The Future of this Blog

Personally, I kinda like blogging academically. It can be an easy way to just blurt something out and bounce it around, or keep those who are interested informed on my work. Plus, I've been looking for a better foothold in the blogging world. I think I'll keep updating this thing as I continue to do more research. I've got a couple of projects to finish in the spring and, of course, hope to keep developing this theory of institutions. I'm sure there'll be some random rants about current events too. Stay tuned?

Almost Over (or is it?)

I have been writing almost non-stop for a month and a half. My life has been institutions this, institutions that everyday for a month. It just keeps going. But, it's almost over. Then I graduate!

Despite the fact that I've been saying the same things over and over, the past couple of days seem to have come with a kinda breakthrough in my thought. It's nothing really grandiose, just another angle that I like. I'm not sure if any of it will make it into the final draft, but we'll just have to see. It's basically taking the theory of institutions apart and making each component a factor of its own through which we can arrange social influence in general.

What will this research become? Since I'll be doing this kinda stuff for the rest of my career, I think it'll become a lot. And I haven't really gotten tired of it, just tired of writing much of the same stuff over and over. I had most of my paper sitting around in my thoughts for most of the semester and now I'm writing it all down. That's what really makes it seem repetitive. BUT, I think I can take this notion of institutions to more arenas and use the new breakthrough to develop a more general theory. It's making the old new again.

At this point, once the theses are done and what not, I would like to get some of this research published. Before I can do that, I would like to go to a sociology conference and get some discipline-specific feedback to get a sense of how it would be received. Unfortunately, there really aren't any sociology conferences in the near future. So, I think I'll wait on it.

Time Crunch

Time is getting short and assignments are piling up. Technically, I haven't missed a deadline yet; but, I'm not getting as far ahead with each assignment as I want to be. A big part of this is trying to manage the random and not so random outside tasks I'm having to. For example, I'm in a dispute with my ex-landlord over move-out charges and having to write letters, meet with legal and university council etc. The one that bothers me the most is the portfolio. It feels like I have so much to do for it because most of the stuff in there is from sophomore (?) year and some of it is specific to my previous self-design major. Fortunately, I do have most of the documents I need for it. I just have to print it all out or copy it to disk and write a short summary. The big projects are the matrices of meaning, two reviews of said matrices, and the transdisciplarities. It's not all going to get done by the end of this week, but it's definitely at the top of my agenda, right below writing the next portion of my thesis. Like graduate school applications, it'll be done (first version) before Thanksgiving.

Work This Week (Part II)

This was the work I wanted to do last week, but the writing took sooo long. This is the part where I get to keep it real. I ordered five articles through ILLIAD last week and got them within like 5 business days. They're all on gang characteristics, formation, and prison experience. I'm excited! So, this week is all about reading and working out exactly how to read the research through my theory of institutions. Some dimensions are not immediately obvious, but there are a lot of neat, important insights that my theory seems to account for well. I think I'll be able to start writing by the end of the week.

If you go back to my timeline, I'm about 2 weeks behind. It's a good thing I planned to take a week off. I still should take time off, but the timeline has to be compressed a bit. On the bright side, I'll be spending part of this week going over what I've written so far and streamlining it for the philosophy version of my thesis. That should help me see where I need to streamline this version as well.

The work load is really starting to bear down, especially as I'm trying to start working on a complete IDS portfolio and graduate school applications. But, this is the end of the Senior semester and I guess I can't expect anything less. In fact, I think I'll start on that portfolio thing now. Peace.

Current Work: Part 1

This week's writing is my take on what institutions are. I'm finally laying out what I've been thinking about for the past three months. Unfortunately, I feel so much like I'm being an armchair philosopher because it's all theory that I already know and can talk about on the theoretical level. I don't feel the impulse to pull together sources because so many people use the terms I'm talking about in much the same way I'm talking about them....But, I'm not really taking my ideas from them, nor am I necessarily talking about them in the same way they talk about them. When/If you read my paper, this part will probably seem like I'm just making all of this stuff off the top of my head. It does come from somewhere, I just can't cite people because I'm not getting my stuff directly from them. Plus, in describing what institutions are, I'm not being complete. I feel like there are other aspects within what I'm talking about (say, social structure) that I'm just forgetting to include. I want completeness because, in trying to describe something, not incorporating certain aspects can change the understanding what is being described. The bright spot in all of this is that I think the key points I'm trying to make still stand despite what I feel is a haphazard approach. I may not be able to fully justify my points by providing a full description of the situation, but I can't think of alternative situations that contradict the key tenants of my theory. After all of this very general talk about my apprehension, here's something concrete that will hopefully explicate it.

I argue that institutions are the particular arrangements of four components which make up what I call the social context. They are the structure, agents, discourse, and events. Each component is autonomous in that they operate on their own internal logics. But, they also influence one another. An institution is an institution because these components themselves are institutionalized into a distinctive arrangement which defines a particular institution as that institution and not some other one or other practice that is not an institution. To take the first component of the social context as my explicit example, I argue that structure is the organization of power through rules, material, and patterns of interaction. I don't feel like I have to cite any authors for this statement because so many talk about structure in general as a feature of society (hence the structure/agency problem that was my original thesis project). Furthermore, I haven't found anyone (that I'm satisfied with) who has talked about structure as simply rules, material, and patterns of interaction. However, these features seem endemic to talk about what structure is. Anthony Giddens for examples talks about "structuration" whereby social structure is the outcome of what I call "patterns of interaction." Foucault talks about the role of material things in structure (e.g. prisons, panopticism, clinics, etc). Rational choice theorists use "rules" to describe the situation within which actors must choose. In my theory, these are separate things which are all parts of social structure. But, I can't cite such inspirations because these authors simply do not use the terms in the way I'm using them. I think they may end up as footnotes. Also, I am not sure that structure is only composed of rules, material, and patterns of interaction. So, I'm worried that there's some fairly obvious part that I'm missing. Despite this blindness, I still think that I show how structure affects discourse, agents, and events and yet is still operates on its own logic. In this, I can feel that my paper is so far sufficient.

Institutionalizing Violence - the case of prison gangs

Since I'm doing my research one section at a time, the latter parts of my thesis are still subject to change. Right now, this is what I'm thinking.

I was originally going to do violence in general. That seemed too ambitious for such a short amount of time for research and, I'm still young, I can go there later. So, I decided to focus on prison violence. I wanted to look at the general forms of physical violence that have become "standards" in prison - rape and sexual abuse, officer beatings (both directions), etc. I thought I could take these from a general perspective and talk about how they became institutionalized. It's not that I thought this project impossible so much as disingenuous. Each of these has very different histories, serve different functions, and operate on different mechanisms. I still believe I can abstract enough away to encompass them into a single schema; however, this wouldn't really demonstrate the proper role of my theory of institutions. I think, if my theory is workable, that it's main role in explanation would not be for these general practices, but very specific practices with their own narratives. It's really a question of specificity - at what level of focus will my theory really be useful in effecting change. I don't believe that talking about general forms of prison violence will contribute much substantive help to resolving each of them (where they should be resolved).

What I want to do is to look at a more pressing and specific institution of violence in prisons - gang violence. Gang violence has become increasingly predominant in prisons over the past twenty-odd years as gang social structure was transplanted into prisons and gangs themselves became more violent. Applying my theory to this specific problem should produce a very grounded and detailed analysis of gangs and gang violence from which we can hopefully predict the emergence and development of gangs and find ways to prevent and deinstitutionalize their escalation to violence. This is one of the major thrusts that's so far sold me on this approach. I can give a very detailed analysis because I'm looking at something relatively specific and I believe I'll be able to offer germane suggestions for preventing and stopping this violence.

I lose the general analysis and the ability to transpose the analysis to other types of institutionalized violence; however, that's what theory is for. The theory itself should be clear enough that it can be taken from one instance of institutional behavior to the next. I shouldn't need to apply it to a general type of phenomenon to show that it can be applied to a range of cases. The application component, gang violence in this case, should merely show how the theory works empirically.

If I'm right in seeing the situation this way, then I've lost nothing in sharpening my focus.

The everyday

It seems I failed to make a post last week. It's easy to lose track of time when you spend so much of it looking at your watch. Studying for and taking the GRE didn't help either. Anyway...

Day to day, I'm setting a goal: one article or chapter a day minimum (for both the philosophy and IDS versions when the research starts to split). I like to break my research down into chunks and take each one as they come in paper. That's what my timeline says anyway. I'll be finishing my research as I finish the conclusion for the rough draft...then start over. It seems to be working so far though. Tittles!

What Institutions Are

An ambitious title I know...and a bit of a lie. Some of you have wondered what I consider an institution. This post is for you.

It's been the most frustrating thing so far to find that what exactly an institution is by definition is not agreed on. Despite the fact that there are roughly 6 subfields studying institutions, none of them have really come to a general consensus about what institutions really are. It seems that most are content taking the normative use of the term - i.e. whatever I say it is. My big project right now is trying to pick out the agreements and disagreements among the various conceptions of institutions. Currently, there are two essential debates: ontology and extension.

The ontological debate centers on the question of how institutions exist. The best conception I've heard so far is that it is a property. A certain practice, rule, norm, or convention is more or less institutionalized - by virtue of have certain properties such as being taken-for-granted, done with intervention, etc. Some say that institutions are formal organizations. Even marriage can be taken to be formally organized in the sense that there are explicit rules, expectations, structures, etc. which structure and support the actual practice of marriage. Still others say that institutions are social domains or social controls - circumscribed cultural fields wherein what is expected and occurs is determined by behavior, ideas, rituals, myths, etc which enforce or support normativity. In this case, institutions are fields. In the previous case, they are organizations. In the first, they things having a certain property. There are about 4 other theories as well.

The extension debate asks what types of things does the word institutions cover. What types of things can we point to and knowingly say "that's an institution." The weirdest one I've found so far is that institutions are "congealed tastes" (from an economist), whatever people have developed a liking for is an institution. Other extension-claims include institutions as regularities in repetitive interactions, government structures, and norms/procedures/rules/conventions embedded in social structure.

Both of these debates really depend on one another. What types of things we want to call institutions depends on what kind of existence these things must have (formally organized, possessing some property, etc.) and vice versa. I take the side of the property argument, but I'm developing my own stance on extension. I intend to argue that institutions are a collection of things with the institutional property, arranged in a way to co-reproduce their defining elements. Institutions are composed of institutionalized structures, discourses, agents, and events which help bring one another into reality.

I'll take domestic (as opposed to say rape in the context of war) rape as an institution to exemplify my theory. The institutionalized structure includes the rapist/victim role, physical and psychological power inequalities, and sequestered (hidden) setting. The institutionalized discourse includes the ideas that women are vulnerable, sexual objects, and a low-level threat ; men are sexually uncontrollable, dominant, and forceful; etc. Institutional agents are particularly those men trained in the role of rapist - to treat women as objects, to be forceful/dominant/uncontrolled, and to ignore or be oblivious to the gravity of rape. The institutional woman is one who is trained as a women to be feminine (sexual), currently, aware of their vulnerability and potentially proactive about it. The institutional event is really a sequence of events in this case which include something like confrontation, play, threat, conflict, genital accessing, and rape. All of these components are, arguably, taken-for-granted parts of domestic rape which require one another to bring about what we consider domestic rape.

Timeline

Sept 27: Finish the first version of “Why an Institutional Approach” section

October 10^th-16: Develop the idea of what exactly institutions are. Put the presentation together

October 18th-31: Violence in Prisons, applying institutional theory to violence in prison.

October 31: First Full Draft Complete

November 1-7: Put it down for one week

November8-10: Re-visioning, taking a critical look at the model and theory of
institutions.

November 10-30: Revise and rewrite

December 1: Final Draft.

New Thesis

As you may notice, my proposal below seems vastly different from what I've been saying I'm going to do for my thesis. And, you're right, I did just change my topic.

This was the original thrust of my philosophy thesis which I've been researching since the summer. I decided to split that topic into two papers so that I could focus on arguing for the benefits of an institutional approach to several persistent problems in philosophy for that thesis. I am so interested in this topic, that I didn't want to just drop my attempt to describe institutions of violence. So, that's what I'll be doing here. I am much further along in the research and more excited about the work, so I think this change is for the best.

I'll be publishing my time line shortly.

Proposal sans timeline

Institutionalizing Violence

This research will look to understand institutional forms of violence – how they are formed and develop. The first part of the research will be aimed at describing of the basic components of the coherent social context, derived from sociological theory, and how institutions are embedded in these contexts. I will argue that the coherent social context is made up of a social structure or field, agents, discourse, events, and an environment. Institutions are regularly reproduced structural relations, explicit in discourse, which agents understand and are able to perform to the point of taking the situation for granted and expect a certain series or sets of events to occur. The second part will be aimed at creating a uniform definition and typology of violence from the currently disjointed understanding of violence. I will limit violence to physical harm and categorize the types of violence according to the group affiliations and intimacy-level between those involved. The final part will attempt to explain how the types of violence become regularized in the social context institutionally and how these institutions of violence change over time. I will argue that institutionalized violence is an event brought about by escalating tensions between in- and out-group agents which reoccur and become taken-for-granted via the institutionalized structures, discourses, and roles embedded in social structure, individual habitus, and common knowledge. These violent events develop as a number of factors change between violent agents including spatial distance, functional distance, and power inequality.

AREAS OF RESEARCH:

Institutional Theory: Economic institutionalism, historical institutionalism, sociological institutionalism

Fligstein, Neil. “Organizations: Theoretical Debates and the Scope of Organizational

Theory.” http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/fligstein/fligstein_pdf/ inter.handbook.paper.pdf. Accessed June 21, 2007.

---. “Social Skill and the Theory of Fields” In Sociological Theory 19 no. 2 (2001): 105-

125.

Hall, Peter A. and Rosemary C. R. Taylor. “Political Science and the Three New

Institutionalisms.” Political Studies 44 (1996): 936-957.

Powell, Walter W. and Paul J. DiMaggio, editors. The New Institutionalism in

Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Sjöstrand, Sven-Erik, editor. Institutional Change: Theory and Empirical Findings.

Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1993.

Social Context: Functionalist approaches, phenomenology, Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice, Goffman’s Dramaturgy

Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York:

Doubleday, 1967.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans.

Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984.

---. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1977;

Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Luhmann, Niklas. Social Systems. Trans. John Bednarz Jr. with Dirk Baecker. Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Categorizations of Violence: Philosophical, sociological, anthropological, political science

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans.

Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984.

---. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1977;

Cudd, Anne. Analyzing Oppression. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006.

Feierabend, Ivo K., Rosalind L. Feierabend and Ted Robert Gurr, editors. Anger,

Violence, and Politics: Theories and Research. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1972.

Nordstrom, Carolyn and JoAnn Martin, editors. The Paths to Domination, Resistance,

and Terror. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Signorielli, Nancy, editor. Violence in the Media: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara,

Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2005.

Key Resources for Instances of Violence: Case studies and histories of violence

Bart, Pauline B. and Eileen Geil Moran, editors. Violence Against Women: The Bloody

Footprints. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1993.

Björgo, Tore and Rob Witte, editors. Racist Violence in Europe. New York, N.Y.: St.

Martin's Press, 1993.

Gurr, Ted, editor. Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century.

Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2000.

Heitmeyer, Wilhelm and John Hagan, editors. International Handbook of Violence

Research. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003

Institutionalizing Violence Resources: Social psychology, post-structuralism, sociology, political science, peace studies, anthropology.

Brewer, Marilynn B. and Miles Hewstone, editors. Social Cognition. Malden, MA:

Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Brubaker, Rogers and David D. Laitin, “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence” The Annual

Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 423-452.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan.

New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

----. The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.\

Hinton, Alexander Laban, editor Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide.

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Staub, Ervin “Genocide and Mass Killing: Origins, Prevention, Healing and

Reconciliation” Political Psychology 21 no. 2. (2000): pp. 367-382.

RAP Session

Well, my RAP session really wasn't what I expected. Instead of coming in with books, articles, and other texts; the librarian showed me how to use the library's resources - WorldCat, EconLit, ILliad, etc. I was disappointed. However, I do have a much better grasp of the range and proper use of these resources. It turns out that WorldCat is best used to find books and check them out through ILliad (AKA interlibrary loan). So, I set up an account and I've already requested a book and an article through ILiad. If any of you have questions about interlibrary loan, I can probably answer them now . Also, he gave me an idea of the breadth of databases and told me which one's one would be best for my area. There were some that I didn't really think about or had never used, so that was useful.

He did say that I could come back and he'd help me more if I still needed help. He mentioned other resources (in a shadowy way) that he could access to help me. I think that if I still needed help, he could help me get actual texts.

Project up to this point

On the Research side, I have some of the more traditional sources in line and I've found a lot of discussion about it in subfields like economic and organizational sociology and institutionalism and in multiple disciplines including philosophy, political science, and economics. Right now however, most of these are only citations. I have a RAP session scheduled for next Wednesday to hopefully get a more thorough source list. Largely, I just need to start reading the key texts and recording the key sub-issues within the larger problem.

On the writing side, I have worked out a preliminary scale to locate different theories' take on the Structure/Agency Problem which should help me organize my review and response to them. What I have read has also helped me pick up some preliminary thesis statement ideas.

On what's yet-to-be-determined, I need to figure out where I will take this piece. I know I'll review positions on the problem, critique them, and put in my own resolution; however, I'm not sure if that will take very much time. I'm no enemy to easiness, but there are a lot of key impacts that a resolution can have. There are ethical, legal, epistemological, and activist impacts that are all important and each of which I could go into. The question is whether to get into them and which ones to talk about.

If anyone is lost because they have no idea what I'm working on, my next post should be a short summary of what the Structure/Agency Problem is and why it's important.