At 11:24 AM 5/8/97 -0700, Jim Devine wrote: >Awhile back, wojtek sokolowski said that it is better >> to analyse social >institutions (e.g. how the production is being organised in the developing >countries) rather than watching trends in economic aggregates which, >paraphrasin Plato, are but shadows cast on the wall of a cave populated by >economists.<< > >Sure, we're in a cave, unable to perceive exactly what's going on. But we >have no direct knowledge of many if not most of the phenomena we try to >understand (including the organization of production). We need all the help >from studies of the shadows we can get. And if our theory (or what's really >going on) predicts different shadows than actually occur? Not that I want to push that metaphor too far, but... For Plato, the solution of the cave condition was turning to the "light" of ideas and ways from the "darkness" of the empirical data. Putting Plato back on his feet, I'd suggest moving away from the ideas back to empirical reality. Not long ago I had a brief exchange with an economist (of the conventional variety) who quite disparagingly spoke of causal models used in social sciences. He also dismissed the entire European school of political and historical economics as being to preoccupied with empircal contingencies. He favoured "prediction" which, upon my questioning, turned out to be a priori policy engineering: what we need to do to get y results. The irony of that position was that conventional economics is not known for its predictive power, to say the least. But it is also my impression that even among empirically oriented historical economist too much emphasis is put on the abstractions which allows building grand theoretical schemes (Mike Perelman nicely described it as the "law of inflated claims") at the expense of what in social sciences is known as medium range theory or even a thick description. These refer to empirical context specific models of limited generalizability -- such as Alfred Chandler's study of the emergence of corporate capitalism in the US under the provocative title "The Visible Hand," Beth Mintz and Michael Schwartz's studies of interlocking directorates and corporate elites, or even anthroplogy of corporate life such as now classic "Men and Women of the Corporation" by Rosabeth Kanter, or "Moral Mazes" by Robert Jackall. Being heavily depenedent on empirical material gathered through direct observation -- rather tha studying numbers that nowadays pass for "facts" -- these studies tell us more about business trends, as practised by real human agents, than we can possibly get from statistical abstractions. In my view, focus on the behaviour of real human agents endowed with material resources can be more fruitful than studying accounting abstractions, or even aggregates like classes or systems of production. In my mind, a system of production is but a shorthand for a range of behaviours, not a determinant of behaviour. Hence my "feudalism" metaphor -- pointing to the fact that both pre-modern landlords and post-modern corporate manegers do (or may) behave in more or less same way under more or less similar circumstances -- regardless of what mode of production we classify them into. But that touches an ancient and hitherto unsolved philosophical controversy between realism and nominalism, where I decidedly take the nominalist side. regards, wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233 ****** REDUCE MENTAL POLLUTION - LOBOTOMIZE PUNDITS! ****** +----------------------------------------------------------+ |There is no such thing as society, only the individuals | |who constitute it. -Margaret Thatcher | | | | | |There is no such thing as government or corporations,| |only the individuals who lust for power and money.| | -no apologies to Margaret Thatcher | +----------------------------------------------------------+ *********DROGI KURWA BUDUJA, A NIE MA DOKAD ISC************
