Causal Mechanisms: In Social Theory

Zusammenfassung:
Im Längsschnitt einer Kohorte ehemaliger Gymnasiasten zwischen dem 15. und 43. Lebensjahr wird gezeigt, dass Lehrerurteile mit prognostischem Anspruch vermittelt über die Erfolgserwartungen der Schüler deren Entscheidungen bezüglich ihres weiteren Bildungsverlaufs zu beeinflussen vermögen und dadurch zu einer Self-Fulfilling Prophecy im Sinne Mertons (1948) werden können. Ursprünglich unzu-treffende Lehrerurteile können durch die Pfadabhängigkeit und Kumulativität des Ausbildungs- und Berufsverlaufes indirekt noch das Berufsprestige im 43. Lebensjahr beeinflussen. Die hier vor¬legten Analysen belegen zugleich, wie sich die Längsschnittperspektive der Lebens¬ver¬laufs¬for¬schung frucht¬bar mit der handlungstheoretischen Perspektive einer Wert-Erwartungstheorie ver¬knüpfen lässt.

Teachers’ Evaluations over the Life Course: Valid Prognosis or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?
Abstract:
In a longitudinal study of former German high school students between age 15 and 43 it is shown that teachers' evaluations with prognostic claims may influence the students' educational decisions by shap-ing their success expectations. Thus initially false teacher evaluations may work like a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense of Merton (1948). Because of the path dependency and cumulativity of educa-tional and occupational career processes they still affect the occupational prestige at the age of 43 indi-rectly. Finally, the following analyses offer prospects in terms of fruitfully connecting the longitudinal perspective of life course research to the action-theoretical perspective of a theory of subjective expected utility.

Adaptive control in the face of uncertainty involves making online predictions about events in order to plan actions to reliably achieve desirable outcomes. However, we often face situations in which the effects of our actions are probabilistic (e.g., returns on our investments), and the environment itself is dynamic, - it can change irrespective of any action we decide to take, and in a relatively stable or unstable way (e.g., economic climate). Therefore, the problem of control concerns learning to isolate the effects that are generated directly by our actions, from those that occur independently of them. We face this problem in a host of uncertain dynamic environments: ecological (using fertilizers to increase crop yield), economic (investing in real estate), industrial (operating nuclear power plants), mechanical (driving cars) and medical (stemming outbreaks of disease). Thus far there has been little attempt at a synthesis of the amassing research directed towards understanding control in the face of uncertainty. The aim of this book is to bring together theoretical and empirical research from disparate disciplines spanning Social, Cognitive and Clinical Psychology, Human Factors and Neuroscience to Engineering and Machine learning. It serves as a round up of the different techniques used to examine issues concerning control (prediction, agency, causality, uncertainty) and unifies a substantial amount of disparate research. The general framework (Monitoring and control- MC framework) used to achieve this proposes two central ideas (agency, uncertainty) that have important ramifications across disciplines. In sum, control processes involve self-regulatory mechanisms that enable us to make subjective estimates of success, which helps to anchor our interpretation of uncertain events. In addition, these estimates are integrated with estimations of rates of change of the events in the environment which helps us track the outcomes we aim to control.

Настоящая, вторая книга «Философии и теории истории» посвящена широкому тема-тическому спектру: от фундаментальных проблем социальной онтологии и исторической динамики до детального анализа событийного слоя отдельных кризисов и революций. Выделены основные сдвиги в современном социально-историческом познании, сфор-мулированы соответствующие принципы. Выстроен концептуальный мост между уровнями макро-и микро-(structure и agency) с учетом их динамики и взаимовлияния. Построена об-щая теория трансформации политических отношений и режимов с приложением к динамике разнообразных неопатримониальных режимов. Главная идея книги-порядок в беспорядке-состоит в утверждении значимости универсальных закономерностей социального взаимодействия, свойств сознания и поведе-ния людей в самых острых кризисах, жестоких конфликтах и бурных революциях, которые обычно принято считать «иррациональной стихией» и «хаосом». С этих позиций проанализирована роль разного типа революций и революционных волн в контексте гуманистической версии смысла мировой истории в пяти автономных про-цессах модернизации. Особое внимание уделено причинам назревания кризисов и револю-ционных ситуаций, закономерностям государственного распада, механизмам конфликтной динамики, взаимосвязи макро-, мезо-, и микропроцессов в революционные периоды на ма-териале Большой Русской революции (1905-1930 гг.), хода политических конфликтов 1917 г., переломных дней Февраля в Петрограде и Евромайдана в Киеве, а также сравнения распадов Российской империи и Югославии. Обоснованы принципы и критерии легитимно-сти постреволюционных режимов. В приложениях рассмотрены причины и пределы ускорения истории, возможности приложения макросоциологических теорий Р. Коллинза к истории России, ее современной политике и перспективам. Книга предназначена для философов, социологов, политологов, историков, для иссле-дователей и преподавателей, для аспирантов и студентов, для политиков и интересующихся политикой, для всех, кого волнуют вопросы философского и научного осмысления истории, теории кризисной и революционной динамики. Заказ книги:

Die Begriffe Politikkonvergenz, Politikdiffusion und Politiktransfer werden in der Literatur nicht immer klar voneinander abgegrenzt. Die daraus resultierende begriffliche — und möglicherweise auch analytische —Unklarheit erschwert bislang die Synthese der unter den verschiedenen Begriffen erarbeiteten konzeptionellen Ansätze und empirischen Ergebnisse und damit die Herausbildung eines übergreifenden Forschungsprogramms (Holzinger/Knill 2005; Tews 2005; Holzinger/Jörgens/Knill im Erscheinen). Ziel dieses einleitenden Beitrags ist es daher, die verwandten Konzepte Diffusion, Transfer und Konvergenz zusammenzuführen und für einander fruchtbar zu machen.

The Coleman diagram is one of the most famous theoretical diagrams in sociology. The aim of this article is to provide a rational reconstruction of the diagram as a tool for social scientific theorizing. I will show how Coleman uses the diagram and how it can be employed as a tool for theoretical thinking. I will also demonstrate how it can be used to clarify the nature of the micro-macro challenge in social explanation. The structure of the article is as following. Section 2 will describe the diagram and its elements. Section 3 will show various ways in which Coleman used the diagram in his work. Section 4 discusses more systematically issues related to the interpretation of the diagram, and Section 5 will provide a diagnosis of some recent interpretations of the diagram. Finally, Section 6 focuses on some important limitations of the diagram.

During the past decade, social mechanisms and mechanism-based ex- planations have received considerable attention in the social sciences as well as in the philosophy of science. This article critically reviews the most important philosophical and social science contributions to the mechanism approach. The first part discusses the idea of mechanism- based explanation from the point of view of philosophy of science and relates it to causation and to the covering-law account of explanation. The second part focuses on how the idea of mechanisms has been used in the social sciences. The final part discusses recent developments in analytical sociology, covering the nature of sociological explananda, the role of theory of action in mechanism-based explanations, Merton’s idea of middle-range theory, and the role of agent-based simulations in the development of mechanism-based explanations.

The objective of the master thesis presented here is to chart a concept of causality adequate for a historical materialism at pace with the times, uncircumventable for grasping complex social phenomena and relationships, their reproduction and transformation following Marx’s materialist notion of social reality. Thereby the main focus does not lie on Marx’s notion of causality, which is not closer explicated by himself as causality. Rather this in general (systematically) relatively little theorized notion within Marxist discourses will be discussed alongside theoretical approaches which seem to be most fruitful for this enquiry: Structural Marxism, Political Marxism and Critical Realism. By means of a brief outline of the Marxian preface of 1859, which is central to many Marxist approaches, it will be attempted to es-tablish the main field under discussion in terms of a history of theory. With respect to an immanently critical and comparative method, the thesis henceforth expounds the aforementioned theories while taking their respective notions of causality as well as, among other things, the interrelated understanding of social structure in relation to agency, the specific effectivities of the involved entities and the notions of lawfulness into account. What is hereby striven for, is to contour though the critical and comparative exposition of the said theories a non-empiricist, non-teleological and non-determinist notion of causality appropriate to the complexity of social reality, without taking a recourse to theoretically restricted positivist or historico-philosophical patterns of explanation and interpretation. In the end the critical impetus of this thesis is to accentuate the importance of causality in a critical theory of society after Marx.

The aim of this study is to develop a better understanding of the relation between housing recovery and user involvement from a capability perspective. The thesis studies housing recovery in areas affected by typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines on 8th November 2013. The focus is on three perspectives: a) approaches to housing reconstruction, b) explanation for unexpected housing outcomes, and c) user involvement. The study uses basic critical realism as metatheory, and case study is the main research strategy. Data collection techniques include observations of social settings, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, a workshop, field notes and document analysis. Fieldwork was carried out in 2014 and 2015 in several cities in Leyte.

Regarding approaches to housing reconstruction, different types of partnerships, components of the reconstruction approach, housing solutions, and types of user involvement, have been discussed. Concerning explanations for unexpected housing outcomes, the study uses a realist laminated ontology to explain how multiple causal mechanisms triggered unexpected outcomes in the housing recovery programme in the province of Leyte. The Resolution Redescription Retrodiction Elimination Identification and Correction (RRREIC) method, a critical realist model of scientific discovery for applied research, was applied to the empirical data and complemented with policy analysis. Six plausible causal mechanisms have been discussed. Regarding user involvement, the study proposes two tools for user involvement from a capability perspective. The Model for user involvement in evolutionary housing recovery has been used to analyze and assess housing reconstruction carried out by two non-governmental organizations a) We Effect, and b) Gawad Kalinga. The study also proposes Freedom to Rebuild, a post-disaster housing evaluation framework, as a tool addressed to disaster survivors for self-assessing their predisaster vulnerabilities, their involvement in housing recovery, and their resilience after occupancy.

The case studies on We Effect and Gawad Kalinga draw attention to how active involvement of prospective users in different stages of housing recovery has contributed to expand their capabilities. Active involvement denotes medium, high or very high levels of user involvement. The findings from the GK-Village in Tanauan show that non-involvement in the first two stages of housing recovery has been compensated to a certain extent because users had high involvement during the post-occupancy stage. However, the enhancement of capacities is limited in comparison with the We Effect project, in which users have attained medium, high and very high levels of involvement. The findings from the We Effect project in Ormoc show that multiplicity of opportunities, purposive choices and a combination of medium, high and very high levels of involvement in the different stages of housing recovery have led to disaster survivors with enhanced capacities at the individual and collective level. These users are confident in their resilience towards future natural hazards in terms of having attained safer housing solutions, experience regarding partnerships with other organizations for accessing funding, and skills for repairing their own houses.

Unfreedoms for resilient resettlement should be transformed through enacting procurement and housing recovery policies that are consistent with counteracting pre-disaster vulnerabilities. Such policies should foster multiple reconstruction approaches, spatio-material conditions that allow for a multiplicity of housing solutions and tenures in-city, and involvement of prospective users in housing recovery. Hence, policies and regulations for resilient housing recovery would create conditions for building both resilient communities and resettlements.

Social mechanisms and mechanism-based explanation have attracted considerable attention in the social sciences and the philosophy of science during the past two decades. The idea of mechanistic explanation has proved to be a useful tool for criticizing existing research practices and meta-theoretical views on the nature of the social-scientific enterprise. Many definitions of social mechanisms have been articulated, and have been used to support a wide variety of methodological and theoretical claims. It is impossible to cover all of these in one chapter, so I will merely highlight some of the most prominent and philosophically interesting ideas.

While paradigm-bound research has generated powerful insights in international relations, it has fostered a tunnel vision that hinders progress and widens the chasm between theory and policy. In this important new book, Sil and Katzenstein draw upon recent scholarship to illustrate the benefits of a more pragmatic and eclectic style of research, aimed at adjusting and integrating causal mechanisms drawn from different analytic traditions for the purpose of generating usable knowledge concerning specific substantive problems.

PRAISE:

"This is the future of political science. Sil and Katzenstein convincingly demonstrate that drawing on an eclectic mix of causal mechanisms provides stronger explanations, more policy-relevant scholarship, and closer connections to other disciplines." —Andrew Bennett, Georgetown University

“For international relations scholars, methodologists, and social scientists more broadly, this is a treasure trove of bold and lucid arguments. The question: How to overcome compartmentalization in international relations scholarship? The strategy: incorporate ideas and analytic tools from seemingly incommensurable research traditions. The reward: a richer interpretive and explanatory understanding of today’s world.” —David Collier and Ron E. Hassner, University of California, Berkeley

“An exceptional book that should be read by every serious student of world politics. For researchers already combining elements from different approaches with neither roadmap nor rationale, it fills a long-standing lacuna. Even those who disagree with such a research strategy will benefit greatly from engaging with its thoughtful arguments and impressive range of examples.” —Colin Elman, Maxwell School of Syracuse University

"A giant step forward for those of us who span the boundaries between theory and practice. The singular contribution of this important volume is to show how “analytical eclecticism,” as Sil and Katzenstein call it, can be systematized and does not need to rely upon individual intuition or shared folk tales. It will deservedly have an enormous impact on the study of world politics." —John Gerard Ruggie, Harvard University and United Nations

"For two decades, the field of international relations has been a prisoner of the misconceived notion that good scholarship falls neatly into incompatible paradigms. Sil and Katzenstein cogently document the value of eclectic work that borrows from more than one paradigm but remains analytically rigorous. Our conceptual jail has no locks, and if we refuse to exit, we have only ourselves to blame." —Robert O. Keohane, Princeton University

This paper crosses the borders of human geography to bring back two related bodies of work from experimental psychology that investigate, in an unusual and refreshingly precise way, long-standing human geographical concerns with tem-porality, place and subject formations, meaning-making and well-being. It is argued that the traffic of ideas and empirical findings between human geography and experimental psychology can be mutually profitable if, and only to the extent that, it encompasses a sustained epistemological, methodological and political critique of the disciplinary practices that have yielded those ideas and findings.

ABSTRACT: Wesley Salmon’s version of the ontic conception of explanation is a main historical root of contemporary work on mechanistic explanation. This paper examines and critiques the philosophical merits of Salmon’s version, and argues that his conception’s most fundamental construct is either fundamentally obscure, or else reduces to a non-ontic conception of explanation. Either way, the ontic conception is a misconception.

Review of P. Demeulenaere (ed.), Analytical Sociology and Social
Mechanisms. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Why should we introduce the notion of ‘analytical sociology’ into the field of sociology, and why should it be linked to the concept of ‘mechanism’? With these two principal questions, Pierre Demeulenaere, Professor of Sociological Theory and Philosophy of the Social Sciences at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, opens his Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms, a collection of thirteen papers written by social scientists and philosophers of the social sciences. Not every contributor should be considered an analytical sociologist. Rather than being a manifesto either pro or contra analytical sociology and the use of mechanisms, it is an attempt to reflect upon the key issues involved in sociological explanation. Even though several chapters raise very interesting points, the overall impression one gets from this book is that analytical sociology fails to redeem its main promise, viz. to add clarity, precision, and conceptual rigor to sociology, especially regarding one of its most central concepts: ‘mechanism’.

This theoretical paper introduces a conceptual framework for empirical study and comparison of collaborative civil society housing (CSH). We suggest that CSH communities satisfy four criteria to a lesser or higher extent: (1) autonomy, (2) participatory democracy, (3) internal solidarity and (4) external solidarity. Drawing primarily on empirical examples from the scholarly literature on co-operative housing, we claim that all CSH communities face challenges that may lead to the erosion of these civil society criteria. We argue that such challenges are general social mechanisms that manifest themselves in various types of situations, for instance, when apartments are transferred or refurbished.

The paper shows how error statistical theory can be deployed to grasp the deeper epistemic logic of the peer-review process. The intent is to provide the readers with a novel lens through which to make sense of the practices of academic publishing.

This book extends debates in the field of biographical research, arguing that causal explanations are not at odds with biographical research and that biographical research is in fact a valuable tool for explaining why things in social and personal lives are one way and not another. Bringing reconstructive biographical research into dialogue with critical realism, it explains how and why relational social ontology can become a unique theoretical ground for tapping emergent mechanisms and latent meaning structures. Through an account of the reasons for which reductionist epistemologies, rational action models and covering law explanations are not appropriate for biographical research, the authors develop the philosophical idea of singular causation as a means by which biographical researchers are able to forge causal hypotheses for the occurrence of events and offer guidance on the application of this methodological principle to concrete, empirical examples. As such, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in biographical research and social research methods.

The point of departure of this paper is Fligstein and McAdam’s A Theory of Fields. It is argued that their theoretical framework would be strengthened by a more systematic focus in social mechanism based explanations since this would increase understanding on how new strategic action fields emerge. We illustrate this argument by exploring the emergence of the European Research Area (ERA) as a transnational strategic action field within the European Union. In identifying relevant social mechanisms we draw both on Fligstein and McAdam’s studies as well as on academic capitalism literature.

Our main conclusion is that the emergence of this field was brought about through following social mechanisms: global economic competition, collective attribution of threat/opportunity, social appropriation and innovative collective action (including sub-mechanisms such as discourse, collective policy coordination and organization re/design), coalition formation, boundary deactivation and legislation.

Moreover, our findings imply there was nothing inevitable in the emergence of ERA. Rather, it was a contested and complex social process that faced considerable resistance from different actors and required activation of multiple and interlinked social mechanisms.

First, we briefly introduce the concept of strategic action fields.
Second, we discuss the concept of social mechanism and how it relates to the emergence of strategic action fields. Third, we describe the ERA and what are its historical roots. Fourth, we
identify and define social mechanisms that explain the emergence of the ERA. Fifth, we provide conclusions.

Today, mechanisms and mechanistic explanation are very popular in philosophy of science and are deemed a welcome alternative to laws of nature and deductive-nomological explanation. Starting from Mitchell’s pragmatic notion of laws, I cast doubt on their status as a genuine alternative. I argue that (1) all complex-systems mechanisms ontologically must rely on stable regularities, while (2) the reverse need not hold. Analogously, (3) models of mechanisms must incorporate pragmatic laws, while (4) such laws themselves need not always refer to underlying mechanisms. Finally, I show that Mitchell’s account is more encompassing than the mechanistic account.

This article makes the case for process patterns as an alternative to causal mechanisms. Causal mechanisms are explanatory tools to unpack the " black boxes " separating the input and output of models. Unlike causal mechanisms, process patterns do not require such a black box. They refer to recurrent sequences of interaction observed across any number of empirical domains. Scholars can apply them across disciplines when similar processes occur in different domains. The article provides examples from International Relations where scholars have sometimes studied process patterns in all but name.

After The state and education policy, the most well-circulated work of Roger Dale is the 1999 published paper Specifying globalization effects on national policy: a focus on the mechanisms. This piece has contributed importantly to Dale's theoretical developments on globalization and education policy. As I argue in this chapter, Dale's focus on the mechanisms contributes to analyze changing education governance patterns from a multi-scalar perspective and through a more complex understanding of how structural forces and strategic action interact with meso variables in the production of educational policy change. Despite its many virtues, the mechanisms' paper can be misleading if viewed as a closed analytical framework. It rather needs to be read as an invitation to identify and understand the causal configurations behind educational transformations in increasingly globalized policy spaces.

A basic claim of this paper is that the foundational theoretical problem of the social sciences — the possibility of unconscious, unplanned forms of cooperation and intelligence among intentional agents (the very hard issue of the ‘invisible hand’, of the ‘spontaneous social order’ but also of ‘social functions’) — will eventually be clarified thanks to the contribution of AI (and, in particular, of cognitive Agent modelling, learning, and MAS) and its entering the social simulation domain. After introducing Multi-Agent-Based Social Simulation and its trends, the limits of the very popular notion of ‘emergence’ are discussed, Smith’s and Hayek’s view of ‘spontaneous social order’ are critically introduced, and serious contradictions in the theory of ‘social functions’ among intentional agents are pointed out. The problem is how to reconcile the ‘external’ teleology that orients the agent’s behaviour with the ‘internal’ teleology governing it. In order to account for the functional character of intentional action, we need a somewhat sophisticated model of intention, and a different view of layered cognitive architectures combining explicit beliefs and goals with association and conditioning. On such a basis we sketch a model of unknown functions impinging on intentional actions through a high level form of (MA) reinforcement learning. This model accounts for both eu-functions and dys-functions, autonomous and heteronomous functions. It is argued that, in order to reproduce some behaviour, its effects should not necessarily be ‘good’, i.e. useful for the goal of the agent or of some higher macro-system.  2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

According to the dominant view, analytical sociology is largely incompatible with the deductive-nomological (D-N) model because the latter allows neither for accurate and precise explanations, nor for explanations that give individuals and their actions a privileged role. This view neglects two relevant facts about the D-N model as understood by Hempel and Popper and some of their precursors such as J. S. Mill and Weber. The first is the relationship between this model, situational analysis and the use of probabilistic laws in explanation. The second is that, from the standpoint of the D-N theory, it is possible to make sense of social mechanisms in terms of Weber’s ideal-typical models. Like these models, mechanisms are functional for the development of concrete empirical sociological hypotheses that, without covering generalizations, lack explanatory power.

Transitional justice and diaspora studies are interdisciplinary and expanding fields of study. Finding the right combination of mechanisms to forward transitional justice in post-conflict polities is an ongoing challenge for states and affected populations. Diasporas, as non-state actors with increased agency in homelands, host-lands, and other global locations, engage with their past from a distance, but their actions are little understood. This introductory article to a special issue develops a novel framework to study causal mechanisms and their underlying analytical rationales – emotional, cognitive, symbolic/value-based, strategic, and networks-based – linking diasporas and local actors in transitional justice. Mechanisms featured are: thin sympathetic response and chosen trauma, fear and hope, contact and framing, cooperation and coalition-building, brokerage, patronage, and connective action, among others. The contributors theorize about causal mechanisms and their sequences involving diasporas in multi-sited transitional justice processes and bring empirical evidence from various world regions.

he article seeks to offer a way forward in discussions about the status of securitization theory. In my reading, this debate has been inhibited by the difficulty of finding an appropriate version of ‘understanding/explanation’ that would be consistent with the meta-theoretical commitments of a post-structuralist theory.
By leaving ‘explanation’ and/or all versions of causality to the positivist other, the Copenhagen School also left its own explanatory status often implicit, or only negatively defined. Instead, the present article claims that the explanatory theory used in securitization research de facto relies on causal mechanisms that are nonpositivistically conceived. Using the appropriate methodological literature renders this explanatory
status explicit, exposing the theory’s non-positivist causality and thus, hopefully, enhancing its empirical theory.

Today, complex-systems mechanisms and mechanistic explanation are very popular in philosophy of science and are deemed a welcome alternative to the decried laws of nature and to D-N explanation. However, starting from a relaxed, pragmatic notion of regularities and laws, I will cast doubt on their status as a genuine alternative. I will argue that (1) all complex-systems mechanisms ontologically must rely on stable regularities, while (2) it is not obvious that all such regularities must rely on an underlying mechanism. Analogously, (3) models of mechanisms must incorporate (and hence are epistemologically dependent on) pragmatic laws, while (4) such laws themselves needn’t always represent mechanisms. As valuable as the concepts of mechanism and mechanistic explanation are, they cannot replace regularities nor undermine their relevance regarding explanation.

In three experiments we investigated whether two procedures of acquiring knowledge about the same causal structure, predictive learning (from causes to effects) versus diagnostic learning (from effects to causes), would lead to different base rate use in diagnostic judgments. Results showed that learners are capable of incorporating base rate information in their judgments regardless of the direction in which the causal structure is learned. However, this only holds true for relatively simple scenarios. When complexity was increased, base rates were only used after diagnostic learning, but were largely neglected after predictive learning. It could be shown that this asymmetry is not due to a failure of encoding base rates in predictive learning because participants in all conditions were fairly good at reporting them. The findings present challenges for all theories of causal learning.