CONCEPT: Entitlement

Entitlement (or Food Entitlement): Amartya Sen introduced the concept of entitlement into conversations about food scarcity and famine. He pointed out that people suffer famine not because of an absolute scarcity of food, but because of their lack of entitlement to it. In essence, vulnerability to famine is crucially a function of one's relative entitlement to food. 

In his book titled Poverty and Famines, Sen suggested four (clearly unequal) options for gaining access to food: (a) direct production, (b) food procurement via market exchange, (c) food donations or gifts, and (d) working in food-for-work schemes (see also Walker, 1989: 90). Emphasizing the pivotal role that entitlement plays during famine outbreaks, Sen (1981: 1) argued at the very beginning of his book that "Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat." This proposition has spawned a considerable amount of argumentation, systematic review and empirical investigation.

Buchanan-Smith and Davies (1995: 3), for example, concur with Sen that the search for workable solutions to famine outbreaks must shift attention to the demand-side of food access -- that is, from "food availability decline (FAD) to food entitlement decline (FED)". They add, however, that even Sen's solution requires refinement anchored on more recent empirical evidence from Africa. That evidence suggests that epidemic diseases kill more people than starvation per se. This suggests that the factor of universal health cover, or entitlement/access to comprehensive health services, must be brought in through robust public policy measures.

Moreover, they argue, economist Sen's preoccupation with market exchange masks the role that "a wider bundle of entitlements" can play -- incorporating "investments, stores and claims", as well as insurance and sale of assets; even though these can in turn attract more mouths, or the unwanted attention of powerful 'claimants' to the private property of the less powerful. 

In addition to (and perhaps above) all that, conflict and war have become a major and stubborn cause of famine across Africa (Buchanan-Smith and Davies, 1995: 3-4). Their effects pose a serious challenge to Sen's entitlement meme. Perhaps we should see how we incorporate peace into the basket of entitlements -- or an entitlement equation. 

But, to be fair to Sen, he did concede that not having enough food to eat may in fact be the result of there being not enough to go around in the first place. His point was that the actual linkages must be empirically investigated, not simply assumed. Subsequent investigations in that direction are most likely the reason that conflicts (including those involving terrorism), war, epidemic outbreaks and  "a winder bundle of entitlements" have more recently assumed the significance they have as explanations for starvation and famine -- in Africa and elsewhere.  The idea of entitlement has clearly morphed. To what extent, one may ask, are epidemic outbreaks also a function of entitlement?

[For an account of certain critiques of Sen's entitlement theory, read Stephen Devereux's 2001 paper titled "Sen's Entitlement Approach: Critiques and Counter-Critiques"]

CONCEPT: Conflict

Conflict: Ancient Chinese philosophers, the Taoists specifically,  saw conflict as the ever-recurring but forward-leaning dialectical spiral of Night and Day -- that is, of Yin and Yang. It was a 'fatal embrace' of sorts destined to always produce Tomorrow, and never yesterday. Plato, the Greek philosopher, likewise saw conflict as a dialectical engagement. In his case, it was a clash between good and evil; and, indeed, he held that "each thing has its evil and good". This dichotomy between 'good' and 'evil' (or Self and Other) characterized (and still does) certain conceptions of the phenomenology of conflict situations. 

Karl Marx, the most consequential proponent of conflict, argued that class struggle was the real driver of epochal change in all human society. This struggle was powered the underlying modes and relations of production/reproduction and distribution in society at large. Those modes and relations were at once unequal, exploitative and unjust -- and contrary to human nature. The contradiction(s) thus build into the relations led to inevitable conflict (in a Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis format) and the pressure to resolve it -- typically and logically in the direction of a new economic and social order. Contradiction, it has been argued even by more recent scholars such as Marcuse, always has (built into it) the drive toward its resolution.

In his paper titled "Social Conflict and the Theory of Social  Change", Lewis Coser explored the functions of conflict (he clearly preferred the term conflict to violence) in the broader context of social change. His exploration focused on: (a) the impact of social conflict on change within enduring social systems, with particular reference to consequences for such concerns as "institutional rigidities, technical progress and productivity", and, (b) the "relation between social conflict and changes [or overhauls/overthrows] of social systems" (Coser, 1957: 197). 

One clear outcome of this exploration was Coser's proposition, inspired by George Sorel, that "conflict prevents the ossification of the social system by exerting pressure for innovation and creativity." He wrapped up his optimistic conception of the operation, and consequence, of social conflict in the following terms:

"The clash of values and interests, the tension between what is and what some groups feel ought to be, the [contest] between vested interests and new strata and groups demanding their share of power, wealth and status...[all of which] have been productive of vitality." 

Georg Simmel has presented perhaps the most intriguing and refreshing post-Marxian characterization of the idea and process of conflict. His version offers, as in a wedding, the opportunity to bring into the conversation "something new and something old, something borrowed and something blue" (that is, something that's not red -- figuratively). 

He argues that conflict is inseparable from social interaction, and thus “sociation”; and is even itself a form of sociation. He sees conflict, indeed, as “one of the most vivid interactions” and, as an example of social interaction, by definition beyond the scope of social acts by the lone individual. Furthermore, conflict is not the cause of some sort of pathology of human interaction, but the resolution or ‘cure’ of such pathology READ MORE

CONCEPT: Chaos

Chaos: Philosophers, poets and painters have, at least since the Greek philosopher Pythagoras (6th century BCE), held a categorical view of  the universe -- or indeed all creation -- as a unity, or Cosmos. They attached to Cosmos such attributes as good order, calmness and peace -- indeed, symphony -- despite the complexity of its many and diverse parts. Their imagined opposite for this clock-work verity or metaphor was Chaos -- meaning, disorder, disharmony, disconnect and even jarring noise (or cacophony). 

In the 19th century, Alexander von Humbolt re-imagined Kosmos (Cosmos) for the modern world as a vast, complex but interconnected and harmonious unity. And in the 20th century, George Santayana suggested that Cosmos had no empirical opposite. There was only Order, often too hidden (or too obvious) to casually see. He saw Chaos as a figment of the imagination, arguing that it was "a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds". That is, the order or complexity imprinted in discrete phenomena or processes observable "out there" in the natural and social worlds may appear chaotic, but only so appear, to the observer who does not have the wherewithal (tools, time, training, frame-of-mind or the like) to grasp their essential or 'below-the-surface' nature. 

Dutto (2000), on the other hand, has argued that chaos is "...the complex and unpredictable motion or dynamics of systems that are sensitive to their initial conditions". These initial conditions may include a system's initial size/magnitude, position, weight, direction or velocity. But he adds that "Chaotic systems are mathematically deterministic -- that is, they follow precise laws, but their irregular behavior can appear to be random to the casual observer." In a word, they are 'ordered', and their orderliness is out there for the well-prepared to discover. 

His examples of chaotic behavior commonly observable within systems include: measles outbreaks, heart rhythms, electrical brain activity, fluids, animal populations and chemical reactions. Even the highs and lows of the stock market may appear chaotic to the more casual observer (see William Dutto, 2000, "Chaos Theory", Encarta). 

The organismic view of society, such as is dominant in structural-functionalism, strongly suggests that social life -- indeed human society -- is founded on a certain 'order of things'. In other words, society cannot properly function and thrive without a preponderance of it. Public policy implicitly or explicitly labels it "Law and Order", a breakdown of which must be prevented from degenerating into civil disorder or anarchy -- or, yes, Chaos.

Conflict (or Social Change) theorists of various persuasions, on the other hand, generally argue that an uncompromising emphasis on Order weakens society by stifling needed short-term and long-term change. Further, they argue that labeling agitators for change or reform as agents of anarchy or Chaos is, deep down, a reflection of the rulers' self-interest and determination to preserve the status quo -- which is beneficial to them. From this perspective, then/too, Chaos is in the eye of the beholder; and Conflict (or Change, or Reform) is, potentially at least, transformative.   

READ "Chaos" Plato, Stanford University.



UPDATED: March 2nd and 8th, 2018

PDF: George Simmel: The Essence of His Conflict Theory

George Simmel: The Essence of His Conflict Theory

By Mauri Yambo


Paper First Posted on August 26, 2015. Click on this Link To Get the PDF Version

G and State Coordinates: Francesca Cancian's Theory of Formal Functionalism

[For the full text of Cancian’s paper on this subject, titled "Functional Analysis of Change", click on the link at the bottom of this post. The paper was first published in American Sociological Review, Vol. 25, No. 6 (December 1960), pp. 818-827. I recommend it]

Francesca Cancian proposes a version of functionalism, Formal Functionalism, which, as Abraham (1982: 90) observed, is made up of “rigorously formulated models which describe how units of a system are inter-related so as to maintain each other as well as the entity itself.” But that is not exactly why her rendition of functionalism stands out. That is not why, almost single-handedly, she effectively neutralizes previous or standard, conflict-inspired, critiques of functionalism.

The inspiration for her brand of functionalism is Nagel’s two key variables: G and State Coordinates, whose definitions we will see in a moment. Even when I first read her work in the early 1980s in a book edited by Etzioni and Etzioni-Halevy, Cancian struck me as one of the boldest defenders of functionalism as a tool for explicating not simply social “stability” or continuity but, importantly, long-term flux in society. To her, functionalism did not by definition reject the empirical factuality of social change, but rather its opposite – the presumption that, somehow, social change was in the functionalist worldview improbable. And yet it is precisely that worldview that its critics accused it of, as if by rote.

Cancian based most of her argument on Ernest Nagel’s[1] formal definition of functional systems, itself influenced by Robert Merton’s essay “Manifest and Latent Functions.” Thus, paraphrasing Nagel, Cancian saw a functional system as:

“a deterministic system – with the added restriction that certain properties of the system are maintained despite potentially disruptive changes in the system or the environment or both.”

In turn, a deterministic system was (in Cancian’s paraphrase of Nagel):

“A simple system – with the added restriction that the properties of the system at one time are a function of its properties at a previous time”

Finally, a simple system (in Cancian’s view) could be formally expressed as a mathematical function, for example:

                        x = f (y)

That is: one property is the function of another. However, Cancian cautions that a simple system does “not necessarily lead to predictions of either change or stability.”

Nagel’s definition portrays a functional system as one made up of two types of variables, as we saw a moment or two ago:

G = “the property of the system that is maintained or is stable”

Examples of G would be a social institution, democracy, civilian government, a corporate entity, a University, a marriage relationship, poverty, happiness, the structure of a nuclear family over time. G should thus be seen as the “enduring dependent variable”.

State Coordinates are the variables which “determine the presence or absence of G”

In other words, State Coordinates are independent variables which determine/shape the status or condition of G.

Cancian rounds off her formalized view of functionalism with a flourish of propositions, as follows:

1.         State Coordinates have “the function of maintaining G” (Cancian, p. 89). Thus, though one or some coordinates may threaten the continuation of G, G will survive if/as other coordinates sufficiently compensate for the variation of the threatening coordinates.

2.         Some coordinates may be located beyond the “system boundary” – in the supersystem, of which the system in question is a part.

3.         A social system, a subsystem such as it may be of a larger social system, in effect represents a set/network of Gs, some of which are bona fide State Coordinates for other Gs located within the social system. Thus, change of a subsystem can be seen as change within a more inclusive subsystem. Importantly, “subsystems treated as state coordinates must be regarded, by definition, to be changing” (Cancian)

4.         The values attached to – that is to say, the variations observed in – respective State Coordinates may mix and match in a variety of ways to yield or maintain the same unchanged G. This, incidentally and ironically, is a back-handed affirmation of the Parsonian idea of “functional equivalents”.

5.         Functional analysis does not assume the stability of G;  “on the contrary, it is assumed that the environment or parts of the system or both are changing so much that it is impossible for G to persist unless there are specific mechanisms within the system to compensate for these changes” (Cancian). Functional Analysis is therefore inapplicable if this latter assumption cannot be made – that is, if the system or subsystem and its environment are considered constant, or G is not threatened. Thus, functional analysis adds value to our understanding of a given social system ( a G) by explaining its structures and functionings, in a static or dynamic context, in terms of how its complement of State Coordinates “do or do not compensate for each other’s variation” (Cancian).

6.         All in all, “the maintenance of G” is assured whenever variations in the values of the State Coordinates upon which the G is anchored rule each other out (or sufficiently compensate for each other), so that the tipping point – the dialectical transition from quantity to quality – is not reached.

7.         Conversely, the combined variations in the State Coordinates that break through the tipping point do, by definition, spell a qualitative change in their specific G – though, contrary to Cancian’s assertion, such a change does not necessarily mean that that “G such as we may have in mind, then it can be argued that formal functionalism accommodates the idea of social or societal change more systematically and perhaps more transparently than the conflict-theory-inspired critiques of functionalism which have, as long as I remember, generally won the continuity-change debate.

8.         G can thus stand for a variety of states or, a la Durkheim, social facts. Examples of social facts, such as a marriage relationship, the family or democracy, were given earlier. The variety of states that Cancian had in mind included: a static or stable state of affairs, a steady or accelerating or declining rate of change, a cycle of events, or series of peaks and troughs.

Read the whole paper>>

p.s. 1: Here is an interesting additional reading on functional analysis from The International Encyclopedia of Social Science. it includes discussions on \Marion Levy, Merton, Cancian and Nagel. Read>>
p.s. 2: For a contrasting conversation about another kind of functionalism -- functionalism as a 'materialist' theory of "the nature of mental states" -- read Janet Levine's article in  the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy>>

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^[1] Nagel’s definition [he was a philosopher] appears in his book Logic Without Metaphysics (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957) – see pp. 247-283 - “A Formalization of Functionalism”. The article also appears in F.E. Emery (ed) Systems Thinking.

Happy New Year, 2009!

A belated happy new year to all.
Bloody though it has begun, a prayer--
That this be a less conflicted year
Than 2008. That there be healing.