|
|
|
|
Critical Review
The Limits of Instrumental Rationality in Social Explanation
by Doug Mann
*
Abstract
The goal of social explanation is to understand human action, both individual and collective. To do so successfully we must explain action on three distinct (but intertwined) levels: the actors’ intentions, the meaning that actors and interpreters ascribe to action, and the structural ideals that govern action. Each level of explanation has certain types of rationality associated with it. Only on the level of intentionality does instrumental rationality assume a prime importance, yet even there it must compete with normative and expressive accounts of action.
To what degree can human action be explained in rational terms? In answer to this question, I will propose a tripartite model of social explanation. Its goal is to produce a bird’s-eye view of the archaeology of a social act within what I term a “structural idealist” model. Like Schliemann, who discovered at Troy seven distinct levels of the ancient city layered on top of each other, the social archaeologist can, I believe, unearth three distinct strata within any given social act: the intentions of the actor; the meaning of the act independent of those intentions, hermeneutically defined; and its structural context. Each of these three levels involves its own distinctive panorama of forms of rationality, as we shall see.
“Intention” is univalent and can usually be identified on a surface level with verbal utterance alone (assuming truth-telling actors). It is a good part of what Weber refers to as “subjective meaning.” An intentional account of an act must take the actor at his or her word as far as motivation goes. But “meaning” is broader, encompassing a series of bivalences (such as those between stated and unstatable intentions, conscious and unconscious thought, nature and nurture, rationally justifiable political beliefs and disguised class interests). To discern the meaning of an action requires penetrating beneath the surface intentionality of the act and (sometimes) the conscious intention of the actor, as when we say, for example, that “her expression of anger towards her friend really means that her marriage is on the rocks and she is taking out her troubles on those around her,” or “his libertarianism may superficially express his love of freedom, but on a deeper level shows that he is an apologist for the rich,” i.e., this belief means something other than what its holder intends it to mean.
“Structure” is multivalent, subsuming both intention and meaning, but not submerging them, in an act’s connection with other individual acts. Social structures can affect individual intentions only through “structural ideals,” which we explain in large part by penetrating the social meaning of an act or series of acts by individual agents. Structural ideals are those ideas that “intend” social objects, whether to create, shape, maintain, or destroy them. They are the rules that a social actor considers to be “givens” (whether moral, aesthetic, or practical) in a particular situation. One can picture the existence of personal ideals, i.e. those ideas that do not intend social objects, as a noumenal ground for structural ideals; and certainly there are there many “ideas” (or thoughts) that are non-intentional, such as when I picture a canoe gliding across a lake. However, as soon as this picture is charged with a longing to be in that canoe, it becomes in some small way intentional, expressing perhaps a vague desire to escape the noise and bustle of the city for a week or two.
I call the model I sketch out in this paper “structural idealism” (although “structural interactionism” may be just as appropriate) because I see social structure as expressed first and foremost in the collective and shared ideas that constitute social reality for a group of actors, but as being a structuring, institutional horizon for social action all the same. 1 Shared ideas can lead to real social stratification and give real power to economic classes or cultural agents (keeping in mind that economic and cultural power interact).
The model I present here is metatheoretical, a prelude to social theory in general, a sort of “critique of sociological reason.” The point is to show how to arrive at a complete case of social explanation. As to what such a case involves, it must tell a true story about the human acts under investigation. The truth of this story should rely on an interpretation of events that relates them to other, similar events, usually by using some type of narrative. I will not argue for sociological or historical laws or for causal explanations, but I will assume that human “purposes” (whether conscious or unconscious, intended or unintended) “cause” events to happen, and that social theory should aim at a true interpretation of human actions that in some way generalizes beyond their original narrow temporal and spatial context.
The Varieties of Rationality
We can categorize the varieties of rationality claimed by social theorists into three broad camps, with a number of further subdivisions:
1. Systemic Rationality (SR) 2. Instrumental Rationality (IR) 2A. Descriptive Instrumental Rationality (DIR) 2A1. Descriptive Selfish Instrumental Rationality (DSIR), which pursues material goods (DSIR-m) or objects of pleasure (DSIR-u) 2B. Prescriptive Instrumental Rationality (PIR) 2B1. Prescriptive Selfish Instrumental Rationality (PSIR) 3. Teleological Rationality (TR) 3A. Descriptive Teleological Rationality (DTR) 3B. Prescriptive Teleological Rationality (PTR)
1. Systemic Rationality (SR). To attribute SR to agents is to assume that they have reasons for their actions so that those actions can be comprehensible to the social theorist. This doesn’t mean that all human action occurs for a conscious reason, or even that all human action can have a reason ascribed to it by the theorist. It does mean, however, that we must take as a methodological principle the notion that human action is significantly governed by some form of rationality (no matter how flawed) that can be understood independent of the actor’s internal mental processes (i.e., by an external observer). Thus, human social action is in some sense rule-governed (but not necessarily selfish, or instrumentally rational, or part of an historical process that is moving toward some grand telos). If it weren’t rule-governed, explanations of it would amount to intellectual solipsism, or, at best, pure description (if such a thing were possible).
SR can account for actions in pursuit of solidarity with social groups; doing things for their own sake; and behavior grounded in adherence to values or norms.
2. Instrumental Rationality (IR). To attribute IR to agents is to assume that they either do or should choose the best (most efficient, most cost-effective, etc.) means to whatever end they value the most in a given situation. This is the “thin” description of rationality implied by Hume’s famous maxim that reason is the slave of the passions. Goals (which may be “reasonable” or just plain silly) are kept separate from the means actors use to pursue them; the passions, in short, do not cloud our instrumentally rational pursuit of the goals they stipulate.
There are two varieties of IR:
2A. Descriptive Instrumental Rationality (DIR). DIR is the classic instrumental rationality of rational choice theory, imported from economics. As a matter of fact, says the DIR theorist, human beings seek the best means to achieve their goals, i.e., the means best suited to satisfy their considered preferences. In its strongest form, the DIR theorist claims that social actors pursue their preferences along the route they see as the most promising (and “cost effective”) way of getting to their destination. In its weaker form, the DIR theorist admits that perhaps not all human behavior lives up to the high standards posited by instrumental rationality, but that we have to assume that it does, for the most part, if we are to theorize and do empirical research in the social sciences. Thus, we can speak of “literal” and “methodological” versions of DIR.
2A1. Descriptive Selfish Instrumental Rationality (DSIR). One version of descriptive rationality posits that people habitually use instrumental means to seek selfish ends. This is DSIR, which can be broken down into two versions: one (DSIR-m) defines the selfish ends that human beings supposedly seek as material goods, mostly financial ones; while another (DSIR-u) merely stipulates that selfish ends involve “objects of pleasure,” utilitarian goals in a broader sense.
2B. Prescriptive Instrumental Rationality (PIR). PIR is the claim that people ought to instrumentally pursue their considered preferences, come hell or high water. It is the importation of Homo economicus from the realm of economic theory into that of normative discourse.
As with its descriptive cousin, we can also imagine a Prescriptive Selfish Instrumental Rationality (PSIR), which tells us that we should seek selfish goals by the most efficient means possible.
3A. Descriptive Teleological Rationality (DTR). Like DIR, DTR describes human action as rational, but this is rationality in the sense of contributing to reaching humanity’s inevitable historical destination, which the theorist defines as rational. Examples are Christian eschatology, Condorcet’s dream of democratic liberation in the coming tenth epoch of history, Hegel’s claim that history is moving toward rational freedom, and Marx’s claim that the historical evolution of the class struggle will lead to a revolution against capitalism that will inaugurate a golden age of equality and prosperity. The rational is real, and the real is rational. Individuals may participate in reaching the rational telos; but by and large, their participation is engulfed by the cunning of reason in a broader social process.
3B. Prescriptive Teleological Rationality (PTR). The PTR theorist advocates moving toward some social goal defined by the theorist as rational, even though this goal is not in any sense inevitable. For instance, a liberal might say that we have a moral duty to build a society where tolerance, freedom, and human decency prevail.
An exclusively social-structuralist understanding of social theory might lead to DTR. Indeed, DTR may have a natural tendency to ally itself with strict social structuralism, as we can see quite clearly in Marx and Engels’s historical materialism. But any serious attention paid to subjective reason (whether systemic or more rigorously instrumental) will surely lead us away from embracing DTR. A purely teleological account of rationality is best left to the prophets (DTR) and moralists (PTR).
This leaves as the real issue the question of whether there is any need to move from thin, systemic rationality toward a thicker instrumental rationality. Following in the footsteps of Weber, Collingwood, and Peter Winch, I will contend that we need to posit systemic rationality if we are to understand the intentions of social actors so as to explain (as opposed to merely describing) human action. But even within the realm of intentionality, there is more than pure instrumentality, including what Michael Taylor (1995) calls “normative” and “expressive” behavior, social identification, and intrinsic motivation. 2 And at the level of “meaning,” instrumentally rational behavior loses even more ground to unconscious impulses, normative and expressive behavior, and the like. When we arrive at the level of social structures, moreover, all we really have to work with is systemic rationality, the idea that people do things for reasons. The logic of collective action involves much more than the instrumental pursuit of clearly understood and ordered preferences. Social forces shape our actions in a variety of preconscious and unconscious ways by impelling, cajoling, or forcing us to accept what I will term structural ideals (roughly speaking, group norms) that guide our actions in myriad circumstances.
Intention
For Weber (1978, 4), we can speak of a social action only insofar as the actor attaches a subjective meaning to his or her action. Part of this subjective meaning is one’s perception of the attitudes and actions of others. Human intentionality on this level of analysis is univalent in the following sense: the observer must accept the actor’s own definition of the intention behind the act. There is no depth to be plumbed in the analysis of intentionality. Although the meaning of an action may refer to something lying below the surface of an actor’s stated reason(s) for acting, the actor’s intention is simply the statement of that reason. Thus intentionality presupposes systemic rationality.
Building on this Weberian foundation, Peter Winch (1958) notes that understanding the meaning of what was done is an act of interpretation akin to trying to make intelligible what was said. More recently, Anthony Giddens (1982, 49) has pointed out that if we want to connect human action with structural explanation we need a theory of the human agent or subject, an account of the conditions and consequences of actions, and an interpretation of “structure” as somehow produced by, or producing, these conditions and consequences. This is almost truistic unless we add that the “theory of the human subject” should have a dual nature, covering both intentionality and meaning, if it is to be a complete theory and if it is going to be able to provide a link to social structure.
Human intentions, however, are not discrete things. It would be more proper to say, following Giddens (1986, 543), that there is a context of intentionality and practice that “saturate” any given social product. Thought and social interaction are processes, not collections of atomic units, although the analyst must, to some degree, treat them atomistically to get on with her analysis. Furthermore, as Giddens (1982, 31) reminds us, intentional thought and interaction are also processes that take place in the durée of everyday life. Each decision, thought, or action that we can isolate from the others surrounding it so as to reflect upon it is, all the same, saturated with the physiological grounding, emotive coloring and mental logic of its neighbors when experienced in its immediate and original location in time/space.
Consciousness is intentional insofar as it is directed toward objects, whether physical or ideal. For the purposes of understanding a section of the flux of consciousness and the way consciousness is played out in social acts, it is useful to introduce an “analytical atom” upon which the social theorist can focus. This atom I will call the phenomenological moment. It is an act or series of acts that the social theorist accords unity for heuristic purposes. It is a slice of space/time containing a discrete quantum of human interaction. The size of this slice varies according to the interests and purposes of the social theorist. Within each such moment, we can discern the intention/meaning/structure network.
A given phenomenological moment can be understood synchronically, as crossing the three elements of our theoretical network at a given point in time. Or it can be understood diachronically, within one level of analysis alone (say, just in terms of the actors’ intentions), by showing how it is connected to prior and later moments in the same local series. For the social theorist, then, history and sociology are methodologically indistinguishable, although they are too often assigned the separate tasks of analyzing social diachrony and synchrony, respectively, in the academic division of labor. A full analysis of a given phenomenological moment should include both history and sociology (at least taken in its structuralist mode).
An interesting analysis of a province of intentional discourse comes from Marvin B. Scott and Stanford M. Lyman (1968), who discuss the “accounts” people attempt to give of their untoward behavior. They divide these accounts between excuses and justifications, detailing several types of each. Their more general point is that the success or failure of an account offered to a given group, subculture, etc., will depend in part on the background expectations of all parties involved (including the person offering the account and those listening to it). The point that Scott and Lyman make with respect to accounts can be generalized: the “success” or “failure” of actions often depends on a correct reading by the actor(s) of the background expectations, or structural ideals, relevant to the situation. Thus the success of intentional discourse can to a large degree be measured by the social meanings attributed to it by its intended audience, with these meanings being themselves, to some degree, structural products. When the wrong meaning is attached to a given discursive effort, it may doom the actor to being misunderstood or ignored.
As I’ve already mentioned, at the level of a strictly intentional account of human behavior, we must assume at least systemic rationality for human action to make any sense at all. John Ferejohn and Debra Satz (1995, 78–79) go a step farther, claiming that intentional explanation must be privileged in the social sciences; only thus can we achieve the (partial) universalism—the discernment of universal behavioral laws—that they hope for. This is part of their attempt to situate rational choice theory—which they see as a mild version of what I call descriptive instrumental rationality (DIR)—at the center of political science. However, even if we assume that intentionality is central in social explanation, it is a rather large category error to leap to the conclusion that we must give any explanatory privilege to DIR. Even acts with clear intentions behind them do not always aim to achieve their goals along instrumentally rational paths. Our core values and our passions (not to mention our social identifications) too often cloud the sunny skies of the pretended utility maximizer. As Robert Abelson (1995, 27) notes, the instrumental state of mind is part of a broader mindset that can be switched on and off at different times, and different people have different mixtures of instrumental and noninstrumental orientations. 3
Herbert Blumer’s presentation of the premises of symbolic interactionism serves as a useful methodological sextant with which to navigate our way from intentionality to meaning.
Blumer castigates positivists and functionalists for failing to go directly to the empirical social world in their work (32). This critique is especially well taken (although any attack on functionalism today might seem to be little more than a red herring) on the level of intentionality, for it is easiest to get at the actual reasons actors have (or would give, if asked) for their actions by asking them directly, or by using reliable written accounts of their actions. 4 While intentionality always exists in concrete human social interactions that are, themselves, mediated by the meanings brought to these interactions, part of this meaning is the stated (or statable) conscious intention of the actor. 5
Other parts of this meaning, however, are things like the unconscious drives of human actors, their metaphysical and ideological presuppositions, the social space and “spirit of the age” in which the action takes place, and the unintended consequences of the action. All of these sources of meaning (and others, too) are tied to, but in some way transcend, the intentionality of the individual. It is true, as Giddens (1979, 5) notes, that all actors enjoy some degree of “discursive penetration” of the society in which they live. They are aware, on the level of discursive consciousness, of the social rules of the game. But this awareness is inevitably less than total, both because of cognitive limitations on the individual’s awareness of all the discursive knowledge there is out there, and because her awareness is channelled or dammed up by the unconscious mind, her basic presuppositions, the limited social and mental space in which her actions take place, and the unintended consequences of her actions. 6
Imagine Tom, an impressionable young undergraduate at a local university; and Mary, a professional woman in a dual-income suburban family. Within each of their social worlds, they intend to be “successful.” Tom is trying to maintain his straight-A average, which is a means to the end of the career in accounting he has set as one of his life goals. Mary, a middle-level manager at a large company, is trying to climb the corporate ladder, primarily so she can earn a higher salary. Both are engaged in instrumentally rational thinking and action.
But on another level, whenever Tom encounters Professor X at school, he automatically and unconsciously treats him with deference or formal respect. Similarly, when Mary encounters a police officer on the street, she accords him the same sort of respect. Built into these interactions are subjective intentions, of course, but also something more. The formal respect paid to authority figures is a sort of status. The intentions of each actor explain only in part why they accord people this type of status. Nor is there, except in part, an instrumentally rational explanation for this respect (Tom’s desire to get a good mark in his course with Professor X; Mary’s desire to maintain good relations with the police). In each case, status expresses a normative acceptance of the respective institutions receiving the respect (the university and the police force).
Tom may even ridicule Professor X behind his back for his clumsy and forgetful manner, but he abandons this disrespectful attitude in the professor’s presence. His respect is “structural” in the sense that it is shared by Tom with most, if not all, of his fellow undergraduates as a given that is ingrained in their practical consciousness. Its “meaning” may reflect on someone’s public character (“He’s such a polite young man”), on someone’s upbringing, on an unconscious projection of a stern and scolding father-image onto the professor, etc. Yet both the meaning and the structure of people’s respect for authority figures are tied to the phenomenological moments when they encounter these figures in a given time and place, i.e., when they interact with them, whether passively (e.g., by avoiding the professor’s office when Tom’s assignment is late) or actively (e.g., by politely asking a traffic cop for directions when Mary is lost).
A simple and common feeling such as respect for authority can be multidimensional when we try to bring it into the realm of social theory. We can enter into any of the common notions associated with social interaction on any of the three levels (intentions, meaning, or social structure), and from that entry point we can extend our analysis into the other two levels. At the same time, we can see not only instrumental rationality at work in the social phenomenon of respect, but also elements of expressive and normative behavior, not to mention social solidarity. None of the three levels of analysis has any special privilege, either methodologically or chronologically, although it seems more pragmatic to start with the subjective intentions of the actor(s) in explaining “what happened” in a given case because (a) this avoids the holist bias endemic to some social science, and (b) we are both morally and epistemologically obliged to take into account the individual actors’ view of themselves before we impose any social meanings or structures upon that self-understanding.
When the social theorist digs into a given social act, all three strata of explanation are simultaneously available if she works hard enough to get at them. The stratum investigated depends on the particular interests of the theorist, though a complete archaeology of a social act should investigate all three strata rather than ignoring the rubble covering his or her primary object of interest (as Schliemann did at Troy).
Meaning
When we leave the conscious intentions of the actor behind and ask, “What is the meaning of her action?”, we are forced to consider a series of bivalent sources of that meaning. These include (although this list is by no means exhaustive) conscious intentions vs. unconscious drives, conscious and truthfully stated intentions vs. conscious but falsely stated intentions (lies), intended vs. unintended consequences, the prior conditions of the act of which the actor was aware versus those of which the actor was not aware, and the actor’s reflexive interpretation of her own past actions versus others’ interpretations of it.
“Meaning” encompasses both sides of each of these binary pairs. Weber (1978, 6) claims that actions that cannot be related to an intended purpose are devoid of meaning, but two pages later tells us that there are two types of understanding (Verstehen): direct observational understanding and explanatory understanding. The latter mode of Verstehen is what he terms the “rational” understanding of motivation, which involves “placing the act in an intelligible and more inclusive context of meaning” (8). 7 Leaving aside the questionable validity of a separate “direct observational” understanding of a social act, my claim is that explanatory understanding is analytically distinct from an understanding of the actor’s intentions, and can be better understood in terms of an analysis of the “meaning” of the act.
As Frank Parkin (1982, 26) points out, in one sense Verstehen seems to be based on the idea that actors are typically aware of their motives and of their subjective states of mind, leaving no place for notions of “false consciousness.” Yet Weber himself (1978, 21) admits that only rarely is the subjective meaning of an action present in the consciousness of the actor:
The theoretical concepts of sociology are ideal types not only from the objective point of view, but also in their application to subjective processes. In the great majority of cases actual action goes on in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness or actual unconsciousness of its subjective meaning. The actor is more likely to “be aware” of it in a vague sense than he is to “know” what he is doing or be explicitly self-aware about it.
This tension between the intentional and the unintentional can be dispelled if we are willing to accept meaning as a separate category from intention. Meaning can go beyond the strictly intentional to the unintended and the unconscious.
The unintentional aspect of subjective meaning leads us back to Blumer and symbolic interactionism. The premise of interactionism is Winch’s observation that our social relations with our fellows are permeated with ideas about reality, such that social relations can be seen as ideas about (social) reality (Winch 1958, 22). Blumer (1969, 10) moves forward from this Wittgensteinian premise to suggest that the “worlds” we live in consist of “objects” created by symbolic interaction. Human life is one vast process of forming, sustaining, and transferring these social objects, which have no fixed status unless their meaning is continuous (ibid., 12). The social object is the focal point for the production of any meaning in a social act over and above that contained in the conscious intention of the actor. 8 The social meaning of an object, for example this essay, cannot be exhausted by even a thorough examination of the agent’s intentions in writing it. It is a social object at all only insofar as others read their own meanings into it (keeping in mind that in the present case, these meanings might parallel quite closely my own in writing it), and also insofar as we allow the circumstances (including biographical, political, and economic) of its production to be part and parcel of its social meaning. We can speak of what the author “meant to say” in a given text, but also of what that text “means” in the greater context of her life; of the “historical meaning” of the work; or even of what the ideas contained in the text “meant” in the lives of its readers. That is, unlike an actor’s intentions, the meaning of a social object must be interpreted (either reflectively by the actor, or by someone else, such as the theorist).
Therefore, the sociology of knowledge is vital to an understanding of the “meaning” of social acts. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966, 1) take as their basic premise the notion that reality is socially constructed, and that the sociology of knowledge must analyze the process whereby this occurs. For the sociologist of knowledge, the central focus, over and above any concern with intellectual history, must be the world of common-sense knowledge: the knowledge that constitutes the fabric of meanings without which no society could exist (ibid., 14). The world of everyday life has a paramount reality, and is organized around the “here” of my body and the “now” of my present (ibid., 21–22). The analysis of this here and now has become an important part of sociology and history in the last 20 years, fueled in large part by feminism and postmodernism, and especially by Michel Foucault’s archaeologies of knowledge and genealogies of the enchained body.
Our understanding of the world of everyday knowledge requires us to move beyond the stated intentions of the social actors to the practical knowledge and unconscious processes that sustain everyday life. The social self is in a continual process of construction through the attribution of significance (i.e., meaning) by all those in contact with that self from moment to moment. The evaluative aspect of this construction of the self ebbs and flows, depending on the words and actions of the actor. Our practical awareness of “how to do things” is what Berger and Luckmann (1966, 43) call “recipes” for the mastery of routine problems. Uncovering the recipes embedded in practical activities is a large part of what I mean by reconstructing the “meaning” of a social action. Needless to say, the actor may know how to use a recipe without being able to formulate it explicitly. This analysis of “recipes” is one of the central tasks of social theory insofar as it seeks to produce a phenomenology of everyday life.
Without getting too deeply into the question of the social construction of the self, it is important to remember that our self-image and our image of others is the end product of a never-ending process of reflecting reflected images. 9 We see ourselves as reflections of the way others talk about us and act toward us, which influences our future performances, which in turn influences the way others will either maintain or revise their images of us. The social meaning of individual acts is usefully seen as tied to a series of performances given within the framework of an infinitely reflexive (and, as Christopher Lasch reminds us, sometimes narcissistic) construction of the self. This construction takes place largely by means of images communicated from the others present in the collection of phenomenological moments we call everyday life.
Weber (1978, 9) saw hidden “motives” and repressions as one of the limits on the understanding of subjective meaning. 10 These were subaqueous formations inaccessible to the surface-sailing social theorist. But as Giddens (1986, 536, 538) notes, we must trace the origins of social meaning to the methodological apparatus embedded in the “practical consciousness” of the routines of day-to-day life. This practical consciousness, this preconscious sense of how to do things, acts for Giddens as a link between the conscious and the unconscious. Both our practical consciousness and our unconscious drives enter into any full account of the meaning of a given phenomenological moment. Although the stated intentions of the actor have a certain methodological primacy, we must further come to understand the practical knowledge that allows (or fails to allow) her to complete the act, along with the possibility that our awareness of the actor’s unconscious impulses might help us to more fully comprehend the context of her intentions and therefore the meaning of her action. Thus a complete theory of mind for the social theorist would see the meaning of social actions as the product of (a) intentional consciousness, (b) practical consciousness, and (c) unconscious drives.
The Postmodern Error
Social theorists notoriously argue over the “meaning” of social actions. This lack of agreement has led to the postmodernist refusal to search for the “true” significance of behavior. The social world is one great text for them, full of signs, all of which can be read in a variety of ways. However, the nonsubjective meaning of an action is not like an empty ship adrift on the ocean, one that can be pulled by the determined tugboat-theorist any which way; it is anchored on the one side by the subjective intentions of the actor and, on the other, by the structural ideals that shaped the act. Although a social epistemology cannot provide a clear and precise formula to guide us to the “objective” meaning of a social action, if we keep ourselves firmly anchored to both intention and social structure we can avoid the postmodernist tendency to drift far out onto the waters of epistemological relativism.
As we escape pure intentionality and move toward interpreting the social meaning of human action, it should become clear that explanations of behavior in terms other than pure instrumental rationality have to be considered. Specifically, part of the “meaning” of a social action is its expression of values, class or other social group solidarity (or lack thereof), or some motivation of which the actor isn’t conscious.
Yet when we look for the social meaning of an action, we can begin to talk about a limited sense of teleological rationality as part of social explanation. Jeffrey Friedman (1995) rightly suggests (in line with a number of other critics of rational choice theory) that instrumental rationality is a “learned” way of thinking that is largely accepted in economic life, but is seen as less than holy in the political arena. Friedman (ibid., 15) goes on to applaud a Verstehende approach to social science, calling for a “transcendent critique that would historicize, as the contingent products of Western rationalism, the strategic maximizing that modern academics may find plausible as a universal explanation simply because we (among others) often engage in it.” In short, we should look at instrumental rationality as part of what it “means” to live in the West at the beginning of the twenty-first century, where a narrow economically instrumental model increasingly dominates the discourse of daily life (especially media reportage and academic and political debate). This type of rationality can be seen less as hardwired into the central processing unit of human nature, and more as a semiconscious telos for a given group of people in a given place and time.
Another dimension of social meaning is ideology, whether political, economic, or religious. It would be almost trite to claim that an important part of an analysis of the meaning of a social act lies in some understanding of the ideological presuppositions of the actor (or of the theorist, for that matter). But it is true all the same. Let’s return to Tom and Mary. Part of the social context of Tom’s everyday life is the politically charged atmosphere of the campus he visits five days a week. Feminism, environmentalism, consumerism, and other ideologies influence the way classes are taught, the way students dress and relate to each other, and the way Tom speaks and acts toward those he sees as bearers of different ideological positions. For example, Tom is especially mindful that he does not say anything disrespectful of women when in the presence of his friend Jane, because he is quite attracted to her (the meaning of his acts being influenced by a strong biological drive) and because he knows that she is a radical feminist and will thus not tolerate the “looser” language that Tom’s male friends use. His “stable and ordered preference” is to sleep with Jane, and he adjusts his behavior so as not to offend her. Moreover, even though, deep down, Tom is a laissez-faire relativist on moral and religious issues (thus proving Alan Bloom right about university undergraduates)—according others the right to believe whatever they see fit, as long as they do not try to impose their beliefs on him—he reacts with some degree of genuine horror at politically incorrect expressions of sexism and racism. In short, Tom is ideologically confused: his behavior is a mixture of instrumentally rational motivations (“Yes, you’re absolutely right Jane!”) and normative goals (“We should all love each other, regardless of race, religion, or culture.”)
Mary, however, is in quite another boat. Although herself openly sympathetic to feminism, she works in the competitive environment of the middle management of a large corporation, where both men and women are in positions of authority. Many of her fellow managers have no sympathy for her political views, and tell her so to her face, while some of her male colleagues claim that Mary’s feminism is just a way of compensating for her lack of success, so far, at climbing the corporate ladder. This infuriates Mary, but at the same time it has taught her that she must shelve her ideological position in most of her everyday relationships with her coworkers. Instead she cynically pretends to adopt the ideology of competitive economic individualism favored by those in positions of power in the corporation, while retaining a strong social identification with the women’s movement outside her office.
The point of these two brief cases is that the environments in which Tom and Mary work give them a distinct menu of ideological choices. Each is subjected to real restrictions imposed on them by the social structures in which they live and work. The structural ideals of their friends, colleagues, and superiors shape their own ideals and thus their behavior. Of course, our ideological menus may not be so constrained as to exclude our own preferred selections. As is the case in the social construction of the self, the construction of the individual’s ideological position is tied to a process of reflecting one’s own initial “gut feelings” in the mirror of the world around us, having them reflected back at us through the speech and actions of others, re-evaluating our initial feelings, and so on, ad infinitum. In this process of construction, instrumental rationality tells only part of the story: intrinsically held values, along with various social identifications, are also important. When determining the social meaning of an action, however, it is useful to look not only at the actor’s stated ideological position but at the ideological “environment” in which she operates, and at any unstated ideological presuppositions influencing her actions (opening the door to the sort of sociology of knowledge to which Marx and Mannheim were sympathetic). Any explanation of the meaning of a social action is less than complete if it fails to address ideology as such a multitextured phenomenon.
Structure
Weber (1978, 6) proposed constructing “ideal types” of purely rational courses of action to help us evaluate how these courses of action are influenced by irrational factors. He also maintained that collective concepts must be treated solely as the result of ways of organizing a collection of particular acts of individual persons (ibid., 13). One of the standard criticisms of Weber is that his focus on subjective meaning prevented him from recognizing the influence of social structures. Talcott Parsons (1947, 20) takes up this criticism in noting that Weber’s suspicion of a functionalist approach to social science is based on his sense of the indispensability of an analysis of individual motivation. Yet in fact, he often resorted to structural explanations, such as the effect of Protestant beliefs on the development of capitalism.
To resolve this paradox, we can once more look to Weber himself. His notion of the ideal type can be rehabilitated as an everyday mental phenomenon (rather than a theoretical construct) that structures action in a way that transcends individual choice: a structural ideal. As R. G. Collingwood points out in The Idea of History (1946, 200), the fact that a certain people lives on an island in itself has no effect on its history, but the way they perceive that insularity, as a barrier or as a highway, does matter. The “hard facts” of a situation are the hard facts of the way the actor sees the situation (ibid., 317). When these perceptual “hard facts” are accepted as unquestioned assumptions in a given social group, class, culture, or subculture, we can speak of a structural ideal and thus identify, with varying degrees of certainty, a structuring element. 11 Structural ideals connect agents to the material resources of their society (including financial capital), in turn influencing future structural ideals. Thus we can imagine a web linking material goods to social actors by means of structural ideals (thus is born class, both as a theoretical construct and a practical reality).
To some degree, Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and doxa capture what I mean by “structural ideal.” However, both of his concepts have their limitations. A habitus is a set of ingrained dispositions within a given group or class. Bourdieu (1992, 85) maintains that such dispositions are necessary if objective social structures are to reproduce themselves among individuals who share the same material conditions of existence. Sociology must treat as identical all biological individuals who support the same habitus, such that an objective view of a social class has as its object of knowledge not an aggregate of individuals but “the system of dispositions (partially) common to all products of the same structure.” Although Bourdieu allows for some diversity of worldviews, for him the history of the individual is never anything but a certain “specification” of the collective history of his group or class; diverse dispositions are seen as structural variants of the group or class habitus (ibid., 86).
At times Bourdieu’s habitus acquires all-encompassing causal powers, emptying it of much of its explanatory content. He says that as a system of acquired “generative schemes” adjusts to particular conditions, “the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all the actions consistent with those conditions, and no others” (1992, 95). If he means by this simply that norms or ideals inform social action, then one can agree (although without much enthusiasm for his pretended discovery). In this case, habitus can be seen as fluid. But if he means that people working within a given habitus are rigidly controlled and directed by it, and that it is fairly stable (which I don’t think Bourdieu would want to say, although he sometimes comes close to doing so), then we would have to abandon his view as a form of structural determinism that tries to sweep under the carpet the thought-side of action, reducing intentionality to a mere function of systemic variables.
Doxa is Bourdieu’s term for the naturalization of the arbitrariness of a given social order in the mind and body of a social agent. He writes (1992, 164) that when there is a quasi-perfect fit between the objective social order and subjective principles of organization, “the natural and social world appears as self-evident.” Thus, “the world of tradition is experienced as a ‘natural world’ and taken for granted.” Doxa become orthodoxies when challenged by nonbelievers. What I mean by structural ideals would have to include doxa, orthodoxy, and heterodoxy, as all three can structure social thought and action.
The “structural” component of social explanation takes into account the way social forces affect behavior (keeping in mind that social forces exist for the most part only in terms of certain ideals being accepted as doxa by the actors in question). Needless to say, these structural elements tend to flow into each other in the concrete analysis of a given social act. It is useful to bring in Giddens’s concept of the duality of structure at this point. According to Giddens (1986, 533), social structures should be seen as both the media and the outcome of the human actions they recursively organize. Social agents are able to carry out their day-to-day activities only by instantiating certain structural properties, or, to use my terminology, by invoking or applying (whether consciously, unconsciously, or on the level of practical consciousness) a network of structural ideals. 12 Structure thus influences the individual actor through the sort of collective concepts that Weber was so suspicious of. When these ideals become sufficiently spread out and temporally durable, we can begin to use concepts like “class,” “subculture,” or “nation.”
As Giddens (1979, 9) notes, institutions can be seen as the structured social practices followed by most people in a given place and time. We can thus see an institution like the university as a spatiotemporal meeting point of the social practices (teaching, research, going to the pub, etc.) of a loosely defined but more-or-less regular body of actors (students, faculty, staff). The “structure” of these practises exists in the general notions that each group of actors brings to the situation, within a given space (the campus) over a span of time (e.g., a lecture hour).
On one level, structure has only a virtual reality (Giddens 1979, 9). We cannot concretely identify a structural element such as “class”; we can only indicate the beliefs, practices, and material signs that point to its “existence.” All the same, structures seem quite real to most actors. For example, in a society with striking differentiations of wealth, poverty is a real constraint on free thought and action. It may be true that property is a legal “notion” that is sustained by symbolic interactions, but the “virtuality” of inequalities in its distribution melts away when the social actor begins to worry about paying next month’s rent. The reality of a concept like poverty exists in its ideational sedimentation in political and economic ideologies, in the legal system, and in everyday economic interactions.
Indeed, the most important structural ideals may be those that organize, distribute, and legitimize the physical and informational objects we call “property”—a regional structure of control that, as Enlightenment figures such as Adam Smith, William Robertson, and John Millar were the first to emphasize, dominates many other regional structures of control (including the laws, political ideologies, and forms of government and public administration). Where social groups blindly or subserviently accept as obvious truths ideals about property that structure their lives, we have discovered an instance of the operation of hegemonic power—the ideological substructure of what is commonly termed “economic” or “political” power. More broadly, one could define “power” as the capacity of an individual or group to compel another individual or group to accept certain structural ideals as valid.
A parallel to the way that structural ideals influence everyday action can be seen in Erving Goffmann’s discussion of how impressions of reality are fostered by our public performances. As human beings, our impulses, moods, and so forth vary over time, but we are expected in our social performances to exhibit a more regular picture of ourselves to those around us, which requires a certain “bureaucratization of the spirit” (Goffmann 1959, 56). The social actor feels a strong obligation to appear in a steady moral light, to be an effective “merchant of morality” whose wares are known and trusted by those who consume her performances (ibid., 251). The self is a collection of dramatically staged public performances. These performances help to create the nebulous structure we call “character.”
The tendency to bureaucratize one’s actions, to produce a pattern of activities that point to a coherent, core self, is accomplished partly by instantiating a coterie of structural ideals in everyday thinking and acting. We choose certain qualities, virtues, and tastes as distinctly “ours” at a given point in our lives, and we act so as to “impress” the reality of this construction of our self on those around us. One result is that other people use phrases like “she’s such a nice woman,” “he’s a hard worker,” and “your taste in music is exquisite.” Lévi-Strauss (1969, 28) tells us that just as music makes the individual conscious of his physiological rootedness, mythology makes one aware of one’s roots in society. With the caveat that Lévi-Strauss was wrong to see structure as operating independently of individual human motivation, we can see our structural ideals as the modern “myths” that give us a sense of rootedness in everyday life. If someone rejects key elements of these myths, we term her an “outsider,” a rebel, or, in the extreme, “mentally ill.” The social theorist does not have to be concerned so much with the moral truth or falsity of these myths/ideals, but with the epistemological question of their content, their influence, and the way they change over time. The analysis of social structure is equally a sociological and an historical pursuit.
At the structural level of social explanation we leave instrumental rationality behind. When “social forces” influence behavior, they work, almost by definition, in the province of values and identifications of which actors are only partly conscious. People’s ethics, political affiliations, styles of dress, codes of deportment, and definitions of economic self-interest are structured by various ideals of which they are only dimly aware (unless they engage in an intensive process of self-examination). These ideals don’t work by presenting actors with menus of choices, each with its own distinct costs and benefits; instead, they define the menus themselves, or, to speak more accurately, they structure which items on the menu the social actor takes seriously, and which ones the actor automatically discounts.
Let’s pay one last visit to Tom and Mary. Tom’s life is structured in space and time by the social practices of university life. He may bring with him to the university certain class or cultural ideals, and these may continue to influence his actions in part, but the university tends to generate its own structural ideals. These include lecture timetables, the attitude of respect that is generally expected by most professors from students, and the sense that education has a positive value either in itself or as a means to the future end of employment.
Further, Tom subconsciously imbibes modes of dress and ways of speaking that reflect his status as a stylish male undergraduate at the turn of the century. He wears a Nike cap and shoes and brand-name jeans and sports an earring, a stylistic ensemble that expresses his solidarity with the mock nonconformity of his friends. As Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, and others at the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies showed in the 1970s, such ensembles express various forms of subcultural identity. 13 In the interval between childhood and the working world of the adult, Tom wishes to be part of a subculture that defies what he sees as the dull conformity of middle-class suburban life. Ironically, his identity with this subculture is expressed in modes of dress and deportment that are given to him in the form of structural ideals he blindly accepts: he is, in short, just as much the “victim” of social forces as the rest of his undergraduate male friends. In short, although Tom chooses his way of being for a variety of reasons, some of which he can articulate (i.e., he is systemically rational), this way of being is given to him by structural ideals not of his own making (i.e., he is plugged into a sort of teleological rationality of which he is only dimly aware).
Mary’s corporate environment is perhaps more rigorously structured in terms of organizing its employees in space and time, while it, too, hands out status and respect differentially to various strata by means of a set of structural ideals its members generally accept (or at least act in accordance with). We can speak of her corporation as being part of a capitalist economic structure insofar as it exists in a network of regular (often competitive) interactions with other conglomerations of actors with similar structural ideals. Mary’s primary motivation in working for her employer is money, with a tip of her cap to social status. But she, like Tom, presents her body in a specific stylistic ensemble that articulates her acceptance of the structural ideals of her professional position and class. She may dress in power suits and tight skirts, her hair tied back as if to symbolize the aerodynamic efficiency of her physical self, and thus of her performance on the job. This ensemble also expresses her social identification and normative connection with corporate life. Further, she revels in the gossipy chit-chat about who’s on the way up and who’s on the way down within the corporate hierarchy. In fact, this attention to hierarchy may allow her to integrate her feminism into her work life by being a tireless advocate of employment equity and of more women in the boardroom. If one were to ask Mary about all of this, she would explain her actions in terms of instrumental and normative reasons (i.e., money and sexual solidarity). Yet, like Tom, the network of structural ideals (of dress, deportment, organizational rules, and ideology) within which she lives and works is not of her own making.
Tom and Mary’s intentions govern their social acts, but the social theorist understands these intentions as having certain meanings that sometimes come together to produce certain structures. These structures, taken as real by other actors, in turn influence future intentions in an endless feedback loop.
A social explanation framed solely in terms of social structures is an unnecessarily reductive enterprise. The consciousness of actors and the meaning of their actions always lurks in the shadows of social structural explanations, and we lose (perhaps for the sake of a single-minded theoretical simplicity) much of the richness of social explanation if we fail to go beyond the level of structure. Structure is not a deus ex machina that we can wheel in whenever we are puzzled by a given set of social events. All the same, social theorists should retain structural explanation as an important weapon in their theoretical arsenal if they hope to explain fully what happened in a given phenomenological moment—provided that they remind themselves once in a while that a deterministic structure that exists wholly independent of individual consciousnesses is nothing more than an occult quality.
We need an account of the individual intentions of social actors. But we also need an account of the social meaning of their actions, and an account of the social structures woven into individual intentions and social meanings. These three levels of explanation are separate only as virtual realities. In any concrete phenomenological moment they are inextricably intertwined. Thus we need a regulative and heuristic concept such as “structural ideals” to explain how social structure is inculcated in individual acts and in the meanings both the actors and the theorist ascribe to those acts.
References
Abelson, Robert P. 1995. “The Secret Existence of Expressive Behavior.” Critical Review 9, nos. 1–2: 25–36.
Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor Books.
Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Collingwood, R. G. 1946. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ferejohn, John, and Debra Satz. 1995. “Unification, Universalism, and Rational Choice Theory.” Critical Review 9, nos. 1–2: 71–84.
Friedman, Jeffrey. 1995. “Economic Approaches to Politics.” Critical Review 9, nos. 1–2: 1–24.
Giddens, Anthony. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory. London: Macmillan.
Giddens, Anthony. 1982. Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory. London: Macmillan.
Giddens, Anthony. 1986. “Action, Subjectivity, and the Constitution of Meaning.” Social Research 53: 529–45.
Goffmann, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Green, Donald P., and Ian Shapiro. 1995. “Pathologies Revisited: Reflections on Our Critics.” Critical Review 9, nos. 1–2: 235–76.
Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. 1976. Resistance through Rituals. London: Hutchinson.
Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1978. Myth and Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Parkin, Frank. 1982. Max Weber. Chichester: Ellis Horwood.
Parsons, Talcott. 1947. “Introduction” to Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Free Press.
Rosenau, Pauline Marie. 1992. Postmodernism and the Social Sciences. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1963. Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Vintage Books.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1991. Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith. London: Verso.
Scott, Marvin B., and Stanford M. Lyman. 1968. “Accounts.” American Sociological Review 33: 46–62.
Taylor, Michael. 1995. “Battering RAMs.” Critical Review 9, nos. 1–2: 223–34.
Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.
Weber, Max. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Winch, Peter. 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Endnotes
*: Doug Mann, Department of Philosophy, University of Windsor, CHN 2184, 401 Sunset, Windsor, Ontario N9B 3P4, Canada, e-mail dimann@uwindsor.ca. Back.
Note 1: Of course, these “shared” ideas are adhered to differently by different people within a collectivity; also, individuals may adhere only to certain elements within a congerie of ideas concerning a given social object. For example, the average suburbanite might generally speaking share the ideal of a “law-and-order” society, but upon occasion may speed or smoke marijuana. The policeman might be less lenient on such matters, the college student more so. Back.
Note 2: Taylor takes issue with rational choice theorists when they attempt to explain behavior that attempts to actualize values (i.e. normative behavior) as “preferences” motivated by various “incentives.” Instead he sees such behavior as expressive of a “self” that is committed to these values. Robert Abelson (1995, 27) agrees with this critique of rational choice theory. He defines expressive behavior as the “spontaneous enjoyment of value-expressive action, performed for its own sake, with no apparent rational consideration of material consequences for the actor.” As both Taylor and Abelson point out, much social and political behavior can be explained only in expressive or normative terms. Back.
Note 3: Indeed, people who consistently exhibit selfish instrumental rationality in their everyday dealings with others tend eventually to be shunned as manipulators or users. It can by no means be assumed that an unsullied SIR is a superior social survival strategy. Back.
Note 4: Blumer’s interactionism is such an effective bridge from intentionality to meaning in part because he himself does not rely on just the actor’s “word,” i.e., on intentions, to get at the “meaning” of a social act. Back.
Note 5: However, we must be aware of Bourdieu’s critique of interactionism here. He chastises the interactionists for failing to realize that the truth of the interaction is never contained entirely in the interaction: “In fact it is their present and past positions in the social structure that biological individuals carry with them, at all times and in all places, in the form of dispositions which are so many marks of social position and hence of the social distance between objective positions” (Bourdieu 1992, 81–82). Elsewhere, he makes the associated point that the whole social structure is present in each linguistic interaction, a fact ignored by interactionists, who treat each interaction as a closed world (idem 1991, 67). Needless to say, the important question here is just how we carry these social structures within us. Back.
Note 6: Under the rubric of unintended consequences we can distinguish two distinct types: those consequences that were merely unanticipated, which we might call surface unintended consequences, and the consequences of those events of which we have no consciousness but that affect social reality all the same, or deep unintended consequences. Both the surface and deep unintended consequences of our actions force social theory away from strictly intentional accounts of human behavior toward an account of the social meaning of that behavior, and eventually, I believe, toward an account of structural ideals (or at least some concept with the same denotative content). Back.
Note 7: Of course, prior to the use of Verstehen, Weber outlined social explanations that were adequate at the level of causation, i.e., explanations that outlined general empirical regularities: “Events of the type ‘A’ tend to cause events of the type ‘B’.” For Weber, these explanations were necessary for social understanding, but not sufficient. Back.
Note 8: Bourdieu (1992, 79) agrees, saying that each social agent, “wittingly or unwittingly, willy nilly, is a producer and reproducer of objective meaning,” and that her actions are the product of a modus operandi of which they have no conscious mastery, containing an “objective intention” that always outruns their conscious intentions. He concludes that because social agents do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing, what they do has more meaning than they know. Back.
Note 9: Under Goffmann’s dramaturgical model of how the self is presented on the stage of everyday life, the individual’s goal is to control the conduct of others by controlling their definition of the situation (Goffmann 1959, 3–4). This way of looking at everyday life may accord people too much intentionality, in that they are always trying to “con” their audience (i.e., one cannot figure out their “true” intentions from their stated motives). Goffmann’s analysis leads him to the interesting conclusion that the self is not so much an organic thing with a specific location but a dramatic effect arising diffusely from the scene presented, and is thus a thing of collaborative manufacture (ibid., 252–53). Back.
Note 10: Motives, in everyday language, can be either conscious or unconscious, acknowledged or hidden. A conscious and acknowledged motive, such as “I went to work today to make money,” is synonymous with an intention. But Weber means here an unconscious, hidden motive, the sort that we are reluctant to acknowledge or that we simply repress. Back.
Note 11: As I said earlier, they are a generalized version of Scott and Lyman’s “background expectations” for accounts. Back.
Note 12: A section of these ideals are what Berger and Luckmann (1966, 33) call the continuum of typifications of everyday life, whereby others are encountered as “typifying” some quality, trait, etc. (in Berger and Luckmann’s example, Henry the “typical” Englishman). Back.
Note 13: See Hall and Jefferson 1976 and Hebdige 1979. Back.