The objects considered by the social
sciences are complex in the sense that event intellectually it is impossible to
list the characteristics that would exhaustively describe a society, an
organization or even a group of moderate size. This mean that we have to select
and simplify. Some simplifications are inevitable in so far as they are
directly imposed by the subject we are dealing with. Once I am interested in a
question relating to a society rather than that society as such (for example,
why is it economically stagnant?) a certain number of characteristics can be
eliminated as irrelevant to the matter in hand. But is not always easy to
determine in advance whether a feature is relevant to a problem or not.
Geographical factors may be either unimportant, or conversely they be of
crucial significance (as in the case of Colombia in chapter 3).
In reality, the relevance of a
characteristic can only be decided a posteriori, once it has proved possible to
construct a theory enabling us to explain the stagnation of the society we are
examining, if that is the problem we are addressing ourselves to. Such a theory
will be more or less complex, depending on the circumstances, and more or less
convincing. In any case, it will take the form of a set of propositions in
which stagnation will be seen as the result of a certain number of
characteristics – A, B, C. . . N – of the society under consideration. In
general, there will not be many of them (at least in relation to the
theoretical and ideal set of characteristics that would provide an exhaustive
description of the society) and they will also be interlinked in a certain way.
Since they are few in number and form a more or less coherent whole, it will
often be said, as a result of an understandable association of ideas that they
make up the structure of the society.
Such a label is, once again, both
natural and useful. The notion of structure certainly brings to mind the notion
of a ‘set of basic characteristics’. It also contradicts the idea of a random
collection. This means that when we talk about a structure in the sense under
discussion at the moment, we certainly see, by virtue of the fact that they come
together as a whole, its structural elements as interdependent or as helping to
produce the effect that is being studied. The danger is, however, that the
nation of structure is virtually synonymous with that of essence and might in
this context suggest that the ‘essential’ features or the ‘structural’ data incorporated
in to the theory describe the ‘underlying reality’ of the society in question and
that all else is simply trivial ‘appearance’. The ‘realism’ of interpretations
of this kind is, as we shall see, unhelpful and dangerous.
In the rest of this chapter, we
shall look at, in turn, the problems raised by the notions of ‘structural laws’
and the ‘structural causes’ of change.
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