Abstract
Analytical sociology, an intellectual project that has garnered considerable attention across a variety of disciplines in recent years, aims to explain complex social processes by dissecting them, accentuating their most important constituent parts, and constructing appropriate models to understand the emergence of what is observed. To achieve this goal, analytical sociologists demonstrate an unequivocal focus on the mechanism-based explanation grounded in action theory. In this article I attempt a critical appreciation of analytical sociology from the perspective of Mario Bunge’s philosophical system, which I characterize as emergentist systemism. I submit that while the principles of analytical sociology and those of Bunge’s approach share a lot in common, the latter brings to the fore the ontological status and explanatory importance of supra-individual actors (as concrete systems endowed with emergent causal powers) and macro-social mechanisms (as processes unfolding in and among social systems), and therefore it does not stipulate that every causal explanation of social facts has to include explicit references to individual-level actors and mechanisms. In this sense, Bunge’s approach provides a reasonable middle course between the Scylla of sociological reification and the Charybdis of ontological individualism, and thus serves as an antidote to the untenable “strong program of microfoundations” to which some analytical sociologists are committed.
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Notes
Emergentist systemism postulates that (1) every thing and every idea is either a system or an actual or potential component of a system, where a system is defined as a complex object whose components are held together by strong (logical, physical, biological, or social) bonds; (2) every system possesses at least one emergent (systemic, global) property absent from their components; (3) every concrete (real, material) system can be analyzed into a definite (albeit changeable) composition, environment (endo- and exo-)structure, and mechanism(s), and the model that incorporates these four aspects is called the CESM model (see Wan 2011).
Human agency here is understood as “the capacity not only to reproduce, but also (under certain conditions) to creatively reconfigure and transform the relational structures within which action unfold” (Emirbayer 1996: 122).
In describing and analyzing a system, one has to take into account (a) what it consists of (its composition); (b) the environment in which it is located (its environment); (c) how its components and environmental items are related to one another (its endostructure and exostructure); and (d) how it works, or what makes it what it is (its mechanism[s]). See e.g., Bunge (1998: 61–64, 105–107, 2003: 35–37, 2006a: 124–129, 2006b: 10–11, 2010b: 378–379).
As Wolfgang Hofkirchner (2007: 477) points out, it was Bunge, “who contrary to most scholars of systems thinking introduced the notion of processes in the definition of systems”. But it should always be remembered that processes do not exist independently of the entities in or among which they occur. See Bunge (2001a: 32–33, 1977: 268–270) for critical discussions of “radical” dynamicism as represented by, among others, Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics.
In the words of Moessinger (2008: 237–238, emphasis added): “A process is an interaction between the components of a system and/or between this system and its environment, capable of producing or preventing change in the system or its components”. Note that in the social realm, these interactions do not take place exclusively between individual actors, since supra-individual actors (collective and corporate actors) play important roles in these processes. See the section on the ontological status of supra-individual actors.
This means that the focus on social action is not an end in itself, but serves to explain social facts (Kroneberg 2008: 224).
“Human beings are the creators, reformers, and destroyers of all human social systems, and social laws and rules are nothing but the patterns of being and becoming of such systems” (Bunge 1998: 122). See also Esser (1994: 184); Vaughan (2009: 701); Hedström (2009: 333); Hedström and Ylikoski (2010a: 60).
For example, the action-theoretical microfoundations of sociological explanation can be flexibly based on a variety of models, such as homo sociologicus, homo economicus, homo reciprocans, homo emotionalis, homo aestimans, homo creativus, or whatever suits one’s explanatory purposes.
Hedström and Ylikoski (2010a: 60, see also 2010b: 395) argue forcefully that rational choice theory is “built upon implausible psychological and sociological assumptions”. As for Hedström’s realist distinction between descriptively incomplete and descriptively false assumptions, and his unequivocal criticism of the latter, see especially Hedström (2005: 62–63, 148–149); Hedström and Ylikoski (2010a: 60–61, 2010b: 394–395); cf. Esser (1993: 120–140); Kiser (1999); Kroneberg (2008: 237–238); Udehn (2001: 288–309). Note that analytical sociologists are interested in rational choice theory not for empirical reasons, but for methodological reasons: RCT is a formal theory that “advocates the same virtues of clarity and precision as analytical sociology does” (Hedström and Ylikoski 2010b: 394).
Bunge had once been enthusiastic about the rational choice approach because “it has all the trappings of exactness—a feature irresistible to the founder of the Society for Exact Philosophy” (Bunge 2001c: 409). But he later came to abandon this seemingly scientific but seriously flawed approach in the 1970s, and has subjected it to searching criticism. As he argues, the precise form of the utility function, a central concept of RCT, is seldom specified, and even when the function is mathematically well-defined, it is rarely checked against empirical data. Importantly, the findings of experimental economics have decisively refuted the main postulates of RCT. (As Bunge [2007: 545] puts it: “If falsity were enough to drop a theory, the thousands of rational choice theories would quickly be consigned to the dustbin of intellectual history”.) RCT is therefore both conceptually fuzzy and empirically untenable.
It should also be noted that most analytical sociologists would agree with Bunge’s emphasis on (1) the social embeddedness of action, (2) the entire process and outcome of practical action, and (3) the dimension of “protest” and its effects on society largely ignored by action theorists (Bunge 1998: 308–309).
This explains why Mahner and Bunge (1997: 176) write that “a moderate dose of methodological—not ontological—individualism may be a healthy antidote to naïve holism”, since methodological individualism (in the broadest sense) holds that wholes can be understood if analyzed into their parts.
In Bunge’s CESM model of society, “social structure” stands for the set of relations among the members of a given social system and among these and items in the system’s environment, while the total social structure of a society is defined as “the union of its biological, economic, political, and cultural structures” (Bunge 1998: 66). On this view, importantly, “structure” is an emergent property of a system and therefore not a thing (Bunge 2010a, b: 375, 379; cf. Wan 2011: 128n).
One reviewer correctly points to the similarity between the situational logic/mechanism as emphasized by analytical social scientists and Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach. In fact, Archer herself employs this term in explaining how institutional and cultural configurations define different situational logics that predispose agents towards specific courses of (strategic) action (see e.g., Archer 1995; Creaven 2000).
For more discussion, see Sect. 5 below. A similar perspective to structural individualism is “actor-centered institutionalism”, which seeks to integrate action-theoretic and institutionalist perspectives (e.g., Mayntz and Scharpf 1995; Scharpf 1997; Schimank 2004; Kron 2010: 17–51). Also of relevance here are the works of the Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, who has developed a comprehensive critique and reconstruction of collective action theory by taking micro-situational and broader contextual factors seriously (see e.g., Ostrom 2007, 2010; Vollan and Ostrom 2010; Poteete et al. 2010).
With the help of the theory of “action and its environments” elaborated by Alexander (e.g., 1987) and Emirbayer (1996), we can say that the emphasis on situational and action-formation mechanisms discussed here well captures the fact that action unfolds within a plurality of cultural, social-structural, and social psychological environments or contexts.
The structure of and conditions for such collective (joint, shared) intentions have been the focus of much debate, since intentionality is generally deemed as a feature of individual minds or brains .
Note that, however, Archer (1995: 258, see also 2011: 84) uses the term “corporate agents” to refer to those who are “aware of what they want, can articulate it to themselves and others, and have organized in order to get it”, and are able to “engage in concerted action to re-shape or retain the structural or cultural feature in question”. Both collective and corporate actors are therefore candidates for “corporate agents” in Archer’s sense.
The most prominent among them include the nuances between different types of composite actors (e.g., Scharpf 1997; Geser 1990, 1992; Coleman 1990; Sibeon 2004; King et al. 2010), the conditions of joint actions and group agency (e.g., Pettit and Schweikard 2006; Pettit 2009; List and Pettit 2011), collective intentionality (e.g., Tollefsen 2002; Saaristo 2006; Chant 2007; Gilbert 2007) and plural subjecthood (e.g., Gilbert 2000; Sheehy 2006), and the logic of “team reasoning” (e.g., Sudgen 2003; Bacharach 2006; Gold and Sugden 2007; Colman et al. 2008) and “we-reasoning” (e.g., Tuomela 2007a, b; Hakli et al. 2010).
Adloff (2006: 4) admits that a “class” is not an “acting unit”, but his reason is that it lacks the ability to “steer its actions quasi-intentionally and self-reflexively”.
See, among others, Wight (2004: 296); Lichbach and de Vries (2007); Maurer and Schmid (2008); Blom and Morén (2011: 64–65). Bunge (1998: 88, 106, 1999: 56, 2006a: 122–123, 131, 2009: 19) himself also writes of such macro-social mechanisms as production and exchange, technological innovation, price formation, wealth redistribution, consumerism, deindustrialization, ethnic conflicts, social cohesion, social control, nation-building mechanisms (e.g., compulsory elementary schooling), various “economic and political segregation mechanisms” allegedly overlooked by the pioneering analytical social scientist Thomas Schelling, and so forth.
I thank one reviewer for making this criticism.
A more popular translation by Wolfgang Mommsen (1965: 44n) is “exorcise the spectre of collective conceptions which still lingers among us”.
This is exactly what the situational mechanism is about (recall the Sect. 3).
Bunge’s emergentism asserts that all facts (states or changes of states [events and processes]), whether chemical, mental, or social, occur in material things. Contrary to physicalism (eliminative materialism), it maintains that supra-physical things, from organisms to social systems, are real/material.
Hedström (2005: 25; see also e.g., Hedström and Ylikoski 2010b: 389) follows Machamer et al. (2000) in defining mechanisms as consisting of “entities (with their properties) and the activities that these entities engage in, either by themselves or in concert with other entities”. This view is referred to by Glennan (2010) as the “mechanistic systems approach”, developed mainly by philosophers of the life sciences. For more discussion on the commonalities and differences between Bunge’s and analytical sociologists’ conceptions of “mechanism”, see Wan (2011: 145–148). Notwithstanding the differences, both sides would agree that “since any ‘event’ or ‘process’ ultimately refers to entities and activities…, a definition that focuses on entities/properties/activities triads seems more accurate than a definition which refers generically to such notions as ‘events’ or ‘processes’” (Manzo 2010: 150). In my view, Bunge’s CESM model and his general systems philosophy provide a coherent ontological basis for conceptualizing these “entities”, “activities”, and “processes”.
In a recent article, Jepperson and Meyer (2011: 68) make a strong case against “assigning privileged status to individualist explanation” by meticulously examining the existing literature on the connections between Protestantism and capitalist development. However, their accusation of the mechanism-based explanation is unsubstantiated, since they simply oppose it to “the theoretical task of attending to the multiple levels of analysis involved in sociological explanation”. As we have seen, once the dogmatic insistence on individualist microfoundations is abandoned, mechanism-based explanations will be perfectly in tune with multi-level analysis. For example, Lichbach and de Vries (2007) distinguish among macro-, meso-, and micro-level mechanisms (e.g., economic mechanisms and political behavior mechanisms taking place at the macro and micro levels respectively) that should be taken into consideration in a multi-level analysis of the mobilization of globalized protest movements. Likewise, in his study of the global order and the post-communist transformation, Pickel (2006) makes extensive use of, for example, nationalism as a nationalizing mechanism, which takes place not merely “at global, regional, state-society, and local levels”, but “in political, cultural, economic, and biosocial systems and organizations of all sorts” (Pickel 2006: 135).
Indeed, Bunge has made it clear that complex systems typically undergo several (more or less intertwined) processes at different levels. This also holds true in the case of evolutionary biology. As Bunge (2010a: 81) points out, most biologists agree that evolution “has resulted from the concurrent operation of mutation, environmental selection, niche construction, hybridization (mainly in plants), and a few other mechanisms present on all levels, from molecule to whole organism to population to community”. It is these multi-level interactions and assorted concurrent mechanisms that radical reductionists, such as the propagandists of “one-level, gene-based views” (Gould 2001: 224), typically lose sight of because of their “desire to explain all larger-scale phenomena by properties of the smallest constituent particles” (Gould 2001: 225).
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I am deeply grateful to eight anonymous reviewers for their criticisms, suggestions, and encouragements. This article is the result of a research project supported by National Science Council, Taiwan (project number 100-2628-H-110-008-MY2) and the Asia-Pacific Ocean Research Center at National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan (project number 00C0302703).
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Wan, P.Yz. Analytical Sociology: A Bungean Appreciation. Sci & Educ 21, 1545–1565 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-011-9427-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-011-9427-3