I have decided to move this weblog to Tumblr. Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform and is generally more suitable to my web-logging needs. First is the simplicity and quickness of the platform but also its suitability to collaboration, sharing of resources and scrap-booking working thoughts. The weblog can be accessed here …
There are therefore four barriers to determinism. Firstly, whether causal powers – such as the ability to bear children – exist depends on the contingent presence of certain structures or objects. Secondly, whether these powers are ever exercised is contingent, not pre-determined. Thirdly, if and when they are ever exercised, their consequences will depend on mediation – or neutralization – by other contingently related phenomena. A fourth possibility is that natural and social causal powers themselves (and not merely whether and in what circumstances they are exercised) can be changed.
Source: Realism and Social Science (page 95) by Andrew Sayer
Bryan Tarpley has posted a web-log questioning the possibility of a universal ethics, arguing there are only socially constructed ethical models relevant to the grounds of its emergence (there is no view from nowhere). However, Tarpley does propose a common ground that is based on an emergentist and relational view of objects within a stratified ontology. Thus flourishing is not only about individual volition (agential) to pursue an individual preference but there are broader questions that we should agree upon, as they affect all of us and can be described as a societal good.
This view of a greater societal good and a universal sense of flourishing is implicated by a shared nature as sentient beings. We cannot flourish except if the conditions we live in are conducive to that goal. But what is the good? Tarpley views that as objects we are not mere discursive constructs, even if we mediate our views of these objects through these constructs. In other words, as objects we can fallibly seek to explain our nature [well-being] but the schemata developed may be mistaken in what may actually generate well being [something distinct from our explanations]. Nevertheless, despite human well being and flourishing being an irreducible reality and so open to revision, we can agree that it remains its own telos. The universal of human flourishing is that it should not be sought for something else.
As personhood is an emergent property of both natural and cultural worlds, we can conclude there are aspects of acculturation that may be detrimental to our embodied nature. The good is not merely a subjectivist solipsism, as it tangibly exists apart from our perceptions. This of course de-naturalises the workings of social structures and can hold them objectionable.
Yet, despite this, we can still speak of the abstract and concrete. Tarpley, it seems, argues the opposite:
The categories of concrete and abstract don’t make sense anymore when referring to objects, by virtue of the fact that our only access to the world is via the abstraction of language. Let’s toss them out.
To posit stratification from a depth ontology is to be committed to abstraction, as the concrete (process-in-product) establishes a product at a different layer of emergence. Parts are prior wholes and the interaction of different parts emerges from a part as a whole at another level. Thus processes, the interaction of parts in the emergence of wholes, are not objects but they cannot be considered as a conceptual substitute for the category of abstract (product-in-process).
Personhood is an example of a “persistent whole formed from a set of parts that is structured by the relations between these parts” (Elder-Vass 2010:17). The interaction of its parts and the relations between them while understood as a process are nevertheless wholes at other levels of a stratification. This posit is important, as it views personhood as a structured relation between both natural and cultural worlds. Further the relation itself is a dialectic that establishes constraints on the processual contingencies of an emergent personhood. As Christian Smith notes, persons possess “particular, natural characteristics, capacities, interests, purposes, and limitations” (Smith 2010: 399). Again, by affirming the categories of both abstract and concrete, but within a stratified ontology, we can explain this process by understanding the nature of the interacting parts and how this may affect our view of personhood.
For example, our shared incompleteness is not only our natural condition but from it emerges social worlds and relations of interdependence. Andrew Sayer, for example, notes how as both stratified and emergent beings with certain capacities and susceptibilities, we become “simultaneously physical, chemical, biological, psychological and social beings”. More, as dependent on others to fulfil our needs as biological, psychological and social beings “we can be affected by different kinds of suffering on different levels: physical sickness; socio-psychological pathologies resulting from culturally produced double-binds; and social contradictions (for example, the development of money as an end in itself rather than a means to an end)” (Sayer 2004: 104).
This dialectic affirms that while we are part constituted by our natural environment as embodied beings, actively engaged in our natural environment, we also constantly re-invent needs and their fulfilment. The novel re-invention of needs is a need in itself, an emergent capacity for “agency and creativity and need for simulation, all people have not only certain basic needs regarding ‘beings’ (such as food and shelter, and a healthy environment), but also a need for access to diverse activities or ‘doings’ (Sen 1999).” (Sayer 2004: 104).
What implications may this have on a common ground model of ethics? The answer would be two-fold – first, not only is there a human nature and so a telos of what human flourishing and well-being may be, but also that any telos is mediated by cultural emergent properties. The latter is a turn away from a liberal negative rights (individuals as autonomous and thereafter social) to a view of rights as emergent and constituted in society. To speak of human nature is not to focus on specific causal mechanisms, whether social or natural but the stratified interdependence of both and the emergence of social wholes from the satisfaction of needs and drives through others:
Social development and acculturation are emergent properties dependent on, but irreducible to, biological and social influences and their interaction. What we call the mind is a co-product of physiology, culture, action and language. Thus to talk of human nature is not usually to refer just to the newborn’s powers and liabilities, or indeed its needs and drives, but to the dependence of those needs and drives on society for their satisfaction, development and supplementation. Humanity is a condition of shared incompleteness (Sayer 2011: 111).
This conceptualises individual rights as part of a broader telos of collective and subsequently individual flourishing but not an end in itself. However, as noted, this does not render representations of flourishing as solely constituted by arbitrary discursive formations. The first point for a common ground of ethics is that there is a shared human nature, as embodied beings, but that this is mediated culturally. Critical realism affirms representations are about real referents and these representations cannot be reducible internally to themselves or that external referents somehow determine the knowledge models developed to understand the natural world. As a result we can know something about human nature and meanings of flourishing but ultimately our knowledge is fallible and open to revision. Nevertheless, there is a telos and this telos views human flourishing as an end itself but the enactment of this telos to be mediated fallibly, we can only revise our conceptual tools for that purpose.
The reduction of structures to the individuals who compose them is also responsible for the illusion that high social mobility implies the abolition of social classes. Moreover, the invisibility of structure to common-sense thinking leads to an underestimation of the interdependence of positions and what is called the ‘fallacy of composition’. This is the assumption that, in all cases, what is possible for an individual must be possible for all individuals simultaneously. For example, it is often imagined that in capitalist economies, because individual firms may be made ‘more competitive’, all firms might simultaneously become more competitive without any thereby becoming less competitive, as if economic competition were a race in which all could win first prize simultaneously. Similarly, in the hope of reducing youth unemployment many ‘experts’ have advised young people to get better qualifications and improve their interview technique, but those who do this can only improve their chances of getting a job by worsening the chances of other individuals: it does not increase the number of jobs available, that is, the number of positions within the structure.
Source: Method in Social Science: A realist approach by Andrew Sayer (page 94)
Dave Elder-Vass, responding to Anthony King’s hermeneutic relationism, argues that a “more than its parts” view of social activity (an emergentism of parts into a whole and a subsequent ascribing of causal powers to the whole) entails a reification of this whole. However, Anthony King does not argue that parts, in themselves, can explain patterned activity. Instead, there are, apart from individuals, social relations. Understanding activity is thus not reduced to individuals but understood considering combined activity. Nevertheless, there is a rejection of an idea of social structure, as something more than this combined activity. Dave Elder-Vass states the problem in the following way:
King denies that the combination of people plus relations, or people plus interaction, constitutes a higher level entity with causal effects of its own
Below is an excerpt taken from Dave Elder-Vass’s above identified article, in it he affirms that not only do higher-level entities (social structures) have causal powers in their own right but also this does not entail any form of reification. Further, it is important to assert this position, so as to properly explain, recursively, the depth emergence of different strata of social ontology:
RELATIONAL EMERGENCE VS. THE DENIAL OF STRUCTURE
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Let me now turn, then, to an example of a social structure cited by Archer that definitely does have emergent properties: the division of labour. In Adam Smith’s example of pin production, a group of workers organised according to the principles of the division of labour is able to produce substantially more than the same group of workers, each producing pins individually (Archer, 1995: 51; Archer, 1996: 686). Hence a group organised on these principles has an emergent property that is not possessed by the same workers when they are not so organised, and the analysis of organisations above applies. This capability to produce more is therefore an emergent causal power of the organised group, and not causally attributable to the individual workers.
Now King recognises that this capability cannot be ascribed to the individuals alone; for King, structure is to be replaced in sociological explanation by social relations (King, 2004, e.g. p. 17). He therefore rejects the label of methodological individualist, and distinguishes himself from rational choice theory, in particular, which he sees as offering sociological explanation purely in terms of individuals, to the exclusion even of social relations (King, 2004, pp. 192–4). One might question King’s choice of identity—Watkins, for example, explicitly professed methodological individualism while endorsing a causal role for the “inter-relations of individuals” (Watkins, 1968, p. 271)—but this is beside the point. The point at issue here is whether structure is causally effective; for King, it is not structure but social relations that are causally effective:
The interpretivist tradition is no way arguing that this new division of labour can be understood through dis-aggregating the division of labour back to its molecular constituents—the individual craftsmen or individual readers. This approach fully recognizes the qualitative novelty of this situation but that newness resides precisely in the new relations between individuals (King, 1999a: 213).
Thus he recognises the same facts of the case as Archer and myself (Archer writes “the power of the . . . emergent property, mass production, did exceed those of everyone involved, because it was no aggregate of their individual productivity but the relational resultant of their combined productive activity” (2000: 467)). Where we differ is on the question of whether these facts entail that the group as such has causal powers in its own right. King denies that the combination of people plus relations, or people plus interaction, constitutes a higher level entity with causal effects of its own (King, 1999b: 272).
In its discussion of organisations, this paper has already stated the positive case for seeing people plus relations as constituting a higher level entity with causal powers. The key points in this argument were (a) that if the people concerned were not organised into such an entity, those powers would not exist; and (b) that the people plus the relations are the higher level entity, so to say that the people plus the relations have a power is the same thing as to say that the higher level entity has the power. Thus, for example, in an organisation that practices the division of labour (e.g. Smith’s pin factory) if we say that the productive capacity of the organisation depends on both the workers and the relations between them that exist when they are organised as they are in this organisation, this is necessarily equivalent to saying that the productive capacity is a causal power of the organisation and not of the workers.
But there is also a negative case, which rests on the fact that King’s version of the reductionist argument has an entirely general form. If it is true, say, in the case of the division of labour, that people plus a particular set of relations between them do not constitute a higher level entity with causal powers of its own, then the same argument would appear to apply to any other part-whole relation. King, along with many other reductionists, offers no reason why this argument could not also be applied to other sorts of entity.9 The argument therefore entails, for example, that when a dog barks, this is not because the dog has the causal power to bark, but rather because its lungs, windpipe, vocal chords, mouth, etc, and the relations between them have the power to bark. And if this is not absurd enough, we can pursue the same logic indefinitely to produce a full reduction ad absurdum—because on the same logic we must also deny that it is the lungs, windpipe, etc, that are doing the barking, but rather the “cells plus relations” that make those organs up, and then we must consider it to be the “molecules plus relations” instead of the cells, the “atoms plus relations” instead of the molecules, and so on to levels where science has so far failed to go.
The full irony of this position appears when we apply it to human individuals. The same argument that is taken to deny causal effectiveness to social structures could be applied equally well to the human individuals whose causal powers individualists seek to privilege. Just as social structures are nothing more than the people in them and the relations between those people, human individuals are nothing more than the cells in them and the relations between those cells. But it would be just as invalid to eliminatively reduce the causal powers of people to those of their cells as it is to eliminatively reduce the causal powers of social structures to those of people (cf. Durkheim, 1974 [1898]: 28–9). For consistent emergentists, people have causal powers—agency—by virtue of the emergent properties that arise from the way their parts are organised, in an analogous ontological structure to that which underlies the emergence of the causal powers of social structures (an argument I have developed in (Elder-Vass, 2006c)). Emergentism is therefore recursively consistent: it ascribes causal powers at each level on the basis of the same ontological argument. But if King’s argument were to be applied recursively, his relational grounds for the denial of causal power to structures like organisations would also imply that people have no causal power either, and thus undermine his own ontology at the next level down.
It is worth noting that beyond this ontological issue, King’s position has a great deal in common with the realist/emergentist tradition. Social relations are immensely important to the emergentist position (see, e.g. Bhaskar, 1998, pp. 28–9)—it’s just that we don’t substitute them for structure, but instead recognise their crucial role in underpinning structure. And there is a great deal of value in King’s theoretical (as opposed to ontological ) analysis of how institutions work, for example in his reply to Stueber, who has also criticised him from a realist perspective (King, 2006; Stueber, 2006).
In ontological terms, King goes so far as to say “For hermeneutics, social networks have their own distinctive properties which are irreducible to isolated individuals, extracted from these networks, but that does not mean that these networks are more than the individuals in them” (1999b: 275). The first part of this reads like an acceptance of emergentism, but he seems to believe that by rejecting the claim that “networks are more than the individuals in them” he turns this into a denial of emergence. There is arguably a sense in which emergentism sees an emergent whole as more than its parts, because a specific set of relations between the parts is also required to constitute it into this type of whole. But as we have seen, King too accepts that relations as well as parts are required to produce the causal effect of the whole. Perhaps by “more than” he is referring to emergentism’s claim that wholes have properties that are not possessed by their parts—but the first part of his statement in this quote seems to confirm that he accepts the same point. There is no other “more than” to be found in emergentism than these, and so it is hard to see what objection there is here to a synchronic relational form of emergentism.
Perhaps the answer lies in his repeated objections to the “reification” of structure by realist thinkers, who, he claims, see structure as “a metaphysical entity which exists independently of humans” (King, 2004, p. 69). This is a criticism he links explicitly to emergence: “despite its apparent coherence, the concept of emergence, in fact, involves a relapse into sociological reification where society comes to exist independently of individuals, although this relapse into reification is concealed by the continual emphasis on individual practices and beliefs” (1999b: 270). The usage of the word “independently” in this context, however, is extremely ambiguous. Relational emergentism certainly does not imply that society can exist independently of individuals, since social structures are always synchronically composed (at least in part) of people. It does imply, however, that wholes like social structures may have distinct causal powers from those of their parts, or in other words causal powers in their own right. On occasion, emergentists may have called these “independent” causal powers, and it is easy to see why they might do so, but these causal powers of the whole remain dependent on the presence and properties of the parts. It would be desirable for the sake of clarity to avoid this usage of “independent”, but when used in this way it does not entail reification of social structure: emergent social structures always remain structures composed of people and sustained (to the extent that they are sustained) by their practices.
It is true, of course, that realists sometimes abstract from these people and their practices when discussing the effects of social structures. Abstraction is an entirely valid methodological move when we have already established the causal powers of the entity concerned: we must always be able to trace a claim for structural power back to the web of individuals and relations that underpins it, that provides the mechanism for it. But given that such a tracing has been demonstrated, and where its details are not directly explanatory of the case under study, we can then abstract from such details and simply refer to the structural power in its own right.
I do not claim that realists have always observed these qualifications; it may be that they have sometimes taken structure and its powers for granted when a careful examination of the underpinning individuals and relations would have been helpful; and it may even be that sometimes such examinations would have revealed that the structures concerned did not have the powers that were being claimed for them. Indeed, the example of demographic distributions discussed earlier may be such a case. Abstraction may sometimes lead to this sort of reification, but this does not mean that abstraction is never justified; only that we must be careful how we use it.
John Brewer has written a letter of recommendation on the London riots, as president of the British Sociological Association, stating the following on crowds:
Crowds are irrational. Crowds don’t have motives – that’s far too calculating and rational. Crowd behaviour is dynamic in unpredictable ways, and reason and motive disappear when crowds move unpredictably.
There is much in the letter that is agreeable but crowds cannot be analysed within their own dynamics, similar to Durkheim’s collective effervescence. A possible better starting point of analysis is in what Goffman termed a ‘loose coupling’ – concrete events are always coupled with a broader institutional order. Derek Layder elaborates on this in positing social settings (nodal points for both reproduced social relations, their associated practices and free-flowing encounters) as empirically variable in its qualitative coupling with system or lifeworld elements:
This variation of settings according to their degree of connectedness with system and lifeworld elements is related to the empirical variations produced through what I have called the intrinsic relationship between lifeworld and system elements. (Layder 2003: 77)
In the case of a riot setting, the spontaneity of the first spark that drove the riots was an exigency and this set out a form of mediation, in a concrete event, that tilted away from systemic constraints. The police were not ready and not prepared to deal with what was not a crowd management situation. This spark and the subsequent free-flowing dynamic doesn’t entail that those rioting were not calculated, the use of technology shows many actually were. No closed assumptions can be made on the activity of crowds in what is, itself, an irreducible domain of situated activity.
Second, considering the intrinsic relation between system and lifeworld elements, we cannot discount that some rioting was motivated politically. Those rioting may have sought their own sense of power and ownership in the manner, as Goffman noted, of individuals resisting what are seen as institutionalised constraints – this is always the case, even in total institutions.
There will always be a distinction between system and social integration (Archer 1996); core institutional features, in their macro-structural continuity, may not conflate with the motivations and intentions of social actors. An opposite conflation can similarly be argued against e.g. reproduced practices as an epiphenomenon of concrete social activity – social integration precedes systemic reproduction.
A stratified ‘depth ontology’, in both lifeworld and system meta-domains, provides a better path of analysis, as no aspect of the social is reducible to another; there is no closed phenomenon, as there is no reduction, in whatever facet, to either side of the dualism. Here lies the fault of much written analysis, whether a conclusion is derived of an anomie (broken society) or an organic crisis in capitalism. For example, it is oft repeated that riots should be understood in terms of what are ‘deeper causes’. However, despite an apparent statement of a ‘depth ontology’, we often have, instead, a methodological collectivism that is dependent on a form of empirical inductivism – the observer reads from a group of measurable indicators and then argues the London riots were an inevitable consequence of these ‘causes’.
In maintaining an emergentism, established from an analytical dualism and its implicated stratified ‘depth ontology’, all paths to an empiricism are explicitly argued against. We cannot argue from an assumed master ontology, thus reifying the social, or its opposite (albeit a very ideological rendering of individual motives). There are, of course, causal factors but this is not a constant conjunction view of causality. The riots are not an inevitable consequence of any preceding systemic shifts but result from the contingent and situational activation of causal mechanisms, beyond either deduction or induction, as they emerge from the complex interplay of social domains and the depth (stratified) constitution of each domain. Individuals affect each other in any given event but this does not completely explain the event – the contours of the event is not reduced to their mutual co-presence. Likewise, enduring practices aligned to given social relations are interdependent on a systemic patterning of contextual resources (Bourdieu’s fields of practice) but this also does not determine the contours of the event. Again, we must view this as a coupling of these elements, relationally, in which we posit them as powerful particulars only in that they affect each other. However, no element can necessitate any outcome, lifeworld or system i.e. a reductionism/determinism in analysis. C Wright Mills succinctly puts this in the following manner:
The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialised, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
Below is a summary of an article written by Andrew Sayer and published in ‘Conversations on Reflexivity‘ (edited by Margaret S. Archer). The summary highlights the article’s main points in near verbatim but with some improvisation in many areas. His main argument is directed at Margaret Archer, whom he views as attaching too much of a focus on individual internal conversations in mediating the influences of of both discursive and non-discursive environments. Andrew Sayer states this is too optimistic and places, theoretically, a relation of a-symmetry towards reflexive activity over social properties. Instead, Sayer argues, there are elements of our consciousnesses that we are not fully aware of and it is these elements that play a part in the emergence of our conscious monitorings.
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Reflexivity and the habitus
Approaching the habitus – Andrew Sayer answers Archer’s claim that Bourdieu is a central conflationist, allowing little consideration for reflexive deliberation. Nevertheless, we can still rescue some of Bourdieu’s claims of the habitus and habitat, in complicity, with a generous reflexivity. First is to tackle the problem of sociological imperialism that is found in Bourdieu’s theory – there is no prior human nature but merely malleable and constituted by social worlds, defining biological libidos and needs. However, Sayer argues, mind-body has aversions and inclinations, flourishing, suffering & neediness – it makes it susceptible to being habituated to social positions and the efficacy of social pressures & socialisation. The socialisation generates new needs, capacities etc. and modifies the prior innate ones.
Bourdieu is accused, by Archer, as treating people as capable & responsive beings and not evaluative beings. Sayer argues that we can embrace or resist situations, based upon reflection. We often feel discomfort and pain where social and environmental conditions conflict with our innate and acquired dispositions and susceptibilities. Thus we should acknowledge both our capacity for reflection on our circumstances, and the embodied dispositions of our habitus, remembering that the latter depend on prior needs and susceptibilities. Yes, active individuals to actively mediate, deliberate and monitor situations – however internal conversations don’t mediate all such influences. It’s an overstatement to say that ‘the efficacy of any social property is at the mercy of the subjects’ reflexive activity’. We are not omniscient, omnipotent beings; some influences get beneath our radar, especially in early life, in our formative years, shaping dispositions and responses without our even noticing them. Realists should acknowledge this.
Emotional responses – Emotional responses are important to consider and Bourdieu, despite considering our embodied and partly subconscious practical orientation to the world, does not sufficiently write on it. Emotions, as impulses, often connect us to our habitus and helps us to understand symbolic domination – feelings of self-esteem, shame or pride etc. Unless we take emotions into consideration we will not properly understand why things matter so much to people. Emotions are commentaries on concerns, cogntive and even evaulative and should be considered. They are about something, things that matter to us.
In virtue of these forms of intelligent response, we can speak of ‘emotional response’. Emotions also motivate us to act in certain ways. The coupling of cognitive and motivating properties implies that ‘emotional reason’ figures prominently in practical reason – in reasoning how to act. Life without emotions would be hard because without them we would lack a crucial indicator of our well-being and how the things that matter to us are faring.
The formation, reproduction and transformation of the habitus is mediated by emotional responses – for example, by the feeling of contentment at being valued and loved or feeling of shame at being despised.
(Un)ethical dispositions – virtues and vices: As Archer acknowledges, our internal conversations may vary from focused and coherent deliberation to fragmented and fleeting musings, but she seems unwilling to accept that the latter merge into the dispositions, learned responses and habits of thought of the habitus that enable us to cope with familiar situations […] e.g. having become consciously and sincerely anti-racist she may feel ashamed about the persistence of the unreformed reflexes, it requires reflection and dedication to re-shape these reflexes […] rather, we should understand lay normativity as embedded in the flow of practice and concrete experience, in which we continually monitor and evaluate things, partly subconsciously through our emotional responses, and partly consciously through reflection, whether this involves ephermal musings or focused deliberation […] the moral life, on this view, is something that is goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices. What happens in between such choices is indeed what is crucial. […] Here, ethical being is rooted in habits of thought reproduced and slowly changed through ongoing, often mundane practice, and the feel for how the game is going, including reflections on how we and the things we care about faring. The work of attentiveness is done both by the habitus and through internal conversations, and there is a zone of overlap between the two. I suggest that this interpretation should be acceptable to followers of Bourdieu and Archer.
Habitus and internal conversations in practice – Their (working class) lack of feel for the game, stemming from the mismatch between their habitus and their new habitat, enables them to notice their habitus […] Insofar as Archer allows any role for the concept of habitus, it is in more stable societies than our own, and she argues that the progressive de-routinization of life produced by high modernity increasingly consigns it to history, by removing the contextual continuity required for its acquisition, so that, we can scarcely form, let alone rely on, the durable dispositions that make up the habitus […] while there probably is an increase in contextual discontinuity there is still plenty of stability and they could hardly become competent social actors if they did not develop a feel for familiar games.
Conclusion – We need to acknowledge the embodied capacities, susceptibilities, needs and concerns, both innate and acquired, that make us beings capable of flourishing or suffering, and hence evaluate beings, and to incorporate these fundamental facts into our theory of the formation and transformation of the habitus. The dispositions of the habitus are related not merely to the dominant social context but also to embodied, sensuous experiences of flourishing and suffering therein. The semi-conscious responses that arise from the dispositions of our habitus merge into the conscious monitorings of our internal conversations. Our relation to the world is not merely one of practical engagement, or indeed contemplation, but of concern.
Below is a series of Reith Lectures delivered by Anthony Giddens (1999). The lectures cover the themes of hyper-modernity, globalisation and a subsequent ‘Runaway World’. Giddens follows on from what he views as the processes underpinning modernity (distanciation, disembedding and greater reflexivity), to then investigate what they mean in a more globalised world. Globalisation, led to by a communications revolution, is a follow-on but also a further intensification of the processes of modernity, including the further spreading of its effects. ‘The Reith Lectures’ cover these effects in terms of human agency, social practice and institutions.
Globalisation: Examining the ways globalisation has affected our lives
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Tradition: Looking at the links between tradition and fundamentalism
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Family: How do changing roles within the family promote democracy and economic development?
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Democracy: Examining one of the most powerful ideas of the 20th century
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Source: BBC Radio 4 ‘The Reith Lectures’
Below is an excerpt from Roger Finke and Rodney Stark’s article ‘The Dynamics of Religious Economies’ (published in Michele Dillon’s edited book ‘Handbook of the Sociology of Religion’). In this chapter, both Finke & Stark, offer an alternative to what is the traditional paradigm of secularisation i.e. modernity has brought with it a gradual decline of religion. The new paradigm argued for by Finke & Starke, on the other hand, does not make encompassing predictions of a demise or otherwise of religiosity. Instead, it turns its analytical focus to the dynamics of religion itself, it variants, and the forms it takes for itself. This is a supply side analysis of religion (religious economies) and both Finke & Stark argue an increased religious pluralism will result in a deeper individual religious commitment, due to a decrease in coercion and a personalisation of religiosity catered to by a diversity of religious niches.
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An Emerging New Paradigm
The assault on the old paradigm has come on many fronts. The standard measures of modernity (e.g., urbanization, industrialization, rationalization, and religious pluralism) have failed to show a consistent secularizing effect on religion. Indeed, increasing urbanization and industrialization were associated with increasing levels of religious participation in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America (Finke and Stark 1988, 1992; Finke 1992) and throughout Christian history urban areas have often been the centers for religious revivals and more orthodox religious behavior (Stark 1996).
Even religious pluralism and rationality, long perceived to be the most corrosive elements of modernity, fail to garner research support. Beginning in the late 1980s a series of qualitative studies questioned the secularizing effects of religious pluralism and the incompatibility of religion and rationality. In her observational study of Catholic charismatics, Mary Jo Neitz (1987: 257–8) found that their full awareness of religious choices “did not undermine their own beliefs. Rather they felt they had ‘tested’ the belief system and had been convinced of its superiority.” Lynn Davidman’s (1991: 204) field study of upper-middle-class Jewish women who converted to Orthodoxy, stressed the benefits of intra-Jewish pluralism and the careful process of evaluation before joining the community – concluding that “pluralization and multiplicity of choices available in the contemporary United States can actually strengthen Jewish communities.” After interviewing 178 evangelicals from 23 states, Christian Smith and his colleagues (1998: 104) concluded, “For evangelicals, it is precisely by making a choice for Christ that one’s faith becomes valid and secure. There is little reason to believe, therefore, that the modern necessity of having to choose one’s own religion makes that religion any less real, powerful, or meaningful to modern believers.”
Numerous quantitative research projects have also questioned the secularizing effects of religious pluralism. Although mired in methodological controversies (see Olson 1998; Finke and Stark 1998), a couple of conclusions can be drawn.(1) First, the key distinction is between areas having no pluralism and those having some degree of religious choice and competition (Finke, Guest, and Stark 1996; Hamberg and Pettersson 1997; Pettersson and Hamberg 1997). Religious markets have a saturation point beyond which additional options do not raise levels of participation. Second, despite ardent criticism questioning the beneficial effects of high religious pluralism, few of the critics propose a return to the old paradigm explanation. Even the critics recognize that a monopoly church supported by the state will not increase religious plausibility and activity.
Perhaps the most critical blow to the secularization thesis, however, is that the trend line forecasted by the old paradigm isn’t supported by the data. A mounting body of research has questioned the nostalgic views of past piety and contemporary accounts of depleted religious activity. This argument has been refuted most forcefully in the United States, where a rise in modernity was accompanied by a rise in religious activity (Finke and Stark 1992; Warner 1993). Yet, nostalgic myths of past piety and recent surges in religious activity extend far beyond the United States. The most prominent historians of medieval religion now agree that there never was an “Age of Faith” in Western Europe (Morris 1993; Duffy 1992; Sommerville 1992; Bossy 1985; Obelkevich 1979; Murray 1972; Thomas 1971; Coulton 1938). Even the strongest advocates of the old paradigm concede that, in terms of organized participation, the Golden Age of Faith never existed (Bruce 1997). And, when it comes to contemporary religion, the religious revivals around the globe have become too frequent and too sizeable to ignore. From Islam in the Middle East and Africa to Christianity in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Korea, religion has proven compatible with increasing modernity.
This lack of support for the secularization thesis, however, does not suggest that religion is always increasing or that modernity is associated with an ever increasing level of religious involvement. Although research refuting the secularization thesis has frequently emphasized increasing religious involvement, the new paradigm does not replace the prediction on the inevitable demise of religion with an equally implausible prediction on the inevitable ascension of religion. Moreover, for the new paradigm, modernity is not the causal engine driving religious change.
The reasons given for doubting (or believing) religious teachings are mostly unrelated to anything specific to modernity and have remained relatively unchanged throughout recorded history (Smith et al. 1998; Stark and Finke 2000). Instead, the new theoretical developments attempt to move beyond nebulous forces of modernity leading to an inevitable religious decline to specific propositions attempting to explain religious variation.
When comparing the old and new paradigms, the contrasts are many. Rather than treating religion as an epiphenomenon, where the “real” causes of religious phenomena must be uncovered, the new paradigm accepts that religious doctrines per se can have consequences. Whereas the old paradigm was content to identify religion as the opium of the people, the new paradigm notes that religion is also often the “amphetamine” of the people, in that it was religion that animated many medieval peasant and artisan rebellions (Cohn 1961), generated repeated uprisings among the native peoples of Africa and North America against European encroachment (Wilson 1975), and recently served as a major center of mobilization against the tyrants of Eastern Europe (Echikson 1990). Instead of attributing religious decisions to unique or irrational cognitive processes, the new paradigm views religious decision making as compatible with rational, instrumental, and scientific thinking (Wuthnow 1985; Stark and Bainbridge 1987; Stark, Iannaccone, and Finke 1996). And, contrary to the old paradigm’s confidence in the superiority of monopoly faiths supported by the state, the new paradigm argues that deregulating religion and increasing competition will spur religious activity. Finally, rather than attempting to explain how modernity causes an inevitable decline in the demand for religion, the new paradigm attempts to explain religious variation by looking at the supply of religion.
Footnotes:
(1) Mark Chaves and Philip Gorski (2001) cited Dan Olson’s work as “decisively” refuting the hypothesis. But Olson and coauthors David Voas and Alasdair Crockett recently concluded: “results from previous cross-sectional studies on pluralism and religious involvement must now be abandoned” because of a “mathematical relationship between measures of religious participation and the index of pluralism (Voas, Olson, and Crockett 2002).
Whether made explicit or not, all social research is guided by a guiding under-labourer; the nature of the object of study and an epistemic relation to that object. Much research bypasses these questions and seeks to study a phenomenon but without carefully justifying the choice of research methods and its efficacy, in explaining the object of study. A ‘what works’ strategy to research, even ad-hoc, often provides a descriptive gloss on aspects of a studied phenomenon but does not penetrate beyond this descriptive account. Three main questions should be considered prior to any research – the epistemological, ontological and subsequently the methodological (Corbetta 2003: 13). Before research instruments can be designed, each tool must be justified as relevant to a specific problematic that is prior informed by an underpinning under-labourer.
1.1 Ontology first?: The importance of meta-theory prior to empirical research
Questions of ontology – the nature of the social – will affect how we study and analyse any social phenomenon. It is the case (as noted) that research methodology will be implicated, de-facto, by a view of the nature of an object studied – as Bhaskar observes, questions of ontology take precedence; ultimately it is “the nature of objects that determines their cognitive possibilities for us” (Bhaskar 1998: 27). Therefore, a consideration of ontology, the object of study, is an inescapable feature of any research, whether made explicit or not.
Despite this, serious consideration of the social and the emergence of its different components are often brushed away; reasons can vary from an anti-theoretical bias or an epistemic bias to questions of ontology. The cognitive possibilities of social research, including methods adopted, are thus given to a pre-supposing conception of the social.
It is the precedence of the epistemic in understanding the nature of social reality that has pushed some analysis in the direction of either methodological individualism or collectivism (underpinned by an empiricism) – an epistemological approach that views the nature of social ontology as ultimately scientific and either verifiable or falsifiable. Thus observed regularities are sought for explanation, by the knower, whether by sense perception or deduction from a hypothesised perspective. In both manners, whether it is positivist empiricism or Popper’s anti-foundationalist post-Kantian empiricism, there is nothing substantive to be induced or deduced beyond an actualism. This despite Popper explicitly critiquing the verificationist criteria of knowability, for example stating:
But observation is a perception, but one which is planned and prepared. We do not ‘have’ an observation […] but we ‘make’ an observation […] An observation is always preceded by a particular interest, a question, or a problem – in short, by something theoretical (cited in Cruckshank 2003: 12).
Empiricism, even beyond its naïve form, is the essential conceptualisation of ontology in what we ‘have’ or ‘make’ – metaphysics is either rejected as meaningless, in the case of empiricist positivism, with no verification, or an unfalsifiable master-ontology that renders research in ideological terms. Either way, it is the meta-theoretical starting points of either approaches that is implicated in any methodological strategies adopted.
1.2 The implications of a theoretical under-labourer in research methodology
To what extent are methods utilised in the natural sciences replicated in the social sciences? How are theoretical frameworks implicated in social research and at a meta-theoretical level, affect a conceptualisation of the social itself?
As both deductivist and inductivist approaches to being posit an actualist conception, then a this-sided tangibleness is expectedly sought. Thus, Popper explicitly argues the more-than-individuals view of the social renders a reification, inasmuch as the researcher can only seek out observable explanations. Thus what can only be conceptualised, or hypothesised, is ultimately what can be directly perceived, in situ.
Karl Popper does concede to the malleability of the social and ultimately the implausibility of universal social laws but states:
If my view of the social sciences and their methods is correct, then admittedly, no explanatory theory in the social sciences can be expected to be true. Nevertheless, this need not trouble an anti-instrumentalist. For he may be able to show that those methods may be very good methods, in the sense that they make it possible for us to discuss critically which of the competing theories, or models, is a better approximation to the truth. (cited by Notturno 1998)
Thus, in this view, there is no definitive ontology, with its encompassing social facts, but instead there must be something tangible or open to falsification i.e. to “make it possible for us to discuss critically which of the competing theories, or models, is a better approximation to the truth”.
Methodological individualism is the only viable possibility for this critical discussion, as it assumes, from starting point, the contingency and malleability of purposeful acts but is simultaneously open to an epistemic immediacy, though a fallible one. In other words, it is not a solipsistic idea of the real as a tautological explanans (as is the case in methodological collectivism) but a falsifiable explanans. There is of course context or what Popper views as a situational logic but the goal of the social scientist is to explicate purposeful or rational acts as embedded within a pre-existing situational logic. So there are two propositions in the explanans – (1) rationally oriented purposeful acts (that individuals will more than likely act in accordance to a given rationale); (2) the context of the act, providing background and the rationale for the same act.
However, in insisting upon ontological individualism, propositionally falsifiable, Popper remains committed to some situational logic to provide an explanation for social practices. Yet the explanandum is utterly reliable on a hypothesised model; a situational model that provides a search light in how we ‘make’ an observation. Yet this trial and error starting point, with its empiricist under-labourer, cannot theoretically go beyond the actual itself and so, at most, gives a descriptive account of the phenomena in study. Still unanswered are explanatory questions regarding the diachronic emergence of a situational logic and the nature of its mediation (considering both constraints and enablements). Again, the nature of the subject-object relation is not adequately considered but brushed aside and defined exclusively in pre-conceived epistemic terms. Justin Cruickshank observes:
Nonetheless, because some social reference is always necessary, the putative individualism of Popper and Watkins ‘smuggles’ social references in implicitly and, in doing this, the question is begged as to what social reality is. ‘Sweeping it under the carpet’ or ‘building it into the individual’ may avoid the impossibility of a purely atomistic view, but it tells us nothing about how the social context which gives meaning to individuals’ actions enables and constrains individuals … If one described the situational logic of employment relations, for instance, in terms of individuals’ dispositions to act in certain ways, then one would be providing an explanation which defined individuals’ dispositions in terms of the prevailing social context. In other words, reference to individuals’ dispositions is not sufficient to warrant a reduction down to individuals, unless one were seeking to produce a psychologistic explanation, whereby ‘social’ relations were a direct expression of fixed mental states, and nothing else. (Cruickshank 2003: 32)
Therefore, it is not surprising that the nomological-deductive-model and verificationism both start from how we derive knowledge in research pursuits, even if sometimes spelt out axiomatically and so conflating the real with the observed. These anthropocentric tendencies can be defined as “what we can know is defined by how we can know” (Cruickshank 2003: 25). Strong meta-theoretical questions are always present and inescapable, contra the claims of grounded theory, and so substantively affecting research strategy. The nature of the problems posed are directly influenced by the cognitive possibilities of the object studied and epistemic questions regarding it.
1.3 An adaptive approach: Theory and research as mutually compatible
A starting meta-theory does not negate its revision nor a multiple level view of theory generation. In other words, a meta-theory as under-labourer, does not entail its use as a criterion of truth; instead it is in constant dialogue or a relation of compatibilism with empirical research. Thus, theory testing feeds into theory generation and are both, in Derek Layder’s terms, in a “co-operative two-way borrowing – from general theory to empirical research and from empirical research to general theory” (Layder 1998: 15). Further, the different levels of theory generation guards against the dangers of either a selective use of theoretical concepts or an imposition of an explanatory framework upon data analysis:
First, where its use is selective there is possibility of wrenching concepts out of their wider theoretical context and thus inadvertently disfiguring their meaning (which could lead either to forcing the data to conform to ‘inappropriate’ concepts, or simply using the concepts as decoration). Secondly, the obverse of these problems may occur when a whole conceptual network or general theory is used as an explanatory framework for research findings. In these cases it is often tempting to employ the whole package of concepts and underlying assumptions to provide a ready-made ‘explanation’ of the findings without due regard for the findings themselves. As a result this may turn into an exercise in self-confirmation and/or self-justification (Layder 1998: 23)
However, does an analysis that posits a distinction in the social, between a transitive and intransitive dimension, render an epistemic fallacy? In other words, is this ontological commitment preceded by an epistemic presupposition? To put it better, in the words of Justin Cruickshank:
This means accepting that it is fallacious to define reality in terms of a priori ideas or a posteriori sense data, as these cut reality to fit the mind (Cruickshank 2004: 582).
Again, this returns to what Derek Layder views as the second obverse problem, identified above. An adaptive approach to theory and research, complemented with an immanent critique, locates both theoretical frameworks and subsequent research outcomes (both are intertwined and mutually re-enforcing) as transitive itself – this entails the fallibility of the theory and negates its use as a criterion of truth. Of course, this is only plausible with a conceptual clarity that circumvents both the epistemic and genetic fallacies in all stages of theorising.
“Positivist empiricism is unable to make sense of human persons, since some of the most important things about personhood are not directly empirically observable and cannot be formulated as nomothetic covering laws of human life. Postmodern relativism equally gets personhood wrong by denying that human reality involves some characteristics, capacities, and tendencies that inhere in the nature of human being, which we rightly can call human nature. The postmodern tendency is to assume that humanity itself is ultimately constructed by language and discourse, and therefore fluid, variable, and infinitely open. By contrast, critical realism views reality as significantly given by the nature of things, stratified, complex, and often emergent. That means that such a thing as human nature can and does exist independent of our mental constructions of it, that it cannot be understood in reductionistic terms, and that science is about better understanding human ontology and the ways that complex human powers and capacities operate in various contexts to produce actions and social structures of importance” …
+ + +
“Personhood is not entirely dependent upon social contexts. The social is only part of the picture, operating with top-down causation from a higher level upon the personal beings from which the social is given its reality, again through emergence. Personhood is most fundamentally grounded and arising from human bodies, their given ontological constituencies, capacities, and tendencies. In my book, I argue that one of the ineliminable properties or features of emergent personhood is dignity. That is not socially constructed by positive law or social contract. It is a sheer fact of human personhood. Since, according to critical realism, all human knowledge, including self-knowledge, is fallible, different cultures of course more or less well recognize and respect that natural dignity of personhood. Different theories thus can be more or less insightful and misleading about reality. The Western liberal tradition has been relatively strong on individual rights. But that has often come at the expense of an appreciation for the interdependent, powerfully social nature of human personhood in which the rights arising from human dignity are grounded. I hope that the conceptual model of human personhood more accurately describes the reality of human existence in a way that provides a strong rationale for dignity and rights, yet one that does not rely ultimately on a view of persons as autonomous individualism that can do little more than insist on the “negative liberties” of not being interfered with in their desires by other agents.”
Source: Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith asks, “What is a person?”
‘Fuel on the Fire: Oil & Politics in Occupied Iraq’ is a newly released book (authored by Greg Muttitt) – both the book’s website and Greg Muttitt’s blog can be accessed here.
The ‘Stop the War Coalition’ have also published a new review of this book and an interview with the author, which can be found here. The book documents the role of corporate oil interests in the Iraq war:
Then to the present day, Muttit’s research reveals vast amounts of evidence demonstrating Britain’s explicit plans to control Iraq’s oil since 2003. For example, through an application under the Freedom of Information Act, Muttit has obtained a hitherto unknown document minuting a Department of Trade and Industry meeting prior to the war in which proposals for Iraq’s oil were discussed. They envisioned ‘Iraq as a member of OPEC but on the dovish side – favouring greater output at more sustainable prices’ with ‘an oil sector open and attractive to foreign investment’ via long-term production sharing agreements and, as requested by the British oil companies, with ‘a level playing field in which all interested parties can bid for development contracts on an open and equal basis’. These policies are in stark contrast to Blair’s public claims at the time that the war had nothing to do with oil and that decisions would be made for the benefit of the Iraqi people.
However, these plans did not always bear fruit and this was partly due to effective grassroots activism:
Furthermore, Muttit highlights the ‘impressive and quite surprising achievement’ of the defeat of the passage of the Western oil law in 2008 by grass roots movement led by Iraqi trade unions, oil experts, political and religious groups. As a result of their campaigning work, the oil contracts that have now been signed, although still problematic, give away far less to investors. Muttit is not the only commentator who recognizes the success of the Iraqi resistance and failure of Western objectives in Iraq. Other leading academics like Jonathan Steel, Noam Chomsky, David Gardner and others share his view.
