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Topic 2: Change
CHANGE: How Boundaries Move, Strengthen, Expand, Shrink, etc.
Symbolic Boundaries Research Network
Online Conference, Feb. 10-14, 2003
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NOTE:
New posts are at the end of this page.
Yours too, if you've just added one!
From: Charles Tilly ct135@columbia.edu
Columbia
Sunday, Feb 2, 2003 (14:48)
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Identities and Boundary Activation:
Let us take a social identity as an organized and relatively durable answer, individual or collective, to the question "Who are you?" (The questions "Who are we?" and "Who are they?" follow ineluctably from the core question.) Significant social identities include three main elements: 1) a boundary separating you from me or us from them; 2) social relations, representations, and practices among people on one side of the boundary or the other; 3) social relations, representations, and practices across the boundary. In this sense, all individuals have multiple identities available to them, and most individuals switch incessantly among identities as a function of the settings they enter, the others with whom they interact, and the activities they are currently carrying on.
Boundaries form and change as a result of four processes: 1) negotiated encounters between previously unconnected clusters of persons, as when newcomers arrive en bloc in a well established neighborhood; 2) transfer of available but not previously active boundaries from other settings, as when storekeepers of nationality X start hiring workers of nationality Y for clearly subordinate positions; 3) authoritative imposition of new boundaries by holders of power; as when Bosnian Serb leaders require people of mixed lineage to identify themselves as Muslims, Croats, or Serbs; 4) day-to-day interaction within and across existing boundaries, as when printers of a distinct ethnicity wear down ethnic casting and discrimination by means of high quality work.
Categorical boundaries need not separate homogeneous populations from each other. Away from the boundary, great heterogeneity can prevail within such categories as female or African American. But boundaries exist to the extent that participants on each side employ similar uniform practices and representations of themselves and of those on the other side. Boundaries reinforced by returns from exploitation and opportunity hoarding play a fundamental part in generating and sustaining categorical inequality -- inequality by race, gender, class, ethnicity, and more.
Boundary activation consists of an increase in the salience of one such boundary, hence one identity, at the expense of others that are available. Boundary de-activation therefore consists of a decline in that salience. Boundary switching consists of de-activation of one boundary combined with activation of a second boundary. Activation, de-activation, and switching occur regularly and consequentially in small scale social life, as a bit of reflection on the partial substitutability of the identities female, student, African American, journalist, and customer will verify.
The three mechanisms also have powerful effects on the larger scale in political life, since ethnic, linguistic, religious, national, citizen vs. non-citizen, party, and many other varieties of mobilization or de-mobilization depend on them. Political brokers often specialize in boundary activation, de-activation, and switching, as for example India's Hindu leaders organize their clienteles to suppress boundaries of class, caste, gender, and community in favor of united attacks on Muslims, or vice versa. Polarization -- suppression of the middle ground between two previously overlapping positions -- often accompanies boundary activation as cause or effect, and facilitates destructive action across the boundary.
From: Michele Ollivier ollivier@uottawa.ca
University of Ottawa
Sunday, Feb 2, 2003 (16:24)
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Conspicuous Openness to Diversity and Cosmopolitanism:
A New Legitimate Culture?
If we define symbolic boundaries as lines that people draw between themselves and others in processes of identity formation and status exclusion, we necessarily assume the existence of criteria for classifying people and things into categories and for establishing hierarchies between them. The main thrust of my work in recent years has been to identify some of these criteria. More precisely, I've been sceptical of approaches which portray contemporary societies as fragmented along a multiplicity of localised identities and spaces of distinction. While rejecting Bourdieu's conception of a single, unified, and hegemonic legitimate culture, and while I acknowledge that boundaries are multiple and contingent, I believe that some criteria of classification and evaluation transcend local situations and constitute what Bourdieu called legitimate culture, that is, cultural representations whose acquisition is widely accepted as desirable but whose conditions of appropriation are not equally distributed.
In our most recent work on tastes, Viviana Fridman and I examine the rhetoric of openness to diversity in the field of tastes, especially in relation to the omnivore-univore thesis, and debates about cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism in the field of politics, where we find competing visions of how to accommodate diversity in national and international arenas. Drawing a parallel between these two fields, we present two working hypotheses. First, we argue that the rhetoric of openness to diversity and cosmopolitanism across fields is symptomatic of the emergence of a new type of legitimate culture, which prescribes new criteria for defining what is desirable and undesirable, and thus for drawing boundaries, in matters of tastes and politics. This new legitimate culture is part of a larger hegemonic discourse based on a series of binary oppositions, whereby terms such as diverse, open, eclectic, global, cosmopolitan, educated, enlightened, dominant, and desirable on the one hand are opposed to what is defined as homogeneous, local, closed upon itself, uneducated, regressive, dominated, and undesirable on the other.
Second, we argue that the opposition between open and closed, as well as that between diverse and homogeneous, function as ideological codes, or rhetorical devices, used by social agents to challenge or sustain unequal relations of power. The rhetoric of openness to diversity in the fields of tastes and in the realm of politics thus produces remarkably similar ideological effects. In the field of tastes, conspicuous openness to diversity constitutes a new type of cultural capital, in the sense of a set of cultural attitudes widely considered as desirable but whose conditions of appropriation are unequally distributed. This legitimate culture presents as desirable values and attitudes which are more closely linked to the cultural resources of privileged groups. In the field of politics, we argue that in current debates about cosmopolitanism, groups occupying a privileged position in a given field often find themselves in a better position to define their own attitudes as open, eclectic, and global, while defining the culture of disadvantaged groups with whom they are in conflict as regressive, closed, and local. Drawing on debates about bilingual education, the status of minority languages, global trade of cultural artefacts, and different conceptions of multiculturalism, we argue that in situations of unequal power, openness to diversity is not always equally desirable for all parties involved. From the point of view of minority cultures, in particular, indiscriminate openness to the culture of dominant or majority groups may not constitute a source of cultural enrichment.
From: Roger Friedland
UC, Santa Barbara
Thursday, Feb 6, 2003 (23:18)
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I am interested in institutional boundaries, the ways in which different kinds of discourses, practices, persons and objects systematically cohere. Institutional facts are symbolically constituted, and hence necessarily meaningful. Institutions are fields, whose logic is known by its effects, a logic immanent in its practices. Institutions have a particular gravity, as John Levi Martin might say (see Martin, ìWhat is Field Theory,î forthcoming, AJSósee http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/ct4/pages/Readings/Martin/Martin.pdf). One methodological implication of Martinís approach is that we might start thinking about institutional change as a problem of historical constellation, like the ways in which the particular properties of galaxies generate particular new stars, planets, solar systems, as sociological historians.
Institutions cannot guarantee their own boundaries. While institutional theorists can account for regularities of behavior within a field, the constitutive moment cannot be explained by the field. From within institutional theory, we cannot adequately explain the emergence of new institutions, only the attributes of their emergenceódense interactions, co-respectiveness, dominant coalitions, and then the fixing of institutional facts. Why, which ones, this way as opposed to thatóthis is much more difficult. Cosmologists have the big bang. We have teleological or contractarian fairy tales. Institutionalization stories are largely stories of successful adoption. Population ecology claims this explanatory space, but relies on an ontologically objective outside to explain institutions which contain a necessarily ontologically subjective element.
We also have no adequate theory about how the boundaries of institutions shift, the ways in which different activities, peoples, objects are claimed and/or captured by one field as opposed to another. The failure of two theoretical engines, each of which have been deployed to affirm or defend institutional boundaries, is illustrative. Neo-classical economics cannot account for the boundaries of the market. Studies of deregulation in the United States show that it cannot be accounted for by market failure. Secularization theorists have been stunned by the politicization of religion. (That was supposed to stay over there, damn.) Institutional limits are outside the limits of institutional theory. Here we are hobbled, I suspect, by the theoretical primacy of the social group. We have spent so much time on the cultural production of social groups but we know much less about the social and political productivity of culture. A societyís changing institutional architecture, and hence which discourses will dominate, is not just a question of group power.
Institutional boundaries fascinate me because they bring me back to the heterologous values spheres of which Max Weber spoke. (To be honest I like it because it is how I experience my life.) I do not want to follow the path of a theorist like Michel Foucault who sought to efface institutional specificity, who refused the state as the locus of political power, indeed a sovereign power. An institutionís cultural specificity is located in its values, or in institutional objects of value, which I have elsewhere called, clumsily and perhaps wrongly, ontological substances, http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/ct4/pages/Readings/Friedland/Friedland.pdf. These substances, or institutional objects, cannot be directly observed, but are assumed by the practices that organize a field, hence they are fetishized realities, the assumption of things out of practical relations, which are nonetheless necessary fictions for institutional fields to have a logic. Indeed one could argue that they are matters of faith. Institutions create the conditions of possibility of desirability of its institutional objects, but cannot assure the value/object/substance will in fact be desired. This is one thing that makes politics possible. The other, of course, are distributional struggles which economistic approaches to institutionalizationówith their emphasis on rent-seeking, etcóare much better at formalizing. These are essential, but I do not believe we can reduce explanatory accounts to distributional struggles, by becoming neo-Ricardians of culture.
From: Bethany Bryson bryson@virginia.edu
University of Virginia
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (15:01)
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Michele (Ollivier), the project you describe sounds fascinating, and the term "Conspicuous Openness" just cracks me up! It becomes part of my vocabulary today. Beside it, my "multicultural capital" just sounds boring and uncritical. Do you mind telling me (us) more? Is it a theoretical paper? Is it available? HOW did you discover these things?
Several people (in other rooms) have asked questions that are methodological in nature. How does the researcher know that there is a boundary? And, while it appears that there are lots of us out there doing empirical research on symbolic boundaries, I think very few of us are explicit about how we do it. One approach is to ask people to describe things or ideas and note key elements of the description. I've done that and liked the results. I've also just noted dislikes (symbolic exclusion, evidence of a boundary) and related those finding to other things posited to cause them. For me, then, the interesting twist that Chuck (Tilly) adds that boundaries can lurk: They can exist without being visible and so perhaps not being measurable. So it's cool to have a theory about how boundaries get activated, but how can know that de-activated boundaries exist? This one is really important to "interplay" as well. I'll put a cross-reference over there,
Roger (Friedland) just comes out with it and says: 'These substances, or institutional objects, cannot be directly observed.' But we're not off the hook on this because, Roger explains, that they are indirectly observable in the form of necessary assumptions. This, in my view, is one of those nice examples of how institutions (big cultures?) shape the stuff that we usually call culture (little culture/beliefs). But, my original post over in the Interplay room shows that I'm struggling with the idea of logic/logics. At the moment, I think I'd rather get around them than understand them.
I trust you'll all tell me how wrong I am!
From: Michele Ollivier ollivier@uottawa.ca
University of Ottawa
Tuesday, Feb 11, 2003 (13:34)
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Bethany, my statement is a summary of a short paper in English and a more elaborate one in French. It is a theoretical paper where we present what Popper would call a conjectureña bold hypothesis based on intuition and incomplete evidence! I see it as an exercise in connecting the dots. The dots are anecdotal evidence suggesting that there is something more to the omnivore/univore thesis than what we usually see.
What started me thinking about this is a series of newspaper articles about well-known cultural personalities in Quebec, in which the author systematically emphasized the eclectic nature of their tastes. It occurred to me that these articles were not only descriptive, but also prescriptive, in the sense that they invariably presented eclectic tastes in a positive way, as a defining attribute of cultural elites and thus as desirable. I also wondered whether sociological work on tastes could have a similar effect since omnivore tastes are presented as an attribute of dominant groups and as a source of status and power.
A few months later, I discovered striking similarities between work on omnivore tastes and political debates about cosmopolitanism. For example, in his work on postethnic identity, David Hollinger contrasts cosmopolitan multiculturalism, based on open, fluid, and elective identities, with pluralistic multiculturalism, based on the idea that ethnic groups form stable and permanent collectivities whose collective rights need to be protected and maintained over time. Hollinger argues that cosmopolitanism is preferable to pluralism since it leads to greater social integration and reduces the likelihood of ethnic conflict. Cosmopolitanism exemplifies an attitude of openness while pluralism is associated with what is unitary and closed. Connecting the dots between these examples lead to our first hypothesis. In many different areas of social life, we see the emergence of a new legitimate culture, which associates terms such as diverse, open, eclectic, dominant and desirable, and opposes them to what is defined as homogeneous, local, uneducated, regressive, dominated and undesirable.
The second part of our argument is that openness to diversity is not always inherently desirable. In his critique of Hollinger, for example, Will Kymlicka argues that when it is transposed in the international arena, Hollinger's position often favours powerful groups, who use these arguments to discredit the claims of national minorities and to justify the destruction of their political and cultural institutions. In debates over cosmopolitanism, competing groups attempt to define their own cultural production and attitudes as global, eclectic, and open while defining the culture of disadvantaged groups with whom they are in conflict as local, regressive, and closed. Another example comes from debates about bilingual education (French/English) in Canada. Some researchers argue that early training in a second language has additive effects when the first language is strongly established and supported by cultural institutions, but substractive effects in less favourable contexts, leading either to the disappearance of the first language or to imperfect knowledge of both. In the latter case, openness to diversity is not a source of cultural enrichment for linguistic minorities.
At the present time, these remain hypotheses. Whether they are fruitful or not remains to be seen. I think of several strategies to further develop them. One would be to do interviews with people about their tastes to see whether and how they use these criteria to draw boundaries. Another one would be to do more systematic analysis of official documents to trace the emergence of a new social discourse on diversity. Another one would be to conduct case studies of situations where the rhetoric of openness has been used as a tool in conflict between groups.
From: Bethany Bryson bryson@virginia.edu
University of Virginia
Wednesday, Feb 12, 2003 (13:04)
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Thanks Michele! You are generous to include all that detail. It sounds like one of those ideas that promoises to be more and more fun/rewarding as it develops. I hope you'll keep me up to date! -bethany
From: Nina Eliasoph eliasoph@ssc.wisc.edu
University of Wisconsin
Wednesday, Feb 12, 2003 (13:59)
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This is really interesting--your earlier work, combined with Walzer's
Spheres of Justice, Michele's work, and this book I' just read, De la
justification,by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot, really have helped me
think about institutional boundaries.
I'm puzzling through these ideas in my own fieldwork, and come up with
two big questions:
1. What do these "necessary fictions" do? Does it matter if nobody uses
the "regime of justification" (as Thevenot and Boltanski put it) in the setting
that we imagine as its home? --that is, if people speaking in a market
institution don't speak in terms of maximization of self-interest,, e.g. I
guess what we have is **collective representations** ABOUT speech
itself: we all "know" that we speak in terms of appreciation for unique,
irreplaceable individuality in the family, even if we never do it; in terms of
max of self-interest in the market even if we never do it...etc. So, Thevenot
and Boltanski study the "regimes of justification" as completely separable
from their institutional homes. I like that idea, but it makes it hard to
imagine studying the ways that institutions do tend to invoke one or
another "regime of justification."
2. I just read a really neat paper by an historian of rhetoric, G. Thomas
Goodnight, on the history of libraries in the US. He argues, rightly, I think,
that libraries have had at least two public functions all along: one is the
one we all think of--to preserve and distribute books. The other is to serve
the public, which has, since the 1910's at least, meant "latchkey kids" who
are rowdy and don't want to look at the books.
IN GENERAL, Goodnight's point is that in a pluralistic society, all public
institutions have (at least) two public voices, two functions, two
discourses. For the librarians, it's professionalism vs. serving the public.
But all institutions have more than one--that's what pluralism is. I think
he's absolutely right, but then it kind of messes up our idea of institutional
boundaries (but in really worthwhile ways!!). For one thing, it means that
the argument I'm making (in the "emergence" section, about the places
that I'm calling "institutionally ambiguous settings" isn't describing
anything new at all--all institutions in a pluralistic society are "ambiguous"
and basically dialogic.
Nina
From: Nina Eliasoph eliasoph@ssc.wisc.edu
University of Wisconsin
Wednesday, Feb 12, 2003 (14:18)
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Oops, my previous post was aimed at Roger Friedland's message, so if
mine doesn't seem to make sense within the discussion of Michele
Ollivier's work, it's because it doesn't belong there.
From: Changdeog Huh changd@msn.com
Douthern Illinois University at Carbondale
Friday, Feb 14, 2003 (12:07)
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Professor Tillyís analysis of identities and boundaries sounds fascinating and insightful to me. I don't doubt that his analysis will be a theoretical or analytical guideline for culturalists who attempt to research the area of identities and boundaries.
Regarding his four processes, however, Iíd like to ask a question for professor Tilly, especially related to the fourth process (day-toñday interaction). In my understanding, professor Tilly points out 4 processes of the ways we choose a corresponding identity among multiple identities to a specific social context. I strongly agree with the first 3 processes such as negotiation, transfer, and authoritative imposition. Those processes explain dynamic and complicated ways of forming and changing identities in our daily life. However, I am not clear as to the idea that the ìday-to-day interactionî is a process of activating/deactivating and switching for a specific identity. That's because I see it as, unlike the first 3 processes, day-toñday interaction is more like a social sphere itself in which boundaries are omnipresent, rather than a process to revitalize an identity. So my question is as follows: does it need to be specified what variable of day-to-day interaction affects forming and changing identities? Thanks a lot!
From: Roger Friedland roger.friedland@verizon.net
Departments of Religious Studies and Sociology, UCSB
Friday, Feb 14, 2003 (15:39)
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Yes, Nina, I worry about this same thing, this indeterminancy of the field, that people do and say all kinds of things in a field, some of which for me I read as the importation of other logics beyond their home domain, which I understand as one of the preconditions of freedom, of change, of agency. But it is a mess. Anyway, I want to try to respond.
An institutional substance is an organizing fact, an institutional fact, in a field, the content of the illusio. Property, popular sovereignty, romantic love, the divine, knowledge, beautyóeverything we care most about cannot be directly observed. They are all performed and presumed by practice. And sometimes, they are invoked in speech and writing, but not always. We believe in the substance and refuse in our daily lives to ever reduce it to the organizational structures, the social relations, the practices, which index, perform, produce and distribute it. The failure of marriage does not end the belief in the existence of love. The Nazi's defeat, the utter destruction of the regime, for example, did not end the belief in a German nation. The science wars, the retreat from value-objectivity, the questioning of the view from nowhere, has in no way diminished even the radical relativists continued presumption that they know what knowledge is. So in part I take the category of substance as something in which you cannot not believe in a particular field, even if that belief need not break into words, a cultural objectivity that need not signify subjectively, that subjective signification being the premise of all works that criticize what are understood as interpretive, non-explanatory. When I say not not believe, I mean that you believe it whether you say it or not, whether it is said to you or not, an intentionality beyond language. Locating language, and the multiplicity of languages, in institutional life is a critical task. The question is whether certain practices can be linguistically appropriated by other languages, and whether certain languages can be used to produce a multiplicity of practices. I donít think we have a clue, in part because we continue to focus on the group as the primary agent, and treat the social primarily as cultureís determining outside, continue to cleave to this distinction between cultural and social systems.
That one cannot directly observe something is not a criterion for exclusion for the human sciences. You cannot observe gravity, only its effects. One posits theoretical objects because, in doing so, they might be associated with observable regularities. A substance is immanent in a field, but it is a premise of a complex, interdependent set of practices, other institutional facts, locationally bounded contexts, and particular forms of objects. Substances always exceed the practices that presume them; they are never exhausted by particular practices in particular contexts. They are cultural spaces around which these are organized, a performative product. The substance is the unobservable telos of the field, which enables everything else to change and yet index the same substance. It is precisely the gap between substance and practice, substance and language, that makes for the possibility of change at an organizational, relational, practical level. So, I think that the category of institutional substance helps us understand the logic of institutionalization, why institutional fields can continue to cohere over time even though everything changes. Although the organization of practice has changed dramatically in America politics, we act as if this thing called democracy is a constant. Although the theology and ritual practice of the Holy See have undergone tremendous change, the same God, the self-same Christ, is still presumed to be present in the community of believers. Although corporations are now juridicial persons, workers can organize to defend their wages and working conditions, private property as a substance is presumed to perdure across these monumental legal and organizational changes. The question of course is the social productivity of different kinds of substances, organized in particular institutional congeries. Cultural elements likely have certain kinds of properties, which make some kinds of organizational/practical constellations possible/probable, and others impossible/improbable.
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