Levels Issues II: Recommended Reading
2 September 2006 at 12:01 pm Nicolai Foss 1 comment
| Nicolai Foss |
One of the most insightful discussions of what we may mean by “levels of the social” that I know of is a recent and apparently still unpublished paper with the same title by philosopher (and chancellor) Daniel Little. Litte defends micro-foundations, mechanism-based explanation, denies macro-macro causation, and argues that the “molecule” of social phenomena is the socially situated individual in a local context. Although the latter position may be too much to stomach for the die-hard methodological individualist, there is much with which Austrians and other economists can agree. An excellent read!
Entry filed under: - Foss -, Methods/Methodology/Theory of Science, Recommended Reading.
Organizations and Markets 
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Bo | 6 September 2006 at 8:19 am
This latter point sounds much like what Allport (1955) calls “the ongoings of the individual system” – the idea that individual action is neither random nor isolated – but rather limited by the surrounding context, and, thus, the admissible range of actions is influenced by a multitude of situational or contextual factors (see also Cappelli & Shearer, 1991). Within a group (a collective), however, the “ongoings” of individual-person systems are likely to meet and interact with others – the actions of individuals will meet with in space and time, resulting in interpersonal interaction. This, in turn, leads to other interactions and a cycle is caused – what Weick (1979) refer to as a “double interact”. Collective action, then, has a structure that inheres in the double interact rather than within either of the individuals involved – hence we can talk about collective action that transcends the individuals who constitute the collective..(for an organizational example – see the literature on “organizational memory” – e.g., Daft & Weick, 1984; Hofmann & Morgeson, 1998).
This has profound implications for multi-level research in that we can conceptualize – and measure – collective constructs that can have a reality that is (at least partly) independent of the interactions that gave rise to them (called the duality of structure by Giddens). That is, not only do collective constructs exist (perhaps as a result of individual interactions) but they also may (can) influence (subsequent) interaction between individuals and thus enable or constrain it..