Stability and the accomplished order

According to Anselm Strauss the exigencies of an interaction situation renders structures of stability as at most a secondary consideration:

The realm of rules could then be usefully pictured as a tiny island of structured stability around which swirled and beat a vast ocean of negotiation. But we would push the metaphor further and assert what is already implicit in our discussion: that there is only vast ocean. The rules themselves are negotiable.

While this appears to be a radical turn (affirming only oceans), Anselm Strauss does not deny any notion of stability but gives it only a minimal place, due to what he termed as his processual view of social life (in his own words - “structural process”):

Sociological analysis ordinarily does not join structure and process so tightly as our notion of “structural process” does. Structure tends to be treated as relatively fixed — because it is what it is, then certain processes can occur. Or inversly, because the major goals involve certain processes, as in a factory or in a governmental agency, the structure is made as nearly consonant with the processes as possible. New processes are conceived as leading to new structural arrangement; while innovations in structure similarly lead to associated processual changes.

Along same lines, he also observed regarding the medical profession:

Of the medical profession as a whole a great deal could be, and has been said: its institutions (hospitals, schools, clinics); its personnel (physicians and paramedical personnel); its organizations (the American Medical Association, the state and county societies); its recuitment policies; its standard and codes; its political activities; its relations with the public; not to mention the profession’s informal mechanisms of sociability and control. All this minimal ‘structure’ certainly exists”

Davina Allen in a study on a surgical and medical ward in a large sized NHS hospital attempts to apply Anselm Strauss’s concept of the ‘negotiated order’ (though with some refinement of the concept) to a medical work context. The study shows a number of work situations that alter the role expectations (stability) of different occupant positions. One finding the study made salient is in how a specific stability was applied (activated) in very different ways. In this case, nurses on the day shift would regularly prescribe medicine to patients, despite it being contrary to the rules. Nevertheless, it was the trust built-up with doctors that removed any inhibitions with breaking the rule:

Indeed I observed junior nurses asking more senior staff to do their boundary-blurring work for them. Moreover, nurses were more likely to break the rules for doctors they trusted: If you were going to break the rules you’d always do it for someone that you trusted than someone you didn’t (Interview—Staff Nurse).

Night nurses, less familiar with the doctors, were less prone to breaking the rule, due to a lack of familiarity with the doctors and so with no similar trust:

All of the night nurses I spoke to were quite clear that they would not give unprescribed drugs to patients. Many justified their position by recounting the same ‘moral tale’: I heard on the grapevine. She gave Temazepam and asked the doctor to write it up later, which she would have done, but somebody told a tale and she was sacked for prescribing (Interview—Staff Nurse).

For proponents of an accomplished order, these are examples of how islands of stability (certain rules and role expectations) are always reduced to what people do with them in lived situations (structural process). Thus stability has no independent existence from the intentional will of the social agent and constraints only apply to their workings or accomplishment in situ. However, the case of the rule above demonstrates the opposite, they not only exist independent of the situation itself but are also trans-situational. In the case of the day nurse, they were fully aware of the rule’s presence and existence but chose to ignore it, due to certain situational contingencies; while it was the night nurses who activated its efficacy.

In other words, its activation or otherwise, in situ, does not negate its independent existence. So the question should not be a principle of negating the existence of the rule as real but that its manifestation, regardless of its presence in any given encounter, as contingent to situational factors. Here there is a conceptual shift from viewing stability as nothing more than an epiphenomenon of people and interactional dynamics, to stability as something that nevertheless exists in its own right but whose coupling with transient factors may activate or de-activate its presence in given episodes.

Consequently, we can conceptualise causality as something other than constant junctions and instead view it as tendencies that exists even when specific actors in specific situations know about and choose to ignore them or are otherwise ignorant of its existence. To be sure, contingencies can give to unique dimensions of interaction (indexicality) and this indexicality results in unique outcomes, as different mechanisms may not only be selectively activated but that there is often many interacting mechanisms that in their interaction renders infinite scenarios. To put it this way, the specificity of situations cohere with the idea of an ontology of structures independent of any specificity and its dynamics. Whether a situation is biased to an unpredictably or its opposite, is largely an empirical question that investigates not only the interaction of individuals but also the social setting of their interaction. 

To re-work Strauss’s statement, we can say there exists both islands of stability and oceans but the sustainment or transformation of either is contingent to their interaction as a coupling. Contingency is stabilised from without but still overdetermined and it is the interaction of multiple mechanisms, in situ, that gives to exigencies.

Causal mechanisms, emergent properties and personhood

Causal mechanisms are explained not in their observed manifestation but as tendencies constituted by emergent properties. This view, therefore, implicates the potential efficacy of trans-situational factors, that may not be observed but nevertheless exist (1). Contrasting with a constant conjunction view of causality that looks for observable conjunctions to establish the existence of powerful particulars, the idea of causal mechanisms as concomitant to the inner configuration of an emergent property connotes to the tendencies of an emergent property from its particular configuration (e.g. the idea of ‘hidden talents’) (2). A configuration is thus resultant from a structuring of relations emergent from its embeddedness within open systems, with the activation of certain mechanisms relational to interaction with other mechanisms in situ.  

I wish to draw attention that this view not only impacts how we research the social, discovering causal mechanisms and how this process should be explained, but also in how we can draw ethical considerations on the workings of structures. In other words, to posit the location of powers (tendencies) within objects, emergent from stratified open systems, is to make an object’s ontology the focus of analysis. This analytical turn allows us to simultaneously differentiate between necessary and contingent relations constituting personhood. Thus the person is constituted in a particular configuration between discursive and natural worlds; meanings of flourishing can thus be anchored to an understanding of human nature, due to a differentiation between necessary and contingent relations constituting an emergent personhood.

Hence as natural beings there are certain necessary needs/doings and relations to meet these needs. However, these are dialectically mediated from discursive structures that are effective in the emergence of personhood from natural worlds. In reality, there is no personhood without acculturation (a necessary aspect of personhood) and so there can be no independence of the natural being from the social being. While this acknowledged, the manifestation or mediation of this personhood through discursive structures remains contingent and from this perspective we can de-reify aspects of personhood. Importantly, this process of anchoring necessary meanings for flourishing follows from a view of the constitution of personhood as the analytical starting point in its analysis, due to it being an emergent property and so both mediated and mediating.  

Footnotes:

(1) The main issue is intransitivity, which is understood as a non-identity between findings and the full depth of a phenomenon. The stratification of social reality entails the existence of multiple mechanisms and their determinations interacting in concrete events. The contingencies of these events do not activate the full scope of any determination that may remain dormant but still exist as part of the causal powers of an interacting part [mechanisms may exist in potentia]

(2) An emergent property can be defined as a powerful particular that is endowed with certain tendencies due to its constitution within a stratified and depth ontology. This constitution gives an emergent property certain tendencies that may be actualized in relation to other emergent properties. For example, the biological body’s ability to bear children emanates from the properties and constitution of the female human body but this tendency may not be actualised due to situational contingencies (cf. Sayer 2000; Bhaskar 2008). It is this distinction between structures and events that “provides the best argument for the stratification of the world” (Bhaskar 2008: 57).

The idea of Google Chromebooks can make a difference

Google’s Chromebook is an innovative idea and challenges contemporary personal computing paradigms. The idea of a self-sustaining system that requires little maintenance, developed and updated from the developer, relieves the burden of hardware compatibility and the costs of future updates from the end-user. Storage is also in the cloud and so no extra hardware or back-up is required. If the system fails, for whatever reason, then the hardware can be reset to factory settings, with nothing lost and within minutes, the end-user returns to the same point (assuming there is no hardware malfunction). 

While not suitable for everyone, the Chromebook/Chromebox covers the needs of most users. With maintenance and updates left to the developer, often at no cost, for many schools the idea of the Chromebook/Chromebox offers an economical solution (no licenses and minimal maintenance). This is more pertinent for rural areas in developing countries, where computer expertise may not exist close-by.

The development of education applications could emerge from local development hubs - these applications functioning on a similar (though open source technology) as Chrome OS, opens dialogue/collaboration between educational institutions and developers, to meet context specific needs. Already ventures such as Mozilla show potential and similar foundations, run as non-profit, could develop an alternative cloud based operating system and then open communication channels to local developers to assist in the development of high standard, stable and reliable applications for the system. More, the connection of many computers, through the internet, opens-up collaboration between institutions across different localities.

While Google is no example of an institution to be emulated, the idea of the Chromebook is merely a means tool that offers possibilities for the dissemination of learning across open learning networks and at low costs.

Talcott Parsons & emergentism

Talcott Parsons’s layered view of a ‘social system’, with its different system levels over-lapping and interdependent is a serious attempt to provide both depth and distinction between different facets of the social. Emergence figures in that he affirms the irreducibility of each system level. For example, he makes this clear when defining the ‘personality system’:

My view will be that, while the main content of the structure of the personality is derived from social systems and culture through socialization, the personality becomes an indepedent system through its relation to its own organism and through the uniqueness of its own life experience; it is not a mere epiphenomenon   

However, key to Parsons is the social subsystem, with its primary function of integration. It is defined in the following manner:

A social system consists in a plurality of individual actors interacting with each other in a situation which has at least a physical or environmental aspect, actors who are motivated in terms of a tendency to the “optimization of gratification” and whose relation to their situations , including each other, is defined and mediated in terms of a system of culturally structured and shared symbols

Thus social systems (Parsons confusingly uses ‘social system’ to indicate an environment of interaction but also broader system integration, in which ‘social system’ is a system level within this integration (cf. Layder 2004: 19)), with its physical environment and structured social relations, regulate relationships and enact role expectations. These roles and their expectations, underpinned by the cultural system, direct and guide appropriate choices in terms of Parsons’s ‘Pattern-Variables’. Role expectations thus link the ‘personality system’ to the environment of interaction (‘social system’), with its structured configuration, and so is emergent from an inter-dependence of systems levels. Consequently, the micro-level personal identity, through interaction, is also inculcated with broader macro-level patterns through learnt roles. Adopting these roles maintains the system, as a functional imperative, in the motivations of individuals.

Hence roles are not an independent dimension of a social system, underpinned by reified shared symbolic systems, but a configuration that is emergent from different levels of social ontology. Similarly the logic of the system [macro] primary functions (Integration, Pattern Maintenance, Goal Attainment and Adaptation), qua system integration, does not directly impinge itself on an environment of interaction but finds in the emergent properties of role expectations a link between the micro environment and macro system imperatives.

The problem with Parsons’s theory was not the distinctions drawn between interaction and role expectations [affirming structures apart from group life] but his lack of analytical focus on the exigencies of social systems. There is, in Lockwood’s terms, a lack of differentiation between system and social integration. In reality ‘role-status’, in Parsons model, is an objective logic and assigning it as a linkage is to merely re-affirm Primary functions in a circular manner. While technically there is no conflation between different system levels but with primacy given to equilibrium through integration, there is an analytical shift to an integration into both social and cultural systems. With the problematic defined in this manner, we do not have the full scope of a personal identity’s emergence and its underlying behavioural organism. System integration should not be assumed, nor given any primacy without a view of its coupling or interplay with the life-world meta-domain.

If the personality system is not an epiphenomenon, as Parsons asserts, then the emergence of action is in the selective uptake (tendencies may remain dormant) of systemic elements - the selective uptake is in what elements are activated and the manner of activation is situational. There is a real sense that the objective ‘status role’ [objective intention] should be complemented with an irreducible individuated subjective intention. Rather it would make no sense to speak of system integration without an efficient cause in the creative exigencies of social integration. In other words, this is a posit of a duality of social relations of both the “reproduced and free-form aspects” (Layder 1997: 80) of social life. We can only speak of morphogenetic causes (diachronic causal impact) if there is an interaction with morphostatic causes over time. This is the key to understanding reproduced institutionalised features of the broader system, especially in its emergence as a structured configuration at a given moment in time.

Thus the problem was not in Parsons affirming the real and irreducible existence of social and cultural systems but in simultaneously neglecting the interaction of systemic with life-world elements at each level of systemic emergence. His layered depth ontology, in the absence of coupling/interplay, is thus rendered into a positivistic view of wholes and de-facto reifies these wholes (though this reification is not due to a posit of system elements apart from group life). Expectantly this reification entails the previously noted circularity that leaves the source of reproduced structured configurations unanswered.