Province. (1)

What I try to account for in this book -- my "explanandum" -- is colonial native policy. Four determining structures or causal mechanisms were especially important in each of these colonies: (1) precolonial ethnographic discourses or representations, (2) symbolic competition among colonial officials for recognition of their superior ethnographic acuity, (3) colonizers' cross-identification with imagos of the colonized, and (4) responses by the colonized, including resistance, collaboration, and everything in between.  Two other mechanisms influenced colonial native policy to varying degrees: [5] "economic" dynamics related to capitalist profit seeking (plantation agriculture, mining, trade, and smaller-scale forms of business) and [6] the "political pressures generated by the international system of states. (2)

This book does not attempt to identify any singular, general model of colonial rule.  Indeed, general theory and general laws are widely recognized as implausible goals in the social sciences.  Historians have always preferred complex, overdetermined, conjunctural accounts, but sociologists and some other social scientists have been reluctant to abandon the chimerical goals of parsimony and "general theory." Rather than attempt to use colonial comparisons to fabricate a uniform model of the colonial state, I will seek instead to identify a limited set of generative social structures or mechanisms and to track the ways they interacted to provide ongoing policies. Even though each instance of colonial native policy was shaped by a different constellation of influences, the four primary mechanisms named above were always present and efficacious to varying degrees. (3)

Note that Steinmetz proceeds here in a clearly comparativist fashion (three cases with salient similarities and differences); and he proceeds with the language of causal mechanism in view.  The comparativist orientation implies a desire to identify causal differences across the cases that would account for the differences in outcomes in the cases.  He suggests later in the analysis that all six factors mentioned here are causally relevant; but that the general structural causes (5 and 6) do not account for the variation in the cases.   These structural factors perhaps account for the similarities rather than the differences across the cases. But Steinmetz emphasizes repeatedly that general theories of colonialism cannot account for the wide variation that is found across these three cases.  "The patterns of variation among these three colonies are as puzzling as is the sheer degree of heterogeneity" (19).

So what kind of account does Steinmetz offer for the four key mechanisms he cites?  Consider first factor (2) above, the idea that the specifics of colonial rule depended a great deal on the circumstances of the professional and ideological "field" within which colonial administrators were recruited and served.  (Here is a posting on Bourdieu's concept of "field"; link.)  "Social fields are organized around differences -- differences of perception and practice.  It is difficult to imagine what sorts of materials actors could use in their efforts to carve out hierarchies of cultural distinction if they were faced with cultural formations as flat and uniform as Saidian 'Orientalism'" (45-46).  The idea here is that the particular intellectual and professional environment established certain points of difference around which participants competed. These dividing lines set the terms of professional competition, and prospective colonial administrators as well as functioning administrators needed to establish their program for governance around a distinctive package of these assumptions.

Was the colonial state characterized by common perceptions of distinction and stakes of conflict? German colonial administrators did in fact compete for a specific form of cultural distinction within the ambit of the colonial state, and this struggle guided each individual toward particular kinds of native policy.  ... The colonial stage thus became an exaggerated version of imperial Germany's three-way intraelite class struggle. (48, 49)

This mechanism is a fairly clear one; and it provides a promising basis for explaining some of the otherwise puzzling aspects of colonial rule and native policy.  It derives, fundamentally, from Bourdieu's theories of social capital.  Consider an analogy with current military policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Suppose there are two large ideas of strategy in the air, counter-insurgency and state-building.  Suppose that each of these frameworks of thought has resonance with different groups of powerful political leaders within the government.  And suppose that senior military commanders are interested in establishing their credentials as effective strategists.  It makes sense to imagine that there may be a competition for choosing on-the-ground strategies and tactics that align with the grand strategy the theater commander thinks will further his long-range career success the best.

This mechanism is consistent with an agent-centered theory of explanation: actors (administrators or generals) are immersed in a policy environment in which conflicting ideas about success are debated; the actors seek to align their actions to the framework they judge to be most likely to prevail (and preserve their careers).  No one wants to be the last Curtis LeMay in Vietnam when the prevailing view back home is "winning hearts and minds."  The explanation postulates a social fact -- the prevalence of several intellectual frameworks about the other, several ethnographic discourses; and the individual's immersion in these discourses permits him or her to act strategically in pursuing advantageous goals.

We can often begin to understand why one strand of precolonial discourse rather than another guided colonial practice once we know who was put in charge of a given colony. (54)

So this illustrates the way that factors (1) and (2) work in Steinmetz's explanation.  What about (3)?  This falls in the category of what Steinmetz calls "symbolic and imaginary identifications" (55).  Here Steinmetz turns away from conscious calculation and jockeying on the part of the colonial administrator in the direction of a non-rational psychology. Steinmetz draws on psychoanalytic theory and the theories of Lacan here. But it remains an agent-centered analysis.  Steinmetz refers to elements of mentality as an explanation of the administrators' behavior, and their possession of this mentality needs its own explanation.  But what proceeds from the assumption of this mentality is straightforward; it is a projection of behavior based on a theory of the mental framework of the actor.

The fourth factor in Steinmetz's analysis turns to the states of agency of the colonized.  Here he refers to strategies of response by the subject people to the facts of colonial rule, ranging from cooperation to resistance.

Resistance is located on the opposite side from cooperation. Colonized peoples were able to modulate and revise native policies. By signing up as a native policeman one might be able to temper colonial abuses of power. More frontal forms of resistance could bring a regime of native policy to an abrupt halt and force the colonial state to seek a new approach. (66)

This aspect of the story too is highly compatible with a microfoundations approach; it is straightforward to see how social mobilization theory can be fleshed out in ways that make it an agent-centered approach.

Here is how Steinmetz sums up his account:

The colonial state, I have argued here, can best be understood as a kind of field, one that is structured around opposing principles and interests and around conflict over specific stakes.  Actors in the field of the colonial state competed to accumulate ethnographic capital.  This field's internal heterogeneity and the fact that a field is "a space of possibilities" with an "immense elasticity" meant that colonial policy was never a smooth, continuous process but was prone to sudden shifts in direction. The relative autonomy of the colonial government from the metropolitan state and its independence from other fields in terms of its definition of symbolic capital meant that it was, in fact, a kind of state, even if political theorists have paid little attention to it. Just as it is impossible to generalize about the contents of ethnographic discourse or the policies of the colonial state,neither can one characaterize the "mind of the colonizer" in general terms, except to say that it was as complex and internally contradictory as the subjectivity of the colonized. (517-518)

It should also be noted that a great deal of Steinmetz's account is not explanatory, but rather descriptive and narrative.  He provides detailed accounts of the history and behavior of the colonial regimes in these three settings, and much of the value of the book indeed derives from the research underlying these descriptive accounts.

So Steinmetz's account seems to have several important characteristics.  First, it is interested in providing a contextualized explanation of differences in nominally similar outcomes (different instances of German colonial rule).  Second, it is interested in providing an account of the causal mechanisms that shaped each of the instances, in such a way as to account for their differences.  Third, the mechanisms that he highlights are largely agent-centered mechanisms.  Fourth, the account deliberately highlights the contingency of the developments it describes.  Individuals and particular institutions play a role, as well as historical occurrences that were themselves highly contingent.  And finally, there is a pervasive use of collective concepts like field, ideology, worldview, and ethnography that play a crucial causal role in the story.  These concepts identify a supra-individual factor.  But each of them can be provided with a microfoundational account.  So Steinmetz's analysis here seems to be largely consistent with microfoundationalism.  It diverges from analytical sociology in one important respect, however: Steinmetz does not couch his explanatory goals in terms of the idea of deriving social outcomes from individual-level actions and relations.  Rather, it is for the reader to confirm that the mechanisms cited do in fact have appropriate microfoundations.

(Steinmetz discusses his theoretical approach to colonialism in his interview included in the "interviews" page. Here is an appreciative review of The Devil's Handwriting; link.)

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_disciplines,comparative method,mechanism

More on The Spirit Level

There are quite a few interesting comments on my earlier post on The Spirit Level on Economist's View. I can't respond in detail to all of them, but here are a few additional thoughts.

A few commentators seem to think I'm unsympathetic to the book, which isn't accurate. So let me be more direct in my assessment of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. I find the empirical data presented to be highly suggestive and interesting. Pickett and Wilkinson demonstrate simple trend relationships between the income inequality score of a set of countries and states and a series of social problems. I myself do not have reason to doubt their statistical methods, though other critics have done so, including Lane Kenworthy in a balanced and reasonable critique in 2010. What troubles me about the central argument of the book is what I find to be a flatly unconvincing hypothesis, that the psychological states created in a country’s population by status conflict and income inequality suffice to explain the variation in health outcomes for individuals in these societies. There are many determinants of a person’s satisfaction with his/her life besides income inequality; and there are many social factors that influence health outcomes for individuals besides their perception of income inequalities and the level of stress that those inequalities create in them.

In my view, a good causal explanation requires an analysis of the mechanisms that bring about the relation between cause and effect. I find only one mechanism underlying their accounts of this relationship – essentially a psychological mechanism linking the individual’s perception of income inequalities to health and behavioral outcomes. They flesh this out with a description of the physiology of stress induced by rising income inequalities leading to rising mental illness; perceived status differences leading to decline in trust; stress based on perceived inequalities leading to increased “comfort eating” and obesity; status competition leads to increased violence; etc. This is what I mean by monocausal; there is just one causal process at the heart of their analysis.

The variety of causal mechanisms that seem pertinent to me in consideration of their data include several different kinds. First, as I mentioned in my post, there are serious and systemic sources of separation between individuals within societies that have nothing to do with income inequalities and that might be expected to have the same kinds of psychological and physiological effects on individuals: racism, ethnic hatred, sexism, economic conflicts that do not have to do with inequalities, and so on. For example, in the United States there are credible efforts to explain racial disparities in health outcomes on the basis of the effects on individuals living in circumstances of endemic racial discrimination and prejudice. (See, for example, Arline T. Geronimus, ScD, Margaret Hicken, MPH, Danya Keene, MAT, and John Bound, PhD, "“Weathering” and Age Patterns of Allostatic Load Scores Among Blacks and Whites in the United States"; link.) These effects are unrelated to income inequalities and derive instead from another aspect of social separation. So race rather than income appears to explain this set of health disparities. So perhaps this implies that if we had a way of measuring a “composite index of non-economic social separation” we might have a similar set of graphs, with societies with a lot of racism and ethnic hatred at the upper right quadrant of the graph. I don’t suppose that this index would be highly correlated with the quintile-quintile ratio that the authors use as their proxy for economic inequality.

Second, there are structural influences on a population’s health outcomes that do not derive from the degree of income inequalities that exist in a society but are nonetheless highly influential on health status of the population. For example, the quality and accessibility of rural healthcare has a large influence on the health status of rural people; the accessibility of health insurance to inner city residents has a large influence; the targeting of food marketing in favor of “comfort foods” has a large potential influence on the whole population; and differential treatments and discrimination within health systems for different populations of patients have large potential effects. None of these factors derive from the ratio of quintile incomes – the degree of income inequality – in the society; they are independent causes of differential health outcomes across sub-populations.

I’m not an expert on statistical reasoning; but of course every reader knows that evidence of correlation between two variables A and B is not conclusive evidence of a causal relation existing between those variables. There may be a common factor that causes variation in both A and B, or the correlation may be flatly spurious. It is necessary to frame a credible and testable hypothesis about how the putative causal condition leads to the putative effect. On the other hand, finding that a proposed mechanism is not in fact valid does not establish that there is not a causal connection between the variables; it only mandates that we then search further for a mechanism that does in fact obtain. Only if we are ultimately convinced that there is no possible mechanism would we come to the conclusion that the correlation is spurious. So my position in the posting under discussion is simply that the authors have not established a mechanism linking income inequalities to bad health outcomes that satisfies me.

One can be opposed to extreme and rising income inequalities in one’s society – as many of the readers of The Spirit Level are – without being convinced of the particular causal connections that the authors assert. And this matters quite a bit; if we want to reform society, we need to have well grounded theories of the causal processes that lead to the outcomes we want to reduce or avoid.

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Posted in: CAT_structure,inequality,mechanism

Spartacus, Kitty Genovese, and social explanation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted in: CAT_explanation,collective action,localism,mechanism

Doug McAdam on contentious politics and the social sciences

Doug McAdam is hard at work shedding new light on the meso-dynamics of contention.  What are the specific social and psychological mechanisms that bring people into social movements; what factors and processes make mobilization more feasible when social grievances arise?  Recently he has done work on the impact of Teach for America on its participants, and he and his graduate students are now examining a set of environmental episodes that might have created local NIMBY movements -- but often didn't.

McAdam's most sustained contribution to the field of contention is his 1982 book on the dynamics of the struggle for racial equality, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970.  The book was reissued in 1999 with a substantive new introduction, and it has set the standard for sophisticated sociological study of a large, complex movement.  McAdam collaborated with Sidney Tarrow and Chuck Tilly in articulating a new vision of how to approach the politics of contention in Dynamics of Contention.  And he has co-authored or co-edited another half dozen books on social movements and popular mobilization.  So McAdam has been one of the architects of the field of contentious politics.  Most importantly, he and his collaborators have brought innovative new thinking to the definition of problems for social research.

So it is valuable to dig into some of McAdam's thoughts and his sociological imagination as we think about how the sociology of the future might be shaped.  I conducted an extensive interview with Doug earlier this month, and it opened up quite a few interesting topics.  The full interview is posted on YouTube (link).



There are quite a few important turns to the conversation.

1. Segment 1: Why is the study of contention a central topic within the social sciences?
2. Segment 2: How can we approach contention without looking only at the successful cases?  How about the moments where contention might have developed but did not?  We can combine quantitative and qualitative methods -- perhaps in an order that reverses the usual approach.  Maybe we can use quantitative studies to get a general feel for a topic, and then turn to qualitative and case studies to discover the mechanisms.
3. Segment 3: Another important theme: "We are voracious meaning-making creatures." Human beings have a cognitive-emotional-representational ability to attempt to represent meanings and their own significance within the larger order.  Rational choice theory has too narrow a conception of agency.  Why did the Black community stay off the buses in Montgomery?  Because people were strongly enmeshed in communities of meaning and commitment that framed the bus boycott in terms of meaning and identity.
4. Segment 4: The psychology of mobilization is complex.  It's not just "rational incentives".  Organizers and leaders use the affinities and loyalties of the community to bring about collective action.  For example, an interesting strategy by SNCC to "shame" church leaders into supporting activists.  Movements happen very suddenly; this seems to reflect a process of "redefining" the situation for participants.  Another interesting issue: what is the right level of analysis -- micro, meso, or macro?  Doug favors the "meso" level.
5. Segment 5: More on the meso level: disaggregated social activity.  McAdam argues that government actions are themselves often at the meso level.  And he makes the point that Civil Rights reform was strongly influenced in the United States by the issues created internationally through the tensions and ideological conflicts of the Cold War.  This explains why it was Truman rather than Roosevelt who endorsed the need for Civil Rights reform.  You can't explain the broad currents of the Civil Rights movement without understanding the international context that was influencing the Federal government.  (This is an example of a macro-level effect on social movements.)
6. Segment 6: Now to mechanisms and processes.  There are no laws of civil wars.  So we need to look downward into the unfolding of the episodes of contention.  Comparative historical sociology is a very dynamic movement today.  Your work isn't quite as comparative as that of Tilly or McAdam.  Doug indicates that he favors comparison; but he tends to choose cases that are broadly comparable with each other.  Tilly often made comparisons at a much higher level of variation.  Q: Would you have been comfortable framing your study of the American Civil Rights movement as a comparison with the Solidarity Movement in Poland?  A: no.  There is too broad a range of differences between the cases.
7. Segment 7: McAdam offers some interesting observations about the relationship between general theory and the specific social phenomena under study.  An important point here is a strong advocacy for eclectic, broad reading as one approaches a complex social phenomenon.  We can't say in advance where the important insights are going to come from -- anthropology, political science, history, sociology, ....
8. Segment 8: We can dig into the social features that make certain figures very successful in bringing a group of people into a readiness to engage together.  Is social status a key factor?  Is it that some people are particularly persuasive?  Doug wants to break open the black box and get a lot better understanding of the meso-level processes and mechanisms through which mobilization occurs.  A closing topic: what about protest and mobilization in Asia?  Do you think these ideas about mobilization are relevant and illuminating in China or Thailand?  Or has it developed in too specific a relationship to democratic societies? Does the current understanding of popular mobilization help us when we try to understand movements like the Redshirt movement in Thailand?  Doug believes the framework is relevant outside the democratic West.  The ideas need to be applied loosely and flexibly.
9. Segment 9: So the theory is really a "sketch" of the space of mobilization, rather than a set of specific hypotheses about how mobilizations always work.  And in that understanding -- the field is very relevant to research on the Thailand movement.

(Note the strong connections between this discussion and a few of the earlier interviews -- Tilly, Tarrow, and Zald in particular (link).  My interview with Gloria House about her experience with SNCC in Lowndes County is very relevant as well (link).)

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Posted in: agency,CAT_collective action,leadership,mechanism,theory

Scientific realism for the social sciences

What is involved in taking a realist approach to social science knowledge? Most generally, realism involves the view that at least some of the assertions of a field of knowledge make true statements about the properties of unobservable things, processes, and states in the domain of study.  Several important philosophers of science have taken up this issue in the past three decades, including Rom Harre (Causal Powers: Theory of Natural Necessity) and Roy Bhaskar (A Realist Theory of Science).  Peter Manicas's recent book, A Realist Philosophy of Social Science: Explanation and Understanding, is a useful step forward within this tradition. Here is how he formulates the perspective of scientific realism:

The real goal of science ... is understanding of the processes of nature. Once these are understood, all sorts of phenomena can be made intelligible, comprehensible, unsurprising. (14)

Explanation ... requires that there is a "real connection," a generative nexus that produced or brought about the event (or pattern) to be explained. (20)

So realism has to do with discovering underlying processes that give rise to observable phenomena. And causal mechanisms are precisely the sorts of underlying processes that are at issue.  Here is how Manicas summarizes his position:

Theory provides representations of the generative mechanisms,including hypotheses regarding ontology, for example, that there are atoms, and hypotheses regarding causal processes, for example, that atoms form molecules in accordance with principles of binding. We noted also that a regression to more fundamental elements and processes also became possible. So quantum theory offers generative mechanisms of processes in molecular chemistry. Typically, for any process, there will be at least one mechanism operating, although for such complex processes as organic growth there will be many mechanisms at work. Theories that represent generative mechanisms give us understanding. We make exactly this move as regards understanding in the social sciences, except that, of course, the mechanisms are social. (75)

Manicas's illustrations of causal powers and mechanisms are most often drawn from the natural world. But what basis do we have for thinking that social entities have stable causal properties -- let alone a profile of causal powers that are roughly invariant across instances?

Consider an example, Theda Skocpol's definition of social revolutions:

Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of socio-economic and political institutions, and--as Lenin so vividly reminds us--social revolutions are accompanied and in part effectuated through class upheavals from below. It is this combination of thorough-going structural transformation and massive class upheavals that sets social revolutions apart from coups, rebellions, and even political revolutions and national independence movements. (link)

Realism invites us to consider whether "social revolutions" really have the characteristics she attributes to them.  Do social revolutions have an underlying nature distinctive causal powers that might be identified by a social theory?  More generally, what basis do we have for thinking that certain types of social entities possess a specific set of causal powers?

The answer seems to be, very little.  Types of social entities -- revolutions, states, riots, market economies, fascist movements -- are heterogeneous groupings of concrete social formations rather than "kinds" along the lines of "metal" or "gene".  Each of the extended historical events that Skocpol offers as instances of the category "social revolution" is unique and contingent in a variety of ways; these historical episodes do not share a common causal nature.  It is legitimate to group them together under the term "social revolution"; but it is essential that we not commit the error of reification and imagine that the group so constituted must share a fundamental causal nature in common.  So the most direct application of this kind of realism to the social sciences seems somewhat unpromising.

But we are on firmer ground when we consider a particularly central type of assertion in the social sciences: claims about underlying causal mechanisms or social processes.  So what does it mean to assert that a given social mechanism "really exists"? 

Take the idea of "stereotype threat" as one of the mechanisms underlying an important social fact, the racial and gender differences in performance that have been observed on some standardized tests (Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, "Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans" (link); see also this article in the Atlantic).  We can summarize the theory along these lines: "Prevalent assumptions about the characteristics and performance of various salient social groups can depress (or enhance) the performance of members of those groups on intellectual and physical tasks.  This provides a partial explanation of the observed differentials in performance."  This mechanism is hypothesized as one of the ways in which performance by individuals in various groups is socially influenced in such a way as to lead to differential performance across groups.  It postulates a set of internal psychological mechanisms surrounding cognition and problem-solving, all related to the individual's self-ascribed social identity.

The realism question is this: do these hypothetical psychological effects actually occur in real human individuals?  And do these differences in cognitive processes lead to differential performance across groups?  If we confirm both these points, then we can conclude that "stereotype threat is a real social psychological mechanism."  The microfoundations of this mechanism reside in two locations: the concrete cognitive processes of the individuals, and the social behaviors of persons around these individuals, giving subtle cues about stereotypes that are discerned by the test-taker.

So we might say that we can conclude that a postulated social mechanism "really" exists if we are able to provide piecemeal empirical and theoretical arguments demonstrating that the terms of the mechanism hypothesis are confirmed in the actions and behavior of agents; and that these patterns of action do in fact typically lead to the sorts of outcomes postulated.  In other words, we need to look at our hypotheses about social mechanisms as small, somewhat separable theories that need separate empirical, historical, and theoretical evaluation.  And when we are successful in providing convincing support for these mechanism-theories, we are also justified in concluding that the postulated mechanism really exists.  The social world really embodies stereotype threat if individuals are really affected in their cognitive performances by the sorts of subtle behavioral cues mentioned by the theory, in roughly the ways stipulated by the theory.  And we will feel most confident in this assertion if we also find new areas of behavior where this mechanism also appears to be at work.

This approach has an important implication about social ontology.  The reality of a social mechanism is dependent on facts about agents, their characteristics of agency, and the environment of social relationships within which they act.  So there is a close intellectual relationship between the ontology of methodological localism and realism about causal mechanisms.

(The smokestack image above illustrates a different kind of social mechanism -- the workings of externalities in a market economy, creating pollution by dumping public harms to save private costs.)

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,causal mechanism,localism,mechanism,philosophy of science

Historical populations

Historical demography concerns itself with two families of questions -- factual description of population behavior and explanation of the patterns that are observed. On the descriptive side, historical demographers are concerned with estimating the absolute population size of a group or region -- Tuscany in 1400, New England in 1700, the Anasazi in 1000. And they are interested in measuring the underlying demographic rates -- for example, natality, mortality, age of marriage, nutritional and health status, or sex ratios.

And, to make useful comparisons, these measurements need to be linked to the same variables over time and comparable populations over the same time period. This set of observations permits the discovery of trends and patterns -- steady population growth in group A simultaneous with flat population size in group B; high rate of growth for C during 1700-1750 followed by slow growth in the next 50 years; high population density in agricultural region D compared with low density in agricultural region E.

The descriptive task is a difficult one. But it immediately raises a host of explanatory questions. What are the social mechanisms that conjoin to bring about the complex observed demographic outcomes? Population outcomes are the result of myriad choices by anonymous individuals; and yet the outcomes are highly patterned. The task of explanation arises when we try to make sense of the demographic behavior and outcomes that are discovered. What are the material and social circumstances that explain the trends we observe and the differences that emerge across populations?

Thomas Malthus offered an explanation of large population trends based on both material and social factors: the food-production capacity of the land inhabited and the norms and institutions regulating family formation and child-bearing. Malthus's theories suggest relating population size and growth rates to measures of economic prosperity -- for example, measures of the real wage for farm laborers over time, measures of the fluctuations in availability of jobs, or measures of available land per unit of population. The classic Malthusian argument predicts that population growth will lag economic fluctuation: rising wages encourage higher fertility and falling wages discourage fertility. And if population continues to rise in declining economic circumstances, then eventually mortality will rise -- again suppressing population growth.

Source: Massimo Livi Bacci, A Concise History of World Population, P. 70.

The simple Malthusian theory, then, postulates that population expands to the limit created by available sources of food. So increases in farm productivity and increases in arable land should give rise to an increase in population, whereas a rising population density on a given territory will eventually lead to the "negative" checks of famine and nutrition-based mortality if not pre-empted by the preventive checks of reduced natality.

The question of scale, both temporal and regional, makes a large difference in the explanatory quest. We can frame the question of group demographic behavior from the micro- to the macro-levels -- from a handful of Alpine villages in the 16th century (population 5000) to the Yangzi delta in the 18th century (population 300 million). Micro-trends may have a different explanations than macro-trends.

It might be maintained that the Malthusian theory is only well-suited to the largest scale: large territory and long timeframe. In the longterm it is almost tautological to observe that a population will expand to the limits created by environmental resources. But long before those limits are approached, there is ample space for the workings of social arrangements to modulate population behavior. Alternative economic and demographic institutions create different demographic profiles. Birth spacing (reflecting family choices and cultural values) can dramatically influence total fertility. Technologies of birth control -- both traditional and modern -- can move a population from high-fertility to medium- or low-fertility. So historical demography requires social explanation based on discovery of concrete and specific institutions in local circumstances, not simply broad-brush hypotheses about resource limits.

Recent studies of population behavior across the expanse of Eurasia confirm this point. The Eurasian Demography Project finds that there is a wide range of demograhic patterns across the locales of Eurasia, from Finland to Italy to China to Japan. And the Malthusian picture works only at the coarsest level; in particular, it turns out that the Chinese population did not teeter on the edge of Malthusian crisis.

(See Eurasian Historical Comparisons for more on the Eurasian Demography Project.)

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Posted in: agriculture,CAT_history,China,mechanism

How the calendar matters

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted in: CAT_mechanisms,cohort,comparative method,mechanism,pathway

Policy, treatment, and mechanism

Policies are selected in order to bring about some desired social outcome or to prevent an undesired one. Medical treatments are applied in order to cure a disease or to ameliorate its effects. In each case an intervention is performed in the belief that this intervention will causally interact with a larger system in such a way as to bring about the desired state. On the basis of a body of beliefs and theories, we judge that T in circumstances C will bring about O with some degree of likelihood. If we did not have such a belief, then there would be no rational basis for choosing to apply the treatment. "Try something, try anything" isn't exactly a rational basis for policy choice.

In other words, policies and treatments depend on the availability of bodies of knowledge about the causal structure of the domain we're interested in -- what sorts of factors cause or inhibit what sorts of outcomes. This means we need to have some knowledge of the mechanisms that are at work in this domain. And it also means that we need to have some degree of ability to predict some future states -- "If you give the patient an aspirin her fever will come down" or "If we inject $700 billion into the financial system the stock market will recover."

Predictions of this sort could be grounded in two different sorts of reasoning. They might be purely inductive: "Clinical studies demonstrate that administration of an aspirin has a 90% probability of reducing fever." Or they could be based on hypotheses about the mechanisms that are operative: "Fever is caused by C; aspirin reduces C in the bloodstream; therefore we should expect that aspirin reduces fever by reducing C." And ideally we would hope that both forms of reasoning are available -- causal expectations are born out by clinical evidence.

Implicitly this story assumes that the relevant causal systems are pretty simple -- that there are only a few causal pathways and that it is possible to isolate them through experimental studies. We can then insert our proposed interventions into the causal diagram and have reasonable confidence that we can anticipate their effects. The logic of clinical trials as a way of establishing efficacy depends on this assumption of causal simplicity and isolation.

But what if the domain we're concerned with isn't like that? Suppose instead that there are many causal factors and a high degree of causal interdependence among the factors. And suppose that we have only limited knowledge of the strength and form of these interdependencies. Is it possible to make rationally justified interventions within such a system?

This description comes pretty close to what are referred to as complex systems. And the most basic finding in the study of complex systems is the extreme difficulty of anticipating future system states. Small interventions or variations in boundary conditions produce massive variations in later system states. But this is bad news for policy makers who are hoping to "steer" a complex system towards a more desirable state. There are good analytical reasons for thinking that they will not be able to anticipate the nature or magnitude or even direction of the effects of the intervention.

The study of complex systems is a collection of areas of research in mathematics, economics, and biology that attempt to arrive at better ways of modeling and projecting the behavior of systems with these complex causal interdependencies. This is an exciting field of research at places like the Santa Fe Institute and the University of Michigan. One important tool that had been extensively developed is the theory of agent-based modeling -- essentially, the effort to derive system properties as the aggregate result of the activities of independent agents at the micro-level. And a fairly durable result has emerged: run a model of a complex system a thousand times and you will get a wide distribution of outcomes. This means that we need to think of complex systems as being highly contingent and path-dependent in their behavior. The effect of an intervention may be a wide distribution of future states.

So far the argument is located at a pretty high level of abstraction. Simple causal systems admit of intelligent policy intervention, whereas complex, chaotic systems may not. But the important question is more concrete: which kind of system are we facing when we consider social policy or disease? Are social systems and diseases examples of complex systems? Can social systems be sufficiently disaggregated into fairly durable subsystems that admit of discrete causal analysis and intelligent intervention? What about diseases such as solid tumors? Can we have confidence in interventions such as chemotherapy? And, in both realms, can the findings of complexity theory be helpful by providing mathematical means for working out the system effects of various possible interventions?

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Posted in: CAT_mechanisms,causal reasoning,complexity,mechanism,prediction