Realism, Causality and the Problem of Social ... - Wiley Online Library

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 30:3 0021–8308

The Problem of Social Structure

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Realism, Causality and the Problem of Social Structure PAUL LEWIS

INTRODUCTION

Recent debate over the merits of various realist perspectives on society, most notably the critical realist approach developed by Roy Bhaskar, has focused on the ontological status of social structure. Social structure, critical realists maintain, is ontologically irreducible to people and their practices. This belief differentiates critical realists from those theorists, such as Rom Harré, for whom social structure is immanent to people’s practices. On the latter view, structure is so intimately bound up with agency that to accord the former a distinct ontological status would be to reify it. Central to the debate is the issue of the causal efficacy of social structure. Critical realists contend that although social structure is unobservable it can nevertheless be known to be real because it makes a difference to observable human behaviour. In making this argument critical realists invoke the so-called causal criterion for existence, according to which unobservable entities can be known to exist through their impact on observable events. The critique advanced by Harré and his supporters, most notably in Harré and Varela (1996), maintains that an appeal to the causal criterion is illegitimate in the case of social structure, implying that critical realism’s claim that the social world contains ontologically irreducible social structures cannot be sustained. My aim in this paper is to cast a critical eye over the debate between the two varieties of realist social theory. To this end, having first outlined the basic critical realist position together with Harré and Varela’s critique, the paper will attempt to develop a critical realist response to the charges levelled against it. The objective of the response is twofold. First, it aims to advance the debate by clarifying the key issues which divide the two perspectives and evaluating where the balance of the argument over these issues lies. Second, by suggesting how the weaknesses in critical realism highlighted by Harré and Varela might be dealt with, the hope is that the paper will prompt critical realists © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Publishers Ltd. Ltd. 2000. 2000 Published by Blackwell Publishers 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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to refine some of their arguments and thus will help to advance the critical realist project.

CRITICAL REALISM, ONTOLOGY AND THE POSSIBILITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

The fundamental question which motivates the critical realist analysis of society is stated by Bhaskar as follows: ‘What properties do societies possess that might make them possible objects of knowledge for us?’ (Bhaskar, 1989, p. 25).

Critical realists answer this question in two stages, first of all addressing the ontological issue of what properties societies possess before then going on to consider the epistemological question of whether those properties make societies possible objects of knowledge for us. At the heart of the critical realist analysis of the ontology of the socio-economic world lies its account of the relationship between social structure and human agency. As we shall see in greater detail below, critical realism seeks to chart a course between voluntarism and determinism. Social structure and human agency are held to be recursively related; each is both a condition for and a consequence of the other. People constantly draw on social structures in order to act and in acting they either reproduce or transform those structures. What is of particular significance for the purposes of this paper is the temporal dimension of the structure-agency relationship. Critical realists contend that a satisfactory understanding of interaction between social structure and human agency requires that it be understood as an inherently historical or “tensed” process in which at any given moment in time social structures and people stand in temporal relations of priority and posteriority towards one another (Archer, 1995, pp. 65–92, 137–58).1 The temporality of the structure-agency relationship becomes apparent once we recognise that all human activity takes place within the context provided by a set of pre-existing social structures. At any given moment of time people confront social structures which are pre-formed in the sense that they are the product, not of people’s actions in the present, but of actions undertaken in the past. The starkest illustration of this is the fact that because every human agent is born into a world of antecedent social structures, they learn a language and face a culture and mode of economic organisation that is not of their own making. These social structures are bequeathed “ready made” to the current generation of agents, impinging involuntaristically upon the latter and confronting them as an objective reality that is ontologically distinct from and irreducible to their current subjective beliefs and actions. Hence, critical realists reject the claim that social structure is merely the voluntaristic creation of agency. In critical realist parlance, there is an “ontological hiatus” between pre-constituted social structure, © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000


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inherited “already formed” from the past, and the practices of agents in the present (Bhaskar, 1989, p. 37; Archer, 1995, p. 196). However, while critical realists claim that at any moment people face given social structures, they do not deny the dependence of those structures on human activity. Indeed, it is this dependence that makes the structures social. Critical realists acknowledge the activity-dependence of pre-existing social structures, and thereby avoid reifying the latter, by admitting that they are indeed the product of human action; but they are the product of actions undertaken in the past, possibly by actors who have since perished, not in the present. And it is because the social structures which form the context for current agency at any given juncture in time are given ready made to agents that critical realists draw the ontological distinction between pre-existing social structures and current actions. What critical realists are doing in following this line of argument is specifying precisely whose actions gave rise to social structure (Archer, 1995, pp. 66, 72, 141–54). Furthermore, while it is of course the case that the continued existence of social structure depends on current human agency, we shall see in greater detail later in the paper that at any particular point in time the incentives agents have to seek either to preserve or to transform the structures which initially confront them, together with the distribution of the resources required to act on those incentives, are themselves a historically given product of actions taken in the past. The picture of social activity to which this gives rise holds that human intentional agency must be understood as acting upon (reproducing or transforming) pre-existent structures, not as creating structures ex nihilo. According to this transformational model of social activity, pre-existing social structures serve both to facilitate and to constrain the exercise of human agency in the present. Critical realists argue that all human activity presupposes a set of antecedent social structures. Critical realists contend that the existence of social structures is a necessary condition for intentional human agency, arguing that activities like speaking, driving on public roads, cashing cheques, giving lectures, and so forth, would be impossible in the absence of social structures such as (respectively) rules of grammar, the highway code, banking systems, teacher-student relationships, and so on. In other words, according to critical realism, social structures facilitate intentional agency (Bhaskar, 1989, p. 34). However, social structures do not merely facilitate human activity; they also constrain it. For the fact that social structure pre-exists and is therefore ontologically irreducible to the current exercise of human agency implies that it enjoys a certain degree of autonomy from and influence over the latter (Bhaskar, 1989, pp. 25, 33, 39; Archer, 1995, pp. 137–9). Bhaskar (1989, p. 39) elaborates on the coercive power of social structure by means of the following quotation from Durkheim: ‘I am not obliged to speak French with my fellow countrymen nor to use the legal currency, but I cannot possibly do otherwise. If I tried to escape this necessity, my attempt would fail © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

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miserably. As an industrialist I am free to apply the technical methods of former centuries, but by doing so I should invite certain ruin. Even when I free myself from these rules and violate them successfully, I am always compelled to struggle with them. When finally overcome, they make their constraining power felt by the resistance they offer’ (Durkheim, 1964, p. 3).

Bhaskar interprets Durkheim to mean that but for the existence of certain pre-existing social structures, particular physical actions—sounds, movements of bodies—would not occur. Social structure can thus be seen to make a difference to which (physical) actions people undertake. Social structure, understood as pre-existing and therefore relatively autonomous from current human action, is thus able to exert its own, emergent or sui generis causal influence on human activity (Bhaskar, 1989, pp. 30, 39, 54; Archer, 1995, pp. 139, 147–8, 167, 176; Lawson, 1997, pp. 30–2, 56–8). And it is in virtue of its being emergent (irreducible to people and the practices in which they engage) and causally efficacious that, critical realists maintain, social structure may be regarded not as a mere theoretical construct but as real. To see this, note first that critical realists acknowledge that social structures, if they exist, will be unobservable: “Society, as an object of inquiry, is necessarily ‘theoretical’, in the sense that, like a magnetic field, it is necessarily unperceivable. As such, it cannot be empirically identified independently of its effects; so that it can only be known, not shown, to exist. However, in this respect, it is no different from many objects of natural scientific inquiry . . . [In this context,] it is important to note that science employs two criteria for the ascription of reality to a posited object: a perceptual criterion and a causal one. The causal criterion turns on the capacity of the entity in question to bring about changes in material things. Notice that a magnetic field satisfies this criterion, but not a criterion of perceivability. On this criterion, to be is not to be perceived, but rather (in the last instance) just to be able to do” (Bhaskar, 1989, p. 45, 12).

In the case of social theory, what this requirement translates into is the demand that social structure be shown to be causally efficacious; that is, it must be demonstrated that but for social structure certain physical human actions would not be performed (Bhaskar, 1989, p. 39). And, so critical realists claim, it is just this criterion that is satisfied by social structure’s capacity to influence the (physical) actions that people undertake. We are now in a position to return to the question which motivated the critical realist analysis of society, namely “What properties do societies possess which might make them possible objects of knowledge for us?” We have seen that, according to critical realism, social structure is sui generis real, being ontologically irreducible to people and their practices. In particular, social structure is causally efficacious, exerting influence on people’s activities. Moreover, moving on to the epistemological question of how these properties make societies possible objects of knowledge for us, it is causal efficacy of just this sort that is required to satisfy the causal criterion for existence. Thus, for critical realism, the causal efficacy of social structure legitimates the possibility of a distinctive science © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000


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of society by underwriting the existence of a distinct, knowable subject-matter for the social sciences (Bhaskar, 1986, p. 123, 1989, pp. 20–1, 25, 40).

HARRÉ AND VARELA’S CRITIQUE

The role of the so-called causal criterion for existence in the critical realist account of the social world has recently been subject to sustained criticism, most notably by Harré and Varela (1996). Harré and Varela argue that the theory of causal powers (from which the causal criterion for existence derives) does not support the claim that social structure possesses irreducible causal efficacy. The keystone of causal powers theory is the concept of a powerful particular. “[I]n any specific application of the notion of causality,” Harré and Madden (1975, p. 5) write, “the crucial element . . . the presence of which makes the action causal, is a powerful particular.” Causation, on this account, always involves a particular which produces or generates something. The realist conception of causality is based upon an ontology of such enduring powerful particulars (Bhaskar, 1989, pp. 19, 39, 1997, pp. 181, 182). The ascription of a power to a particular (a thing, material or, with certain qualifications, a person) may be expressed schematically as follows (Harré and Madden, 1975, p. 86): “X has the power to A” means “X will/can do A in the appropriate conditions, in virtue of its intrinsic nature”,

where the presence of the “can” is meant to allow for the powers of people. What particulars are able to do or liable to undergo is determined by their natures or internal structures. Silver, for example, will conduct electricity in virtue of its intrinsic atomic structure. On this view, “causality” does not denote some abstract ontological tie between objects and events that exists apart from the operation of powerful particulars, but is simply the name causal powers theory gives to the operation of specific, potent particulars: “Causality is a name for a certain quality of events, it is not a name for the agency behind the events. The agency is there, to be sure: it is the lava flow, the medicine, the light rays, the mechanic’s muscles, the tossing waves. There is no other ‘force’, there is no other cause, than just these specific things. But these things are forceful: they operate: they produce. And they are forceful and operate and produce in that specific way we call necessary. Causality names that kind of necessary operation” (Lamprecht, 1967, p. 144).

In short, according to causal powers theory causation is the activity of forceful particulars at work. Particulars are causal agents because it is the activity of particular things that actually brings about changes in the material world. It is © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

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the powers and abilities of particular things that constitute the ontological “ties that bind” causes and effects together (Harré and Madden, p. 86). The idea that causation just is the activity of forceful objects, as opposed to some reified ontological tie between objects and events that exists along side such objects and their ways of acting, gives rise to an (ontological) principle of structural integrity for the attribution of causal efficacy to some object ( Varela, 1994, p. 174, 1995, pp. 368, 369; Harré and Varela, 1996, p. 322). What this principle stipulates is that the causal power which is putatively attributed to some entity must be shown to be grounded in the way that the entity, in virtue of its intrinsic nature, acts. The principle is designed in particular as a safeguard against the detachment of a causal power from its grounding in the activity and the intrinsic nature or internal structure of the relevant particular: “We must avoid at the outset the reification of an abstract term. The notion of causal power should not be conceived as an undefined descriptive predicate that refers to an ontological tie that binds objects and events together. The exercise of causal power is not a force or power that has some existence of its own but refers to forceful objects at work. There are not both things and causality in nature, but causally active things” (Harré and Madden, 1975, p. 57).

On this view, causation presupposes a singular structural unit of activity: the term “causal power” is not to be used refer to some reified concept of agency lying behind events; rather, “causality” is simply the name for the operation or action of specific, potent particulars; causation is the power of a particular, not a particular and some (abstract, reified) power ( Varela, 1994, pp. 174–5). Harré and Varela maintain that the claim made by critical realists that social structure possesses sui generis causal powers violates this ontological criterion for the attribution of causal efficacy. Harré and Varela note first of all that, according to causal powers theory, if social structure possesses (emergent) causal powers, then it must be a powerful particular; that is, it must be something that in virtue of its nature produces changes in the material world. They then go on to argue that because critical realists regard social structure as existing and exercising causal efficacy only through the activities of human beings, it is it unclear in virtue of what (if not the capacities of people) these partly unrealised powers exist (Harré and Varela, 1996, p. 321). As Keat and Urry (1982, p. 243) put it: “Bhaskar does not show that ‘societies’ and ‘persons’ are social entities so constituted that they are possible objects of knowledge for us. Indeed, since he claims that societies only exist in terms of their effect it is difficult to see how these are appropriately analysed as entities possessing causal powers. He never indicates of what these in part unrealised powers consist.”

And in the absence of an account of how social structures are capable of generating certain physical actions as their effects, it is difficult to see how they are to satisfy the ontological conditions required to qualify as powerful particulars and, therefore, as sui generis real possible objects of knowledge. © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000


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For Harré and Varela, then, the problem for critical realists is that they have yet to explain how social structures, as distinct from the practices of individual people in their interactions with each other, can generate or produce anything. As Harré and Varela see things, people (and not ontologically irreducible social structures) are the powerful particulars in society. “Causal power resides in people,” Harré (1993, p. 98; also see Harré, 1997, p. 177, and Varela, 1999) has written, “not in any of the tools they use to accomplish their ends nor the conditions under which they use them, however systematic they may be”. For Harré and Varela, the attribution of causal efficacy to social structures involves detaching causal power from the true powerful particulars of the social world, namely human actors, and reifying it. Consequently, as they see it, the use of the term “causality” in the critical realist ascription of causal power to social structure is an example of just the sort of “reification of an abstract term” which Harré and Madden (1975, p. 57) counsel must be avoided in employing causal powers theory. “We have here,” Harré and Varela (1996, p. 314) write, “the fallacy of ‘collectivism’, the fallacy of reifying a property of a group of social actors into an entity.” The conclusion to which Harré and Varela’s rejection of the causal efficacy of social structure leads them is that social structure is in actual fact immanent in (and so ontologically reducible to) people and their practices (Harré and Varela, 1996, pp. 313, 315; Harré, 1997, p. 174). From this perspective, it is people’s conversations and not (as critical realists believe) the interplay between human agency and ontologically irreducible social structure that lie at the heart of social life. The social world is the joint product of people’s discursive practices: ‘[S]ocial phenomena are to be considered to be generated in and through conversation and conversation-like activities . . . [W ]e do not think that society can be split up into three ontologically distinct levels (each with its own discipline: psychology, social psychology and sociology). Rather, we think of the social world as consisting of one basic realm, that of conversations and analogous patterns of interaction, in which psychological and sociological phenomena are generated, including such complex interpersonal relations and belief systems as social class’ (Harré and van Langenhove, 1999, pp. 2, 10).2

Such an account suggests that macro-social concepts like “class” are best thought of as taxonomic categories which are used to classify and label different types of people and practices. The referents of such concept are not objective social structures but people’s discursive practices (Harré, 1975, 1981, 1997, pp. 174, 181, 184; Harré and Gillett, 1994, p. 27; and Harré and Varela, pp. 316, 319–24). The claim that social life is best thought of as a discursive construction entails a rejection of the view that people fashion their activities of out of pre-existing social structure in favour of a model which portrays people as rhetoricians who create social activity through symbolically mediated interpersonal interaction (Harré, 1980, p. 204). A person’s actions are facilitated and constrained, not by pre-existing social structure, but by the willingness of his or her interlocutors © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

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to take up that person’s intended meanings in their conversations (Harré, 1997, pp. 174, 181–2). In this scheme of things, macro-social concepts are regarded as rhetorical devices. They are used both to portray events as having a particular meaning and to situate the participants in those events within some moral order. For instance, by using a particular narrative style to redescribe an event, it is possible to constitute it as just or unjust and the participants as deserving or undeserving (Harré, 1975, 1980; Shotter, 1989, 1990). A person may thus be able to persuade others to view events in a way that is sympathetic to his or her own interests and hence to undertake actions that are consistent with the achievement of his or her preferred outcome. Indeed, human freedom consists in it just such an ability to negotiate courses of action and (ultimately) outcomes that further one’s own interests (Harré and Gillett, 1994, pp. 113, 125–8). This picture of social life suggests that the principal task of the social scientist is to understand the interpersonal interaction through which people constitute the social world, in particular by analysing the discursive processes in terms of which such interaction is conducted. And because the absence of objective social structures implies the lack of a distinct subject-matter for sociology, Harré and Varela’s argument has the following important consequence: “Taking up the idea of life as discourse and the human sciences as the study of the grammars of the many imbricated and shifting story lines we live out, abolishes the distinction between psychology and sociology, and of the distinction between both and anthropology and history” (Harré, 1997, p. 189). For Harré, in claiming that macro-social concepts denote real social objects critical realists are confusing the grammar of “big” words like “class” and “nation”, erroneously thinking of them as nouns as opposed to what they really are, namely shorthand for a series of instructions about how to classify people and practices for rhetorical purposes (Harré, 1975, 1981, 1997, pp. 174, 181–2). Harré and Varela argue that critical realists’ failure to grasp the grammar of macrosocial concepts has serious consequences. Perhaps most notably, the violation of the logic of causal powers theory entailed by critical realism’s attribution of causal powers to social structure is said to have led to a deterministic account of social life which does not do justice to the human agency. Harré and Varela maintain that in the critical realist account, having been detached from the powerful particulars (people) whose activities constitute causation in social life and reified, “causation” serves as an activator, so called because it exists externally to people and causally activates their actions (Varela 1994, p. 174, 1995, p. 368; Harré and Varela, 1996, p. 323; Harré and Madden, 1975, p. 59). In other words, for Harré and Varela, critical realism ends up reifying human practices into putative abstract social structures which causally determine the activities of the people. Only by subscribing to the view that social life issues from people’s discursive activities, Harré and Varela argue, can this illicit downplaying of human agency be avoided.

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A CRITICAL REALIST RESPONSE

What are critical realists to make of Harré and Varela’s critique? The following two sections set out a critical realist response to Harré and Varela’s arguments. The first suggests that critical realists should admit the charge that the theory of causal powers developed by Harré and Madden provides an inappropriate framework for conceptualising the causal efficacy of social structure. Social structures are not efficient causes and hence are not powerful particulars (as the latter are understood by Harré and Madden). However, critical realists can concede this point and yet still maintain that a satisfactory social metaphysics must include the category of causally efficacious social structure. In order to do so, it will be necessary to develop an alternative to Harré and Madden’s analysis of causation that is more suitable for conceptualising how pre-existing social structure makes a difference to the course of events in the social world. The second of the two sections which follow contains some indications of what might the requisite notion of causation might look like. We have seen that the theory of causal powers developed by Harré and Madden stipulates that an entity can legitimately be said to possess causal powers only if it is a source of activity. This implies that to be a bearer of causal powers an entity must be an efficient cause, because it is only efficient causes that actually initiate change and are the agentic sources of activity (Harré and Madden, 1975, p. 57). The significance of this point will become apparent if we explore in a little more depth critical realism’s transformational model of social activity. The transformational model likens the social actor to a sculptor. Just as a sculptor fashions a product out of the raw materials and tools available to him, so social actors in general are understood as producing their actions out of pre-existing social structure (Bhaskar, 1989, p. 34, 1994, p. 92). Critical realists elaborate on this by employing an Aristotelian typology of causes. The sculptor is the driving force or efficient cause of such artistic activity. Clearly, the clay or marble doesn’t mould itself of its own accord and, for that reason, is not an efficient cause. However, the medium in which the sculptor works is a material cause and affects the final outcome by influencing the sculptor’s actions. For example, different types of material (clay and marble, say) may lend themselves to different types of sculpture and may therefore induce the sculptor to use different tools and techniques. Hence, even though the material cause only acts in and through the actions of the sculptor, it makes a difference to those actions and therefore to the final outcome. The sculptor analogy suggests that critical realists should concede Harré and Varela’s (1996, p. 321) claim that people are the only efficient causes or producers of change in the social world. Indeed, Bhaskar has done so implicitly, writing that:


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“[P]eople are the only moving forces in history—in the sense that . . . everything that happens, happens in and through their actions” (Bhaskar, 1989, pp. 39–40; also see Lawson, 1997, pp. 39–40).

Because social structure lacks the capacity to initiate activity and to makes things happen of its own accord it is not an efficient but a material cause of social activity. As a result, it does not meet the requirements for qualifying as a powerful particular set out by Harré and Madden; only efficient causes do so, not material causes. However, while critical realists acknowledge that people are the only powerful particulars in society, they argue that pre-existing social structure makes a difference to the course of events in the social world by influencing the actions that people choose to undertake. And in virtue of making a difference to people’s actions, pre-existing social structure satisfies the causal criterion for existence and qualifies as a possible object of knowledge for social scientists.3 We can see more clearly how social structure exerts a causal influence on current social activity (and so satisfies the causal criterion for existence) if we examine in detail the way in which social structure and human agency interact. Critical realists attach great significance to two observations in this regard. First, according to critical realists, society is typically structured along hierarchical lines, in the sense that different people have different rights and obligations. Landlords, for example, are obliged to ensure that the accommodation they provide meets certain safety standards, in return for which it is a landlord’s prerogative to insist that tenants pay the rent on time and keep the property clean and tidy. Second, as critical realists see things, these rights and obligations exist independently of the particular individuals who happen to be landlords and tenants at any specific point in time. New landlords and tenants will typically have the same rights and responsibilities as their (respective) predecessors. Critical realists explain these two observations by arguing that social structure is constituted by a set of positions, each associated with particular rights and responsibilities, and into which, as it were, agents slot. And it is the occupancy of these positions by particular individuals—and more specifically the conditioning of the subsequent behaviour of the incumbents by the rights, obligations and (as we shall see) interests which accompany the positions—that lies at the heart of the interaction between social structure and agency. Additional insight into the nature of social structure can be gleaned from the fact that the practices routinely followed by the occupants of such positions tend to be directed towards the occupants of other positions. For instance, the rights of landlords are oriented towards, and defined in terms of, their interactions with tenants. The conclusion that critical realists draw from this is that social structure is highly relational in nature. Critical realists elaborate on this point by distinguishing between two types of relation. Two entities are externally related if neither is constituted by the relationship in which it stands to the other. The association between two strangers who pass each other on the street is an © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000


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example of an external relationship. In the case of internal relationships, however, the relata are what they are in virtue of the relationship in which they stand to each other. What it is to be a landlord is at least in part constituted by the relation which obtains between landlords and tenants. And while fully acknowledging that abstract philosophical inquiry yields no a priori reason to expect that one type of relation to be more numerous than the other, critical realists contend that the prevalence of examples such as landlords and tenants, teachers and students and bosses and workers indicates ex posteriori that the social world is in actual fact highly internally related. The picture that emerges from critical realism, then, is one in which society is portrayed as a nexus of (in many cases internally related) social positions, each of which is accompanied by a corresponding set of rights and obligations and is occupied by an individual socio-economic actor. Significantly, as was alluded to above, each of these positions is also associated with a set of vested interests and resources. We have already seen that any given moment in time socio-economic actors inherit the social structures which give rise to these interests as the result of actions undertaken in the past (either by themselves or by previous generations of agents). These interests, like the pre-existing structures themselves, constitute an objective reality that is ontologically irreducible to behaviour in the present and which endows the current cohort of people with reasons or incentives to follow particular courses of action. Antecedent social structures also impact upon current activity because, at any particular moment in time, the material and cultural resources required to prosecute particular courses of action (wealth, power, status, access to credit and so on) are distributed unevenly between the various positions in the social structure as the result of actions undertaken in the past. Once again, in virtue of the fact that the distribution of endowments is temporally prior to current activity, it constitutes an objectively given and to a degree autonomous context within which current decisions must be made. Depending on their location in the social hierarchy, then, people are endowed with an historically given array of resources, which in turn constitutes an ontologically irreducible influence on their ability to further their interests in the future. Critical realism, then, suggests that the distribution of interests and resources bequeathed by historically given social structure to the current generation of agents may exert an important influence on social affairs. However, contrary to what Harré and Varela claim, critical realism does not thereby deterministically reduce human agency to an epiphenomenon of pre-existing social structure. The pattern of vested interests laid down by antecedent social structure disposes people to act in particular ways but it does not compel them to do so. People may choose to act against their interests in favour of other considerations. Similarly, far from implying that the pre-existing distribution of resources determines the specific course of action adopted by an agent, critical realism acknowledges the possibility that people may respond creatively to their circumstances, devising © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

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new ways of employing (historically given) material and cultural resources in pursuit of their desired goals (Archer, 1995, pp. 70, 89–91, 153, 205–13; Porpora, 1998, pp. 343–6, 352–3). The critical realist view of social activity might be summarised by Marx’s aphorism that “people make their own history, but not just as they please; they do not make it in circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” ( Marx and Engels, 1968, p. 96). Pre-existing social structures, the deposit or residue of actions undertaken in the past, provide the context in which current action takes place. As we have seen, these historically given structures condition (but do not determine) people’s behaviour in the present by laying down an initial distribution of resources and vested interests. It is worth re-iterating at this juncture that in pursuing this line of reasoning, critical realists do not reify social structure. On the contrary, as was argued earlier in the paper, far from denying that the existence of social structure ultimately depends on human agency, critical realists are particularly careful in specifying whose activities it depends upon. While the continued existence of social structures depends upon the activities of the current generation of agents, both the pattern of incentives which motivate them to seek or to oppose the transformation of those structures, and the distribution of the resources required to do so, are given to the current generation as the product of actions undertaken in the past. As such, they constitute an ontologically irreducible social structural influence on current activity (Archer, 1998a, pp. 77– 8, 82–3; Lawson, 1997, pp. 170–1). The (reproduced or transformed) set of social structures which emerges as the outcome of the current set of actions in turn forms the context for the next round of social activity. Accordingly, social events of interest must be understood as the result of the interplay over time between (antecedent) social structure and (subsequent) human agency (Archer, 1995, pp. 15, 71; Archer, 1998b, p. 202).4 The vantage point provided by critical realism reveals that the conversational analogy in terms of which Harré and his supporters frame their account of the social world has serious shortcomings. Perhaps most significantly, the conversational analogy entails a severely restricted metaphysics which collapses the social world into people’s discursive practices, excluding in particular the category of historically given social structure. The latter, as we have seen, is the product of actions undertaken in the past and as such is ontologically irreducible to current discursive interaction.5 Consequently, it is not amenable to analysis in terms of conversations and conversation-like encounters. What this implies is that the commitment made by Harré and his colleagues to explain socio-economic life in terms of interpersonal discursive interaction leaves them unable to do justice to the way in which the latter is conditioned by historically given and therefore relatively impersonal social structure. While investigating the dynamics of interpersonal encounters is an important part of social research, then, it is unwise to allow it to monopolise social science, for a myopic concentration of attention on © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000


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discursive interaction can lead to the neglect of factors that are potentially of considerable importance. The limitations of the discursivist metaphysics manifest themselves in the highly circumscribed set of explanatory possibilities to which it gives rise. A commitment to explaining the social world in terms of conversations and conversationlike activities precludes one from answering satisfactorily a number of important questions. For instance, a framework which presupposes that society is discursively constructed, and that the locus of human freedom is to be found in a person’s ability to persuade his interlocutors of the merits of his preferred interpretation of events, leaves unanswered the question of whose agreement is required for a particular meaning to gain currency. Antecedent social structures have more than a little to do with this. The reason why a worker seeking a higher wage has to persuade a particular individual that he is a deserving case lies in the fact that the person in question is the worker’s boss and, just in virtue of his position within the firm, has the power to grant or withhold pay rises. Similarly, we can explain why a tenant who wants to modify her rented accommodation seeks the permission of a specific person by referring to the fact that that person is the tenant’s landlord and that the judicial system grants people occupying the position of landlords the right either to be consulted over alterations to their property or to seek legal redress if such consultation is not forthcoming. What these examples illustrate is that an individual’s location within social structures is an important determinant of whether or not his or her assent is required for a particular meaning to be accepted. The identification of the individuals whose discursive activities are central to the ascription of meaning to the event under investigation is not the only important element of social scientific explanation that requires a consideration of objective social structures. Reference to objective social structure is also relevant for understanding why those individuals might choose to resist or support efforts to portray events in a particular light. The pattern of vested interests bequeathed to the current generation of agents by antecedent social structure will influence people’s responses to a particular narrative by determining whether they would be likely to benefit from its success. To take a recent example from the UK, not least among the reasons why the chief executives of public corporations were unfavourably disposed towards narratives which portrayed them as “fat cats” was that the image of laziness and lack of desert evoked by that description was likely to (and indeed did) have unfortunate implications for their remuneration. Hence, attempts to explain why a person or group responded in the way they did to a particular narrative might well profit from considering the pattern of vested interests embodied in antecedent social structure. Finally, objective social structure will also condition people’s ability to promote their preferred interpretation of events through its influence on the distribution of resources. A person’s location within various social structures, by determining the resources with which he is endowed and his access to positions of authority, © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

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may have a significant impact on his ability to bring conversations to his preferred conclusion. A person’s interpretation of events is more likely to be binding on other people if that person is endowed with enough wealth to employ consultants to advise on how to present his viewpoint and to buy the advertising required to get his message across. Indeed, it may be difficult for people who lack wealth even to gain access to the relevant conversation, leave alone to influence the negotiation of meanings. For example, it is commonly acknowledged that those candidates who lack the financial resources to purchase considerable “air time” are at a grave disadvantage in US Presidential Elections. In a similar vein, people who occupy positions of authority within social structures are more able to impose their meanings and narratives on others than people who are in a subordinate position. For example, the character and outcome of conversations between a worker and his boss will be influenced not only by their respective rhetorical skills but also by the fact that the boss is located in a position of authority within the firm in virtue of which he has the power to determine the pay and conditions of the worker and to promote or even to fire him. A worker may refrain from disputing a boss’s interpretation of events, even though he has the rhetorical skills to do so, because he is concerned that the boss may punish such “insubordination” by withholding pay rises and promotion or even by dismissing the worker. It is difficult to see how this point can be accommodated within an explanatory account without invoking the role of the (pre-existing) social structures which condition the (subsequent) interaction between the boss and the worker (Porpora, 1998, pp. 349–53). Similarly, while an analysis of the longevity of the repressive Soeharto regime in Indonesia which focuses on its use of discourse to position the Indonesian people as powerless vis-à-vis the state performs a valuable service, it is far from complete (Berman, 1999). A fuller account would explain why the state is able impose its interpretation of events on the Indonesian people, referring not only to the state’s discursive practices but also to the social structures which facilitate those practices. In this case, one explanatorily significant fact is that the dictator and his supporters occupy positions of authority which give them control both of the media (thereby enabling them to monopolise public discourse to the virtual exclusion of other perspectives) and also of the judiciary, police and armed forces (enabling them to declare membership of opposition groups illegal and to silence dissent by force). In this way, the state is able to set limits on people’s interpretative activities which ensure that public discourse is dominated by narratives and meanings which serve its own ends. Thus, a person’s rhetorical skills are only one of a number of factors influencing his ability to steer a conversation to his preferred outcome. Other (nonrhetorical, material) factors which are intimately bound up with that person’s location in the social structure may also be important. Social life is not simply a discursive construction. This implies, pace Harré (1997, pp. 174, 181), that adequate notions of constraint and enablement in social life must extend beyond © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000


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people’s discursive practices and rhetorical skills to encompass the way in which their location in antecedent social structures furnishes them with resources (money, access to positions of authority, and so on) that can be used to enforce their meanings and narratives. Antecedent social structures constitute the context in which current discursive interaction takes place and so condition (without, to repeat, determining) the latter. The fact that the metaphysics employed by Harré and his supporters presupposes that discursive interactions are the exclusive medium of social life, then, denies them conceptual purchase on a set of factors which are potentially of great explanatory significance. What is required is a more elaborate metaphysics which will enable social scientists to acknowledge and give adequate weight to the influence of relatively impersonal social structures as well as to the impact of discursive factors. Critical realism provides just such a metaphysics. It is interesting in this context to consider Harré’s (1997, p. 178) belief that, “In the end the choice of ontology is largely justified pragmatically—how much of the phenomena of interest does it enable us to comprehend in a fruitful and constructive way.” Judged by reference to Harré’s own standards, then, an ontology which includes objective social structure is to be preferred to one which is confined to people’s discursive practices simply because (as we have seen above) the former facilitates the development of theories with a wider explanatory scope than the latter. Of course, critical realism readily acknowledges the possibility that a particular causal factor such as people’s discursive practices may on occasion exert a dominant influence over the phenomenon being studied. However, according to critical realism, whether or not the possibility of a dominant intersubjective influence is realised in actual fact cannot be determined in advance but can only be established ex posteriori through concrete research (Archer, 1995, pp. 21, 75, 146, 159–60, 1998b, p. 197; Lawson, 1997, pp. 60–1; Layder, 1997, pp. 20–1, 106, 218–20, 237). The problem with the approach adopted by Harré and his followers is that by foreclosing the analysis of objective structure, it pre-judges the issue and thereby runs the risk of overweighing the significance of people’s discursive practices for the phenomenon under investigation. The critical realist metaphysics, on the other hand, leaves room for both social structures and discursive interaction and is therefore able to do justice to them without overemphasising importance of either.

CAUSALITY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE

It has been argued above that, while social structures are causally efficacious in the sense that they make a difference to the course of action that people choose to undertake, they are not powerful particulars, that is to say, they do not initiate events in the social world. This gives rise to the question of how the © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

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causal efficacy of social structure is to be understood given that causal powers theory, being a theory of efficient causation, is unsuitable for the task.6 The argument advanced here follows Patomäki (1991, pp. 223–4, 232, 239) in suggesting that critical realists should conceptualise the causal efficacy of social structures in terms of Mackie’s (1974) notion an INUS condition. The latter states that a cause is an insufficient but necessary part of a set of conditions which are collectively unnecessary but sufficient for the production of some outcome (a social event, say). This seems to cohere well with the critical realist account of the significance of social structure. As we have seen, critical realists maintain that social structure is a necessary condition for human action. However, on its own social structure is insufficient for social activity, for the latter also requires the driving force of human agency. On this view, social structure and human agency presuppose one another, implying that only the combination of the two is sufficient to produce social events. Furthermore, given that people are not compelled to act in a particular way by social structure, one can imagine different combinations of social structures and human agency that would lead to the same outcome. A given causal complex may be only one of a number which are sufficient for producing a particular outcome, implying that any one causal complex is sufficient but not necessary for the outcome in question to obtain. What this goes to show is that, according to critical realism, social structure is a necessary but insufficient part of a causal complex that is sufficient but unnecessary for the occurrence of a particular social event. Hence, social structure satisfies the INUS condition and qualifies as a cause of that event. For critical realists, then, both human agency and social structure exert causal influence over events in the social world, forming a causal complex that involves both efficient and material causation. The former can be understood in terms of powerful particulars, the latter in terms of INUS conditions. While Mackie’s approach might, as Bhaskar (1989, pp. 129, 162 n. 23) suggests, be inappropriate for understanding efficient or generative causation, this does not preclude it being used to give an account the causal efficacy of social structure, simply because social structure is not an efficient but a material cause. Hence, Mackie’s work seems to provide one important avenue of investigation for those critical realists who might accept Harré and Varela’s critique of their use of causal powers theory but who wish to retain the idea that social structure is causally efficacious. In truth, Harré’s work contains a number of passages which suggest that he would not be wholly averse to the idea that social structure exerts a causal ( but non-deterministic) influence over people’s choice of action. Harré’s principal concern seems to be not so much to deny that social structure can make a difference to people’s actions but rather to avoid ascribing “active” causal powers (akin to Newtonian forces) to those structures for fear that doing so leads an unacceptable downplaying of human agency (Harré, 1997, p. 181; Harré and Gillett, 1994, pp. 122, 123). Indeed, Harré (1981, pp. 156–9) argues that while social structures do not possess the “focused agency” of people, they can exert a © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000


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“diffuse causal influence” over the course of social events. More specifically, macro-social structures influence social events by impacting upon people’s opportunities to act, constituting “necessary but not sufficient conditions for the exercise of [personal] power” (Harré, 1981, p. 157). While in the absence of further clarification of the meaning of phrases such as “diffuse causal influence” one would not want to read too much significance into the similarities between the quotations from Harré and the reformulation of the critical realist position suggested here, these passages suggest that if the critical realist account is modified so that the (material, not efficient or active) causal efficacy of social structure is conceptualised in terms of INUS conditions, then it may prove to be more palatable to Harré than previous debates have suggested. Indeed, as we have seen, social scientists like Harré may well find it desirable to include the category of causally efficacious macro-social structure within their metaphysics because such a metaphysics is likely to yield theories of greater explanatory power than one which is confined to people’s discursive practices. CONCLUSION

There is a tension in critical realism between the claim that social structure is a material cause of human activity and the philosophical tool employed to capture that idea, namely causal powers theory. For the latter is a theory not of material but of efficient causation. However, critical realists can concede that pre-existing social structures are not efficient causes and hence are not powerful particulars, and still maintain that social structures are causally efficacious. Macro-social structure exerts a causal influence because the course of action that people choose to pursue is conditioned by the distribution of vested interests and resources embodied in antecedent social structure. And in virtue of making a difference to people’s actions, preexisting social structure satisfies the causal criterion for existence and hence qualifies as a possible object of knowledge for social scientists. The category of objective social structure, then, has a legitimate place within the metaphysics to which social scientists subscribe. Finally, given that the theory of causal powers developed by Harré and Madden is inappropriate for understanding the influence of social structure as a material cause of social action, it is necessary for critical realists to develop a different notion of causation that is more suitable for the task. It has been argued that the account of causation that framed in terms of Mackie’s notion of INUS conditions provides a useful starting point for conceptualising the causal efficacy of social structure. Paul Lewis Newnham College Faculty of Economics and Politics Cambridge University, UK [email protected] © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

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Acknowledgements. I have accumulated numerous debts in the course of writing this paper. Charles Smith has displayed immense patience during the course of the paper’s rather long gestation period. I am very grateful. I would also like to thank Tom Boylan, Rom Harré, Tony Lawson, Mario da Graça Moura and Doug Porpora for conversations about the issues discussed here. Jochen Runde and a number of anonymous referees provided extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper. Needless to say, the responsibility for the paper’s deficiencies is mine and mine alone. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the contribution of the late Nikos Siakantaris, with whom I spent many hours discussing the work of Bhaskar and Harré. This paper is dedicated to his memory.

NOTES 1 To express the idea in the terminology used by (heterodox) economists, one might say that the interaction between structure and agency occurs not in logical but in real historical time (Shackle, 1958; O’Driscoll and Rizzo 1985). 2 Harré and Varela’s preferred perspective on social life, known as “positioning theory”, is set out in detail in Harré and Gillett (1994) and in the essays collected in Harré and van Langenhove (eds., 1999). 3 In arguing that social structures are a possible object of scientific knowledge, critical realists sometimes make use of a second analogy, drawing a parallel between social structure and a magnet field (Bhaskar, 1989, p. 45). This comparison is intended to reinforce the point that, like a magnetic field, social structure is unobservable but can be known to exist via its observable effects. The argument introduced above and elaborated on in the remainder of this section suggests that, in this respect at least, the analogy is defensible. However, the magnet analogy has also proven to be the source of difficulties for critical realists, most notably because they have not always spelled out sufficiently clearly the fact that, unlike a magnet, social structure is not a powerful particular and so in and of itself cannot produce changes in the material world. The failure to make explicit the disanalogies between a magnet and social structure is problematic for critical realists because it reinforces the (ultimately misleading) impression that they regard social structures as efficient causes which determine people’s behaviour. Certainly, the belief that causation in the social world is not to be understood in the same terms as the causal impact of physical forces such as magnets figures prominently in the work of commentators like Harré (Harré, 1981, pp. 156–9, 1997, pp. 181–182; Harré and Gillett, 1994, pp. 122, 123). In order to deflect criticism along these lines, then, critical realists need to be much more careful about using mechanical metaphors to conceptualise social structure, stating explicitly that the causal efficacy of social structures is not akin to the deterministic influence exerted by Newtonian forces and mechanisms in the physical world. And indeed, more recent critical realist writings have displayed the requisite degree of circumspection about mechanical analogies (Patomäki, 1991, p. 247 n. 5; Archer, 1995, p. 153; Layder, 1997, p. 202). Hopefully, this should allay some of the concerns that Harré and Varela have about critical realism without conceding the fundamental point that social structure exerts a causal (but non-deterministic) influence over people’s choice of action. Some indications of how one might go about conceptualising this causal influence will be given in the next section of the paper.



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4 More extensive discussions of the critical realist metaphysics and of the explanatory framework to which gives rise are to be found in Archer (1995, pp. 165–344), Lawson (1997, pp. 157–271) and Bhaskar and Lawson (1998). 5 One might add that because historically given social structure is irreducible to current interpersonal interaction, then from the standpoint of agents in the present time it is relatively impersonal in nature. 6 Indeed, at one juncture Bhaskar himself seems to realise that causal powers theory is not a suitable tool for conceptualising the causal efficacy of social structure, writing that: “There are two paradigms for the non-actual real, viz. the powers of a particular or kind, and the relations between the elements of a system. But the consideration, implied by the TMSA [transformational model of social activity], that social structures are themselves social effects (reproduces/transforms) entails that they must be aligned under the second paradigm, save in respect of those properties where the system may be treated as a particular or which are essential to sociality as such” (Bhaskar, 1986, p. 132). Unfortunately, Bhaskar fails to build this insight into his subsequent theorising, continuing to use the language of causal powers theory in the analysis of social structure in his later work (see, for example, Bhaskar, 1993, pp. 52, 127, 240, 387 n. 17, 1994, pp. 67, 214, 257–8).

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