Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour最新文献

Complexity theory (CT) identifies our social system as a contingent and emergent product of non-linear interactions between existing patterns and events. However, CT scholars carrying out various empirical applications have often adopted constructivist positions that disallow the separate existence of social systems and agency, thereby preventing effective analysis of their interactions. Instead, with the help of Critical Realism (CR), we offer a realist complexity approach that sees complexity in terms of the distinction between the domains of the Real, the Actual, and the Empirical, when existing studies of CT still work with a flat ontology that collapses the three domains into one (the Empirical domain). Our non-conflationary CR-CT approach thus argues that a satisfactory explanation of social complexity cannot be at the level of agential experience (the Empirical domain) or at the level of human and systematic events (the Actual domain) but needs to identify causal mechanisms (in the Real domain) of such events. It then combines this depth ontology (that distinguishes the three reality domains) with epistemological relativism (that underscores the contingent character of knowledge claims) to argue that though our knowledge and complexity reduction techniques are socially constructed, it hardly follows that the ontological dimension of reality (spreading across the three domains) is always affected by our complexity reduction efforts at the epistemological dimension in the Empirical domain.

I will argue that from a CR perspective, social reality is complex. It just is not complex in the ways CT suggests. Even emergence, according to CR, is more complex and stronger than CT suggests. First wave CR is enough to advance the issue considerably, but I will also examine dialectical CR as a further attempt within CR to take account of complexity.

This article examines the gradual evolution of the French Régulation school (FR) for the study of capitalism through the lens of structure and agency. The analysis first segments the school into two epochs, the early Régulation, led by authors Aglietta and Lipietz, and the later Régulation, which saw the rise of Boyer. We find that the gradual progression that occurred within the FR school is linked to its authors' implicit ontic engagement with structure and agency, which, in turn, provides natural linkages to Critical Realism. In the second part of the paper, we demonstrate how the comparison between Morphogenetic Régulation and French Régulation (FR) can facilitate a much deeper reading of the structure-agency debate pertaining to the transformation of capitalism. In so doing, it discusses the value addedness of Morphogenetic Régulation through three specific concepts by stressing their relevance for contemporary studies in international political economy. These concepts are: stratified emergence; causality and the problématique of hierarchy.

This paper re-examines a key feature of Emile Durkheim's sociology of knowledge from a critical realist perspective. It is argued that Durkheim's attempt to establish a social basis for the categories in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life should be understood along ontological rather than epistemological lines. This brings to light new problems with the argument which, however, can be brought fruitfully into contact with the more recent social psychological literature on collective intentionality. This yields insights into future lines of inquiry into social cognition and theories of human conceptualizing capacities.

This paper introduces the concept of “borderline institution” to characterize an institution in which actors push upstream the boundary between the normal and the pathological and find downstream ways of systematically taking advantage of this push ex-post. This happens for example when actors make decisions based on predictions; and are simultaneously allowed by vertical concentration to manage conflicts generated by the consequences of these decisions when these predictions fail. A theory of how to identify a borderline institution based on this vertical concentration uses bankruptcy proceedings at the Commercial Court of Paris as an example, relying on Karl Polanyi's concept of double movement and Margaret Archer's concept of double morphogenesis. In this court, bankers as lay judges can control both credit-related predictions at the bank, and bankruptcy proceedings at the court. Enabling conditions for borderline institutional entrepreneurs as “vertical linchpins” in this multilevel context explain how they concentrate enough power to reach a position from which to drive such dynamics. The conclusion asks whether societies promote new borderline institutions to face contemporary and urgent existential challenges.

As Petter Naess observes, some specifically prominent voices within CR have expressly denied our ability to predict much in the social domain while others express great caution about endorsing any such ability. In print, Naess has been the most prominent CR voice defending predictability, but there are others of us critical realists who share Naess's view. The purpose of this paper is to further defend the view that critical realists have no special problem with predicting events. We just do not grant prediction the same status that positivists do. The argument here is parallel to Porpora's that critical realists can and do run regressions but without granting them the same explanatory status as positivism.

To understand social issues and practices such as those related to climate change and technological change that are clearly future-oriented – collectively experienced events that are “not yet” – and co-constructed by different actors, we need nuanced conceptualizations of how people think about, negotiate and co-create futures that allow us to understand not only what people (can) think and do about future-related issues but also how that happens, what for and with which implications. However, so far, one of the key theoretical approaches that has conceptualised how people make meaning in situations of change and uncertainty – the socio-psychological social representations theory (SRT) – has not often engaged with the future or with different forms of temporality. By contrast, the French pragmatic sociology of engagements and critique (PS) has engaged with these notions, conceptualising them in relation to materiality and a plurality of moral orientations – two dimensions often seen as key to how collective futures are made and imagined. To offer a more nuanced and systematic conceptualization of how people represent the future and with what consequences, this paper will present, compare and synthesise SRT and PS, as a first step towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on social change and representations of the future.

The article argues that social catastrophes are the product of networks of unsaturated social relations that lead to the exponential spread of a social evil (pandemic, poverty, desertification, etc.). In the exponential curve of catastrophe there is an inflection point where, if unsaturated social relations are saturated, the catastrophe can be halted and ultimately avoided. The inflection point can be conceived as a generative relational complex in which both necessity and contingency of social relations are at work. Necessity is due to constitutive mechanisms that are automatic and, therefore, to some extent mathematically predictable. Contingency refers to non-automatic, in principle unpredictable relational mechanisms. However, contingency can be of two kinds. It can mean “dependence on” other factors, which can have some degree of predictability, or can be understood as the possibility of “being otherwise”, which is less predictable in its outcomes, but can also open up new opportunities to change the catastrophic trend. The reduction of the exponential curve to logistics can be expected if the networks of relationships at the inflection point are saturated in one way or another. This can be achieved by managing the contingent factors of both types in order to steer the morphogenetic processes of the social networks that configure the inflection point as a relational complex.

In this article I examine and criticize some mainstream views of the future within scholarly debates, mainly in social science. The goal is to review the strategies sociology is following to include the future as a theme of its own reflections. Such strategies also reveal relevant aspects of the society in which they are developed. The main argument revolves around some tensions concerning the relationship of contemporary societies to their future. The key points can be summarized as follows: in contemporary complex societies, where change is believed to be the only constant, social science seems to have abandoned the future as a theme of its reflections, while at the same time prediction and forecast are increasingly necessary. Future studies are, therefore, mainly an enterprise for managers and engineers, taking place in either government or corporate environments and far from the academy. Why is this happening? And is it necessarily so? What does sociology know about "the future(s)? Could prediction still be the form of the argument sociology can make about the future? And if this cannot be, then what exactly is its possible contribution – if any? Are these embarrassing questions a reflection of the way things really are, or of a wrong attitude sociology has taken to future studies? The main thesis is that insofar as sociology still occupies the field of future studies, it is undergoing a process of hybridization, which leads to mix its representational and performative function in a new way, and that can possibly escape confusion with old and new forms of utopian thinking. Such a thesis is illustrated introducing one particular analytic tool deployed in social scientific oriented future studies, namely scenarios, and comparing its inherent logic with that of the morphogenetic approach to sociological research. I attempt to examine the rationale of such a tool, and how it can serve the purpose of sociological analysis, constituting some kind of reflexive morphogenesis of sociological theory of the future

The subject of this special forum is contingency and the openness of the future, and in this essay we take a route not often travelled in regard of these and focus first on philosophy of time. We contrast static and dynamic theory of time in order to (eventually) acquire some traction on the meaning of both contingency and the open future. We suggest critical realism presupposes dynamic theory and that critical realism provides various conceptualizations that might contribute to dynamic theory.