From interaction to institutions and back again: John Levi Martinʼs Social Structure

Alberto Cottica – University of Alicante

This paper is part of the INSITE project: http://www.insiteproject.org

John Levi Martinʼs book Social Structure – despite its authorʼs recurring disclaimers and understatements – sets out on an ambitious journey: deriving higher-level social structure from individual-level interaction. This is done, in principle, purely by formal analysis: non-interaction based rules that steer the behavior of social agents (like “culture”) should be an outcome of formal analysis, not an exogenous constraint of the model.

Throughout the book, Martin starts with relationships between individual agents that interact with each other and looks at what kind of social structure different kinds of interaction give rise to. For example, “is a friend of” turns out to be a transitive and symmetric relationship: if A is a friend of B and B is a friend of C, it makes sense that A be also a friend of C. Transitive and symmetric relationships give rise to cliques: if now C befriends a D, A, B and D are automatically expected to befriend each other as well.

A special attention is paid to the aptitude of each type of relationship to generate simple social structures that scale well. For Martin, simple means “generated by n relationships of the same type”; scaling means that molecular structures generated by the interaction of only two or three individuals can be aggregated to give rise to stable structures involving a high number of individuals. It turns out that only two relationships, patronage (hierarchical, antitransitive) and command (hierarchical, transitive) fill the bill.

At this level, the analysis can and does stay close to rigorous formality, that makes use of graph theory as its main mathematical tool. While simple structure does take the reader some way in underpinning the study of real-life social phenomena (the discussion of the evolution of feudal patronage structures and, from them, of modern armies is probably the most entertaining example in the book), for most such phenomena the researcher is forced to expand his arsenal in two directions. Both are only briefly examined in the book.

The first one is compound structures, that result from combining simple structures of two or more different kinds: for example, a hierarchy of cliques. Individuals interact in a certain way, and from their interaction simple structures emerge. These simple structure, then, interact with each other according to rules that differ from those governing the lower-level individual interaction.

The second one occurs from individuals that, after interacting with each other and having seen their interaction give rise to some simple structure, come up with some conceptualization of the relationship and redeploy it, sometimes creatively. For example, a feudal vassal might suddenly realize that his lord is “like a father” to him. At this point, he might realize that, if having a powerful figure dispensing protection is good, having two is better; and he might unmoor the rules of behavior governing that particular relationship from it, using them to attempt to establish new ones with third parties. These free-floating rules of behavior is what Martin calls institutions. This marks a stark difference: in simple structure, roles such as patron or client result from the interaction patterns (recall crystallized interaction patterns is precisely what Martin calls structure), in institutions, interaction patterns result from an intersubjective understanding of roles. In the authorʼs words:

“An institution tells us “what to do” because we know that types of people we are interacting with (as opposed to focusing on the particularity of well-known others).”

With this move, Martin points us to a positive feedback dynamics. Interaction crystallizes into structure; structure undergoes subjectivation; subjectivation, mediated by culture, gives rise to institutions; institutions allow new interactions and so on. The model is fascinating for elegance and generality. However, it has an operational disadvantage: we can expect any reasonably sophisticated society to have long bootstrapped its own constellation of institutions regulating interactions – and institutions are difficult to formalize and compare across time and place. What this means is that the traces of such a dynamics can, in most cases, be only looked for in history; in most present-day societies, interactions are so enmeshed into institutions that structural analysis becomes pointless.

There may, however, be an important exception: the toy societies of online communities. Those of us who are familiar with the bootstrapping of a new online community (be it a forum for programmers in a certain software language or a Facebook group) will have certainly noticed the initial “feeling around” of users trying to figure out an appropriate way to behave in a relatively information-poor environment. In these cases, one might actually see structure emerge from repeated interaction; whatʼs more, online environments provide cheap and comprehensive monitoring facilities since every interaction is encoded into a database, and this makes formal analysis through graph theory empirically viable. Martinʼs book could be a useful tool for the scholar of online communities, and the latter are natural candidates as testing grounds for his positive feedback dynamics.