Social positions and relations as integral to social reality’
Social life, then, is not only structured but intrinsically dynamic. In emphasising its structured nature I have so far focused upon social rules. But this is not all there is to it. Specifically, social being is also constituted in a fundamental way by both social relations and positions. These features arc essential to understanding the precise manner in which human agency and structure come together.
The significance and fact of social relations and positions arc easily recognised once we take note (and inquire into the conditions) of a general feature of experience: that there is a systematic disparity across individuals regarding the practices that are, and apparently can be, followed. Although most rules can be utilised by a wide group of people it by no means follows that all rules are available, or apply equally, to everyone, even within a given culture. To the contrary, any (segment of) society is highly segmented in terms of the obligations and prerogatives that arc on offer. Teachers, for example, are allowed and expected to follow different practices than students, government ministers to follow different ones than lay-people, employers than employees, men than women, landlords than tenants, and so on. Rules as resources arc not equally available, or do not apply equally, to each member of the population at large.
What, then, explains the differentiated ascription of obligations, prerogatives, privileges, and responsibilities? This question directs attention to the wider one of how human beings and social structure, such as rules, come together in the first place. If social structure such as rules is a different sort of thing to human beings, human agency, and even action, what is the point of contact between human agency and structure? How do they interconnect? In particular how do they come together in such a manner that different agents achieve different responsibilities and obligations and thereby call on, or arc conditioned in their actions by, different social rules and so structures of power?
If it is clearly the ease that teachers have different responsibilities, obligations, and prerogatives than students, and government ministers face different ones than the rest of us, then it is equally apparent that these obligations and prerogatives exist independently of the particular individuals who happen, currently, to be teachers, students, or ministers. If I, as a university teacher, were to move on tomorrow, someone else would take over my teaching responsibilities and enjoy the same obligations and prerogatives as I currently do. Indeed, those who occupy the positions of students arc different every year. In short, society is constituted in large part by a set of positions, each associated with numerous obligations, rights, and duties, and into which agents, as it were, slot.
Something more about this system of societal positions can be expressed if we take note of the additional observation that practices routinely followed by occupants of any type of position tend to be oriented towards some other group(s). The rights, tasks, and obligations of teachers, for example, arc oriented towards their interactions with students (and vice versa), towards research-funding bodies or governing institutions, and so forth. Similarly the rights and obligations of landlords arc oriented towards their interactions with tenants, and so on.
The importance of internal relations
Such considerations clearly indicate a causal role for certain forms of relation. Two types of relation must be distinguished: external and internal. Two objects or aspects are said to be externally related if neither is constituted by the relationship in which it stands to the other. Bread and butter, coffee and milk, barking dog and mail carrier, two passing strangers, provide examples. In contrast, two objects are said to be internally related if they are what they arc by virtue of the relationship in which they stand to one another. Landlady/landlord and tenant, employer and employee, teacher and student, magnet and its field are examples that spring easily to mind. In each case it is not possible to have the one without the other; each, in part, is what it is, and docs what it does, by virtue of the relation in which it stands to the other.
Now the intelligibility of rule-governed and the rule-differentiated social situation noted above requires that we recognise, first, the internal relationality of social life and, second, that the internal relationality in question is primarily not of individuals per se but of social positions. It is the positions that arc defined in relation to others, say of teachers to students. The picture that emerges, in other words, is of a set, or network, of positions characterised by the rules and so practices associated with them, where the latter are determined in relation to other positions and their associated rules and practices. According to this conception, the basic building blocks of society arc positions, involving, depending upon, or constituted according to, social rules and associated tasks, obligations, and prerogatives, along with the practices they govern, where such positions arc both defined in relation to other positions and arc immediately occupied by individuals.
Notice, finally, that notions of social systems or collectivities can be straightforwardly developed using the conceptions of social rules, practices, relationships, and positions now elaborated. Specifically, the conception of social systems and collectivities that is supported in this framework is precisely of an ensemble of networked, internally related, positions with their associated rules and practices. All the familiar social systems, collectivities, and organisations - the economy, the state, international and national companies, trade unions, households, schools, and hospitals - can be recognised as depending upon, presupposing, or consisting in, internally-related position-rule systems of this form.
Formalistic modelling as a generalised tool of social science
What follows for the practices of economic modelling? We know that econometrics and other projects concerned with detecting social-event regularities of interest have so far been rather unsuccessful. We now have an explanation: the social world is a highly internally related, intrinsically dynamic process, and one that is dependent upon, if irreducible to, transformative human agency. Certainly the experimental isolation of stable separable social structures and processes seems infeasible. Nor is it surprising that event regularities of sufficient stability to facilitate a successful practice of economic modelling have not been found to occur spontaneously, that is behind the backs of human intentional actions. It can be admitted that there are numerous regularities that arc made to happen but that are thereby of limited scientific interest. For example, in certain parts of the world Christmas is celebrated on the same day each year (although even here, in specific families say, there can be exceptions due to illnesses, the need for members of the family to be away from home on 25 December, or whatever.) But regularities such as this hardly constitute the sort of result that formalistic modellers seek to uncover.
In short the social realm seems to be constituted of stuff that is largely not separable and intrinsically stable, so that the lack of successes of the formalistic modelling project in economics is quite explicable, and future successes are seemingly improbable.
It follows, I think, that feminists may have been too cautious in their criticisms of formalistic modelling. Certainly, there arc grounds for supposing that those empirically oriented feminists in economics insistent upon applying standard econometric methods in all contexts arc proceeding wholly in the wrong direction.
But it may even be the case that feminists have been largely in error in identifying the primary direction of causation of the errors involved. I have in mind here the tendency of feminist economists to interpret as fundamental the disposition of male economists to portray human agents as relatively isolated, self-contained individuals. The latter is seen as a peculiarly masculinist view, counterpoised with the feminist emphasis on social relations. I think it is. But it may be indirectly and subconsciously achieved.
For I am suggesting that the primary problem with mainstream economists, which differentiates them from other social researchers, is their largely uncritical passion for formalistic modelling. And once it is realised that, to guarantee results that take the event-regularity form, it is necessary to formulate conceptions of separable, stable (intrinsically constant) entities - basically of isolated crypto-atoms -the mainstream emphasis falls into place. For the individualistic agents of mainstream constructions are just that: individual optimising atoms set in situations where a unique optimum of sorts is feasible, guaranteeing stable predictable results. It may thus be the modelling strategy per se that is the chief masculinist error here, and the substantive formulations a secondary implication.14
In any case, ontological analysis is seen to be consequential. It follows from it that formalistic modelling is not only overly partial: it may actually be
Feminism, realism, and universalism 25 misplaced.15 Economists can pursue the same sorts of goals as the ex posteriori successful natural sciences; that is, be concerned to identify causes of surface phenomena. But when mainstream economists insist that we should all work more or less exclusively with procedures of formalistic modelling, they succeed not only in marginalising without investigation all alternative approaches to doing economics (those that arc not based on closed systems modelling), they also succeed in universalising a practice that even in natural science is found to be but a special case (confined mainly to the well-controlled experimental situation), and a special case that, in the social realm, conceivably has no legitimate counterpart at all.
