marx

In doing some background reading for my current research project on the global regulation of private wealth, I was struck by this observation about corporations from anthropologists George Marcus and Peter Dobkin Hall:

“…the internalized functions characteristic of modern, bureaucratically organized business firms has been less a means of responding to market forces than a means of eliminating them. While remaining nominally in the economic realm, corporations have increasingly become (and may, indeed, always have been) mechanisms for the maximization of social and political utilities: identity, status, power, influence.”

—from Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century America (1992: 257;  emphasis mine)

My first reaction upon reading this was: “Preach it!” The phrase that really grabbed my attention was: “and may, indeed, always have been.” As in, maybe corporations have always been about enhancing the personal attributes—“identity, status, power and influence”—of corporate executives.

I’ve been waiting for someone to say that in print for a long time. To say that the rhetoric used to justify the existence and behavior of corporations, expressed in set phrases like “adding shareholder value,” is about as convincing as the praise of the court officials in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

The Emperor's New Clothes.

Whenever some executive piously intones these set phrases, it makes him (and it is usually a him) sound like an altruist who somehow got lost en route to the local Peace Corps office and wound up in the C-suite instead: “Oh well, now I’ll have to accept a multi-million-dollar salary and a private jet instead of teaching apiculture in Zambia. Fiddlesticks!” It’s ludicrous, and yet rarely does anyone in social science speak up against this farcical claim that people run companies in order to make other people—specifically, shareholders—rich.

My second reaction was to think of Dennis Kozlowski—the CEO of Tyco, who used his firm’s money to pay for his wife’s birthday party (with the infamous vodka-peeing ice sculpture), along with a $6,000 shower curtain, $15,000 dog-shaped umbrella stand, and other accoutrements of conspicuous consumption.

Partying like it's 199. On Tyco's nickel.

Before he went to prison for what the Wall Street Journal (!) termed “looting Tyco of some $600 million,” Kozlowski sure had a lot to say about shareholder value.When rumors started to spread in early 2002 about his misuse of company funds, he had Tyco’s PR department issue a press release stating:

“We are holding this meeting to respond to the continuing stream of baseless rumors that are depressing our stock, and to discuss ways in which we plan to enhance shareholder and debt-holder value.”

Memo to haters: Dennis Kozlowski Wants to Make You Rich.

Amazingly, that was the actual title of an article published by Smart Money magazine 9 months before the SEC filed larceny charges against Kozlowski. Such is the power of the executives-as-philanthropists-manqués trope that a reputable financial publication essentially became the propanda arm of a deeply corrupt organization.

The delusional quality of this reporting calls to mind something that Bourdieu wrote in his autobiography:

“The grip of strongly integrated groups, the limiting case (and practical model) of which is the standard family, is to a large extent due to the fact that they are linked by a collusio in the illusio, a deep-rooted complicity in the collective fantasy, which provides each of its members with the experience of an exaltation of the ego…an enchanted image of the self.”

—from Sketch for a Self-Analysis (2008: 7)

The idea that corporate elites represent a strongly integrated group willing to take coordinated action to preserve their collective interests is nothing new. Marx theorized it in Das Kapital and other writings; Useem investigated the phenomenon empirically in The Inner Circle. But what doesn’t get talked about enough, in my view, is the element of illusion—the fantasy and enchantment that comes with being a corporate executive.

What’s really puzzling is not the illusion on the part of CEOs, but the collusion from others that supports it. Many journalists play the role of courtiers praising the emperor’s new clothes, but so do academics. Every time university professors use phrases like “creating shareholder value” uncritically, they are colluding in the illusion of benevolent executive power and drawing a veil over the self-serving uses of the corporation by executives. Personally, I’d like to see more of us—particularly in business schools—discuss the possibility that people like Kozlowski aren’t deviants, but individuals who have been caught and punished for what is otherwise accepted practice among their peers.

ascent-of-man-donado-cartoon1

This post represents something of a departure from the usual themes of this blog, since it does not deal directly with questions of economic behavior, money or markets. However, it does address “big picture” issues in scientific inquiry, which affect all realms of sociological research. Specifically, the post builds on an analogy drawn by Wolfgang Streeck in his new book, Re-Forming Capitalism: Institutional Change in the German Political Economy (Oxford 2009). His account of epistemology in social science, and its resemblance to the advance of knowledge within evolutionary theory, struck me–to my surprise–as  a particularly compelling way to frame the contribution of qualitative research to sociology. The devaluation of qualitative sociology as “unscientific” and of dubious value compared to quantitative research has always struck me as ill-considered; Streeck’s work provided a way to articulate a response that went right to the heart of the debate. 

Early in the book, Streeck raises “the possibility of the theory of biological evolution…serving as a model for social history” (p. 11). It’s an extraordinarily fruitful idea, with wide-ranging implications. The pursuit of knowledge through data sources such as archival research, content analysis and participant observation turns out to have a surprising amount in common with evolutionary theory. Yet qualitative research faces ongoing threats to its legitimacy, even within sociology. The fallacies of these legitimacy challenges will be the subject of this post, drawing on and extending Streeck’s analogy between sociology and research on evolution.

The works of Marx and Weber, like virtually all the classic literature in the field, were based on qualitative, historical methodology (Durkheim’s quantitative study Suicide being a notable exception). As Streeck puts it,

Classical social science examined how the modern way of life had evolved out of the past…and the evolution of the emerging political-economic institutions of capitalist society.
(p. 11, emphasis in original)

Even outside the realm of these classic studies, qualitative research in sociology inevitably contains an element of the historical. In order to explain how things are, what social actors think they are doing, and what it means to them, qualitative research necessarily delves into the past, uncovering path-dependencies in structures and actions. In this way, it shares the basic perspective of evolutionary theory: privileging explanation over prediction. Yet no one questions the position of evolutionary theory as part of the broader scientific endeavor. Even creationist publications that reject evolution as “Satanic” acknowledge its status as a science by attacking its purported failures to be sufficiently scientific—for example, by claiming that “evolution is just a theory” or that “The primary scientific evidence is a pitifully small array of bones.”

In contrast, sociology occupies a far more tenuous position, often treated as a pseudo-science or a “wannabe” science particularly when it comes to qualitative work. As of 2006, 95 percent of Americans agreed that biology—of which evolutionary theory is a part—was a science, but only about half that many (49 percent) thought sociology was; a full 8 percent said they’d never heard of sociology in the first place! Making matters worse, sociologists themselves disagree as to whether their discipline is a science. Qualitative sociology has been at the center of these attacks—often devalued as “mere description,” making it indistinguishable  (in the eyes of some) from non-scientific endeavors like history and journalism. These legitimacy challenges to the status of qualitative research as part of the scientific endeavor has been growing since the “quantitative revolution”—the rise of computer-assisted calculation—swept through sociology starting in the 1950s.

Why evolutionary theory isn't such a good analogy for quantitative sociology?
Why evolutionary theory and quantitative sociology aren't such a good fit?

Streeck’s observations about the surprising commonalties between sociology and evolutionary theory got me thinking about the liminal status of qualitative sociology. Given the many resemblances between it and evolutionary theory, the questions about the scientific status of the former seem even more ill-founded than usual. Of the many observations one could make in this connection, I was especially struck by two things:

  • On Prediction and Hypothesis-Testing

    Like qualitative sociology, evolutionary theory has been subject to widespread misunderstanding about its ability to make predictions. While evolutionary theory can’t predict exactly how animals and plants will evolve, it can make predictions that guide future research, as the cases of Tiktaalik roseae and the naked mole-rat illustrate. It does this by looking backward, explaining how things came to be, then using that method to construct and validate models that can be extrapolated into the future. Sometimes, this process results in highly specific predictions—like those surrounding changes in the appearance of the Peppered Moth in Great Britain during recent decades—other times in more generalized conjectures, such as warnings about the possibility of a “mass extinction event” if global biodiversity continues to decline at its present rate.These methods of advancing knowledge have close parallels in qualitative sociology. For example, the ability of qualitative sociology to generate theory inductively, through means such as grounded theory development, is fairly well-accepted. This process includes the formulation of causal models and hypotheses, which means that qualitative research can create testable (and falsifiable) predictions—an essential characteristic in the definition of science.

It's all in the wrist: the missing link between fish and land animals.
It's all in the wrist: Tiktaalik roseae as the missing link between fish and land animals.

However, the rigor of theory testing is often thought to be beyond the scope of qualitative research—an assumption that persists despite a multitude of peer-reviewed, published studies demonstrating the contrary.
 

  • Accounting for Historicity and Change
  • Another important commonality between evolutionary theory and qualitative sociology is their direct engagement with historical change. Evolution is first and foremost about processes of transformation in the natural world, and qualitative sociology excels at this kind of explanation in the social realm, particularly when it comes to addressing phenomena such as the effects of repeated interactions on groups and institutions. Both domains of research recognize that there is an irreducible element of stochastic change—that is, unpredictability—over time within any complex system. And while their temporal scales are certainly different—evolution deals with change over thousands of years, while sociology rarely looks at more than a century’s worth of data—they share the basic viewpoint that history matters and that one purpose of inquiry is to explain how.

    While some notable sociologists—such as Mark Granovetter, whose undergraduate degree is in history—have pointed out that sociological research can and should acknowledge the impact of “embeddedness,” regardless of the research methods employed, much of discipline has fallen into “temporal reductionism”—“treating relations and structures of relations as if they had no history.” [1] This is particularly strange, because as Streeck points out in his new book, explaining historical change was one of the core objectives of the emerging social sciences in the 19th century. Yet paradoxically, in its quest to become more “scientific” in the 20th century and beyond, the discipline modeled itself on “nineteenth-century mechanics,” resulting in the “search by much of current social science for historically universal, invariant principles governing social organization” (p. 12).Streeck does not elaborate here on the methodological consequences of this selection, but a definition of “science” as the discovery of mechanistic laws that transcend time and space would seem to exclude virtually anything but quantitative research. At the same time, this (mis)understanding of science devalues qualitative inquiry, making many sociologists “afraid of being accused of ‘atheoretical storytelling’” (p. 12). Thus sociology finds itself in the peculiar position of seeming to delegitimate its own origins.

    Among the most regrettable consequences of this is the limitations it imposes on what sociology can achieve: that is, the kinds of questions it can address, and the kinds of answers it can offer. In the latter case, as Streeck points out, we are confronted with many instances of “ahistorical theory-building” (p. 12), whose explanatory power leaves much to be desired. Perhaps even more troubling, the devaluing of qualitative research has the perverse effect (for a discipline that purportedly seeks “universals”) of reducing sociology’s ability to engage with the big-picture questions of the social world—like “how did capitalism arise where and when it did?”Because evolution can address big-picture questions without having to defend its status as a science, it has made a good deal of progress on issues like the origins of life on Earth. The downside of trying to do big-picture science is that it leads into the messy terrain of complex systems: ones that combine elements of randomness with strong patterns of historicity. Acknowledging these forces is a strength of evolutionary theory, as well as of qualitative forms of sociological research—good reasons to embrace the latter as part of the social scientific endeavor.

While Streeck’s point about the links between sociological theory and evolution was incidental to his larger aims in the new book, he contributes an important insight on the puzzling status of qualitative research in contemporary sociology. The computing revolution, along with the long-standing popular view of sociology as mere common sense—a misconception that remains surprisingly robust, despite having been tackled by Max Weber nearly a century ago—have all contributed to the problem. Sociology’s ill-fated efforts to achieve scientific legitimacy by modeling itself on the physical sciences have been noted by others; but Streeck does something entirely new, suggesting that the problem is not that sociology is unscientific, but that sociologists have been modeling their work on the wrong kind of science—and an outmoded type at that!

His simple observation suggests something rather radical: instead of trying (and failing) to be like 19th century physics, sociology would play to its own strengths and contribute more to knowledge by building on its commonalties with evolutionary theory. One way to start this paradigm shift, as I see it, is to start by recognizing the scientific value of qualitative research, based on its ability to address complex, big-picture questions, and to offer explanations that account for conflict and change—things we often miss by privileging quantitative sociology.

darwins-birthday

 

This year gives us occasion to celebrate two important events:

 

* the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth (12 February 1809)


* the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species (24 November 1859)

 

Happy Birthday to both!

 


[1] Granovetter, Mark. 1992. “Problems of Explanation in Economic Sociology.” In Nohria, Nitin and Eccles, Robert (Eds.), Networks and Organizations,Boston: Harvard University Press. p. 34.

U1300513INPOnce upon a time, the phrase “The Lady or the Tiger?”–taken from an 1882 short story of that name–was a byword for impossible choices. The story took place in a mythical kingdom where justice was dispensed through the workings of chance. The accused were presented with two identical doors behind which awaited opposing fates: one concealed a hungry tiger, who would immediately devour the accused, while the other concealed a beautiful woman, whom the accused would have to marry on the spot. This doesn’t present a problem until the accused man is the lover of the King’s daughter; when the lover asks the princess for a hint as to which door to choose, she has to decide whether she’d rather see him dead or married to another woman. The story ended without the author revealing the princess’ choice or the lover’s fate; the unresolved puzzle thus secured the story’s role as a topic of speculation and “thought experiments” for generations to come.

This is by way of prologue to the economic sociological news that an American woman was recently offered a live tiger in exchange for her virginity. Now the woman has been running an auction for her virginity since September, so the offer didn’t come entirely out of the blue. But still, the offer of a live tiger (by a zookeeper in an undisclosed location) is incomparably bizarre.

It’s also deliciously ironic, in that it brings “The Lady or the Tiger?”  into a 21st century Western context, in which everything can be legitimately and publicly commodified so that there is no longer an irreducible opposition between lady and tiger. Instead, they are being offered as equivalents for exchange. Reduction of everything to a price tag puts everything up for grabs, and everything on an equal footing.

I stress the legitimate and public commodification of virginity, because of course, intact hymens have been put on the auction block for hundreds–perhaps thousands–of years. It still happens openly all over the world: Nick Kristof of the New York Times has done an excellent series on the selling of young Vietnamese girls (by their own families) into sex slavery in Cambodia. It even happens in the US, albeit under cover; since selling other people’s bodies is against the law, we only hear about it when there is a criminal investigation or a dramatization, like those surrounding the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints.

But what if you want to sell your own body? And what if you want to define it as an act of free market rationality–“I have something of value, and I should be compensated for it.” Or how about framing the sale of one’s hymen as a feminist act, by keeping the profits rather than having them expropriated by men or older women, as was the fate of Moll Hackabout (see below)? 

These are precisely the ideological claims of the lady–one Natalie Dylan, aged 22, of San Diego–who is being offered a live tiger in exchange for being sexually penetrated for the first time. Dylan’s reasoning, in her own words, is as follows (the phrases in boldface are my emphasis):

And the value of my chastity is one level on which men cannot compete with me. I decided to flip the equation, and turn my virginity into something that allows me to gain power and opportunity from men. I took the ancient notion that a woman’s virginity is priceless and used it as a vehicle for capitalism…  And for what it’s worth, the winning bid won’t necessarily be the highest—I get to choose.

Bidding for this prize was up to a reported $3.8 million earlier this month. Natalie’s ability to construct a narrative of empowerment and autonomy around the auction stems in part from her training in Women’s Studies, in which she received an undergraduate degree from Sacramento State University. She says the auction started as a “sociological experiment” on the value of virginity, as well as a practical means of raising money to fund her graduate studies in marriage and family therapy. She was inspired in part by her older sibling, Avia, who earned enough in three weeks working as a prostitute at Nevada’s Bunny Ranch brothel to put herself through graduate school. Sisterhood is powerful!

Avia and Natalie Dylan (not their real names).
Sisters doing it for themselves: Avia and Natalie Dylan (not their real names).
So Dylan presents herself as a feminist capitalist, extending the logic of the market to an extreme that only slightly surpasses what Madonna and other female “entertainers” have been doing for decades. Dylan adds that she has been praised for her “entrepreneurial gumption” by an unnamed Fortune 500 CEO–a claim I have been unable to verify independently. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true, given what Frankfurt School sociologist Jürgen Habermas calls the creeping “colonization of the life-world” by capitalism, in which “systemic mechanisms –for example, money – steer a social intercourse that has been largely disconnected from norms and values.”
 
Habermas means that concepts, values and modes of thought associated with the market have intruded into daily life to such an extent that individuals become increasingly unable to think–or act–outside the hegemonic system. Everything gets (re)packaged in market terms–that is, everything is (eventually) assigned a price. This impoverishes our world and our relationships, as if we eliminated words, images and gestures from our communication, and replaced them instead with number systems like binary or hex. More “efficient” and “precise”? Possibly. But can those qualities really be traded off against the powers of allusion, metaphor, and symbolism?
 
Habermas’ ideas have their roots in the work of founding sociologists, like Karl Marx (who wrote of the “internal colonization” of humans by capitalist ideology) and Max Weber, who observed the competing relationship between value-rationality (in which entities can be measured on their own terms, and cherished for their own sake) and instrumental rationality (in which entities are measured by their exchange value).  The increasing dominance of instrumental rationality is linked to the process of modernity, and it not only “flattens” the world by reducing everything to its value vis-a-vis something else (usually money), but it reduces our own autonomy as humans. As another contemporary social theorist put it in a recent essay,
The life-world, by and large, characterized by value-rationality, begins to be eclipsed and absorbed in instrumental rationality, making persons become means to political and economic ends not in their interest, nor under their control.
Herein lies the fallacy of Natalie Dylan’s empowerment reasoning, and–to be fair to her–the reasoning of the many, many men and women who make the same claims. Dylan and people like her have no real “autonomy” or “control” in the market system. According to Habermas, and to Kant, when you live in a world turned upside-down, where instead of socio-economic structures serving human needs, humans become subordinated to the systems, you have no means to mount an effective challenge. By profiting from the trophy status of her virginity, Natalie Dylan isn’t doing anything new–consider all the marriage markets, past and present, in which a woman’s ability to command a wealthy husband is contingent in part upon her intact hymen–and she’s certainly not subverting anything. This isn’t her fault, or a weakness on her part; it’s the human condition in what Max Weber would call modern, rational-bureaucratic societies.
 
This scenario differs from the plot of The Matrix only in that there is no cabal–no specific people or institutions–who can be overthrown in order to change the system. The horror of it all is that many people and institutions contribute, often unknowingly, to the commodification of themselves and others, making the system incredibly difficult to change. So Natalie Dylan isn’t “hacking” the system of women’s sexual commodification, nor is she going to alter it with her auction. Certainly, the process will change her, and from what I’ve read of her, she seem to both underestimate that change and overestimate her own power to control her experience within this colonized life-world.
 
While writing this post, I’ve been conducting a little thought-experiment of my own: what would I have done if Natalie Dylan had been my student? Answer: I would have tried to do what I aimed for with all the students I ever taught, which was to inform them, and show them how to think critically and clearly. I doubt that just discouraging her, or conveying my concern about the effects the auction might have on her, would have made much of a difference. And for a 22-year-old, even parental disapproval would likely be ineffective (though I’ve wondered how her parents responded–something I have not seen addressed in any of the news coverage).
 
So, had she been my student, I would have asked Dylan to do three things:
  • First, read about the colonization of the life-world by the market, using selections from Habermas, Marx, Weber, Kant.
  • Second, write a paper describing a world in which selling sex (or reproductive material) wasn’t the only way for a young woman to make a big pile of money quickly, just to see if she could imagine such a thing–and to help her begin to see what it means to be “colonized” by an idea (somewhat like the strategy employed by the high school counselor working with the white supremacist teenager in American History X).
  • Third, I would ask her to analyze her auction plan in relation to the valuation of other women’s virginity: what does it mean that she expects to command enough money for her hymen to put herself through graduate school, while the Vietnamese parents interviewed by Nick Kristof (see above) can barely clear enough from the sale of their virgin daughters into brothels to open a little hut selling rice and vegetables? Is it acceptable to her to profit from the same social system that led soldiers in Sierra Leone, the former Yugoslavia, and many other war zones, to target virgins for rape in order to inflict maximum damage on the enemy?

Perhaps none of these exercises would have changed Dylan’s mind. But I think we’d be hearing a lot less from her about empowerment. Instead of claiming “I’m seizing control of the commodification of women’s sexuality for my own benefit,” I imagine she’d say something more like, “I’m willing to enter into this corrupt and unfair exchange because it’s the only way I can make a fortune in a few months.” I’d prefer unpleasant accuracy to pleasant (self)deception any day. And maybe a more accurate perception of herself and her actions would lead her to do something positive, like donate proceeds of her auction to help the women whose trophy-virginity was taken without consent or compensation.