Economics as Sociology’s Other (More Temperate Version)

This is the correct URL: http://sociology.berkeley.edu/profiles/fourcade/pdf/ABS_2007.pdf .

I don’t know if this is irrelevant to the post, probably is, but I love Crooked Timber, I really do, somehow it manages to remain both broad and deep at the same time. Something in this particular post was so profoundly warm and familiar that it triggered in me the following thought (think of this as not a parody, more like a token of affection).

The ultimate crooked timber post, the platonic form of a crooked timber post, is:

Evolutionary psychology explains why analytic philosophers appear to be aliens (organ trafficking aliens!), implications for non ideal political theory and the Obama regime’s response to the structure of humanities discourse in Belgium. Plus, we uncover the secret cave where neo-classical economists are produced “Maxima-expectoritous”.

Henrei’s post IS much more informative than the other one. And I think Andrei’s point about some mutuality in graduate training programs for Sociology and Economics might benefit from the lessons of the 16/17th, or ‘Scientific Revolution’ if you wioll forgive the whiggishness.

The debate/conflict between Sociology and Economics seems remarkably similar to the tussles among cosmological models and astronomy methods in the 16/17th century. Like astronomy, it seems that Economics and Sociology could benefit by articulating with a consensus-derived epistemologically ‘Social’ higher equivalent of Natural Philosophy. Call it ‘Social Science’ which then enables all the ‘subordinate’ disciplines – economics, sociology, government, anthropology, and so on.

Or perhaps those sort of natural science ‘paradigm’ and enabling science/subordinate science frameworks don’t fit the social sciences.

Well it’s certainly not a paper written to be read by non-sociologists, an observation which I suspect would not bother the authors a bit.
But do economic sociologists really start off with such broad-based questions as:

What do we learn about ourselves from studying markets? How do analyses centered on the economy help us better understand the sociological nature of our modernity?

It seems an usual mode of operating.

Magistra – what puzzled me was the scale of the questions. Nothing in there about “why is Britain so rich?” or “why are diamonds more expensive than water, when water is essential for life?”, or “why do people forget what they learnt in gemoetry classes so quickly?” or “why did women win the vote in some countries before others?”
Perhaps it’s just because it’s a survey article.

Why was sociology developed to only discuss modern societies? I’ve read “Watching the English” by Kate Fox, an anthropologist who writes about English society, and it struck me as quite different from what sociologists appear to be doing. (The book is a very funny read in and of itself).

@10: In my very brief notes for chapter 2 of The Domestication of the Savage Mind, I have: “Goody lays out the idea that, at least in some kinds of societies, knowledge is social more than individual. He follows this idea from its initiation by Durkheim through its development in Levi Strauss’s examination of mythology.” Since Durkheim is interested only in modern civilization, “some kinds of societies” means “modern societies (with division of labor and so forth).” So it sounds like he would agree that sociology developed to discuss the nature of modern society. On the other hand, for the same chapter, I also wrote, “There is apparently significant conflict among social scientists and philosophers concerning these issues.”

I’d have to go back and look at Goody and Durkheim, and I’ve never read Levi Strauss, but for the most part Goody’s book was a false trail for me, as I’d been looking for something like an anthropological discussion of binary thinking more than a discussion of binary thinking among anthropologists.

Bianca – what would a society with individual knowledge, not social knowledge, look like? Division of labour is far older than the 18th century.

Tim, I give you, from page 7:

Network methodologies are themselves supported
by, and constitutive of, a particular theory of society—a geometric representation of
the social world that owes much to Simmel’s call to analyze the formal invariants
beneath the surface of concrete social interactions, and to the early Durkheim’s
emphasis on the morphological features of social solidarity.

I followed this up to “formal invariants” (apart from not knowing who Simmel is). Why there would be invariants, formal or informal, below the surface of concrete social interactions is beyond me, perhaps all those maths courses in different fields are leading me astray. And I just am totally lost as to what the word “morphological” means here.
They also have some puzzling juxtapositions of natural against a result of society, which makes me wonder how they are defining “natural”.

I think a lot both of methodological differences and of attitudes towards one’s subject in anthropology versus sociology go back to the original plans of research in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Anthropology was intended to study small-scale primitive ‘societies’ in the colonies; sociology was trying to provide a scientific theory of how a previously unknown form of society (the nineteenth century west) worked, and what life in this new form of society meant. It would have been undignified to observe nineteenth century Europeans in the same quasi-zoological way you could investigate a tribe, and it was inappropriate to apply social science to small-scale societies, because they obviously weren’t complex or rational enough to be analysed in that way.

Tracy @15 – Fair enough. I was still on the prologue then and should have been less hasty. In fact I abandoned it altogether at ‘we experience markets as stable, patterned institutions’. And in your extract I was a bit baffled by ‘supported by and constitutive of’, but found ‘formal invariants beneath the surface’ OK, choosing an impressionistic reading along the lines of ‘constant features of the underlying reality’ (i.e. presumably of the kind you might make lawlike generalisations about). But that might be entirely wrong…

Anyway I now have to agree that it is written for sociologists (and – just possibly – the very patient). A propos not much, I have a copy of Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money (in translation) which I read rather hastily about 10 years ago – can’t remember much about it except that it was tantalising in that it kept looking as though it was going to be useful but then on closer inspection wasn’t (to me at the time, in the context of normative theory of economic value and exchange).

Chris @16 – Not sure that the ‘knowing about it would invalidate its social nature’ point wrt emergent/irreducible social knowledge. I can know that you have knowledge about the back of your hand, without myself possessing that knowledge. And the quote does say ‘social more than individual’. But also don’t know if that’s what ‘s being driven at. Popper put forward a conception of objective knowledge which IIRC consisted largely of things in books (and these days other forms of external storage). Don’t know if that’s what’s meant either.

magistra@17 – I take it the content of your last sentence is merely attributed, and not your own view.

Reading Gintis and the rest all I can see is a overworked attempt to get freedom out of determinism: “rational determinism.” The mixture of moral passivity and optimism is bizarre.

And the difference between Anthropology and Sociology is that the former is concerned not only with individual societies but individual persons. Sociology is concerned with people as a mass. The preference for the latter functions as an interest in “ideas’ but also as a preference for impersonal forms of communication and knowledge. This preference itself can be described as a product of a cultural determinism.

Anthropology and sociology as practices exist as examples of two kinds of performative ethos; each are manifestations of the moral assumptions/values that precede them. One is social one extra-social.

We want to create meaning out of the world. Some prefer crystalline forms: absolute, time independent, “immortal” designs. Others see a narrative arc: from beginning to end.
Each group responds to trauma (the traumatic interruption of their pattern) differently.
Suicide: when you feel you no longer ‘should be alive’ when the narrative arc comes crashing downward after a traumatic event. But why am a still here?

It’s the formal pattern that’s determinate for modern consciousness not Darwinism.
But of course consciousness itself is epiphenomenal.

It would have been undignified to observe nineteenth century Europeans in the same quasi-zoological way you could investigate a tribe, and it was inappropriate to apply social science to small-scale societies, because they obviously weren’t complex or rational enough to be analysed in that way.

But surely, if Theory is good for anything, it’s good for telling us that this distinction is self-serving and baseless. So why haven’t the two fields subsequently recognized that they are the same and merged? Bureaucratic empire building? Institutional inertia? Or is there something more?

As for Gintis, I think he has a point that several fields are groping the same elephant and reporting very different shapes, but his specific synthesis seems supported by more enthusiasm than sober consideration. Maybe that’s just a sour reaction to the ambitiousness of the undertaking, though, or a reflection of how much he is trying to do with such a short paper, I dunno. (I don’t see any attempt to tackle determinism, which seems beyond the scope of even his ambitious program.)

Bianca Steele – I think Goody, though, considers Durkheim’s “social knowledge” as a form of technology, akin to writing, that thus like writing influences a culture’s cognitive activities, as well as its social organization.

So is the Maori institution of the marae, where groups meet in a building for long discussion and speech-making, a form of social knowledge or not? How about the Ancient Athens Assembly?

Tim – thanks for the possible explanation of the “formal invariants”.

A really excellent paper. I must confess that just about everything I have read or heard from M.Fourcade was really impressive. I am eagerly awaiting her joint book with Kieran.

Tracy, the paragraph about morphology and formal invariants is really nothing mysterious at all. It’s just a generic way to say that a social institution in which people all connect to each other (which you can represent by a very messy graph) probably behaves very differently from one where all members connect to one central node and that’s all (that one would look like a starfish). The difference in behavior between those two structures would presumably be independent of the culture, history and what-have-you of the members of the network (though as the article points, these parameters would influence how the network came to be structured like this in the first place) and can thus be called “formal”. That this is a question of morphology is simply the definition of morphology. And there you go.

Tracy:
Those are good questions, and I’d bet a sociologist would be able to rattle off an answer for you right off the bat, but this wasn’t the part I was most interested in.

On Durkheim and ‘social knowledge’, I’m very much going on what Mary Douglas says in ‘How institutions think’ (which is a very interesting book, though irritatingly short on definitions at times). Durkheim’s original interest was in how different individuals come to think the same things, i.e. why people have shared representations/beliefs, which he could see in societies of minimal technical advancement e.g. Australian Aboriginal tribes with shared religious beliefs. Douglas points out how conventions, shared beliefs, institutions etc can reduce people’s needs to process information for themselves. (As one trivial example that occurred to me, I save time first thing each morning by only having to select from appropriate breakfast type things to eat, rather than choose from all the food I have in my house).

I think the disadvantage with calling these shared norms, images etc ‘social knowledge’ is that it can make you assume that it’s actual facts that are ‘stored’ in these common ideas and institutions, whereas that’s not necessarily the case. For example, the analogy of man is to woman as right hand is to left hand can be used to ‘encode’ an entire ideology of why a gendered division of labour is justified.

I still don’t know the definition of morphology you are using here

Sorry, if I was confusing. Allow me to try again. First, you are right of course. The paragraph from which the excerpt is making a statement about some methodologies in sociology: it points out that representing society as networks implies that you think society somehow can be fruitfully represented as a network. Put like that, it looks like a tautology but I think this is actually a helpful paragraph, insofar as it clarifies that network analysis should not be construed strictly as an empirical tool.

Now back to morphology. Let me take a concrete example. Say you are a sociologist and you study junior high school classes. You patiently record who plays with whom, who speaks to whom, who sits next to whom in class etc. Then you draw a graph: each vertex is a pupil and each arrow represents a relation. Now, the theoretical insight that permeates network analysis (which the author attributes to Simmel and to Durkheim) is that you will learn something of interest if you study the shape, or form, of the graph you have drawn, or in fancier language, if you study its morphology (the meaning I give to the words “emphasis on the morphological features” of the author is simply “pay attention to the shape”). You could perhaps ask if the graph is connected or else how many connected components it has. Calculating mean distance and/or the incidence matrix, you could propose a formal definition of popularity inside the class. Whatever.

All this is of course really interesting, but some sociologists disagree, or rather have an alternative point of view. Continuing the example, they would say: suppose that a new kid arrives in the class. By your tools and your methods of network analysis, you will eventually be able to determine if he became popular or not, but you won’t be able to predict it, or explain it. This is how you could have done it: instead of observing directly interactions between kids, you could try to write down a list of what kids value. This “list” will in fact look more like a high-dimensional vector space, as orientation is needed because some things that some kids will value highly (say, good grades), some will dislike highly. So you get this vector space of values. Now you try (this I think is the hard part, especially in my example) to plot the kids in this space: Lea has quite good grades, is part of the drama club, doesn’t like Rihanna so much and is very talkative in class so she ends up there in my vector space. So far so good. Then, because you don’t like to represent society as high dimensional vector spaces, you project everything in one or two dimension using component analysis. The, these sociologists say, you will observe that clouds of points appear and they predict that there will be relations in the network you previously drawn between neighboring points. In particular, when that you new kid shows up, you can predict where he will end up, if you happen to know what his inclinations were. The above being a long long explanation of what (I think that) Fourcade meant when she wrote: “When the network approach emphasizes coordination and connectivity among market actors, then, field analysis reveals the topology of social differences.”

In case you read up to there, Tracy, then sorry for having bored you to death.

In economics also, I’ve noticed that there are two very distinct approaches to network analysis, one focusing on topology and the other on aggregate properties of the network.

@37: Certainly it’s possible to create and study systems that aren’t connected to the real world (although I would question whether they really ought to be called “models” if they’re not modelling anything). But I don’t think most economists or sociologists would consider such an endeavor a legitimate part of their disciplines, since those disciplines are defined by the study of phenomena (economies and societies) that exist in the world.

What you seem to be describing is some sort of armchair philosophy – maybe you missed the recent philosophy threads?

To reverse your hammer analogy, there are a great many interesting and useful objects that will not drive a nail. But if you are employed as a carpenter, I think your employer has a legitimate right to insist that you set aside pillows, spools of thread, and butterflies, and employ only objects of proven nail-driving ability in y0ur professional activities.

It’s possible the reference is to the discussion we had about theories of justice. To oversimplify, the economists in that discussion mostly took it for granted that such a theory should provide some basis for supporting or opposing particular social structures, whereas the philosophers tended to see the primary task as clarifying conceptions of justice, with no necessary policy implications.