Re: [Critical-Realism] Holism and social structure

["Dave Elder-Vass" <d.eldervass@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To qualify one of my responses from last night:

Mervyn wrote: "An organisation has a structure that is precisely not
just a property of the people who operate it and their relations".

And I replied: "As I understand the term, the structure of an entity 
precisely IS what parts
it has and their relations to each other."

But a better reply would consider the different levels of abstraction at 
which we might choose to address this question. At the level of a 
metaphysical ontology, my statement still seems to me correct, but when we 
turn to the narrower question of the ontology of organisations (and indeed 
some other social entities that are types of groups of people) we can move 
down to a lower (and thus richer, more detailed, but less general) level of 
abstraction. This enables us to be more precise about the sorts of parts and 
relations that are characteristic of organisations. As I have argued, the 
parts are people. The relations are more interesting, and this is where the 
argument connects up with others earlier in the thread (and in parallel 
developments of it): the relations that we are interested in here are those 
that Bhaskar has characterised as 'position-practices' (I forget the precise 
terms - could someone point me to where he discusses this?).

My assumption is that when Bhaskar refers to positions and practices as 
underpinning social structure he is referring to what sociologists normally 
call roles. A role is a bundle of expectations (generally backed up with 
sanctions) regarding the relations the role incumbent is to maintain with 
others. This covers both their positions (the name of the position occupied, 
and its relationship in authority terms to others) and practices (how the 
incumbent is expected to perform the role). In other words, it is a more 
concrete expression of the relations that bind the parts into the form of 
the whole.

To illustrate the point, we can move one step further down the scale of 
abstraction and consider a particular role - say a team manager. Their 
position is defined by the expectation that they will exercise authority 
over the members of their team, and defer to the authority of their own more 
senior manager. Their practices are defined by such things as job 
descriptions and operations manuals, which define their responsibilities 
more precisely and set down standards regarding how they are to be 
performed.

The use of the term 'practices' for this is slightly unfortunate, since as 
Andy pointed out, this often has actualist implications, in sociology at 
least - practices are simply repeated patterns of behaviour in this sense of 
the term. If my interpretation above is correct, then Bhaskar's usage is NOT 
actualist in this sense, as he is referring to the expectations (some might 
say rules, but that opens up another can of worms!) about behaviour rather 
than the behaviour itself.

I hope this goes some way towards reconciling some of the views expressed in 
this discussion.

Cheers

Dave


----- Original Message ----- 
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2007 00:38:04 +0100
From: "Dave Elder-Vass" <d.eldervass@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Holism and social structure

Hi Andy & Mervyn,

Andy wrote: "You seem to be saying that social structures are relations of
*persons* (Joe Bloggs et al). If so then they would indeed be spatially
located. But if so then they would change with every birth and death. We
would have no way of saying, for example, that capitalist stuctures are
present now and 100 years ago. "

But this is just the old problem of identity as expressed in the well-known
"ship of Theseus" argument - is the ship still the same ship if we replace
each of the planks that makes it up one at a time? Or even more pertinently,
persons are composed of cells in certain physiological relations to each
other, but those cells gradually die and are replaced with others. On your
argument we would have no way of saying that the same person was present
today and tomorrow because many of the cells making them up had been
replaced.

I would suggest that the sensible response is to say that the continuing
existence of a whole thing is entirely compatible with the gradual
replacement of its parts, as long as the parts continue to be of the
necessary type and to be related to each other in the necessary relations.
On this argument, it is entirely compatible with the continuing existence of
a capitalist organisation for (a) its parts to be persons and (b) those
persons to be gradually replaced with others.

Mervyn wrote: "I'd suggest that there's no 'missing social entity' in CR --
the entity is 'society'".

But what is 'society' - is there just one of these in the world, or do you
think there are many? The term is usually used to refer to national
societies, which is highly problematic - there are many social entities or
systems that cut across national boundaries, for example. But the idea that
all social structures are properties of a global society doesn't seem any
more convincing. Is the causal power of an organisation to employ me, for
example, a property of global society? It may, of course, depend
diachronically upon a host of causal interactions between the organisation
and other social entities that sustain its financial and legal viability.
But this doesn't make this ability to employ me a causal power of those
other entities, any more than my dependence on breathing oxygen makes my
ability to type an email a causal power of the atmosphere. The ability to
employ me is a synchronic emergent causal power of the organisation (one
that is currently unexercised, by the way!) and not of society as a whole.
Similarly, the ability of an organisation to increase production by
implementing the division of labour, Adam Smith style - an example used by
Margaret Archer - is an emergent causal power of the organisation.

I'd argue that once we start to identify the particular social entities that
possess particular causal powers we are well on the way to demystifying the
problem of social structure.

And Mervyn wrote: "An organisation has a structure that is precisely not
just a property of the people who operate it and their relations".

As I understand the term, the structure of an entity precisely IS what parts
it has and their relations to each other. Granted, the term 'structure' has
many other usages, but I believe this is the one that is relevant to
identifying mechanisms underlying causal powers.  There is a sense in which
identifying mechanisms in this way IS reductive, but the point is that this
sort of explanatory reduction (I believe I could dig out a Bhaskar reference
for this term, used in this way, by the way) does not entail the elimination
of the higher level causal power - it is still an emergent power of the
higher level entity because it would not exist if the higher level entity
did not exist.

Apologies if this is a little terse, but it's late!

Cheers

Dave

----- Original Message ----- 
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2007 11:03:47 +0100
From: "Mervyn Hartwig" <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Holism and social structure

Hi Andy, Dave and Dave,

I agree with Andy's point. Relatedly I'd suggest that there's no 'missing
social entity' in CR -- the entity is 'society' ('social form', 'social
totality', etc) = the relatively enduring ensemble of social relations + the
more transient people 'inhabiting' it at any one time. The problem with
focussing on groups is that it's conducive to reducing the former to the
latter. An organisation has a structure that is precisely not just a
property of the people who operate it and their relations.

Mervyn


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andrew Brown" <A.Brown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List"
<critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2007 12:55 PM
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Holism and social structure


Dave,


You seem to be simply saying that social structures are relations between
persons ('people'), in which case my reply to Dave Taylor applies also to
you. Or have I misunderstood?

'Matter' certanly is a problem term (in some of my previous debates on this
list you will see that I have rather different understanding of
'materialism' than many). Still, I would certainly say that a necessary
aspect of matter is that it is spatially located.

Andy



________________________________

From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Dave
Elder-Vass
Sent: Tue 6/5/2007 11:43 AM
To: critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Critical-Realism] Holism and social structure



Dear All,

First, let me say that this is exactly the sort of debate I hoped to see
when I joined this list - a vast improvement on recent fare.

Second, I'd like to suggest that the missing piece from the various accounts
of social structure discussed below is social entities. 'Social structure'
can be causally effective only as the emergent properties (and thus the
causal powers) of an actual entity. This, I take it, is the point of Harre's
critique of critical realist accounts of social structure; for him, the
social structures advanced in these accounts (e.g. 'class structures' and
'legal systems') are not powerful particulars because powerful particulars
are entities with emergent causal powers and he regards the examples
mentioned as being taxonomic categories rather than such entities. The
appropriate response to this argument is to identify entities that DO meet
the requirements to be entities with emergent causal powers (though Harre
himself might remain unconvinced, for other reasons).

Elsewhere I have examined the ontology of two such types of social entity
(though I expect there are others): organisations and normative communities.
(On organisations, see my paper in the Journal for the Theory of Social
Behaviour, March 2007 and my paper at BSA 2005; on normative communities, my
papers at IACR 2006 and BSA 2006 - the former is forthcoming in JCR and
versions of the conference papers are available through my website
http://www.eldervass.com/ ). To put the argument at its simplest: both of
these are types of social entity that are composed of groups of people (just
as people, for example, are entities composed of biological cells), and with
emergent causal powers conferred by mechanisms that arise from the structure
of the group (i.e. its members and the relations between them, e.g. as
specified by roles in organisations).

This is precisely the ontological form implied in Bhaskar's RTS (see my
paper in JCR 4:2, 2005): causal powers are emergent properties of things,
arising from their structure. Despite this, there seems to be a great deal
of resistance to the idea that social structure refers to the causal powers
of social entities. This seems to me perverse, particularly amongst
realists. When we discuss non-social causal powers we refer to the entities
that possess them - we would not discuss physics without attributing the
causal powers concerned to particular particles, or chemistry without
molecules, or biochemistry without cells or psychology without people. Why,
then, is it assumed that we can discuss 'social structure' as a genus of
causal powers while ignoring the entities that such talk implicitly depends
upon? What is the point of critical realism's ontology of entities, powers,
and mechanisms if we don't apply it as soon as we get to the case that
interests us most?

One reason for the problem is the tradition of talking as if 'social
relations' could be causally effective. But relations can do nothing without
the things related; and once we have BOTH the things related and the
relations themselves we are no longer looking at 'relations' but rather at a
higher-level social entity constituted by these parts and relations.
(Incidentally, Marx, according to Ollman, sometimes used relations in our
usual sense and sometimes to stand for BOTH the relation and the things
related, which has contributed to confusion on this front. When he uses it
in the latter sense he is in effect referring to social entities.)

And once we recognise that social structure stands for the causal powers of
social entities, the problem of materiality also becomes more accessible,
though perhaps not uncontroversial, as materiality is one of those slippery
concepts that are bandied about without much thought as to what they
actually mean. If it refers simply to extension in space, which seems to be
the criterion most frequently referred to in this thread, then social groups
such as organisations and normative communities are material since they are
composed of parts (i.e. people) that occupy space. They are unusual compared
to most other material things, in that these parts (a) can move around
rather freely of each other; and (b) may also be parts of other social
entities at the same compositional level. Nevertheless they are material in
a sense in which 'relations' alone can never be.

Cheers,

Dave

-----Original Message-----
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2007 08:56:40 +0100
From: "David Bailey" <d.bailey@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Comment re: holism
To: "'Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List'"
<critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Message-ID: <02b101c7a747$0d0b4ef0$93f89786@lssimage>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Andy,

In order to clarify this position further - what, then, DOES constitute
social structures - presumably it's the relationships between the actors
(rather than their actions themselves)?

David

-----Original Message-----
From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Andrew
Brown
Sent: 05 June 2007 08:45
To: Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Comment re: holism

Mervyn,

You say social structres are constituted by social practices. I'd be
interested to know how, then, you interpret Marget Artcher's critique of
'central conflation'? Most people, including me, seem to think thqt this
critique (i) precisely denies that social structures are so constituted,
(ii) attributes this denial to Bhaskar, and finally, that (iii) Bhaksar now
agrees with Archer on this very point! I suggest you read Archer's 'tennis
match' account of ch.2 of PON in Archers 1995 'Morphogenesis' book.

I'd also be interested to know how you would argue that social structures,
as social practices, are in a 'deep', 'non-actual' domain, since social
practices are actualities, they are the flux of actual events of the social
world! No, for CR it is and must be the case that practices are resultant
actualities, they are constrained and facilitated by social structres but
they do not constitute the latter, just as the flux of actual events of the
the natural work are contrained and enabled by natural structures and
mechanisms. Now, I grant you that not all CRists take this view. Some are
much closer to Giddens, and PON ch.2 can be read in this way (As Archer
herself points out). But your assertion of 'nonsense' is characteristically
over the top!

Many thanks,

Andy


________________________________

From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Mervyn
Hartwig
Sent: Mon 6/4/2007 11:54 PM
To: Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Comment re: holism



Hi Andy, et al.

It seems to me a nonsense to say that Bhaskar denies that social structures
are social practices. Practices are central to his conception, and why you
should think his emphasis on them 'cunning' (previous post) I don't know.
What he denies is that they and the relations by which they can be
individuated are material or physical in the way that natural structures
are. This seems to me self-evident. They of course have a material context
or ground or substrate, as others have emphasised, and they have material
effects, but this is not the same as saying that they themselves are
material. The word 'material' needs underlining. They are *materially*
present -- they exist materially -- only in their effects.

Mervyn



<snip>





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