Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 13:45:35 +0000 From: "Caroline New" <c.new-AT-bathspa.ac.uk> Subject: BHA: Causal powers of structures Dear all, I think this question Howard raised, taken up by Tobin and Martha, is crucial to realist social theory, and key in the debate between critical realists and ‘discursive psychologists’ (or whatever term Harre’s new position uses for their reductive ontology). Howard is asking whether the causal powers of social structures are derived entirely from past actions. Yes, I think Tobin and Martha are right here in saying that they are. An act in the present which is brought about (caused) by a social structure should not be seen as ‘completing’ or ‘expressing’ it. It represents an exercise of the structure’s causal powers (which, as Tobin says, do not depend for their existence on such exercise). The present act isn’t determined or made necessary by those powers, for its possibility also results from the causal powers of the person or people who carried it out - and this is why Harre wants to deny that structures are powerful, and argues that people are the only ‘powerful particulars’. The bungling of the inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence (black teenageer stabbed in racial incident, policy inquiry delayed by assumption that Stephen was a criminal, refusal to listen to witnesses, subsequent cover-up now exposed) was the result of institutionalised racism within the police, a structure established by many diverse past actions, including the establishment of certain formal and informal rules of procedure which tend to have discriminatory outcomes whatever the subjective inclinations of those required to follow them. Policepeople with some awareness of the workings of this structure and the will to do otherwise can produce non-racist results, in cases where a more passive rule-guided approach would have led to yet another discriminatory or unjust result. Such police officers aren’t *necessarily* elaborating the structure by their mini-resistance, though they may be heightening the discursive contradictions, or drawing attention to theory-practice inconsistency, which might lead to structural elaboration. My point is rather that when this happens, the structure is not lying fallow. We cannot conclude it is causally inert, because the outcome its internal relations lead us to expect has not occurred. It is still causally efficacious, since it has affected the way in which the actors had to act to bring about the non-discriminatory outcome - with awareness, strategy, cunning, daring, the details of which we can only imagine. Martha distinguishes, following Archer, between social structures - like a population structure, or the distribution of wealth - which constrain what individuals, variously positioned can do, how they can live and so on, and social structures like the gender order which also constrain people, and are also the result of past agency, but are much more dependent on present agency for their continuing effects. Yes, I haven’t time to look it up but I remember it and have heard Archer use the first type of structure to exemplify the extra-discursive reality and causal powers of structures. It took me aback, because I think of the second type as the paradigmatic form of social structures., Although both clearly constrain and enable human agency, it seems they are causally powerful in different ways. The former present themselves as part of the context of action, but the latter include rules and meanings, and thus work by offering the agent reasons for acting in particular ways. I doubt we really have two different sorts of structure here: it seems to me the first sort is an incomplete representation, a sort of snapshot of the effects with the dialectics left out - the distribution of wealth seen as an effect of a historical moment of capitalism certainly itself has effects, but what those are depends on the dynamic workings of the economic system which produced and sanctioned them. Can anyone else shed light on this distinction? Where is Doug? And Tobin, I know you’ve written about Archer - can you give me the ref? Akll the best, Caroline --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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