source: Nancy Leveson, Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety Why do complex technologies so often fail, and fail in such unexpected ways? Why is it so difficult for hospitals, chemical plants, and railroads to design their processes in such a way as to dramatically reduce the accident rate? How should we attempt to …
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 …
How does Bourdieu meet history?
Pierre Bourdieu's sociology has influenced a broad range of sociologists (and philosophers) since the appearance of Outline of a Theory of Practice in 1972 (with an English translation in 1977). Generally speaking his work seems to fall on the synchronic rather than diachronic side of the social sciences -- more about "reproduction" than "transformation", in Phil …
Institutional logics — actors within institutions
Why do people behave as they do within various social contexts -- the workplace, the street, the battlefield, the dinner table? These are fundamental questions for sociologists -- even when they are ultimately interested in the workings of supra-individual entities like organizations and structures. And generally speaking, sociology as a research tradition has perhaps not …
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Tyler Cowen on global inequality
Tyler Cowen sounds a bit like Voltaire's Pangloss when he argues, as the New York Times headline puts it, that we are living "all in all, [in] a more egalitarian world" (link). Cowen acknowledges what most people concerned about inequalities believe: "the problem [of inequality] has become more acute within most individual nations"; but he shrugs this off …
Entropic social mechanisms
Many of the examples of mechanisms that we turn to in the social sciences are purposive, agental, and designed. But there is a fundamental feature of the natural world that seems to have relevance to the social world as well that is distinctly non-purposive -- the workings of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics holds …
Kathleen Tierney on disaster and resilience
The fact of large-scale technology failure has come up fairly often in Understanding Society (link, link, link). There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that our society is highly technology-dependent, relying on more and more densely interlinked and concentrated systems of production and delivery that are subject to unexpected but damaging forms …
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Mechanisms thinking in international relations theory
source: Alex Cooley, "America and Empire" (link) One of the most fundamental ideas underlying the philosophy of social science expressed here and elsewhere is the view that social explanations should seek out the causal mechanisms that underly the social phenomena of interest. So now we need to be able to say a lot more about …
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What drives organizational performance?
We have a pretty good idea of the characteristics that support very high individual performance in a variety of fields, from jazz to track to physics to business. An earlier post discussed some of the different combinations of features that characterize leaders in several different professions (link). And it isn’t difficult to sketch out qualities …
Getting inside people’s frames
It seems clear that human beings bring specific frameworks of thought, ideas, emotions, and valuations to their social lives, and these frameworks affect both how they interpret the social realities they confront and the ways that they respond to what they experience. Human beings have "frames" of cognition and valuation that guide their experiences and …
Understanding Society 