Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2002 10:05:52 +0100
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Culture as structure


Hey you guys, I think there's an article in all this for JCR sometime. I
for one didn't know about Sewell's venture into CR, and I think a
critique of his position would be really worthwhile. For what it's worth
I thought Doug's comments spot on, hence also Tobin's position (though I
thought there was some equivocation between distinctions as merely
analytical and as real; when a distinction is really worth making I
think it always apprehends something real. Perhaps we need to think a
little more dialectically, of real distinctions within a totality, real
differences within an overarching unity... Viren's comments seem to
suggest Sewell is getting at something like this, so a really
constructive engagement might be possible.)

Mervyn

viren viven murthy <vvmurthy-AT-midway.uchicago.edu> writes
>Hi Doug, Tobin, Carrol, Dick and other listers,
>
>I would definitely like to read the articles in which you deal with
>Sewell.
>
>From Tobin's last post (which I found helpful as usual), I was beginning
>to conclude that Sewell's position was actually quite close to CR, but
>you now you bring up another complex issue, namely the definition of
>structure.  
>
>In a number of places, Bhaskar and Archer claim that structures are real
>generative mechanisms.  Giddens, on the other hand, calls them rules and
>resources.  Sewell  follows Giddens by calling them "schemes and
>resources."  He argues that the idea of "rules" are
>too formalistic and does not account for tacit schemes.
>
>Archer criticizes this conception of structure and tries to give examples
>of "rule-rule" structures and "resource-resource" structures.  This is the
>logical way to proceed in criticizing Sewell, since he basically argues
>that all social generative mechanisms can redescribed as schemes and
>resources.
>
>When I first read this definition, I thought that Sewell's definition
>would run into problems when dealing with culture.  However, the key is
>to note that for Giddens/Sewell resources are "anything that can serve as
>a source of power in social relations."  He then separates resources into
>"authoritative" and "allocative" (Sewell uses human and non-human).  Hence
>it
>seems that one way of separating cultural from non-cultural social
>structures would be to distinguish between the types of resources
>involved.
>
>But coming back to Archer's criticisms, she gives some examples of
>of resource relations that I found quite compelling.  For example, she
>claimed that a famine was a resource-resource structure.  It seems to me
>that insofar as famines are a natural occurrence, I would conclude that
>schemas are required to recognize them, but they are not an essential part
>of their
>structure.  I think that there are two responses available to Sewell and
>Giddens.  First, they could claim that if one conceives of famines as
>natural occurrences, they  fall outside of the scope of social
>theory.  Then
>they could conclude that, while all structures are generative mechanisms,
>only social structures can be described as schemas and resources.  On the
>other hand, if one follows Amartya Sen and stresses the human component in
>emergence of famines, then famines are an emergent property of a
>conjuncture of structures, some of which are social, and hence can be
>described as schemes and resources, and some of which are natural.
>
>In the end, I think that Sewell ( I am not sure about Giddens ) would
>agree with Tobin that all social structures have semiotic
>components, but in cultural structures, the weight of meaning is more
>significant.
>
>I think it is interesting to compare Sewell and Bhaskar, since both of
>them appear to be groping for a similar position.  In PON, Bhaskar tried
>to avoid the pitfalls of positivism and relativism.  Sewell has followed
>the same path with respect to the practice of social history.  Given that
>he was a social historians writing in the late 70s and early 80s, he
>actively embraced the linguistic turn and the criticism of Marxist
>positivism.   Hence he was part of the "cultural history" movement and his
>most famous work is a cultural analysis of French workers during the
>Revolution.  However, in the late 80s and early 90s, he has begun to find
>that cultural history has avoided positivism only to lapse into
>relativism.  Consequently, Sewell has been searching in Bhaskar for a path
>that can synthesize aspects of cultural and social history.
>
>However, in the late 70s, Bhaskar partially saw himself as providing the
>epistemological foundations for Marxism, but he doesn't get into any
>detailed discussion of Marxist histories.  Hans' comments about the
>Dobbian Marxism being in line with CR was helpful, and hence I wonder
>about the relationship between that Marxism and the new cultural
>historians that want to take non-cultural structures more seriously.
>
>Best,
>
>Viren    
-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
Editor, Journal of Critical Realism
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