Social ontology of government

Daniel Little, University of Michigan

Book proposal: A short and accessible treatment of the nature of the social realities and causal powers of government. The book is intended for a general audience, suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars with an interest in arriving at new ways of thinking about the nature of the political realm. Length: 100-130 pages.

Abstract: An accessible analysis of the nature of the social reality of government, through discussion of recent issues in contemporary social theory and philosophy of social science. The book aims to serve as a bridge between current thinking in political science and philosophy, in order to help the reader come to a richer understanding of the complexity and contingency of the institutions and applications of government in the contemporary world.

Author bio: Daniel Little is a philosopher of social science who has written extensively on a range of topics concerning the social sciences and the social world. Primary topics include scientific explanation, economic development, China studies, philosophy of history, and other topics. He is professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and professor of public policy and sociology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He served for 18 years as chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Little is the author of the academic blog Understanding Society, which has appeared continuously since 2006.

Book Overview

Philosophers of social science have directed renewed attention to issues of ontology with regard to the social world. What kind of entities, powers, forces, and relations exist in the social realm? What kind of relations tie them together? What are some of the mechanisms and causal powers that constitute the workings of these social entities? Are there distinctive levels of social organization and structure that can be identified? Earlier approaches to the philosophy of the social sciences have largely emphasized issues of epistemology, explanation, and confirmation. Greater attention to social ontology promises to allow working social scientists and philosophers alike to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the nature of the social world. Better thinking about social ontology is important for the progress of social science. Bad ontology breeds bad science.

These issues are especially interesting when we consider the nature and role of “government” in the modern world. What is government? How does it work? How are the many agents and subjects of government tied together through constraints, values, incentives, emotions, and interests?

Government is not one unitary thing. Instead, it is a composite thing that encompasses many social functions, doings, and powers, at multiple and overlapping levels. Government is not precisely “laminated”, in Bhaskar’s suggestive phrase. Rather, it consists of multiple systems, organizations, groups, specialists, brokers, and rogues working sometimes with considerable independence and sometimes with great coordination and subordination.

Consider some of these examples of the face of government, and notice the great heterogeneity they represent: the cop on the beat, the health inspector, the city health department, the state and federal revenue services, the national science foundation, the state economic development agency, the mayor’s office, the elected school board, the NRC, and so on ad infinitum. There are ties among these nodes, both formal and informal, and there are sometimes organization charts that display functional relationships, authority structures, and flows of information along various offices and actors. But there is also substantial contingency and path dependence in the development of these institutions and relationships and a quilt-like arrangement of jurisdictions and histories.

A great deal of recent work in sociological theory has provided new tools for describing social arrangements. For example, this is a perfect zone of application for Fligstein-McAdam strategic action field theory. Government is well conceived as interlinked action networks with tighter and looser linkages and strategic actions by a variety of actors. (Think of the jurisdictional struggles between FBI, state and local police authorities.) The theory of assemblages is another suggestive theory of social ontology in this context. Manuel DeLanda spells out some of the connections. The social ontology of assemblage illuminates the modular and contingent arrangement of offices, networks, and actors that make up government at a period in time. And recent discussions of generativity and emergence offer new ways of thinking about the relations between higher level and lower level social entities.

The book seeks to provide a better understanding of some of the central puzzles of empirical political science: how does “government” express will and purpose? What accounts for both plasticity and perseverance of political institutions and practices? How do political institutions come to have effective causal powers in the administration of policy and regulation? And how are we to formulate a better understanding of the persistence of dysfunctions in government and public administration – failures to achieve public goods, the persistence of self-dealing behavior by the actors of the state, and the apparent ubiquity of corruption even within otherwise high-functioning governments?

Table of contents

1. Introduction and framing (10 pages)
2. Part 1. What is social ontology?
   1. Chapter 1. realism for the social realm (12 pages)
   2. Chapter 2. social mechanisms: how things work (12 pages)
   3. Chapter 3. social action sociology: the substrate (12 pages)
3. Part 2. What is government in the modern world?
   4. Chapter 4. Overview: functions, power, decision and choices, democracy, public goods, the rationale for regulation (12 pages)
   5. Chapter 5. policy and administration. Causal dynamics. (12 pages)
   6. Chapter 6. Visions of government: assemblage theory; strategic action theory; complexity, overlap, and contingency
4. Part 3. The stuff of government
   7. Chapter 7. structures, institutions and organizations (12 pages)
   8. Chapter 8. values, norms and practices as causal factors (12 pages)
   9. Chapter 9. Networks and relations (12 pages)
   10. Chapter 10. Dysfunctions (12 pages)
5. Part 4. Emergence, generativity, contingency, persistence
   11. Chapter 11. Two conceptions of “emergence”; Plasticity and persistence (Thelen) (20 pages)

References

Bhaskar

DeLanda

Fligstein and McAdam

Tilly

Elder-Vass

Scott Page