What is Real and What is Realism in Sociology?

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 29:40021–8308

What is Real and what is Realism in Sociology?

ROY NASH

INTRODUCTION

The influence of realism on sociology theory and practice has become increasinglyapparent. Bhaskar (1979), Sayer (1979), Keat and Urry (1982), Outhwaite (1987)have all contributed to the development of a ‘critical realism’ directly influencedby a marxian materialism. Archer (1995) has presented what seems remarkablylike a modernised version of Durkheim’s realist social morphology and it maybe in that context that the realist element of Bourdieu’s (1993) epistemology hasbecome more noticeable. At the same time, social theorists have become moreaware of the mainstream realist philosophical tradition represented by, amongothers, Smart (1963), Armstrong (1968) and Bunge (1996). It is probably Harre(1983), a neo-Aristotelian in the philosophy of science and a social psychologist,who had done as much as anyone to introduce realism to the attention ofcontemporary social theorists. If the purpose of science is to explain what theworld is like, then one is already committed to a realist ontology: there is nopoint in trying to explain an unreal world, and if the statements of our theoriesdo not refer to things that exist they might just as well be about anything – ornothing. It is for such reasons that Bunge (1996: 137), one of the most trenchantmaterialist philosophers, makes explanation dependent on ontology: ‘[t]o explaina thing ... is to show how it works, and to explain a fact is to show how it cameto be.’ Even in the natural sciences, however, where the existence of materialentities might seem uncontested, realism is not taken-for-granted, least of all byphilosophers. Yet what is real in sociology, what entities, if any, exist, is noteasily settled.

If it is a science then sociology must be about real things and real thingsought to be capable of demonstration: but what sort of reality do the severalentities have that contemporary realists recognise as possessing emergent proper-ties with the capacity to cause social events – including social relations, socialorganisations, human dispositions (habitus), social dispositions, social powers, andso on – and how can their existence (or non-existence) be demonstrated? Thispaper will argue, after Bunge (1996), that not all of these entities should beregarded as useful to realist explanations of social events, and for a moderate

© The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers 108 CowleyRoad, Oxford, OX4 1JF UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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scientific realism in which social organisations are created by social relationsbetween people (maintained by human dispositions) in which those relationshipsand organisations should be recognised as entities, with properties appropriateto their constitution. It rejects explanations of social events in terms of the‘powers’ and ‘dispositions’ of social entities, except in so far as they can be‘deconstructed’ or expanded into accounts that specify the organised practices(which may rest on human dispositions) that have brought them about. In theend, it is explanation that is important, and theoretical arguments are useful in asmuch as they contribute to the construction of sensible accounts in terms ofsocial mechanisms. The debate between realism and anti-realism is mostunambiguous in the natural sciences, and to introduce the discussion at thatpoint will not be a digression. It is about a little more than hot air.

Why do helium balloons deflate much more quickly than air-filled balloons?This question turned up in New Scientist’s Last Word section where readers’queries are answered by others with specialist knowledge of the area. GavinWhittaker (1998) explains the phenomenon in terms of the properties of helium:helium gas consists of atoms which are much smaller than the molecules ofnitrogen and oxygen that largely make up air and so pass more readily throughthe membrane of a balloon. There are other processes going on, but this accountis sufficient, and the statements can be regarded as true because the things andprocesses they refer to are in fact the case. Scientific realism takes the term‘helium atoms’ as a reference to (real) material entities that have the propertiesascribed to them (a diameter of 0.1 nanometres, and so on), and argues thatwhen balloons are filled with helium they rise into the air as a result of thenatural necessity of helium as the substance it is. This is not the view of anti-realists, among whom are included Doyle and Harris (1986: 37), who have theirown ideas about helium:

a statement apparently as innocently observational as ‘This balloon is full of helium’ is alreadyvery far from a completely untheorized perception. No one has ever seen helium. It is anessentially theoretical concept which derives its meaning from an atomistic view of the world.

Scientific realists emphatically reject such arguments and most, certainly Bunge(1983), insist that a material world exists, that human beings have developedthe capacity to gain an accurate knowledge of its nature, and have succeededin doing so across a broadening range of natural phenomena. A realist ontologyis attractive to those with a common-sense frame of mind, and it is not surprisingthat realist approaches have gained adherents in social science. But as Harre(1997) points out, although the questions, ‘Are there mental states?’ and ‘Arethere techtonic plates?’ (and he could have added ‘nation-states’) might soundalike, they are not settled in the same way. The test of reality is demonstration

and, as the comments by Doyle and Harris suggest, people have differentstandards as to what they will accept as real even when the discussion is about

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material entities. The grounds for the reality of, let us say with Smart (1963:36), objects in the series, ‘stars, planets, mountains, houses, tables, grains ofwood, microscopic crystals, microbes’, are, of course, not the same as those thatground the reality of social groups. The existence of such material entities canbe demonstrated by acts of ostension, such as pointing, and this is so even inthe case of entities too small, or too far away, to detect without instruments. Tobe ‘demonstrated’ means to be pointed out in such a way that the evidence canonly be rejected (not refuted) by refusal to take notice, in exactly the way thatcertain of Galileo’s critics refused to look through his telescope. Realists believethat the reality of social organisations, such as families, firms and universities, isdemonstrated by the fact that we live and work in them. But the whole processof demonstration is quite different in the natural and social sciences becausephysical and social reality are clearly not the same. A social system is constitutedby the actions of people, not by material elements, and has no substantial reality,and that is why there are those who do not accept that social organisations existas real entities with properties distinct to their constitution.

Harre, for example, prefers to think of social entities as theoretical concepts,what he calls icons, to be judged as useful or not depending on their value insubstantive explanatory theories. In this way, while able to ‘presume that theontological status of nuclear families, and the like is indubitable’ maintains that‘the most convincing exegesis of the uses of the word ‘‘France’’ is as a taxonomicterm’ (Harre, 1981: 144 and 149). It is questionable whether an ontology thatmaintains, as this seems to, that a nuclear family is a real thing but a nationstate is not, should be accepted as realist at all. But although it seems asurprisingly sceptical position to adopt, as Gilbert (1992: 433) puts it, explicableonly ‘if one has an ontology more or less restricted to stones’, many socialtheorists are reluctant to accept the real existence of social entities, families,firms, and nation states. Bentham (1962) regarded society as a ‘fictitious body’,and Elster (1989: 248), a contemporary individualist in this tradition, states flatlythat ‘[t]here are no societies, only individuals who interact with each other’.Nevertheless, realists deem it almost as absurd to deny the existence of socialentities as it is that of physical entities. The social bonds that constitute socialsystems are just as real, if not in the same way, as the molecular bonds of thingslike sticks and stones. Moreover, the emergent social systems themselves haveproperties, that are not those of their individual elements, just as material entitieshave properties distinct to their organisation. Such in outline is the realiststandpoint taken here on the nature and properties of social entities.

If physical realism can be denied, as it is by idealists, then it is more thanpossible to be sceptical about the reality of social entities. In either case, resolutionof the argument, as it depends on an individual sense of what is acceptable asa demonstration, must ultimately be a matter of personal conviction. But it is,at least, easier to reach agreement on what counts as a demonstration of theexistence of material entities than it is of social entities. These intractable


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difficulties generate a degree of impatience, even testiness, to the discussionabout the nature of social reality. Ossorio (1997) suggests, in line with commonusage, that ‘real;’ should more or less be confined to objects and contrasted with‘illusory’. Bhaskar (1997), on the other hand, asserts that everything in the worldsystem is real, including errors and illusions, and is interested not in whethersocial entities (and ideas in the context of his paper) are real but in how they arereal. Bhaskar thus hopes to avoid dualism, and this approach certainly negatesthe dualism between real and non-real, but it suggests – although this cannotbe his intention – that the question, ‘what is real?’ is irrelevant, and offers littlehelp in the practical businesses of providing demonstrations of real social entities.One of the most difficult problems, complicating matters yet further, is that theorganisations created by people are not natural kinds but, in a sense that cannotbe ignored, to some degree concept dependent. The concept ‘dog’ refers to anatural kind, but ‘capitalism’ does not. The kind of economic system that is‘capitalism’ can only be distinguished from the kind that is ‘socialist’ (or‘primitive’, ‘Asian’, or ‘feudal’) by appropriate analysis, but as there is no parallelto be found in the DNA that makes ‘dogs’ not ‘cats’ (or ‘mice’, ‘horses’ or‘elephants’), the search for it cannot succeed. It is true that Members ofParliament cannot suddenly sprout prunes (Bhaskar, 1993: 317): but couldParliament become a force for socialism? In the programme of naturalism thesequestions may be approached within the same broad manner – but the latterwill not be settled by reference to DNA, and the social entities and theirproperties that would have to be included in any such account require criteriaof demonstration far more difficult to satisfy. If the concepts of science are torefer to what exists, then if what exists depends on the concepts that describeit, the entire realist project in sociology appears to be in jeopardy. The moreaccurate position must be that social relations and the organisations theyconstitute exist as such, but that there may be more than one approximatelycorrect description of their character.

Bhaskar’s use of marxian concepts, notably the ‘organic composition of capital’and ‘surplus value’, enables this issue to be examined with specific cogency.Bhaskar contends that an indicator of capitalist production (roughly, the ratiobetween labour power and invested capital), can be picked out as a causal agentbecause, according to the labour theory of value, profit is derived from theexploitation of labour power. The difficulty is that the effects of capitalism canactually be derived from its search for profit, and the marxian view on theultimate source of that profit, even if it is correct – which Marxist scholars (Meek,1973; Steedman, 1981; Farjoun and Machover, 1983) have found impossible todemonstrate – does not seem essential when to halt the analysis of process atthe imperative for profit maximisation is sufficient for all practical purposes.The absence of this concept from Lawson’s (1997) critical realist analysis ofeconomic theory may be one of those absences Bhaskar would recognise as real.In any event, to a realist, and naturalist, programme of science, it may be



acceptable to posit the existence of a mechanism and to then look for it, butwhen that mechanism is concept dependent, as are the processes describedunder the concept of surplus value, which do take place but are open to otherinterpretations, looking for it is not like looking for the mechanisms that underliethe physical processes of organic evolution and plate techtonics.

This is why many theorists, for example Outhwaite (1987), believe that thekey problem in the development of a realist sociology is that of conceptualisationand, indeed, it is not for nothing that debates in social science are so oftenabout concepts. It is problematic enough that an entity or property may beconceptualised in different ways, but that different theories construct parallelconcepts to employ in explanatory accounts of the same, or closely related,social events makes matters even more difficult. What refers to social realitymost accurately, ‘social class’, or ‘socio-economic status’, ‘capitalism’, or the‘market economy’, ‘surplus value’ or ‘profit’? These concepts do not, of course,refer exactly to the same features of the world, but they replace each other, andare used in explanations of similar events and processes, and the crucial issueof which are to be preferred is extremely difficult to resolve. The tacit solutionadopted in social science – and, in fact, not at all tacitly in the case of post-modernism – is to regard the competing theoretical frameworks that generatesuch parallel concepts as ‘perspectives’ that, in the end, are a matter of theoretical,or personal, or political, preference. These issues may not be capable of resolutionby a commitment to a realist ontology of social entities – but that commitmentdoes mean that realists are conscious of the need to justify the concepts theyuse to describe social entities with particular care, because what they areattempting to do is demonstrate what social reality is like and explain its workingson that basis. Nowak’s (1980) discussion of these matters suggests that theprocesses of idealisation and abstraction, which themselves can be approachedscientifically, are central to adequate conceptualisation.

SOCIAL STRUCTURES AND SOCIAL EXPLANATIONS

The purpose of sociology is to explain social events and processes. If explanationsare tied to ontology, as the argument has suggested, then it is necessary to decidewhat social entities are real and how that reality can be described anddemonstrated. Bunge’s (1996) analysis of these matters has been adopted in theaccount that follows: What, then, is real? To begin with – although in a theoryof social systems it is possible to begin at almost any point – the relationshipsbetween people that constitute social organisations are real bonds. People formfamilies (through the central constitutive relationships of husband/wife, parent/child), firms (employer/employee), churches (priest/lay member), and so on; andthey do so through bonding relations of love, friendship, loyalty, contract, andso on; and both the social bonds and the emergent organisations that depend


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on them for their existence are real. The systems constructed by people, asformal or informal organisations, have certain functions, in the examples chosen,to bring up children, to provide economic goods and services, and to worshipGod. Social systems, thus with the capacity to act on the world, can be describedin terms of their resources and powers to do that in particular ways. The wayin which things are related together to form a system can be described in termsof structure: when things are related together in an organized manner theynecessarily have a structure of some sort. It is the concepts of structure andsystem that go together (in that sense the usual coupling structure/agency ismisleading), and it is systems, not structures (which are properties), that haveemergent properties and thus the ability to have some effect on the world. Ifagency implies the capacity to produce an effect, which is so, then it must bespecified and, as social agency can only be human agency, what matters is todescribe the nature of the bonds and the forms of organisation produced byjoint social activity which allow it to be said that certain effects are those, forexample, of people organised as families.

Nevertheless, it is in terms of structure and agency that the debate in thisarea has been conducted and for this reason ‘structure’ in social explanationrequires its own investigation. Isaac (1990), in an analysis sympathetic to realism,refers to ‘pre-existing symbols’ as ‘social structures’, and he is not alone in thisrespect, but symbolic systems are not the most appropriate entities to build asocial science on. Structure is a relatively abstract concept, and causal explanationsare more appropriately made in terms of the specified properties of socialsystems. Porpora’s (1989) analysis of the meanings given to the term ‘structure’in different sociological theories is particularly useful. He recognises fourreferences:

(i) patterns of aggregate behaviour that are stable over time(ii) law like regularities that govern the behaviour of social facts(iii) systems of human relationships among human positions(iv) collective rules and resources that structure behaviour.

The first is specified by exchange theories (Collins, 1979), the second isassumed by positivist theories (Blau, 1964), the third is the realist position mostcharacteristic of Marxism (Marx, 1973), and the fourth describes the theorydeveloped by Giddens (1984). There is also a fifth concept of structure,unless Porpora has subsumed it under one of these four, which is that ofstructuralism itself:

(v) cultural codes that generate behaviour.



These five distinct concepts have a single semantic label: it is not surprising thatthere is confusion in this area. If any of these references are to be understoodas real properties of social systems it is essential to sort them out.

There is a sense in which all of these concepts select aspects of social systemsthat can be observed and analysed. We may suppose that: (a) social systems,formal or informal organisations, are constituted by relations between peopleand possess emergent properties, such as strength, endurability, and capacitiesof one sort or another (thus, systems of relationships among human positions); (b) thesocial systems constituted by social relationships, are always maintained byformal or informal rules of conduct, and they always command material andsymbolic resources, that is to say, social systems considered as organisations canbe analysed in terms of their constitutive rules and actual resources; organisationshave real causal properties, such as the size, mobility, and power of an army(thus, collective rules and resources that structure behaviour); (c) social systems come tohave established modes of practice which is how they operate, and such practices,of child-rearing, education, economic production, religious belief, and the like,may be regarded as having causal properties (thus, patterns of aggregate behaviour that

are stable over time); (d) all complex social systems are in certain function states inrespect to the distribution of material and symbolic resources and these can bedescribed, particularly by statistical methods, at any point in time and treatedas causal properties, or indicators of such properties, for the purposes ofexplanation (thus, law like regularities that govern the behaviour of social facts); and (e)social systems, because they rest on regulated actions, can be treated as culturalsystems operating with an underlying set of rules, a structural code, that controlsthe operations of the society and which, when disclosed by appropriate analysis,may be included in a causal explanation of social events (thus, cultural codes that

generate behaviour). This is a compressed account intended to make connectionsbetween the analysis of social structure and the analysis of systems. It is the firstview of structure, as a reference to the form of organisation taken by the relationsamong human positions (‘between people’ would be better) in a social system,that is most useful to a realist theory, but although the use of the term ‘structure’to denote so many distinct aspects of the social world creates a situation closeto chaos, the references can be distinguished. There may be a case for regardingall as real, for it is arguably possible to demonstrate that there are social systems,rules and resources, patterns of behaviour, and regularities, and yet it might not,nevertheless, be a wise – or realistic – policy to construct social explanations inwhichever of these terms one pleases.

In every instance analysed the reference is actually to properties of socialsystems (necessarily composed of elements structured in some way), rather thanof ‘structure’ itself. Any real property has some effect on some other thing. Inthis way realists argue that the social relations which unite people are real andthat their properties affect the ways in which social groups behave. Families aremore likely to remain together when the relationship between husband and wife


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is strong rather than weak, and that statement, while it may be obvious, is nota tautology. Thus, it is proper to argue that social relationships have causaleffects. In the same way, realists also argue that the systems constituted by socialbonds are real and that such social systems have identifiable properties that canbe included in causal accounts. Families possess resources of wealth, knowledge,and social connections, and are able to carry out their functions as families asa result. Thus, it is proper to argue that family resources affect the capacity offamilies to accomplish their several purposes, which they do with varying degreesof success largely in proportion to the class-derived resources they control. (It isfor this reason, above all others, that class position is causally related toeducational access.) The argument advanced here should be compatible withHarre’s view that the personal agency of people in their joint social activities isthe only efficient social causation, for it is argued only that joint social activitiesgenerate social organisations and that those organisations have properties thatexist in so far as people are efficient actors able to work together. As for therest, in any complete explanatory account of a complex social process it willprobably be necessary to make reference to collective rules and resources,patterns of aggregate behaviour, and even cultural codes, in so far as the ideasthat influence behaviour can be analysed in that way.

SYSTEM TO SYSTEM LEVEL EXPLANATIONS –

THE PARADIGM CASE

System to system level relations are the paradigm case of sociological explanation.For Durkheim (1963) this defined the field of sociology, and his methodologicalrules specify that social facts are always to be explained by other social facts.The relationships between, for example, the housing supply and drunkenness(Engels, 1932); unemployment and school-retention rates (Bauman, 1998); themarital-dowry system and female infanticide (Harris, 1979), are simply a few ofthe endless examples that could be given of sociological models that use socialfacts to explain other social facts. In most cases, what is being linked in a causalrelationship are two states of affairs, ‘function states’, usually represented byindicator variables. In Bunge’s view, such states of affairs exist (when they do)and can therefore be studied by realist science, and, because they affect whatpeople do, and can do, it is quite proper to include them in causal accounts.Many of the difficulties in social theory arise from the ‘positivist’ approach tocausal analysis and, because the realist approach to social investigation –emphasising mechanisms of process, what happens, as closely as possible – theanalysis is worth pursuing. It is easy to construct equations in which therelationship is modelled by the form, ‘For each unit of increase in variable a

there is observed a decrease of y units in variable b’. The relationship betweenunemployment and school-retention rates, for example, readily lend themselves



to this model of statistical analysis. This whole matter requires some attentionin the context of a discussion of realism. Even a sociologist as critical of positivistforms of sociology as Bourdieu is prepared to make use of the ‘statistical modeof explanation’, relating it to a ‘dispositional’ thesis accepted as realist by somecommentators, and whether this argument is well-founded or not is worthdiscussing.

The sensible attitude to statistical causal analysis, so called, is to treat it as amethod that reveals associations between indicators (which it does with precision),and useful in the construction of accounts of process and mechanism that alonemerit recognition as full explanations, and which, having regard to the fact thathuman action is not determined, should receive a non-deterministic interpretationin terms of the social practices that generate such associations. Many statisticalmodels are implicitly determinist, or, which is no more satisfactory, support aprobabilistic determinism (Salmon, 1975) in which the status of the individualas a statistical artefact is unavoidable. The statistical models of ‘causal sociology’seem to call for a model actor, the rational ‘homo economicus’ of economicmarginalism, for example, because without such a presence there is no agent toenergise the model (which is all the ‘mechanism’ that is required). These agents,however, are simple, one-dimensional, determined models about as like to realpeople as the cardboard police officers one sometimes sees in shopping malls.This unreality, indeed, is regarded as a strength in as much that it enables, sothe claim goes, unessential features of reality to be disregarded and the aspectsimportant to the behaviour under investigation to be brought into sharper focus(Dahrendorf, 1968). Yet the distortions introduced into social thought by thedeliberate construction of causal accounts based on determined agents motivatedsolely by economic self-interest when people are actually non-determined agentswith multiple sources of motivation, often inhibits the development of complexmodels of social mechanism. An adequate account of the processes of leavingschool, for example, will show that the rational-actor model assumed by anequation describing the association between unemployment and school retentionrates is hopelessly inadequate as an explanation of how people actually behaveand why they do so. In fact, statistical models, although completely incapableof explaining individual action, more or less invite certain misguided interpreta-tions. The variables associated with school success, to remain with the sociologyof education, are reasonably well-known, so that when an able, white, middle-class student succeeds and a less able, black, working-class student fails, thesuccess of one and the failure of the other, is held to be explained in terms ofthe model, and to many this seems entirely unproblematic. But what happenswhen a working-class student succeeds? All that can be said, and one hears itsaid often, is that the student ‘beat the odds’, and if a middle-student fails,nothing is likely to be said, unless the argument – ad hoc and irrelevant as it is –from ‘structural necessity’ is invoked to the effect that a certain proportion ofmiddle-class students must fail in order that the illusion of equal opportunity is


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maintained. In practice, it is extremely difficult to relinquish the idea that asuccessful prediction in the case of any individual does not demonstrate theeffects of the variables included in the model; they may do so, and it is self-evidently the case that they probably do so, but without a careful analysis ofindividual cases what they did and what happened to them is absolutelyunknown. It is an obvious fallacy to assume that the success and failure of allindividuals is due to the whole set of variables included in the equation operatingwith their given weights: the effect of Down’s syndrome as a cause of populationvariance in educational level attainment, for example, is so low as to be negligible,but for any individual with Down’s syndrome it is likely to be the most importantcause for it is associated with an average 60 point IQ deficit.

The attempt to map dispositional powers on to causal statistical models is aclosely related but specific error. Take the association between unemploymentand school-retention rates: the causes of an individual student remaining atschool or leaving, whether in a time of high or low unemployment, cannot beknown from causal equations of the type being considered. The approach, usedfor the purposes of predicting individual trajectories, is to treat behaviour asprobabilistic, as the odds of each individual acting in a certain way are just theodds derived from an analysis of all individuals in the same group. It is thuseasy to say that each individual has a disposition – in Quetelet’s (1973) terms a‘tendency’ – to behave in the average manner of the group. It is not only‘positivist’ sociology that lends itself to this interpretation. Bourdieu’s (1993)account of the ‘statistical mode of reproduction’ has exactly the same character,for the generative embodied habitus of the individual has the odds of success andfailure for the group built-in so that if only 5 per cent of lower working-classchildren enter university, children from this class have a taken-for-grantedknowledge of the odds against them built-in to the habitus and so reproducethem. In order for this argument to work it would have to be shown thatindividuals possessed a learned ability to estimate the probability of those ‘likethemselves’ to achieve any relevant future state and that their actions wereshaped in accordance with that knowledge. That has not been done and it isdifficult to imagine how it could be done. People may have specific dispositionsto act (the argument for the reality of habitus will be developed in the followingsection), but they almost certainly do not have that kind of disposition – and itis unrealistic to suppose that they do in order to maintain a form of ‘statistical’explanation. The educational system can also be given dispositional properties,for example, the capacity to select students by class origin and so argue that,for example, the educational system of the former East Germany was less sociallyselective than that of West Germany. It may have been less selective, too, butto speak of the ‘powers of selection’ in this sense is not to suggest that thosepowers have a source that is not derived from human agency. Provided thatsuch accounts are treated as a form of shorthand, and that an attempt is alwaysmade to expand, or ‘unpack’ them, by detailing the social processes that



constitute the effective mechanics, they should present no difficulties. Dispositionalarguments have become more common in sociological theory; Bourdieu defineshis central concept of habitus as a disposition, or set of dispositions, to act, andthere is some reason to examine this term.

DISPOSITION AND HABITUS

Theories of ‘disposition’, as faculty theories, are very old, at least Aristotelian,and in medieval times became an actual barrier to the progress of empiricalscience because, as Moliere, a dramatist of the Enlightenment, mockingly pointedout, medical practitioners who explained the efficacy of opium to cause sleep interms of its ‘virtus dormitiva’, that is its power to cause sleep, seemed too easilysatisfied. Yet, in a careful thesis argued by Harre and Madden (1975), if the‘disposition to cause sleep’ is regarded as a reference to some material constituentof opium, then the search for it might be fruitful and, until the issue is settled,it may be useful to explain the properties of opium in terms of its naturalpowers. Chemistry eventually discovered morphine by following such a researchprogramme. The intricacies of the philosophical debate about dispositionsneed not greatly trouble sociologists. In the tradition of analytical philosophy‘disposition’ is associated with Ryle’s (1984) pseudo-behaviourism, which, asRoche (1973) points out, employs the concept as a means to construct explanationsof human behaviour without reference to ‘reasons’ or ‘causes’. The argumentthat human actions are performed for reasons, and that reasons are not causes,led Winch (1958), influenced by Wittengstein, to conclude that sociology was anill-founded discipline with no possibility of attaining true scientific status. Theconcept of ‘disposition’ seemed to offer a way forward within a broadly naturalistidea of science. As dispositions are not events, but more like reasons, they arenot causal and explanations of behaviour could treat rule-following as theexercise of a disposition. Ryle thus suggested that intelligence, for example, aproperty of people of great interest to psychology and sociology, should be takenas a reference to the regular exhibition of acquired dispositions and habitsdisplayed by an individual. To be intelligent means that one behaves in a wayrecognised as intelligent in certain areas and circumstances and, therefore, it isappropriate for a scientific account to include the powers and propensities ofwhich the actions of people are exercises. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus has, ofcourse, the same intellectual origin – it is Aristotelian – and a specificallysociological interest in these arguments might be expected to emerge.

There is a fundamental difference between human dispositions, a term thatrefers to embodied skills and knowledge, and the disposition of physical entities,where the reference is to some not-yet-adequately-specified state of a thing’snature. In physical science, it is a dispositional explanation – taking a stockexample of the discourse – to say that glass shatters when struck because it


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possesses the property of brittleness. Harre and Madden accept this as anexplanation of sorts, and one that could be improved by an investigation thatshowed glass to have a certain structure, presumably to do with the way itsmolecules are bonded together, making it necessary that it will break when givena sharp blow. Armstrong (Armstrong, Martin and Place, 1996) argues thatdispositions are not causes but accepts that statements in terms of dispositionsare permissible where it is understood that the real cause is the material natureof the substance. Place (Armstrong, Martin and Place, 1996), on the other hand,offers support for the idea that dispositions are in themselves causal properties.Bunge (1996) prefers to construct theoretical models in which the causal agentis postulated, as agent x, perhaps, but in any case as a material entity of anappropriate kind that could exist, and begin a research programme to find it,and therefore has little use for explanations in terms of powers or dispositions.In Bunge’s view, the ‘virtue’ of opium should be taken as a reference to achemical compound or replaced with a term that does so. The application ofthis model of human dispositions to sociological explanations is problematic: itis difficult to conceive of an account of some social process that referred to theskills and knowledge of human agents that did not specify what they were. Inother words, explanations in terms of habitus cannot be ‘promissory’ notes, as ifwe could discover what the nature of the disposition was, but in order to beplausible must already be specified not only as the principle that generates theact (by definition) but detailed in terms of its real and thus demonstrableprinciple.

Nevertheless, the forms of the argument, that social entities (rather thanhuman beings) may have causal dispositions, has been advanced by severalwriters. Lash and Urry (1983), ‘theoretical realists’, have argued that the powersof social entities, including classes, should be understood in this manner. Socialclasses are not organised social systems, as are trades unions, political parties,and so on, and they thus have no relational or organisational properties of thekinds possessed by organisations, but there is a sense in which one social‘structure’ of a society, that is to say its system of stratification, is a state function

of the society which may have effects on social events and processes. It is exactlythis line of reasoning that has always led political theorists to analyse the socialclass (and where relevant) ethnic composition, or structure, of societies in orderto evaluate the likelihood of political developments of one sort or anotheroccurring. If the language of ‘causal powers’ directs attention to social resourcesthat may be mobilised for action, which must always exist in a society, for thereare always organisations that can be formed and things that can be done thatare not being done, then there can be no serious objection to it. This is just tostudy how a society might be organised, what it would take to bring thatorganisation about, and what it would then be capable of doing. Even nihilistsemployed class analysis in their models of political capabilities. Stepaniak (1891),reflecting on the Russian class system of the 1890s, thus recognises the peasants,



the ‘town workmen’, and the intellectuals, as the classes that must provide thebasis for organised political action. As there was no party working in the interestsof the peasants – the most powerful class – and as the urban workers were asmall minority who could not hope to take power in their own interests,Stepaniak took the view that propaganda among the intellectual class, which‘occupies all of the high posts, and fulfils all the most important social functions’and, as it ‘commands the Tsar’s army and fleet’ could take over the state at asingle blow, held out the best hope of destroying the existing regime (Stepaniak,1891: 20). Analyses of these kinds are indispensable to politicians, and if theyintroduce the language of ‘class powers’ and ‘class forces’, they are not so muchfalse as metaphorical. An account of the Russian revolution, for example, givenin terms of class forces will be accompanied by an analytical narrative of thedetailed actions of the organisations involved in bringing the revolution about,including the late recognition of peasant demands by the Bolsheviks, and suchan account effectively makes any reference to ‘class forces’ in a causal senseredundant. Lash and Urry, among the most inclined to adopt this language,argue that the terms should properly be explained as the potential to organiseand that potential, as things that could be done, may be located in the actualrelations that constitute the social organisations of a society. Although explanatoryaccounts of social events and processes often provide mechanisms, the transitionfrom feudalism to capitalism, education and economic development, nationalismand state formation, and so on, these, nevertheless, seem to lack an element ofdemonstration, possessed by their counterparts in physical science. One responseto these difficulties is to declare that the reality of social entities and theirproperties is given by their effects. This is true, as the earlier argument stated,in a necessary sense, but it is also true, and again the point has been madeearlier, that this argument has a dubious circularity to it. The principle is quiteclear: an effect must be caused by an entity for which there is evidenceindependent of its purported demonstration in the effect to be explained. Thetheory of dispositional powers, although worthwhile in contributing to conceptualclarity, no matter how finely elaborated, as in Bhaskar’s (1997) three-tieredanalysis – perfectly applicable to the revolutionary illustration given here –cannot make the demonstration of their existence any more compelling. Whatshould be considered to exist, in the argument of this paper, are the relationsbetween people that constitute social organisations, and it is in terms of theproperties of those relations and organisations that an explanation of socialevents should be given. This is not to say that ‘powers’ are irreal, as Bhaskarsays, but they are not actual and an attempt to demonstrate their reality shouldbe grounded in social relations and social systems rather than, for example, intheir purported effects.

The introduction of ‘powers’ in a scientific explanation requires the utmostcaution. Whatever exists must have certain properties. Material objects outsidethe realm of the sub-atomic have the solid property of mass, which is relatively


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easy to demonstrate and isolate for scientific study, but the emergent entities ofthe social world have no such tangible property and that is precisely why thereis a debate about their existence. The familiar examples of emergence – theywere used by Durkheim (1963) – are well-known. Water has properties notpossessed by its elements hydrogen and oxygen, bronze, an alloy of copper andtin, is quite different, much harder, than its constituent elements, and so on. Aflock of birds is not the same entity as a solitary bird and, in a more contemporaryapproach to the concept of emergence, it is possible to model the behaviour ofa flock of birds by a simple set of rules (try to match direction with neighbours,head for their average position, avoid collisions) that resemble rather closely therules of cultural practice that structuralism, and related methods of culturalanalysis, attempt to derive from the analysis of social behaviour. It has alwaysbeen apparent, however, that the appeal to emergent physical properties insupport of the contention that social organisations emerge as entities withproperties distinct to their existence carries no great conviction. Bunge (1996:20) provides a definition of emergent properties that should satisfy the need forrigour, but it cannot offer a formula by which their existence can be demonstrated:

P is an emergent property of a thing b if and only if either b is a complex thing (system) nocomponent of which possesses P, or b is an individual that possesses P by virtue of being acomponent of a system (i.e. b would not possess P if it were independent or isolated).

Bunge defines emergent properties not emergent powers. This distinction is obscuredby many theorists. Archer (1995: 51), for example, states that, ‘to talk about‘‘emergent powers’’ is simply to refer to a property which comes into beingthrough social combination,’ and it will be noted that she uses the term ‘powers’where Bunge has ‘properties’. This is not simply a matter of semantics, for it ispreferable to say that the properties of water, to freeze solid and to turn to gasat different temperatures, and so on, are the emergent properties of a physicalsystem, a molecule, the components of which are hydrogen and oxygen atoms,and that, as a result of those properties, water has the power to burst pipes andsteam puddings. To enumerate in this sense the ‘powers’ of water would takeforever, because this is just to talk about all the ways in which water has aneffect on the world, but the physical properties of water can be specified in adetermined number and, it is fairly safe to say, have been specified by science.

This is why explanations in terms of ‘powers’ are so problematic. Whatevera thing does indicates its ‘powers’: a pocket calculator will give the square rootof a number, hence it has the ‘power’ to calculate square roots. There arescientific methodologies, that start from this point: one move is to postulate theexistence of ‘a square root module’, that is to hypothesise the existence of anactual electronic component with that function, which can then be looked for,the second, particularly common in contemporary psychology as ‘functionalism’,is to construct a theoretical model in which the term ‘module’, obviously and



trivially a ‘concept’, has no necessary reference to a physical existent of anykind, and gains its value as an explanation from its ability in a model to predictregularities in the world. The first explanation is acceptable to scientific realismand the second, because of its complete indifference to the (actual) nature of themechanism involved, is not. That does not mean, of course, that explanationsof the first kind are necessarily correct, to postulate the existence of something isnot the same as to demonstrate its existence, that is why it is necessary to look forthe things that are supposed to exist. But the scientific programme of lookingfor physical entities postulated to exist, as the discussion has already noted,cannot have the same characteristics in social science.

The confusion of ‘powers’ with ‘properties’ has the consequence that theformer are treated as the causal entities of a realist social science, but this is notto serve the interests of scientific investigation at all, for the mechanisms thatprovide explanations for a realist science are not adequately formulated as‘powers’. An explanatory sketch that includes references to ‘causal powers’ can,and should, be given a more adequate construction. Many of the difficulties inthis mode of thought are evident in the work of Bourdieu whose influence insociology has become considerable. The ambiguities and contradictions inBourdieu’s theory are notorious, and although Robbins (1991), one of the mostrespected of Bourdieu’s commentators describes him as a ‘thorough-goingphenomenologist’ and demonstrates convincingly the direct influence on hisepistemology of Merleau-Ponty (1974), realist interpretations of Bourdieu’s workhave been offered more than once. Outhwaite (1987: 123–4) may have beenamong the first to note that despite his conventionalist ‘as if ’ usages Bourdieu’s‘metatheory’ bears a close resemblance to Bhaskar’s ‘transcendental’ realism. Ifthis is so it is astonishing because it would be hard to find a sociologist less likea scientific realist than Bourdieu. The suggestion, therefore, by Fowler (1996:7–8), that Bourdieu’s theory may be situated in the tradition of the ‘new realism’merits particular attention. She argues that:

his theory is premised on the existence, within the limits of megaperiods, of ‘intransitiveobjects’ in the natural world, such as forces of gravity. These are the generative forces ofrelations which possess more causal powers than others: especially those structured aroundthe cultural and economic bourgeoisie, the state and patriarchy.

The term ‘intransitive objects’ was introduced into this discourse by Bhaskar(1979), in a direct reference to Kant (1964). As Outhwaite’s (1987) discussion ofBhaskar confirms, ‘intransitive objects’ are representations of reality, such astheories and concepts, and ‘transitive objects’ are the things they refer to.Bhaskar’s argument seems to be that as ‘intransitive objects’ work, that is as thepractice of science is clearly successful, there must be entities they refer to, whichmay be designated ‘transitive objects of science’. Harre (1997) would doubtlessfind in Fowler’s references to ‘the state and patriarchy’ exactly the sort of ‘big


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word’ account he finds ‘obscurantist’ and in her attribution of causal ‘powers’to such entities a ‘barely intelligible’ assertion. Nevertheless, even such highlycondensed theoretical statements – they are scarcely explanatory accounts – canbe made more intelligible by an appropriate form of expansion, one that providesa mechanism in terms of social processes. Fowler’s substantive argument, sheattributes it to Bourdieu, that there are ‘generative forces of relations whichpossess ... causal powers’ most importantly those ‘structured around the culturaland economic bourgeoisie, the state and patriarchy’, must mean something like,‘the social relations that constitute the cultural and economic bourgeoisie givethat class the power to effect social change’, and if that is so (leaving aside thestate and patriarchy for the sake of clarity), then the thesis is not necessarilyobjectionable.

On the other hand, Fowler’s (1996: 9) apparent support for Bourdieu’sassumption ‘that the ... low percentage of the children of workers and peasantswho achieve educationally at the levels of the children of the haute bourgeoisie, isin itself proof of the operation of such generative relationships which often actagainst the will’, is more problematic. The substantive argument is circular andthe practice of demonstration, of proof(!), it reveals is no less circular. Bourdieu(1991: 64) really does hold this position: ‘the coherence of the constructed systemof intelligible facts is itself its own proof’, and it is as if, to use one of his ownfavoured modes of expression, Bourdieu understands that this theory of theinternalisation of objective chances cannot be supported by any empiricalobservation, other than the distribution of class access to education that itattempts to explain, and for that reason moves to undermine the ‘epistemological’foundations of a demand for such supporting evidence. The problem with thisposition is not so much the attempt to use ‘powers’ as causes, but that it doesso in a context that cannot be expanded in the way that is necessary to constructa full explanation in terms of social organisations and social processes. It ispractically a tautology to argue that the existence of a property is revealed byits effects, but to say that gravity is demonstrated by the fact that objects fall isnot exactly to formulate a theory of gravity, and the problem in social scienceis to be able to recognise what a particular event is an effect of. Only when themathematical relationship between the mass of bodies and their power to attracthas been described does one have a theory of gravity with any useful content.It is hardly necessary to point out that Bourdieu has no such Newtonian theoryto offer sociology. This stance is incompatible with scientific realism: it might,perhaps, be a form of Durkheimian social realism – and Schmaus (1994) hasargued convincingly that Durkheim meant what he said about the conscience

collective being an actual force – but it is not scientific realism. The circularity in‘dispositional’ theories, Moliere’s point, has always been their weakness. Bourdieuis fully conscious of the difficulties, and it is easy to understand why, but circularaccounts of educational inequality are offered within a Bourdieuan frameworkwith increasing frequency. When Fowler (1996: 10) argues that, ‘[t]he habitus is



the consequence of people’s material experience and early socialisation: itprovides the basic or meta-dispositions towards ways of perceiving, knowing andappreciating the world’, and goes on to say that, ‘[h]umans internalize their‘life-chances’, so that a reading off of any situation permits a sense of whetheror not ‘‘this is for the likes of us’’; whether we can imaginatively understandourselves in a specific position’, she offers a dangerously circular faculty account.If the argument is that: ‘Working-class children fail at school because of theirworking-class habitus which is evidenced by their collective failure’, then it cannotpossibly be convincing. It is exactly in this area, however, where the importanceof habit in the explanation of human behaviour is so crucial, that Bourdieu’sconcept of habitus has become pivotal. For as Harre (1997: 184) is aware, ‘thewhole of psychology, as a discipline, hinges on whether and to what degree weshould assimilate habits to causes or to monitored actions.’ The human capacityto act depends on knowledge and skills embodied in the form of a habitus andto the extent that such dispositions are demonstrable (which would requireattention to people) they have a place in the explanation of social events. Yet itshould be very clear that ‘disposition’ as a reference to a particular form ofindividually embodied tendency to act is not the same as a reference to the‘disposition’ of the nation-state to undermine (or support) patriarchy.

The causal statement, ‘capitalism has weakened patriarchy’, linking Harre’s‘big words’ somewhat provocatively, refers to social systems and processes in acompressed form, but it is understandable, and, in fact, something rather likethis thesis has recently been argued by Jackson (1998). Such causal statementsdo not give ‘capitalism’ and ‘patriarchy’ a form of agency that is not human.The statement can be expanded: in a minimum form, the capitalist economicsystem, being essentially concerned with the maximisation of profit, is indifferentto forms of family control and, indeed, antagonistic to those that threaten itsrequirement to obtain labour at the lowest cost, including the patriarchal family-wage practice. There is no agency here that is not that of people organised intofamilies and economic units and so constituting, if the relations between themare of the appropriate kind, a family system that might be called ‘patriarchal’and an economic system that might be called ‘capitalist’. There is no likelihoodthat sociologists will abandon the attempt to construct causal models at this levelof generality and abstraction and there is no good reason why they should. Thecausal statement ‘capitalism has weakened patriarchy’ is not determinist even inits linguistic form. (‘Capitalism weakens patriarchy’ as a law-like statement maybe open to a determinist interpretation, but as people are not determined inwhat they do there is no reason why even in that form anyone should be misledinto supposing that the explanation sketch so stated implies that human actionsare determined.) The argument that ‘patriarchy’ and ‘capitalism’ are entitieswith active causal powers of a dispositional kind detracts from the actual contentof the explanation, which has to do with the actions of people within organisationsof particular kinds, and being unnecessary is perhaps better avoided. Nevertheless,


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the statement, ‘capitalism has the power to weaken patriarchy’ is meaningful,and the study of social systems in order to determine their capabilities (tendencies,liabilities, and so on), is essential to policy analysis, and does not necessarily thatunexplained powers are causes and that ‘capitalism’ acts as an unexplained entityon ‘patriarchy’.

CONCLUSION

What is resolved by the adoption of a realist ontology of social entities? Theprogress of scientific knowledge in the last century or two – it cannot reasonablybe denied – has taken place with little or no regard for the philosophy of sciencewhich throughout most of that time has been dominated by idealist doctrinesof one kind or another (although it is unlikely that most working physicalscientists have ever doubted the existence of the entities they work with). Ifsocial science has made less spectacular progress that is probably not due to itsunderlying philosophical assumptions but to the nature of the social. As Bunge(1996) has noted, most of the major figures in sociology, in any case, have adopteda type of system analysis regardless of their formally expressed methodologicalpositions. The theses of Marx and Weber on the origins of capitalism – not sodifferent as their inadequate characterisation as materialist versus idealist theoriessuggests – are difficult to resolve, although the realist character of marxism isnot irrelevant, by appeal to a realist ontology of the social. Yet what is real andwhat is not real, what relations and systems can be demonstrated to exist andwhat cannot, is surely not a matter of indifference to social science. An anti-metaphysical philosophy of science that affected indifference to the reality ofwhat it sought to explain was possible only because virtually everyone shares apractical conviction that physical objects do exist. There are, in fact, definitehazards in the ‘new realism’ which may show too easy a readiness to constructexplanations in terms of ‘powers’ and ‘forces’ when an explanation in terms ofspecific social mechanisms is required.

It is common-sense that attracts many people to realism in the physicalsciences and it is perhaps in the hope of finding that same quality in a realistapproach to social science that has led to the interest in this area. Making senseof sociological accounts, and making sensible sociological accounts, is very mucha matter of common-sense. Archer (1995) points out that the demographic structureof a society, the proportion of young to old, for example, is a constraint on thepolitical decisions of government and, no doubt, on the commercial decisionsof insurance companies and the like. But how, it might be asked, can a proportionact? In a strict sense it does not: and the insistence of Varela and Harre (1996)that ‘the personal agency of people in their joint social activities is the onlyefficient causation in ‘‘society’’ ’, may be accepted, but that does not mean thatsociology cannot make reference to morphological structures (or system states)



and include them in explanatory accounts. A brief illustration will make thepoint. In Britain the number of mature students enrolled at university hasdeclined. The responsible government minister, Baroness Blackstone (Blackstone,1999), rejects the criticism that this is due to an increase in fees and argues thatthe age cohort from which most mature students are drawn is becoming smallerand contains an increasing proportion of those who already have degrees. Inother words, the decline in mature students at university is not caused bygovernment policy but is an effect of demographic structures. This argumentdoes not make the demographic structure a powerful thing (like a nation-state), itis merely an expression of the facts as given, moreover, as those facts are takeninto account by the providers of education for mature students the decisionsthey make, and their intended and unintended consequences, will also, in asense that is sensible, be caused by the demographic structure. The emergentproperties of all social entities depend ultimately on human agency, much asthe properties of physical objects depend on nuclear forces, but this does notmean that explanation in terms of the physical properties of things are alwaysmost usefully given at that level, and the same principle applies to socialexplanations.

Turner (1985: 151) argues that ‘the search for underlying mechanisms hasnot proved to be a particularly fruitful ideal in the social sciences’, and notesthat Durkheim’s attempts to realise that ideal led eventually to structuralism.He points out:

According to a realist, causalist view of social life, sociology is concerned with real causalrelations. It is idle to ask such questions as ‘‘How do social facts constrain?’’ because thesequestions ask that the regularities be somehow ‘‘cashed in’’ in a language alien to them. Inspeaking of the real causal structure of the world, in terms of his picture of causal relationsbetween social facts and social facts and individual actions, ‘‘constraint’’ signifies no more andno less than the existence of a law-governed relationship.

This is exactly why scientific realism in sociology must insist that explanationsprovide an account of the specific mechanisms which have brought aboutwhatever social event or process is under investigation. It is not ‘idle’ to ask howsocial facts constrain, and some of the most influential contributors to thecontemporary realist philosophy of social science, Archer (1995) and Bunge(1996), are directly concerned with that issue. Bhaskar (1979), whose work mightlean a little in the direction indicated by Turner, recognises a marxism thatremains committed to the investigation of social processes. Nevertheless, thereis a warning here that, although it must be more sensible to think of socialrelations and the social entities constituted by them as real (rather than non-existent), the attribution of properties and powers to features of the social worldthat do not meet the criteria for recognition as social entities is all too easilymade. A cautious scientific realism, at least enough to allow the common-senseposition that social organisations exist with the properties and capacities to act


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given by their particular human constitution, is one thing; but Harre is correctin this regard, unrestricted licence to attribute causal ‘powers’ to any ‘big word’concept that one wishes to call ‘real’ is quite another.Roy Nash

Massey University College of Education

Palmerston North

New Zealand

[email protected]

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What is Real and What is Realism in Sociology?

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