International Relations

One of the benefits of attending international conferences is meeting interesting scholars from different countries and traditions. I had that pleasure while participating in the Asian Conference on Philosophy of the Social Sciences at Nankai University in June, where I met Chaiyan Rajchagool. Chaiyan is a Thai academic in the social sciences. He earned his undergraduate degree in Thailand and received a PhD in sociology from the University of Manchester (UK). He has served as a senior academic administrator in Thailand and is now an associate professor of political science at the University of Phayao in northern Thailand. He is an experienced observer and analyst of Thai society, and he is one of dozens of Thai academics summoned by the military following the military coup in 2014 ( link ). I had numerous conversations with Chaiyan in Tianjin, which I enjoyed very much. He was generous to share with me his 1994 book,  The rise and fall of the Thai absolute monarchy: Foundations of...

The idea that there is a stark separation between many of our ideas of the social world, on the one hand, and the realities of the social world in which we live is an old one. We think "fairness and equality", but what we get is exploitation, domination, and opportunity-capture. And there is a reasonable suspicion that this gap is in some sense intentional: interested parties have deceived us. In some sense it was the lesson of Plato's allegory of the cave; it is the view that Marx expresses in his ideas of ideology and false consciousness; Gramsci's theory of hegemony expresses the view; Nietzsche seems to have this separation in mind in much of his writing; and the Frankfurt School made much of it as well. The antidote to these forms of illusion, according to many of these theorists, is  critique : careful, penetrating analysis and criticism of the presuppositions and claims of the ideological theory. (Here are several efforts within Understanding Society to engage...

I've just had the singular opportunity of participating in the habilitation examination of Gianluca Manzo at the Sorbonne, based on his excellent manuscript on the relevance of agent-based models for justifying causal claims in the social sciences. Manzo is currently a research fellow in sociology at CNRS in Paris ( Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique ), and is a prolific contributor to analytical sociology and computational social science. The habilitation essay is an excellent piece of work and I trust it will be published as an influential monograph. Manzo has the distinction of being expert both on the philosophical and theoretical debates that are underway about social causation and an active researcher in the field of ABM simulations. Pierre Demeulenaere served as a generous and sympathetic mentor. The committee consisted of Anouk Barberousse, Ivan Ermakoff, Andreas Flache, Olivier Godechot, and myself, and reviewer comments and observations were of the highest qua...

Image: detail from Family Portrait 2 1965  (Creative Commons license, Richard Rappaport) Herbert Simon made paradigm-changing contributions to the theory of rational behavior, including particularly his treatment of "satisficing" as an alternative to "maximizing" economic rationality ( link ). It is therefore worthwhile examining his views of organizations and organizational decision-making and action -- especially given how relevant those theories are to my current research interest in organizational dysfunction. His highly successful book Administrative Behavior  went through four editions between 1947 and 1997 -- more than fifty years of thinking about organizations and organizational behavior. The more recent editions consist of the original text and "commentary" chapters that Simon wrote to incorporate more recent thinking about the content of each of the chapters. Here I will pull out some of the highlights of Simon's approach to organizations. T...

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...

photo: Tianjin, China A group of philosophers of social science convened in Tianjin, China, at Nankai University in June to consider some of the ways that the social sciences can move forward in the twenty-first century. This was the Asian Conference on the Philosophy of the Social Sciences , and there were participants from Asia, Europe, Australia, and the United States. (It was timely for Nankai University to host such a meeting, since it is celebrating the centennial of its founding in 1919 this year.) The conference was highly productive for all participants, and it seems to have the potential of contributing to fruitful future thinking about philosophy and the social sciences in Chinese universities as well. Organized by Francesco Di Iorio and the School of Philosophy at Nankai University, the meeting was a highly productive international gathering of scholars with interests in all aspects of the philosophy of the social sciences. Topics that came in for discussion included the na...

Crucial to improving an organization's performance is being able to obtain honest and detailed assessments of its functioning, in normal times and in emergencies. FEMA has had a troubled reputation for faulty performance since the Katrina disaster in 2005, and its performance in response to Hurricane Maria in Louisiana and Puerto Rico was also criticized by observers and victims. So how can FEMA get better? The best avenue is careful, honest review of past performance, identifying specific areas of organizational failure and taking steps to improve in these areas. It is therefore enormously disturbing to read an investigative report in the Washington Post ((Lisa Rein and Kimberly Kindy,  Washington Post , June 6, 2019);  link ) documenting that investigation and audits by the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security were watered down and sanitized at the direction of the audit bureau's acting director, John V. Kelly. Auditors in the Department of Homeland Secur...