Cultural Theory Reading Group

Yesterday, we had the second session of the governance discussion group, and invited Dr. Michael Thompson.

He kicked off the session with the story of Arsenal Football Club. In this story, Arsenal (market actor), the City Council (hierarchy actor), and local residents (egalitarian actor) were negotiating on expansion/re-location of the Highbury football stadium, and came up with the solution for all, the current Emirate Stadium. The new stadium, he explains, is an example of the clumsy solution, which was not possible without the presence of all three voices.

He further explains that the presence of the three voices is necessary but not sufficient condition. It is important that these three voices are communicated constructively. Here, he introduces his version of Steven Ney’s 3×3 matrix of democracy. In addition to the original two dimensions, accessibility and responsiveness as two dimensions, the dimension of deliberative quality makes it 3-D matrix.

The participants seems to accept the descriptive capability of this 3×3 matrix, but left with two important questions.

1. In the case of Arsenal Football Club, there are some incentives for each actor to constructively negotiate, e.g. loyalty to the club and the long history. However, in many cases (maybe because of the conflicting nature of the three voices) actors are not willing to cooperate. So, is it possible to design such communicative environment? and if so, how?

2. In the 3×3 matrix, as you move toward the right-top corner (i.e. democratic institution), the cost of decision-making seems to increase (not only financial terms, but also time etc.). So, is democratic institution always better? and if so, why?

Ney emphasizes that the 3×3 matrix is a set of hypothesis to be tested, and that the implication of different institutional types are not 100% clear. If democratic institution may not always better, the prescriptive power of this theory remains uncertain.

Yesterday, we had the first session for the governance discussion group. We invited Dr. Jill Jaeger and discussed about how scenario can help governance.

The first step to write a scenario is brainstorming. You need to identify ‘critical uncertainties’ in the issue you are looking at. Then, you develop different stories to reflect what can happen with such uncertainties.

She explained that scenario is a plausible story about future and can be used in two ways; fore-casting and back-casting. My understanding of fore-casting is that you explore possible futures through the exercise of scenario writing.

I thought back-casting is easier to understand. It means that you choose the ideal scenario and assess what you need to get there. It can also work in the other way, you choose the undesirable scenario and assess what you must not do to avoid it.

In either way, the key is who you accommodate in the brain storming session because this has a large influence on what critical uncertainties are.

Another point was that in what way scenario can help negotiation process. If two parties with different ideal stories have to make a single decision, can scenario help? It does help in understanding what the other people want. However, this does not mean they can reach agreement easily. Also there are cases where, even though two parties can have different decisions, two scenarios do not stand together. In such cases, scenarios may not be so useful.

I remember that, in one of the seminars at JMI, it was discussed that who your scenario is developed for as well as who you (the scenario writer) are should matter. I am a bit confused as scenario seemed topic-based rather than user-specific. Are they two different approaches of scenario writing, or am I still missing some ingredients?

Anyway, scenario seems to be one of the interesting tool for governance, and I want to learn a bit more about it.

Hi,

At IIASA, Austria, I am organizing a discussion group of governance. The aim is not to hold entirely CT based discussions, but to see how the notion of governance involves in academic research and what are the tools used in such research contexts. CT is definitely one of the tools, and scenarios can be another.

The group is a mixture of ‘hard’ and ’soft’ scientists, and we had the first meeting last week and our interests lies in:
1. In the context of ‘uncertainty’ (i.e. we don’t know what would be the best solution in the context), how can we identify the best solution?
2. If we know the best solution but there is ‘unknown’ obstacle to implement such solution, how can we identify and overcome the obstacle?

Steven Ney suggested that, regarding the 2nd issue ‘the best solution’ should not be the best. The best solutions has to be implementable. And the best way to realise this is to ask ‘uncomfortable’ questions. I really look forward to see how the discussion group goes.

The format is an invited speaker gives a short presentation and then start ‘governance’ discussion in the context of his/her research. The planned speakers are:
- Dr. Jill Jaeger
- Dr. Larry Willmore
- Dr. Steven Ney
- Dr. Michael Thompson

I will try to post summaries from each of the sessions. I would appreciate any comments/suggestions. Thank you.

Hallo all. I had lunch today with Marco Verweij, and we discussed pedagogy. Can anyone come up with an excerpt (i.e. 2-3 pages) of a well-known literary work that might be used as a basis for a discussion about CT. This would involve a clearly defined issue, and 4 separate perspectives that can be attributed to the CT types.

Steven visited the James Martin Institute last Monday, and we had a great opportunity to listen to his presentation as well as to have a small meeting session with him.

He kindly commented on Sam’s and my concerns about our own research. Here, I shall pick some points relevant for the blog.

He told us that he approach the research field with lettle assumption about social solidarities of actors. In other words, you should not approach ‘government’ assuming that it is hierarchical organization, thought often it is the case. This, for me, suggests that formal labels of organisations does not necessarily match their structure.

Another point is that operational use of Cultural Theory. He sees Cultural Theory as a ‘value-free’ mapping tool. To link this tool with normative statements seems to be a difficult issue.

Also he thinks that there are some ambiguiteis in terms of concepts and not the perfect tool.

However, he is keen to see two different path-ways; to develop the thoery further, and to experiment it in many fields of study. He himself is more interested in actually using the theory, but he agrees that someone have to take the other path.

As my comment, I am very interested in his diagram of responsiveness/accessibility. As Steve commented at the presentation, I took the two axes as number of voices in the field of concern and number of solidarities involved in decision-making.

If such field, what he called ‘advocacy coalition’, is built up in this way, I am also interested in the structure of this coalition. For example, the coalition at the national-politics level is seen as a voice at the international-level and forms another level of coalition. Steven and also Sam might want to some words on this view.

Thank you very much, Steven, and sincere apologies if I got some points wrong. I am hoping that Steven or Sam would correct me if that is the case.

Today we discussed "Political Cultures", Part 3 of Cultural Theory by Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky.  Mike Thompson was able to join us, and I video-ed in from Washington.

Part 3 is largely an attempt to resurrect the idea of ‘political culture’ from it’s demise in the 1970s.  The first question, then, was what has been done to update political culture ideas since the publishing of Cultural Theory.  One of the more interesting advances that Mike cited was Steve Ney’s recently completed thesis, which builds off Dahl’s diagram of plural democracy.  Dahl has two-axes (from my understanding), one for whether the public has access to decision-making, and the other for how responsive the decision-makers are to the public. When the political system is neither accessible nor responsive, there is closed hegemony.  When it is both accessible and responsive, there is plural democracy.

According to Mike, Ney dis-aggregates the ‘public’ in to types of social organisation, thereby gradating the axes depending on the number of voices that are accessible and responded to.  I think this is a worthwhile development, because such a diagram could be useful in showing how a particular issue area could move to being more ‘plurally democratic’, or as cultural theorist say it these days, ‘clumsy’.

We then tackled the last chapter of the book, which levels some of the criticisms of Cultural Theory and tries to respond to them.  The one we chose to look at was the ‘Multiple Self’ (p.264).  Two quotes are worth reciting here:

Our theory asserts that cultural bias depends on social context (and vice versa).  If this is so, then we would expect that an individual’s bias will be consistent only to the extent that his social context is consistent.

Let us imagine two extreme cases, one in which an individual perceives each object of attention equally through the five cultural biases and another in which an individual perceives all objects through the same cultural bias.  In the former instance, it is difficult to see how such an individual could ever act.  Just as to the man in Dostoevsky’s famous novel Notes from the Underground, evidence for all positions would always appear equally compelling, so that we could never make up our minds. . . In the case of the individual who sees everything through the same cultural bias, it is hard to imagine him ever cooperating with anyone.

The first quote the the one that is reasserted in this section, saying that further research needs to be conducted to see how people cope with being in multiple contexts: whether they compartmentalise or try to harmonise their contexts into one cultural bias. 

I took issue with the second quote, however, because it seems to disregard the asserted ’scale-independence’ of Cultural Theory.  Why, on one hand, can an individual not have competing voices inside of them and be able to make a decision, while on the other, only when there are competing voices in a society can clumsy solutions come about?  Said another way, how could society make any decisions when there are competing voices, when a person could not if they have competing voices?  Either a person should be able to see an issue equally through all cultural biases and be able to come up with a clumsy solution by themselves (e.g. Marco Verweij’s chapter in Clumsy Solutions) or else when all voices are equally represented in a group of individuals (be it at the society or any other level), a solution should be impossible to achieve. 

Steve Rayner avoids the conundrum I have laid out above by removing the individual (and indeed the idea of there being a ’scale’ from individual to civilisation) from his analyses.  For him (and correct me if I’m putting words in your mouth, Steve), the unit of analysis for cultural theory is the voice that each solidarity (combination of cultural bias and type of social organisation) espouses. 

I’m of the persuasion that an individual could be able to see an issue equally from each cultural lens, but that doesn’t necessary mean that the solution he or she comes up with will be acceptable to others who are involved in the issue.  I think the main reason this is the case is not because the solution is not ‘good’, or even that it’s not ‘clumsy’, but it’s that not all of those involved got a chance to voice their opinion.  I think that the actual act of voicing an opinion, of taking a stance on an issue, is critical to a person’s acceptance of whatever the outcome of that issue is.  So as long at the issue only affects one person, then I think that person could find a solution that they could accept from each cultural bias (not that people do this!).

Those are some thoughts.  I’ve asked the others to contribute their ideas too.

This week's CT reading group was more about what Cultural Theory can deal with and how we can understand it rather than the book 'Cultural Theory'.

The following is a summary of the discussion we had on this week’s reading: “Cultural Theory” by Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky.

The session started with an overview by Mike of the three analytical levels supporting Cultural Theory: social relations, cultural biases and relational strategies. Human beings can transact in different ways and hold different constructions of how the world is, but the hypothesis is that there will be consistency between the three levels that makes people behave systematically. Steve talked about one main analytical level which is ‘strategies’, that is the set of core beliefs and justifications people mobilise across social contexts.  

We brought into question the place of nature and looked at the typology on page 71. The diagram features different constructions of nature (capricious, ephemeral, benign and tolerant) which come each with a different moral justification. Steve and Mike related this to a longstanding philosophical debate on fairness and justice opposing “is” theories which preach a fixed form of nature to explain the workings of society (a society ruled by unchanged guardians), and “ought to” theories which produce normative claims about how the world should be and try to find a social basis for how nature legitimises systems of preference. Central to the diagram is the notion of ‘relative surprise’; i.e. the perception of how the world is does not relate to actual events but the events that occur have their own cultural type. How is an event perceived therefore depends on people’s cultural types. Mike argued that these are simultaneous aspects of nature which interact with the (four) ways in which we perceive the world. Steve stressed that talking about ways in which nature “actually” behaves must not be understood as a realist statement. He explained that the argument is that given the options in which we perceive nature, and to the extent nature behaves in ways consistent with these, we would have the types of responses (i.e. surprises) illustrated in the typology.

We also talked about the ways in which people advance their cultural justifications and simplify their arguments in policy debates. This discussion led us to the issue of subjectivity. Steve and Mike argued that the fundamental unit of analysis is not the individual but the social relation or “the form of social solidarity” people build. The individual is neither an analytic entity, nor is it an abstract structure. He binds himself into different forms of solidarity across his life, and adjusts to changes so as to avoid being marginalised in some forms of solidarity. Cultural Theory is therefore concerned with the process whereby people create solidarities and dissolve others, and the strategies they use to adjust their argumentation accordingly. Steve recalled the notion of the “dividual” (Kapferer and Mariott); people have multiple potentialities and speak in a way that is compatible with the system of social solidarity in place. Values are then stabilised in social interactions through our capacities and choices of where we want to place ourselves. Steve argued against the use of the word “belief” which could mislead us to conceive it as a stable conviction in people’s minds. He prefers to talk instead about “frameworks for self-justification” that hold other people accountable.

The final issue we raised was criticism to Cultural Theory. Critics of Cultural Theory often suggest its views on social organisation are too restrictive, but they conversely propose dichotomies or reduce social relations to only one model. Steve pointed out that the Theory came as a response to functionalist models of social organisation by giving an account of the different cultural contexts in constructive contestation and the way certain modes of organisation become stabilised as a result of the forms of solidarity supporting them. Mike agued that the wording “Cultural Theory” must not be referenced as “cultural theorising”, but as a “theory of socio-cultural viability”, or “a theory of plural rationality and interactive decision processes”. Steve perceives it as a “Theory of Solidarity” because it is framed in forms of social solidarity and focused on social relationships  

./.

This meeting: Natural Symbols by Mary Douglas

Next Meeting: 3 January 2007, Cultural Theory by Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky

This week's reading was Natural Symbols by Mary Douglas. It forms the backbone of grid-group analysis, which was used to develop Cultural Theory.

Douglas' intention with the book was to develop a tool that could be used to identify different types of social organisation. She hoped that the tool would be able to show that 'primitive' and 'modern' societies both showed a mix of social organisation types, therefore debasing the privileged status of modern societies in contemporary anthropological research.

Bodily Control

One of Douglas' main arguments is that social structure is physically manifested through bodily control. The more controlled and ordered one's body, the more one is socially controlled. Her examples come mainly from religion, where groups with low social structure tend to engage in more flamboyant activities, such as speaking in tongues and spontaneous movement. 

Changing Cosmologies

One point we found of interest was that Douglas shows how people are not tied so strictly to their cosmologies as they are to their physical and social environment. If the latter changes, she would expect the cosmologies to change as well. 

Anyone who finds himself living in a new social condition must, by the logic of all we have seen, find that the cosmology he used in his old habitat no longer works.  We should try to think of cosmology as a set of categories that are in use.  It is like lenses which bring into focus and make bearable the manifold challenge of experience.  It is not a hard carapace which the tortoise has to carry forever, but something very flexible and easily disjointed. Spare parts can be fitted and adjustments made without much trouble. (p.158 in 1996 version)

This gives a partial answer to our question from last week: What initiates social change and/or change in cosmology in Cultural Theory? Douglas argues that, in a new social setting, a person can choose(?) to how they will react, i.e. which cosmology they will use to make sense of the new environment.  While that sheds light on the issue of personal cosmological changes, it does not address how the broader social environment itself can change.  Foucault says that social change is enacted by epistemic breaks, which reflect people's perception of ordering at a particular point.  Tarek can perhaps say a bit more here. 

Unclear cosmology correlations with grid and group

Douglas never explicitly named the different cosmologies in this text, though she does use some labels frequently (cf p.148 in 1996):

• "Strong grid strong group": self-explanatory in terms of location on the scales of grid and group, this cosmology falls well into the later-developed hierarchical type.
• "Small group": not to be confused with 'low group', this cosmology is characterised by small but tightly related people.  It corresponds well with the later-developed egalitarian type.
• "Strong Grid": this is the place of the 'Big man', but also those who are oppressed by him.  This seems to fit with the individualistic and fatalistic types in later work, but fitting it onto the grid/group typology is actually quite difficult, as the title would suggest it only resides in the top half.

Discrepancies in editions

One of the most interesting points that we found in the meeting, however, was the difference in text between the 1970/1973/1982 versions and the 1996 version.  Douglas rewrote much of Chapter 4, and even changed its title.  In the earlier versions it is called 'A rule of method', and in the 1996 version it is 'Grid and Group'.  The major edits begin on p.60 of the 1996 version, p.57 of the 1970 version).  It seems that Douglas wanted to show her work as being derived more from Berstein in the later version, but has do so at the expense of the clarity she had in her original description of grid and group.  The result is much confusion, including moments where she contradicts herself in the number of cosmologies she is describing (3 or 4).  We agreed that the earlier version is much easier to understand, particularly with the graphs used. Below are the diagrams from 1970:

It is unclear from this diagram if this is representative of the whole grid/group axes, or only of the top right quadrant (though we suspect it is the whole). 

And this is the diagram from the 1996 version:

Here we see that the 0 is placed firmly in the middle of the graph, which is where a number of the confusions arise.  Douglas speaks of the 0 point (later called the 'hermit' position) as being a the minimum of grid and group.  Some of us thought by this that the cosmologies should be placed only above the horizontal, since that is the only place where there is a shared system of classification.  We even played with the idea of placing all the cosmologies in the top-right quadrant.   

 In general, we all concluded that Natural Symbols provided more confusion than clarity to the ideas of Cultural theory, and that, given a choice, we would all choose the 1970/73/82 versions over the 1996 version for ease of understanding the basic grid/group classification.

Questions for Mary Douglas

We thought we might ask some questions to Mary Douglas about the discrepancies we found: 

• Did she intend 'strong grid' to be distributed above the horizontal axis? 
• If so, how does she reconcile that with the current location of the individualist solidarity in the bottom left quadrant?
• Also, it seems (at least from the 1996 version) that Big Men also are strong grid strong group.  Are we incorrect in thinking this?
• Was there a particular reason for not naming the different cosmologies explicitly in this book?

The meeting discussed the Grid/Group typology introduced by Mary Douglas in Chapter nine of her book “in the active voice”; ‘Cultural bias’. The typology opposes the dimension of individuation to that of social incorporation. ‘Grid’ refers to the rules to which individuals are subject in the course of their interactions whereas ‘Group’ is defined in terms of the members that constitute it as a social body, the potential boundaries that exist among them, ways in which every individual identify herself as being part of the Group and the kind of social relations that emerge out of these perceptions.

The typology features four quadrants, each defining a specific cosmology. Group A rests upon individualistic, competitive premises. B (insulated) is based on fatalist presumptions, and thus imposes rules and regulations which no one has the desire to change. Group D emphasises a strong sense of belonging to the higher body, whilst Group C bounds this sense of community with a set of segregated roles.

We agreed that groups cannot be studied individually; individuals try to contrast their position in a certain category only with regards to others. This is what Mary Douglas refers to as the “social-accounting approach”: that is the constant effort to justify one’s view to other people in a given cosmology. We also accepted that, contrary to various other social theories which attempt to simplify human relations in order to theorise society, Cultural Theory tries to capture the complexity of society and provide more orderly explanations of social control than post-structuralist models.

A number of grey areas were identified at the meeting:

1/ The question Mary Douglas tries to answer is how to allow for individual choice when one opts for a theory of social construction (i.e a theory that emphasizes the primacy of context)? She argues that individuals transform their environments by making decisions, and that the more decisions they make the more social relations are likely to emerge. The separation between social context and cosmology aims at showing that social context does not necessarily determine how people behave. Although she argues that decisions are rational, and cosmologies define ways of justifying oneself to others, she remains unclear on how the individual chooses to adhere to a certain cosmology. The idea of separating social context (consciousness) and cosmology seems very problematic in empirical terms as well. For example, if we think about colonies as examples of ‘B’ type cosmologies (i.e. many restrictions and low sense of belonging to the group), rebellion must reflect the consciousness of the entire group, not only individual subjects.

2/ On the issue of power: The conception of power is also unclear to us. Indeed, Mary Douglas is explicit on the fact that this typology is not a preamble to a theory of power, yet she places emphasis on the individual side through the idea of personal empowerment and ways in which the individual moves forward by subjecting other people. The same observation applies to the question of free will. Cultural Theory appears to be concerned with control and downplays change and action by presupposing social and individual consciousness. Thus, things do not seem ‘messy and moving’ in this typology. The question then is: what kind of human consciousness and change does Mary Douglas advocate and how does she account for individual freedom?

3/ Why do certain categories produce contradictory outcomes? For example, in quadrant A one would expect gender equality to prevail, yet nothing propels a gender equality situation in this category (or in anywhere else on the grid) and there is usually a set of contradictions between the desire for equality and the manifestation of inequality that pushes this group to adjust itself constantly

4/ A particular example of the concept of the hermit (someone who is placed at the bottom left corner of the typology) puzzled us: solitary nuns. Can these be considered as hermits? Aren’t they bound by ‘silent’ social relations? In other words, is linguistic interaction a necessary condition of social communication?

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In the forthcoming meeting (Tuesday 19th, 10.a.m.) we will discuss another text by Mary Douglas; “Natural Symbols”.