Metaphors for history

What kind of thing is "history"? Think of the history of the Roman Empire, or the history of Tokugawa Japan, or the history of the American banking system. We want to be able to conceptualize these complex stories as possessing some kind of unity over centuries of time, thousands of locations, and millions of lives; we want to be able to identify common threads of development, common themes or topics that continue to recur throughout the history of the period. And yet it is plain that history consists of unmeasured diversity and heterogeneity as well -- individuals, psychologies, local conditions, aberrant princes, external threats, famines, floods, and panics. So historians are led to adopt different kinds of metaphors to attempt to provide a degree of unity to their subject. There are quite a few different metaphors that have been used to characterize history: a river, a tree, a labyrinth, an ocean, a landscape. Several are particularly worth unpacking, but the metaphor that I prefer is "pathway."

Here is how the river metaphor might work as a way of thinking about the "course" of history. Rivers have tributaries -- rivulets of water flowing down hill into the broader concourse. History has "streams" of contributing events that lead to the larger outcome -- the confluence of developments in the French medieval rural economy, the development of the fiscal crisis of the Ancien regime, and the emergence of a town-based bourgeoisie, for example, coming together to contribute to the unfolding of the French Revolution. There is a seeming unity to a river over time, even though the constituent water simply passes through continuously; analogously, one might view history as a "stream" of events that individual humans pass through, constituting a larger and more stable historical current. (Though of course we won't forget the Heraclitus paradox.) Rivers are to some extent constrained -- by existing topography, but also by human artifacts (dams, levees, flood walls). Historical developments too are constrained by circumstances such as agricultural productivity, population levels, and warfare. Rivers sometimes change their course -- for example, the frequently changing course of the Yellow River over many centuries. But more commonly they become longstanding features of the terrain over centuries or millenia. Analogously, there is at least the semblance of long, steady periods of continuity of human affairs within human history -- interrupted by crises and turning points. (See an earlier posting on the idea of a turning point.) Rivers have a direction of flow -- from north to south, from high ground to lower ground. And some interpreters of history have argued analogously for a direction of change in history as well -- towards "progress," "modernization," greater administrative intensity, higher standards of living for the population, or greater democracy, for example. And rivers have a powerful momentum of their own -- we can be swept away in the currents of the Mississippi River, as John Reed was swept up in the events of the Russian Revolution.

The river metaphor captures some of our intuitive thinking about history -- tributaries, currents, stretches of turbulence. But it also conveys a necessity or inevitability that fails to come to grips with the deep contingency of history. A river has an inexorable course of flow -- from high ground to low ground. And the topography essentially determines the shape and configuration of the river bed. This metaphor suggests that history too has an inevitable course or direction -- which is profoundly untrue.

How about the idea of history as a tree? Here, the idea is that there are "branches" in history -- points where developments could have gone "left" or "right", and the next phases of history are dependent on the specific branches that have been taken before. America could have invested in canals rather than railroads -- and its transportation history and subsequent urbanization would have been significantly different. (Robert Fogel makes an argument along these lines in Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History; here is a nice, short description of his argument.) The analogy isn't exactly between "history" and "tree"; instead, it is between the space of hypothetical historical possibilities and the branches of a tree. Actual history is one specific pathway through this tree of possibilities. Finally, trees have systems of "roots" -- the structures under the ground and out of sight that explain the nutrition and growth of the tree. And how often historians turn to expressions like "the roots of the Cold War extend back to X, Y, and Z."

This metaphor does a better job of capturing the contingency of history, in that it highlights that the actual course of history is simply the aggregate result of the branches or choices taken previously -- with the clear understanding that other routes through the space of possibilities were possible as well. One of the obvious difficulties with the tree metaphor, though, is the extreme uncertainty that exists about the branches, the hypothetical alternative outcomes that might have put a given society on a different trajectory. For any given major historical event we can speculate with varying degrees of rigor about how things might have come out differently; but we can't really go very far down the route of the "alternative history" that might have ensued. So the idea of a "tree diagram of alternative histories" is only a metaphor, not something that could be accomplished through historical research. (Niall Ferguson has an interesting book on "counterfactual history"; Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals.)

So here is a third possible metaphor for history: history is an accumulation of pathways and contingencies that embed human action over time. I find that this metaphor works well as a way to characterize the course of history. Paths are created by purposive agents, going somewhere with an understanding of the topography. Pathways become roadways, and they become systems of constraint and opportunity. And they sometimes become the elements or segments of larger systems with long historical and human consequences (for example, the Roman road system illustrated at Ambrussum above). Road systems illustrate the meaning of “path-dependence”; once the pathway exists, other routes across the terrain become less likely. And the metaphor illustrates as well the perpetual interaction of agent and structure that good historians almost always emphasize; the plasticity of social entities; the contingency of their specific properties; and their constraining power influencing human choices.

The pathways metaphor incorporates both diachronic and synchronic elements into our conceptualization of history. At a given time, history presents us with a given set of embodied constraints and opportunities that represent the accretion of the past as a context for the present. The system of roads penetrating through a medieval town represent a snapshot of its history over a thousand years -- and a set of frustrating obstacles to the contemporary driver. Marx puts the weight of history's legacy in these terms in the Eighteenth Brumaire:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

But there is a diachronic aspect of the metaphor as well: the structures that constrain the present today are themselves involved in a temporally extended process of modification and accretion from yesterday to today to tomorrow. The road system continues to evolve in response to contemporary needs and wants, and presents a new set of constraints and opportunities to the generation to come.

On this approach, history doesn't have any ultimate directionality; it is simply the sum of a long series of inventions, actions, interventions, and accidents over decades or centuries. At the same time, it is subject to a degree of explicability, in that earlier moments of historical development set the stage for choices and inventions in the next phase. Outcomes are "path-dependent", in that they depend critically on the circumstances and accidents of the past. But at the same time, there is a degree of "sunk costs," social momentum, and embodied infrastructure that make some historical developments much more likely than others.

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Posted in: CAT_history,history

Is a rail network a social structure?

figures: RER map of Paris; E. J. Marey's graphical representation of Paris-Lyon train schedules, 1885

What role does a rail network play within an adequate ontology of society? Is a rail system primarily a set of physical assets, a set of administrative procedures, or a set of embodied opportunities and constraints for other members of society? The answer is, a transportation system has elements of all of these.

A rail system provides convenient transportation among a number of places, while providing no service at all between other pairs of locations. You can get from Porchefontaine to Sevran Livry with only a change of trains at St. Michel - N Dame in about 30 minutes -- whereas from Point X to Point Y there is no convenient transportation connection by Metro or RER. This means, among other things, that some parts of Paris are much more tightly integrated than others. It is possible for residents of arrondissement X to shop and work in arrondissement Y very conveniently, whereas this would not be true for arrondissement Z.

So a rail system certainly has direct effects on social behavior; it structures the activities of the two million or more Parisians by making some places of residence, work, shopping, and entertainment substantially more accessible than other places. And there are a number of other social characteristics that are structured by the commuter rail system as a consequence: for example, patterns of class stratification of neighborhoods, patterns of diffusion of infectious disease, patterns of ethnic habitation around the city, patterns of diffusion of social styles and dialect, ... In brief, a rail system has definite social effects. It creates opportunities and constraints that affect the ways in which individuals arrange their lives and plan their daily activities. And other forms of social behavior and activity are conveyed through the conduits established by the transport system.

Moreover, a rail system is a physical network that has an embodied geometry and spatiality on the ground. Through social investments over decades or more, tracks, stations, power lines, people movers, and fuel depots have been created as physical infrastructure for the transportation network. Lines cross at junctions, creating the topology of a network of travel; and the characteristics of travel are themselves elements of the workings of the network -- for example, the rate of speed feasible on various lines determines the volume of throughput of passengers through the system. And neighborhoods and hotels agglomerate around important hubs within the system.

In addition to this physical infrastructure, there is a personnel and management infrastructure associated with a rail system as well: a small army of skilled workers who maintain trains, sell tickets, schedule trains, repair tracks, and myriad other complex tasks that must be accomplished in order for the rail system to carry out its function of efficiently and promptly providing transportation. This human organization is surely a "social structure," with some level of internal corrective mechanisms that maintain the quality of human effort, react to emergencies, and accomplish the business functions of the rail system. This structure exists in the form of training procedures, operating manuals, and processes of supervision that maintain the coordination needed among ticket agents in stations, repairmen in the field, track inspectors, engineers, and countless other railroad workers. And this structure is fairly resilient in the face of change of personnel; it is a bureaucratized structure that makes provision for the replacement of individuals in all locations within the organization over time.

So a rail network has structural characteristics at multiple levels. The physical network itself has structural characteristics (nodes, rates of travel, volume of flow of passengers and freight). This can be represented statically by the network of tracks and intersections that exist (like the stylized map of the RER above); dynamically, we can imagine a "live" map of the system representing the coordinated surging of multiple trains throughout the system, throughout the course of the day. The railroad organization has a bureaucratic structure -- represented abstractly by the organizational chart of the company, but embodied in the internal processes of training, supervision, and recruitment that manage the activities of thousands of employees. And the social and technical ensemble that these constitute in turn creates an important structure within the social landscape, in that these physical and human structures determine the opportunities and constraints that exist for individuals to pursue their goals and purposes.

A general problem that confronts assertions about "social structures" is the question, what factors give the hypothesized structure a degree of permanence over time? Why should we not expect that social structures will morph quickly in response to changing uses and demands by opportunistic actors within them? A rail system provides a somewhat more definite answer to this question than is possible for most putative social structures: the physicality of the system is itself a barrier to rapid, radical structural change. The locations of the great rail terminus stations in Paris have not changed in the past century. And this is at least in part a consequence of the vast "sunk costs" that are associated with the embodied structure of track, intersection, and station that had developed over the course of the first fifty years of French railroad expansion. So the need for a passenger from Dijon to Strasbourg to convey himself/herself from the Gare de Lyon (1900) to the Gare de l'Est (1849) is exactly the same today as it was in 1900.

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Posted in: CAT_structure,spatial pattern,technology,transportation

Social entrepreneurs

Social entrepreneurs are people who want to bring about non-routine projects, collaborations, or organizations where they didn't previously exist in order to solve a perceived social problem. This is very different from working within an existing organization and using its official resources to bring about a particular result. An example might be a community activist who conceives of a storefront operation providing financial advice to local homeowners facing foreclosure. In order to bring this about, he or she needs to secure financial commitments from some potential partners, recruit expert volunteers from others, and gain cooperation from community neighbors to trust and use the service. And, finally, the project needs to deliver a reasonable percentage of its promised benefits -- some number of troubled mortgage holders need to be successful in retaining their homes thanks to the service.

There are examples of highly successful social entrepreneurs everywhere -- think of Geoffrey Canada and the creation of the Harlem Children's Zone (link), Matt and Jessica Flannery and the creation of Kiva, a successful peer-to-peer micro-lending program (link), Father William Cunningham and Eleanor Josaitis and the founding of FocusHope in Detroit (link), or Millard and Linda Fuller, founders of Habitat for Humanity (link). And we don't have to turn to the high-profile cases to find great examples of skillful social entrepreneurship -- every city is home to community leaders and innovators who have created coalitions or organizations that have significantly contributed to solutions for important social problems.

It is interesting to notice that the idea of social entrepreneurship brings in the social in two different ways. Social entrepreneurs are involved in addressing social problems; so the object of the entrepreneurial activity is to enhance some aspect of the public good or to solve a social problem, rather than achieving a private "return on investment". But second, social entrepreneurship depends on putting together voluntary coalitions among a number of independent social actors in a sustained common effort. A purely private and self-financed effort to provide meals for homeless teenagers would be a laudable effort; but I'm not sure I would call it "social entrepreneurship." It doesn't confront the key problem of locating potential partners, engaging them in the project, and sustaining the collaboration over the long term. So a social entrepreneur involves social cooperation at the input side and public goods on the output side.

The question here is a simple one: what are some of the factors that permit some people to be successful in efforts at social entrepreneurship and others strikingly not? There are also other groups of people -- those who would never consider the idea of creating a new social project in any circumstances and those who look at social causes as a moment for personal gain, for example. But just consider the well-intentioned actors who undertake to put together a successful coalition for the public good -- what distinguishes between those who succeed and those who fail?

A couple of related concepts in the social sciences are immediately relevant to this question -- in particular, the concept of social capital and the idea of a social network. Putting the point very intuitively -- success in a project of social entrepreneurship is more likely if the agent has more social relationships of trust and confidence with other influential players to bring to bear in the effort. And likewise, he/she is more likely to succeed in some rough proportion to the depth and weight of the social networks within which the agent is located. (Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community is one place where the idea of social capital is applied to contemporary society.)

Crudely, the individual's capacity to make things happen is multiplied by the strength of the organizations he/she can call upon in support of the effort. This point segues to the point about social networks: if the agent is in a position to call upon the support and collaboration of other resource holders as a result of personal and professional relationships, then he/she is more likely to succeed in putting into place the elements needed for establishment of the project.

Let's apply these points to our community activist. Suppose this individual has developed strong relationships with regional foundations, businesses, semi-governmental organizations, and elected officials. And suppose that these relationships have resulted in a deep reservoir of trust in the activist's perseverance and integrity. Finally, suppose the agent has a well-developed plan for establishing and maintaining the center with high credibility of success. He/she has a good "business plan" for the social project.

It is believable that this actor is much more likely to succeed than his twin with very weak personal and organizational relationships. Our organizer will have a good chance of persuading these potential partners to make the financial commitments and commitments of engagement needed to put the financial counseling center in place. And if the center is successful over several years, it is also likely that the agent's fund of trust and confidence will deepen -- making the next project even more achievable.

This part of the story concerns the social location of the actor -- the networks and organizations the agent can turn to in seeking support for the project. What are the features of personality and character that support and deepen these elements of social capital?

Here are several. Trust and credibility are essential. This is true because the success of the enterprise requires the continuing cooperation of voluntary partners. The agent needs to inspire trust in the partners. And inspiring trust isn't just a fact about current behavior or a persuasive smile -- the agent needs to have a track record of behavior that validates that trust as well.

Second, credible competence is crucial as well. The agent needs to be able to make the case that the project can succeed and that he/she has the skills needed to carry it out. This too depends heavily on one's history -- the best evidence of future competence is demonstrated past competence.

This also implies a third characteristic -- a need to be able to communicate clearly and credibly. Simply being a good communicator isn't enough, but failing to communicate well certainly weakens the likelihood of success in bringing together a durable partnership.

And we can't overlook the characteristics of originality and imagination. Solving difficult social problems requires new ideas and innovative approaches. So the successful social entrepreneur probably needs to have a focused imagination that permits him/her to conceive of new potential solutions -- or at least recognize them when other people invent them.

One wonders, finally, if there is a dimension of empathy and emotional intelligence that plays an important differentiating role among different social actors in this kind of activity. How important is it for the social entrepreneur to be able to understand and express the human importance of the issue? And how important are these skills in sustaining coalitions once they have begun? It seems believable that this is very important indeed.

It appears that social entrepreneurship is ready for some serious academic study, along the lines of studies of private entrepreneurship over the past several decades. Here is a report of a preliminary study of Ashoka fellows in social entrepreneurship (link). And the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford Graduate School of Business offers some interesting examples as well (link).

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Posted in: CAT_agency,collective action,community,social networks

Disaffected youth

Every city seems to have its floating population of disaffected youth -- school dropouts, occasional workers, drug users, skateboarders, hooligans, street people. How much of a problem is this? What are its dimensions? What are the social causes that influence the size and nature of this population in Detroit, Manchester, Cologne, or Novosibirsk? And are there social programs that can significantly diminish the number of young people who wind up in this category?

As for the importance of the problem, there are at least two aspects. In some times and places this population becomes a source of violence -- youth gangs, football hooliganism, shop window breakage, and skinhead attacks on racial minorities, gays, or other targets. But second, whether violent or passive, the precipitation of a sub-class of young people with no skills, no jobs, and no futures is a huge social cost for the societies that produce them.

Here I'm mostly interested in the processes of neglect and social-economic disadvantage that play into the mentality of some young people, leading to the formation of an individual social psychology that brings about the low-level anti-social behavior that is observed. Basically -- why do some young people drop out of the process of gaining an education, building a career, forming a family, and looking forward to the future, and instead spend their time hanging out in the streets? The skinhead phenomenon adds another element that is also worth understanding but is not the primary interest here -- a degree of organizational effort by political entrepreneurs who work towards mobilizing disaffected youth around racist and nationalist agendas. This falls under the category of social mobilization studied by people such as Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, or Charles Tilly. But here I'm more interested here in the process of socialization at the individual level that leads to the phenomenon of disaffection. (Several earlier posts have addressed the mobilization part of the story -- for example, here.)

Here is a very interesting academic study by Robert MacDonald of the making of a "youth underclass" in the UK. Here is how MacDonald frames his problem of research:

Most young people in the UK make relatively ‘successful’, unproblematic transitions from school to work and adulthood. What do we call those that do not? Labels imply explanation, not just description. Terms with academic and policy currency tend to define such young people by something they are not or by their presumed social and economic distance and dislocation from ‘the rest’. How we might best describe, explain and label the experience and problem of so-called ‘socially excluded’, ‘disconnected youth’ is the focus of the paper.

To use the term "disaffected" is to bring a Durkheimian mindset to the table; it is to offer the beginnings of a diagnosis of the problem as well as a description. The phrase "disaffected" (or its cognate, "demoralized") presents the problem as one of disconnection from prevailing social values and alienation from a set of moral ideas about how to behave. The "disaffected" no longer believe in the old chestnuts about working hard, listening to one's parents, showing respect to others, obeying the law, and conforming to society's expectations. So on this line of thought, the anti-social behavior of young people in this category derives from their "demoralization" -- their failure, or society's failure, to absorb a compelling set of normative standards about personal and social conduct.

But here is a slightly different tack we might take here. Perhaps disadvantaged youth disbelieve because they have lost all confidence in the underlying promise: conform to these norms and you will have a decent life. In other words, maybe the psychological cause of these forms of youth behavior is economic rather than moral; they are deeply discouraged about the possibility of a pathway to a better future than the world they seem around themselves at the moment. "Hopeless and angry" is a different state of mind than "disaffected."

And what about the factor of motivation and personal ambition? To what extent is normal youth development propelled by internal factors of motivation and aspiration? And how much of a role does a social context that "demotivates" young people play in this picture?

Another line of thought has emerged out of research on youth gangs -- the idea of the positive forms of solidarity and community that are provided by the gang as a welcoming social group. Young people who have lost the social support of their families and other traditional organizations may find that the street gang is the closest thing to "home" that they are able to locate. These are social groups with their own codes of behavior -- even though their largest effects are profoundly anti-social.

A common recourse when it comes to trying to explain these kinds of outcomes is to refer to various "breakdowns" -- breakdowns of the traditional family, of schools, of religion, of community organizations, or of public values. These are the institutions through which young people form their social psychologies, their identities, and their basic values. But if the young person lacks an emotionally meaningful connection to adults through some of these institutions, where will those positive social values come from?

Finally, it is worth noting that poverty and socio-economic disadvantage are not the only settings where youth disaffection occurs. Many observers in the United States have written about the use of drugs by affluent suburban high school students and other forms of involvement in anti-social activities. Wayne Wooden's Renegade Kids, Suburban Outlaws: From Youth Culture to Delinquency documents some of this behavior.

Why is this an important problem for "understanding society"? Because the social processes through which the next generation of citizens -- children, teenagers, and youth -- is shaped are deeply influential on the nature of the society that will develop in twenty to forty years. If "disaffection," "anger," "demoralization," and a propensity for anti-social behavior are inculcated in a large minority of the youth cohort, then society is likely to go through some very hard times in the coming decades.

It's relatively easy to find some dimensions of these issues on the web. Here is an interesting report on "football hooliganism" prepared by Dr. Geoff Pearson of the Football Industry Group. Here is a blog posting from the UK on youth gangs and terrorist organizations. Here is a quick report on skinheads.

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Posted in: CAT_agency,class consciousness,morality,social groups,social problems,youth

Sociologie de Paris?

What might be involved in creating a new sociology of Paris? Paris is a particularly good subject for a new urban sociology. It is a gritty, diverse, and dynamic city, and a city displaying unceasing chaotic surges and currents of social life. It is a global city, both in Saskia Sassen's sense (strong networked interconnection with other global cities) and in the sense of being a magnet for immigrants from every part of the world. It is an intellectual city, a conflictual city, a city with continuous poverty and deprivation, as well as conspicuous wealth, and a city with high unemployment and aggressive policing. And it is a city with ubiquitous transit (dozens of lines serving hundreds of stations), implying thorough urban mobility; but also invisible boundaries marking the edges of the social circuits of various social and ethnic groups.

If we were beginning anew, we might start with the racial and ethnic diversity the city contains and the circuits of social life that these many groups traverse. Ride the RER from Chatelet to Charles de Gaulle and you may get an impression of a great salad spinner of humanity -- everyone all mixed up on one long subway carriage. But this impression is probably mistaken -- Didier Lapeyronnie's analysis of the French ghetto puts stop to that thought (post) and highlights the very sharp separations that exist between immigrant neighborhoods and the rest of French cities. So a sociology of Paris needs to uncover the distinct social worlds it encompasses.

And we would want to map the terrain of poverty and deprivation in Paris. Who are the poor? How is poverty caused and reproduced in Paris? What groups are most likely to be homeless and hungry (SDF -- sans domicile fixe)? And how large a factor does immigration play in this question? Recall the deadly fires several years ago in Paris -- these were temporary housing facilities for homeless immigrants (story). A recent collaboration among sociologists and journalists picks up this thread in La France invisible. The creators of the project have undertaken to give voice to the many categories of poor and disempowered people in France: accidentés au travail, banlieusards, délocalisés, discriminés, disparus, dissimulés, drogués, ... These short pieces provide thumbnail descriptions of the circumstances of life of the people involved in these categories, often incorporating an interview or two. The hope here is to give a visceral glimpse to the reader of the life difficulties involved in these (alphabetically organized) categories.

A related subject for a new descriptive sociology of Paris has to do with the patterns of public health that the city embodies. What sorts of health disparities exist across different social groups? How are these differentials patterned socially across the city itself? Here is a very brief discussion of the issue of health disparities in France, presented at the "Congrès national des Observatoires régionaux de la santé 2008 - Les inégalités de santé" in Marseille, 16-17 octobre 2008. But this report is very brief and is not city- or region-specific. By contrast, a central focus of public health research in the U.S. is on the patterns of health disparities that can be found in cities such as Detroit, Chicago, or New York, often accompanied by detailed social mapping of the results.

And what about employment and education? What are the mechanisms through which education, social position, age, race, and ethnicity play out across social groups to create the specific patterns of employment opportunity that Paris presents? Jobs and education are highly volatile issues everywhere in France today -- witness the current waves of strikes and demonstrations about unemployment and education reform. What are the social mechanisms underlying these systems? (Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron addressed the social class aspects of the French educational system in Les héritiers (1964).) To what extent do the concrete institutions of training, education, and job recruitment work to reproduce significant inequalities across social groups?

Social mapping analysis would help in each of these areas. GIS maps of the city demonstrating the spatial distribution of poverty, crime, bad schools, police brutality, and 2-1-1 calls would tell us a lot about the social geography of the city. It would be enormously interesting to be able to have access to an interactive map of the city, combining many social variables of interest. In fact, that social map would help make sense of the long RER ride mentioned above. As you pass through neighborhoods ranging from affluent to graffiti-inscribed banlieue, you would be able to make the connection to some of the social realities that underlie these glimpses. Surprisingly, though, these sorts of spatial analyses and maps don't seem to exist yet for Paris or other French cities -- or at least, they are not easily located on the web. Is this a specific feature of the French sociological discourse -- with French researchers perhaps more attuned to discursive theory and less to spatial analysis and empirical study?

One might paraphrase the point here as saying that Paris deserves what Chicago received in the 1920s through 1940s in the form of the "Chicago School of Sociology" -- a focused, empirically rigorous, analytically astute series of efforts to come to grips with the complex social realities of the city, and to provide a better diagnosis of the social problems of the city in a way that supports more effective social policy. It's possible that this type of approach already exists within some of the social science research institutes of French universities. If so, I hope that readers will point us in the right direction.

(Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot have a recent book on the sociology of Paris. Here is an interview with Michel Pinçon in LeJournalduNet on the subject of the wealthy class in France and an interview on the "bourgeoisification" of Paris. And Céline Béraud and Baptiste Coulmont offer a very good account of the recent development of French sociology in Les courants contemporains de la sociologie. Baptiste Coulmont maintains an interesting academic website and blog here.)

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Posted in: CAT_disciplines,city,France

Regional interconnectedness

Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit are part of a large economic region in the upper Midwest of the United States, which is sometimes referred to as the Great Lakes Region. There are hundreds of lesser cities within this regional system -- Erie, Toledo, Rockford, Grand Rapids, .... What are the economic interdependencies that exist among these cities? How important are these relationships in the overall pattern of economic development that each city demonstrates? And of critical practical importance, how much leverage exists for development planners in these major cities to enhance their city's progress through adroit use of these relationships? Is there a possible gain for Milwaukee in virtue of the net effect of its relationships to Detroit? Or is each metropolitan region mostly autarkic with respect to the other?

There seem to be several theoretical possibilities. One is that there are in fact major point-to-point economic interdependencies among cities within a large economic region and that these are significantly different across different pairs of cities. It might be that the growth or contraction of auto manufacturing in Detroit is tightly enough linked to supplier companies in Milwaukee that what helps Detroit also helps Milwaukee.

Another possibility is that the regional impact is systemic rather than point-to-point. Here the idea is that the great metropolitan regions within a regional economy contribute to the macroeconomic environment for the region -- labor demand, growth, consumer demand, and fiscal shares. The region sets the basic parameters -- transport cost, commodity prices, and the current distribution of population and talent. But the impact of, say, Milwaukee on Toledo is entirely mediated through the macroeconomic environment of the region. And to the extent that there are correlations of advance and decline, this is the result of regional "pulsing" of macroeconomic factors rather than specific city-to-city interactions.

A third possibility is that each metropolitan region is largely independent within the larger region, so that regional economic performance is simply the aggregation of the performance of the component metropolitan regions (cities). And if this is the case, then we would expect a low degree of correlation on economic development across the cities of a region. (But in this case it is more difficult to explain why we refer to the set of cities as an economic "region" at all, since this term implies a degree of economic similarity and interdependence.)

Let's look at the first possibility more closely. Logically, the possibility of this kind of interdependency appears to depend on the existence of directed flows of activities between the places that do not extend to other places. There must be some network reality to the region within which A and B are proximate nodes. What else could provide the mechanism of mutual causal influence upon which the postulated interdependence depends?

So what are the inter-city connections that might support tight point-to-point linkages? The direct industry-to-industry dependencies mentioned above are most obvious. More furniture manufacturing in Grand Rapids might stimulate a surge in business for the plastic mesh producers in Rockford, to complete those great Aeron chairs. The input-output tables measuring exchange activity between the two cities might be extensive or minimal.

Here is another possible connection -- the talent needs in some cities might lead to the growth of universities in cities in other parts of the region. In a hypothetical history of the Midwest, Chicago might extend its current concentration of research universities and become a "knowledge center" for the region, supplying the inventors, architects, accountants, and lawyers for the region. In fact, specialized education and research is more diffused than this; but isn't this essentially the role that Boston played for a century or so for the northeast?

A third possibility -- two cities might be tightly linked through the existence of particularly efficient transportation or communication systems between them. Are Seattle and San Francisco more tightly linked economically because they are both Pacific Ocean ports with low-cost transport between them? What about Minneapolis, St. Louis, and New Orleans, linked by the barges of the Mississippi River?

Historically there are fairly good measures of economic interconnectedness between places. We can examine the correlation of time series of prices, wages, and profits to measure the degree of economic integration that exists among A, B, and C. Likewise, we can examine the patterns of growth or contraction of employment over time; do Milwaukee, Toledo, and Detroit demonstrate synchronized patterns of growth and contraction in business activity and overall employment over long periods of time? And the transport links mentioned here are a particularly fundamental source of economic integration in 19th-century studies of China, France, or the United States. (It's possible that contemporary data would suggest that all U.S. cities are equally integrated by these measures, since market integration has increased dramatically through transport and communications improvements.)

The most compact basis for studies of regional integration derives from the original insights of central place theory -- William Cronon's analysis of Chicago and its hinterlands, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, is an outstanding example of this approach. And G. William Skinner's analysis of the urban hierarchies of late imperial China falls in this general approach. What these examples do not permit, though, is analysis of inter-city dependencies across a region. At a very different level, these are the kinds of questions Saskia Sassen is asking about "world" cities. She attempts to identify the linkages that exist among major cities with respect to financial flows, internet traffic, and telephone calls. See earlier posts on each of these approaches (post, post, post).

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Posted in: CAT_structure,city,economic development,urbanization

A crisis in sociology?

Alvin Gouldner thought there was a "coming crisis in sociology" -- but that was almost forty years ago, in 1970 (The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology). And in 1996 Immanuel Wallerstein closed out the century by chairing the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, issuing a report that called for some radical rethinking of the basic assumptions of the social sciences (Open the Social Sciences).

Both Gouldner and Wallerstein are pretty good at theorizing about the social world. So what can we learn from their worries? Does the twenty-first century demand some new thinking in the ways that we construct the social sciences?

I think it does. If we want to have a more adequate basis for understanding the rapid processes of social change that surround us globally and locally, we need to rethink the concepts and methods we bring to social theory. And if we want to have a basis for attempting to influence some of these processes through policy, so as to avoid some of the more awful outcomes that they seem to lead to, then we need to be more eclectic in our thinking about social causes and their interactions.

What are some of the considerations that lead Gouldner, Wallerstein, and other critics to the conclusion that sociology needs some rethinking?

Gouldner's concerns are focused on what he calls the Academic Sociology of the first half of the twentieth century. The first two-thirds of the book takes the form of a critique of the sociological theories that dominated sociology in the 1940s and 1950s -- theories of social order, structural development, the workings of the social system, functionalism, and the pervasive influence of Talcott Parsons in the middle decades of the century. So the crisis to which Gouldner refers is really the crisis of functionalist sociology (though he indicates that he thinks that Marxist sociology is heading towards its own crisis as well). It is a sociology that attempts to understand society as a system, that expects social phenomena to be lawlike, and that abstracts almost entirely from history as context or process.

Essentially Gouldner's critique is that functionalism implicitly assumes that social systems have reached some kind of optimum in the composition of institutions that govern social life. Social organizations bring about maximum social utility. But Gouldner points out that this theoretical mindset makes it inherently difficult to deal with change. And yet the United States in the 1960s was unmistakeably involved in a process of profound change in its social, economic, and political institutions. So functionalist sociology was ill-equipped to understand and explain the most basic features of American life in the post-Vietnam War era -- mass protest, racial inequality, extension of the welfare state, urban poverty, and maladaptive political structures.

This is roughly the point at which Julia Adams, Elisabeth Stephanie Clemens, and Ann Shola Orloff pick up the story in Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology. And their focus group of beacon social scientists is a promising one -- scholars such as Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, or Jack Goldstone, for example. Adams and her co-editors provide a much more hopeful interpretation of the promise that the methods of historical sociology have for improving our understanding of the society we live in. The sociology of social movements, conflict, and change replaced the sociology of systems and functional adaptations among the basic institutions of a society; change rather than stasis was the central thread. And along with this emphasis on change came a sociological spotlight on history. In fact, one might say that the crisis that Gouldner foresaw was actually resolved by the explosion of research within historical sociology, social mobilization theory, and mid-level studies of historically concrete social institutions and processes.

Now what about Wallerstein's worries about contemporary sociology? Several points are particularly salient. First, there is a critique of the "nomothetic" quest -- the idea that the social sciences should discover social laws. In fact, the commission report observes that this goal is even a bit challenged in the natural sciences when we consider the dynamics of non-linear dynamic systems:

Today many natural scientists would argue that the world should be described quite differently. It is a more unstable world, a much more complex world, a world in which perturbations play a big role, one of whose key questions is how to explain how such complexity arises. (62)

And social phenomena surely demonstrate this sort of complex non-linearity as well. So it is unlikely that we will discover robust "laws of society" that will serve to explain and predict social outcomes.

Second, there is praise for the reunion of social science and history, with social scientists recognizing that the phenomena they study always have a historical context, and with historians recognizing that the social scientists may have uncovered quasi-general processes that can assist them to arrive at explanations of puzzling historical outcomes. This converges a bit with Gouldner's critique of functionalism. Referring to a new generation of social scientists, Wallerstein writes:

Their criticism of "mainstream" social sciences included the assertion that they had neglected the centrality of social change, favoring a mythology of consensus, and that they showed a naive, even arrogant, self-assuredness in applying Western concepts to the analysis of very different phenomena and cultures. (44)

Third, Wallerstein notes that many of the large concepts of social science research in the 1960s are deeply questionable -- for example, the concept of modernization as a construct around which to understand the development processes of the post-colonial world. Much more satisfactory is research along the lines of that of Arturo Escobar, fundamentally questioning the assumptions of progress, development, and modernization that dominated a lot of development thinking in the sixties (Encountering Development).

And fourth, Wallerstein and the commission raise pointed questions about the adequacy of disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences, and they emphasize the value of stimulating social research across the boundaries of the various disciplines.

So what kind of sociology should we be looking for if we want to understand the big, complex changes that surround us -- big cities, globalization, social networks, terrorism, failing schools, economic transitions, or the transmission of pandemic illness?

Here's a possible vision: We should be eclectic in theory and in method. We should welcome large interdisciplinary collaborations. We should expect heterogeneity and plasticity in the phenomena we study. We should pay a lot of attention to historical process and historical context -- not because the past determines the future, but because it constrains it. We should look carefully for the concrete mechanisms that bring about the social outcomes of interest. We should be ready to disaggregate large social processes into their components. And we should be more than ready to settle our gaze on the middle range of phenomena rather than stretching for heroic generalizations that are intended to hold across time, space, and culture.

We will need the best social science we can create to handle the challenges of the twenty-first century. And the shards that remain of positivism, functionalism, and naturalism won't help us to arrive at the innovative intellectual frameworks that will be required.

(Here and here are posts on some related methodological disputes in sociology and political science.)

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Posted in: CAT_methodology,sociology