MacBook New Feature from COREANOMAC on Vimeo.

Good for a laugh in Soc 101.

Now, there are several orgtheory related points here. First and most obvious is the fact that there’s already an interesting literature on the dynamics of competitive racecar driving, as many of you will be aware. But, second, the social organization of this particular sort of Folk Rallying seems fascinating. For one thing, Finnish egalitarianism is evident in the composition of the field in the clip. For another, it seems that there is a terrific rule that keeps resource competition—the temptation to gussy up your car to give yourself an advantage—from getting out of hand. Rules such as this exist in NASCAR and other professional racing sports, of course, but they require a bunch of administrative monitoring systems which presumably would just be way too much hassle for a sport that’s not just amateur but also very informal, and meant to be fun. The solution? Every entrant’s car has a designated nominal value (1,000 Euro or whatever). At the end of the race, if another racer comes up to you and asks to buy your car for that much money, you have to sell it to them.

But enough trolling. Beyond the problem of vague concepts lies the question of vague argument. On the plane home this Sunday I read Jon Elster’s new book on De Tocqueville. It’s typical Elster: incisive, clever, restless, and weirdly dissatisfying. At one point he remarks that too many writers are not clear enough to be wrong. And then, in passing,

Tocqueville here relies on what I called the first law of pseudo-science, “Everything is a little bit like everything else.”

He immediately follows this up with the second law of pseudo-science: “Everything is causally related to everything else”. The latter law is, I think, a besetting vice in much of sociology, where one reaction to monocausal explanation (on the one hand) or empirical murkiness (on the other) is to emphasize the irreducible complexity of the explanation, to the point where there is really no prospect of finding any disconfirming evidence. But while Elster’s second law leads directly to disaster, the first law seems more ambiguous in its effects. For one thing, any number of innovations in social theory (or I daresay the sciences more broadly) spring from applying this law as a heuristic. Drawing on a post from almost six* years ago, the strategy is as follows:

Take a few basic kinds of institutions, structures or practices that can be identified across many different social contexts. There are markets, say, and there is politics. There is ritual. There are hierarchies. There are networks. There is culture. And so on. (Not all of these are the same sort of thing; that doesn’t matter at the moment.) Identify the basic features of each. Now, pick one of these and show it underpinning a setting usually taken as governed by one the others.

For example, you can say Politics is really Markets. This is Public Choice Theory. Because the market form is such a dominant feature of contemporary societies and of talk about them, applying the “x is really a market” trick to any given x is by now ubiquitous not just in theory but also often as a matter of common interpretation and even public policy, facts on the ground notwithstanding.

Markets are really Politics. This is one wing of economic sociology—Neil Fligstein’s work for instance—but also a line of left-wing economics.

Markets are really Culture. Viviana Zelizer’s The Social Meaning of Money takes the world of apparently cold-blooded economic exchange and shows how the ritual creation of social ties between people is fundamental to the nature of money. Alternatively, for a comparative approach read Frank Dobbin’s Forging Industrial Policy to see how 19th-century economic policy about Railroads took as its model different conceptions of the polity in each of France, Britain and the United States.

Organizations are really Ritual. Meyer and Rowan’s “Institutional organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony” makes the case.

Markets are really Hierarchies. Sounds like a tough one, but Art Stinchcombe has a go at the theory in “Contracts as Hierarchical Documents.”, and the AEA junior job “market” instantiates the practice.

Ritual is really Markets. Rational Choice theory of Religion.

Markets are really Networks. Mark Granovetter; Harrison White. Production markets are really self-reproducing interfaces created by the mutual monitoring of firms trying to find a sustainable niche in a production system.

And so on and so forth.

*Jesus Christ.

… these writers … are condemned for applying rigorous ideas in a careless manner. (Some of my colleagues here in the rigor-fixated halls of the University of Chicago have a particularly snide way of referring to this kind of work: this is the kind of work they do at Harvard.)

With no connections to either Harvard or Chicago, I don’t have a dog in this fight. But key flaws in my personality leave me unable to resist formulating the obvious rejoinder from Cambridge, viz, that as the intellectual home of pragmatism in its many forms, Chicago is where they apply careless ideas in a rigorous manner.

I’ll get my coat.

David Schuster and his writers go all Kenneth Williams.

Spike Jonze moves on to his next children’s book.