A New Social Ontology of Government: Consent, Coordination, and Authority

© The Author(s) 2020

D. LittleA New Social Ontology of GovernmentFoundations of Government and Public Administrationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48923-6_1

1. Ontology and Government

Daniel Little¹  

(1)

University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Daniel Little

Email: delittle@umich.edu

Abstract

What kind of things do we need to hypothesize when we refer to government? A government is made up of actors—individuals who occupy roles; who have beliefs, interests, commitments, and goals; and who exist within social relations and networks involving other individuals both within and outside the corridors of power. How are the actors who make up government tied together through constraints, actions, institutions, values, incentives, norms, identities, emotions, and interests? What forms of social causation and influence serve to constitute the organizations and institutions of government? Recent work in organizational sociology has provided new tools for describing social arrangements within organizations on the basis of which organizations function. Current studies of organizations also provide a basis for understanding the importance and sources of dysfunction within government and other ensembles of organizations. This chapter lays the ground for developing an extensive theory of the social realities that constitute a modern government.

Keywords

Actor-centered sociologyGovernment agencyOrganization theorySocial ontologyStrategic action field

Overview

What kind of things are we talking about when we refer to government? What sorts of processes, forces, mechanisms, structures, and activities make up the workings of government? In recent years philosophers of social science have rightly urged that we need to better understand the stuff of the social world if we are to have a good understanding of how it works. In philosophical language, we need to focus for a time on issues of ontology with regard to the social world. What kinds of entities, powers, forces, and relations exist in the social realm? What kinds of relations tie them together? What are some of the mechanisms and causal powers that constitute the workings of these social entities? Are there distinctive levels of social organization and structure that can be identified? Earlier approaches to the philosophy of the social sciences have largely emphasized issues of epistemology, explanation, methodology, and confirmation, and have often been guided by unhelpful analogies with positivism and the natural sciences. Greater attention to social ontology promises to allow working social scientists and philosophers alike to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the nature of the social world. Better thinking about social ontology is important for the progress of social science. Bad ontology breeds bad science.

These issues are especially interesting when we consider the nature and role of government in the modern world. What is government? How does it work? How are the many actors and subjects of government tied together through constraints, actions, institutions, values, incentives, norms, identities, emotions, and interests?

The book seeks to provide a basis for a better understanding of some of the central puzzles of empirical political science: how does government express will and purpose? What accounts for both plasticity and perseverance of political institutions and practices? How do political institutions come to have effective causal powers in the administration of policy and regulation? And how can we arrive at a better understanding of the persistence of dysfunctions in government and public administration—failures to achieve public goods, the persistence of self-dealing behavior by the actors of the state, and the apparent ubiquity of the influence of private interests even within otherwise high-functioning governments?

If we are to think seriously about the ontology of government, it is good to begin with a few obvious ontological truths. Most basically, it is plain that any specific government is not one unitary thing. Instead, it is a composite thing that encompasses many social functions, networks, doings, and powers, at multiple and overlapping levels. Government is not precisely layered in the fashion suggested by an organizational chart. Rather, it consists of multiple systems, organizations, groups, specialists, brokers, and rogues working sometimes with considerable independence and sometimes with great coordination and subordination.

Consider some of these examples of the face of government, and notice the great heterogeneity they represent: the policeman on the beat, the health inspector, the city health department, the state and federal revenue services, the National Science Foundation, the state economic development agency, the mayor’s office, the elected school board, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the President, and so on ad infinitum. There are ties among these nodes, both formal and informal, and there are sometimes organization charts that display functional relationships, authority structures, and flows of information along various offices and actors. But there is also substantial contingency and path dependence in the development of these institutions and relationships and a quilt-like arrangement of jurisdictions and histories.

Another important truth about government is that it is made up of actors—individuals who occupy roles; who have beliefs, interests, commitments, and goals; who exist within social relations and networks involving other individuals both within and outside the corridors of power; and whose thoughts, intentions, and actions are never wholly defined by the norms, organizational imperatives, and institutions within which they operate. Government officials and functionaries are not robots, defined by the dictates of role responsibilities and policies. So it is crucial to approach the ontology of government from an actor-centered point of view, and to understand the powers and capacities of government in terms of the ways in which individual actors are disposed to act in a range of institutional and organizational circumstances. Whether we think of the top administrators and executives, or the experts and formulators of policy drafts, or the managers of extended groups of specialized staff, or the individuals who receive complaints from the public, or the compliance officers whose job it is to ensure that policies are followed by insiders and outsiders—all of these positions are occupied by individual actors who bring their own mental frameworks, interests, emotions, and knowledge to the work they do in government.

This point is all the more important when we consider the range of tasks performed by government. Governments make decisions through legislation and executive agencies; they gather knowledge about complex challenges, both scientific and social; they set priorities for government itself, and indirectly for the society in which they operate; they establish policies and rules; they collect taxes; they wage war; and, of course, they seek to implement the rule of law and the scope and effectiveness of rules and policies. Generally, these tasks require extended processes of collaboration, delegation, coordination, and communication within the organizations that make up the divisions of government. And often enough these processes misfire, leading to outcomes that are counter-productive for both government and society.

Every part of this long list of tasks involves deep complexities that are of interest to political scientists and public administration specialists. And all of these activities involve the coordinated (or sometimes uncoordinated) activities of legions of individual actors. The workforce of the Environmental Protection Agency is over 14,000 men and women, and the Food and Drug Administration is comparable in size; the Department of Justice employs over 110,000 individuals in dozens of major departments and offices; the Department of Homeland Security employs 229,000 individuals and consists of over a dozen large sub-agencies and sub-bureaus. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a relatively small Federal agency with a very important and complex charge, has 3800 employees.

Now think of the possibilities of overlap, interference, and inconsistency that exist among the functionings and missions of diverse agencies. Each agency has its mission and priorities; these goals imply efforts on the part of the leaders, managers, and staff of the agency to bring about certain kinds of results. And sometimes—perhaps most times—these results may be partially inconsistent with the priorities, goals, and initiatives of other governmental agencies. The Commerce Department has a priority of encouraging the export of US technology to other countries, to generate business success and economic growth in the United States. Some of those technologies involve processes like nuclear power production. But other agencies—and the Commerce Department itself in another part of its mission—have the goal of limiting the risks of the proliferation of technologies with potential military uses. Here is the crucial point to recognize: there is no master executive capable of harmoniously adjusting the activities of all departments so as to bring about the best outcome for the country, all things considered. There is the President of the United States, of course, who wields authority over the cabinet secretaries who serve as chief executives of the various departments; and there is the Congress, which writes legislation charging and limiting the activities of government. But it is simply impossible to imagine an overall master executive who serves as symphony conductor to all these different areas of government activity. At the best, occasions of especially obvious inconsistency of mission and effort can be identified and ameliorated. New policies can be written, memoranda of understanding between agencies can be drafted, and particular dysfunctions can be untangled. But this is a piecemeal and never-complete process.

Recent work in organizational sociology has provided new tools for describing social arrangements within organizations and institutions. Richard Scott and Gerald Davis’s major work Organizations and Organizing (2007) provides an excellent contemporary framework for understanding the workings of organizations, emphasizing rational, natural, and open-systems approaches to organizations. Their analysis sheds a great deal of light on the workings of government agencies. The word organizing in the title of their book signals the idea that organizations are no longer looked at as static structures within which actors carry out well defined roles, but are instead dynamic processes in which active efforts by leaders, managers, and employees define goals and strategies and work to carry them out. And the open-system phrase highlights the point that organizations always exist and function within a broader environment—political constraints, economic forces, public opinion, technological innovation, other organizations, and today climate change and environmental disaster.

This is a perfect place for application of Fligstein-McAdam strategic action field theory (Fligstein and McAdam 2012). Government is well conceived as interlinked action networks with tighter and looser linkages and strategic actions by a variety of actors. (Think of the jurisdictional struggles between FBI and state and local police authorities.) The theory of assemblages is another suggestive theory of social ontology in this context. Manuel DeLanda spells out some of the details of this ontological framework on the social world (2006). The social ontology of assemblage illuminates the modular and contingent arrangement of offices, networks, and actors that make up government at a period in time. Some of Marx’s theories about politics and government are relevant as well—the salience of class interest in the formulation and application of government policy is plainly an important aspect of the ontology of government, in the United States and all other countries. And recent discussions of generativity and emergence offer new ways of thinking about the relations between higher level and lower level social entities. Subsequent chapters will introduce the reader to these theories and more.

What Does Government Do?

What does government do? In brief, government is the organized, formal, and normatively grounded expression of the common will of citizens and the public good of all of society (Rousseau). Government exercises a monopoly of coercive force in society on behalf of the legitimate goals of government (Weber). As Jos Raadschelders observes, In the past 100-150 years, government has grown to become a complex service-providing and policy-developing institution the size of which has no historical precedent (2013: 1). Government establishes a framework of law and policy within which society functions. Key functions of government include administration of justice and protection of individual liberties and rights; foreign diplomacy and military defense; provision for public goods and services; provision of social insurance and social welfare; and establishment of regulations to ensure public health and safety against externalities of private activity. Some laws and policies serve simply to establish the rules of the game through which ordinary life is carried out, including protection of civil and economic rights, procedures for conflict resolution, and laws of liberty and property. Other laws and policies are aimed at remedying current problems faced by society. The War on Poverty was President Lyndon B. Johnson’s effort to create processes of social and economic change that would end severe poverty in the United States. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were aimed at eliminating racial discrimination in public and social life in the United States. The environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s was aimed at halting and reversing the decline of environmental quality witnessed in mid-twentieth-century in the United States and the adverse effects on public health and quality of life that ensued. Decades-long efforts to reform the way that healthcare insurance is provided to Americans eventually led to passage of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act—with years of subsequent efforts by political actors in the opposition party to undo the policy.

Governments formulate policies in service of their priorities. A policy is a set of actions designed to bring about a set of social outcomes—improve air and water quality, decrease automobile accident fatalities, end child malnutrition. Policies—the action plans of government—may be the result of legislation or executive action through the workings of various governmental agencies, and both types processes raise interesting issues. The implementation of policy requires the ability of government to secure appropriate behavior by citizens and government officials alike; this challenge is the topic of Chapter 9 where we consider how government exerts its will.

Setting policy unavoidably involves gathering data about the processes in question and arriving at estimates of the range of effects various possible interventions are likely to have. And given that policies involve issues where there is a significant degree of risk and uncertainty, it is inevitable that government policy-setting processes need to have some appropriate way of measuring uncertainty and balancing risks and benefits. This knowledge-gathering and assessment process is also a key process of government and is discussed in a later chapter.

Much of the work of government is performed by agencies through policies, actions, and administration that have important effects on the interests and wishes of citizens and private organizations and corporations. Governmental agencies have rule-setting powers and powers of enforcement, delegated by Congress to permit them to carry out their assigned missions—the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, or the Social Security Administration. Agencies implement policies under broad enabling legislation enacted by Congress. They are generally large hierarchical organizations incorporating layers of administrators and technical experts, and the eventual content of a new policy is often the highly complex result of myriad different scientific assessments, interests, and voices. This is a key focal point for a theory of the ontology of government and a key point of application of current thinking in organizational sociology.

Actor-Centered Social Ontology

The social ontology we will explore here depends on an important premise, an approach to social thinking that can be described as actor-centered. The basic idea is that social phenomena are constituted by the actions of individuals, oriented by their own subjectivities and mental frameworks and relationships with others. Higher-level institutions, organizations, and forces exist; but their properties and dynamics are constituted by the collective actions of the actors who make them up. It is recognized, of course, that the subjectivity of the actor does not come full-blown into his or her mind at adulthood; rather, we recognize that individuals are socialized; their thought processes and mental frameworks are developed through myriad social relationships and institutions. So the actor is a socially constituted individual (Little 2006, 2016). I refer to this conception of the social world as methodological localism, according to which socially constituted and socially situated individual actors make choices within a set of locally instantiated norms, rules, social relationships, and opportunities.

Actor-centered social science begins in the intuition that social processes are embodied in the interactions of socially constructed individuals, and it takes seriously the idea that actors have complex and socially transmitted mental schemes of action and representation. So actor-centered sociologists are keen not to over-simplify the persons who constitute the social domain of interest. This means that they are generally not content with sparse abstract schemata of actors like those that pervade most versions of rational choice theory (Green and Shapiro 1994).

This assumption about the nature of the social world can be described as ontological individualism (Epstein 2009). It embodies the idea that there is no mysterious social stuff that is distinct from the actions and mental frameworks of the individuals who make up the social world. Ontological individualism does not force us to adopt the much stronger claims of methodological individualism (the idea that social explanations need to be reduced to statements about individuals). Rather, we are encouraged to recognize that individuals themselves are affected by social arrangements and relationships in the past and the present, so that the individual who plays a role in a social institution is herself socially constituted by past experience and learning in social environments. This point does not contradict the premise of an actor-centered approach to social science, because all of those earlier social experiences and interactions were themselves created by socially constructed individuals.

The idea of the microfoundations of a given social fact or entity reflects this view of the actor-centered nature of social entities (Little 1998, 2015, 2017). If we want to assert that a given social-level fact persists, we need to have some account of what features of the local environment of action would induce independent actors to choose actions in ways that contribute to the emergence and persistence of the social fact in question. The properties and causal powers of government require microfoundations.

Organizations as Social Things

A key concept in analyzing the workings of government is the idea of an organization. Organizations exist on a range of scales, from a small business to an architectural firm to a university to a government agency. Examples of organizations include things like the University of Chicago, the Department of Energy, the Baltimore police department, a collective farm in Sichuan in 1965, the operations staff of a nuclear power plant, a large investment bank on Wall Street, an NGO such as Oxfam, and the Xerox Corporation. It does not make sense to think of government itself as a single organization, because it is evident from what has been said already that a government is an ensemble of many organizations, loosely connected through a variety of means. But understanding how mid-size organizations work will be crucial to allowing us to analyze the nature of government action, knowledge formation, and decision.

An organization is a meso-level social structure. It is a structured group of individuals, often hierarchically organized, pursuing a relatively clearly defined set of tasks. Scott and Davis (2007) describe an organization in these terms: "Most analysts have conceived of organizations as social structures created