Alexander Stewart

Explanation and Social Theory

Positivism relativism vertical and horizontal fallacies rationality and action action and structure power and normative order structure, function and contradiction false consciousness and ontological alienation.

Concepts and Measures: The Example of Unionateness

The purpose of this article is to take a single concept, unionateness, and to illustrate the way in which theoretical and operational considerations interact in leading to its refinement and elaboration. A distinction is introduced between enterprise and society unionateness, and the problems associated with the operationalization and measurement of each of these new concepts are discussed. The importance of measurement procedures as an intrinsic part of the problem of conceptualization is emphasized, particularly in relation to certain techniques of measurement which are not widely used. In a concluding section there is a brief presentation of findings which demonstrate the value of the distinction introduced.

Rationality and Action

We have seen that the vertical and horizontal fallacies are drawn from the same sort of data and that neither represents an adequate explanation of that data. Since each fallacy derives from the same problem there can be no expression of either that does not involve the other. In the illustrations offered in the previous chapter, modern Weberians were associated with the horizontal fallacy and modern Marxists with the vertical fallacy, but the connections between them can be traced from either position.

Action and Structure

Weber began by promising a unity of the material world and the cultural world achieved in the categories of rational action. He ended with, essentially, two conceptions of rational action, one competent, but constraining, the other free, but socially meaningless. We have shown how these forms are not different, unconnected conceptions of action, but the components of a contradictory conception of action which requires both the closure of knowledge, or competence, and the openness of innovation and choice. The two conceptions are bound together in their inadequacy and each includes the other as its own negation. Modern Weberians — and, in this connection, we shall consider, most importantly, Parsons, Habermas and Giddens — all recognise the unsatisfactory nature of the types of rationality in their conflicting claims and fictitious status. They see ‘positivistic’ elements in Zweckrational forms and ‘idealistic’ elements in Wertrational forms, but believe that Weber’s division of these forms and his acceptance that they cannot be integrated is a weakness of his analysis which is unnecessary. They all believe that the division of the forms of action has produced a rigid, mechanical and oppressive account of purposive-rational action, on the one hand, and a meaningless individualism, on the other.

Structure, Function and Contradiction

When social theorists deal directly with ‘structure’, the mutuality of structure and action as two ways of seeing the same thing is well behind them. The orderliness of structures realised and reconstituted in actions which mobilise resources as power, is a poor description of the diverse and confusing social world they confront. In this chapter, we shall trace the ways in which the social scientific fallacy is offered as a means of dealing with explanatory deficiencies. We shall show the connection between the vertical and horizontal forms of the fallacy by demonstrating how answers offered in one form call up the other form as they fail.

Vertical and Horizontal Fallacies

The problems which form social science as a distinct undertaking occur when patterns of behaviour apparently reproduce circumstances in ways which cannot be understood in terms of existing social scientific theories. This combination of theoretical inadequacy and practical adequacy is held to be unique to the social sciences where the objects of study, as creative human beings, can always act in self-determined and potentially novel ways.

False Consciousness and Ontological Alienation

An essential contradiction between human beings and nature must have specific effects. Which practical contradictions, or, more properly, whose practical contradictions, then, are generalised as the essential contradiction? Whose alienation is ‘ontological’? We shall see that it is not straightforwardly the alienation of actors. They are often enough seen as existing in an alienated condition, but their alienation is treated as contingent and unnecessary. Actors’ alienation is usually seen as masked by a ‘false consciousness’ which gives them a spurious non-alienated perception of their circumstances and an absence of the hopelessness that knowledge of alienation brings.1