File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1999/bhaskar.9903, message 29


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




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