Complexity, Society and Social Transactions

Developing a Comprehensive Social Theory

Thomas Whalen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138894587
• eBook ISBN: 9781351717762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book develops and presents a general social theory explaining social, cultural and economic ontology and, as a by-product, the ontology of other social institutions and structures. This theory is called social transaction theory. Using the framework of the complex adaptive systems model, this transdisciplinary social theory proposes that society, culture and economy are emergent from social and environmental transaction and negotiation. Each transaction contains an element of negotiation. With each transaction, there is continual renegotiation, however small or large. Even if the result is no change, renegotiation takes place. Thus, there is a constant emergence of social constructions and a continuous reconstruction of society in the 'specious present.' Practices, beliefs, explanations, and traditions become part of the accepted canon of a group through continual social transaction. Deviations from canon and expected outcomes are managed through narrative. Narrative can be either rejected or accepted into the social canon of a group or society.

This social theory applied Bhaskar's critical realism to refine the several theoretical works that were utilized. These include complex adaptive systems, Mead's social theory, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Strauss's negotiated order theory, game theory, Bruner's narrative and folk psychology, Giddens's structuration theory and Ricoeur's interpretation theory.

A transdisciplinary account of the emergence of society and culture and the role of narrative, Complexity, Society and Social Transactions will appeal to scholars and practitioners of social theory and sociology.

1 An invitation to a social journey

 

 

 

 

 

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Lao Tzu 2001, verse 64

 

 

While many have begun this same journey in the search for a social theory, no one ever arrives at the same destination. Like our predecessors, we will take many of the same roads, but our journey will bring us to a different destination. I pray that, at journey’s end, our understanding of society will be clear. Thus, I have set a difficult goal to attain. I will open our journey where I first began, with a brief review of how humanity has approached the idea of culture.

Where have we been?

Although society and economy have been the focus of some disciplines for millennia, culture has only become a concern of scholars in the past century and a half. Over the past 40 years, business and government have become interested in culture as well. Although it was not specifically recognized until the nineteenth century, humans have been aware of culture for millennia. In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus ([440 BCE] 1987) recognized that culture varied between people of different nations and that most people approach other cultures ethnocentrically. He famously documented a comparison that King Darius of Persia made concerning the Greeks who burned their dead and the Callatians who ate their dead:

Darius... called together some of the Greeks who were in attendance on him and asked them what would they take to eat their dead fathers. They said that no price in the world would make them do so. After that Darius summoned those of the Indians who were called Callatians, who did eat their parents, and in the presence of the Greeks... asked them what price would make them burn their dead fathers with fire. They shouted aloud, ‘Don’t mention such horrors!’

3: 38

While ancient funerary practices provided a distinct contrast for Darius and Herodotus, everyday common practices, whether mundane or extreme, can also be a source of distinction. Consider the reactions that various societies have ‘to contact with snails, slime, faeces, vomit, entrails, some people relish eating the very things which fill others with disgust. If we feel revolted by the idea of eating human flesh, we have to admit that cannibals like it’ (Douglas 2005: 2). These examples illustrate just a trivial slice of the myriad customs, traditions and beliefs created by humans.

Culture study is a relatively new discipline. In 1871, E.B. Tylor (1958) published the first work that examined culture as a field of study. The underlying motivation may not have been altogether virtuous. For example, Bergendorff (2009) argued that the initial motive to study culture was based on Western control of colonized people. Since Tylor, explanations of culture have ranged the breadth of human imagination. Early theories were grounded in social ‘evolution’¹ and held that Western civilization was the pinnacle of human cultural achievement. In the early twentieth century, Franz Boas and his students² argued against an ethnocentric approach to culture. Instead, they sought to understand culture relative to the local population rather than an absolute value system on an ‘evolutionary’ scale (Salzman 2001).

For much of the twentieth century, culture studies and theory were confined to anthropology and sociology. Numerous theorists, including Boas, Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss, Malinowski and Parsons, provided their input. Geertz (1973) went so far as to refer to culture as ‘not just an ornament of human existence but – the principal basis of its specificity – the essential condition for it’ (46).

In the past four decades or so, other disciplines such as business, management and leadership studies have taken up the subject. In 1972, Roger Harrison posited that organizations have culture that can be identified, categorized and managed (Cartwright and Cooper 1992). Pettigrew (1979) focused on organizational culture. Given the success of the Japanese automobile industry and the theory that it was due to corporate culture, a trend began in both the academy and the business world to examine the concept. This idea quickly gained traction and there was increased research into organizational culture.

Hofstede ([1980] 1984) used an IBM corporate survey to quantitatively isolate four cultural dimensions and later added a fifth (Hofstede [1991] 1997). This quantitative approach to a complex subject inspired numerous studies, practices and theories. Schein ([1985] 2004) attributed organizational culture to leadership and identified the leader as the primary factor in cultural formation. Bowditch and Buono ([1985] 1994) linked organizational culture and effectiveness. Eventually, academics and business researchers began using culture to explain many diverse subject areas including: leading change; enhancing corporate effectiveness and performance; and creating an environment that embraces learning, safety and connectedness. As a result, the popular press freely tosses the term ‘culture’ about, realizing its power over organizations and individuals. The term is used in corporate boardrooms and on factory floors with little understanding of its origin, but knowing its role in determining success and failure. Executives cite the need for ‘cultural changes’ when planning mergers and acquisitions, as if these changes were as simple as changing a light bulb – never realizing the underlying cause of the phenomenon or the potential difficulty they face.

Economic globalization has demonstrated the value of understanding culture for business purposes. The internet and globalization have created a need to understand culture for personal reasons. The cultures of the world are increasingly entwined. At the time I am writing this book, communication between continents is nearly instantaneous. Because most transoceanic travel is accomplished via air rather than sea, the elapsed travel time is measured in hours rather than weeks or months. Social networking tools allow people to develop and continue relationships in ways that were not possible even 20 years ago. People are able to stay in continuous contact via Skype, FaceTime, smart phones, text messaging, social media and email. New words and meanings are being created at an unprecedented rate through text messaging and Twitter. Internet blogs permit anyone to publish their views on any subject imaginable. Business, economic, social and political interests are shared across the globe. As a result, there is a need to better understand other regional and national cultures.

What is the question?

Given the confusion and perceived urgency to understand culture, my objective was to answer the question of exactly how a group of people comes together to form culture at either an organizational level, an isolated group level or an informal level. I sought to understand how culture is created, developed and changed. Such understanding can help leaders better comprehend the people that they lead, the interaction of an organization’s members and the organization’s interaction with other organizations regardless of nationality.

I postulate that, since society subsumes culture and economy, all three aspects of human behaviour and organization can be approached as a gestalt.³ For this reason, related questions are found throughout the social sciences – for example, the Hobbesian question: ‘How can one establish a society in which force and fraud are not routinely used in satisfying wants?’ (Ellis 1971: 692). Similarly, the economics community asks, ‘What is the economy made of? What are its constituents and how do they hang together? What kind of general principles govern its functioning, and its change?’ (Mäki 2001: 3). Finally, consider game theorists, who ask what underlying strategies and principles hold our society together? On the surface these questions appear to be unrelated to my initial question regarding social and cultural formation, but on closer examination culture studies, social contract theory, game theory and economic theory have three commonalities: people interacting with people, people interacting with the environment, and the rules and strategies that emerge to govern those interactions. Thus, when I ask how people form society and culture, when Talcott Parsons asked ‘How is society as an ordered set of related actions possible at all?’ (Habermas 1981: 175) and when a contemporary economist asks ‘what is the essence of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”?’⁴ it is likely that we are all seeking the same answer. That same answer may account for moral philosophy systems, some religious belief systems and portions of political science. If these commonalities are taken as a gestalt and Dewey and Bentley’s transactional strategy is employed, then the picture becomes clearer. We have organisms and environment transacting as one and developing strategies, rules and laws to govern those transactions.

Where am I taking you?

There are three primary elements to the refined theory. The first, transaction, is initially presented in this book as interaction. Interaction was the primary mechanism of George Herbert Mead’s work in social phenomenology. Later in the book I will explain Dewey and Bentley’s transactional strategy and how it transforms interaction into transaction.

The second mechanism, negotiation, comes from the business and economics world, but most importantly from the work of Strauss ([1964] 1981, 1978). It was later expanded by his colleagues and students and it is this expanded version that I will use. Negotiation permeates our lives. We are continually negotiating and renegotiating socially and environmentally. Even when we do nothing we are implicitly renegotiating the status quo. Game theorists approach negotiation in a slightly different manner and insights from Axelrod (1984), Binmore (2005), Nash ([1950] 2002) and Schelling ([1960] 1980) will be combined with Strauss’s work.

The third element is the concept of emergence. Although emergence has long been an aspect of both philosophy and science, it has most recently appeared in complexity science. Goldstein (1999) described it as, ‘the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns, and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems’ (49). I argue that society, culture and the economy are continually emerging from the first two elements.

Overview of the book

I have divided this book into two parts. Part I consists of five chapters in which I present several theoretical foundations, including a scientific philosophy that will guide us, a rubric for evaluating social theory, a discussion of scientific method and some definitions of ambiguous terms. Finally, I situate the refined theory in the realm of human experience and human consciousness.

In Part II I develop and present the refined theory, then apply the theory to numerous social institutions. I address each of the major elements of the theory in separate chapters. These are complex adaptive systems; emergence theory; applicable social theory; Dewey and Bentley’s transactional strategy; negotiation, negotiated order theory and game theory; meaning, meaning making, language and symbols; environmental transactions; and, finally, the refined theory itself. In Chapter 15, I begin to apply the theory. I will look at how the refined theory can explain social structure, social power, culture, economic theory, moral philosophy and political organization.

Notes

1I hold that evolution is strictly a genetic event. In most cases when someone refers to ‘evolution’, they really mean adaptation. Therefore, when a source has used the word in this context, I will place the word in scare quotes.

2These are numerous and include Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Alfred Kroeber.

3Gestalt is a German word for ‘form or shape’. It is used in English to refer to a concept of ‘wholeness’. Wertheimer ([1924] 1997) described a gestalt as ‘wholes, the behaviour of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole’ (2).

4In this sense I am referring to the modern usage prevalent in neoclassical economics. The meaning of Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ has changed significantly since Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776. The only time Smith referred to an ‘invisible hand’ in that document was in describing how an individual would seek to promote domestic production over foreign production (572). Krueger (2003) argued that ‘Smith’s faith in the invisible hand has been greatly exaggerated by modern commentators’ (xviii).

Part I

Laying the foundation

Aspire to be like Mt Fuji, with such a broad and solid foundation that the strongest earthquake cannot move you, and so tall that the greatest enterprises of common men seem insignificant from your lofty perspective. With your mind as high as Mt Fuji you can see all things clearly. And you can see all the forces that shape events; not just the things happening near to you.

Miyamoto Musashi [1645] 2005

In this first part, I will lay out what many think of as ‘the boring stuff’. Nevertheless, I think it is necessary to establish some basic principles from which we can move forward with mutual understanding – a broad and solid foundation, if you will. I will address five specific topics. First, I will discuss the philosophy underlying social science. A key aspect of this discussion will be an examination of B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface: why do we need another social theory?
• Acknowledgments
• 1 An invitation to a social journey
• Part I Laying the foundation
• Part II Developing a theory of social ontology
• References
• Index