Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action

White, Harrison C.

ISBN 10: 069100398X / ISBN 13: 9780691003986

Editore: Princeton University Press, 1992

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Codice articolo S_433145447

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action
• Editore: Princeton University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 1992
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 069100398X
• ISBN 13: 9780691003986
• Rilegatura: paperback
• Condizione: Acceptable

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

In proposing a comprehensive network theory that cuts across the range of social sciences, Harrison White rejects conventional hierarchical models and focuses instead on efforts of control in a social structure described as a tangle of locked-in practices. He argues that the widely held conceptions of person and goal grounded in traditional political economy do not provide a basis for social theory that is either coherent or consistent with current developments in psychology and anthropology. White replaces person with identity, which, in a distinctively human sense, emerges from frictions and social noise across different levels and disciplines in networks. Likewise he reshapes the notion of goals, maintaining that they merely inhabit sets of stories used to explain agency, and that action itself comes through selective strategies to break through formal organization. As his main empirical basis, White uses case studies covering a wide range of topics, including tribal religions, changing rhetorics of industrial administration and the premodern Church, practices of State-building, and change of style in popular music. His analyses draw from English social anthropology, natural science, French rhetorics, mathematics, German industrial history, control engineering, and American pragmatism.

Contenuti

	List of Figures
	Preface
1	Introduction to Identity and Control	3
	Identities from Contingencies	5
	Control and Decoupling	9
	Scope and Terms of Social Organization	14
2	Disciplines	22
	Pecking Orders	23
	Three Species from Valuation Orderings	28
	Embedding and Variations	32
	Interfaces	38
	Arenas	48
	Councils	54
	Catnets for Black Hole in Index Space	60
3	Network and Stories	65
	Ties and Stories	66
	Tracings of Social Space	70
	Network as Population	78
	Types of Tie	84
	Blockmodels of Structural Equivalence	93
	Ambiguity versus Ambage	102
4	Institutions	116
	Village Caste and University Science	118
	Boundaries	126
	Values	136
	Corporatism	142
	Clientelism	150
	Norman Feudalism	156
	Positions across Role Frames	160
5	Styles and Person	166
	Styles	167
	Profiles	177
	Entourages	191
	Persons	196
	Careers	212
	Professionalism and Regimes	222
6	Getting Action	230
	Further Control in Time	232
	Hieratic Styles	237
	Agenda for Agency	245
	Getting Action	254
	Dual Hierarchy and Servile Elite	267
	General Management	273
	Annealing	281
7	Rhetoric and Theory	287
	Rhetorics and Systems	288
	Rationality	297
	History and Natural Science as Guides	303
	Identity and Control	312
	Appendix 1: One Hundred Topics	317
	Conjectures 1-27	317
	Speculations 1-19	321
	Questions 1-54	323
	Appendix 2: Some Models	328
A	Disciplines and Networks	328
B	Space-Times	337
C	Persons as Kalman Filters	346
	Appendix 3: List of Software	350
	Works Cited	351
	Index	415