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What do social scientists do in their accounts?
I feel that the best way to appreciate the meta-theoretical claims of the previous chapter is to look at several examples of social science up close and to show what kinds of explanations and powers are being talked about.
Weber’s Protestant Ethic
Of course, Weber’s “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” is well known as a reply to Marxism. Weber is intent on proving that it is not just economic and material factors which determine history. Ideas are crucially important. What I find particularly interesting about the explanation is the way it turns on an assumption about human nature and in some ways prefigures later conceptual schemes based on “discourses” or “habitus”.
Weber begins the book by emphasizing just how unique modern Western capitalism is and saying how much it differs from similar forms of commercialism in other cultures. To some extent this fact of itself is used to support the view that Protestant Christianity was one of the major social forces bringing about capitalism. Capitalism was a unique new thing and something major. It must have been caused by something equally important, and, in some way, new, breaking in on the Mediaeval world. Calvinism fits. It was an important development and it was significantly different from Catholic Christianity. To establish its importance, he writes that Calvinism “was the faith over which the great political and cultural struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were fought in the most highly developed countries” (Weber 1970: 98). He points to the way protestants attempted to bring asceticism into everyday life. This, he remarks, was “unquestionably new” (Weber 1970: 80, 117).
This argument makes sense if it is believed that causes and effects are necessarily connected. If a major event occurs, one seeks its cause in the development of some new thing of equal importance. If there is a bright flash of light and a door slams, it makes sense to begin by looking at how these events may be connected causally. An argument of this kind is merely plausible. By itself, it is far from convincing.
Weber backs up this argument with a complex explanation of the connections between Protestantism and capitalism. In this he refers to social and individual powers and makes more use of inductive arguments. Weber takes the “Protestant movement” or “Protestantism” to be a social force. In other words, it is a “power” - which is seen as lying behind a great number of everyday social events. Like every power it is defined in terms of its direction or tendency. The Protestant movement is a social force, which can be defined and understood in terms of some of the key ideas that it promoted. So it is the social force that tends to promote and explicate these ideas. But as becomes clear, it is not just the promotion of ideas as a set of idle statements, which is the sole effect of the Protestant movement; it also lies behind certain kinds of action. Weber finds the ideas that define the movement in the writings of Protestant churchmen such as Calvin, Luther and Baxter. He uses a fairly loose argument to show that these ideas were widely received and that the people he quotes were successful in promoting these ideas. For instance, he quotes Luther, because it is well known that he founded an important Protestant sect. He thinks Baxter is important and representative because he had a key position close to government and his books were widely read.
When discussing Baxter, he says that “religious forces express themselves through such channels” and become “the decisive influences in national character” (Weber 1970: 155). An ambivalence that is characteristic of much writing in the social sciences is very manifest in this and the surrounding passages.
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On the other hand, the fact that this social force can also be conceived as being made up of actions chosen by individual agents is also apparent in an earlier sentence in the same paragraph. Here, he says that “the clergyman, through his ministry, Church discipline, and preaching, exercised an influence” which nowadays we find hard to imagine (Weber 1970: 155).
In this earlier formulation, the clergyman is not just a “channel” through which religious forces are expressed but an active agent who exercises influence.
In the previous chapter I considered the relevance of these two conceptualizations within agentic and determinist poststructuralism. Agentic poststructuralism emphasizes the individual as an active agent, while determinist poststructuralism treats individual action as an effect and presents the social force, the discourse, as primary.
My own view is that neither conceptual framework should be taken as primary and “real” at the expense of the other. Social forces are both real as social forces and also consist of the actions and choices of individual people. We are more certain of the actions of individuals and we induce the existence of social forces from these actions. But, on the other hand, we cannot really understand the actions of individuals without talking about social forces. We do this in everyday accounts of action, not just in the social sciences. So these two accounts of social reality inform each other; are in some respects contradictory ways of looking at reality; but are both indispensable and have to be taken as part of our view of reality.
To attest to the impact of these ideas, Weber mentions the political struggles fought over Calvinist beliefs – in other words, these beliefs affected social actions. He extracts from this history evidence of a particular kind of belief and of the social actions that accompanied it. He finds a common emphasis within different puritan sects on everyday asceticism. The idea of a “calling” or an everyday employment to which one is called by God, is common to Lutherans, Calvinists, Pietists, Methodists and Baptists (Weber 1970: 79, 80, 133, 139). He goes on to argue that these ideas were also expressed in conduct. For example, puritans in positions of political power banned spontaneous festive events.
The second stage of Weber’s argument links the religiously inspired behaviour of protestants with a pattern of secular practice. This link is made through an assumption about human nature. Weber argues that if a person acts in an ascetic manner out of religious conviction, then this mode of action becomes part of their character. The ascetic character then, is built out of certain patterns of action that were initially inspired by religious ideas. However this ascetic character will also become a fixed part of personality and continue to operate – even if the religious ideas that initially inspired it diminish in their force. I will outline the argument before discussing it as meta-theory.
With the Protestant elimination of confession, there was no chance of salvation unless you were one of God’s elect. To prove to yourself that you were one of this elect, you had to show this closeness to God through a pattern of conduct. This pattern of conduct had to be godly in every respect. By behaving in this way you could become as certain as possible that you were in fact one of the elect – a life of good works became evidence of being chosen by God. “The God of Calvinism demanded of his believers not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified system” (Weber 1970: 117). This is the religious set of ideas, which Weber takes as the starting point of his account.
Action according to this set of ideas can also be specified outside of this religious content. Calvinism “attempted to subject man [sic] to the supremacy of a purposeful will, to bring his actions under constant self-control with a careful consideration of their ethical consequences” (Weber 1970: 119). Weber uses this description to abstract the consequences for a psychological formation of character that arose out of practices initially inspired by religion.
The Puritans, like every rational type of asceticism, tried to enable a man to maintain and act upon his constant motives, especially those which it taught him itself, against the emotions. In this formal psychological sense of the term it tried to make him into a personality. (Weber 1970: 119)
Elsewhere he talks about this personality structure as a “national character” – in other words a personality type that is common throughout the nation (Weber 1970: 155).
What Weber uses here is a fairly specific theory about human nature. This is not in itself defended, but is assumed by Weber, almost as though common knowledge. Implied is that the character formation that is created through a certain set of practices can last and have effects even if the ideas that originally inspired it are no longer relevant. It is the character structure itself that is primary in an individual’s action over the long term – not the ideas that inspired the actions that formed that character in the first place. Weber assumes this analysis of human nature here but it is also confirmed by his historical analysis.
This character structure can be expressed in economic activity, not just in good works as specified in the religious belief system. As such, this character structure is manifest as “the spirit of capitalism”; another social force according to Weber. Systematic and rational self-control combined with asceticism becomes the systematic pursuit of wealth. Asceticism is expressed as the limitation of consumption.
To provide evidence of this spirit of capitalism, Weber refers to a set of ideas, which seem to express this secular version of the character structure created by Protestantism in the first place. He takes Benjamin Franklin as a key author who expresses a view, which has wide currency. Benjamin Franklin expresses the idea of a “duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself”. Franklin recommends “the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment”. Weber takes Franklin to be a representative writer because he “called forth the applause of a whole people” (Weber 1970: 52,53,56). He also refers to other parallels between Franklin’s secular ethic and the original Protestant position. For example, Franklin’s exhortations against wasting time, which mirror exactly statements by early Protestant writers.
Weber sees Protestantism as a social force as something which has tendencies, which are by no means foreseen by members of the movement. Nor are these consequences even wanted. According to Weber, Franklin’s writings about making money would have been seen as irreligious by early Protestants:
We shall thus have to admit that the cultural consequences of the Reformation were to a great extent … unforeseen and unwished for results of the labours of the reformers (Weber 1970: 90).
Yet according to this analysis, there is a link here. In other words, the social force (Protestantism) has effects, which the individuals constituting it do not want.
This possibility is itself explained through a theory about individual action and behaviour. According to the theory of human nature being made use of here, actions form character and character outlasts the ideas which inspire the original actions. This is stated as a fact about individuals in their own lifetimes but clearly Weber also has in mind the intergenerational and social transmission of character structure in social reproduction. So across generations too, this character structure lasts better than the ideas that originally inspired it.
Clearly, for me, one of the interesting aspects of this explanation is its covert assumption of a theory of human nature. Weber does not state this as a theory of human nature yet the analysis completely depends on making assumptions about the relationships between ideas, actions and character that together constitute a theory about human nature. What is also interesting is the way that subsequent theoretical frameworks tend to make a similar assumption even if they frame these insights quite differently.
Let us now engage in some mapping. Can we state Weber’s hypothesis within the meta-theoretical framework set up by Foucault and poststructuralism? We will take the case presented by Weber as an example of what Foucault refers to as a fact of discourse. A discourse can move from one kind of political strategy to another.
We would make “asceticism” or “rational self-control” the discourse, firmly pinning a set of abstracted ideas to a set of actions – the discourse including both the ideas in their most general form and the actions that embody that discourse. We could say that this discourse is first manifest as socially significant in the actions of early Protestants and the set of ideas that went with that – ideas about salvation, the calling and spontaneous pleasures being abhorrent to God. However the discourse then changes its form and a new set of actions (a new strategy) is manifest in the new version of the discourse, which comes to back up asceticism and rational self-control in the context of economic activity.
In this analysis we have made the consistency of the “discourse” of asceticism and rational control of everyday life the key explanatory factor rather than character structure. We have looked at an early version of that discourse in Protestantism and its change to a new strategy in relation to capitalism. I am not saying that these are exactly the same theories but what is interesting is how many of the insights of Weber’s analysis can be mapped onto a poststructuralist conceptual scheme. I would also argue that Foucault’s insistence on the primacy of discourse and on the unconscious and practical elements of discourse fits well with the theory of human nature that Weber uses. What lasts is not a specific set of ideas, or even a specific set of moral conclusions, but a combination of patterns of actions, unconscious tendencies and subjectivities. We can refer to this as the discovery of the continuity of discourse if we like - but what makes sense of this continuity is an idea about human nature.
It could be equally possible to map Weber’s concept of “character” as a kind of habitus in Bourdieu’s sense. It is a disposition that is partly unconscious and allows the subject to discriminate between a range of activities and specify those which are valued and are to be sought within the habitus. As with a habitus it is transferable across contexts. In Bourdieu’s Distinction, a habitus can specify an “easy going” style of cooking and be transferred to another context to specify an “easy going” style of furniture. So the protestant ethic is a habitus that can be transferred from the religious to the economic realm to specify which kinds of economic actions are to be valued as “hard working”, “ascetic” and the like.
The final step in Weber’s argument is to say how these character traits affected economic activity. He makes this argument through an example. Considering the continental textile industry, he argues that the traditionalistic businessmen of the early capitalist period conducted business in a leisurely way – with the extent of output and profit, the circle of customers and the relationships with workers all set by tradition. At a certain point “this leisureliness was suddenly destroyed” (Weber 1970: 67). The key factor was the personality of a key business owner, a young businessman affected by the “new spirit, the spirit of modern capitalism” (Weber 1970: 68). Such a person would conduct business by making every effort to increase profits through rational conduct. What would follow was that “those who would not follow suit would go out of business” (Weber 1970: 68). Following from events like this was an increase of wealth and productive output throughout capitalist society:
When the limitation of consumption is combined with this release of acquisitive activity, the inevitable practical result is obvious: accumulation of capital through ascetic compulsion to save … making possible the productive investment of capital. (Weber 1970: 172)
He backs up this speculative assessment by looking at writings by Wesley who expressed concern that the adoption of Methodism led adherents to amass capital (Weber 1970: 175). Clearly he uses examples throughout to back up this analysis.
In terms of our interest in seeing what kinds of explanation are operating here, we should note that this argument turns on certain assumptions about the way a market operates. For example, that the young businessman who is able to sell cheaper products will gain market share at the expense of those who continue to sell at the traditional price. This is a law of economics, which is assumed to operate here rather than being demonstrated closely. This is by no means obvious. It is a social fact that money means something and that buyers will operate within a market framework to buy cheaper – rather than to use money to make confetti for weddings or only buy from people whose names start with “J” or whatever. In other words, what is being referred to here are social forces that are supposed to constrain action within the pattern of a market economy. Charitably, we can suppose that Weber is not smuggling in an assumption that capitalist social relations already exist in order to explain the development of capitalism. We can take his argument to be the following. As Feudal society ended, various elements of the capitalist market were put in place. However, the “capitalist spirit” had to be added to get the take off in growth and industry that he wants to explain.
In terms of Weber’s own meta-theoretical categories there is no doubt that he takes this market economy as a structural force that constrains actions. It is an institution, which has various social powers. The power to make it most likely that people will buy cheaper products, for example, or that workers will be able to purchase goods with their wages to live. On the other hand, just as with Protestantism itself, this constraint can also be understood as coming out of a plethora of individual actions, which maintain and create these social powers.
We could also see the market economy as a “discourse” with its various sub-discourses, which operate to create subject positions and constrain as well as enable certain actions. The “buyer”, the “seller” and so on, are all subject positions within the market economy discourse. It is in Dorothy Smith’s sense a “textually mediated discourse” (Smith ) and one of its texts is money itself. The acts of coercive power which enforce property rights are also manifestations of people acting within the framework of this discourse - but are no more definitively acts of power than acts where no “coercion” takes place – where people exchange money to purchase goods or agree to a wage contract.
I have noted here that Weber’s argument turns on certain assumptions about human nature. I have argued that the whole concept of a “character” depends on a theory of human nature. It is a theory about character and its relation to ideas on the one hand and patterns of practice on the other. This is not the only place where ideas about human nature are present in this text. A key argument is that the spirit of capitalism is an “unnatural” development; something that does not flow naturally out of human nature and has to be explained as the product of a very specific social construction. This discussion is quite early in the text:
… the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment in life … is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational … Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naïve point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence. (Weber 1970: 53)
What is being assumed here is that human nature is composed of desires for spontaneous enjoyment, happiness and utility. Cross cultural study reveals that in other cultures these strong forces at work in human nature are expressed in social institutions and personality types. The fact that this is not the case in capitalist society deserves a special explanation. This argument is also implied in a later discussion of the usual pattern to be expected of employees in cultures not affected by the capitalist spirit. Weber begins by discussing the way it is often difficult to stimulate people to work harder by increasing the rate of payment for a given output – increasing piece rates. Instead of working harder, employees may work less to achieve an expected income:
A man does not “by nature” wish to earn more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose. Wherever modern capitalism has begun its work of increasing the productivity of human labour by increasing its intensity, it has encountered the immensely stubborn resistance of this leading trait of pre-capitalistic labour. (Weber 1970: 60)
Again, Weber, backs up his assumptions about human nature by pointing to a cross cultural reality of the behaviour of employees recruited from a wide variety of pre-capitalist cultures. It is also assumed in this account that “work” as it is being defined here in terms of wage labour is not enjoyed for its own sake. Work is being defined as what is felt to be unpleasant - only the necessity to earn money could induce participation. This simple use of the term “work” in itself pre-supposes a theory of human nature. What is necessary for capitalism to function is an attitude “which, at least during working hours, is freed from continual calculations of how the customary wage may be earned with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of exertion” (Weber 1970: 61-62). The terms “comfort” and “exertion” are terms that are tied to a theory of human nature. People seek comfort and avoid exertion. There is a cross cultural reality in which terms like comfort and exertion have a common meaning; these terms can be translated adequately from one cultural context to another. This translation is possible because of a shared human nature. This is not to say that Weber’s theory of human nature is necessarily correct or adequate. The important thing to realize is that his account, his explanation, fundamentally depends on it. Readers make sense of his account by understanding these assumptions and not finding them strange. This meta-theory is a background, which is shared by author and reader.
A last example of Weber’s use of concepts of human nature is his discussion of the impact of religion in the early years of the Protestant movement. He maintains this was a period in which “the after-life was not only more important, but in many ways also more certain than all the interests of this world” (Weber 1970: 109-110). In this context, it is not taken as surprising that people were motivated to action by “an anxious fear of death and the beyond” (Weber 1970: 107). We receive this account as understandable because we share Weber’s common sense view that humans fear death. We also believe that they try to avoid pain. Consequently we can understand that people who believed that they would suffer an eternity of torment in hell might try to avoid this fate. We take the belief itself as a cultural arbitrary and socially constructed but we take the fear of death and the desire to avoid “torments” as understandable in terms of human nature.
Pusey’s “Middle Australia”
Michael Pusey’s book, The Experience of Middle Australia (2003) was well liked by many Australian sociologists and also ended up by being quite a significant text in the political life of Australians. I will use it as an example of more recent writings by “working sociologists” that can be picked over to discern elements of sociological explanation; to discover the kinds of social objects that social scientists uncover and describe.
In discussing Pusey’s book, I have several aims. I first want to make the obvious point that Pusey is a typical social scientist in assembling everyday facts and making use of them to back up an analysis in terms of institutions and social forces. He certainly does not behave as though there is no cumulative knowledge in the social sciences as Flyvbjerg suggests. The second point I want to make is that a key argument of the book is really an ethical argument. He uses the everyday facts that he assembles and his broader picture of social forces to construct an argument about justice and the good life – that Australians are worse off as a result of neo-liberal policies implemented by government. He also wants to establish that this viewpoint is widely shared by the Australian people, despite continuing electoral support for the mainstream parties that have introduced neo-liberalism. Not only this, but at the heart of this discussion there is also a political philosophy. Pusey supports the functionalist claim that some inequality is a necessity to make society work well for all – at least where capitalism is concerned. But he questions the degree of inequality that exists with neo-liberal policies. What this argument relies upon is a notion of fairness and exploitation, of equivalence in work and share of the social product. I will argue that there are a number of ways in which these arguments rest on assumptions about human nature – about what benefits and what frustrates people; a humanist ethics which I will say more about in later chapters.
Social forces and the nature of evidence
In the first chapter, Pusey sets the scene with an overview of the economic reforms that are often referred to as economic rationalism.
… one must look for the social meaning of the massive structural changes that economic reform has unleashed on Australia. Economic engineering has mostly produced, or otherwise abetted, a seismic shift in the distribution of income, power and resources. (Pusey 2003: 6)
In what follows he first lists some of these changes, such as redistribution from the public to the private sector, or from wage and salary earners to corporations. In turn these summary statements are nailed down to specific statistical data coming from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Treasury and so forth, with various appendices and references directing the reader to these original sources. For example, the share of wages in “total factor income” declined from 61.7 percent to 54.1 percent between 1975 and 2000 and the share of profits rose from 16.0 to 23 percent.
As a kind of account of social change this shares much with Weber’s discussions of the impact of new practices of entrepreneurial work on the nature of the economy. It treats the economy as a kind of machine. The government enacts legislation (economic reform) and the economy responds with various changes in income, power and resources. This analysis of capitalism is not argued in detail, it depends to a large extent on theoretical understandings of social processes shared by Pusey and his readership. For example, that the removal of an arbitration of wages through collective agreements and awards, allows employers to drive down wages.
To document the “social meaning” of these changes, Pusey makes use of data from censuses that attempt to question every household, data that comes from information legally required to be submitted to governments by income earners through the tax system, and data from large random sample surveys. He also makes use of his own survey and of qualitative data and focus group data taken from a selection of those who are surveyed. These are the everyday facts through which he argues a broader picture of effects taken as a whole. In all this, there are a whole lot of assumptions being made here about the reliability of surveys to access the truth, the honesty of those being compelled to give information, the efficacy of sanctions against lying, the reliability of those working to collect data, the accuracy of mathematical processes being used to summarize the data. As Flyvbjerg says, the everyday facts of a social science account depend on a mass of assumptions which cannot all be explicit.
What is the meta-theory behind the treatment of capitalism as a kind of social machine – something which is evident in many parts of this analysis? It depends on the idea that institutions and structures are social objects, with powers to constrain action within certain predictable patterns. Taken down to a case-by-case analysis of people’s behaviour in particular instances, it undoubtedly draws on assumptions about human nature as well. For example, what is it that makes the various coercive and financial sanctions that keep these structures in place effective? Why are measures such as gaol and unemployment effective as sanctions? What is assumed by readers and the author is that people do not like constraints on their freedom of action or poverty and low status.
Just like Weber, Pusey establishes the action and existence of social forces through examples which document key events and processes. He traces the social forces that lie behind the legislative changes which amount to “economic reform”. He writes:
The wider interests of the nation and the people could never have been so thoroughly subordinated without a close partnership between the economic rationalists in Canberra and the peak organizations of big business. (Pusey 2003: 11)
A key organization is the Business Council of Australia. During the 1980s the secretariat of this organization and the senior members of the Treasury were together writing national budgets. The Business Council:
… successfully pushes for the maximum possible reduction of input costs to big business – ever lower wages, ever more labour ‘flexibility’, and ever lower levels of corporate taxation. (Pusey 2003: 11)
What is implied is that these measures and this organization work to promote the interests of big business. The ‘wider interests of the nation and the people’ and ‘the interests of domestic manufacturing’ are subordinated. Other interest groups – such as those representing small businesses, retailing and so on – are manipulated as pawns. The aim of the economic reform being pushed by this section of government and business is “to produce a maximum nation-wide dependency of both people and institutions on markets rather than upon particular sectional interests” (Pusey 2003: 11).
So what is combined in this discussion is a documentation of key events along with a theory of the nature of “interests” within the framework of capitalism. These are the interests of big business (to expand profits) and those of “the nation and people” – to live well by having a decent income and good working conditions. What animates this explanation is a sense that certain actors share certain real interests. An “interest group” is not just a group of people who say the same kind of things and act together. They are animated to an extent by a correct understanding of their sectional interests – what will benefit them. I will argue later in this chapter that it is impossible to unpack these ideas in detail without making use of concepts of human nature – something that specifies the concept of “benefit” in a way that is not completely nailed down to a particular social context.
What is also apparent is that you can have an interest without necessarily being aware of it. In other words, Michael Pusey is going to argue that this program is not in the “wider interests of the nation and the people” and is not just going to do that by seeing what people say in a survey about their interests – since people consistently voted for governments who carried out these programs. His argument about people’s “real” interests is not based on wild flights of fancy; he is assuming that it is not in people’s interests to have their wages cut and to have less economic security in their jobs. His book as a whole also goes on to document people’s concerns about the impact of the changes Pusey identifies – for example their sense of struggling to pay their mortgages. This data is evidence for this claim that these measures were not in people’s interest.
“Middle Australia” as political philosophy and ethics
This theory of a clash of interests is stated again early in the next chapter:
For the corporations and elites who drive the reform process, success means reconciling the people to whatever reduced relative incomes are deemed necessary to insure increasing shareholder returns (profits), investment and growth. For the people, on the other hand, success means – in some combination that it will be our purpose to examine – an adequate income and a just compensation for their contributions to the larger economy. (Pusey 2003: 19)
This statement relates the concept of a clash of interests to what are clearly ethical concepts – the people want an “adequate” income and “a just compensation” for their contribution. What is going on here? As a social scientist, is Pusey standing back and examining the ethical concepts that are current in popular discourse and just telling us that people do not believe their compensation is “adequate” or “just”, whatever that may mean to them? Or is he actually weighing into this debate himself and trying to establish that their compensation is not adequate and not just in fact? In the latter case, what he is trying to establish as a social scientist is what I shall refer to as an “ethical fact”. As I will suggest in future chapters, the ambivalence present here is typical of current social science as it has been affected by Hume’s view of ethics and by Weber’s arguments for ethical neutrality.
Let us begin by reading it as an attempt to nail the concept of class interest firmly to what people want – their conscious and manifest feelings. An “interest” is what people mean when they define “success”. Ordinary people define success as an adequate income and a just compensation. The capitalist class defines its interest as reducing incomes, because that is what “success” means for this class. These are meanings of “success” that are patent and can be found articulated. This understanding also informs the phrase “our purpose to examine”. The book as a whole will examine what people are saying about whether they feel they are getting an adequate income or getting just compensation for their contributions. So in doing this the research will be able to uncover people’s understandings about what their interests are – are their interests being served in the present situation or are they not getting an adequate income and just compensation?
Now, here is the second reading. The conceptual apparatus of this discussion is shared by Pusey the social scientist, those whose feelings he is revealing, and by the reader. This second framework assumes that there is a real meaning to concepts like a “just compensation” or a “contribution” that must be “compensated”. It is not just a matter of what people may say is a “just” compensation – clearly different groups could have very different views of this. No, there is a sense in which the social scientist will be able to determine what is in fact a just compensation. Such a framework treats people’s interests as an objective ethical fact – are they living well and being treated fairly, or not.
In this second reading, the concept of fairness is informed by an ethical theory like that of classical Marxism. The basic idea is that work in capitalism is a frustration of aspects of human nature. On the other hand, income can be used to purchase goods, things which can benefit people. In a fair or just transaction between two parties, the frustration on both sides is the same and the compensation or benefit is also the same. Marx argues that capitalism is fundamentally an “unjust” system because the work that people put in as workers is not paid back with an equivalent wage – one that allows you to consume products which embody the same amount of work that you had to put in yourself to earn the wage. The capitalist class appropriates the surplus and in doing this gains the power to own and renew the means of production.
My view is that Pusey writes as a typical social scientist of the present day in avoiding the different readings of these ethical issues outlined above. A lot of what he talks about makes most sense if we use the second analysis. There is really something that we can call fairness in an exchange and there really are some experiences in life which are in fact bad and to be avoided.
Let us argue for the moment that Pusey is using the same concept of fairness and just compensation as that used by Marx. However, while Marx concludes that the most ethical response is to abolish exploitation, Pusey sides with what has been called the “functionalist” argument for class inequality. This argument is that it is functionally necessary to have some inequality to ensure that the system of economic production functions in an optimum way to produce the largest possible social product. On the other hand, what Pusey also argues is that while some inequality may be necessary, too much inequality means that the degree of unfairness is excessive and that people (the ordinary Australian people) are not benefiting from their work as much as could be possible with a more equitable arrangement.
Pusey begins by noting the view of business elites that income inequality is necessary for society to function - “there must be an appropriate structure of incentives to reward individuals for striving and achievement” (Pusey 2003: 37). He goes on to argue that this view is shared by the Australian public at large. For example, in a 1987 survey people agreed that people would not take extra responsibility unless they were paid more. A more recent survey showed acceptance of the legitimacy of income differentials between various kinds of work. However within this shared framework the issue is the degree of inequality. The reforms that have taken place have strained the “limits of what Australians accept as legitimate”(Pusey 2003: 38). Pusey backs this up with his own survey and other polls.
My view is that this position only makes sense if you take the ethical issues seriously. “Fairness” is here a bedrock presumption against which other unequal arrangements are judged. It refers to what is spelled out in the Marxist account – the principle of equivalent returns for equivalent effort. Within the framework spelled out by business and the people alike, some kind of unfairness is necessary to make the capitalist system work – to provide the pie, which continues to grow and allow an increase in real consumption for the population as a whole. How much unfairness is necessary for this increase is one question. Another is whether some degree of fairness itself is worth a cost in efficiency – a diminution of the total pie for the sake of an increase in the smallest slices!
In every way, these are both ethical and factual questions. The social scientist cannot convincingly stand aside and merely report the debate. Pusey clearly sides with the population at large in believing that unfairness goes beyond functional necessity and uses his research to demonstrate the costs for the least unfortunate players, as well as to claim that the population broadly agrees with his own position. A central argument that the degree of inequality caused by economic reform in Australia is not functionally necessary is early in the book, where he compares models of capitalism:
… the Anglo-American libertarian model of free market capitalism is by no means the most successful among at least five different forms of ‘developed’ capitalism in the world today. (Pusey 2003: 9)
He claims German and Dutch “partnership” capitalism as the most successful. So this is a model of capitalism in which there is less inequality but the economy still functions well and growth continues. Given that capitalist societies reward occupational groups differentially, how does this affect economic growth? The argument is that some degree of occupational inequality has a positive affect on economic growth. The supposed mechanisms of this effect are the ones referred to in popular discussion - there is an incentive to take on responsibility; to engage in difficult training and so on. This “carrot and stick” model as Pusey calls it, works on some theory of human nature in which work (at least work in capitalist societies) is generally a burden, which will only be done conscientiously if relative rewards in the form of higher income are provided.
In this analysis of a just wage, people have a “real interest” in maintaining some inequality but not any more than what is necessary to maintain economic functioning. They are also taken as having an individual real interest in maximizing their income and reducing their work effort. A “just” compensation is the highest compensation that can be given to a particular occupation without undermining the degree of inequality necessary to produce what is considered an “acceptable” rate of growth in the economy as a whole. So people may indeed have different feelings or views about this but what they are debating is something quite concrete, which is both an ethical and a factual question.
One should also note that the concept of “contribution” trades on the idea that work is a burden rather than a pleasure. It is burdensome so you need something to “compensate” for this burden. The sense in which work is burdensome within capitalist economies is spelled out in Marx’s early writings in terms of concepts of human nature. At a common sense level the burdensome nature of work is signified by the fact that people usually leave their jobs when they win the lottery and no longer have any need of the cash payment.
The damage done
The discussion so far has been of the scaffolding in which Pusey places his central findings. Within this framework – the economy; interest groups; interests – he places his analysis of people’s feelings about these changes. These feelings are articulated in the social surveys he has conducted. As he points out, income levels in themselves do not tell us a lot about “subjective well-being, about wealth and real resources, enjoyment and satisfaction” (Pusey 2003: 26). Here what is being referred to are inner mental states, which the social scientist can discover by looking at various kinds of behaviour. In this case, filling in a survey and writing in comments or speaking in a focus group become a guide to internal mental states. Overall, his analysis is of the damage done by neo-liberalism. Again, I am claiming that his discussion refers to aspects of human nature, that terms like enjoyment and satisfaction are related by Pusey to specific situations which the reader can see as “bad” or “good” in relation to desires and drives common to humans as a species.
Pusey argues that those on higher incomes are more likely to be satisfied with their economic situation and this difference can be traced in the survey answers. Only one in twenty middle income Australians in the top quintile of incomes say that they “ever feel poor”. By contrast, almost a third in the lowest quartile “say that they feel poor”. In this group about 70% say that they have less than a family of four would need to “live satisfactorily” in the area in which they live (Pusey 2003: 27). These statements are statement about inner mental states combined with explanations of how these mental states come about. Feeling poor is an unpleasant condition caused by low income. Pusey explains that those who feel their income is not enough have:
… ever less capacity to save, buy houses, provide for their own, and their children’s, education and medical expenses, and secure their retirement incomes. (Pusey 2003: 29).
This is a list of things that Pusey assumes middle Australians would do with an adequate income if they had one. It is based on an understanding of pervasive cultural norms of Australian society, knowledge of which is shared by the reader, the author and the subjects of the research. These are assumed desires, which cannot be satisfied with the incomes they now have. The impact is to “put great social stress on coping strategies” (Pusey 2003: 29). Here, what is implied is that if these key desires of Australian culture cannot be met, people will not cope, they will suffer stress. This whole passage skirts on the edge between assumptions being made about human nature and accounts of cultural expectations. Clearly “housing”, as understood by Australians, is not a requirement of human nature. On the other hand some kind of shelter is clearly preferred by humans in any culture, for reasons that are readily explicable in terms of human nature. Or we could consider whether it is a universal of human nature that people will experience “stress” when key expectations of their culture about living well cannot be met – however variable these expectations may be from one culture to another.
Documenting examples of the stress created by economic reform, Pusey is frequently drawn to accounts, which draw on a theory of the good life – how people in general prefer to live. One discussion is of workers who are now self employed, or working as subcontractors for larger firms. These workers are comparing their working life now to that before redundancies drove many out of permanent full time positions. Greg is a sub contract truck driver. “I have to work three bloody [casual] jobs to make the same money. Dunno whether any of them is going to be there tomorrow”. Pusey summarizes their situation: “They loathe the invasive pressures, the changing rosters, the irregular hours and the unpaid overtime, of whatever flexible and rationalized work they do have. A delivery driver says that he ‘eats and sleeps the mobile phone … turn it off and you die’ ” (Pusey 2003: 59-60). The problems of irregular flexible work are described in this account. You cannot be sure of an income. The wages per hour are actually less than in previous employment. It is stressful wondering where your next job is coming from. The irregular hours and the necessity to be constantly seeking employment eats into time outside of the job. Another group are white collar workers in various kinds of bureaucratic employment. They complain that economic rationalization has forced an intensification of work:
As the education officer puts it, ‘When someone leaves they never get replaced. It never stops. You wind up carrying someone else’s job as well as your own.’ He goes on to complain: ‘I send e-mails to myself at home so I can work after hours. It’s the only way I can get the work done. No one ever says thank you!’ (Pusey 2003: 60)
Increasing intensity of work, insecurity in employment, hours that are unsocial and cut into time spent with friends or family, the absence of social rewards for one’s contribution in appreciation. These complaints all relate to a concept of the good life. The good life consists of work that is enjoyable and in which you are not pressured to complete things at a faster than comfortable rate. Your income, the necessary basis for all other things, the power to gain access to the products of society, would be secure and not vulnerable to random and arbitrary curtailment. You would have time for social life and time with the family. What you do in society is appreciated as the important contribution that it really is, through an adequate income and also through personal appreciation and praise.
A key complaint is that control over income is in the hands of employers and your immediate supervisor. There is a sense that this control has intensified:
… the notion of justifying yourself constantly to your boss simply didn’t exist for most people twenty years ago. (Pusey 2003: 65)
What is interesting about these accounts is the way key features of capitalism as alienated labour become the focus of discontent. At the same time the critique does not go so far as to condemn alienated labour in toto. It is expected that you will have to work under someone else’s authority to get an income. It is accepted that ultimately your boss will judge your performance and sack you if they think you are not doing your job well. It is accepted that you will be made redundant if your job is no longer necessary for the organization. It is seen as perfectly ok that “work” will not be rewarding socially and will cut into time when you can enjoy social pleasures under your own direction. It is expected that this work may not be creatively fulfilling. However what is being complained about is the intensification of this situation. As with the complaints about inequality, the complaint is not that we live in a capitalist economy, but that the economy is too capitalist. Here as before, capitalism is seen as an unpleasant necessity in order for production and consumption to take place. However measured against a utopia in which “fairness” prevails and labour is not alienated, the situation of economic reform is judged as capitalist to an unnecessary extent!
The ethical issues that come up here are part of what Pusey and his research subjects are attempting to describe. The situation is measured against an ideal of the good life. As I will argue in a subsequent chapter, this kind of description makes most sense if we regard the good life as one in which the desires that make up human nature are satisfied as well as they might be. It is human nature to want interesting work. It is human nature to want to be appreciated for what you do by other people you are working with. It is human nature to want to have control over your work. It is human nature to want to enjoy the company of others and have the time and space to care for those dear to you. It is human nature to want to have some security in your enjoyment of the wealth which you and others produce, and some security in meeting your basic physical needs.
Weedon’s poststructuralist feminism
At this point the reader may wonder whether I have discovered these elements of social science – interests, institutions, ideas, intentions, human nature - because of my selection of two texts that do not reflect the very different meta-theory of poststructuralism as pioneered in Foucault’s writings. We can examine Weedon’s poststrucuralist writing to discover whether the more “humanist” or “structuralist” of these concepts have been successfully purged from poststructuralist accounts of social reality. Weedon’s work is of particular interest because she attempts to render a feminist analysis of society within the meta-theoretical framework of poststructuralism.
Weedon begins her account of subjectivity by rejecting humanist discourses. Humanist discourses, she says:
… presuppose an essence at the heart of the individual which is unique, fixed and coherent and which makes her what she is. (Weedon 1987: 32)
As she notes, within humanist Marxism, this essence is human nature, alienated by capitalism. Against this essentialist view:
… poststructuralism proposes a subjectivity which is precarious, contradictory and in process, constantly being reconstituted in discourse each time we think or speak. (Weedon 1987: 33).
So what makes people act is always a subjectivity that is socially constructed by available discourses and constantly shifts as these discourses shift historically and day to day for any one individual. She uses this framework to consider the birth of the second wave feminist movement:
… as we move out of familiar circles, through education or politics, for example, we may be exposed to alternative ways of constituting the meaning of our experience which seem to address our interests more directly. For many women this is the meaning of the practice of consciousness-raising developed by the Women’s Liberation Movement. The collective discussion of personal problems and conflicts, often previously understood as the result of personal inadequacies and neuroses, leads to a recognition that what have been experienced as personal failings are socially produced conflicts and contradictions shared by many women in similar social positions. (Weedon 1987: 33)
At first glance, this account seems to work within the framework of poststructuralism she has set up. In childhood, we are exposed to certain understandings of social reality, discourses of femininity. However as we move away from the family through various changes in our life, we become exposed to different ideas and constitute our subjectivity within a different discourse – that of the woman whose problems are shared by other women and come out of social conditions. This illustrates the idea that subjectivity is not fixed since the same person has changed their subjectivity from that of the compliant feminine subject to that of the woman conscious of her oppression.
However what is crucially missing from this account of the change is anything that would explain why it was that such a lot of women chose to belong to these consciousness raising groups and why it was that they found this developing analysis of things more attractive than the one that they had experienced in childhood. It could have been just as likely that women in the seventies would have gone in great numbers for a theory of alien abductions – why did feminism take off and alien abductions remain a minor discourse?
Weedon does in fact provide such an explanation and it is in two key parts. One is that the analysis provided by feminist groups was actually an accurate analysis of social reality and was attractive and convincing because of that – our exposure to consciousness raising leads to “recognition”. The implication is that an essence of humans is an ability to evaluate different pictures of social reality in terms of their accuracy – and, other things being equal, to prefer a more accurate view. The second part of her explanation is that this feminist picture of the world was seen to “address our interests” more directly. Here interests are taken as something that endures while discourses and subject positions change. It is our interests which explain our shift from one discourse and subject position to another. Our interests are in fact being pictured as part of our essential nature, going on regardless of subject position and in fact explaining our shifts in discourse and subject position. It is not in our interests to be stressed, overworked, exploited by men and so on. As an example she considers this case:
… as a mother she is supposed to meet all the child’s needs single-handed, to care for and stimulate the child’s physical, emotional and mental development and feel fulfilled in doing so. The recognition that feelings of inadequacy or failure are common among women in similar positions … (Weedon 1987: 34)
So what is described here is a stress, an impossible situation. It is not in fact possible to feel “fulfilled” by isolated full time child care. The social demands create a feeling of inadequacy because the job is too hard. Here the interests that she is talking about must be seen as tied to human nature, because they are things which endure and explain our shift in subject positions as we become aware that our interests are not being served. A fulfilling life is one in which you can do a good job of carrying out the tasks that other people expect of you and get social recognition and appreciation for your work. It is a situation in which you do not have to engage in difficult tasks in social isolation. You are not deprived of social pleasures and social support for long periods of your daily life. So we are attracted to a picture of social reality (the discourse of feminism) that recognizes and gives an account of these problems in our lives.
What this gap in Weedon’s poststructuralism reveals is a problem for any attempt to explain social change without talking about “real interests” or “human nature”. We want to be able to explain why cultural change takes place. This is a change from one arbitrary set of cultural understandings to another. We can just say that it is random and unpredictable. Certainly this is a large part of the truth, but it does not help to explain what it was that made a particular kind of change attractive. We cannot say it is just the effect of some other part of the culture, because that in itself does not explain why this new effect came out of cultural elements that were already present. What social scientists actually do is to talk about the way changes in culture fit with aspects of human nature that are presumed in their accounts. The explanation is always in two parts. The creative and imaginative invention of a new cultural item – a somewhat random process. Following that, its success as a cultural novelty because it fits with certain “interests”.
What I want to suggest through this is that the claim of poststructuralism to have abandoned the “essential” subject of humanism and to have created a social theory that does not depend on ideas about human nature can only make sense if we stay at the abstract meta-theoretical level. The minute we try to address any real problem of social science and describe and explain some real social event, we find that these excluded concepts from humanist social science intrude and are smuggled in to the account being presented. | 
