Reflexivity Bleg

4 October 2006 at 6:26 am Nicolai Foss Leave a comment

| Nicolai Foss |

While we can all agree that ideas matter, how much do they matter? Is much, and perhaps most, of social reality essentially bootstrap phenomena in which the Thomas Theorem (i.e., the “the situations that men define as true, become true for them”) holds true? Do the social sciences bootstrap much of social reality in the sense that social science decisively affects the agents that social scientists study? Or, are there constants, stable mechanisms, etc. that exist and work regardless of what social scientists believe about them (as, I suppose, many economists would hold)?

The idea that theorizing affects the objects of theorizing — that is, the notion of “reflexivity” — has been an important one in sociology for a long time (Thomas wrote about it in the 1920s; Merton in the 1940s). It has become a Leitmotiv in the sociology of knowledge. It has also been a recurring theme in economics (in connection with predictions and the modeling of expectations; e.g., the debate surrounding the Lucas critique), and it has been treated by philosophers as well (e.g. Popper). However, this literature has not discussed the extent to which reflexivity (in the above sense) obtains.

The issue is obviously very difficult to get a hold on. However, I also believe it is a crucial one, particularly in management where we have recently witnessed people essentially arguing that economics-as-applied to management is (nothing but?) a self-fulfilling prophecy (i.e., this paper). So, do any of our readers know of literature that can help to frame and answer the questions with which this bleg began?