This is social science: A ‘patterned activity’ oriented to attaining objective knowledge of human society

Patterned activities as compared to cultural systems

Other advantages of the patterned activities concept become salient through comparison with Geertz’s cultural systems framework. Seeking to expand the conceptual reach of the social sciences, Geertz trains his focus on what he calls the cultural dimension of human activity (Geertz, 2003: 89, 144–145). The ‘cultural dimension’ is the complement of ‘social system’ and ‘personality structure’ in a Parsonian approach to the study of human society. ‘Culture’, Geertz writes, ‘denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life’ (2003: 89). At the elementary level, Geertz’s view permits delineation of the relevant symbolic or meaning-laden features of a given social context. The contribution of his approach is that it enables the rigorous definition of the symbolic structure of an isolated human social phenomenon, namely by controlling for bias and prejudgment as to what the phenomenon is beforehand (2003: 194).

Symbolic forms and their utilization – all of those public, external, phenomena that are amenable to objective analysis – are, Geertz argues, theoretically abstractable from the events that give them reality (2003: 91). His framework draws attention to the manner in which the symbols (he alternately calls these ‘vehicles for conceptions’) and the practices and events in which they are embodied comprise a system – a cultural system – and mutually reinforce or ‘borrow authority’ (2003: 90) from one another. ³ Take into account, for illustration, Geertz’s important claim relating to the use of the cultural system framework in the anthropology of religion:

The anthropological study of religion is … a two-stage operation; first, an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols which make up the religion proper, and, second, the relating of these systems to social-structural and psychological processes.

For a given event, the observer must account for ‘the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms’ (2003: 91); this raw material thus becomes the set in which systems of meanings may be traced. Once these systems have been delineated, one proceeds to the second step – relating them to social-structural and psychological processes; examples of this given by Geertz include relating the role of ancestor worship to the regulation of political succession, or relating the role of initiation rites in propelling personality maturation. Emphatically, Geertz notes that it is the activity named in the second step that, at the time of his writing, was the subject of so much social anthropological work in religion (2003: 125); comparatively speaking, this is the less problematic aspect of the question for Geertz because it is the one least in need of attention. The payoff of the cultural system approach for Geertz is clear: a more rigorous conceptual apparatus capable of broadening our understanding of activities and patterned behavior makes likely progress in theory-formation (mainly as a result of the discipline it imposes on the use of concepts), and it enables a more profound understanding of the web of relationships peculiar to every specific case of symbolic activity insofar as the various symbolic patterns in a given case can be analytically grasped, permitting conceptual refinement and explanation. ⁴

On the surface, the concept of a patterned activity being advanced in this article bears resemblance to Geertz’s framework of a ‘cultural system’, particularly as it relates to determining the organizing principles of a set of patterned behavior and helping to account for the complex of which such behavior is part and parcel. The concept of a patterned activity developed here, however, differs from Geertz’s in a very important way: in accounting for the characteristic or defining goal (that is, the appetite, desire, or need being satisfied) of a given set of activities, the framework of a patterned activity preserves the centrality of the question of the motive and causal forces in human action. The framework of a patterned activity, in this way, accounts for aspects of the phenomena left unaddressed by Geertz’s contribution. ⁵ The attention paid here to Geertz’s thought is meant to help circumvent misinterpretation of the framework of a patterned activity and to draw attention to the fact that the emphasis on the aims of human action in the patterned activity framework enables symmetry between the observed phenomena and the conceptual tools used to make sense of them, and, in this way, the framework of a patterned activity surpasses Geertz’s contribution.

Science and its presuppositions

With the concept of a patterned activity in mind, let us pose the question: ‘What is the organizing principle by which science coheres?’ One of the most influential sociological responses comes from Merton. As early as 1942, Merton specified the standard variety of referents of the term ‘science’. He writes:

Science is a deceptively inclusive word which refers to a variety of distinct though interrelated terms. It is commonly used to denote (1) a set of characteristic methods by means of which knowledge is certified; (2) a stock of accumulated knowledge stemming from the application of these methods; (3) a set of cultural values and mores governing the activities termed scientific; or (4) any combination of the foregoing.

The characteristic set of methods Merton mentions first is a central subject of discussion for the tradition of the philosophy of science, and, as it regards the stock of accumulated knowledge stemming from the application of these methods, this refers to the ideal set of that to which we may refer as the content of science. Analysis of the facet of science concerning the set of values and mores governing activities termed scientific makes manifest, Merton argues (1973b [1938], 1973c [1942]), the following institutional imperatives: universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. In Merton’s view, these four features characterize the ethos of modern science; notably, they also inform our understanding of the methods and content, both of which are logically secondary. In a paper of 1957, Merton added the claim that recognition is the central reward mechanism in scientific activity.

The analytical purchase of Merton’s approach is grounded in his treatment of science as an interconnected and manifold set of phenomena realized by human actors. His inventory, however, leaves a major lacuna: the identification of science’s organizing principles. Lacking an account of the motive force behind scientific activity, Merton overlooks an important facet of the process rendering certain forms of knowledge worthy of pursuit for or worth being known to the actors who create scientific reality; for this reason, there is no organizing principle which provides coherence to the activity and helps explain why certain methods are viewed as legitimate, what the significance of the products is, or why certain typical values and mores – the norms of science – come to be adopted. Merton’s claim that recognition is the central reward mechanism in scientific activity, although it accounts for a force which may sustain the activity of science once it is already underway, leaves unanswered the questions as to why certain fields are carved out and rendered legitimate and why there has been enduring emphasis on getting the scientific method ‘right’. Barry Barnes’ argument (2007) demonstrates a suggestive linkage between Merton’s thought and the concept of status groups developed by Weber that provides a route to answering these questions, but for this to work the end or goal of science must be taken to be prior (as it would be for Weber) to the norms. Speaking metaphorically, norms are the channels through which human action flows in Merton’s account, but, in my account, it is the goal or aim of science that provides the motive force behind the carving out of the channels in the first place. It may be the case that Merton’s desire for originality, noted in Stephen Turner’s recent work (2007: 169), led him to under-specify the Weberian basis of his thought in this regard, which in my view comes at the expense of emphasizing what is prior. Merton’s specification of the norms of science does constitute an analytically potent step toward understanding science, but it is the understanding of the goal or aim accorded value (that is, the ‘maxim’ determined in the act of analysis or the guiding ‘internal presuppositions’, as discussed above) that helps to make sense of these norms and, therefore, of the significance of science’s methods and content: that is to say that values, mores, methods, and content are secondary phenomena from the standpoint being advanced here and thus stand in need of explanation. By emphasizing the significance of the goal or aim accorded value from which norms spring (and therefore the primacy of the goal or aim), viewing science as a patterned activity suggests a new take on the fundamental problem in the social sciences concerning, in Barnes’ formulation, ‘just how norms and their putative specific applications are connected’ (2007: 181). The emphasis on norms is misplaced; norms themselves are the putative rules for action, and these rules have fundamental organizing principles that must be discovered in order to be understood. A general question – one which I will not examine here – that merits attention in the social sciences is what explains the scope of a norm in actual practice and to what extent this scope differs across domains of patterned activity. In any case, the patterned activities view thus seeks to fill in the gaps left by Merton and to illuminate the significance of his claims.

A comment on Parsons

The explicit background of Geertz’s and Merton’s respective contributions is the same as the implicit background of the bulk of post-World War II theory: the legacy of Parsons. From the perspective of the patterned activities standpoint, the central limitation of Parsons’ approach – a limitation that affects both Geertz and Merton – is that his specification of the cultural dimension of concrete action focuses on symbol systems of value orientation (that is, on patterns of evaluative orientation seen as an actor’s way of orienting to his or her own orientations – whether these orientations are of the cognitive, affective, or evaluative types; Parsons and Shils 1951: 161–164) without adequate regard for the postulated underlying motive (that is, goals or aims) driving individual and inter-individual systems of value orientations. ⁶ In other words, Parsons focuses on evaluative symbols or ‘norms’ at the expense of goals or aims. In his posthumously published paper on institutions (originally submitted for publication in 1934 to the Journal of Social Philosophy), Parsons recognizes that what I refer to as goals or aims (his term is ‘ultimate value attitudes’) underlie what he calls ‘the system of common or ultimate ends’ (1990: 324). The Weberian linage of this view is obvious. Unfortunately, Parsons never systematically developed this idea, and his usage of Weber’s thought in this regard, although acknowledged, was never carefully spelled out or shown in what way it fell short of or surpassed his own view. Granted, Parsons’ intention to theorize institutions led to a focus on normative rules (which he saw as the institutional element or defining characteristic) and the systems of which they are a part. His view of institutions, by focusing on the normative rules, differs from the Weberian view of ‘orders’ that places the emphasis on the goals or aims.

The patterned activity view focuses on the goals or aims so as to isolate and explain the motive force driving patterns of action. The systems of normative rules that comprise institutions can be seen, of course, as constraining the pursuit of goals or aims (as Merton clearly saw), and I agree with Parsons (Parsons and Shils, 1951: 331) that ‘the institutional element constitutes a causal factor in its own right’ in explaining concrete instances of action. Normative rules, however, are representations of something more basic, and as the discussions of Durkheim and Weber later in this article illustrate, this more basic something is the level of analysis that ties together subjective expression of aims (as concrete ends), norms, and patterns of relation within communities. As Alexander argues (1987: 302–327), Geertz himself appreciated the importance of this lacuna in Parsons’ view, although the resolution of the problem was ultimately unsuccessful. Normative rules are in the service of goals or aims whose characteristic qualities are integral both to the clear understanding of the significance of any given value system and to defining the nature or underlying form of the set of patterned relations among various systems.

Patterned activities being concerned with the presuppositions internal to the phenomena in question are not to be confused with ‘institutions’, which (whatever the differences are among social science’s several approaches to institutions) take a broader view (for example, Abrutyn, 2009; Gerth and Mills, 1954: 370; Parsons, 1990) and account also for dynamics among institutions and ‘external presuppositions’ such as peer recognition (Merton, 1973a [1957]). ⁷ As the patterned activities view suggests, I take the goal or aim to underlie Parsons’ norms – and it is the definition of this more basic element that would legitimate his prolegomenon to a theory of institutions.

Durkheim

Durkheim’s aims for his science are spelled out in his earliest major work, De la division du travail social: ‘This book is before all else an effort to treat the facts of moral life according to the methods of the positive sciences’ (1930 [1893]: xxxvii). ⁹ In Chapter 1 of Les règles de la méthode sociologique, he specified social facts as sociology’s relevant order of facts: social facts ‘present very special characteristics: they consist in manners of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individual, and that are endowed with a power of coercion in virtue of which they impose themselves on him’ (1937 [1895]: 5). ¹⁰ In the preface to the second edition of the same work, he offered his definition of sociology: ‘… the science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning’ (1937 [1895]: xxii). ¹¹ To be clear, Durkheim’s concept of institutions, ‘all the beliefs and all the modes of behavior instituted by the collectivity’ (1937 [1895]: xxii), ¹² composes both social facts (‘manners of acting, thinking, and feeling’) and the theoretical entities based on analyses of these forms, or collective representations. These elementary albeit telling statements reveal the goal or aim accorded value when Durkheim’s endeavor is seen as a patterned activity: to solve problems relating to a specific body of phenomena using the scientific method. Approaching Durkheim’s work from the perspective of a patterned activity exemplifies Warren Schmaus’ contention (1994: 14–16, 18, 236; 2004) that Durkheim’s explanatory goals and method deserve to be the object of focus. The foremost part of Durkheim’s endeavor is to demonstrate the soundness of his aims – that is, that institutions can be studied systematically as objective reality – and this is perhaps his signal contribution.

Throughout his oeuvre Durkheim sought complementarity between his claims (that is, sociological claims at both the basic and theoretical levels must be completed by or be shown to agree with their objects), and he argued that his central subject matter comprises phenomena that are ‘recognizable by certain distinctive characteristics; it should thus be possible to observe, describe, and classify them and to seek out the laws that explain them’ (1930 [1893]: xxxvii). ¹³ The groundwork for Durkheim’s sociology – the central focus here – entailed delineating his central subject matter at the basic descriptive level and, concomitantly, at the theoretical level. To wit: the big idea in Durkheim’s discussions of his central subject matter is a theoretical entity – collective representations – that lends coherence to the social facts and the realized instances of behavior that ground this entity (Malczewski, 2013). Durkheim’s main theoretical contention is that collective representations explain the realized instances of acting, thinking, and feeling for which individual actors are proximately responsible. Schmaus argues:

… it is the manner or type of action and not the action itself that exists in collective representations for Durkheim. To classify actions as belonging to a certain type is of course to ascribe a certain meaning to them. … When he said that manners of acting exist in collective representations he was trying to say that what makes the motion a kind of action is its shared meaning and not just the meaning that it may have for an individual.

I maintain alongside Schmaus (1994: 3–20) that there is continuity across Durkheim’s thinking on this matter. From Durkheim’s standpoint, the systematic study of social facts opens a vista to collective representations, the putative underlying reality of central importance, which in turn sheds light on the nature of particular types of social facts; hence when Durkheim refers to his sociology as the science of institutions we are to understand the term ‘institutions’ as encompassing both defined social facts as well as the theoretical entities – generally termed collective representations – that are observed in the study of such facts and which help to explain them (Durkheim, 1960 [1912], 1970 [1914], 1955). For clarity, an analogy can be made concerning the relationship between organisms and life: the study of organisms opens a vista to the processes of life (the putative underlying reality of central importance), which in turn sheds light on the nature of particular organisms; life, in this way, is a theoretical entity observed in the study of organisms that helps to explain them – and it is life that is the central subject matter of biology (Mayr, 1998).

Social facts as defined by Durkheim compose a set made up of manners of acting, thinking, and feeling – that is, types of rule-based behaviors – that are essentially based on instances of meaningful or symbolically oriented behavior: this is explicitly obvious in Durkheim’s cases of behaviors postulated as being oriented to a principle symbolized by a totem (1960 [1912]), or in his analyses of legal codes that open to claims regarding theoretical entities such as social solidarity or anomie (2004 [1897]), or in his illustration of the genesis of the French esprit rooted in analyses of meaningful orientations (1977 [1938], 2002 [1898]), or even in the passionate reactions by society to those who have violated rules of conduct which provides a view on punishment understood from the aspects of its function to strengthen the collective consciousness (1930 [1893]). In founding his descriptive and theoretical claims on this set of phenomena, Durkheim’s theories rise from a real basis. ¹⁴ Schmaus has argued with exquisite care as well as with remarkable sensitivity to Durkheim’s thought and its broader intellectual contexts that Durkheim’s firmly hypothetico-deductive approach ‘links the theoretical with the empirical and the meanings of social facts with their explanations’ (1994: 4; also see Durkheim, 1899 [1897–1898]; 1902: i–xxxvi; 1978a [1888]; Schmaus, 2004) and that Durkheim ‘treated definitions like empirical hypotheses, comparing them with regard to their empirical scope’ (1994: 194). Schmaus notes that Durkheim’s theoretical terms for unobservable entities ‘have actual referents for Durkheim’ (1994: 43; also see Schmaus, 1994: 62–68 regarding the differentia of and views on Durkheim’s realism). Ken Morrison avers that Durkheim wanted to show in a realist sense how ‘obligations and practices can be considered to carry capacities that override personal dispositions and discretions’ (2001: 99). Although Durkheim defined his relevant phenomena in accordance with the nature of the problems that he set for himself, postulated theoretical entities in order to gain explanatory leverage, and recognized the artificial, constructed nature of scientific discovery, it is evident that his view is both constructivist and realist without contradiction. Durkheim writes: ‘… there is nothing in reality that one is justified in considering as fundamentally beyond the scope of human reason’ (2002b [1903]: 4; also see Alpert, 1939: 151–163). On this note, Schmaus argues that Durkheim’s lesson for us is that the fact that science is a social construction has no antirealist, metaphysical consequences (1994: 68).

Emphatically, the concept of social facts lends form to more basic – elemental – empirical instances of meaningful behavior: that is to say that social facts are defined by Durkheim in the process of scientific discovery, and his searchlight allows us to see certain phenomena – elementally meaningful or symbolically oriented behavior – in a special way. Underlying social facts, however, is always simpler stuff – realized individual instances of meaningful behavior. From the perspective of Durkheim’s driving questions, it may appear controversial to draw attention to the as if ‘raw’ or ‘actual’ meaningful behaviors that complement the descriptive statements concerning either social facts or postulated theoretical entities and processes such as collective representations (in general) or social solidarity or anomie (in particular) – not least because it might appear to suggest inductivism. It is undeniable, however, that Durkheim’s realism as well as the order of facts he deliberately drew from to test his hypotheses support the argument that the elemental facts are meaningful behaviors realized by individuals, ‘society’s only active elements’ (1937 [1895]: xvi fn. 1); ¹⁵ meaningful behaviors, of course, can be individuated only by recourse to their shared meanings, a point Schmaus drives home (1994: 4). Depending on the problems one poses, from this view one may emphasize within Durkheim’s central subject matter either the general composite set of reality (that is, institutions), or the explanatory theoretical reality (that is, collective representations), or the defined set of empirical reality (that is, social facts), or the elemental empirical reality (that is, meaningful or symbolically oriented behavior) illuminated by our searchlight. By drawing attention to the fact that meaningful behaviors are realized by individuals, I do not mean to suggest that an individual actor’s intentions are central for Durkheim, for this would be a misreading at odds with his view; instead I wish to emphasize that Durkheim’s theoretical claims direct our attention to a basic defined set of empirical phenomena that provides a place for hypothesis-driven investigation of the relevant theoretical processes and entities sharing the same empirical ground.

In its generality, Durkheim’s central subject matter is meaningful (symbolically oriented) behavior and theoretical entities based on it. In the creation of his ‘social’ science, Durkheim delineated a central subject matter composing meaning-laden facts opening out to a grand theoretical entity he called ‘society’, an entity whose facets could be examined according to what was seen to be worth being known from his standpoint and without fracturing the totality. As Marcel Mauss recognized, Durkheim specified both a method and a subject matter for sociology (Mauss, 1928: v; quoted in Schmaus, 1994: 3); Morrison put it more recently that in Durkheim’s first three major works ‘the autonomy of its own domain of treatment … its own rationality and its own way of doing things’ was inaugurated for sociology (2001: 98). In short, Durkheim gave birth to a ‘social’ scientific approach with its own organizing principles and a clearly demarcated central subject matter.

Weber

Weber offered a perspective similar to Durkheim’s in two important respects: one, Weber explicitly provided a guide to his aims and goals; two, he circumscribed his central subject matter in his methodological writings and exemplified his approach in his studies. In ‘Basic Sociological Terms’, Weber writes that sociology is ‘a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences’; he adds, ‘We shall speak of “action” insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behavior. …Action is “social” insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course’ (1978: 4). The view articulated here is consistent with the one that he published in ‘Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology’ in 1913, in which he writes, the ‘individual [as the agent of meaningful behavior] and his action are treated as the most basic unit or “atom”’ (Weber, 1981 [1913]: 158; also see Gerth and Mills, 1958: 55; Graber, 1981; Oakes, 1998; Whimster, 2007: 251–252; and Weber’s letter to Robert Liefmann of 9 March 1920, quoted in Whimster, 2007: 263). The characteristic qualities of the patterned activity defined by Weber as sociology – that is, the centrality of the problem of meaningful behavior and the belief in attaining objective knowledge of it – demarcate this activity from all other activities and practices.

The central subject matter Weber specifies composes two types of facts: ‘action’ and ‘social action’. The first type of facts (which Weber terms action) is elemental or basic – they are the behaviors to which subjective meanings are attached realized by individuals. The focus of Weber’s sociology is on the set of phenomena that bear an additional, second, distinguishing characteristic: subjectively meaningful behavior must take account of or be ‘related to’ (Whimster, 2004: 312) behavior of others and be oriented in its course. Social action thus composes the basic fixed empirical forms of meaningful behavior as well as the analytical types based on the analyses of the former. The relevant set of phenomena for Weber’s sociology is social action. Throughout Weber’s studies, types of social action shed light on the patterns of action he is examining and lend coherence to the historical phenomena that comprise the individual cases he provides as evidence. ‘Typical modes of action’ or ‘courses of action that are repeated’ (Weber, 1978: 29) are simple theoretical entities built from the basic units of subjectively meaningful behavior of several actors.

Most importantly, the two sets of facts that Weber’s definition of social action composes undergird his grandest set of claims – those concerning rationalization. Rationalization, a theoretical entity capturing an essential human social process, is the big idea in Weber’s thought. Weber argues:

By [rationalization] very different things may be understood. …There is, for example, rationalization of mystical contemplation, that is of an attitude which, viewed from other departments of life, is especially irrational, just as much as there are rationalizations of economic life, of technique, of scientific research, of military training, of law and administration. Furthermore, each one of these fields may be rationalized in terms of very different ultimate ends, and what is rational from one point of view may well be irrational from another. Hence rationalizations of the most varied character have existed in various departments of life and in all areas of culture. To characterize their differences from the viewpoint of cultural history it is necessary to know what departments are rationalized and in what direction.

Rationalization refers to the process of the meaningful construction of reality and the cognitive orientation to and ordering of it (also see Greenfeld and Malczewski, 2010). Liah Greenfeld argues that the general meaning of rationalization manifest in Weber’s thought is

… that of articulation and organization, primarily cognitive, of an area of experience. … [Rationalization] refers to the fundamental process of the ordering of reality, or its cultural, i.e., symbolic, i.e., mental construction … it goes on all the time, in every society, and in all spheres of life.

The process of rationalization is a theoretical entity empirically established on the foundation of patterns manifest in social action – the set of phenomena on which Weber shines his searchlight. Weber’s claims regarding rationalization are theoretical claims explaining what he argues is of significance in the basic empirical data. His main insight for social theory is that the process of rationalization precedes and conditions the realm of historical or individual behavior (see Eastwood, 2005; Roth, 1978: xxxviii, xxxix; Weber, 1978: 280, 287, 293–294, 298).

To repeat, the starting point for Weber is social action; he avers, however, that the underlying phenomena can be studied from other perspectives, writing that history concerns important individual human events and ‘the causal analysis and explanation of individual actions, structures, and personalities possessing cultural significance’ (1978: 19, 29). By contrast, sociology concerns generalizations of processes of social action, which offers concepts that shed light on and explain historically important phenomena (1978: 19–20). In his well-known view, ‘It is not the “actual” interconnections of “things” but the conceptual interconnections of problems which define the scope of the various sciences’ (2011a [1904]: 68, emphasis in original). Rob Beamish notes that Weber’s sociology moves ‘from the specific to the more general and, ultimately, to broadly inclusive analyses of social behavior’ (2010: 175; also see Weber, 2011b [1906]). In this way, history and sociology shed light on the same elemental or basic phenomena, although their respective problems demand different – although not necessarily incompatible or ontologically contradictory – types of explanation. Both individual and patterned group phenomena have a place in Weber’s social science.

In training his focus on social action in full recognition of the significance of the more general set of meaningful (symbolically oriented) behavior from which it is selected (that is, action), Weber elevated the problem of the interconnectedness of meaningful behavior, and, in this way, his central theoretical entity, the process of rationalization, does not fracture reality in seeking to answer the problems he posed. Weber deliberately emphasizes the constructed nature of his concepts: he exhorts us to remember that his works ‘ask’ to be surpassed (1958a [1917]: 138) – Durkheim likewise held that ‘everything leads us to think that scientific progress will never end’ (2002b [1903]: 4) – and the ‘value-relevance’ of a given question does not extend to all, yet Weber’s work embodies a central concern for real basic empirical phenomena that are clearly demarcated. Like Durkheim’s, Weber’s view is both constructivist and realist without contradiction.