The social mechanisms approach to the social sciences aligns well with two key intellectual practices, experiments and policies. In an experiment we are interesting in testing whether a given factor has the effect it is thought to have. In a policy design we are interested in affecting an outcome of interest by manipulating some of …
Ethics as culture
Gabriel Abend has recently published The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics, a remarkable book on what seems initially to be a small subject -- a history of the academic field of business ethics. I say "seems", because in Abend's hands this topic turns out to be a superb subject for …
Improving skilled performance
What can ordinary experience tell us about how skilled practitioners can be brought to a high level of competence and performance? Let's say we are interested in teaching a child to play the violin at an advanced level, beginning at the novice level. The outcome we want to influence is the child's ability to play …
Coleman’s house-of-cards theory of structures
image: Henri Bonaventure Monnier, Crowded Restaurant 1860 image: James Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory, p. 245 James Coleman offers a skeptical position on the question of the reality of social structures in his landmark book, Foundations of Social Theory (1990). Coleman advocates for a view of research and theory in sociology that emphasizes the actions …
Continue reading "Coleman’s house-of-cards theory of structures"
Structures, diagrams, rules, and flows
When we refer to the structure of some complex entity, we often intend to capture one of the following ideas: the parts and their arrangements the parts and their interactions the flow of content -- information, money, value, ideas -- through a set of interconnected parts Clouds and monads lack structure -- monads because they …
Globalization and the planetary knowledge business
It is a commonplace that modern social and economic systems are intensely knowledge-based, and that the centers of knowledge production are no longer exclusively located in the industrialized north and west. Further, anyone who follows a Twitter feed knows that knowledge centers around the world are connected at the speed of light (more or …
Continue reading "Globalization and the planetary knowledge business"
Three concepts of social structure
There is an important ambiguity in the idea of social structure that needs to be addressed. The word is sometimes used to refer to functioning entities or units within society. The state is a structure within society; likewise is the system of public education. A corporation is a structure, and so is the feature of the economic …
Sellars and Bhaskar
Robert Brandom has just published a highly interesting book about the coherence of the philosophical thought of Wilfrid Sellars, From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars. In reading the book I am brought back repeatedly to thinking about Roy Bhaskar. There is the affirmation of scientific realism that both endorse; there is the appeal to …
Social structures as entities
Image: first organizational chart (link) One mark of modernity is the fact that we swim in a sea of structures -- states, markets, militaries, employment systems, social networks, taxation systems, and systems of racial and gender disadvantage, to name several. In place of a perhaps mythical pre-modern society in which social life was mediated by …
Fissioning community
What is a community, and what forces exist to either preserve the strands of community or to erode those strands? To start, a community is a population within a defined geographical space. It is a group of people who have their own interests, identities, and affinities. It is a group of people who act in …
Understanding Society 