Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [152]
29. See Perrow (1984) for examples of what he calls normal accidents in complex organizations. See also Carlson and Doyle (2002) for a more technical treatment of the “robust yet fragile” nature of complex systems.
30. See Tabibi (2009) for an example of how Goldman Sachs profited from multiple forms of government assistance.
31. See Sandel (2009).
32. See Granovetter (1985).
33. See Berger and Luckman (1966). The deliberative democracy literature mentioned in Chapter 1, note 25, is also relevant to Sandel’s argument.
CHAPTER 10: THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND
1. The full text of Pope’s “Essay on Man” is available online at Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2428.
2. Parsons’s notion of rationality was inspired by Max Weber, who interestingly was not a functionalist, or even a positivist, espousing instead what has become known as an interpretive school of sociology, manifest in his claim that rational action was that which was understandable (verstehen) to an analyst. Nevertheless, Weber’s work was quickly seconded by strongly positivistic theories, of which rational choice theory is the most obvious; thus illustrating how deeply the positivistic urge runs in all forms of science, including social science. Parsons also is sometimes cast as an anti-positivist, but once again, his ideas have been incorporated into positivist theories of social action.
3. For critiques of Parsons, see Mayhew (1980, p. 353), Harsanyi (1969, p. 514), and Coleman and Fararo (1992, p. xvii).
4. Many sociologists—both before Merton and since—have been critical of what they have viewed as facile attempts to replicate the success of natural science by imitating its form rather than its methods As early as the 1940s, for example, Parsons’s contemporary Huntington Cairns wrote that “We possess no such synoptic view of social sciences which encourages us to believe that we are now at a stage of analysis where we can with any certainty select the basic concepts upon which an integrated structure of knowledge can be erected” (Cairns 1945, p. 13). More recently, a steady drumbeat of criticism has been directed at rational choice theory, for much the same reasons (Quadagno and Knapp 1992; Somers 1998).
5. Quotes are from Merton (1968a).
6. See Merton (1968a) for his description of theories of the middle range, including the theory of relative deprivation and the theory of the role set.
7. Harsanyi (1969, p. 514) and Diermeier (1996) both reference Newton, while the political scientists Donald Green and Ian Shapiro have called rational choice theory “an ever-expanding tent in which to house every plausible proposition advanced by anthropology, sociology, or social psychology” (Green and Shapiro 2005).
8. The “success” or “failure” of rational choice theory, it should be noted, is highly controversial, with rational choice advocates claiming that it is unfair to evaluate rational choice theory as a “theory” in the first place, when really it should be regarded rather more as a family of theories unified only by their emphasis on purposive action as the cause of social outcomes over accident, blind conformity, or habit (Farmer 1992; Kiser and Hechter 1998; Cox 1999). Perhaps this is an accurate statement of what rational choice theory has become (although interestingly some rational choice theorists include even habit within the gambit of rational incentives [Becker and Murphy 2000]), but it’s certainly not what early proponents like Harsanyi intended it to be. Harsanyi in fact criticized Parsons’s theory explicitly for not being a “theory” at all, lacking the ability to derive conclusions logically from a set of axioms—or as he put it, “the very concept of social function in a collectivist sense gives rise to insoluble problems of definition and of empirical identification” (1969, p. 533). Whether or not it has subsequently metamorphosed into something more realistic should therefore not distract from the point that its original mission was to be a theory, and that in that sense it has been no more successful than any of