International Relations

I am currently thinking about the topic of "organizational actors", and Margaret Gilbert's arguments about social actors are plainly relevant to this topic. It seems worthwhile therefore to reproduce a review I wrote of Gilbert's book On Social Facts  (1989) in 1993. It is a tribute to the power of Gilbert's ideas that the book has much of the same power thirty years later that it had when it was first published. I also find it interesting that the concerns I had in the 1990s about "collective actors" and "plural subjects" expressed in this review have continued in my thinking about the social world through the current date. I continue to believe that constructs like collective actors require microfoundations that establish how they work at the level of individual "socially constituted, socially situated" individual human beings. I refer to this view as "methodological localism"; link . I also find it interesting that my own...

Supervenience is the view that the properties of some composite entity B are wholly fixed by the properties and relations of the items A of which it is composed ( link , link ). The transparency of glass supervenes upon the properties of the atoms of silicon and oxygen of which it is composed and their arrangement. Can the same be said of a business firm like Xerox when we consider its constituents to be its employees, stakeholders, and other influential actors and their relations and actions? (Call that total field of factors S.) Or is it possible that exactly these actors at exactly the same time could have manifested a corporation with different characteristics? Let's say the organizational properties we are interested in include internal organizational structure, innovativeness, market adaptability, and level of internal trust among employees. And S consists of the specific individuals and their properties and relations that make up the corporation at a given time. Could this s...

I've argued for the idea that social phenomena are generated by the actions, thoughts, and mental frameworks of myriad actors ( link ). This expresses the idea of ontological individualism. But I also believe that social arrangements -- structures, ideologies, institutions -- have genuine effects on the actions of individual actors and populations of actors and on intermediate-level social structures. There is real downward and lateral causation in the social world. Are these two views compatible? I believe they are compatible. The negative view holds that what appears to be downward causation is really just the workings of the lower-level components through their aggregation dynamics -- the lower struts of Coleman's boat ( link ). So when we say "the ideology of nationalism causes the rise of ultraconservative political leaders", this is just a shorthand for "many voters share the values of nationalism and elect candidates who propose radical solutions to issue...

The idea of generativity in the realm of the social world expresses the notion that social phenomena are generated by the actions and thoughts of the individuals who constitute them, and nothing else ( link , link ). More specifically, the principle of generativity postulates that the properties and dynamic characteristics of social entities like structures, ideologies, knowledge systems, institutions, and economic systems are produced by the actions, thoughts, and dispositions of the set of individuals who make them up. There is no other kind of influence that contributes to the causal and dynamic properties of social entities. Begin with a population of individuals with such-and-so mental and behavioral characteristics; allow them to interact with each other over time; and the structures we observe emerge as a determinate consequence of these interactions. This view of the social world lends great ontological support to the methods associated with agent-based models ( link ). Here is...

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...

Critical realism proposes an approach to the social world that pays particular attention to objective and material features of the social realm -- property relations, impersonal institutional arrangements, supra-individual social structures. Between structure and agent, CR seems most often to lean towards structures rather than consciously feeling and thinking agents. And so one might doubt whether CR has anything useful to offer when it comes to studying the subjective side of social life. Take for example the idea of a social identity. A social identity seems inherently subjective. It is the bundle of ideas and frameworks through which one places himself or herself in the social world, the framework through which a person conceptualizes his/her relations with others, and an ensemble of the motivations and commitments that lead to important forms of social and political action. All of this sounds subjective in the technical sense -- a part of the subjective and personal experience of ...

Robert Merton is one of the most sophisticated exponents of a qualified functionalism in sociology ( Social Theory and Social Structure ). He finds that earlier versions of sociological functionalism were conceptually flawed. Here is how he characterizes the classic theory of functionalism: We should attend first to the list of terms ostensibly referring to the same concept: purpose, function, motive, designed, secondary consideration, primary concern, aim. Through inspection, it becomes clear that these terms group into quite distinct conceptual frames of reference. At times, some of these terms � move, design, aim and purpose � clearly refer to the explicit ends-in-view of the representatives of the state. Others motive, secondary consideration � refer to the ends -in-view of the victim of the crime. And both of these sets of terms are alike in referring to the subjective anticipations of the results of punishment. But the concept of function involves the standpoint of the observer, ...

Critical realism pays particular attention to the enduring structures that underlie various social orders and processes. But as argued in an earlier post , CR also needs to be able to provide a vocabulary for describing the "subjective" and normative aspects of the social order. Margaret Archer's evolving theory of morphogenesis provides resources for discussing precisely this dimension of the social world. The most recent volume of collaborative research emerging from Archer's morphogenesis research project, Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity  (2016), is highly relevant to the ontology of normative features of the social world. The book focuses on the stability of legal systems in changing societies; but it is relevant to broader issues of normative coherence as well. The book includes contributions from a dozen contributors, and there is an admirable degree of focus and coherence across the chapters. Particularly interesting to me were chapters by Doug Porp...

Take a typical day in a major city -- a busy street with a subway stop, a park, a coffee bar, and a large consumer financial office. There are several thousand people in view, mostly in ones and twos. Some people are rushing to an appointment with a doctor, a job interview, a drug dealer in the park. A group of young men and women are beginning to chant in a demonstration in the park against a particularly egregious announcement of government policy on contraception. There is a blooming, buzzing confusion to the scene. And yet there are overlapping forms of order -- pedestrians crossing streets at the crosswalks, surges of suits and ties at certain times of day, snatch and grab artists looking for an unguarded cell phone. The brokers in the financial office are more coordinated in their actions, tasked to generate sales with customers who walk in for service. The demonstrators have assembled from many parts of the city, arriving by subway in the previous hour. Their presence is, of cou...

Brian Epstein is adamant that the social sciences need to think very differently about the nature of the social world. In The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences  he sets out to blow up our conventional thinking about the relation between individuals and social facts. In particular, he is fundamentally skeptical about any conception of the social world that depends on the idea of ontological individualism, directly or indirectly. Here is the plainest statement of his view: When we look more closely at the social world, however, this analogy [of composition of wholes out of independent parts] falls apart. We often think of social facts as depending on people, as being created by people, as the actions of people. We think of them as products of the mental processes, intentions, beliefs, habits, and practices of individual people. But none of this is quite right. Research programs in the social sciences are built on a shaky understanding of the most fundamental...

One of the more intriguing currents of social science research today is the field of complexity theory. Scientists like John Holland ( Complexity: A Very Short Introduction ), John Miller and Scott Page ( Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life ), and Joshua Epstein ( Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling ) make bold and interesting claims about how social processes embody the intricate interconnectedness of complex systems. John Holland describes some of the features of behavior of complex systems in these terms in Complexity : self-organization into patterns, as occurs with flocks of birds or schools of fish   chaotic behaviour where small changes in initial conditions (� the flapping of a butterfly�s wings in Argentina�) produce large later changes (� a hurricane in the Caribbean�)   �fat-tailed� behaviour, where rare events (e.g. mass extinctions and market crashes) occur much more often ...