RE Greg Williams (930416)
I think I should make clear that Little's book explores a number of
approaches to "explanation" by sociologists, and so there are many
chapters in it on other approaches besides Rational Choice Theory.
Little himself isn't advocating RCT exclusively, but rather treats it
as one of the MAJOR ways contemporary sociologists "explain." In the
RCT chapter, Little references several sociologists who ARE or HAVE
BEEN hot on RCT (such as Mancur Olson) who might be amenable to being
"signed up." (Though they might interpret the situation as PCTers
signing up with them!) My main point in providing the quote was to
deal with the seeming inconsistency between Tom Bourbon saying that
virtually all social scientists (in his experience) confuse actions
and goals, and Little saying that a major approach to sociological
explanation doesn't seem to (even though, of course, it doesn't
theorize an HPCT control structure, which, as Clark has said, limits
it).
Thanks for the reference to the Little book. I have ordered it from the
library. One point in your post (930416) should be corrected. Mancur
Olson is an economist and not a sociologist. In the early 1960s he wrote a
book called _The Logic of Collective Action- which was seized upon by a
number of sociologists interested in collective action (e.g., social
movements, demonstrations, etc.) as "rational" alternative to the then
"madding crowd" and "twisted personality" explanations of human actors who
participated in those forms of collective action. Olson's argument in a
nutshell was (is) that most collective efforts that succeed will produce
benefits which are available to everyone and not just to those who joined
in the collective efforts, it is not in the rational interests of anyone to
participate in such efforts. They can be "free riders" and then reap the
benefits of others' successful efforts but not have to pay the costs of
engaging in those efforts which are unsuccessful. How then is any
collective action ever possible? Only because those who organize such
efforts offer additional incentives for participation. Thus, Olson's
argument is a rational calculus, minimax strategy, to explain "why" people
act and why they will not act with others unless offered extra goodies
beyond those which would derive from acting together.
This line of "reasoning" led a generation of sociological students of
collective action to explore all manner of incentives offered to induce
people to act together in anti-war, civil rights, anti-nuke, pro-choice,
and a variety of other local community interest efforts. But now that
rational calculus model has proven inadequate to make sense of the majority
of the phenomena in which these people are seeking to explain. They have
not abandoned the search for a purposive model of human actors but they are
expressing very serious reservations about, if not abandoning, the rational
calculus model. This is not, of course, the only substantive arena in
which RCT has a foothold in sociology. The recent Nobel Prize laureate,
Gary Becker, jointly appointed in sociology and economics at Chicago, has
for twenty years been applying RCT to the family and sociologists have
flocked to his camp by the dozens. RCT also is rampant in criminology as
well as other areas of sociology where operant conditioning, George Homan's
social exchange theory, and various versions of RCT are applied to a
variety of phenomena far too complex to yield to the oversimplifications of
RCT.
cheers,
Clark