Daniel Little — Classifying mechanisms by location

If we are going to take social mechanisms seriously, we need to be able to say more about what they are. Earlier posts have opened the possibility of offering a scheme of classification for social mechanisms (link,link). Here I want to briefly explore a different idea: to group mechanisms according to which part they play within the space of social influence postulated by the idea of methodological localism (link). I introduced the idea of methodological localism in "Levels of the Social" (link) as an ontological alternative to both methodological individualism and methodological holism. That specification of the nature of social reality suggested a small handful of fundamental questions. Here I want to experiment with classifying a number of mechanisms according to which of these questions they answer. Here is the relevant statement from "Levels of the Social" (link):

According to methodological localism, the social is constituted by socially situated individuals, nested within social relations and institutions that have only an intermediate degree of persistence and permanence.

The socially situated individual finds herself within a concrete set of social relationships, networks, and institutions. This complex serves to socialize and provide incentives, as well as to constrain. The approach of methodological localism supports as well the reality that institutions often have extra-local scope, geographically, demographically, and administratively. So, we can legitimately describe institutions with broader scope as being “higher-level” institutions. 

Understanding Society

Classifying mechanisms by location
Daniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

My view is that methodological individualism is just wrong and methodological holism is right. Individuals are elements in complex sets of a web of relationships that constitute a system. The elements of system have no meaning outside of the context in which they are embedded. It is impossible to say anything significant about the elements of a system without reference to the overall contexts, the system and its components, e.g., subsystems.

I believe that methodological localism is an articulation of the components of a system in terms of their characteristics and complex interactions with elements and subsystems, all within the context of the system.

In social science, the system is foundationally constituted by global society (humanity) and the environment. The elements are individual human beings. However, from the point of view of other contexts, physical and biological sciences, human beings are systems that are analyzable into networks of relations and subsystems.

If methodological individualism has a place in social science, it is the analysis of elements of the system, which is clearly incomplete with respect to the system as a whole and the parts that are not elements.

Finally, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This is called synergy. This is investigated in particular in systems theory.

There are two aspects to a system. The real aspect is the existential structure in which everything within a static environment is related and the context in which actual change takes place in a dynamic. The formal or ideational aspect of a system is the epistemic representation of this environment as a system.

Generally speaking, the systemic aspect of reality and knowledge are ignored or submerged so that assumptions and analysis are context-independent. Since meaning and significance are context-dependent, that haphazard methodological approach is defective and often results in nonsense.

Methodological individualism versus methodological holism

Methodological localism emphasizes two ways in which actors are socially embedded. Actors are socially situated and socially constituted.

Socially situated. In any given situation individuals are embedded within a set of social relations and institutions that create opportunities and costs for them. They have friends and enemies, they have bosses and workers, they have neighbors and co-religionists, they have families. All of these relations and institutions serve to constitute the environment within which they make plans and perform their actions....

Socially constituted. The second form of social embeddedness is deeper and more persistent. The individual’s values, commitments, emotions, social ideals, repertoires of action, scripts of behavior, and ways of conceiving of the world are themselves the products of a lifetime of local social experiences. Individuals are socialized throughout their childhoods and adult lives into specific ways of thinking and acting, and the mosaic of these experiences serves to constitute the moral, emotional, and practical characteristics of the individual’s social-cognitive system. The way the individual thinks about the social world is itself a feature of his/her social setting. Moreover, the mechanisms of socialization—schools, religious institutions, military experience, playgrounds, families—are themselves concrete social phenomena that are amenable to empirical sociological investigation, and they too are locally embodied....

These two aspects of embeddedness provide the foundation for rather different kinds of social explanation and inquiry. The first aspect of social embeddedness is entirely compatible with a neutral and universal theory of the agent -- including rational choice theory in all its variants. The actor is assumed to be configured in the same way in all social contexts; what differs is the environment of constraint and opportunity that he or she confronts....

The second aspect, by contrast, assumes that human actors are to some important degree "plastic", and they take shape in different ways in different social settings. The developmental context -- the series of historically specific experiences the individual has as he/she develops personality and identity -- leads to important variations in personality and agency in different settings. So just knowing that the local social structure has a certain set of characteristics -- the specifics of a share-cropping regime, let us say -- doesn't allow us to infer how things will work out. We also need to know the features of identity, perception, motivation, and reasoning that characterize the local people before we can work out how they will process the features of the structure in which they find themselves. This insight suggests a research approach that drills down into the specific features of agency that are at work in a situation, and then try to determine how actors with these features will interact socially and collectively.

If both actors and structures differ substantially across social settings, then there are many possible pathways that interactions and processes can take.

Understanding Society
Social embeddedness and methodological localism
Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

Daniel Little's methodological localism is a weak form of methodological individualism, the strong form being methodological atomism, or the view that by everything can be known about a group by examination of the individuals alone, apart from their relations. 

My own view is that of methodological holism, toward which the concept of being "socially constituted" points. 

Methodological holism is based in the assumption that societies are complex adaptive systems rather than mechanical ones. This is different from methodological collectivism, which holds that everything can be known about a system, including the elements, by examining the system alone, apart from individual elements.

Most social scientists reject methodological atomism and collectivism, and focus on either methodological individualism or holism. Generally the disagreements are over "microfoundations." Methodological individualists insist on strong microfoundations, while methodological holists emphasize context.

Methodological holism recognizes that individuals in human societies are related through reflection, reflexivity, and reciprocity as individuals, and interconnected through social, political, and economic institutions in such fashion that their behavior is interdependent. 

In addition, cultural beliefs, traditions, and rituals provide the contexts and sub-contexts in terms of which individuals relate not only to others but also to themselves. Individuals are not only embedded in context in the sense of being situated, but also their worldview, language, customs, values, norms, preferences, attitudes and so forth are constituted by context. Not only are individuals different across contexts, but also individuals change (adapt) as context shifts, resulting in emergence that is not predictable based on prior data.

The stronger the methodological individualism, the more a priori assumptions can be. The greater the methodological holism, the more a posteriori assumptions must be in order to make space for adaptation and emergence. 

See, for instance, Methodological Individualism vs. Holism by Carl Ratner, Director, Institute for Cultural Research and Education.

Some weekend reading — Daniel Little on social causation

On Thursday, March 8, 2012, I posted Daniel Little — Coleman on the elementary actor. Here is some follow-up on the methodological debate among sociologists, in particular between methodological individualists and institutionalists.

In Causal Pathways through Colman's Boat, Daniel Little examines the relationship of macro explanations and microfoundations.

In Microfoundations and Meso Causation, Daniel Little examines how macro explanations are not incompatible with microfoundations even when not traced out specifically in detail as narrow conceptions of methodological individualism require.

See also Daniel Little, New ideas about structure and agency for more on the debate between methodological individualism and institutionalism.

Finally, here Daniel Little's Current issues in causation research report on Causality and Explanation in the Sciences (2011), which summarizes the major current positions regarding causal explanation in the sciences.

From this, it should be pretty clear that most of the causal "intuitions" one sees on blogs by the non-rigorous are, well, not rigorous.

Peter Cooper shows how this methodological analysis applies to macroeconomics from an MMT viewpoint in Thinking in a Macro Way.

These few short posts cover a lot of territory if you have a chance to get to them.

Leo Foresta on reason and intuition

Almost all university departments and research institutes are now financed directly or indirectly by big business or governments entirely controlled by multinationals through their lobbies and networks.

A key point to grasp is that the mechanistic world vision suits big business, whereas the alternative holistic subtle vision does not.

Read it at Leo Foresta on spirituality and the global crisis

Physics shedding light on the crisis (Part I)

by Leo Foresta

Holism is an extremely important trend that has been developing in the mainstream since the Sixties, when Abraham Maslow successfully overthrew B. F. Skinner's behavioral approach to psychology and established, first, humanistic psychology and then transpersonal psychology. We have come a long way since then, baby, and many people have no clue about it. 

Holism is going to one the dominant trends in this century, and it will replace mechanism. Neoclassical economics is chiefly mechanistic and it will be replaced with a holistic economic paradigm, such as suggested by E. F. Schumacher and Kenneth Boulding.

It is important to distinguish between methodological individualism and ontological individualism, between methodological holism and ontological holism, and between methodological individualism and methodological holism. Adopting a methodology does not necessarily require adopting the corresponding ontology, but it is easy to conflate methodology and ontology if one is not careful.

See also:

Wray, L. Randall. "Kenneth Boulding's Reconstruction of Macroeconomics", Review of Social Economy, vol. LV (Winter 1997): 445-463.

Wray, L. Randall. "Kenneth Boulding's Grants Economics," Journal of Economic Issues, 28 (December 1994): 1205-1225.

Wray, L. Randall. "Boulding's Balloons: A Contribution to Monetary Theory," Journal of Economic Issues, 25 (March 1991): 1-20.