=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" option. For information about RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, see http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Institutions and the Entrepreneurial Self Phil Agre http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/ Version of 19 December 2001. 9000 words. Although reviews of my column about how-to's were generally kind, sociologists demurred from some of my generalizations about their field's treatment of the relationship between the institution and the self. The issue, you might recall, is the extent to which institutions define us. Everybody occupies locations in several institutions: professional, political, medical, educational, family, religious, and so on. And every one of those institutions offers us a personality: language, beliefs, habits, artefacts, interactional style, and so on. The question is, do institutions completely remake us in their image, or do we remain to some degree ourselves? It is not an easy question, since it could mean several things. Even if we know what the question means, it is not entirely clear how we could know the answer. For example, we can study doctors and conclude that they walk and talk exactly the way that the institution of medicine wants them to, but that proves nothing until we determine whether they had already believed in the institution and consciously chose to acquire its ways. We would also have to confront the fact that we are all shaped by numerous institutions: since no one institution defines who we are, do we thereby transcend them all? These are important questions for us now because of the tremendous power of information technology to facilitate institutional change. As institutions change, people change too. We need to know how we're changing and what choice we have. I want to respond to the demurrals of the sociologists, but to address the question properly we need to know where it came from. Because the question depends on the particulars of each case, we would need to consider the case in each continent or broad cultural area on its own terms. So I want to talk about Europe and the United States, since it is mainly European and American ideas that are inscribed in information technology today. I want to sketch in fast-forward the history of the relationship between institutions and the human person, as well as the social context in which certain ideas about the subject emerged. A thorough version of this story would require a long book, but I only want to develop enough raw material to provoke inquiry into our own situation today. European thought about the distant past is naturally rooted in European myths. One such myth is that ancient Europe was a simple, homogenous, primitive place. In some senses of course it was, but the intuition is still misleading. When communication and transportation technologies are poorly developed, institutions develop more or less independently in each locality. Of course, the institutions in a given region must contend with the climate and natural resources, and with the practicalities of growing food and keeping people alive. Even so, it is an important intuition that the natural condition of human society is one of institutional diversity. Institutions are well-understood as routinized accommodations among competing interests -- people's everyday interactions, in which conflict and compromise are omnipresent, settle into routines which then take on a life of their own. These routines take different forms in different places, if only because there are many paths that the settling-down of routines could possibly take. So institutional diversity needs no explanation; what needs explaining is the establishment of uniform institutions across a wide area. That is why the Roman Empire played such a central role in setting European institutions on their path. Rome managed to establish a relatively uniform institutional system across large parts of Europe. People throughout the Empire came to understand themselves as the objects of administrative representations and procedures, and they were eventually exposed to the idea of a universal religion and a hierarchical Church. This is not to say that Rome succeeded in homogenizing the entire population; invaders' institutions enter into complex syntheses with the institutions that they encounter. Even so, the Romans (more so than, say, the Ottomans) worked to homogenize (for example) the political workings of cities, with the result that some areas of Europe ended up with more homogenous institutions -- and thus with different ideas about people and their place in society -- than others. When Rome fell, a natural experiment took place. How do institutions develop in homogenous areas versus heterogeneous areas? The answer is not simple. The space of possibilities can be understood simply in terms of the relationships among three levels of society: the towns, the regions, and the nation as a whole. In England, regional powers established themselves as coequal with the monarchy, partly by drawing on account of the institutional similarities among them. In France, the monarchy crushed the regional powers, consolidating its control by developing local homogeneity ever further. Spain was able to consolidate central control, but it never suppressed political turmoil between the regions and the center sufficiently to establish a functional administrative system. And Italy failed to consolidate central control at all; instead, Roman ideas and institutional forms developed in various directions in each locality. Again, institutions can follow many paths from the same starting-point. Outside the Empire, things were just as diverse. Sweden consolidated central control largely because the monarchy could ally with the towns against the depredations of regional nobles. Germany, on the other hand, retained its local institutional diversity at a very high level well into the nineteenth century. In each case, the opinions toward government in each country are explained to a surprising degree by the patterns that took form a thousand years ago. So too the opinions about culture. The concept of distinct national cultures arose first in Italy, where it failed to compete with inherited Roman ideas, and it then flourished in Germany, where it provided the ideological basis for a nationalist campaign of political and institutional unification. Even so, this story of independent development is far from complete. When the European economy began to revive in the 11th century, the need for institutions of all types was severe. And the main source of these institutions was the one institution that had maintained a sophisticated intellectual foundation throughout, the Church. The 11th and 12th centuries saw a revolution in Western institutions, including the universities and the modern legal system. The legal system was based the secularization on canon law, so that for example the idea of punishment for a crime derived from the codified schedules of penance that the medieval church had drawn up in its attempt to administer the spiritual lives of a far-flung population in a uniform way. This pattern is common on two levels: existing institutions often serve as analogues for the invention of new institutions, and modern secular ideas routinely develop from older religious ideas. So even though textbooks have tended to focus on the political divergences that I described above, the quieter development of the institutional foundations of Western society was more or less unified. This too represents a pattern: people involved in intellectual work (meaning administration as well as scholarship) are interested in talking to their opposite numbers in other organizations, regardless of boundaries, simply because no individual is intellectually capable of performing such work on their own. Scholarship and administration require the communication and transportation infrastructures that earlier societies lacked. (The problem is roads, inns, and safety, not horses and vehicles -- it's not that hard to walk from one end of Europe to the other.) They also require social networks, which scholars build easily, and a lingua franca, Latin. But there is a complex tale to be told about the maintenance of these logistical foundations of European collective cognition during the medieval era, as well as their growing complexity later on. What is more, the religious origins of the institutional machinery of the West influenced broader Western conceptions of the person. Administrative bureaucracies assumed an authority that they modeled on that of the Church, with administrators serving as mediators of a universal and permanent law. Western concepts of equality and the rule of law have their origin here, as do Western concepts of paternalism and social reform. Social control emerges not as the arbitrary subjection of individuals to one another, but as impersonal, rational procedures: a shift, as Weber might say, from substantive to procedural rationality. The modern state, however, arose not from the independent political development of different countries, nor from the uniform development of the bureacracies that ran them, but from the era of Darwinian warfare that followed. The absolutist era in Europe is often told as the history of conquests, alliances, and territories, but on a deeper level it is the story of war as the motive force for the competitive development of institutions. Consider the most basic requirement of war: taxes. Warring states confront two facts: wars are expensive, and people do not want to pay their taxes. And so victory in war went largely to the state that developed the most sophisticated means of extracting taxes from the populace. One can extract taxes through arbitrary theft, but that system is inefficient and leads to revolts. The key to tax-collection is record-keeping, and the states that succeeded in war did so by developing rational methods for keeping track of the populace. This was not easy. Many people had the same name, traditional farming practices were complicated, and the diversity of local institutional arrangements frustrated centralized rule-making. Whatever forces for homogenization already existed, the constant pressure to collect taxes increased them. This is the era when people were assigned acquire surnames and farmers were assigned their own plots of land rather than farming different plots in different seasons according to local customs. It is the era of representations such as censuses and maps, and the era when states rearranged people's lives to fit the representations. There is another complex tale to be told about the interaction between this Europe-wide development of modern administrative procedures and the diversity of political institutions with which they interacted. Each set of institutions had its own ideas about people and their lives, including ideas about power and authority, honor and valor, mind and body, health and disease, wealth and poverty, the spiritual and the corporeal, and so on. The ideas often conflicted: indeed, the conflict between administrative neutrality and the divine right of kings was the driving force for a vast outpouring of intellectual creativity. Yet the ideas themselves developed in specific contexts. In England, ideas could be spun by independent nobles and their intellectual clients. English intellectual tracts were often written as moves in savage political conflicts, and it is never certain whether our modern-day interpretations of them as abstract philosophy correspond to the way they were read at the time. Their struggles for autonomy relative to the monarch and authority relative to the lower orders helps explain the peculiar combination of liberalism and hierarchy that later coalesced into modern conservatism. In France, on the other hand, the production of ideas was regulated in the same way as everything else, in a minutely stratified social system. Court life in absolutist France was a war zone of social competition whose potential for violence was largely domesticated sublimated beneath norms of polite emptiness. Polite conversation was all, and scholars could only pursue their serious social inquiries on the fringes of the system or beneath the guise of pleasant cultivation. Things haven't changed much since. In talking about the relation between institutions and the self, therefore, we are talking at two levels: the ways that institutions shaped everyone in the society (or tried to), and the ways that institutions shaped the people who developed the ideas within them (and thus, to some extent, the ideas themselves). Institutions are routinized interactions among people, but they are also ideas put into practice. Institutions formalize and structure relationships between people, and they do so by inducing everyone to insert themselves into a certain order. Now, many scholars have understood this process in terms of "power" and "resistance", as if institutions were always foreign impositions. But enough history has been recounted here to make clear that things are more complicated. By focusing on the case of taxes, you can indeed make the case that institutions exist to impose something artificial on the natural order that went before. By focusing on the case of religion, however, you can make a very different case. The fact is, the Church can operate with such a flat hierarchy because the common people want religion. Organized churches in many societies go through cycles of decadence and regeneration as people demand that religious authorities act religious. This is another model of institutions: people subscribe to them because they embody what people believe and deliver what people want. So which theory is correct? They both are, to varying degrees, and the hard problem is to understand the relationship between the models in different contexts. And the problem is reflexive, since institutions both produce ideas and embody ideas. We inherit both the institutions and the ideas, and we only understand ourselves as institutional beings as we understand both kinds of inheritance. Institutions, as I've observed, tend to take on a life of their own. And so it is that the institutions that arose in the absolutist era in Europe survived the passing of monarchy. Institutions are embodied in diverse ways: not simply in written rules but also in language, habits, values, knowledge, strategies, and artefacts, all of it interlocking into a way of life that easily reproduces itself from one generation to the next. In that sense institutional origin stories are always misleading, since everyone inherits an institutional system, and thus a collection of social roles and much else, just by joining into the way of life that they find already in progress around them. Even so, institutions are not machines. They are living things that give shape to the ambitions of the individuals and groups within them. It is a mistake to think of institutions as pacifying people. Institutions do not brainwash people or turn them into sheep. Indeed, their greatest role is providing the ground rules for people's conflicts and the resources for people's strategies. If institutions were wholly alien impositions then we could not understand why people sign up with them. On the other hand, it is not as though people's goals exist fully formed prior to their signing up with institutions. People's goals draw on the forms of imagination that are available in a culture, and they generally belong to the restricted range of goals that a person in a given place and time could realistically expect to achieve. It follows that the supposed philosophical problem of free will is not much of a challenge to a theory of institutions. Consider, then, the conditions in which sociology first took form. It happened in France. The beheading of the monarch did not behead the institutions that the ancien regime had created; in fact, the Revolutionary universalism helped consolidate bureaucratic control. In a society of absolutism, feudal arbitrariness, and clerical corruption, bureaucratic rationality was an attractive alternative. It makes perfect sense, then, that the Revolution would institute a theocracy of reason, and that a regime beset by foreign enemies and domestic reaction would place such a priority on establishing the metric system. Although the Revolution eventually failed politically and militarily, it won intellectually, as none of its competitors established anything like a competing intellectual or social vision. It is thus that sociology emerged in the 19th century as a science of society in the form of a religion of reason. The literal idea of a religion of reason, complete with a liturgy and symbolism, was generally regarded as an embarrassment, and the people who invented modern sociology fell into disrepute because they actually believed what they were saying. Yet the fact remains, contradictory as it seems, that sociology began life as a secularized form of reason: social engineering for a deified state. Individual human beings have no special place in this picture of society; they are simply the atoms of social physics and the bricks of social architecture. But the institutional arrangements that once collected taxes in a rational manner had now made society visible from its center, and the imagination of the time took for granted a transparency of social processes that had not been imaginable centuries before. This kind of transparency has often been interpreted as a license for totalitarianism, and in some contexts it has been used that way. But it is important to see that the secularized religion of reason is not very specific about the institutional forms in which it should be embodied. It has served just as well for corporations as for communism, and in practice it serves to organize an archipelago of institutional agendas whose family relations require a more complex analysis. The actual field of sociology was founded slightly later by Durkheim. He was not so crudely scientistic as his predecessors; his main concern was to establish not a secularized religion but an autonomous intellectual discipline within the expanding and secularizing institution of the university. Autonomy was the key for Durkheim. He wanted above all for "society" to be a self-contained intellectual category, sealed off both from the categories of neighboring fields (psychology, for example, then also taking form) and from outside the academic world (i.e., the Church). Durkheim wanted to define a space of social facts that could not be reduced to other kinds of facts, collective representations that could not be reduced to individual cognition, and so on. Durkheim's concern for autonomy is understandable in the context of social theory's origins in the ancien regime, when the all-encompassing court culture made serious intellectual work impossible simply by making serious public talk of any sort impossible. This pattern too is widespread: institutions exist to organize and mediate social ambitions, and so the dynamics of institutional life consist largely of the segmentary politics by which different groups try to carve out zones of autonomy for themselves. Of course, autonomy means different things in different cultures, and people in social democracies will probably deny even caring about it. Autonomy can mean raising your crops without having to serve in the military, or it can mean doing your research without having to shape either the form or the content of your thought to the pressure of other agendas. Then the very strategies by which individuals and groups fight for their autonomy become institutionalized themselves, passed along by diverse routes to others whose circumstances and goals may well have changed. Meanwhile, the United States was founded in a rebellion against an insane king. Different segments of the country understood this rebellion in different ways, from the rationalism and republicanism of the men who wrote the Constitution to the communitarianism and conspiracy theories of the religious dissidents. Europeans understood America through the screen of their own utopian traditions, and Americans understood themselves to be living out a contradictory mixture of millennial promises that were expressed in egalitarianism, commerce,e and religious revival. Having been modeled on ideas that the immigrants imported and transformed, American institutions and intellectual life then developed more or less independently of Europe. We take for granted today that intellectual influences flow easily between continents, but that situation dates only to the era of cheap air travel in the 1970s; before then, the reception of foreign ideas was slow and fallible. This is the context in which we can understand the emergence of sociological ideas in the United States. Although American scholars had written about social issues in religious and political contexts, professionalized sociology became established only with Talcott Parsons at Harvard in the middle of the 20th century. Parsons' influence on American social thought is well documented; what is less documented is his influence on American life in general. Parsons had two things going for him. First, he was an intellectual arbitrageur. He was the scholar who imported European sociology into the United States, most importantly in "The Structure of Social Action", which he presented as a study of Durkheim, Weber, Pareto, and Marshall. In fact, "The Structure of Social Action" was primarily a study of Parsons, who projected his own views of society onto the European scholars whose worked he claimed to describe. This is a common problem with the reception of new ideas; people understand new things through the prism of what they know, and the distortions introduced by that prism are often severe. But Parsons was not just running an import business. He had the great fortune to establish an American school of sociology in the era of social reform in the mid-20th century. The New Deal was founded on an intellectual base of the Social Gospel, Progressive good government, and antitrust, but the social welfare programs of the 1960s were built on sociology. The demand for social science grew enormously, and so did the universities where social research was conducted and taught. A whole generation that took tenured jobs during that period is about to retire, and we will see their influence most clearly in retrospect as they do. What Parsons provided was not simply a canon for the study of sociology but a formula for sociological work on any subject. Parsons' theory, in accord with the American variety of conservative social thought that had grown up in that era, was called functionalism. Its central idea is that society is fitted together in a coherent and stable fashion, and that each element of society can be analyzed in terms of the role it plays in the functioning of the whole. Parsonian sociology is remarkable for its sheer volume and for the local rigor of its argument; it is hardly trivial. It has been a productive object of dispute, and has also provided a supply of raw material for other research programs since. High-quality neofunctionalist research is done to the present day. The main complaint against Parsons was his "oversocialized" view of the human person. Because he viewed society as a stable structure into which everything fits comfortably, it was hard to imagine how anything could change. For Parsons, the individual was socialized into institutions by internalizing their values. This concern with socialization was hardly new with Parsons, who inherited it from the longstanding concern with the incorporation of immigrants into American society and especially American industry. That background may help explain the tendency of sociologists in that era to regard an individual's existing values as leftovers, even implicitly as a danger to social order. It may also help explain the nature of the reaction to Parsons and the ideological tendency that he represented: the celebration of dissent from a suffocating conformity. Throughout this story, ideas have tended to oscillate between two extremes: on one extreme, you have theories in which individuals exist prior to the invasion of alien institutions, and on another extreme, you have theories in which institutions entirely enclose individuals, structuring their lives inside and out. The individuals may be understood as good or bad, and the institutions too. As so often, the opposite extremes are united underneath, joined in their apprehension of a dichotomy between the autonomous agent and the socialized self. This dichotomy is the starting-point of most Western thought about institutions, and no theory of institutions should be taken seriously unless it analyzes the dichotomy and seeks middle ground. The facts are straightforward: people are partially defined by institutions and partially independent of them; they partially embrace the values that insitutions offer while partially maintaining a critical distance from those values; they partially embody the new ways of life that emerging institutions create while also partially embodying the older ways of life that predated them; they partially cooperate with the forms of rationality that the institution organizes while partially subverting those forms of rationality as well. Just saying all this, of course, does not solve the problem. It hardly *defines* the problem. But at least it provides a standard with which to eliminate from serious consideration those theories that collapse into one triviality or the other. Thus my complaints against Foucault. Conservatives and cynics argue that left-wing academics shifted their allegiance from Marx to Foucault when communism fell, and the timing is not far off. Foucault hardly replaces Marx, though, since he provides nothing like a political economy. Foucault's central question is the constitution of the self: the categories and distinctions that are inscribed in people's lives through ideologies, practices, disciplines, artefacts, language -- through institutions. If you believe that social ills derive from the artificial categories that society imposes on people, then the path to liberation seems to lie through a disruption of categories and a subversion of institutions. This view does not come from nowhere: conservatism in many countries, and certainly in France, Germany, and the American South, has long meant precisely the conserving of institutions that are founded on stable categories of social distinction. Contemporary conservatism in the United States sells itself on the liberal ideas that people like Burke combined into an uneasy amalgam with the traditional conservatism of hierarchy and authority, but that is not the normal understanding of conservatism in most of the world and most of history. In that sense, Foucault's theory takes its place in a wider family of anti-institutional social movements. Theories of institutions routinely overgeneralize from particular circumstances, and Foucault, being French, is overgeneralizing from the history of institutions in France. This includes the machinery of representation and regulation that I described above, and it also includes Catholic confession. The framework of categories that these institutions impose in society are not the walls of a jail; quite the contrary, they are the raw material from which people are made: their conceptions of themselves, their identities in relation to others, their rituals, and so on. For Foucault, the traditional institutions of conservative society are perfectly continuous with the extractive apparatus of absolutist rule, which in turn is perfectly continuous with the reformist state that intervenes in the life of the populace to inculcate hygeine, nutrition, morality, and much else. Each of these social projects achieves its goals by inserting its ways into the bodies, minds, and architecture of the populace, all of which would remain self-propelling to a degree even if the bureaucracies that administer them were to disappear tomorrow. That is what institutions are. The challenge is to construct a theory of the individual against that background. Foucault paints a picture of impersonal historical processes inserting ever-more-invasive forms of rationality into the fine details of people's lives. Law, medicine, the penal system, psychoanalysis -- all of these are ways of reaching ever more deeply into people's selves, bringing knowledge of them out into the open, reconstructing that knowledge in a rationalized form, and then turning the rationalized knowledge into institutions that monitor and intervene in their own particular area of life. The institutions that result succeed only by reconstructing people's conceptions of themselves and the way they live their lives. The medical system induces people to wait in waiting rooms, fill out paperwork, submit to medical procedures, reveal information about themselves, swallow pills, administer procedures on themselves under doctor's orders, pay attention to medical reports in the media, and so on. People are induced to play their part and to intertwine themselves with the system. This is what Foucault means by the "production of subjects". The "subject" is the person who engages with the places and people of medicine both inwardly and outwardly: identities and interactions, concepts and practices, knowledge and representation. The problem comes when he tries to explain what's left over -- what there is to a human person other than the subjectivity that is prescribed by institutions. Critics will object that Foucault's version of the human person, like Parsons', is oversocialized: he can tell us who the institution thinks you are, but that is not the same as telling us who *you* think you are. True, your conception of yourself is indeed shaped and organized by the institution to a considerable degree. True, your mental understanding of things, however critical-minded, is rendered somewhat superfluous by the matrix of bodily practices into which you've been inserted -- you may not like it, but you do it anyway. True, the whole purpose of institutional power is to arrange society so that you have no practical option but to play your part in the drama that it scripts. But these are only partial answers. Foucault understands perfectly well that every institution has fissures. He is quite clear that the web of practices that comprise an institution is not seamless, and that the whole system is only held together by a continuous and diverse stream of interventions by various parties with various motives. Above all he emphasizes that institutions encounter resistance. The core of the problem with Foucault's theory is that he provides, and can provide, no serious theory of what "resistance" means. Foucault is very concerned with the word "power". He wants to replace a conception of social order as the conscious domination of a sovereign with the impersonal, self-replicating capabilities of an institution. Institutions are spread out. Nobody is in charge of them. They may include organizations that have directors and presidents, but those job titles correspond to forms of subjectivity that the institution produces in the same way that it produces everything else. Power, therefore, is "capillary": it is to be found not in the citadel but on the ground, in the detailed work by which it is lived in the relations and interactions among people. And that is where resistance is to be found as well. Power is power because something resists it, Foucault and his followers would argue. Otherwise there would be no need for it. But this won't do. It defines resistance purely in terms of power -- more an expression of power's paranoia than a position in its own right -- and gives it no independent existence at all. Power is generative, and resistance is simply one more of its generative effects. In particular, resistance cannot be understood as a form of subjectivity, because all subjectivity is held to flow from power. Resistance for Foucault is thus a purely negative principle. Nor is this an accident; it is the essence of Foucault's Nietzschean philosophy. Just as Marx foresaw the immanent laws of capitalist development bringing about their own final negation through the forces that they themselves generated, so likewise the resistance that Foucault saw power generating in every greater profusion along an ever greater multiplicity of fronts is supposed to bring about the final dissolution of power and thus the final dissolution of the subjects that it has produced. By exploding all categories and rejecting all essences, we are going to find freedom beyond our suturing into institutions. It is a hard position to argue for, since the liberation it seeks cannot be named; to specify it in detail would simply set in motion the impersonal machinery of power once more. It is, ultimately, a kind of faith -- faith that the comprehensive dismantling of the personality leads to freedom and not to madness. It is an easy faith to hold if you believe that madness is simply an institution like an other, a label which some people are assigned, a category to which they conform and are conformed. But it is not a faith for which we have any evidence. And lacking evidence, all that Foucault has really given us is a picture of the social world operating at absolute zero, utterly colonized by institutions except for the white noise that crackles in the background. An intellectual system gets its power largely by making alternatives unthinkable, and in Foucault's case the effect is straightforward: anything that happens in society can easily be recast as one more effect of power. The only remedy for this kind of hermetic closure is engagement with reality, and to that end it will be helpful to consider an application of Foucault's theory, a paper by Mark Poster (his best, in my view) about the nature of computer databases. The folk view of computer databases is that they are containers of digital symbols -- ones and zeroes -- some of which refer to particular individuals in society. Databases are dangerous, on this view, because powerful bureaucracies can use the information to come around and intervene in people's lives. The idea is that people are perfectly self-defining until that day when the authorities decide to oppress them. Poster rejects this view, arguing instead that databases can only be understood in terms of the institutions that they support. People's lives don't get represented in databases at random; rather, databases encode (if not always correctly) facts whose categories an institution defines. Medical databases are part of the medical system, and so are you. Information about you resides in medical databases because you are a patient -- that is, a particular category of person who is defined by the institution of medicine -- and it remains connected to you for the same reason. You can think of a database as simply one element in a chain that binds you together with other sorts of people and places into a larger system. The lines of power flow through your body, and then through the medical offices, and then through the database, and then through the public health system, and so forth until they flow once again through your body and the circuit is complete. From that perspective, it makes no sense to think of privacy in terms of being left alone. The medical system doesn't come beating down your door; rather, you go over to the doctor's office and submit yourself to the medical system of your own free will. You are intertwined with that database, and central to that intertwining is the system of categories that defines both the indices of the database, your health and illness as a patient in the mind of the medical system, and your own understanding of yourself as a participant in the system (e.g., as a person with high cholesterol). Of course, these different manifestations of the medical categories need not be exactly the same; databases don't always capture the full meaning of the concepts that they encode, and medical concepts do not always survive translation from medical language to the vernacular. But the institution of medicine, on Foucault's account, does not require that sort of seamlessness. It requires only that pressure be continually applied to reconstruct the patient more and more fully within the system of rationality that the medical system organizes and the database inscribes. This understanding of databases is certainly an improvement on the blurry understanding that it replaced. But it still leaves a great deal to be desired. For one thing, it does not tell us what to do about the problem -- it's not even clear about what the problem is. If our existence as medical patients is wholly constituted by the medical system, save for the intrinsically undefinable static of "resistance", what exactly is wrong with the overall picture of medical databases that should motivate us to change it? Nor does the Foucauldian story explain how databases came about. The Foucauldian explanation would be that databases express the same impersonal rationality that also organizes large parts of our selves and lives. This is true in the sense that the main tradition of computer system design emerged as a means of automating existing bureaucracies; the whole point of this design practice is to inscribe an institution's existing categories into the database. But this is too unitary an account of the actual development of these systems, all of which reflect a negotiated tension among different interests within the medical world. Nor does it explain the serious collisions that occur when the rational visions inscribed in medical informatics systems encounter the mangle of practice in real clinics. Despite its appeals to heterogeneity, Foucault's theory is the story of the expression of one principle throughout history, the impersonal yet single-minded force that institutes its multiplying categories within our lives. No other principles are even conceivable, and yet it is only through the contention among different principles that we can understand the actual course of history. Backing off from Foucault's story does not mean returning to an unsocialized view of human beings as completely defined by their own already-autonomous goals. But it does mean acknowledging agendas besides the ones that are generated by the mechanical workings of power. Alternative theories exist. Driven partly by the conflict between the liberal and oversocialized views of the individual, sociologists have made several attempts to overcome the dichotomy that I described above. One of these new institutionalisms, for example, directs our attention to the rough edges between different disciplinary agendas in organizations. People are socialized to a degree through the cognitive patterns they acquire from their professional training, but these patterns hardly operate in a vacuum, free from abrasion by incompatible systems of thought. Other theories have observed simply that people have multiple, incompatible worldviews that they shift among, depending on which one makes most sense or appears most strategic in a given setting. This kind of multiplicity is compatible with Foucault's theory, which does admit that people are incorporated within multiple institutions that are not necessarily continuous with one another; what is missing in Foucault's theory is a positive theory of the person who transcends those multiple standpoints, or synthesizes them, or shifts among them, or holds them at some degree of critical distance. I find especially striking the contrast between Foucault's theory and that of Commons. For Commons there is no mystery about the formation of subjects: people are indeed formed by the institutions in which they participate, but they are formed not as individuals remade in the institution's image but collectively as members of the social groups that the institution defines. An institution such as the market, the educational system, or the church define a complex of social roles, a space of practicable goals, a repertoire of strategies, and so on. The participants in the institution come together and keep it working as a going concern -- as a business in a literal sense, since the institution needs to keep serving the practical goals that keep people voluntarily bound to it. Along the way, employees as a group develop their collective interests, collective knowledge, collective identities, and so on. Likewise patients as a group, teachers as a group, and every group that is defined by one of the constitutive social roles of an institution. In this sense institutions define classes, and the history of institutions is largely the history of the process by which every class ascends, organizes, and causes its own practices to be inscribed into the law. Examples abound: the labor movement, the consumer movement, the patients' rights movement, employers' associations, democratizing movements in religion, and many others. The mangle of practices that organize the day-to-day activities of an institution's members are, for Commons, effectively contracts that interest groups negotiate among themselves. The point is not necessarily that each group forms associations, elects delegates, convenes with the other groups' delegates around a table, hashes out language in all-night bargaining sessions, goes on strike for better wages, and so on. That is a stereotype even of union bargaining, much less of bargaining in other spheres of society. The operating rules of an institution evolve over time as practical knowledge grows and a multitude of practical situations are worked through by the parties involved. Group solidarity is not a given, but neither is it necessarily measured by the formal displays of legislatures and demonstrations. Law is central to the development of institutions, but more as its culmination than its substance. Commons' theory reconciles the tension between the individual and the institution that has organized so much of Western intellectual history. Individuals are largely formed in their thoughts, actions, strategies, knowledge, and goals by the institutions in which they participate, but no longer are the institutions understood as foreign invaders, much less as impersonal forces that seek only to deepen their own power. Interests contend, and institutions evolve not according to any predetermined teleology but through the negotiated evolution of working rules. Commons' theory is a political economy as well as a theory of subjects, and I would argue that everything that is true in Foucault's theory was already present in Commons'. Of course, Foucault has drawn attention to some new issues within the horizon of institutional analysis that Commons had described. Commons was not concerned with issues of representation, for example. He was concerned with work practices and their development, but not with the embodiment of that work. He would probably not have seen the point. Foucault cares about those things because he sees individual human beings as the passive objects of the manipulations of power. Commons, on the other hand, sees individual human beings as members of social groups that succeed or fail in their collective strivings to establish a place for themselves in the social order. While representation and embodiment could probably be reconstructed as topics against that different background, they would end up being different topics. The point is not that Commons was a collectivist in any radical sense. He was not a Marxist. He was a Christian and persuaded of our individual value and fate. Yet he saw that individuals make their contribution to history through the roles they play in the development of institutions. Perhaps the greatest flaw in his theory is that he took collective action too fully for granted, and did not analyze the specific roles that individuals do play in institutions. His individual was not entrepreneurial, was not in fact even especially deliberative. His central value was democratic culture (which has nothing to do with the ancient authoritarian stereotypes of democracy as the rule of mobs and the tyranny of mindless majorities) and he wanted to facilitate the emergence of an institutional order that realized democratic values. I don't know if he saw that order as inevitable, but living through the Progressive and New Deal era he did think that he saw it happening before him. In writing about how-to's, I am trying to fill in the missing pieces of the picture. The place of the individual in institutions has been a well-kept secret, despite going on so massively in our own day-to-day activities, both because of the nature of institutions and because of the impasses in our theories about them. The concept of socialization, for example, contains a crucial ambiguity. If we think of institutions as requiring mere compliance, then the purpose of socalization is to train people to conform to the rules. Any old system of ideas will suffice, so long as the people conform. Foucault goes further, arguing that institutions require a continual revelation of ever-deeper facts about the individual, whether through scientific research or epidemiology or psychiatry, turning individuals inside out to entwine them more profoundly in the circuitry of power. Commons, writing in the context of industrial relations in the early 20th century, was concerned with the practical skills involved in doing the job and with the contracts that define how those skills are allocated and fitted together. Commons studied going concerns. What has gone unexamined all around is the skill by which individuals use institutions to get what they want -- what's called, in a precise- sounding but empty way, agency. Anybody who has dealt with an HMO can relate to the idea that getting medical care is a skill -- not just in complying with the complexities of the system, and not especially in subverting the system, but taking hold of the levers of the system to reveal nonobvious choices, uncover nonobvious information, and so on. Likewise, anybody who has gone to graduate school can recall the time when they did not understand the system, when people around them were busily engaged in career-furthering activities whose logic was not at all clear. If you believe that socialization simply means learning to comply with external demands or simply learning to believe in the legitimacy of the institution's norms, then this kind of career skill is beside the point. It plays no obvious role in explaining social order, and in fact it probably sounds dangerous from the point of view of maintaining social order. I contend that the vacuum of information around career skills is a drag on the efficacy of most institutions. Career skills are not simply a variety of procedural knowledge; having applied those skills, one starts to occupy a new standpoint from which new kinds of knowledge become visible. It is only in working the institution under your own steam, in pursuit of your own goals, that you learn how the institution really works in the first place. How, then, do institutions really work? As a rule of thumb, any institutional theory lacks a serious theory of individual agency unless it explains the dynamic relationship between collective cognition and social networks. The world changes, and careers are made by articulating the changes and building social networks around them. This is true across a wide range of institutions, and it is strikingly true even among social groups like medical patients that we conventionally understand as passive individuals. To be sure, those conventional understandings are not illusory; they simply overgeneralize from the pathological situation in which medical patients (for example) lack the skills and associational forms they need to be properly organized in pursuit of their collective interests. Even the language of collective interests misleads us, so deeply has it been shaped by radical conceptions of the "masses" as a blurry group whose political success is determined solely by their solidarity. In this way collectivist thought has generally rejected the appeal to individual initiative that I am advocating. That is because they see individual initiative purely against the background of market institutions that place undifferentiated individuals in pure price competition against one another. Class solidarity, on that view, is founded precisely on recognizing and amplifying that group homogeneity. An alternative perspective is that careers are made -- within groups as well as between them -- by taking the initiative to articulate a particular emerging issue. Differentiation is the key in building an effective association for collective action, just as it is the key to avoiding price competition in the market. But differentiation here does not mean artificially introducing differences for their own sake, but rather identifying one's own unique contribution. This is a social skill whose prototype has historically been the business enterpreneur, and for that reason it is often called entrepreneurship in a more general sense. Generations of individuals in the depths of institutions have suffered lectures on the necessity of being entrepreneurial, even though few of those lectures provide any useful guidance about what this means or how one should go about it. Enterpreneurialism is often treated as a character trait, and its lack as a defect of character, precisely because the nature of the skill -- as with most skills -- is largely unarticulated even by the people who do it. Even books about entrepreneurship typically start late in the process, taking for granted that the entrepreneur possesses a network and an idea and then settling down to the details of funding and hiring and marketing. It is very common for textbooks to skip the first few chapters, the ones that the author has forgotten ever not knowing, and the first few chapters of society's textbook of entrepreneurialism likewise tend to be missing. As a result of these silences, lectures about being entrepreneurial are often misunderstood: people watch the finagling that goes into starting a new business -- a process that one entrepreneur described to me as convincing ten people that the other nine are already on board -- and they recoil, seeing entrepreneurship as competely unrelated to their own conception of themselves. What they don't realize, because nobody has ever told them, is that the essence of entrepreneurship lies much earlier in the process, in the recognition of themes that are emerging in the thinking of numerous people in your social world. You can recognize those themes by meeting people at parties, or attending professional conferences, or going bar-hopping, or reading books -- any mechanism that provides you with surveillance about the thinking of a broad sample of people in your social group. This claim -- that enterpreneurship is a general phenomenon and not restricted just to starting new businesses in the market -- throws new light on the nature of institutions in general. A common intuition in conservative theories is that institutions, though often venerable, do not define human nature. We need to eat, sleep, work, socialize, raise children, and so on, and these broad categories of needs are universal and exist prior to any specific institutional form. Institutions, from this perspective, bring order to the provision of biological needs. Institutions provide a cognitive framework for sharing knowledge, an economic framework for production, and a moral framework so that people can discipline themselves to provide for their needs rather than collapsing into dissolution. If so, then perhaps the role of social networks in entrepreneurship is also prior to institutions and then organized and given form within them. We should not be surprised to see family resemblances among institutions in different times and places, as well as differences in the effectiveness of institutions, given that each institution exists to subserve one or more of a limited repertoire of underlying functions. Perhaps entrepreneurship is one of these functions -- not an end in itself but an intrinsic principle of social functioning in a world of any dynamism. None of this is to exonerate the less attractive features of the conservative philosophy of institutions, such as its comfort with injustice in the name of tradition and its willingness to trade off the dysfunctions of existing institutions against the hazards of changing them. It is more of a thought experiment. After all, conservatism is no more helpful than the progressive theories of Commons when it comes to explaining the conditions of entrepreneurship. So long as liberty is conceived in negative terms, purely as the lack of intervention by the state, it is hard to understand what makes for entrepreneurship in markets, much less in the broad range of institutions generally. Entrepreneurship has institutional conditions of several sorts, and complacency about the institutional legacies of the past is probably not among them. In a dynamic world, institutions are necessarily remade in every generation -- not just restaffed, as retirees leave and new recruits occupy their offices, but remade, as the mechanisms that mediate the full range of human relationships are reinvented in the practical, ideological, infrastructural, and economic context of the times. The age-old confusion about the relationship between individuals and institutions recurs in the chronic unclarity in the literature about the relationship between entrepreneurship and group interests. Entrepreneurs are stereotyped as individualists who break out of institutional molds, assemble new networks of people and practices, and allow those new networks to settle into place. Entrepreneurs, on this view, are pioneers who clear new land and then move on. But entrepreneurship is something much larger than that. It has an intellectual dimension. And most entrepreneurs work within the institutional terrain provided by particular social groups -- for example professions, academia, large companies, the government, innovative regions such as Silicon Valley, and so on. Social groups like the ones that Commons describes engage in collective cognition, and entrepreneurship is one way they do that. New ideas come to fore because entrepreneurial individuals in the group pioneer them -- not just by writing them down but by assembling networks of people who know about them. Social groups likewise adopt new strategies because individual entrepreneurs within them have taken the trouble to assemble consensus around those strategies. Consensus in this context does not refer to the procedures of group deliberation, but rather to the putting-together of a network that is capable of winning an argument in a democratic forum. Entrepreneurs do these things as an investment: they expect that their issue will grow, so that the network they begin assembling will acquire its own momentum with time, leaving them in a privileged position as the person in the middle who knows all the players and tracks all the action. They may intend to make money, or to promote a social vision, or to gain a possibly unforeseen range of collateral benefits from their central location. Reviewing the history of institutions that I sketched at the outset, it seems to me that much of that history remains unwritten. Because so much of the practical work of entrepreneurship is taken for granted, and because so much of that work is hidden in the tacit logic of harmless-sounding social interactions, many social phenomena are effectively treated as magic by everyone involved. Histories too often tell of major social figures who become interested in a given topic and then show up in the next paragraph working in the White House or starting a company, as if anyone at all could have decided one morning to attain those positions, or as if their ascent expressed their unique personalities and not the things they did in the material world. This situation is starting to change now, happily, as theories of entrepreneurship (Michel Callon, Mark Casson, etc) become more sophisticated. Yet the theme of enterpreneurship has not been integrated back into the framework of social thought, renewing categories of social analysis that otherwise remain underpowered. This, it seems to me, is the most important area of research that is opening up before us, and not just because of its intellectual interest but because of its material consequences for people's lives. Institutions that merely socialize people do in fact trap them into the sort of passive confusion that Foucault takes for granted even as he rails nebulously against it. Institutions that provide the conditions of democratic leadership for all their participants, on the other hand, do not simply socialize people into riding in the back seat but take the risk of handing them the keys. Robust institutions can deal with the consequences of unleashing fully drawn human beings. Those that cannot are not worth being conserved. References Phil Agre, In defense of how-to's, MS, 13 December 2001. Available at <http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2001/RRE.notes.and.recommenda3.html> Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, London: NLB, 1974. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, Harvard University Press, 1983. Michel Callon, ed, The Laws of the Markets, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes, eds, The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Mark Casson, The Entrepreneur: An Economic Theory, Oxford: Robertson, 1982. Mark Casson, Entrepreneurship and Business Culture, Aldershot, UK: Elgar, 1995. John R. Commons, Legal Foundations of Capitalism, New York: Macmillan, 1924. John R. Commons, The Economics of Collective Action, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970. Originally published in 1950. Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon, 1973. Mark Granovetter, Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness, American Journal of Sociology 91(3), 1985, pages 481-510. Judith Gregory, Sorcerer's Apprentice: Creating the Electronic Health Record, Reinventing Medical Records and Patient Care, doctoral dissertation, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego, 2000. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason, Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952. Friedrich A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Johan Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory, translated by Sheila Gogol, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949. Mark Poster, Databases as discourse, or, Electronic interpellations, in David Lyon and Elia Zureik, eds, Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio, eds, The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Ann Swidler, Culture in action: Symbols and strategies, American Sociological Review 51(2), 1986, pages 273-286. Dennis H. Wrong, The oversocialized conception of man in modern sociology, American Sociological Review, 26(2), 1961, pages 183-193. Anton C. Zijdervald, The Institutional Imperative: The Value of Institutions in Contemporary Society, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000. end
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