The sociological citizen: Pragmatic and relational regulation in law and organizations

Abstract

The interconnected networks that constitute our everyday lives can be both intensely familiar yet completely unknown. Whether we call it a firm, a university, an industry, a system, or a society, we live and work in collectivities coordinated through human, physical, and chemical transits. Most of the time, we fail to notice the links that connect one action to another, one person to hundreds of others, and one organization to a framing institution or field of action. We may be momentarily reminded of those relations when a major disaster occurs, or we chat with a new acquaintance actively seeking common ground. More often, however, articulations among people and places are mediated through representations, in effect, known of but not part of how we live and work. The articles collected in this special issue of Regulation & Governance challenge this conventional account of the unconscious threads assembling the social (Thévenot 2004; Latour 2005). With case studies ranging from Australia to France, Mexico, Brazil, and the US, the articles describe how some organizational agents apprehend “relational interdependence and use this systemic perspective to meet occupational and professional obligations” (Silbey et al. 2009, p. 203). We call these public agency regulators, inspectors, prosecutors, private managers, and microloan officers “sociological citizens,” and the consequent performance of their professional obligations “relational regulation” (Huising & Silbey 2011). These concepts identify and name patterns of relatively successful, and distinctly pragmatic, regulatory implementation achieved across diverse roles, organizations, and locales. Although sociology is a scholarly occupation, we invoke the label to identify among a population of non-sociologists (ordinary persons and members of communities and organizations; that is, citizens) an appreciation of the processes that assemble, sustain, reproduce, and, as importantly, revise social transactions, organizations, and institutions.1 To actors characterized by this label, the setting in which they perform their professional obligations – a bank, a firm, a university, a security agency, or a local economy – is understood “as the outcome of human decisions and indecisions, trial and error, and just plain making do” (Silbey et al. 2009, p. 203). The organization is experienced as a garbage can rather than a rational plan (Cohen et al. 1988). Sociological citizens, acting as managers and law enforcement agents. See their work and themselves as links in a complex web of interactions and processes rather than as a cabin of limited interests and demarcated responsibilities. Instead of focusing closely, as we normally do to manage daily affairs, and only sporadically taking account, if ever, of the larger reverberations of one's actions, these actors view their organizations, or states, as a dynamic entity in which their own role is reconceived as insignificant by itself yet essential to the whole. The concept of the sociological citizen developed through a process of inductive theorizing across the projects presented in this issue. Our conceptual invention itself exemplifies the unscripted, yet pragmatic processes we first observed among the actors and organizations we were studying in the field: by speaking with each other about our research, we began to see commonalities and connections across these different projects and settings. Whether attorneys general, middle managers, microloan officers, labor inspectors, security agents, or environmental health and safety staff, some people were doing their jobs in ways that seemed to serve the organizational and legal mandates more consistently than were others. Some were working beyond compliance and the formal responsibilities of their role. There was a strong commitment to practical rather than perfect outcomes, to experimenting with what might work now and dealing with similar or different situations as they arose. We use the term relational regulation to name a particular form of this practice, or sociological citizenship, through which agents “govern the gap between regulatory expectations and performances with an appreciation of the ongoing production of organizational and material life through human transactions . . . Relational regulation acknowledges the impossibility of perfect conformity between abstract rules and situated action while nonetheless managing to keep practices within a band of variation surrounding, but not perfectly coincident with, regulatory specifications” (Huising & Silbey 2011, p. 17). In 2008, I was asked to submit an article for review to L'Année Sociologique, the journal first published in 1898 (founded in 1896) by Émile Durkheim. Silbey, Huising, Coslovsky (2009) used that opportunity to theorize across the observations we were collecting. We became increasingly confident from these disparate examples that something was happening in management and regulatory enforcement that merited closer attention. The result was the article “The Sociological Citizen: Recognizing Relational Interdependence in Law and Organizations” (Silbey et al. 2009). We offered a nominal definition and examples, with limited hypotheses and a call for further research. The announcement requesting applications for special issues of Regulation & Governance provided the impetus to push the work further. I submitted a proposal to edit a special issue, which was accepted by the Journal's editors. Once the proposal was accepted, I put out a call for papers on various list servers between July and October of 2008. Authors of articles that survived a preliminary review process for quality and relevance, along with scholars who would critique each paper, were invited to participate in a two-day workshop held at MIT in January 2009. For two days we shared data, manuscripts, and comments. The articles were revised on the basis of the group discussion and written critiques by the invited commentators. The articles appearing in this issue were each sent out for anonymous peer review by the editors of the Journal, revised again in response to the Journal's reviewers, and finally accepted for publication if they met the reviewers’ and editors’ criteria. The research collected in this issue attempts to overcome the theoretical impasse that has characterized much of twentieth century social science in which the heterogeneity of human action is simplified within homogeneous models of action. It seeks to enhance policy debates paralyzed by theories locating the source and shape of social action in either human will and desire (i.e. markets) or conversely in forces determining the course of both individual and collective affairs (i.e. social structures, bureaucracy, or government). Piore's contribution to this issue directly and purposively intervenes in these debates about the proper understanding of political economy. He observes that what seems to be an emerging, contemporary preference for more regulation is not driven by theoretical persuasion or conviction. In other words, structural social theory has not trumped rational choice or methodological individualism. Rather, across the globe, policymakers have reacted to a continuing stream of spectacular disasters as well as economic, environmental, and financial crises. Although empirical events overwhelm, the theoretical impasse remains. We are left, Piore suggests, in a conceptual vacuum. The work in this issue attempts to address this void by offering a conception of governance (coordination and regulation) based on conceptions of neither the rational, utility maximizing individual nor the rule-governed bureaucracy, but on a model of the sociological citizen, a pragmatic actor who sees her work and herself as a link in a complex web of unfolding transactions and processes. As Piore (2011) writes, the authors in this issue are “looking for ways of creating flexible, innovative . . . solutions” for the coordination of human action “through the management of [organizational] cultures rather than through direct management of the agents themselves.” Furthermore, the research reported here argues quite consistently that no single, simple solution will address the problems public policies seek to regulate: the systemic consequences of complex organization. The following section offers a more elaborate discussion of the concept of the sociological citizen. Drawing from the empirical projects reported in the articles, I describe how, by recognizing a world of unfolding relations constantly in the making, these innovative managers and law enforcement agents reach beyond scripted responsibilities and immediate work groups to gather information for pragmatic and experimental adaptations to meet organizational goals. The performances are enabled by flexible organizational cultures. Notably, we suggest that organized heterogeneity in roles and means may limit the excesses inherent in any particular role performance, whether legitimate or illegitimate. In the conclusion, I locate this concept within modern social science and suggest questions for future research. Durkheim famously observed that in societies with a complex division of labor, administrative, commercial, and procedural law would predominate, serving to reconstitute ruptured interdependencies and helping to sustain the organic solidarity characteristic of industrialized societies. Nowhere did he suggest, however, that relational interdependence or the compensatory and reparative functions of law would be intended by or manifest to broad segments of the society's actors. Indeed, he was adamantly opposed to the notion that the basic mechanisms of social solidarity and coordination would be components of popular consciousness. Although Durkheim remained committed to the notion of social life as a “system of representations and mental states,” his analyses depended on a sharp distinction between the mental life of the individual and collective representations “subject to their own laws which individual psychology could not foresee” (Durkheim 1982, p. 253). He insisted that “not a single word of mine must be understood” to suggest “that social facts can be understood immediately by states of individual consciousness” (Durkheim 1982, p. 253). For Durkheim, the networks of association and meaningful character of social interactions are routinely and systematically obscured, their functions more latent than manifest. Only through meticulous analysis of social facts (empirically demonstrable patterns of action) could the web of associations that constituted the social be uncovered and specified. This analysis of patterns of action, networks of association, and circulating meanings is the work of sociology, Durkheim claimed, and what 50 years later C. Wright Mills would call “the sociological imagination.” According to Mills (1959, p. 5), “the sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him [sic] to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions” (my emphasis). Those collectivities coordinated through human, physical, and chemical transits in which we live and work are the subject of sociological inquiry. Because most social actors are, happily, not professional sociologists, they normally focus closely, attending to their immediate activities, pacific or troubled, indifferent to the invisible threads that connect their individual biography to historical trajectories. Although both Durkheim and Mills insisted on the necessity of mapping the relational interdependence that constituted what in more contemporary verbiage we might call the assemblage, neither expected this perspective, and thus this capacity, to persist widely beyond the bounds of professional sociology. Thus, our invocation of the term “sociological” demands emphatic clarification lest we be misunderstood. We use the expression metaphorically to denote exactly this apprehension of the assembling activity that constitutes the social (Latour 2005). We are not claiming that the actors who use this relational perspective have an innate proclivity toward this mode of action, choose it deliberately, or are always conscious of their unusual cognition. Some may become sociological citizens and engage in relational regulation because of idiosyncratic and serendipitous variables, interactions, or sequences of events. Moreover, we are not claiming that these agents are sociologists or that only sociologists share this understanding. Quite the contrary. We are suggesting that while Durkheim and Mills may have been correct in predicting that few persons would analyze, or appreciate, the interdependencies that constitute the social, they were wrong in assuming that only sociologists would. Durkheim and Mills were, after all, engaged in jurisdictional competitions for professional terrain (Abbott 1988). We are not. Again, quite the contrary. The scholarship contained in this issue was produced in diverse disciplinary spaces observing phenomena spread across different occupations and types of organizations not limited to the interests of one professional or disciplinary community. The metaphor “sociological citizen” is deployed as a label for actors who accomplish their work by enacting a relational epistemology, seeing a world of “unfolding relations” (Emirbayer 1997). Rather than consisting primarily of substances, static organization charts, or even scripted processes, the organization in which the agents work comes to be understood as the outcome of momentary as well as continuing human transactions. They come to understand that work gets done in these organizations – whether public or private – through fluid relationships where the lines of the organizational chart and the boundaries separating different organizations describe formal positions and roles, obscuring the activities performed within, among, and across those positions and organizations. Through the regular interactions, especially talking with others and sharing and exchanging information, the sociological citizens reach beyond scripted responsibilities and immediate work groups, extending the material and informational resources available to do their work. For example, Coslovsky (2011) provides an account of the alliances attorneys general in Brazil develop on a case-by-case basis to invent integrated solutions to complex environmental and labor problems that create persistent violations of current regulations. Similarly, Pires (2011) describes how labor inspectors in Pernambuco state in Brazil's labor ministry collaborated with the federal banking system to develop an information system that would allow very few inspectors to assess wage and severance payments across a large number of firms. This unconventional outreach to another agency permitted four inspectors to do the work otherwise occupying 99 inspectors. Canales (2011) describes how what he calls “spirit of the law” loan officers often use their clients’ networks to find creative ways to help clients and collect loans. They straddle boundaries in their own organization to bend rules or create new rules when they think it will enhance loan performance. These loan officers created the notion of loan restructuring and new, more realistic, and less restrictive ways to assess client assets that were not part of their jobs but nonetheless were value added for the firm. Haines (2011) describes how the human agency of officers responsible for counterterrorism efforts at seaports and airports was essential to achieving regulatory goals, but nonetheless depended on their ability to reach beyond their agencies to secure support from political elites. For the actors studied in these projects, their worlds are composed of relationships, links, and collectivities rather than individuals. Although they do not use the language of units of analysis, their practice and orientation substitutes the link or connection for the individual as the unit of analysis. Eponymously, Huising and Silbey (2011) name this practice “relational regulation.” We describe, for example, how serendipitously organized meetings among environmental health and safety coordinators created the opportunity to exchange stories about problems they were having implementing health and safety regulations in laboratories. Through these stories, the coordinators discovered a common content to the narratives of their difficulties.2 The stories “uncover[ed] the similar experiences of which they [had been] collectively unaware: a state of pluralistic ignorance of the shared features of their lifeworlds” (Fine 2010, p. 665). The group meetings revealed the collective organization that had first seemed like – and may have continued to be experienced as – individual, idiosyncratic situations in the different departments (Ewick & Silbey 1995, p. 221). However, the common narrative of a collective situation was slowly understood to be an ongoing production, the consequence of all sorts of diverse actions and actors, not what was planned or mischievously created. Most important, perhaps, these actors we call sociological citizens are pragmatic, experimental, and adaptive, going beyond and outside the prescribed rules and processes with the goal, nonetheless, of actually achieving the ostensible public or organizational purpose (Coslovsky et al. 2010). Each of the articles in this issue describes agents’ practical accommodations within local contexts – adjustments that look like divergence from prescribed procedures but even so those are exactly what was expected – compliance with labor or in environmental and safety violations (Huising and other the are for to as well as environmental as Haines (2011) pragmatic adjustments between security and resources not only to and but to of goals. In a sociological citizen did not the as by the regulatory agency or even that were and for an of goals. The sociological citizen is a a a who what is available to what is The who . . . the . . . which are which had not been especially with an to the for which they are to be used and to which one by trial and to not to it or to of at even if their form and their are p. the various articles, we find of how the agents’ activities beyond the scripted responsibilities and how they are to develop a or of processes. This very experimental no simple or of doing the but rather on the relations to informational for – and between and means – and legitimate goals. have that actors activities may these of achieving their for example, and others engaged in & all, famously that both and legitimate unconventional means to legitimate goals. the role of sociological citizen is by recognizing a world of unfolding beyond scripted responsibilities to gather information for pragmatic and experimental adaptations to meet organizational goals, what these that may from beyond rules and Sociological citizens work among others who do the jobs the of as a on the excesses in Thus, Canales (2011) describes a of who attempts to the “spirit of the law” in and These loan officers strong relationships with their achieving a understanding of the environmental in which the clients live and the they and the that may be only by time, loan and these “spirit of the law” officers often from they do so with a understanding of the relationships between organizational policies and the policies The of processes and of action within an organization not only as a on any particular course of action, but the and the reach of the work Canales that that both “spirit of the law” and of the law” loan officers of than where one or the other Similarly, Pires (2011) that the labor inspectors first used a enforcement to to the consequences of seeking in labor Coslovsky (

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