Emergentist statehood and macro-mechanisms

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Secondly, because ‘objects have powers whether exercised or not, mechanisms exist whether triggered or not and the effects of the mechanisms are contingent’ (Danermark et al. 2002: 56), it follows that ‘causal laws must be analysed as their tendencies’ (Bhaskar 1975: 3) in ‘open systems’.

And, in this view, tendencies should thus both be considered ‘potentialities which may be exercised (…) without being realized or manifest in any particular outcome’ and powers which may be ‘fulfilled or actualized unperceived by men [sic]’ (Ibid.: 40, emphasis added). This particular critical realist displacement from ‘statements of laws’ to ‘tendency statements’ (Ibid.: 7) not only naturally implies an increasing focus on the less strict notions of, for example, macro-level ‘tendentiality’ (as in Marx’s work) and more mundane sociological ‘dispositions’ (as in Bourdieu’s work) but also, with regards to mechanisms and social structures, a redirected emphasis on theoretical considerations and (if ontologically meaningful and pragmatically feasible) the discovery of theoretically framed symptomatic indirect/derivative empirical indicators/approximations (cf. Beach & Pedersen 2013).

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of whole’ (Elder-Vass 2007a: 28).²⁸ Arguably, there is both a ‘diachronic’ and a ‘synchronic’

dimension to emergence (Elder-Vass 2007a: passim, 37, 2010: 16). Firstly, Archer’s (1998: 375, emphasis added) so-called ‘morphogenetic’ approach argues for an analytically posited temporal separability of structure and agency; in this view ‘structure necessarily pre-dates the action(s) which transform it’ and ‘structural elaboration necessarily post-dates those actions which transformed it’.

Importantly here, emergence or extra-individuality, in Archer’s (1998: 376, emphasis added, 375, 377) approach, stems in particular from the existence of ‘pre-existing structures’ operating over and above individuals – that is, the analytically necessary temporal or ‘diachronic’ (Elder-Vass 2007a: 34) distinction between a prior ‘structural conditioning’ and a later agentic interaction/elaboration/reproduction.²⁹ Secondly, in Elder-Vass’s (2007a, 2010: 23) so-called

‘relational’ or ‘synchronic’ account of emergence, it is construed as ‘a synchronic relation amongst the parts of an entity that gives the entity as a whole the ability to have a particular (diachronic) causal impact’. In this synchronic view the origin of the irreducible sui generis quality of ‘social wholes’ lies particularly in ‘the organisation of the parts: the maintenance of a stable set of substantial relations between the parts that constitute them into a particular kind of whole’ (Elder-Vass 2010: 20, emphasis added). In other words, it is ‘because a higher-level entity is composed of a particular stable organisation or configuration of lower-level entities that it may be able to exert causal influence in its own right’ (Ibid.: 23, emphasis in original).

Now, brought together, this dual understanding of emergence provides the study with an initial firm philosophy of social science basis for accepting the existence of, and practically operating with, complex collective ‘social entities’, such as notably organizations and institutions, having ‘causal powers in their own right’ (Elder-Vass 2010: 26) – a coherent social-theoretical justification which many scholars who commonsensically treat collective/corporate actors often fail to provide.

28 For a discussion of the similarity and, especially, ontological incommensurability between (particularly critical realist) emergentism and Luhmann’s type of autopoietic (and partly emergentist) functionalism, see Elder-Vass (2007b).

29 On the (perhaps seemingly) subtle yet crucial divergences between Anthony Giddens’ well-known

‘structuration’ theory and Roy Bhaskar’s so-called Transformational Model of Social Action (TMSA) and Archer’s Morphogenetic approach – the former of which informed the latter – see notably Porpora (1998), Archer (1998) and Buch-Hansen (2005: 62-3).

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Importantly, this study’s particular treatment of statehood shall construe the state as an irreducible higher-level entity with extra-individual ‘emergent powers’ (notably, as shall be seen, in the form of

‘state-crafting’ and its related properties and strategies). In this study, the emergent connection between the lower- and higher-level properties of statehood is stressed in particularly two overlapping ways.

Firstly, the study puts emphasis on the dynamics and tensions associated with the state’s relational/synchronic organization of (what shall later be described as) both its four organizational monopolies and its four institutional/structural functions. Secondly, the study emphasizes the emergent simultaneity of the state’s (a) complex lower-level constitution – implying a necessary dependence on the dynamics of elites, classes, bureaucratic personnel, voters, consumers, etc., and (b) peculiar irreducible extra-individual emergent causal powers.

As shall be argued in chapter 5, both the Skinnerian-Hobbesian conception and the Staatslehre tradition’s understanding of modern statehood is commensurate with, compliments and implicitly operates with, such emergentist account of the state. The productiveness of an emergentist conception of entities like states can be understood in light of the way in which organizations and institutions more generally appear as particular paradigmatic forms of emergent collective/social action and social structure (see Elder-Vass 2007a: 31-34; Elder-Vass 2010: 115-168; Kaidesoja 2013: 312-19). Although both are ultimately merely different modalities of ‘social structure’ (Elder-Vass 2010: 167-8), institutions and organizations may be defined slightly differently: While the former refers to relatively continuing causally emergent rules, orders and structures that normatively pattern behavior and expectations, the latter denotes a more or less persisting, regularized, formalized, authority-constitutive, interest-driven and purposeful form of emergent collective/social/group interaction or association (cf.

Elder-Vass 2007a: 31-34, 2010: 115-168; Kaidesoja 2013: 312-19; Hall & Soskice 2001: 9; Streeck &

Thelen 2005: 9).

Importantly, it is critical to take into account both of these two dimensions when treating modern statehood – that is, both the more concrete, visible organizational apparatuses of the state and its more transfactual and functional institutionalized existence. Arguably, as this study shall continuously maintain, a productive way of grasping the state’s simultaneous organizational and institutional presence – is to conceive it as a ‘corporate actor’ (on this term, see notably Coleman 1974, 1982).

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Unlike ‘natural persons’ (Coleman 1982: 19), and some but not all organizations,³⁰ corporate actors have a transcendental legal status and codification; as juridical/legal persons, corporate actors inter alia operate with a heightened degree of: (1) ‘replacability’ of natural persons (Coleman 1974: 35-38, 1982:

26-7) – i.e. put in the presented emergentist vocabulary, the corporate actor, having emergent higher-level properties, structurally lowers the importance of the specific quality of the lower-higher-level entities (see also Elder-Vass 2007a: 31-34); (2) actorness/agency/personhood – i.e. capacity for ‘unitary action’ or

‘coherent, goal-directed action’ (Coleman 1982: 33); (3) abstractness, providing them with an unusual transfactual and transcendental quality.

Importantly, the emergent ‘corporate’ character of the state critically complicates a purely empiricist conception of statehood – in other words, it provides an independent basis for rejecting ‘flat’

or non-stratified ontological perspectives. As shall be elaborated upon later, this implies a rejection of the largely ‘phenomenalist’ so-called neo-Weberian state perspective (e.g., Evans et al. 1985a), which tends to (over)stress Max Weber’s definitional/nominal account of the state and his programmatic emphasis on its organizational ‘means’.³¹ Specifically, both the relational organization of the state’s lower-level properties and the temporal separability of prior ‘structural conditioning’ and later agentic dynamics critically complicate the establishment of a 1:1 relationship between the state’s individually non-exhaustive components, their synthetic organization and the final contingent empirical manifestation of this in the form of an institutional-organizational whole. The transcendental and transfactual character of the state renders it not only much more than an identifiable organizational apparatus (as in the neo-Weberian view) but, more importantly here, makes it necessarily different from merely government (or occasionally party politics), as sometimes commonsensically proposed in the governance perspective. As shall be argued repeatedly, this empiricist tendency of failing to take into account the emergent corporate quality of modern statehood generally inhibits scholars’ ability to productively construe governance as an alternative historically specific modality of state-crafting.

30 One can perhaps say that while all corporate actors are also necessarily organizations, the reverse is not necessarily true (cf. Coleman 1982: 33).

31 Although he occasionally falls prey to the above mentioned epistemic fallacy, a proper reconstruction of Weber’s broader substantial historically informed work, as also undertaken in, for example, Dusza (1989) and Anter (2014), shows him implicitly operating with a social-theoretically appropriate emergentist understanding of modern statehood.

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As already hinted at earlier, the critical realist understanding of emergence also has implications for another perennially important and perhaps ultimately unsolvable question in social theory, namely how to treat the relationship between structure and agency. Importantly, the particular ways in which emergentism and the structure-agency question deeply intertwine in the critical realist perspective implies that both so-called ‘individualism’ and ‘holism’ should be rejected. Firstly, as mentioned, both Elder-Vass’ synchronic form of relational emergentism and Archer’s (1998: 376-7) morphogenetic approach implies the necessary operation of irreducible extra-individual higher-level causal properties.

Secondly, it also follows from the presented form of emergentism that macro-causal arguments – pertaining to ‘social facts’, systems, structures, societies, fields, functions, networks, organizations, etc.

– cannot meaningfully refuse to make, as Porpora (1998: 348) puts it, ‘reference to individual behavior’. Just as it is the case that ‘any entity’s emergent properties depend upon its being composed of a collection of lower-level entities that are its necessary parts and on the properties of those parts’

(Elder-Vass 2010: 19, emphases added), one can say that, as Bhaskar (1998: 216, emphasis added, 214) points out, ‘[s]ociety does not exist independently of human activity’ and ‘that such activity would not occur unless the agents engaging in it had a conception of what they were doing’.³²

Let me – by way of also going beyond critical realist reflections – specify this initial position. On the one hand, the acceptance of sui generis emergentist powers means that one can defensibly operate with authentic ‘macro-mechanisms’ (Kaidesoja 2013: 310-13) or processes of an ‘institutional’ or

‘social-organizational’ kind causally working ‘above the individual or elementary social level’

(Jepperson & Meyer 2011: 62). Clearly, if ‘individual-level microfoundationalism’ minimally implies

‘that all causal powers ascribed to social groups are ontologically reducible to the aggregates of casual powers of their individual members’ (Kaidesoja 2013: 308, emphasis removed), and if methodological individualism entails that ‘facts about societies, and social phenomena generally, are to be explained solely in terms of facts about individuals’ (Bhaskar 1998: 208) – or, as Elster (1982: 454, emphasis removed) seems to advocate, the necessary search for a ‘purposive actor’ – the above emergentist view rules out all (meaningful) versions of either perspectives.

On the other hand, as mentioned, the existence of some kind of agentic activity is necessary: there should always be ‘micro-instantiations’, micro-level events/objects/forces that are ‘present and

32 One can perhaps add to Bhaskar’s last point concerning agents having a ‘conception of what they were doing’

that this conception obviously need not be an accurate or normatively desirable one.

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operative’ and processes ‘working through individual actors’ (Jepperson & Meyer 2011: 66, 67). But, as pointed out, even though society – or any other form of ‘social fact’ – ‘exists only in virtue of [individuals’] activity’ it is nevertheless ‘irreducible to people’ (Bhaskar 1998: 214, 206). Moreover, as Jepperson & Meyer (2011: 67) argue, ‘microfoundations must be distinguished from explanation’ – that is, it is important not to confound two overlapping yet critically separate issues, namely (1) the selected level/unit of analysis and (2) questions of causation and explanation.³³ Although perhaps correlated in some way, these two dimensions are not identical: providing ‘micro-instantiations’ of a certain process – i.e. placing one’s explanation, at least momentarily, at a relatively lower level of analysis (focusing, e.g., on detailed micro action) – is not the same as providing ‘causal arguments at the level of individuals conceived as actors’ (Ibid.: 67, emphasis removed). In other words, the existence of micro-level activity does not necessarily imply that it has ‘explanatory centrality’ (Ibid.).

Of course, while there is not necessarily a relevant micro-causal mechanism being activated higher-level emergent explanations are arguably all else equal relatively more convincing if they are supplemented with some kind of micro-level ‘instantiations’ of the proposed relevant process (cf.

Jepperson & Meyer 2011: 66; Kaidesoja 2013: 315). Importantly, though, this study does not necessarily agree with Jepperson & Meyer’s (2011: 66; although cf. 68) claim that while explanation and microfoundationalism should be disentangled, it is nevertheless a ‘(legitimate) requirement’ to be

‘able to illustrate micro-instantiations of any process’. This seems to be too strong an obligation; as Kaidesoja (2013: 316) for example argues: ‘[I]n many explanatory studies on large-scale macro-phenomena, it is sufficient that we have a general understanding [of] how the collective agents of this kind function (…) and empirically grounded reasons to believe that the macro-phenomenon of interest was causally generated by the interactions of this kind of collective agents with emergent powers’. The decision of what unit of analysis to focus on – or, relatedly, how abstract the study should be – cannot be decided a priori but is contingent on a number of factors, such as: (1) pragmatic considerations (time, space, skills, data, style, etc.);³⁴ (2) analytical considerations (the specific questions being

33 It is arguably uncertain whether, for example, Rose & Miller (1992), as dominant exponents of the neo-Foucauldian literature (with its advocacy of the search for more micro-level ‘mobile’ and ‘diverse’ practices of government), are able to appropriately distinguish between these two dimensions.

34 As Kaidesoja (2013: 316) for example argues, micro-level corroboration ‘requires the uses of different methods and data from the explanatory studies on large-scale macro-phenomena’.

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asked/studied);³⁵ (3) causal/ontological considerations (whether one thinks that the chosen unit of analysis is where, as Jepperson & Meyer’s (2011: 68) would formulate it, the relevant ‘causality lies’).

It makes sense to now return to another issue which likewise obviously cannot be treated entirely abstractly (for early arguments in this vein, see Mills 1959: especially chapter 2), namely the earlier overall question of the relative weighing between structure and agency. As shall be seen throughout the study, this question critically hinges on at least the following four aspects. Firstly, the structure-agency issue obviously depends on the specific question(s) being asked. Secondly, and equally obviously, the relative strength of either structure or agency critically depends on the specific sphere, location, point in time, constellation, actor, etc., one is focused on studying (see also Berger & Offe 1982: 524). A movie director all else equal has more causal leverage (i.e., ‘agency’) than an ordinary citizen trying to alter global CO2 emissions through her/his individual consumption behavior. Thirdly, and relatedly, it is productive to make a simple analytical distinction – which many scholars involved in the structure-agency debate, surprisingly, fail to properly consider – between what might be described as local agency and global agency. Whereas local agency refers to a persons’ capacity for positively affecting and cognitively supervising certain highly geographically and causally circumscribed parochial events or processes, global agency denotes a person’s capacity to positively and genuinely affect, change, control or help restructure the key dynamics of certain geographically and causally encompassing and comprehensive large-scale social structures (i.e., systems, organizations, institutions, networks, etc.).

Importantly, as shall be pointed out later, the two types of agency do not necessarily move in tandem.

Fourthly, implicitly in line with much historically inclined literature it makes sense to speak of a Weberian-like historical-temporal evolutionary logic of ‘path dependency’ connected to causally emergent social structures (more generally) and concrete institutional-organizational constellations (more specifically), which, at least within their circumscribed extra-individual domains, over time tends to lessen the general causal significance of individual actors and spontaneous human interaction.³⁶ In other words, the type of higher-level sui generis emergent powers that have been treated above is not only simply temporally situated; tendentially speaking, emergentist powers become increasingly

35 As Jepperson & Meyer (2011: 68, emphasis in original) at one point argue – although this conflicts with their earlier point about this being a requirement – ‘one may go on to seek micro-foundations if it is analytically useful to do so’.

36 For a particular and formalized conceptualization of ‘path dependency’, see Mahoney (2000: 510-11).

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accumulated and concentrated over time within a specific social structure/constellation. Specifically, organizations may be singled out as extreme examples of this temporal concentration process; as argued earlier, organizations/collective agents can be taken as ‘plausible candidates’ for higher-level emergent mechanisms (Kaidesoja 2013: 312, 313-16). Organizations not only ‘have real emergent causal powers that materially affect social events’ (Elder-Vass 2010: 168, 2007a: 32) but also, more specifically, coordinate relationships between humans through the explicit/implicit codification of ‘roles’. In other words, organizations (and, in particular, mature and formalized corporate actors) and their proliferation – or what can be described, following Coleman’s (1974, 1982) overall analysis, as a both quantitatively and qualitatively heightened societal corporatization – all else equal tend to reduce the importance of the distinct attributes of individual actors. As shall be seen in the next section discussing state functionalism, this generally inverse relationship between emergent corporatization and agency – the implications of which I shall return to many times – provides an independent justification for a state functionalist perspective.