Human Organizations and Social Theory: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Adaptation

Preface

preface My purpose is to present a new kind of social theory. The center of the theory is a new view of social organization: what its parts are, how they are combined, and how it all is related to behavior. With it, our previous preoccupation with society or culture as underlying realities that organizations merely manifest turns inside out. They are seen as projections of the organization process, not underlying causes. Phenomena and epiphenoma change places. Where everything important seemed hidden, now we see the importance of what is observed. The analysis applies to organizations of all kinds: kinship as well as government , “ours” as well as “theirs,” traditional as well as modern, face-to-face as well as global, those normally dealt with by anthropologists as well as those normally dealt with in the other social sciences. It also applies to the sciences and social sciences themselves. During the last twenty years, self-labeled proponents of postmodernism and interpretivism have made their careers by conspicuously rejecting the very possibility of an ethnological science. Even before this, however, a far more corrosive attack originated not from these declared enemies of empiricism but rather from those who represented themselves as its friends, primarily proponents of positivistic metatheory and related views. It is in positivist pseudoscience that the postmodernist misrepresentations actually originate, and it is the confusion and misdirection that positivism has generated that lends them plausibility. What I am arguing for here is neither positivism nor postmodernism; it is radical empiricism. There are several good general counter-critiques of the interpretivist and postmodernist arguments, including J. Tim O’Meara’s article “Anthropology as Empirical Science” (1989), Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition (1994), Lawrence Kuznar’s Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology (1997), James Lett’s Science, Reason, and Anthropology (1997), and Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? (1999). Yet there is still no comparable critique of positivism and its allies. I will therefore provide one, but my main purpose is to present the theory that positivism has heretofore prevented us from developing. Positivism begins with philosophical dogma. Empirical theory begins and ends with observables. In human social organizations around the world, three observations stand out uniformly and stubbornly. First, no society ever has just one organization or structure. The innumerable efforts to justify the idea of a unitary social organization, social structure, or culture that occupied the better part of the last century consistently failed. All societies, regardless of scale, are pluralistic. The real problem is not to show how everything is really unified but rather to show how the evident pluralism is maintained. The second recurrent observation is that such organizations do not control us. We use them to try to control each other, with varying success. Nor do organizations or societies simply evolve as though on their own. People use them to accomplish common purposes, also with varying success, and the outcome is a societal adaptation, which also may be variably successful. The archaeological record is paved with the bones of organizational failures. The third recurrent observation is that organizations are purposive constructions of their members. They consist of an orderly set of indigenous ideas and resources in use, and the use is future-oriented. The fact that the concept of purpose has proved to be so troublesome up to now should not deter us. There is a way to handle it, and it rests on recognizing that it is not we as analysts but rather those who actually construct the organizations who have to say what these organizational purposes are. What we need to do is elicit them without prejudging them. Rigorous empiricism, relativism, and pluralism are hallmarks of the line of social theory associated with Kantian skepticism in Europe and pragmatism in America, not exclusively but importantly. Both of these traditions are constructivist . They include analyses of the social construction of the self, of interaction, of language acquisition, of cognitive development, of government, and of law and legal processes, inter alia. They have also been enormously successful in the area of public policy. What has been lacking is a consistent and comprehensive constructionist analysis of organization as such, and without this there is no center to pull the rest together. We will fill this gap. viii Preface ...