International Relations

Many of our intuitions about causality are driven by a background assumption of determinism: one cause, one effect, always. But it is evident in many realms -- including especially the social world -- that causation is probabilistic. A cause makes its effects more likely than they would be in the absence of the cause. Exposure to a Zika-infected mosquito makes it more likely that the individual will acquire the illness; but many people exposed to Zika mosquitoes do not develop the illness. Wesley Salmon formulated this idea in terms of the concept of causal relevance: C is causally relevant to O just in case the conditional probability of O given C is different from the probability of O. (Some causes reduce the probability of their outcomes.) There is much more to say about this model -- chiefly the point that causes rarely exercise their powers in isolation from other factors. So, as J.L. Mackie worked out in The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation , we need to be looking for...

It is often held that the behavior of a particular organization is affected by its culture . Two banks may have very similar organizational structures but show rather different patterns of behavior, and those differences are ascribed to differences in culture. What does this mean? Clifford Geertz is one of the most articulate theorists of culture -- especially in his earlier works. Here is a statement couched in terms of religion as a cultural system from The Interpretation Of Cultures . A religion is ... (1) a system of symbols which act to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. (90) And again: The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an...

The worrisome likelihood that Russians and other malevolent actors are tinkering with public opinion in Western Europe and the United States through social media creates various kinds of anxiety. Are our democratic values so fragile that a few thousand Facebook or Twitter memes could put us on a different plane about important questions like anti-Muslim bigotry, racism, intolerance, or fanaticism about guns? Can a butterfly in Minsk create a thunderstorm of racism in Cincinnati? Have white supremacy and British ultra-nationalism gone viral? There is an interesting analogy here with the weather. The weather next Wednesday is the net consequence of a number of processes and variables, none of which are enormously difficult to analyze. But in their complex interactions they create outcomes that are all but impossible to forecast over a period of more than three days. And this suggests the interesting idea that perhaps public opinion is itself the result of complex and chaotic processes th...

Several earlier posts have made the point that important technology failures often include organizational faults in their causal background. It is certainly true that most important accidents have multiple causes, and it is crucial to have as good an understanding as possible of the range of causal pathways that have led to air crashes, chemical plant explosions, or drug contamination incidents. But in the background we almost always find organizations and practices through which complex technical activities are designed, implemented, and regulated. Human actors, organized into patterns of cooperation, collaboration, competition, and command, are as crucial to technical processes as are power lines, cooling towers, and control systems in computers. So it is imperative that we follow the lead of researchers like Charles Perrow ( The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters ), Kathleen Tierney ( The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Dis...

What is a dysfunction when it comes to the normal workings of an organization? In order to identify dysfunctions we need to have a prior conception of the "purpose" or "agreed upon goals" of an organization. Fiscal agencies collect taxes; child protection services work to ensure that foster children are placed in safe and nurturing environments; air travel safety regulators ensure that aircraft and air fields meet high standards of maintenance and operations; drug manufacturers produce safe, high-quality medications at a reasonable cost. A dysfunction might be defined as an outcome for an organization or institution that runs significantly contrary to the purpose of the organization. We can think of major failures in each of these examples. But we need to make a distinction between failure and dysfunction. The latter concept is systemic, having to do with the design and culture of the organization. Failure can happen as a result of dysfunctional arrangements; but i...

The question of China's political future is an important one and a difficult one. Will China evolve towards a political system that embodies real legal protections for the rights of its citizens and some version of democratic institutions of government? Or will it remain an authoritarian single-party state in which government and the party decide the limits of freedom and the course of economic and social policy? Two recent books are worth reading in this context, and they seem to point to rather different answers. Ya-Wen Lei's The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China  makes the case for a broadening sphere of public discourse and debate in China, which seems to suggest the possibility of a gradual loosening of governmental control of thought and action. Wenfang Tang's Populist Authoritarianism: Chinese Political Culture and Regime Sustainability on the other hand makes the case for a distinctive version of populist authoritarianism in Chi...