Abstract
The main argument of this chapter is that discussions about action concepts in the social sciences are still far too much presented as letters of faith pitching various necessarily partial theoretical approaches against each other in a totalizing fashion. This modality of engagement with human action for sociological purposes falls short of a number of criteria that I will develop in Part 2 of this chapter. In particular I will show that the very common narrow focus of the activity concepts discussed in Part 3 (rational choice, habit, practice, interaction, social action, and performance) overlooks not only the constitutive role of emic understandings of activities in everyday life, their plurality in use, and their historicity, but also the socio-political and thus historical responsiveness of scholarly activity concepts themselves. Moreover, many activity concepts make it difficult to comprehend how diverse aspects of social life are connected with each other. This does not mean, however, that these concepts would not be useful in particular kinds of circumstances. It only means their totalizing claims are misleading. To help crafting situationally and historically specific concepts of action I propose in Part 4 a consequently processualist metatheoretical framework focusing on action-reaction effect webs. A secondary argument of this chapter addresses another unfortunate feature of contemporary sociological work. In spite of the fact that there is near universal agreement among sociologists today that social configurations exists in the interconnected activities of people, activity concepts play only a subordinate or perfunctory role in major parts of sociology. The reasons for this highly problematic and unnecessary state of affairs lie in the history of how the social sciences have developed in response to political, economic, and social revolutions out of individualistic Enlightenment political philosophy and ethics. I therefore open this chapter in Part 1 by very briefly tracing the historical roots of action concepts in the Europeanoid tradition including the idea that social configurations can (or even must) be studied without recourse to the activities of their constituent people. This historical snapshot will also shed light on the question why action concepts are, in the social sciences, discussed as articles of faith.
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Notes
- 1.
Examples are the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, the Edict of Nantes of 1598, and in a different constellation the English Act of Toleration of 1688. Historically, such agreements were echoing medieval efforts of the church, of the emperor, and of cities to create systems of adjudication with centralized monopolies of violence in lieu of the feuding rights of nobles. Perhaps the most famous one of these is the Old Swiss Confederacy of 1291.
- 2.
What Parsons (1937) characterizes as a universal problem of social order has thus very specific historical roots, which is to say it gets thematized as a problem only in particular historically specific circumstances.
- 3.
What I call here holism was articulated in different countries at around the same time in different ways, to different extents, and with different emphasis, which came to be known under different names. Paradigmatic examples are Sentimentalism in England and Romanticism (with a precursor in “Sturm und Drang”) in Germany. Importantly, both were simultaneously literary and philosophical movements.
- 4.
- 5.
This shift in concerns and attention can be nicely brought to the fore by contrasting graphical depictions of supreme power and sovereignty. Whereas medieval and early Renaissance images show the Christian divinity in the guise of an old man who as heavenly puppeteer holds the strings of his own creation, the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan shows the sovereign state made up of all citizens together in front of the beautiful order they have created together and govern through him in scepter and sword. Nineteenth century depictions are much less flattering. Daumier for example shows Louis Philippe the “citizen king” chained by his own obesity to the throne where he is force-fed the goods of the kingdom while he is at the same time endlessly defecating laws keeping his brown-nosing underlings busy.
- 6.
This does by no means imply, of course, that the emic notion of activity is in any sense true. It simply means that their employment does have an effect on the course of activities.
- 7.
Emic refers to the study of a cultural phenomenon based on its specific, internal elements and their functioning, in short local use, whereas etic refers to the study of cultural phenomenon by applying general, external for example academic frames.
- 8.
Historically, efforts to theorize social life emerged at the interstices between cognitive and political interests. In some cases the political element is more obviously in the foreground, as with Machiavelli’s Prince, Hobbes’ Leviathan, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, or with Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. In other cases, say Mommsen’s Roman History, or Malinowski’s Argonauts the description of the lives of people at some other time and place may make it appear as if social inquiry was a content-neutral purveyor of facts of life at some distant place. Yet the political purpose of such writing, often the other as an example to emulate (or to avoid), self-discovery, calls for help, preservation or transformation etc. are everywhere shining through the prefaces, styles, and rhetorical structures of these texts.
- 9.
Not surprisingly it is rarely used as a criterion to discard beloved concepts notably by its strongest proponents in economics.
- 10.
The use of the term modern as adjective reaches back into the Renaissance to denote perceptible temporal breaks with the past. As a noun and further solidified into the term modernity it begins to become an epochal marker during the Enlightenment to reach the significance we attribute to it today in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a contrasting term it always implies plurality. The degree of plurality and fragmentation of authority then comes to be mapped onto “early modern”, “modern” as well as more recently onto the “post-modern”.
- 11.
This implies a decisive shift in the overarching project from within which the conceptualization of action was undertaken. The analysis of action for the sake of making it better (more ethical or less sinful) gave way to an interest in understanding it as a feature of the world as it is. Only with this shift did action become an object of theoretization in its own right.
- 12.
The label utilitarian rationalism is not common in the literature. I use it to emphasize its pronounced differences with traditional models of rational action and contract while also marking its tendency to engage in a priori reasoning.
- 13.
Advantage of course garnered the attention it did because the calculus developed here was immensely useful first in justifying and later also in conducting business. The possibility to formalize the pursuit of advantage, that is pure scientific form mattered as well. There were, needless to say, efforts to formalize the pursuit of truth and justice as well. Yet these have not gone nearly as far as the pursuit of advantage now dubbed “utility”.
- 14.
Proponents of individualism typically denigrate communal perspectives as collectivist playing on not so subtle associations with fascism and socialism. Conversely, communalists of either of the two stripes of discussed below often reciprocate by calling the opposing perspective atomism with likewise not so subtle overtones of confusing the study of social life with the study of dead matter. Although I am in some sense clearly taking sides in the debate I want to avoid such name calling not least because all well-established models discussed in what follows have value if typically in a domain much smaller than the one imagined by their authors.
- 15.
This is of course precisely what is done in biology today—a valuable lesson in the half-time of naturalistic metaphors.
- 16.
The fruitful tradition of looking at nationalisms, notably the American one as a “civic religion” (Bellah 1968) has taken off from here and it has contributed to communitarian thought the only successful normative school of social thought in which American sociology after World War II was represented with important scholars such as Bellah.
- 17.
The emergentists much quoted examples from nature cannot serve as proper analogies here. While natural scientists can for example observe elements and their properties independently of the molecules of which they can be a part, the same is not true in society.
- 18.
To say it with the natural metaphors of the emergentists: It is as if the oxygen in water was different from the oxygen in carbondioxide. It is as if there was no oxygen tout court, but only oxygen in something else. It would be pointless then to be puzzled by the fact that the properties of oxygen and hydrogen would not “add up” to form those of water, simply because nobody had ever seen oxygen and hydrogen and carbon by itself. At the level of biology: yes humans are made of cells, but these cells operate differently from mono-cellular beings in spite of very many structural similarities. Humans emerge no more from flagellates than society from individuals.
- 19.
Aristotle (322BCEa, b) gave praxis the added specific meaning of a set of activities that is not undertaken for the sake of something else that is what he calls poiesis, but completely for its own sake. As central as this distinction is to Aristotelian practical philosophy, it is specific to him and his school.
- 20.
The ancient Greeks saw good habits as a basis for good practice and as such of virtuous behavior. Accordingly, habits became the target of educational efforts. Yet, the Greeks also saw that these habits are the results of practices as much as of direct instruction. Although manifesting themselves as characteristics of persons, then, the Greeks saw habits as the result of a social process of instruction as well as of experience, of repeatedly acting in social context (Aristotle 322BCEa). Politically good habits were seen as the basis of a stable and reliable social order (Aristotle 322BCEb).
- 21.
It appears that habit was generally suspect to thinkers aspiring to effect changes. Missionizing Christianity is, unsurprisingly, not interested in habit. In the work of Augustine, and this is very significant for the place of habit in Europeanoid social thought after the Reformation, will and choice are emphasized and habit no longer plays a roles as a significant theoretical concept. Of course there are sound theological reasons for this preference as well. Yet, with Christianity firmly established and through the reappropriation of Aristotle’s practical philosophy in the thirteenth century, habit once more played a significant, if secondary, role notably in the work of Thomas Aquinas. Subsequent revolutionary movements kept to Augustine rather than Aquinas.
- 22.
Dewey even collapses will into habit.
- 23.
Elias is concerned here with processes of colocation (e.g. urbanization) or connection (e.g. trade) following political centralization and expansion as much as in socio-technological means of coordination (e.g. money, standardization, clocks).
- 24.
Elias too was concerned about the habitus generating powers of status competition. Yet, in his work it works as only one kind of interweaving mechanisms among many others. The similarities in both accounts are as interesting as their respective differences. Suffice it to say here that Elias’ concept is wide enough to see that cooperation is as powerful a generator of habitus as competition. Bourdieu on the other hand adds a Cartesian precision and level of self-reflective theorizing which is absent in Elias. This depth is particularly useful where Bourdieu provides to tools to study the self-normalizing tendencies of fields and the symbolic violence they exert on participants (1990).
- 25.
These three aprioris are not reconcilable with caretaker-infant interaction (e.g. Stern 1984) because they presuppose a fully developed self with linguistic abilities. As such they fail as aprioris in the sense intended by Simmel. However, the Simmelian aprioris can be interpreted fruitfully as dimensions of a social imaginary for fully symbolized social interactions. Yet, since early developmental interactional forms make much use of affect attunement and since they do not simply subside it is clear that Simmel’s notion of interaction is fundamentally incomplete even for adult interaction.
- 26.
Bakhtin systematically builds on Buber (Friedman 2001). At this point it is unclear to me, however, whether either Buber or Bakhtin had actually read Simmel’s apposite texts and whether they saw themselves developing his notion of interaction further. In a certain sense Simmel’s work was prolific but was often received in a piecemeal fashion.
- 27.
Feminism and postcolonial theory (Fabian 1983) have drawn significantly on a dialogic imaginary. On the monologic/objectifying end of these attitutes there has been something of a common thematic focus and intensive cross-fertilization of ideas emerging from dialogism, a reinvigorated interest in Hegel’s notion of recognition (Honneth 1992) a postmarxian Lukacs (1923) inspired interest in processes of objectification (Honneth 2005) and a Freud inspired line thinking of processes of fetishization (Kaplan 2006; Böhme 2006).
- 28.
This of course includes the possibility that that the interpretation given to an action by a sociologist may deviate significantly from the meaning the actor may have connected with it. The point Weber is making is simply that no matter what the actor may have thought he or she was doing, their intended meaning matters to understand the particular course of action they have taken as other meanings would have putatively led to other actions.
- 29.
In the lack of a more sophisticated understanding of meaning comes to the fore one of the lacunae of Weber’s otherwise so stunning erudition: the complete absence of linguistic knowledge of either the classical historical school of linguistics, of the synchronic linguistics of Saussure or of Peirce’s semiotics.
- 30.
The tracing of ideas is of course an endless business. An alternative but crucially incomplete line of reasoning unfolds from Kant’s epistemology (together with Aristotle and Plato the terminus a quo par excellence), to Durkheim’s (1907, 1912) pioneering work on the importance of socially derived categories operating as systems of classifying the world; then came the acquisition of these ideas by W. I. Thomas (1928) who thus remembered them for a younger American audience, yet without the important layer of a mediating semiotics to then feed into Merton’s notion of self-fulfilling prophecy again sens linquitics. These ideas have since then been recycled a number of times (e.g., Butler, Mckenzie). I have highlighted the rhetorical strand here because the symbolic mediation matters here centrally.
- 31.
- 32.
To avoid misunderstandings: Reaction does not mean reactive. Neither does it imply any other kind of mechanistic response. Reactions can be eminently creative, like the clever repartee in a dialogue. Indeed, creativity lies in what is made of the available pieces in the immediate present or in the more distant past, not in a divine creation ex nihilio. And these pieces are even as memories, understandings etc. ultimately traceable to actions, past and present. When Arendt (1958) leaning on Augustine (395) describes creativity as a capacity for new beginnings I would respond that what looks like the ability to start something new is better understood as the jiu-jitsu-like art to alter trajectories thanks to the artful triangulation of vectors pointing in all sorts of directions.
- 33.
- 34.
Subjective means here merely employed by this actor. Understanding therefore does not imply truth in any objective sense of that word.
- 35.
From the perspective of the consequently processualist model presented here it is therefore highly misleading to speak of micro and macro as “levels”. It makes no sense to talk, as Coleman (1990) does of “social conditions” causing the micro- phenomenon of frustration. What causes frustration are the concrete actions of concrete others, if potentially many of them and repeatedly, for example competing with ego for few goods, creating price hikes, etc. that is the level of action-reaction effects is never left. To say this is of course not to argue that everything is “micro” which would totally overlook the fact that even single actions can be the consequence of a wide variety of spatially and temporally dispersed actions.
- 36.
This model therefore allows for a much more nuanced approach to the vexing ambiguity in the results of experiments on cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957; Petty and Cacioppo 1981). Dissonances can only occur if two contexts actualize the same profiles of understandings. As such the model also provides the resources to think through the “tensions” (Spannungen) Weber (1920a, b) thematizes as a major driver of innovation in institution formation and ideas.
- 37.
- 38.
It is no accident, therefore, that the art of rhetoric as a self-conscious practice bloomed first in participatory politics of the ancient Greek poleis and in Republican Rome. Accordingly within the Europeanoid tradition Aristotle’s On Rheotoric and Cicero’s Orator have become the defining texts.
- 39.
This has very interesting consequences. As institutions organizations require a self-politics to maintain them for the purposes of engaging in target politics. That creates all sorts of interesting problems concerning the relationship between both kinds of politics. Many of the problems and frustrations commonly seen in politics are closely related to conflicts between target politics and self politics. Pioneers in the field of political organization had to wait for mass-modernity to appear. The most important first generation encompasses Lenin (1902), Michels (1911).and Weber (1922).
- 40.
Control efforts can have rather interesting ironic effect in that they produce the illusion of power while actually undermining it.
- 41.
For a discussion of the ironies such control efforts can produce see Glaeser 2013.
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Glaeser, A. (2016). Action in Society: Reflexively Conceptualizing Activities. In: Abrutyn, S. (eds) Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32250-6_4
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