A Jeanne Site
A Jeanne Site
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: September 18, 1999
Faculty on the Site.
Calhoun's Discussion of "Administered" Society
Problems with Recognition of Identity in the Academy:
A Specific Application of Calhoun's Politics of Identity and Recognition
Essay on Calhoun's Discussion of Theory's Major Role in Interpretation
Add link to positivism
add links to Arrigo citations
add Peter Steinfels article on the Economist
"Administered" society is a term we have borrowed from Craig Calhoun. He uses it in his interpretation of Habermas' concern over the extent to which the public today is prepared to carry on public discourse. Habermas' concept of legitimacy through good faith discourse requires the synthesis of many factors.
Habermas believes sincerely in rational discourse, in our ability to think and talk our way through the crises of community and individual needs and freedoms. But he is a philosopher, with little experience of the nuts and bolts of making discourse happen, on all levels, like our site.
Calhoun reminds us that much of our work experience has shifted from doing and making things to servicing things and supervising people. Manufacturing jobs are still disappearing. Work is changing. Calhoun describes Habermas' thinking thus: "[T]he boundaries between state and society had been increasingly collapsed," Habermas thought, " . . . Social decisions were increasingly removed from the rational-critical discourse of citizens in the political public sphere and made the province of negotiation (rather than discourse proper) among bureaucrats, credentialed experts, and interest group elites."
A professor on one of our campuses was recently overheard to say: "It used to be that we told the registrar what to do about students' grades. Now the registrar tells us what to do." We understand this as an example of the administered society, and as illustrative of how the public has come to accept being "supervised," told what to do, instead of working together to govern its own behavior.
Narratve and learning identity have been primary in our concerns with dealing with today's student. Both "narrative" and "identity" are terms that have been adapted to a variety of disciplines in a variety of contexts. In this brief essay, we want to focus on Craig Calhoun's description of the fact that the "morally charged subjectivity [of identity] is not in all respects uniquely modern", [though that] "does not stop it from being distinctively modern." (op.cit., at p. 194) What we understand by that is elaborated further by Calhoun in the context of recognition of identity as the recognition of our "self-knowledge," our self-image by the authoritative context in which that self functions. Calhoun gives as an example the validation of the Bishops of the Catholic Church by the symbols of their office and their recognition by the authoritative body of the Church and those who acknowledge it. Calhoun cites Bourdieu: "[T]he clariity of earlier identity schemes . . . has allowed schemes of understanding and normative order to appear as doxic, as simply given, rather than merely orthodox, or authoritatively defended, let alone heterodox and implicitly contested. (citation omitted; quoting from Calhoun, op.cit, at p. 195.
Through most of our work, through the Amsterdam paper on the co-optation of programs designed for minorities, through our elaboration of writing techniques and critical thinking techniques for what were generally referred to as non-traditional students, we were concerned primarily about discrimination, about labeling or self-fulfilling prophecy effects as the non-traditional student tried to express a new narrative of learning, define a new normative order. Status characteristic theory (Cohen, cite Formal Theory in Sociology), Katz' work with bi-racial groups, reported in Social Class, Race, and Psychological Development, and recent material on expectation theory (should support - need citations) led us to the concern for redefining and gaining recognition for an identity within a hostile expectation climate.
We spoke of deconstruction in the sense of providing students with opportunities to perform which contradicted the negative expectations that were commonly voiced within the academy and in the press with respect to "non-traditional students. Much of our recent work with criminology theory has led us to recognize, as Calhoun is saying, than no identities are stable and safe anymore in the postmodern era. But part of the problem that has been encountered in higher education with the non-traditional student stems not from the non-traditional student him/herself and the identity he/she is trying to narrate, fit to the more traditional normative ordering patterns propagated by the institution, and have recognized. Part of the problem stems from the identity instability of the faculty, the professionals of the academy, whose professionalism has been denied, who have been maligned publicly in the press and by the dissipation of their faculty governance system.
This means that not only do we have to take into account the bright rat/dull rat dichotomy of self-fulfilling prophecy that Tolman so thoroughly illustrated, but we must also take into account that the bright rat/dull rat syndrom is now being applied to faculty and is causing major instability in the interdependent relationships of teacher and student in the academy. Bright rat=corporate manage, profit producer; dull rat=expensive senior worker.
This is a draft process text. . . We will be developing it. . . July 17, 1999
We have been discussing the role of theory in relation to policy and practice. Calhoun, in Critical Social Theory, provides us with a way to understand that relationship while situating it along the positivism - critical theory - posmodernism continuum.
"Most social science is decription of the familiar social world with slightly differing contexts and particulars. . ."(Calhoun, Critical Social Theory, at. p. 3) Our formulation of theory is drawn in large measure from that "familiar social world" as we perceive it through our presently accepted theories of how the world works.
Calhoun reminds us that theory is more than just interconnected ideas about the patterns we can identify in the social setting we are trying to describe and predict. Such interconnection, he says, is much like a taxonomy, a categorization. He suggests that social theory is much more than that, resulting sometimes in our systematizing "in a more theoretical way, one that argues for an underlying order that cannot be found in any of the surface characteristics of its objects." This is a little like "the whole is more than the sum of its parts." In developing an overview, in seeking to situate the factual patterns within larger patterns, we are sometimes able to make better sense of the whole, and, in consequence, of its parts.
Calhoun (op. cit., at. p. 3) speaks of Hume's recognition that there are limits to what empiricism can offer us in explanations of our world: "Hume showed . . . the essential place of theory and the limits of empiricism as a source of certain knowledge." Theory removes us from the concrete factual or empirical situation long enough and well enough to let us imagine explanations we might never have seen while caught up in the empirical world.
Barbara McClintock, recipient of the 1993 Nobel prize in medicine, is described in Evelyn Fox Keller's A Feeling for the Organism, as refusing to allow anyone to make her laboratory observations in her place:
"Without being able to know what it was I was integrating, I understood the phenotype. . . . Since here days as a graduate student, she had always carried out the most labourious parts of her investigations herself, leaving none of the labor, however onerous or routine, to others. . . . For McClintock, more than pride was involved. Her virtuosity resided in her capacity to observe, and to process and interpret what she observed. As she grew older, it became less and less possible to delegate any part of her work; she was developing skills that she could hardly identify herself, much less impart to others." (A Feeling for the Organism, at p. 103.)
Great inventions, great discoveries go beyond the factual observations that can be ritualized and which others can be trained to record. Theory can take us to places of imagination from which we can discover new perspectives, new solutions. So can "history, language, and everyday culture."
Narratives provide the social texture for recreating the situation, providing theorists the opportunity to determine "how prior events or actions limit and orient subsequent ones." (Calhoun, Critical Social Theory, at p. 4) Narratives provide detail to our data, permitting us to see interpretations that might not have been seen when those data were collected. And narrative often provides clues to new channels of discovery.
Calhoun refers in his Introduction to the difficulty of choosing a single approach to social theory to which one can swear absolute allegiance. Like Calhoun, Dear Habermas faced that same dilemma. We chose both Habermas and Postmodernism, but neither with any intention of excluding from our study or our solutions the others. We do not adhere to what Calhoun calls "the absolute otherness" of the postmodern. Nor do we even pretend to acceptance of a positivism that accepts Truth as discernible by an objective scientist with an unacknowledged perspective.
Calhoun, in Critical Social Theory takes a reasoned path, with careful scrutiny of the arguments made on both sides. The balance, the honesty, the thoroughness with which he addresses each theoretical approach has been a tremendous help to me, as I hope it will be to our students.
Calhoun speaks of the problems inherent in universality. Recall that universal laws governing the social world were what enlightenment originally sought. "The attempt to construct universal truths or norms followed from the "rupture in unquestioned, "doxic" acceptance of traditions that constituted not multiple truths and commensurable values but simply Truth and Value.