Pragmatic Liberalism: Constructing a Civil Society

Pragmatic Liberalism

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Pragmatic Liberalism Constructing a Civil Society

Albert Hunter and Carl Milofsky

PRAGMATIC LIBERALISM

© Albert Hunter and Carl Milofsky, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7549–2 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7549–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hunter, Albert Pragmatic liberalism : constructing a civil society / Albert Hunter and Carl Milofsky. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7549– 3 (alk. paper) 1. Social ethics—United States. 2. Civil society—United States 3. Liberalism—Moral and ethical aspects. 4. Civics. I. Milofsky, Carl. II. Title. HN90.M6H86 2007 303.3⬘72—dc22

2006050192

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Research for this book was partially funded by the Changing Dimensions of Trusteeship Project, Program on Nonprofit Organizations, Yale University, funded by the Lilly Endowment

For Renée and Sandy, our partners in the fifteen years of talk, travel, and adventure that have gone into this book

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Contents

Prologue

ix

1

Malaise

1

2

Rights

15

3

Why Help?

29

4

The Conservative View: Markets, Inequality, and Social Efficiency

51

Class Conflict and the Radical View of the Common Good

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6

The Constructive Chaos of Pluralism

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7

Institutions, Social Policy, and the Death of the Old Social Science

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8

Moral Policy

137

9

Implementing Pragmatic Liberalism: Leadership, Citizenship, and Community

159

5

Works Cited

173

Index

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Prologue

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he key concepts in our title—pragmatism, liberalism, and civil society— are rich with meanings and deserve a brief comment on how we will think about them and use them in this book. Their richness is in part the result of these ideas having both an evolving technical academic history and a popular public usage. The academic and popular meanings are related to one another but also contain subtle distinctions that reflect different uses of the ideas and shifting historical arguments and agendas. For each concept, we will first state what we see as its most common contemporary popular usage, followed by a few of their more central academic meanings. We recognize fully that to do justice to the nuances of the concepts would require a separate treatise on each, which, fortunately, others have provided and to which we are indebted. (For only a partial sampling, for example, on pragmatism see Stuhr, 2000; Murphy, 1990; Durkheim, 1983; on liberalism see Hobhouse, 1911; Strauss L., 1968; Anderson, 1990; Kelly, 2005, and on civil society see Edwards, 2004; Ehrenberg, 1999; Keane, 1998; Seligman, 1995; and Shils, 1997.) Pragmatism The popular idea of pragmatism is widely understood to connote a realistic view of a problematic situation that produces a ready solution that works. One focuses on the immediate problem at hand and finds a quick, if not always elegant, solution. The solution may be devoid of artistry and extraneous considerations for one is not sidetracked or distracted by “philosophical” concerns or questions of “purity.” Beauty, elegance, and ideological consistency are secondary to finding a satisfactory solution—one that works. It may not be the “best” solution, but, in the terms of rational decision theorists such as Herbert Simon (1997), it is a “sastisfycing” solution—plenty good enough. A bit of this and a bit of that, when cobbled together in an imaginative way, gets the job done. For example, some cranks, chains, shafts, and other parts from bicycles wedded to the light frames and cloth of kites produced the first airplane, while half a century later the small Redstone rocket perched awkwardly atop the powerful Jupiter C missile lofted the first American space satellite into orbit because the

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more beautiful and elegant Vanguard rocket, designed explicitly to do the deed, had crashed and burned in numerous failed attempts off the launching pad. The academic meaning of pragmatism—often considered the American philosophy—is connected in its origins with three people—Charles Peirce, John Dewey, and William James. Each has his own subtle differences from the others—but there is a common set of understandings that include above all the idea of mind and thinking as an adaptive evolutionary development that provides humans with the ability to read reality and formulate courses of action to satisfy their needs. Pragmatism involves a learning capacity based on experience— physical contact with the world that in fact forms the basis of Dewey’s philosophy and practice of education—an experimental positivism. “Truth” does not involve a deep metaphysical enduring essence but it is more mundanely defined as a reading of reality that works. Below I briefly highlight some of the key ideas of each. Charles Peirce Peirce (1998; 1931–58) presented the most formal and sophisticated idea of pragmatism. He focused on the communicative social function of language (semiotics) and the ways in which the creation and use of signs and symbols as referents of the real world was critical in operating successfully in that world. True representations of the world were likely to lead to survival and success, false ones to failure. Reading reality was not an idiosyncratic individualistic activity but a deeply embedded cultural construct of a functioning society. William James James (1907; 1967), following closely upon Peirce, focused on the merging of biology, psychology, and—by implication—sociology in the evolution of human adaptation to the environment. The biological idea of autonomic stimulus-response was paralleled by the psychological theory linking happiness and survival in a variant of behaviorism, of seeking the pleasurable and the productive in the same mental state. Above all James popularized the concept of pragmatism and, operating with a more scientific frame, rooted it in the psychology of the human organism (James, 1890) and distinguished it from the ethical and metaphysical European philosophies of the day. John Dewey Dewey (1922; 1930; 1933) stressed above all the role of experimentation via experience and hands-on empirical exploration in generating useful (and therefore true) knowledge. His pragmatism had an empirical scientific (and even prescientific) knowledge base that evolved with the development of the active organism moving through the changing flux of surrounding circumstances. This led from philosophy through psychology to education that became a major focus of Dewey’s pragmatism.

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The more contemporary academic meaning of pragmatism rests as a mantel preeminently on the shoulders of Richard Rorty (Rorty, 1991; 1980; Saatkamp, 1995). Like his predecessors he eschews any transcendental, essentialist, and universal notion of the “true” and has been critiqued by some such as Jurgen Habermas (1992), for his underlying relativism and failure to champion universalistic values of individualism and its democratic, egalitarian corollaries. Rather, Rorty locates the genius of pragmatism precisely in its situational relativity in contrast to more determinist ideologies. The good and the reasonable are shifting outcomes based on shifting realities, and a product of a temporary collective consensus worked out in the normative framework of egalitarian and democratic debate. Pragmatism as such may be an “ideology,” but one which is qualitatively distinct from the traditional political ideologies of left and right. Liberalism In contemporary America, to be labeled a “liberal” is to be accused of holding the view that the state, preeminently the federal government, should provide a wide range of domestic welfare benefits that are entitled rights of citizenship. These are usually lumped together under the collective rubric of “The Welfare State” and include such programs as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, and Unemployment Compensation. In contrast to “liberals,” “conservatives” are seen to champion a more minimalist state with greater reliance on the competitive operations and outcomes of the institutions of the “free market.” The classic opposition of state versus market, or socialism versus capitalism, still echoes through the din of today’s debates over contemporary issues such as welfare reform, tax reform, healthcare reform, and social security reform, among others. Classic liberalism also connotes the liberating spirit of free inquiry and open debate resolved by appeals to reasonable interpretations of facts rather than obeisance to authority and revelations of faith. In this, classic liberalism was a product of the age of reason and enlightenment and placed its faith in the secular, rational, free thinking, enlightened individual (Hume, 2000). Classic “liberalism” emerged as an ideology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that spoke to the rights of the individual to engage in a sphere of behavior unfettered and free of control by governmental and religious authorities. Thomas Hobbes’s (1651) Leviathan spoke to the tyranny of central authority over the individual, while Adam Smith’s (1994/1776) Wealth of Nations provided a positive rationale for the pursuit of individual self-interest in the operation of markets defined by minimal state regulation. Though Smith saw difficulties that individualistic liberalism posed for holding society together, concerns he addressed in his corollary work, A Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith A., 2002), he saw liberalism’s self-interest producing—through the unanticipated consequences of the “invisible hand of the market”—the greatest good for the greatest number. Liberalism in this historical context represented an enlightened emancipation from the tyranny of a mercantilist monarchy and a land based aristocracy. This classic conception of liberalism is different from, if not downright in opposition to, today’s popular meaning of “liberal”

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(Gutting, 1999). As such some have labeled it the “neoliberal” perspective that has, in turn, morphed with conscious irony into the popular label of “neocon” (“neoconservative”). Academic champions of the left’s meaning of liberal would include such thinkers as the economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1952) and the sociologist Allan Wolfe (1991), while the right’s meaning of market-oriented “neoliberal” would include more traditional conservatives such as the economist Milton Friedman (1962) and the sociologist Robert Nisbet (1986), among others. The preeminent popular political icon of the liberal left would be Teddy Kennedy, while on the right one has the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Our discussion of “liberal” contains elements of both the left and right. Like the left we stress a major role of the state, but we see that role as more expansive and inclusive beyond direct provision of services to assisting in promoting not-for-profit elements of civil society, and like the right we recognize the possibilities, power, and utility inherent in for-profit institutions of the market. Civil Society In current popular usage the idea of “civil society” is most often associated with the idea of “civility” in interpersonal behavior, its antonym being “rudeness,” at times bordering on hostility, aggression, and violence. The erosion of civility in modern life, increasing public “incivility,” is often seen to be the result of a hyperindividualism and legitimation of egocentric behavior leading to a disregard and lack of concern for the welfare of others. Such behaviors bespeak a lack of etiquette, manners, tact, and in a word “civility” (Caldwell, 1999; Kasson, 1990; Sistare, 2004). A second meaning of civil society that originated in academic and intellectual circles and has migrated into public discourse focuses on the role of “voluntary associations.” These are “nonprofit” and “nonstate” organizations operating outside of the market and the state—the two poles of the classical left-right distinction of liberal versus conservative thought—and as a result some refer to them as “the third sector.” They are—in a phrase—“non-state, non-profit voluntary associations.” A civil society is thus defined as one in which rational individuals enter freely and voluntarily into mutual association to pursue their collective interests, resulting in a dense rich network of associational life. The history of this idea of civil society in America begins with the astute observations of that nineteenth century French sojourner Alexis de Tocqueville and his remarking on the facility with which Americans formed voluntary associations of all kinds to deal with their collective needs as opposed to relying on more centralized powers of church and state (Tocqueville, 2000). These two connotations of civil society are not unrelated as Edward Shils suggests in the descriptive subtitle of one of his essays “Civility and Civil Society: Good Manners Between Persons and Concern for the Common Good in Public Affairs” (1997, p. 63). The dynamic of a “loss of civility” may apply to both connotations as well, that is, less politeness in the public sphere and a declining participation in voluntary associations. Robert Putnam (2000) has

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bridged the academic and popular discourse in his book Bowling Alone documenting the decline of participation in public life of various forms, from declining voting rates to loss of voluntary association memberships—including bowling leagues. Following the current “economistic rhetoric,” such voluntary ties have been relabeled as “social capital” and are seen to be a resource to be accumulated and expended through “networking” in the pursuit of individual and collective goals (Lin, 2001; Schneider, 2006). The building of such ties is also seen to rely on elements of “trust” and this has been incorporated into assessments of a society’s “social capital.” As a variable component of social capital, trust includes both interpersonal trust of other individuals and the legitimating trust of social institutions. A central point of our argument about civil society, and one that is in sharp contrast to much of the prevailing use of the term, is that a civil society is a particular type of society and not simply a single sector or just a part of society as a whole. Equating civil society solely with voluntary associations, we feel, is too myopic, and unnecessarily limiting of the analytical power of the concept. We see the “civil” in “civil society” as an adjective characterizing a society that is distinct from other “uncivil societies.” As such, we are returning to the classic meaning of the idea of civil society first proposed by Adam Ferguson (1995/1767) and others of the Scottish Enlightenment toward the end of the eighteenth century. Civil societies were an evolved state out of the rude and crude primitive states of “barbarian” and “savage” societies. A civil society therefore included a particular form of government and types of laws, and deep cultural frames defining the collective good (Shils, 1997, p. 321). It also incorporated emerging Enlightenment ideas about the rational individual, and the evolving rights and duties of citizenship in the modern secular nation-state. In short, civil society is not simply an autonomous sector of nonprofit, nonstate social organization but a merger of this with particular legal and state structures and a supporting public culture. A civil society includes the whole ball of wax.

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CHAPTER 1

Malaise

A

t the turn of the millennium and as we march into the twenty-first century there is a pervasive anxiety about public life in America. Nearly every institution is beset with problems that are profound. We worry that our basic needs will not be met in times of personal hardship or public disaster. If we are personally secure now, we recognize that others in society have lost access to opportunities and services that people need, and that many of us could be in the same situation following a slight twist of fate. Humanitarian concerns aside, we would like to feel we have a stake in society and are willing to support the needed amenities for basic social order. We may feel personally secure, but we see a shadow on the horizon and fear that a huge social crisis could be coming (Glassner, 2000; Altheidi, 2002; Furedi, 2005). This book addresses these anxieties and fears and offers hope and solutions. The problems we fear arise from many different particular situations and the specific crises of now this social program or now that agency or organization. But these are just symptoms. The real problems are global ones that have to do with the moral, economic, and political fabric of our society. Concentrating only on specific solutions for challenges that face institutions will be inadequate. Those specific solutions ultimately are needed, but to achieve them we need to develop and share an understanding of the global problems that face us and generate solutions that address both small- and large-scale problems at the same time (Berman, 1978; Eulau, 1998; Schelling, 1978). The challenges and anxieties we face as a society are daunting. Schools do not teach basic skills to poor children and they do not do a good job of teaching values and commitment to civil society to anyone. They are dangerous places to learn and to work for children of all social classes and races. Math and science education are failing just when other countries are closing the technological gap with the United States. Higher education is so expensive that working class and even some middle-class families cannot provide the best education for their children (US Dept of Education, 2005; Sharpes, 1987). Health care is not available to increasing portions of the working poor and the lower middle class.

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But wealthier people too find that their choices and their freedom to choose are being cut back. They also worry that they will lose health care coverage should they lose or change their jobs. Moreover, while costs are huge, we seem to spend health care dollars on care that benefits businesses more than people. The United States has the highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world; the life expectancy for black Americans has been dropping dramatically; the AIDS epidemic is gradually drowning urban hospitals in patients who are expensive to treat and unable to pay for their care. Pandemics loom as potential public health disasters with questionable planning (Gostin, 2004). The criminal justice system is collapsing beneath the weight of drug arrests. Police are outmanned and outgunned, court dockets are backlogged, and jails are full with too few cells to house convicted felons. Meanwhile, the millions of guns owned by the public makes us worry that casual public encounters will result in violence (Wright et al., 1983). The public assistance system has been gutted by welfare reforms that may or may not meet basic needs of the poorest citizens. Unemployment hovers between 40 and 50 percent for young minority men living in inner cities. Job training is inadequate, although there are no jobs to give even adequately trained people. Old basic industries in the rust belt have closed, leaving many out of work. A concentrated permanent underclass of urban black Americans has emerged despite the progress of middle-class blacks due to the civil rights reforms of the 1960s (Wilson W., 1987). Low-income housing has never been easy to build in the post–World War II era, but new construction of housing for the poor has come to a standstill. Homelessness remains a visible problem on the urban scene that grows dramatically whenever there is an economic downturn. Many of the homeless are simply poor people who ran out of resources and have not been able to obtain public aid. But there also are many homeless people who have been pushed out of institutions that in the past have helped the mentally and physically disabled ( Jencks, 1994). We have awakened to an environmental emergency that is often a crisis of nonresponsibility. Many health problems and much human suffering can be traced to the actions of specific public or private organizations. Chemical spills, radiation leakage, acid rain, hazardous waste disposal, erosion of the ozone layer, global warming, the loss of forest cover, and starvation in various corners of the world are all collective problems that no specific authority either assumes responsibility for or can be charged with repairing the damage (Schnaiberg, 1986). A collective crisis is also found in the inadequacies of corporate America. In the 1980s we saw the collapse of savings and loans, and in the 1990s international loan defaults have created a crisis in the International Monetary Fund. In both instances public money bailed out investors. Resources that might have been used to help reduce social crises were instead being used to reimburse middle-class and wealthy people with sufficient assets to have put them in savings institutions. High interest rates attracted these savings, but those high rates were made possible by speculative investment arrangements that allowed many people in the financial industry to amass fortunes. The public bailout of the industry protected and reimbursed these private individuals (Derber, 1998). We could drag out this tale of woe, but that is not the purpose of this book. This is an effort to offer solutions. Because the problems are global, the solutions that are possible

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cannot be recommendations that are specific and concrete. The malaise that confronts American society involves problems that are intertwined and massive. They also are problems that grow from failures of values, moral will, and responsible social engagement. The problems are fed by a commitment to private, personal welfare at the expense of the public, collective good. The problems are also fed by a need of people to survive in an increasingly stressful world, where their negative coping behavior all too often involves a retreat into drugs or an abandonment of families. While problems are global, solutions still are possible. In 1960, for example, poverty among the elderly was a serious national problem. Creation of Medicare, construction of public housing for the elderly, and development of a national network of senior centers have dramatically reduced poverty for senior citizens (Marmor, 2000). We also have seen a vast change that grew out of the civil rights movement of the 1950s. Not only has social justice for racial and ethnic minorities been vastly increased, other previously disenfranchised groups such as women, the disabled, and gays also have expanded rights and are beneficiaries of new social benefits. These groups are materially better off, but on another level there is an expectation that equity and justice should apply to them in the same way that it does to white males (Switzer, 2003; Cain, 2000). Changes such as these are specific and particular, but they also represent a change and an improvement in the moral and civil quality of society. This book is an argument for continuing to make progress with these kinds of large changes. A Citizen’s Morality It is generally considered not very good form for a book by social scientists to say that solutions to the world’s problems can be found by strengthening moral fiber. Social science has promoted a relativistic view of values. Careful scholarly research usually finds it impossible to make clear moral statements on any problems of social importance. Yet this moral ambivalence is itself a moral position, one that social scientists have advocated with conviction and assertiveness. Moral absolutes are dead, they say. Therefore, the only morality acceptable to social science is relativism. Translated into social action, relativism becomes an argument for complete freedom for individuals to pursue their “rational” selfinterests. This is fine from the abstract and mythical perspective of neoclassical economic theory. It is disastrous when we confront the immediacy of real world problems and ask what responsibility individuals have for the well-being of others in society, or what obligations society has to guarantee the welfare of individuals. Our book is centrally concerned with citizenship. This is a two-sided concept. From the point of view of individuals, citizenship requires that people subordinate some of their private interests to the good of the community. From the point of view of society, citizenship requires that individuals be guaranteed certain minimal rights and benefits. Citizenship is, in short, a reciprocal relationship between the individual and society, defined by mutual rights and duties. Each of the crises we have mentioned is a crisis of citizenship. It is a crisis created by a failure either of institutions to provide basic support to those in

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need or a failure of individuals to consider their duties to the larger society by focusing instead solely on opportunities to enrich themselves. Working together, these two failures create accelerating inequality, growing social instability, and real danger that life as we know it will soon end (Marshall, 1965; Katz, 2001). The intention of this book is not, however, to produce one more tract that bemoans the loss of family values or extols the virtues of religion. Rather, we talk about how American society can build citizenship and a sense of collective responsibility among the people who live in our society. Our central question and ultimate aim is to explain how we can build a civil society. Most of our discussion involves the mechanisms or tools—things that work or do not work to promote the well-being of citizens. That is, we talk about government and public organizations and what social science has learned about the things that make them work well or badly. The main subject matter of this book is a discussion of why government and policy interventions have failed. We need to make sense of the profound failure that has resulted from massive efforts at rational, planned interventions to solve social problems. Scholars share with others in society pessimism about the prospects for reform (Lindblom, 1959). Reviewing the academic debate is important, however, for in spite of the collective dismissal of planned change, there have been important insights into the process of change that need to be acknowledged (Mills, 1959/2000). Many of these insights of social scientists have been ignored or dismissed because most of them have been developed and advanced in the service of an ideology. Commentators on social policy for the last quarter century have distinguished between three orientations that supposedly are mutually exclusive: a conservatism that emphasizes free market mechanisms and minimal government, a liberalism that accepts the value of the market but advocates aggressive government to repair market failures, and a radicalism that emphasizes the negative consequences of class divisions and elite dominance of society and government (Gordon, 1977; Apter, 1964). These ideologies, along with some variants, turn out in our analysis not to be mutually exclusive at all. Ours is an empirical study. We are like anthropologists looking at what people do and what they say they are doing. These are our data. The policies and programs are what people have done, and the theories and ideologies are what people say they are doing. They disagree in some measure because they are concerned with different basic facts. Conservatives, liberals, and radicals talk past each other without acknowledging this basic incongruity. No wonder their disagreements cannot be resolved! This book is about solutions because we pay attention in a pragmatic way to the insights of the different ideological traditions. Each point of view builds arguments about truth and morality by emphasizing certain facts or realities. Perceptions of reality differ, and yet over the last five decades social science has accumulated some important understandings about how government works, and why it does not work. Thus, the empirical understandings that undergird the different traditions can be woven together into a new pragmatic synthesis. This provides some important insights into what is wrong

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with government and civil society, and what steps we can take to make things better. What Works, What Doesn’t One of the main messages social science has to teach is that things usually do not work out the way we expect or plan—there are always unanticipated consequences. This reality is something that anyone who reads the newspaper every day and tries to pay attention to important political and social issues recognizes. “Common sense” tells us that the unpleasant surprises and inefficiencies that accompany most efforts to deal with social problems come about because someone made a mistake or was dishonest. But unanticipated consequences also produce great benefits. Rather early on—at least for the last fifty years or for more than two centuries, if one goes back to Marx or the Scottish Moralists such as Adam Smith—professional social analysts concluded that the expected should be the unexpected, or the unexpected the expected (Smith A., 2002; Marx, 2001; Merton, 1968). We should be surprised if any rational plans work. We should understand that unintended consequences, rather than intended ones, are often the most important and enduring consequences of purposive action. Conservative market theorists would point to the “invisible hand” of the market, where individual selfish action produces the greatest collective good of economic efficiency. Political activism among the poor was one of the main “gains” of the War on Poverty, even though its programs might not have worked very well to reduce poverty (Moynihan, 1969). One of the main things that makes social science insights uncommon and hard to understand for laypeople is this very simple shift of mindset. And it is precisely because the unexpected is the expected that social scientists continue to find the everyday social world so fascinating. If things never work the way we plan, does that mean the work is unknowable and beyond control? Most of the work of social science, ideological though it may be, has gone to show how the world is somewhat predictable if we just make certain “adjustments” in the way we define what is rational or sensible and if we alter the nature and the degree of predictability we are willing to work with. Conservatives, for example, tell us that each individual pursues his or her own self-interest in all things. This leads us to familiar rules of markets that involve supply and demand. Conservatives also tell us to notice how social programs reward behavior that is the opposite of what we want people to do. Aid to Families with Dependent Children tended to reward women who had children out of wedlock. Public schools, by creating a monopoly and eliminating competition, encourage self-satisfied and unresponsive teaching. Health insurance, by not forcing either doctors or patients to be accountable for costs, encourages runaway inflation. We think conservatives are pretty much correct as far as they go (Friedman, 1962; Levitt and Dubner, 2005). Radicals offer a different approach to making sense of nonsense in the social policy world. They suggest that wealthy and powerful people have a collective

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interest in maintaining their control of resources and in passing their elite status on to their children. Elites are most interested in social and governmental services to the extent they are instruments by which their elite class interests can be maintained. This translates into a concern with leading poor people to accept their lot without being rebellious, with socializing the citizenry to work without complaint, and with controlling those who do get out of hand. Social services exist not to dispense services but rather to further these goals of the elite class. Most of those who work in social services would object to this observation and claim that they follow egalitarian service values. But their failures are nicely explained by elitist models. You do not have to be a revolutionary to see that schools do not educate the poor, doctors do not take very good care of the poor, and that police control the poor more than they protect them. Good science tells us that if the model explains the facts, it is probably true and so it goes with radicalism (Harvey, 1989). Liberals emphasize pluralism where competing interests balance against each other, creating shifting alliances and policy priorities but within an overall stable governmental structure. In health care, for example, doctors’ interests once dominated and they used their political power to exploit the system economically. Doctors might have been rich but they protected the doctor/patient relationship. In the new era, managed care health providers have turned doctors into bureaucratic employees and they operate less as advocates for patients. Today other interests make claims for a legitimate voice in healthcare decision making and these interests are more balanced so that hospitals, insurance companies, employers who pay for health insurance, patient advocates, medical supply companies, and the government, all compete to shape health care. Similar shifts in the power and alliances of varying interest groups surrounding schools—teachers, parents, administrators, public officials, and employers—have shaped the policies and programs of public education (Starr, 1994). From our perspective, all three models make pretty good sense. The trouble is that they are supposed to be mutually contradictory. This is only a problem, however, if you buy the ideology that goes along with the description of reality. Ignore the Marxists and Milton Friedman and the two perspectives give us some rather sensible advice about how to think about social intervention efforts. Pay attention to the diverse self-interests that different groups bring to social programs and you probably can anticipate some of the more extreme ways that a program might fail and the surprising ways that they might succeed. Take seriously that social programs help rich people and hurt poor people (Gans, 1995). Recognize that, in the long run, social programs serve poor people to the extent that they are politically useful for the powerful. Encourage poor people to let the rich know that they should be happy to support efforts that provide food, shelter, health care, and education. Recognize that service institutions exist and prosper to the extent that they are politically useful. Revolutionary social movements do wonders to encourage reform. We live in an age of extremists, true believers, and doomsayers. That makes for discouragement if you are trying to figure out what to believe about how we all are doing in society. Conflicting messages, all of which say the world is

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coming to an end, encourage confusion and discouragement. This book seeks to overcome these feelings by looking for the practical message beneath the rhetoric. We are pragmatists. Because we listen to everyone and believe in the importance of collective action, we are liberals. Hence the title of the book—Pragmatic Liberalism. Civility and Charity The major crises of our society involve failures of civility. People pursue private goals. They only work for the community if they see their self-interest served (Sennett, 1992; Lasch, 1978). People succeed in getting help from service institutions if they know people, if they are sophisticated about how complex organizations work, and if they are (or can afford to be) persistent. Leading institutions, dominated by the elite and the powerful, are biased in pointing out their own and society’s successes, and in masking their failures. Unmasking these failures, pointing out ongoing problems in need of solutions is an unpopular role. Rather than being viewed as helpful, challenging established institutions makes one seem like a rabble-rouser rather than a positive critic. Civility requires an honest and open appraisal and discussion of reality. This is partly because politics at all levels are driven increasingly by special interest groups that are not built upon a broad populist base. Money talks and the interests of the rich get served. Basic social services also are provided by established, monopolistic institutions that resist reform, external intervention, and reconstruction. Our resources are invested in service provision schemes that do not seem to work, but that we can neither do without nor get rid of. Politicians and service institutions ought to be the instruments by which a sense of commitment to the collective is fostered and built. They not only fail, they produce the opposite: anomie, cynicism, discouragement among those who would help, and ultimately a passive disquiet, a fatalism, and despair (Putnam, 2000). The best chance for reversing the pervasive sense of crisis that plagues us is to promote interventions that build community and a spirit of charity and voluntarism. Such a recommendation is hardly one that most people on the political left want to hear. It rings of Reagan’s exhortation that the private sector ought to solve social problems or George H. W. Bush’s celebration of the “thousand points of light,” or his son’s “W’s” call for “faith based initiatives.” Charity sounds like religion and rich people giving away a small amount of their wealth to assuage their guilt, a noblesse oblige to create the impression that they truly are civic spirited. We think of Exxon sponsoring orchestra concerts on public television after the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, or of Wal-Mart sponsoring local benefits as its competitive practices drive local retailers out of business. Charity, voluntarism, and community smack of hypocrisy, truly irrelevant public relations and image building, often coupled with a piousness that celebrates the moral flaws of the poor. Who wants it! These are the wrong images. Instead of Reagan, Bush 1 and 2, and Exxon, think activists Jane Addams, Saul Alinsky, and Martin Luther King. One of the great, pragmatic traditions of American radicalism lies in the community organizing

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movement and its political cousin, the union organizing movement. Among radical social scientists, the pluralism championed by political scientists has long been seen negatively as the epitome of liberal complacency for the status quo. But reading Alinsky’s (1946) Reveille for Radicals, one appreciates that a liberal democracy includes a commitment to mobilizing the powerless and having them give voice to their concerns in direct, disruptive ways (Rorty, 2002). As the social theorist Jurgen Habermas (1984–87) has powerfully argued, in a true democracy all voices should be heard even if some such as the poor and the powerless have to be more raucous and shout louder to be heard. This is hardly complacency. Accumulating resources in revolving loan funds to support entrepreneurial ventures in poor communities is hardly complacency. Peer counseling among high risk youth to reduce drug abuse and the risk of AIDS is not complacency. Mutual aid by self-help groups among the disabled is not complacency. Organizing charter schools, governed by parents that draw on community resources to give children an opportunity to escape from the oppressiveness of public schools, is not complacency. Publicly sponsored services to help the needy have withered and the public dialog about the problems that most demand attention and can most practically be alleviated flounders in confusion. Meanwhile, grassroots organization, voluntary activity, and charity have boomed in the last quarter century. To our surprise, for example, the majority of the grassroots social service organizations that were created in the 1960s as the legacy of the War on Poverty have somehow managed to survive in some fashion into the new millennium despite the withering or elimination of most public funding for such things as housing rehabilitation, rape crisis management, legal aid, waste recycling, or community mental health. Researchers for The Independent Sector tell us about spectacular growth among health charities—the Muscular Dystrophy Foundation, the American Cancer Society, the Shriners’ Hospitals for Crippled Children, the Children’s Miracle Network, and so on (Hodgkinson, 1996). Americans each year donate hundreds of millions of dollars to these organizations and they also give countless hours of volunteer time. The charities have become increasingly ingenious in their approaches to fund raising, using direct mail and schemes to convince businesses to channel spare change to charities. The Muscular Dystrophy Foundation, for example, has worked out an arrangement with real estate companies wherein the interest on escrow accounts, set up during the process of housing sales, will be donated to the foundation. With a penny here and a penny there, almost unnoticed by the donors, enormous resources are being accumulated. In a recent annual report, the Shriners reported upward of $5 billion in unused assets, which is more than ten times what the organization spends each year on hospitals. As laudatory and impressive as voluntary efforts are, given the scale of problems in America today, the private sector can do little more than scratch the surface or offer a band-aid in terms of providing real relief for social problems. Try as they might and as noble as they are, community organizations and charities find it hard to inspire any overall confidence because they are dwarfed

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or co-opted by the dark forces—privatism, political opportunism, and institutional self-protection. As long as charity and community continue to be fragmented social impulses with no collective voice or orientation, they cannot be an effective force for change in society. As long as charity and community remain under the control of small groups of philanthropists or entrepreneurs who are accountable to no social or political base, marketing will be a more important instrument for mass mobilization than will a citizenry’s commitment to the greater good. As long as marketing rules, the main function of charitable organization will be to create complacency by making concerned members of the public think they are solving social problems while in fact they are supporting the accumulation of private wealth and financing an unspoken, unarticulated, and often invisible social and political agenda. Things could be different. This is not just an issue of how to get the nonprofit sector and community-based organizations to work more effectively. The deeper issue has to do with how our society can generate consensus about an agenda for effective social change. Change that really does something to solve problems. Change that works and doesn’t just make people feel good. Pragmatic change. We write with the conviction that an effective consensus among the people already exists (Wolfe, 1998). We need a structure of communities and voluntary organizations that allow people to work effectively for social change. They must educate people, telling them that working for their communities is a necessary part of the solution. In this book we give them a framework within which to work and a rationale as to why these efforts will work. We need a government that is proactive in fostering the conditions that will promote and nurture these citizen efforts. We also need societal leadership that makes the consensus clear. Leaders need to say what we all think: mass homelessness is intolerable; the inaccessibility of health care is intolerable; schools that are hostile to poor children are intolerable; lawless communities are intolerable; businesses that casually pollute the environment are intolerable; the unemployment of deindustrialization is intolerable. This is not radicalism. It is common sense. Raising the alarm about social problems is not sufficient, however. People will only support a social change agenda if they are convinced that it will work, that collective interventions—probably government-sponsored and supervised interventions—can actually do what they promise. Much of our current malaise comes from a conviction that any public intervention to solve social problems will dissolve into political opportunism, bureaucratic infighting, and professional selfaggrandizement (Pressman and Wildavsky, 1984). This discouragement about implementation is the reason that this book devotes most of its space to telling the story that social science tells about why and how reform works. There are some simple lessons to draw from this story. Although those lessons are usually couched in the negative language of explaining why things do not work, scholarship can just as well, when held up to a mirror with the image reversed, become instructions about how to launch interventions that will do better (Skocpol, 1996).

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We have learned, for example, that the political system will direct resources at those initiatives that have the most effective political representation. One of the important services that the health charities have performed with their growing resources is that they have become the most effective lobbying force for spending on research and services that will benefit those affected by chronic diseases. These individuals and their families cannot in most cases represent themselves, so the charities are responsible in large measure for the growth of government spending on chronic disease (Fund Raising Management, 2001; Rose, 2003). Similarly, one of the reasons so many of the mentally ill are homeless today is the result of the deinstitutionalization movement through which we emptied out large, residential institutions for the retarded and the mentally ill. We then failed to provide community halfway houses that were the second prong of this reconceptualization of how best to define and treat mental illness. Books such as The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz (1961), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (2002), or Asylums by Erving Goffman (1961) and films such as Titicutt Follies by Frederick Wiseman make it hard to believe that deinstitutionalization was wrong. However, large institutions have been a stable and effective lobbying force over the last century and they have guaranteed that government and private funds would be given to help those with chronic psychological problems. Looking at the bleak mental hospitals of the 1950s, community mental health—which provided the intellectual rationale for deinstitutionalization— probably was a good idea. The program was a disaster politically, however (Hunter and Riger, 1986). The new community mental health centers were too small and fragmented to assemble a strong political lobby. Community-based service programs also are easy targets for local political opposition. Where the state can impose a large, unpopular institution on isolated communities, it cannot easily impose many small facilities in scattered locations. “Not in my back yard” becomes such a ubiquitous rallying cry that it acquires its own acronym, NIMBY. With local leaders attacking and no strong interest groups supporting funding, community mental health service was cut back leaving the deinstitutionalized handicapped with no services. These people are an important fraction of the homeless population we now see on city streets. We know now that to create an effective service program, it has to be built around an effective lobby. Professionals and business interests are among the most important members of an effective lobby. A good example of a citizen’s lobby is that of and for the elderly, a lobby that has mobilized people and resources in national and local organizations to create a variety of social services from local senior citizen centers to federally funded health care provided through Medicare (Morris, 1996). The struggle is to find means for making powerful lobbies accountable to the public and getting the public to make its agenda for social change crystal clear. We have begun to see these changes happen in the environmental movement where public outrage is forcing business to take accountability to the public seriously and government to seek ways of producing collective answers that will be consistent with the concerns of grassroots organizations. Twenty years ago,

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businesses could treat environmental pollution as cost neutral. Chemical storage, hazardous gas emissions, and industrial spills rarely imposed any expenses beyond the cost of real estate for a dumpsite or the construction costs of smokestacks. Increasingly, however, businesses are accountable for hazardous materials that they manufacture or use or that are consequences of doing business. Consumers may boycott a product or service; government may impose regulation; there may be liability suits that could wipe out all assets of a business; new construction becomes difficult because permits will not easily be given to dangerous businesses. Businesses are being forced to reprocess hazardous wastes that are byproducts of their profit-making activities. The expenses involved are leading them to change to less environmentally consequential ways of doing business. Public concern and government action have worked together to change the climate of business so that it is increasingly cheaper for companies to be careful and accountable to the public good than sloppy and indifferent to community needs (Schnaiberg and Gould, 2000). This is not to say that environmental problems have all been solved or that businesses have become wonderfully community oriented. Environmental issues make the point of pragmatic liberalism, however. We should not be surprised that people act in ways that maximize their self-interest. We should not be surprised to see that businesses try to shape public policy to further their economic interests, nor should we be surprised to learn that the people who run businesses would prefer to help people who share their class position. But as pragmatists, we also see that if we change the rules of the game to include a certain concern for a public payoff, and not just a private profit, then these same rational interests can be mobilized to produce public goods for the public welfare. This is one of the major roles the state can play, creating legislation that sets the rules of the game in such a way that private interests are mobilized in the service of the public good. We also, however, should not make the mistake of thinking that community and voluntarism are dead in American society. Some people, bereft of community support and hostile to the wealthy, act in nasty, troublesome ways—drug addicts in cities, for example. Others, indifferent to community support and rich enough to ignore collective problems also behave in nasty, troublesome ways—they sell junk bonds, not drugs. Many other people give time and money to what they think are worthy causes (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Fact Sheet. 2006). Whether or not we agree with their ideas about how to produce effective social changes, we should recognize that they are an enormous reservoir of energy for change. The trick is to tap that reservoir. Doing so requires that leaders be willing to go out on a limb and demand that things be made better. Doing so also requires that we have some sophistication about understanding how social problems come about and how interventions may be launched that will have a reasonable chance of working. Rational planning is not totally irrelevant but it is a small part of the whole solution. Coherent answers and focused interventions also are not irrelevant, but they too will be a small part of effective solutions. The social changes that will work in this society have to be ones that have support at the

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grassroots, that create political interest structures that can win legislative battles, that allow for long-term, rigorous regulatory supervision, and that allow for a sensible way of organizing service delivery. Simple. Plan of the Book In the chapters that follow, we do our part in going out on a limb to articulate a vision about how to achieve a just and civil society. As best we can, we have synthesized what social scientists have said about social policy over the last half century. In doing so, we tromp on many sacred cows. Inevitably, this will provoke attack. (This will only happen, we suppose, if we are effective, because otherwise this book will just be ignored, the fate of most social research.) Maybe those attacks will be justified, for perhaps here and there we have been too casual with big and serious ideas. However, we are dead serious. Our goal is to draw a coherent viewpoint with some hopefulness about change from a mass of writing that is a cacophony of disagreement, is mostly nihilistic, and is all too often sophistry—where esoteric academic squabbles about “the real meaning of poverty” are the modern day equivalent to the burning medieval question of “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” (Corcoran et al., 1985). We have provided some selective citations that back up the things we say— but not the excessive references that are too often mere pedantic claims of the overachieving academics insecure in their own argument. We have decided to base our writings on what is in our heads and what we know—not just from books but from our own experiences as participant observers engaged in voluntary efforts to construct civil society in our own settings. As academicians, we do feel the call but resist giving in to the temptation to thoroughly research each subpoint we cover. The scope of this book is too broad for such an inquiry and we do not want to tack each assertion we offer to some pillar of academic legitimacy. Besides, others have done much more thorough analyses of any single point we might address, and for their work we are thankful and feel indebted. Our goal is to bring many of their key insights together and actually have them dialogue with one another. We are two social scientists, each active in community activity and social policymaking for over a quarter century. Either we know it by now or we do not. We thought it was time for us to pull our thoughts together, to put them down on paper, and to share them with our fellow citizens. The book is divided into two sections. The first part explores the consensus around social justice that we believe prevails in the United States today (chapters 1 and 2). We then explore three ideological orientations (each with its own chapter—3, 4, 5) that explain why we might want to help others and that suggest why current efforts at helping do not work very well. These are the conservative, radical, and liberal or pluralistic perspectives on social policy. In each of these cases, we argue that the ideological positions rest on a foundation of sensible, concrete (ethnographic) observations. We outline this ethnographic foundation and explain what it tells us about social policy. In chapter 6 we argue that we must bring a sensitivity to organizational and institutional dynamics and

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to our understanding of social problems and we explain what this means as a theoretical stance in social science, and what it implies for enlightened public policy. The second section of the book explores the fate of societal efforts to define and intervene in solving social problems. The policy sciences have been preoccupied in recent years with the ambiguity and uncontrollability of the social policy environment. Anything we try seems to fail or to produce the opposite of what we want. Following our strategy of the first part of the book, we treat this tradition ethnographically as well. Rather than focus on discrete ideological traditions, however, this discussion sees social policy itself as an American cultural tradition, and as a recurrent sort of social movement in American society. This analysis has two goals. First, we argue that the current malaise felt by many of those concerned with social policy has counterparts in other periods of twentieth-century history when the discussion of collective, societal action stagnated. Periods of stagnation have given way eventually to periods of policy activism and great social vision. We happen, presently, to be in a trough, where activism is concerned, but this book is written with the expectation that this period of quiescence and erosion of civil participation will soon end and is likely to remerge in new forms (Aryes, 1999). Seeing policy activism as a recurrent social cycle gives us confidence that changes are possible, even likely, and perhaps inevitable. Second, we argue that the current preoccupation with the ambiguity and uncontrollability of the social world rests mainly on a narrow engineering vision about how social change is best initiated and we contrast this to a broader more enlightenment approach (Hunter, 1985). The engineering model encourages precise definition of the nature of a problem, careful calculation of the kinds of resources that will be needed for solution, and laying out of a mechanical plan to achieve success. We like engineering solutions for working through limited social problems. The trouble is that they tend to define as disruptive and negative those social influences that shatter expectations. The engineering perspective also must be amoral in its approach. It takes a defined problem as its starting point and seeks a mechanism for resolving that problem. It offers no way of telling a good problem from a bad one, nor does it tell us how to make broad social decisions in ways that respond to common sense and the consensual values that we lay out at the beginning of this book, in chapter 1. We need leadership that brings an enlightenment approach to social problems. Enlightenment-oriented social explanations encompass engineering solutions, but they place those solutions within a more global analysis of society and social relations. An enlightenment view acknowledges that the processes by which social problems are solved may be as important as the products generated by change efforts. Indeed, change processes themselves may be instruments for solving social problems. Thus, we may build community or create effective political coalitions on the way to solving narrow problems. Those affiliations have then been brought into existence and made available for other change initiatives. This is the ultimate recognition that democracy is a process not a product, that a civil society is self-generated by civility in both its citizens and its leaders.

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Though civil society may be packaged and promoted in specific programs; it is above all, a way of life (Shils, 1991). The book ends with a call for leadership that is rightly concerned with solving narrowly defined social problems, but more importantly, in so doing, a leadership that—in conjunction with citizens— consciously contributes to furthering the processes of creating a civil social order.

CHAPTER 2

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t is our basic contention that in the modern world an institutionalized liberalism that works—that is pragmatic—is necessary to ensure the ideal of a civil society. Furthermore, we contend that pragmatic liberalism demands a positive role of the state in securing these needs. And finally, we emphasize that it is the relationship of the individual to the state that defines these needs in terms of basic rights and duties—neither the individual nor the state alone should be the focus, but the relationship itself (Lacey and Haakonssen, 1991). The enduring problem with which this book is concerned is how to balance the needs and rights of the individual versus the needs and rights of the collective (Madison et al., 1987/1788; Freud, 1930; Olson, 1965; Coleman, 1986). The existing three ideologies—conservative, liberal, and radical—tend to emphasize one or the other of these polarities in their analytical descriptions and their public policies. The contemporary conservative perspective sanctifies the rights of the individual over the needs of the collective. The modern meaning of liberalism equates it with the welfare state and the heightened role of the state as the primary protector and provider of social welfare, as in New Deal liberalism. And, the radical perspective in its analysis tends to emphasize the role of powerful elites working through the state, over and against other subordinated groups and classes. Our use of the term liberalism is one that relies on the classic notion of a balance between the individual and the collective—giving neither a generalized ideological preeminence nor any subordinated position relative to the other. Both are valued, and the balance attained in any particular case involves a careful reading of the facts, of “the definition of the situation,” and an eclectic application of whatever tools will work, whatever their ideological origin. The balance is what we call classic liberalism, the eclecticism is pragmatic, hence—pragmatic liberalism. The autonomous “individual” is, in the long sweep of history, a relatively recent cultural invention (Shain, 1994; Dewey, 1930). Before the last few hundred years, and in many nonwestern societies today, the idea that people could have a unique, separate identity and personality, could own personal property,

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and could have a direct, personal relationship to God would be unimaginable. In that sense, we need to think of individuality as a myth, often related to the idea of “inalienable rights.” It is easier to accept that individuality is a myth if we also accept that the guarantor of rights, the modern “state,” is itself a glorified, abstract construction (Godfrey and Unger, 2004). “States’ rights” are often defined in terms of a vague “collective good.” But the collective always has to be described and defined by an individual with a point of view, interests, and a desire to make his or her point of view dominant. Pragmatic liberalism stresses neither of these one-sided myths. These myths are an important part of our Western cultural heritage contained in a mythical prehistory of either a natural person, such as Rousseau’s “noble savage,” or a primordial community of peaceful cooperation. Pragmatic liberalism instead focuses on the relationship between the individual and the state, the two together are seen to be mutually constructed and mutually defined. One has meaning only in relation to the other, and these meanings are in a continual process of definition and redefinition varying with the exigencies of place and time. A Consensus on Values All societies must satisfy people’s basic needs. This belief underlies all social and political theories and ideologies, whether they are radical, conservative, or liberal. Ideologists argue over what should be included or excluded on the list of basic needs and, of course, over how and what society, or the state, should do to make sure those needs are met. But we can bypass a lot of disagreement at the outset by starting with a discussion of what people in American society consider their basic needs. A simple proposition is that to the degree that these needs are not met, then citizens begin to feel that they are not living in a civil society. For people to feel that it is worthwhile to give up things for the good of the larger community, they must believe that the world they live in is civilized (and therefore civil) and that their rights will be respected and protected. So what are the needs that people think are basic, and what needs should be met for people to believe society is civil? It is a central thesis of this book that there exists within American Society today a broad consensus about these basic needs. In spite of the confusion, conflict, and chaos that seems to permeate much social and political debate, we sense that when Americans are asked the question “what constitutes the good life?” they are in basic agreement on the answer. If asked, “In what kind of a society would you like to live?” the specific characteristics listed would appear to be numerous and varied; but, we believe, they could be summarized under a single ideal—“a civil society!” The questions we need to ask are, first, “What goes into making a society civil in terms of American values?” Then, second, we need to ask, “How do we build a civil society that will achieve these central values?” It is not a matter of the state or anyone else giving people “the good life.” The question is “How should society be arranged so that people can make the good life they want?” (Bellah et al., 1985). The consensus that exists around the ideal of a civil society may be framed as a modern-day “Bill of Rights and Duties.” Putting expectations and responsibilities

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together is what makes the connection between the individual and the state a relationship. Even though the original Bill of Rights might not pass the consensus test if it were subjected to popular vote today, there still is a commonsense, pragmatic consensus that undergirds the American ideal of a civil society. Asserting that such a consensus exists is, perhaps, the most radical claim we make. A number of objections might be raised to the idea that there is such a consensus. One comes from those who argue that given the power of individual self-interest as a motivating force in human affairs, diversity and difference, not consensus, are the natural outcomes for society. People and groups are not interested in pursuing the collective good but only their own selfish interests. This is tantamount to saying that individualism is not a myth, but an objective truth. This being true, a critic might argue, competition and conflict are pervasive and it is foolish to think that a society as complicated as America could share any values. Second, there is a powerful relativism that currently exists within social science and social thought more generally. Relativism asserts that there are no absolute moral standards governing social life and that all values are relative to one’s point of view, the context in which one lives, and the historical development of one’s society. If this is the case, there can be no overarching consensus about central values. Rather, moral assertions of what is right and good or what is bad and deviant are merely socially constructed, variable, and subject to whim and fashion. They are ultimately defined in political struggles where powerful groups assert their will over and against powerless minorities. Third, within social science itself there has been a clear retreat in recent decades from grand theories such as Marxism or the structural functionalism of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons (1964), or developmental theorists of modernity such as Wilbert Moore (1963). Simply because of their scope, great theories have built into them an underlying assumption of cultural consensus about basic societal values. Theories that claim to explain everything do not tell us much about the details of social life (Tilley, 1984). Recent theory has been more interested in these details; and to make sense of them, it has used personal decision making as a point of departure for explaining the social world. This has moved research in the direction of a neoconservative individualism where consensus is the problem to be explained, not a beginning assumption, and where the focus is upon smaller-scale “rational choice models” of interpersonal competition and conflict (Becker, 1976). All of these objections to our claim of an overarching consensus have some merit. At the same time, they tend to be myopic because they focus on the trees not the forest and they lack a sense of history. Advocates of these viewpoints fail to see and appreciate the broader consensus within which their ideas operate. It is one of the central ironies of the original, classical liberal philosophers that consensus and agreement operate alongside, not in opposition to, the pursuit of individual self-interest. This is true for John Locke’s “social contract” and Adam Smith’s “greatest good for the greatest number.” It also applies to Max Weber’s account of the rise of modern democracy from

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the bargaining and haggling in medieval urban markets. It also applies to Emile Durkheim’s assertion that a “mechanical social order” based on a collective conscience is a consensual umbrella holding together the most finely specialized division of labor, or what he calls an interdependent organic social order (Locke, 1773; Smith A., 1994/1776; Weber, 1958; Durkheim, 1964). All of these thinkers point to the need for some overarching, powerful consensus, some minimal level of agreement about certain social norms to which all are held accountable. Such a consensus may take the form of agreement that government should be minimal. It may involve agreement about something seemingly simple such as the weights and measures to be used in trade. It may involve the most primitive of moral sentiments tied to kinship (blood) or neighbors (land) that will serve as a minimal bedrock, an unquestioned base of trust for forming social relationships that will hold conflict in check (Tonnies, 1963). Our belief in consensus is not an assertion that conflict will not and does not occur within American society today. That would be a silly idea that could be dismissed on its face. But by focusing on individual selfinterest and conflict, as so many do today, we overlook the underlying collective consensus that exists, we focus on the shadows dancing on the walls of Plato’s cave and not the reality and the substance of the dance itself. For Adam Smith, for example, the competition occurring among individuals pursuing their self-interest was not an end unto itself, as some would now argue. It was but a means to achieving the ultimate collective good, “the greatest good for the greatest number,” and in fact as Adam Smith argued in his companion book to the Wealth of Nations, A Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith A., 2002), it was a deep-rooted consensus on these moral sentiments, not the market-based pursuit of self-interest, that would hold society together. We have tended to focus on the means and to elevate meanness, competition, and conflict to central values, ignoring the consensual end market competition was meant to serve. It is an old adage that for competition and conflict to occur there has to be a shared consensus among the protagonists that what is being fought over is, in fact, of value and that the substance of the conflict is, in fact, important to both sides. Conflict, by definition, implies some minimal consensus on shared values (Coser, 1956). Given our assertion of consensus, one might ask why a stronger sense of citizenship does not seem to exist in America today. Why can we not seem to agree on what should be done to solve our social problems? It is precisely because our current social and political debate is focused on conflict between competing ideological systems that the real strength of an underlying, taken-for-granted, pragmatic American consensus has been ignored. The time is ripe, we feel, for the consensus to emerge from the conflict, for order to emerge from chaos. The genius of American pragmatic liberalism lies in its ability to construct, and to continuously reconstruct a civil society—a selforganizing and self-governing system within which the rights and duties of citizens and the role of government in this relationship are morally grounded in an overarching consensus. We do not simply assert that a consensus exists about what constitutes “the good life.” In the pages that follow we also spell out the

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content of this consensus, the nature of the good society (the civil society), the rights and duties of its citizens, and the role of its government. Let us assume, for the moment, as did Locke and others, that diversity and difference in self-interest do produce competition and conflict throughout society. Let us then ask, “Well, is there anything, no matter how abstract or concrete, upon which we do agree and that we can use as a beginning basis to organize and govern our social life?” Is there , in short, any basis for asserting that in fact there exists a unitary thing that we can still call “American society?” (Williams R., 1960). A Bill of Rights—and Duties Answering that question gets us back to talking about basic needs, and the rights that flow from those needs (Tuck, 1979). The rest of this chapter is devoted to spelling these out, and in doing so we will frame this consensus as a series of “rights.” In part, we mean to follow the format of the original Bill of Rights. We stress, however, that within the civil society, “rights” imply “duties,” and the notions of “rights and duties” apply equally to government and to the citizens. What then, are these consensually agreed upon rights? Right to Life A civil society maintains as its primary value the right to life. When we hear the phrase “right to life,” we usually assume that this value is rooted in some transcendental ethic. That is not true for pragmatic liberalism, it instead argues on a very down-to-earth, grounded, empirical basis that all we can assert with certainty is that this current life of the five senses exists. There may be transcendental realms and values (or more to the point, many different versions of what these transcendental realms may be), but one can assert with a greater degree of certainty and consensus that we are alive, this life exists, and what happens in it is important to us. When this or any life ceases, it is gone. Pragmatic liberalism is in this sense “conservative” in arguing for the need to protect and defend the right to life for those now living. Current life should not be coercively sacrificed for the dead of the past or for the unborn of the future. It does not accept counterclaims that individuals’ lives should be coercively sacrificed for the collective good, nor does it accept the simple but bold claim that some individuals just do not deserve to live. A civil society provides for the maintenance of life. This is not done out of a cost/benefit ratio of what a given life contributes to the collective good versus the cost of maintaining that life. Life itself is seen as an ultimate value in a civil society. Life can only be taken in defense of life, not for a hypothetical improvement of another life. Within an idealized civil society resources would willingly be expended in the maintenance of life to uphold this central value. In our society, for example, homes are provided for the mentally retarded and brain-damaged, the physically handicapped, and prisons exist for criminals who might otherwise be sentenced to death but are instead given “life” sentences (Bedau and Cassell, 2004).

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Human life is a sacrosanct value of a civil society. Human beings are, furthermore, considered to be equal in their right to life. They are not arranged on some continuum or scale of degrees with respect to this central value. They are neither to be redefined as “less than human” nor as “less human.” People may use labels to dehumanize, calling someone a “nigger” or a “gook,” a “criminal” or an “idiot,” in an attempt to deny them this right. But in a civil society that is not done. The question of abortion may seem to be tricky here, but we suggest that both pro-choice and pro-life advocates are in fact in agreement in supporting the sanctity of human life. Where they differ is in the answer to the profound but simple question of when does human life begin? The question is legally phrased as the question of “viability.” In this sense opponents in this debate are speaking past one another and the consensus is slighted while the conflict is heightened (Staggenborg, 1991). The example of abortion also brings up a more general point that these central tenets of a civil society may at times come into conflict with one another. No a priori judgment can determine the priorities among them. This is the point at which a pragmatic liberalism underscores the need for value judgments that are responsive to the variable circumstances of time and place, and for a profound consensus about how those differences should be worked out (Kohl, 1975; Dworkin et al., 1998). The right to life also implies a duty to maintain life. In the simplest case of the duty to maintain one’s own life, this would seem to be no problem, given the prevailing assumption of “self interest.” The duty to maintain life, however, does imply a constraint on self-interest, such as the moral obligation against suicide or the more mundane duty to buckle one’s seat belt when driving. The duty to maintain life extends most profoundly toward others, in that one cannot take another’s life. Homicide, the death penalty, euthanasia, and even abortion or the soldier’s killing of an enemy are seen as morally anathema and are therefore personally and socially costly and traumatic in their consequences, as they should be. These tragic consequences and the personal anguish and passion expressed on all sides of these issues speak loudly to the centrality of this underlying value about the duty to reverence life that people are socialized into within a civil society. Freedom from Pain Recognizing that a right to life is the primary value in a civil society, we now move to rights that emphasize the quality of the life. Foremost among these is the freedom from avoidable pain. Pain may be defined as an organism’s physiological condition created by distress. Suffering is a psychological condition of distress that may be related to the physiological condition. A civil society is one that values the expenditure of resources to alleviate pain and suffering. In some transcendental systems, and some more worldly forms of psychoanalytic insight, “pain” may be seen as the just deserts of a wrathful god, or the motivational basis of personality growth and change (the athletic coach’s proverbial, “No pain, no gain!”). However, a civil society is one that unequivocally defines pain as bad,

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not good, something rightfully to be avoided, not promoted (Lewis, 2001/1940). Therefore, any and all actions that might induce pain in others must be seriously evaluated in terms of their contribution to life, or to other central values. Hospital patients may undergo painful procedures in an attempt to secure health and life, but this action must be taken with “informed consent,” that is, consent given knowingly and voluntarily, and only in the pursuit of another central value. (We note that the social psychologist’s “deferred gratification” may be thought of as a milder, positively valenced form of this trade-off— foregoing current pleasure for greater pleasures in the future.) On the other extreme, this is the point at which euthanasia also emerges as a central value conflict between life and avoidable pain. Pain and suffering may extend beyond physiological symptoms to mental anguish. Though difficult to “quantify,” the symptoms of mental anguish have been readily recognized historically, and the extension of civil rights to permit the redress for claims of mental pain and suffering have been readily granted by the courts (Niemeyer, 2004). Now pragmatic liberalism does not assert that pain and suffering (physical or mental) can be eradicated by fiat. Whether this is possible is an empirical policy question. It does not, however, passively accept them as a necessary and expected condition of life, no matter how unavoidable they may be. Rather, it asserts proscriptively that actions that produce pain and suffering are consciously to be avoided, and more positively it prescribes that actions should be taken to alter the conditions that produce them. Above all, it asserts that one is not obligated; one does not have a duty, to accept pain and suffering for the collective good, nor for the good of another. Furthermore, in the pursuit of one’s own self-interest one does not have a right or a duty to inflict pain and suffering on others. More positively, one has a duty to alleviate pain and suffering, either one’s own or others’. The centrality of this value is clearly seen in the esteem accorded to those whose jobs routinely deal with the alleviation of pain and suffering: doctors, nurses, paramedics, social workers, and clergy. The duty, however, is one that extends to all citizens within a civil society, and includes the many little acts of civility, for example, the good Samaritans who stop and help you change a tire on the expressway, are living out this central civil duty, and are rightly accorded the community’s accolades and held in high esteem. Freedom of Action A second major aspect of the quality of life in a civil society is the central value placed on autonomy of action—freedom. This central value is based upon, but it extends beyond, the transcendental question of “freewill” to the more concrete, grounded, and pragmatic question of freedom of action and expression. This central value clearly rests upon an assumption, a basic image of individuals as rational actors capable of defining their own self-interest. A civil society is one that not only permits but also promotes an individual’s free exercise of this rational choice.

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A civil society then must be concerned with structuring the opportunities available for individuals to exercise this free choice. The very concept of freedom makes most sense in countering claims or justifications for any system of oppression, most notably tyranny and slavery (Patterson, 1998). Tyranny, among other things, rests upon the use of physical force and violence by one group over and against another. We will address the issue of violence in a civil society more fully, but let us first note that the use of violence, and the physical coercion and constraint of another’s actions, runs counter to the values of a civil society. Other constraints on freedom of choice and expression exist, however, and are especially evident when one looks at the opportunity structures within which individuals exercise that freedom of action. Systematic patterns of racial and ethnic discrimination in employment and housing, for example, constrain the rights of individuals to exercise their free market choices. We leave aside, for the moment, the issue of economic inequality as a constraint on freedom but simply note a key proposition in this area: the greater the resources, the greater the freedom of choice. However, the relationship between economic choice in free markets and political choice in democratic politics is an enduring dilemma for civil societies. The more wealth one has, the more that person can influence the political system. Yet a civil society not only condemns constraints on political choice but also more positively promotes the expansion of freedom of choice in the political arena—seeing political rights and the free exercise of political choice, as in elections, as equal and inalienable rights of individuals. A desire for political equality encourages us to try to reduce economic inequality because of the degree to which economic inequality equates with different degrees of freedom of choice. The greater the wealth, the greater the choice the greater the freedom, and the less, the less. These political rights are captured in the civil society’s most venerated and, some say, sacred status—citizen. In recent decades the expansion of the welfare state has meant an increasing growth or expansion in the entitlements of citizenship in a civil society—but all of the more specific entitlements begin with the primary and essential political rights of citizenship itself. Voting, assembly, and the redress of grievances in court are expressions of this freedom of political choice (Marshall, 1965). A civil society therefore promotes those conditions that increase the exercise of rational freewill and political choice among its citizens. When part of the citizenry lacks power, or groups are inequitably denied their political rights, this central tenet of a civil society is undermined. Some political analysts currently echo the old aristocratic critique of democratic society by arguing, for example, that a high voter turnout in national elections implies criticism of the government and heralds a crisis of legitimacy for the state. A bad sign, they assert, is a bad thing. They confuse the symbol for the reality and would, it seems, prefer a less involved, more passive, and acquiescent citizenry (Lipset, 1960). Citizens who organize and protest their housing conditions, or the inadequacy of their children’s schools, are not the problem. Their actions are, rather, signs and symptoms of the underlying problems that exist. We can accept the major

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premise that a highly politicized citizenry is often simultaneous with a crisis of legitimacy. But that does not necessarily mean that there is a low level of commitment to the collective good or to the importance of civil society. The civil right to vote, among other political rights, points to the need for an “enlightened” citizenry exercising its “rational” choice, an informed and educated citizenry. What many aristocratic theorists really still fear is an unenlightened, irrational, passionate, and potentially violent “mob.” Protection of the mass media and promotion of public education are clearly central institutions that aid in the construction of a civil society, ensuring a more informed, enlightened, and rational choice by citizens. Therefore, constraints on access to education and information are ultimately constraints on freedom of rational choice and may undermine the civil society. There are some, for example, who question the value of extending educational opportunities, and they are, we would argue, undermining a basic requirement for a civil society. Finally, we must address economic rights, for it is empirically obvious that poverty is a constraint on freedom of action. Even if one granted that economic inequality was a legitimate constraint on rational choice in markets, the degree to which it causally creeps into and erodes freedom of choice in political affairs is anathema to a civil society. Though seeming to counter free market champions who claim inequality is a just outcome of free market transactions, one must not lose sight of the fact that even among the earliest of free market theorists, the market was but a means to a civil society, not the reverse. These early theorists were well aware of the implicit threat posed by an enduring underclass, and that political liberties could be eroded by economic inequalities. This was the point at which the good offices of a civil citizenry would intercede to protect the liberties of others, for in so doing they would ultimately be protecting the constitution of a civil society that guaranteed their own liberties. The history of social science research has pointed repeatedly to the debilitating effects of poverty in undermining a fully enlightened and participating political citizenry. Now the right to freedom of action has within a civil society its parallel duty to act freely. It is somewhat ironic that the duty to act freely may be seen as a constraint that a civil society demands of its citizenry—it demands that they be free! In contradiction to those philosophers who assume that self-interest and freedom of action are identical, civil society requires that its citizens exercise this freedom of choice. They are not free not to act in the pursuit of their self-interest. If citizens are passive, acquiescent, and follow the dictates of others, or simply choose not to act at all, then they are shirking their duty to act freely. Parallel to the above rights, these duties include the duty to think rationally, to be informed, and to base their action on rational and informed choices. And, above all, it includes the duty to resist the use of violence, coercion, and intimidation that constrain this freedom of action. Furthermore, as a more powerful duty, freedom demands that citizens react to any and all uses of force that may constrain the freedom of legitimate actions of others. No matter how advantageous it may seem to constrain another’s freedom for one’s own personal gain, not to resist coercive constraints on another’s freedom is to start down that

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“slippery slope” that may tomorrow, when the wind shifts, propel oneself off freedom’s heights. Freedom from Violence According to Max Weber (1946) the state is an entity that claims a legitimate monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territory. This definition underlies a central value of a civil society—it condemns and will not tolerate the use of violence and force among its citizens. Stated more positively, a civil society promotes and guarantees the safety and security of an individual and his or her property from violent attack. Claims and counterclaims, disputes, and disagreements are bound to arise in any social order. In a civil society, however, the parties to the dispute must agree to settle their differences without violence, and in accordance with the law. Again, pragmatic liberalism acknowledges that even in a civil society, force and violence are likely to be found. But those who use force and violence in the conduct of their affairs have abrogated their rights to citizenship, and the state is therefore entitled to use its legitimate force to constrain them. This is the police function of the state and has resulted in a complex set of criminal justice institutions ranging from the policeman on the beat, to professional bar associations, to the most sacred civil institution—the Supreme Court. Now some theorists of the left have mistakenly equated the defense of property rights and the use of state violence to enforce those property rights as a major critique of liberal civil society. They have argued that state violence is really a tool of a dominant bourgeoisie protecting its property interests and enshrouding them in the “rights of property,” and protecting the state itself in its “rights of power” (Domhoff, 2002). However, they have failed to focus on the key aspect of violence that liberal theorists have emphasized. The freedom from violence, a central tenet of a civil society, means that citizens not only are protected from the violence of others, but, perhaps more significantly, that citizens are also free to conduct their affairs without having to rely on violence themselves. They need not brutalize themselves by brutalizing others and need not expend their resources (economic and psychological) in an excessive defense against the violence of others. Prudence dictates precaution, but in a civil society it need not become an obsession. The flip side of intolerance to violence is the positive duty to promote the rule of law. To be allowed to play in the game of a civil society, players must agree to abide by the rules. Pragmatic liberalism emphasizes, in addition, that for the games to be meaningful (that is, to be important enough to entice people to play and to commit them to play by the rules), players must believe that when they play by the rules, they have some chance of winning. Probabilities of winning need not necessarily be equal, but from a rational actor’s perspective the payoff must be sufficiently high to justify the cost of committing oneself to the game in the first place. If one stays in school to acquire skills, then, one should have a higher probability of later getting a well-paying job to support oneself and one’s family. The rules must be seen to be fair.

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Not only must the outcomes be fair, but the means must also seem to be fair. The moral socialization into a dutiful commitment to the “idea of law” and playing by the rules extends beyond the simple cost/benefit calculus of payoffs to a rational actor. The use of wealth and power to get things done, to get housing built, or Mussolini’s promise to make the trains run on time are not sufficient bases for claiming the allegiance of citizens or their commitment to the legal system. The “legitimacy of the deed” is an insufficient form of legitimacy in a civil society. Yes, pragmatic liberalism stresses getting the job done, but a civil society demands that it be done in a democratic way to gain legitimacy. The idea of a moral legitimacy is based on a belief in the fairness of the system and the process and procedures used—on the means used and not simply on the outcome. In this discussion, we must also not lose sight of the continual presence and role of force and violence even in a civil society (Apter, 1997; Janowitz, 1968; 1981). In a civil society its legitimate use is narrowly defined and circumscribed by the laws themselves. As the rights of citizenship have expanded, the state’s right to an unrestricted use of violence has become more legally constricted. Where before it was more a positive right (where minor exceptions to the use of violence might be noted), it is now a more narrowly circumscribed right where the conditions and situations of its appropriate, limited use are defined. The charge of police brutality, for example, highlights that the central police function is to maintain personal safety and secure property; and in the name of exercising that function, agents of the state cannot endanger safety and destroy property. Police discretion in the use of force still exists, in part, due to the very nature of their job requirements. But there is an increasing legal accountability of police action brought about by the political mobilization of groups demanding their rights as citizens. From the perspective of pragmatic liberalism, it is only a politically active citizenry that can ensure its legal rights. It is the political activities of citizens that gives both authority to and defines the content of the law. A civil state that needs to exercise its violence, therefore, must be assured of the political legitimacy of its acts. Excessive violence undermines the legitimacy of the civil state. At the microlevel, for example, street crime and excessive violence by people poorly socialized as citizens undermines the state’s ability to maintain public order. This violence undermines legitimacy both because people do not feel safe and because victims of violence lose the privilege of not having to be violent. If I am required to arm myself and use violence, then I have lost a basic right within civil society not to have to use violence in the conduct of my affairs. At the macrolevel, the state’s excessive use of violence against an uncivil populace leads alternately to the polar swings of anarchy and tyranny. A civil society is one in which social and state violence are minimized, a society in which individuals are free and secure in personal safety and private property from one another and from the state itself. Citizens of a civil society are, in short, entitled to domestic tranquility. And the use of domicile, “home,” as the root metaphor of this tranquility—as in the expression “the house as haven”—speaks to the close linkage between private, parochial, and public rights.

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Rights to Food, Shelter, and Clothing In conjunction with asserting the right to life, a civil society also values and defines as rights the conditions that promote and protect life. That is, at a minimum, the individual has a right to the material conditions of food, shelter, and clothing (Shue, 1996). By defining these conditions of life as rights, a civil society acknowledges a social responsibility for a minimal level of physical functioning, if not of creature comfort. To proactively deny or minimally fail to provide these material conditions is to deprive citizens of the minimal necessities for not only sustaining life, but also for fulfilling their other roles as citizens in a civil society. A central function of any society is to survive in its physical environment, to be able to cull the resources of the environment, and to control or mitigate the capricious acts of nature—flood, storm, fire, heat and cold. A civil society elevates these minimal material conditions to individual rights, proactively promotes them (as in the case of some form of public housing), and reactively mitigates capricious natural consequences that deprive people of them (as in disaster relief for floods, tornados, and hurricanes). These rights imply a freedom from the ravages of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. As the material capacity of society has developed, what were previously accepted fates are now defined as neither necessary nor tolerable conditions of existence. Pragmatically, these rights translate into such details as the state’s requirement that architects be licensed and accountable for designing earthquake-proof structures, and the National Weather Bureau’s and the mass media’s duty to disseminate tornado storm warnings, and the more positive promotion of various forms of public housing and food subsidies. By defining these as rights, a civil society expands its duties and stakes its claim to legitimacy on the promise that these minimal conditions of life can be met by current social and governmental arrangements. It promises that citizens, regardless of mere market “merit,” personal qualities, group or class position, are all entitled to these minimal conditions for the maintenance of life. Citizens in turn have moral duties within a civil society to act to provide these material conditions for themselves and for others. Housing should be maintained in a safe manner, and food should be thoughtfully purchased and consumed for nutritional value. Within a civil society these material conditions should be shared with the needy both through voluntary acts of providing in kind such as clothing and food donations, and through taxes that subsidize the provision of housing and food. The sense of unease and discomfort produced by the presence of homeless and hungry fellow citizens on the streets of our nation’s cities attests to the centrality of this value, and the vague, unarticulated sense that “something isn’t right” becomes translated within a civil society into the pragmatic moral response “it shouldn’t be” and “something should be done.” Rights to Health and Protection for the Defenseless Citizen is an “ideal status” of a civil society. It implies a physically functioning, rational, informed, and competent individual. Within any society, however, are

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found those unable to fulfill all the specific roles associated with this status: the very young, the elderly, the infirm, and the mentally incompetent. A civil society extends rights to these individuals, even though they may not be able to fulfill all the duties expected of the idealized citizen (Boylan, 2001). Pragmatically, for those whose condition can be altered, a civil society must provide minimal protection and care and must promote where possible their restoration to the full role-set of the idealized citizen. Individuals may over time go in and out of these infirmities and dependencies (the young will grow up, and the sick may be cured). For those whose condition is unalterable, a civil society must extend its rights and expend its resources for their continuing care and protection. Legitimate questions arise as to what are the central functioning roles of the idealized citizen, and by what criteria one is going to determine who is entitled to extraordinary care and protection. Just as the material conditions of food, clothing, and shelter are necessary for the maintenance of life, those unable to provide for themselves are entitled to the necessary provisions of life. Laziness and individual culpability may have created such dependencies, but a civil society must grant even fools, felons, and failures their right to life. Nursing homes should be comfortable and caring, prisons free of violence, foster homes promoting physical and mental health, and schools and places of employment accessible to the handicapped. Again, a narrow cost/benefit calculus is often used in an attempt to make such moral decisions. But, such a calculus can only select among the more efficient means—the moral commitment must come from a sense of duty to provide a decent life for the dependent. For example, cost/benefit analysis may be used to determine whether it is more efficient to use state funds to build and support nursing homes for the care of the elderly, or whether state subsidies should be provided to adult children to provide direct care for their elderly parents; but, the moral commitment of a civil society is clear, the elderly should be provided for in a way that allows them to live out their lives in a decent and dignified manner. This example again reflects our central point that in America today there exists a widespread consensus about the central values of what should be done to create and maintain a civil society, it is in the how of achieving it that we run into problems. We believe pragmatic liberalism is the answer. Conclusion The above are major values that we believe are consensually shared by Americans today, values that they would willingly grant as the rights of citizenship within a civil society. Pragmatic liberalism maintains that the state has a central role to play in promoting and protecting these rights, either directly or indirectly. Whether the civil state itself should be the full and direct provider of these rights or, more minimally, should encourage other institutions to meet them is an open political question; but beyond question is the role of the state in guaranteeing that these rights are met for all its citizens. Furthermore, it is the function of the state to see that appropriate institutions are built (state or

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nonstate) to ensure that these rights are institutionalized. That is, that resources and power are brought to bear on these values, and that social institutions are created and maintained to service these rights. Fully connected to these individual rights of citizenship in a civil society are the correlated duties of citizens to promote and defend these rights, not only for themselves as individuals and their own set of specific interests, but also in the abstract. Laws, citizenship, and the very idea of civil society are abstractions, while individuals live out their lives in the very real concrete realities of day-to-day parochial existence. Pragmatic liberalism and the institutions that serve it provide a basis for the necessary and critical links between the microworld of individuals to the more macroinstitutions of the larger society, and these same institutions also provide the necessary link to promote that critical balance between civil rights and civil duties. The duty of citizens is to support and participate in those institutions that are the basis of safeguarding these values of a civil society. Americans are a pragmatic, fair, and compassionate people. They are in agreement on what constitutes the good life and the kind of society in which they would like to live. It is a civil society in which citizens’ rights and duties are coupled to a government that actively promotes those duties and guarantees those rights. There is a consensus, but there is also a crisis. There is a feeling that government does not or cannot guarantee these conditions for the continued existence of a civil society and that in the current malaise neither can one rely solely on the goodwill and voluntary efforts of one’s fellow citizens. The crisis of confidence in government and the prevailing sense of the impotence of public policy has more to do with doubt and debate about the means by which policies can be achieved than with the pervasive and profound consensus that certain good ends ought to be pursued. And, there is a profound consensus that it is the duty of both citizens and government working jointly within a civil society—to pursue these values and to secure these rights. We have a consensus of what should be done, what we need is a rationale for how to do it. This is the purpose of the next chapter.

CHAPTER 3

Why Help?

T

he previous chapter argued that Americans share a broad consensus about good things—things that are valued, or what we shall call values, and that define for us what makes a society civil. Even with this broad consensus about core values and a shared belief that all have the right to those values, clearly, Americans do not share equally in the distribution of them. These are often scarce values and in the distribution of scarce values some people get more, some less. There may be many reasons why some people get less—perhaps there are personal failures of moral rectitude, perhaps there are governmental and institutional failures to provide, protect, or preserve these values, or perhaps it is simply the result of the vagaries of chance, nature, or God (Lasswell, 1958; Davis and Moore, 1945). Whatever the cause, there is a broad consensus that people in need should be helped. Agreeing to this general principle does not mean that we actually are sympathetic to every individual in need, nor does the principle tell us how we move to action or what methods we should use. We now confront the difficult question “Why help?” That is to ask, “Why should we give our resources to help those who have less?” and, “Who do we help?” Who among the needy most deserve our help? (Halper, 1973; Piven and Cloward, 1993; Trattner, 1999). The problems that bother Americans the most, we believe, have to do with relationships between the individual and the collective, and not with issues that concern either one by itself. Pragmatic liberalism calls neither for the reforming of human nature—we accept people as they are—nor for a revolution in the structure of society. We call for a reworking of the social contract between individuals and the collective. “Why help?” and “who to help?” are questions that apply on three levels: first, the personal, one-on-one; second, the institutional level, through participation in and support of organizations and professions; and third, through support of governmental programs and policies. In short, answers to the question of “why help?” are personal, institutional, and governmental rationales for action to solve society’s social problems, rationales that operate simultaneously on all levels.

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This chapter explores some alternative rationales by reviewing three ideologies of helping: humanitarianism, utilitarianism, and entitlements. Each ideology provides an explanation for why we need a collective agent—a community or a government—and each explains how the rights individuals deserve to enjoy might be protected and actively promoted. Each ideology also carries a moral message, arguing that some people are more deserving of help than others. These negative arguments about why some people do not deserve help are important because they are linked to various diagnoses of social malaise. If the social problems are mostly caused by the people we least think deserve help, then we are paralyzed because we will not work to improve their living conditions. Consider the opposition of religious conservatives—people who otherwise are responsible for much of the charity in America—to the distribution of clean needles and free condoms to those at risk of contacting HIV-disease (AIDS). We know that AIDS is usually transmitted when people share dirty needles or have unprotected sex in unusual ways with lots of partners. We are personally devastated that young, talented people are struck down by the disease. We want these people to have decent medical care and to be protected from stigma, and to live the remainder of their lives comfortably. We also want to prevent spread of the disease for everyone’s sake. Unfortunately, if one believes that addictions and loose social sexual mores are primary causes of the erosion of civility—of family breakdowns, violence against others, disrespect for the community and its facilities, economic dissoluteness, and spiritual poverty—then distributing clean needles or condoms may reduce AIDS but may increase these other social problems. AIDS is but a symptom of the real social problems of addiction and sexual promiscuousness. The argument of moral conservatives goes on to say that when community leaders show addicts and free love advocates how to practice their arts safely, they encourage and legitimate incivility. We (e.g., people who handle our personal lives responsibly) should not sanction self-destructive behavior. We also should not waste resources, time, and energy to help people bent on hurting themselves. They do not want to change; they only will take advantage of benefits we provide and continue their unpleasant behavior (Siplon, 2002). This argument is not a silly one. Unfortunately, where the AIDS epidemic is concerned, tying our willingness to help to the degree of personal responsibility demonstrated by recipients consigns us to inaction. This inaction is unacceptable morally and as a social policy. Ideologies that urge us to help, on the one hand, thus, may be the same ideologies that justify inaction and not helping on the other. On the positive side, to the extent that these ideologies capture widely held sentiments in American society, they suggest that desires to help are shared by many and that, because of this, the collective does have a positive obligation to act. Even conservative ideologies that some portray as hostile to social intervention include a concern for the community and a sense of obligation to protect the rights of the needy. However, these ideologies may also encourage unbending and intolerant analyses of social problems that do the opposite of what they claim. They may

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be framed as theories of the collective good, of individual responsibility, and of how individuals relate to the collective. They function too often as excuses for disengagement and self-satisfied rejection of any personal responsibility to be involved in social betterment. The ideologies offer pat explanations of how the needy have failed. They also make the ideologies themselves more important than the reality, so that a lot of energy goes into rejecting and ignoring assertions that flow from the opposition’s ideology (Eagleton, 1964). One of the main objectives of pragmatic liberalism is to reduce the paralysis created by ideological thinking. We recognize that the three ideological perspectives described here are useful. They are based on important insights that need to be preserved and used to inform social action. They have value as moral systems. They urge people to be involved and emphasize the relationship between individuals and the community. They also distinguish between needy people who do deserve help and those who do not. It is not very popular on the political left to define some people as undeserving of help. If we are to emphasize the relationship between individuals and the collective, however, it is essential that we take personal responsibility and accountability seriously. Pragmatic liberalism accepts in principle that the collective has a greater obligation to help some individuals than others. Pragmatically, if resources are limited, as they always are, then one cannot help everyone and must make hard decisions about whom one should help. The different ideologies of helping freeze each other up because we think of them as mutually both opposed and exclusive. When advocates talk about who deserves help, their intentions are tainted because people favoring different ideologies of helping pay more attention to the debate with their opponents than to helping those in need. People whom one perspective brands as evil include those another perspective most wants to help—think about the AIDS example. Arguments about what it means for someone to deserve or not deserve help keep us from talking about larger agreements we may share. The confrontation of ideologies prevents the help from being delivered. At times, though, we will all agree that the same group of people are needy and must be helped. Pragmatic liberalism by emphasizing civility sets abstract conflicts aside and emphasizes the practical usefulness of the different ideological perspectives and seeks to make helping a more natural and less problematic activity (Dugatkin, 2006; Gintis et al., 2005; Barber, 2004; Nagel, 1970; Hutcheson, 1728). It shows us that recognizing legitimate need is complicated but far from impossible to discern. Several values (or variables) come into play when we try to define need, and there are many varieties of it. This chapter shows how to construct a hierarchy of need and insists that we get beyond ideological squabbling to make sure the helping we all can agree on actually happens. Rationales for Helping The question “why help?” implies that people are not automatically inspired to do things for people in need. This is not necessarily the case. Studies of tightly structured communities, such as those described in many anthropological studies, find that helping cannot be separated from the overall fabric of social

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life. Helping becomes problematic in societies that emphasize and value individualism, a concept that is modern and Western in origin, rather than a natural attribute of humans. Pragmatic liberalism, by emphasizing civility as a central dynamic of society, seeks to de-emphasize the tendency in American society to treat helping as a special or problematic activity. We believe that it can flow easily, naturally, and forcefully from the way people and their communities normally function. Making this happen is an ambitious goal but before we talk about such lofty goals we must talk in more familiar terms about helping. Three perspectives form the heart of this chapter: humanitarianism, utilitarianism, and entitlements. They justify helping by arguing that good things happen when we give targeted kinds of assistance to others. There may be and sometimes is conflict among the three perspectives because each builds its argument around a different beneficiary. Humanitarian arguments suggest that we ought to help others because we, the helpers, benefit. Utilitarian arguments urge helping to protect or advance society. Entitlement arguments focus on the needy themselves, saying that they deserve help simply by virtue of being humans and citizens. In important ways, all three arguments are convincing, so it seems most logical to seek a position that synthesizes them. This is the goal of the final section of this chapter. Humanitarianism Humanitarians argue that we should help other people simply because we have an obligation to do good and doing good makes us better human beings. One version, asserts that people who are wealthy or successful or have strong character should share their good fortune (McCarthy, 1982). Such philanthropy is good for the soul of the giver even as it provides opportunities for moral guidance of those less fortunate. A critical and defining characteristic of being a moral human being is to be of help to the less fortunate. Not to do so is to call into question one’s moral character, one’s humanity. While many criticize this sort of helping as paternalism, it realistically acknowledges differences in wealth, knowledge, and status and asserts that responsibilities and duties flow from those differences. This forces us to focus on the moral logic of giving, and thereby on escaping the amoral, bland relativism that paralyzes professional social research. A different perspective argues that certain social benefits can only exist if individuals give without asking what they might receive in return. What goes around, comes around. If we do not give, we do not get. This is true because we are linked together in diffuse networks and chains of interdependence in modern society. Many arrangements of giving are embedded in traditional institutions and social rituals. This approach is deeply conservative, in the sense of preserving things that have long existed. However, this is more like the English conservatism of Edmund Burke than like the conservatism that has dominated American politics in recent years. Paternalism Humanitarianism is inherently unsymmetrical. People who have should give to those that have not. This makes a relationship of dominance and control between

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those giving help and those receiving it hard to avoid. Humanitarianism does not seek to avoid this imbalance, however, because it is the relationship between those who have gotten their lives together and those who have not that allows humanitarianism to overcome the contradiction inherent in giving away one’s valuables. We do not give things away to anyone. We give things away to make a point—to teach, to encourage, to protect, to build the community. Furthermore, we engage in this charity because our own well-being derives from and depends upon helping and showing a concern for the community. It is a reaffirmation of our own moral right and righteousness, a willing acceptance of the vestigial duty of noblesse oblige. Protestant Christianity has a long tradition of helping rooted in the belief that one has an obligation to share one’s success and salvation. This continues to be expressed in religious institutions and activities today, to the frustration of many. Religious activists often seem to premise their social and political work on the idea that they are morally superior to the people they are helping—and to other people who are less religious and less helping. In turn, a frustration for religious activists is that others in the community tend to dismiss the value of their good works, tinged as they are with moral enthusiasm and paternalism. This tradition of helping, however, is widespread outside of religious institutions as well, and is reflected in the ethos of professional work. This is no accident, since settlement houses in America—which spawned the profession of social work—organizations such as the YMCA, community hospitals, and free public schools, all emerged in the nineteenth century as the religiously motivated Progressive Movement put their humanitarianism to work for the reform of society. A paternalistic commitment to helping the less fortunate remains a key value in these institutions today (Gould, 2000; Diner, 1998; Wiebe, 1967). While Americans sometimes object when anyone proclaims his or her superiority over others, most people unquestioningly accept certain kinds of paternalism or care taking. For example we believe that some services should be supported through charity and philanthropy—by rich people who pay for poor people. Emergency medical care and services to children who are affected by catastrophic diseases traditionally have been supported in this way, although government programs now pay many medical costs. Medical services of all kinds are paternalistic because someone who is an expert directs the care of others who have less medical knowledge. There is a movement to increase consumer awareness in medicine. But for complicated medical problems, we have no choice but to place our faith in the wisdom and the moral trustworthiness of physicians. The same is true in our relations with most other professionals—teachers, family therapists, or engineers (Abbott, 1988). We can talk about sharing in this humanitarian tradition as a moral obligation. You should share your good fortune to set an example of good behavior for the needy who are suffering through their own bad behavior. In the language of religious humanitarians, to have the grace of God, which is the undeserved love of God, those with good fortune should help the unfortunate. If one has good fortune, it is presumably because the fates have been in your favor. One shows one’s respect for and appreciation of God’s grace by in turn helping others in

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a great chain of giving. This shows an acknowledgment of the capriciousness of fate and a way of, on one hand, being thankful for one’s good fortune and, on the other, reminding oneself that fortunes may change at any time. One is not trying to buy off God. One is trying to remind oneself that one has not completely earned good fortune, and that therefore one has no preordained right to have it. Giving is a way of acknowledging that one has been lucky. This talk about obligation has a calculating quality, however, that most humanitarians—religious or otherwise—would object to. We do not help because we fear the consequences of not helping. We help because that is the only way to live. People who possess skills or wealth or respect from other people only gain satisfaction by interacting with others. One has to use these assets helping others to benefit from them oneself. Thus, many physicians would argue that their work only makes sense as service—as an effort to make other people’s lives safer, more comfortable, and more independent. Most satisfaction in the work comes from being successful in this service, and most anxiety and frustration comes from having failed to help. Obviously, most physicians also become very wealthy doing this work, and laymen are generally cynical about the supposed altruism of doctors. In fact, many doctors do compromise their work with patients to make more money. But this does not change the fact that doctoring is a deeply intimate relationship between people in which the physician literally takes the life of another in his or her hands and where the relationship of trust between helper and recipient is basic. It really does not matter to me if my brain surgeon or trauma physician is a millionaire with shady real estate investments and huge Swiss bank accounts. What counts is technical competence and medical judgment—the ability to choose treatments that are most humane, given the special conditions that prevail in a particular patient’s life. Competence and sound judgment are the qualities that make doctors popular with patients and other physicians. They also relate to the depth of a physician’s commitment to caring and helping. The work cannot happen without a deep commitment to paternalistic helping. For physicians helping and paternalism—or maternalism—are inseparable from their identities. Humanitarianism generalizes this to say that for anyone, making a continuing effort to teach, nurture, and help others represents a higher state of moral—or ego—development. Those who are self-absorbed or excessively concerned with personal success and material possessions are less successful human beings, however successful they might be in material terms. The corollary is that helping others can be an important way of building one’s own character. The most important example, perhaps, are the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. They assert that helping others is essential for maintaining one’s own sobriety. Such a philosophy is less idealistic than the purely altruistic view. But it does not offer any specific payoffs for helping—in contrast to the ulterior motives of people who volunteer only to gain work experience and a line on their resume that will aid in their promotion or that will make it easier to get into graduate school. In the A.A. tradition, one helps because helping is a foundation stone for becoming a sober, productive citizen (Denzin, 1987).

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Gift Relationships Although many of the good things we enjoy come from the community, it often is in no one’s self-interest to give time or resources back to it. Some economists have argued that all behavior is selfish in the end and, because of this, communal activity is irrational and unlikely to last. Advocates of gift relationships argue that people must do good for the community because without altruism the community withers. Urging people to serve the community is not just a matter of idealism, though. Some kinds of action are fundamentally polluted if they are driven by self-interest. Good things can come only when people give to the community with no expectation of specific returns. A classic example is that of blood donation. In his book The Gift Relationship, English policy analyst Richard Titmuss (1970) argued that if people are in any way compensated for their gifts of blood, they have an interest in lying about health dangers that might compromise the purity of their gift. Titmuss explains that the American blood collection system relies heavily on self-interested gifts (such as payments to donors or enrolling them in blood insurance programs), where as the British system depends on uncompensated gifts. A consequence of this difference is that, in contrast to the English system of donation that is wholly altruistic, the American system collated blood that was historically more prone to contamination by viruses that cause AIDS and hepatitis. Titmuss explains that in the gift relationship, people recognize that they receive benefits from the community but in unpredictable and incalculable ways. Recognizing, further, that the community can only survive if people make contributions without worrying about returns, people give for unspecific reasons. In some broader sense there still is self-interest at work, since people give with the expectation that they or people they value will receive benefits some time. While Titmuss makes his argument in practical terms, one can take it as an argument that defends tradition and ritual on nonreligious grounds. People who look for the rationality or the usefulness of traditional practices misunderstand what these are about. Tradition is important because it has always existed and because, if it is adhered to, society is more stable. Communities retain a more robust structure of self-help and mutual aid. If one looks for reasons to adhere to specific traditional practices—like not mixing meat and milk at a kosher table— it is hard to find convincing, practical explanations for why such behavior is important. You need to have traditions and rituals, however, for an Orthodox Jewish community to persist and for its members to reap the benefits of mutual aid from the Jewish community. Traditions themselves are not rational, only their results are rational or functional. Action based on self-interest, Titmuss argues, destroys tradition and the civility it fosters, because it insists that action must be rational, sensible, and profitable in ways that are easily calculated. Defending tradition, humanitarianism might, thus, be taken as strongly conservative. The conservatism it justifies is not the right wing version of Reagan, Goldwater, and Milton Friedman, however, for their politics are built primarily upon a utilitarian view of the world. Humane conservatism, if we may coin

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a term, is the conservatism of Edmund Burke, European aristocracy, and the traditional university (Burke E., 1790; Shils, 1984). It fosters the life of culture and tradition because they are intrinsically valuable; but conservatism does this also because culture and tradition entail a style of life that values obligation and responsibility in the service of helping others. Humanitarianism and Moral Failure Humanitarianism is built on the expectation that altruism is possible and is beneficial in a diffuse way for the giver. While the giver may not benefit, there is an expectation that needy people will receive help and that they will become better people through the efforts of the altruist. Under paternalism, there is an expectation that the social, cultural, or moral development of the giver will help the recipient by teaching methods for self-improvement. In gift relationships, altruism anticipates a chain of helping where the person who receives a gift will then help someone else. Through this sequence of aid, a community of trust and self-help emerges and is sustained. While humanitarianism tells us to help because we, the givers, benefit, its logic depends on recipients being moral. People should be helped because an act of God has made them needy, despite their best efforts at self-improvement. Children, the sick or disabled, people whose communities are destroyed by natural or economic disasters, and people who seek to reconstruct their lives after a dissolute past are good candidates for help. We imagine that these people face hard times for reasons that are beyond their control and that their lives can be made better if their personal efforts are nurtured by proper instruction, sufficient resources, and reasonable opportunities for success. Just as humanitarianism tells us who can most profit from altruism, it also tells us that certain people are not likely to benefit from help. Some people are needy because they are dangerous or self-destructive. Thus, although many shelters for the homeless are sponsored by humanitarian organizations, people are routinely turned away if they have been drinking or using drugs. Young single men have trouble receiving many kinds of free social services because it is assumed that if they tried they could get work and support themselves. Linking help to a moral theory of self-improvement among the needy, humanitarianism becomes a strategy for social control. This has made it a target of criticism. Success not only makes people eligible (and obliged) to help others, it also gives them the license to decide who is morally worthy. Since the obligation to help is generally rooted in a specific religious or cultural tradition, however, things that are moral usually are defined as the habits and values of the helper’s culture. Altruism that seeks to help the needy live more moral lives is easily seen as cultural imperialism, or as an apology for excesses that are inherent in being wealthy—for example, physicians extolling the virtues of their service ethic to justify great wealth. Those who promote humanitarian social programs need to be especially careful about cultural assumptions that are built into their moral philosophies. Unlike the critics of paternalism, however, we are not very worried about overly zealous social control. We are more concerned about its opposite, inaction. It is

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easy to adopt a humanitarian philosophy when the people who most need help can be judged self-destructive and thus not worth helping. If urban problems are caused by drug addiction, gang warfare, and fatherless families, then the victims have caused their own misery and helping will do little good. This withdrawal from helping is the paralysis of humanitarianism. Utilitarianism For utilitarians, people should help others because (and when) it is in their own self-interest to do so. To humanitarians, this might not even count as help—it is more like selling a product and pocketing the profits. The utilitarians sound like the philosophers of the “me generation.” Things are not so simple. Classical economics is the most powerful utilitarian tradition, and economists would point out that nearly everything we do requires a choice among alternatives that require foregoing one pleasure to enjoy another (Samuelson, 1980). Judgments about costs versus benefits are everywhere in life, and the decisions we make about helping others are no different. Helping decisions differ from those in the business world because the payoffs often are vague and hard to calculate. It is especially hard to compare alternatives when one choice gives us a clear short-term result while the other gives us an ambiguous, longer-term one. Returning to Titmuss’s example of blood donation, utilitarians would argue that it is easiest for most people to donate blood when the incentive is clear-cut—perhaps a guarantee that loved ones will be assured free blood, should they need it. Confronted by a blood drive at work, too many people avoid the discomfort of blood donation, even after being told that a gift with no promise of return will produce a safer blood supply. Utilitarians may be no happier than someone such as Titmuss that their arguments seem to idealize selfishness. They would point out, however, that selfinterest is the simplest and most descriptive way to explain what motivates people in America and in most European countries. Making explicit the framework of self-interest that governs choices helps us bring into sharper focus the disincentives for helping. It also shows us ways in which government or community organizations inadvertently discourage activities we need to support if we want to see the public interest served. Three justifications for helping come out of this perspective: pure selfishness, the big picture, and fear of the revolution. Pure Selfishness Many individuals, when confronting a choice about whether to help someone or to participate in some philanthropic or community organization, look for definite, calculable benefits that might come from their involvement. Decisions about whether to help or participate in voluntary associations turn to whether individuals, making their private calculations, expect to gain as much in enjoyment (or utility, to use the economic term) as they must “spend” in time, money, or effort. Those who argue for this perspective recognize that costs and benefits (the units of utility) may involve commodities that are private and very hard to

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measure in any quantitative way or in any way that would make comparisons among units practical. No matter. The perspective speaks more to a model of human nature that says that people will only behave “altruistically” if they stand to gain from that behavior (Bentham, 2003; Catlin, 2005; Allison, 1990). Some of the most outspoken utilitarians worry that civility either will not occur or will atrophy if everyone follows rules of self-interest. We then have a “community of limited liability” where people simply are not willing to go out of their way to help others. People only support activities that have clear payoffs for themselves (Janowitz, 1957). The “free rider” problem is a good example of a breakdown that follows if pure selfishness is the rule. It is hard to motivate people to be philanthropic about a service such as public broadcasting because everyone can get the service free without subscribing. Only if the number of subscribers falls so low that the station goes out of business, do free riders stand to lose. Because it is not rational—in the economic sense, anyway—for people to give, utilitarians worry that such an organization will always teeter on the brink of failure. Some will fall over the edge and die. But most such services will limp along with insufficient resources to provide the services really needed by the community, unless some independent kind of funding is provided—from the government, foundations, the United Way, or individual philanthropists (Meyer and Zuker, 1989). Unfortunately, if we deal with the free rider problem by increasing the benefits for donors or by convincing government to pay for a service, all incentive for the gift relationship evaporates. Titmuss argued that when self-interest arguments are used to guide policy, they invariably undermine and corrode the logic of altruism. One’s charitable gift seems insignificant, irrational, and foolishly self-punishing when large government grants are provided anyway or when others receive attractive benefits in return for their contribution. Such criticisms direct our attention away from the usefulness of the community of limited liability concept for understanding voluntarism. When it comes to giving time or expertise or money to a specific civic project, donors almost always relate their contribution to some personal pleasure or need. Managers of volunteer activity try to figure out in a practical way why people give both to encourage greater generosity and to match the things that need to be done to possible offers of help. These people become millstones that drag down the organization. Volunteers who stay on in leadership positions long after the task for which they were recruited is complete plague many participatory organizations. The organization would work better if people came in to do a job they were good at because they would get some specific personal return and then quit. A clever organizer thinks about how to structure volunteer roles both so that they will be rewarding to people who will do the work well, and so that these volunteers will then either quit or move into roles that allow others to take over responsibilities for which these newcomers have talent. In this way, utilitarianism builds civility by making voluntarism attractive and effective (Grossman and Furano, 1999).

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Paying attention to short-term self-interest helps us understand what motivates people to choose to act in ways that will either build or will undermine civility. This framework also lays the foundation for comparing social programs and for asking why troubling social problems exist. Paying attention to self-interest shows us that some social programs reward destructive behavior. We might also be able to change unpleasant behavior if we can create the right kinds of incentives or if we can convince those who are troublesome to be more aware of where their self-interests lie. Then the payoffs may be shifted so that these people will act more responsibly or with more civility. This is essentially a theory of how organizers and policymakers can get other people to be more helpful, as well as a theory of why the helping dreamed of by promoters of civility does not always happen. The Big Picture The self-interest approach does not just operate at the individual level, however. It gives us tools for diagnosing problems in social programs, and for seeing social programs that help other people as being important for society and for our own long-term self-interest. Utilitarianism tells that we should support some programs that we do not much like from a moral standpoint, because without those initiatives disaster will follow. It also may tell us that some of our favorite social programs create serious problems that we might not otherwise want to acknowledge. Certain kinds of social spending are important because they allow us to avoid larger expenditures later on. Economist Gary Becker’s (1993) human capital approach, for example, emphasizes the importance of investing in people so they develop skills that will allow them to participate effectively in the economy. Human capital thinking carries the implicit assumption that key social services will be in place because without them personal barriers will make it impossible for people to work on long-term personal goals. Because of this support for basic social service institutions, the human capital perspective generally endorses the principles of the civil society. We want to spend money on education, for example, because lots of people are going to be unable to participate in the adult work force if we do not. Human capital thinkers also talk about social programs such as some forms of general assistance that produce negative investments in people. These programs sometimes teach people not to work, to neglect developing skills, and to ignore economic incentives. Services that teach moral responsibility get special attention from human capital thinkers. This moral concern is not obvious in many social programs since we usually understand what they do in terms of specific tasks they seek to achieve. When we think about job training programs, for example, we tend to think of skills as value neutral. The human capital perspective points out that people who participate in these programs are trying to build their human capital. The benefit of the program is not just that people learn to run a wordprocessor or a drill press, however. They also are enacting the social value that people in need should seek to help themselves by making long-term plans and

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by investing time and resources now so that they will be able to participate economically later. This long-term approach to personal social change tells us that we must support social programs even if they seem to go against our short-term selfinterest, and even if we do not much like the people who are being helped. Cutting off programs now means that we will pay much higher costs later. We also have to recognize that some people who seem thoroughly unpleasant today—such as addicts or members of street gangs—need to have available the means to change their way of life when they are prepared to do so. If we do not give addicts clean needles and they get AIDS, their health care will become extremely expensive later and we will lose the chance to see them rehabilitated. If we do not tailor education so that it is attractive to rebellious young people, we are more likely to have hardened criminals or people locked into a stagnant underclass later on. We do not have to like social reform to accept that we must support it and help in organizing it. One of the difficult aspects of this societal benefits approach is its impersonality, focused as it is on the long-term consequences of present actions. In some cases this leads to harsh assessments about actions most people would support out of a humanitarian ethic. For example, we pour enormous amounts of money into medical research to attack the symptoms of genetically caused, chronic diseases such as cystic fibrosis or hemophilia. People with these chronic diseases as a consequence live longer and suffer fewer debilitating symptoms. This allows them to have families that, in turn, pass on their genetic flaw. Future generations will, as a result, have a growing segment of the population affected by chronic genetic diseases. By carrying out research that ameliorates symptoms of these killers, in other words, we are obliging future generations to expand health spending. Needless to say, this sort of argument does not endear blunt utilitarians to those humanitarians who might equate such talk about chronic disease to eugenics and the Nazi solution to ethnic diversity. The sharp conflicts and personal attacks that greet people who promote extreme utilitarian positions discourage most sensible people from going public with their ideas. We hardly support an end to research on chronic diseases, but the sharpness of conflict around these issues makes it hard to acknowledge the kernel of truth behind the utilitarian argument. Intense ideological conflict makes the dispute the center of attention and stops us from talking about the serious underlying issue. This is another way that ideologies prevent helping. Fear of the Revolution Most of the utilitarians we hear about take their ideas from economics and the rational language of cost-benefit analysis. A sharply different approach from political science and sociology emphasizes instead the importance of trying to maintain social order. People justify helping by saying, “We have to take care of this need or the poor people will do something terrible—like start a revolution.” Such comments imply a cynicism about services that most people do not want

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to acknowledge. This is an argument advanced by left-leaning social critics to explain the presence of social services, however. Sociologist Talcott Parsons, for example, used this sort of argument to explain the arbitrariness with which social status is allocated by public schools (Parsons, 1999). He acknowledged that schools are in part devices for legitimating the existing status order in a way that would be palatable to those who will be left with low status. This is similar to the description of schooling given by Marxist educational critics Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1976). What sets Parsons off from the Marxists is that he thought the existing social order was fine and that it was appropriate for the state to erect institutions that would control disorder through indirect, symbolic means. A more commonly recognized social order rationale for services treats them as products of negotiation or bargaining. If poor people demand services and back up their demands with an effective show of political force, then the state may give them services in exchange for supporting the regime. The civil rights movement achieved its gains this way. One scholar described the historical roots of the workman’s compensation system in these terms (Fishback and Kantor, 2000). The social order approach is by its nature cynical, viewing services as an effort by a distinct class of elites to control society. Although elite action does not usually involve a self-conscious conspiracy, this approach to explaining why services are set up the way they are fits the data on the organization of many social services. In practice, maintaining order among the poor seems to be one of the major functions performed by social services. Usually this is more an unintended consequence of the system than a self-conscious policy. Still, if one is looking for a rationale to explain why social services have evolved as they have in contemporary society, this is not such an illogical theory. If one is willing to admit satisfaction with the system of privileges and inequalities as they stand, a satisfaction that fits with the way most of us live our lives (even if it does not fit our ideal selfimage), then this should not be such an outlandish justification for a system of social services (Piven and Cloward, 1993). The hidden question is the following: If we cut out services, will there be a rebellion of poor people? Contemporary politics do not make it seem likely that deprivation will lead to class conflict in American society. That means that even if services look like they exist to maintain order, this explanation does not provide a perfect explanation for why they are there because cutting them out does not seem to lead to disorder. Yet historical accounts suggest that many social service programs have their origins in protest movements, and that many services have declined in the absence of organized demands from constituents (Gamson, 1975). We cannot expect that protest is like a water tap—that it can be turned on and off through the intentional or unintentional acts of political leaders. A decline in social services, however, withdraws from communities of need social vehicles by which they are connected to and integrated into the dominant community. It also eliminates instruments that would work to limit open conflict and to channel volatile social movements into political expressions that are more centrist and

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conforming. Without service organizations, we might expect protest movements to grow rapidly into violent confrontations with the power structure. However, a contingent constellation of proper social and political conditions must exist before these movements may emerge in the first place. Utilitarianism and the Idea of the Surplus Population Utilitarianism strongly links helping to needs of the society as a whole. Unfortunately, some of those who most desperately need help inevitably will represent a net loss for society (Farber 1968). The most obvious cases involve people with fatal, long-term chronic diseases. One economist pointed out how challenging it is from a utilitarian perspective to give complex medical care to people suffering from HIV disease, since they are expensive, incurable, and threaten to make it impossible to care for the rest of the sick population (Myatt 1987). Treatments for people with fatal genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis or hemophilia compound this expense because we increasingly are keeping people alive until they can have families. If utilitarians had their way, there would be a population of people placed beyond the pale and judged unworthy of help. In addition to people who are too expensive to assist, there are others who have failed to build their personal capital or who are politically inactive. As long as these people are politically inactive and not too dangerous to others, utilitarians can find no reason to help them. Like humanitarians, however, utilitarians are vulnerable to accusations of cultural elitism. It is easy for people with college degrees to accuse school dropouts of not trying or for people with jobs to complain that the unemployed do not look hard enough for work. It also is easy for people who feel well represented by dominant political coalitions to be unsympathetic to the needs of people mired in tiny minority interest groups with enormous needs. A utilitarian philosophy, impoverished by a lack of adequate information provides good excuses for inaction. Like humanitarianism, it explains need as a problem caused by the needy rather than as a difficulty created by the whole society or by the simple fact of being human—and sick. Utilitarians are by and large causalists. That is, they do not take chance and fate into account. Things only happen for reasons. Something has created the needy, something that can be held accountable, something other than chance. Utilitarians also do not allow for collective sentiment as a rational motive (such as family or local community) but see them as archaic and mythical residues that hinder individual rational action. In this way, utilitarianism may undermine the collectivity on which the utilitarians themselves ultimately depend. Entitlements The altruistic humanitarian and the utilitarian perspectives, both assume that services are gifts from a privileged section of the population to an underprivileged section. We talk about why all segments of society need services because we want to convince the privileged that they really should be nicer to the needy. The complexion of the discussion changes if we treat everyone as equal members of

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the society with certain inalienable privileges and rights. Everyone can spend money and participate in the economic system. Increasingly, everyone in American society over 18 can vote, hold political office, and make politically controversial speeches (within limits). These are inalienable rights and if they are violated, individuals can demand redress from the rest of the community. Everyone is entitled to the rights of citizenship, and as these claims for citizenships rights have expanded both to new groups of people and to new types of rights, the government has responded in kind by increasing its provision of these services (Marshall, 1965). At first blush, that entitlements are based on rights makes it seem like this is not an ideology of helping. Helping in the entitlement view is not contingent on proper behavior, it is absolute and part of the contract that forms the legal basis of the state. In practice, however, the definition of specific rights are open to debate and may change from year to year. Do women have a right to have an abortion if they so choose? This changes from year to year and the issue is subject to sharp public debate. Those people who favor abortion tend to argue for the right—that women should be able to control medical decisions about their own bodies—rather than for the procedure—one can be pro-choice and still believe that abortions are a horrible form of birth control. We usually talk about efforts to work for or against abortion as political work. But activists will often say that their work started from personal experience or from a desire to help friends or clients and a desire to prevent unpleasant or immoral events from being repeated. Working to expand or to maintain certain rights thus is based on a desire to help. Entitlements provide help in two ways: social insurance programs and citizenship rights. Social Insurance Social insurance refers to resources people are given when they are in need. Many entitlement programs, such as social security, workman’s compensation, disaster relief, or pension programs, are set up explicitly as insurance programs. People pay into a fund during one period and draw money out later. Some of these programs are heavily subsidized, so that people can receive full benefits even though they have made small contributions to the fund (Rejda, 1998). Social insurance programs have tremendous legitimacy as instruments for helping because recipients themselves fund the programs. This is true even if those who receive the biggest benefits actually have not paid enough to cover their costs to the system. In health maintenance organizations (HMOs), for example, someone who requires open heart surgery may well cost more to the system than what that person has paid in health insurance premiums. We do not think of these excess payments as charity or as an investment in the future. Rather, we think of them as contractual obligations that have to be met because recipients joined a risk pool. As with a private insurance pool, each person pays into a fund from fear that they will suffer a disaster, a disaster that will now be financially covered. Those organizing the pool, in contrast, gamble that they will have to pay out less than they receive. When government programs use a social insurance model to give services, the money received in payments often does not match the amount of money paid

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out. This is partly because the money collected, as in the case of social security, goes into the general fund and becomes a handy alternative to tax revenues when the budget has to be balanced. Promising to pay off claims later, the government can spend the money it collects now. The government also can subsidize the insurance fund, as it does with Medicaid and Medicare. This does not seem like welfare, however, because an individual’s social debt cannot be disentangled from the overall bookkeeping of the government. Citizenship Rights In the previous chapter we spoke about rights that have philosophical force in American society. Here we are talking about social rights. Speaking as we are about giving help and alleviating need, we are not referring to the freedoms that originate in constitutional guarantees—to civil and political rights. Social rights are created by legislative actions that commit government to address needs. A society may choose to guarantee one or another social right; but once legislation has been passed, citizens have a right to demand the service and to demand access that is equal to that enjoyed by any other qualified person (Marshall, 1965). A good example of this sort of right are the laws that say all children have a right to an appropriate, publicly financed education (Street, 1969). These laws were passed in each state around 1880 to 1910 and they require both that schooling be available and that children attend. In the early years of universal public education, many children apparently stayed away from schools— particularly when they had jobs. Over the years schools became more successful at keeping children in schools and achieving high levels of attendance. Meanwhile, public protest groups increasingly demanded that schools be truly available to all and that education be equalized across the population. Brown v. Board and achievements of the civil rights movement that followed it were important milestones in the expansion of children’s educational rights. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 showed that the education rights movement did not serve just racial minorities (Larson, 1985). The welfare rights movement followed a similar course, although the right to welfare is more controversial and precarious. Until the 1960s, welfare payments through programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) were organized as though this was a humanitarian, paternalistic program. Recipients often were subject to moral tests while, according to Piven and Cloward (1993), welfare programs in some communities apparently were manipulated by wealthy and politically powerful members of communities to serve their own economic interests. In the 1960s, this changed in response to an aggressive protest campaign organized by the National Welfare Rights Organization. From the 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s there were no moral tests for people to receive welfare benefits. That has changed again with welfare reform. The requirement that recipients receive job training and that they seek work reintroduces a moral test as a requirement for receiving welfare benefits. The key point that we can draw from the above historical overview is that entitlements vary from time to time and that, although the status of citizen may not vary, the nature of guaranteed benefits may vary.

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Another example of expanding rights is the Citizens With Disabilities Act that focused on the simple but profound question of “physical access” to a variety of settings (Groch, 2001). Settings that in turn represented opportunities for productive citizenship such as employment and education, all based on individual rights of mobility and access through such mundane but expensive alterations of the physical environment as curb cuts, ramps, and access to public transit. In the entitlements perspective, we do not question whether particular people deserve to receive benefits such as free public education or welfare payments. There may be humanitarian or utilitarian justifications for them. But at bottom people get these benefits because we are our society. As a society we choose to distribute our assets to ourselves and to do so in a way that guarantees that all of us have certain minimum resources. This is not a matter of generosity toward the downtrodden. People who need these resources have the absolute right to demand them. If resources are withheld, they have the right to seek redress and damages. Entitlements and the Transfer of Responsibility At first it would seem that there can be no undeserving needy where entitlement programs are concerned. Recall that in our discussion of humanitarianism or utilitarianism, we focused on how those who might help were able to convince themselves that the needy do not deserve aid. The entitlements perspective similarly encourages disengagement by potential helpers. It does this in two ways, through political distancing and by the transfer of responsibility to government. Rights come into existence because people fight for them. The people who would benefit from the acceptance of a right form a fighting group that extracts a concession from those in power. Once institutionalized, this interest group may lose its active character because professional service providers do most of the work required to maintain services such as education or the distribution of welfare benefits. Only if the service is attacked would we expect groups of political activists to come back into existence. This has happened with abortion, a right that seemed safely protected as a matter of personal choice for women. Although reproductive service groups such as Family Planning remained in existence after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, only the growth of the pro-life movement and a succession of legislative and judicial attacks on the right to abortion reawakened the pro-choice political activist movement (Staggenborg, 1991). The corollary of this notion, that rights emerge when interest groups fight for them, is that those who are not part of the group feel free to be uninvolved, and this is where political disengagement enters. We may join in as allies, conscience constituents somewhat disengaged from the frontline fight, but our expectation is that those most likely to benefit will fight for the cause. If they will not organize to extract desired benefits from the powers that be, it is not practical for bystanders to fight on their behalf. Even Marxists could not launch a revolution if the working class would not fight for its interests. Thus, rights arguments invite political passivity from those who do not expect to benefit. Once a right is institutionalized, even members of the original interest group tend to become disengaged because the service becomes an obligation of

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government. We expect education to happen just as we expect traffic lights to operate or sewage and garbage to disappear into treatment facilities. Responsibility for the service is transferred to professionals. We consequently become disengaged from day-to-day provision and from planning for services. When the service is inadequate this becomes a problem, especially if professionals seek to exclude laypeople from having control over the way services are provided. Laypeople become progressively incapable of understanding technical issues, so that even if those running institutions let us participate, it is unlikely that we would have many effective suggestions to offer. Giving responsibility over to service institutions atrophies our ability to govern the service (Illich et al., 1978; McKnight, 1995). This leads to needy people being unserved because there is no machinery for addressing the concerns of those people who fall in the cracks of the service system. When we expect government to provide services but it does not, some political actor must emerge to speak for the interests of the neglected. Usually, however, these are the people who are least equipped to fight for themselves politically: sufferers of severe chronic disease (whose expenses outrun the cost limits in health insurance), spouses of nursing home residents (who must spend down all of their family assets before the government will fund enormous nursing home costs), or minority children labeled mentally retarded in public schools in spite of federal regulations that supposedly protect them. Since in the rights framework others are not likely to fight for you, the needs of these unserved and unorganized people will be neglected until a political movement represents them. This does happen in our society, and sometimes very effectively. One of the main virtues of health charities such as the Huntington’s Disease Foundation or the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is that they serve as interest groups representing tiny, expensive minorities. Some critics argue that this political activity violates the altruistic intent of the charities. Without this kind of political representation, however, the rights tradition in our political system denies services to needy people just as effectively as do the humanitarian and utilitarian perspectives. Utopian Visions and Pragmatic Practices We concluded the previous chapter by arguing that there is a consensus in America that citizens should enjoy certain basic rights. There did not seem to be any mechanisms for being sure that those rights would be protected, however. We have the sense that most people are disengaged from helping others and do not much support (via their taxes) government action to reduce deprivation. The three models of helping offered in this chapter suggest that there are a number of different motives or ideologies that support helping others and that people are not so disengaged or hostile to the idea of making life better for the needy. Most people think that social misery and disorganization are explained by one or more of the three helping ideologies. If this is true, then people might well agree that they ought to be active. In fact public opinion surveys and the receipts of fund raising drives tell us that volunteering and charitable giving

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have been rapidly growing in America. Charity is not dead (Wuthnow, 1993). Charity is, however, mostly ineffective at reducing social need. The same models that say we should be involved in helping tell us that we should stay away from the people who most need assistance and from the social problems that most need solving, for example, by segregating them and ourselves into different neighborhoods and communities. The same ideological ideas that motivate us to help also paralyze us; they promote divisiveness, and, rather than build it, they undermine civility. We need both helpers and beneficiaries to be involved in building a civil order that uses the government to promote mutual assistance. The helping ideologies are correct in demanding, as they do, that the people who receive help should be responsible and use society’s resources wisely. However, when those ideologies legitimate inaction because the needy are judged unworthy, they promote social dissolution. Those who receive help have an obligation to give help and those with the power to give have to trust that their efforts are productive and that their resources are being used wisely. Everyone has to understand that their personal well-being depends on working to serve the whole society. When people think about their problems or their obligations to serve in narrow personal, means-ends terms, social cohesion falls apart. To make a call for trust and responsibility the main theme of this book hardly sounds like a promising project in today’s America—maybe it is telethon material, not scholarship. The three models of helping, however, are not fictions and they are not farfetched. We need to see three things about them. First, if we take the models separately, most people would agree that each makes sense, even though, as ideological systems, they seem to be mutually contradictory—utilitarians think humanitarians are moralists; humanitarians think utilitarians are cruel; and to entitlement thinkers both of the others are elitist. Second, people think about helping in a passionate way, which is one reason they get so angry with people who have the wrong (i.e., different) ideology. Third, all three models make compelling cases for helping some people and not helping others—distinguishing between the deserving and undeserving needy. If we can bring these three points together, then our call for a civil society might seem less far-fetched. The Logic of Helping The most important realization to take from the discussion of the three models of helping is that all give powerful arguments for attacking social problems. All also assert that each of us has a personal obligation to give help, and that, at the same time, those being helped have certain obligations to act responsibly and in ways that support the whole society. The three models are in partial conflict with each other. That arises, as we said at the outset of this chapter, because their philosophic arguments emphasize different beneficiaries, and thus different reasons for giving help. Not surprisingly, my personal motivations for helping are different from the reasons that would convince me that helping is good for society. Sometimes those

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motivations are in conflict with each other. No one should be surprised that values conflict, however. Any values, taken seriously, will run afoul of other ones. That is the human condition. We need to respect the wisdom in each perspective, yet take each with a grain of salt. If we do this, the three models show us that there is in fact surprising agreement that helping is serious business in American society. We mostly agree that social action is necessary. We disagree a lot about what to do and how to do it. But talking about what problems should be solved and how to solve them is a different topic than asking whether Americans are passive, disengaged, and unsupportive of the idea that we should be involved in helping others. These three ideologies may see different institutional actors or arenas—for example, the voluntary sector, religious institutions, or the state—as the appropriate vehicle for helping. Fortunately, in a complex pluralistic society there are many institutionalized avenues for helping and rather than seeing one or another as the best solution, all are required to be operating to create a civil society. The Deserving and Undeserving Needy One of the definite assertions of the three models of helping is that each distinguishes between people who deserve help and those who do not. It is important to make such distinctions (Katz, 1990; Trattner, 1998). The three approaches to helping have conflicting formulas for defining who is deserving and who is not, however, and we have to resolve this conflict. The simplest way to do this is to use all three definitions of deserving need at the same time. Rather than seeing the ideologies as being in conflict, we can see them as presenting different sides of the same issue. When we explore whether or not an individual needs help, three issues are relevant. We can ask, first, whether the individual to be helped seems motivated to improve his or her situation or is irresponsible and inclined to waste resources and benefits given out. We can ask, second, what activities or personal characteristics a person has that suggest that it would be in society’s best interests to help. Finally, we can ask whether a person has objective characteristics that give that person a right to expect help. Generally speaking, a person who qualifies as needy on all three counts is a person who absolutely ought to get help—and if they do not, there is something seriously wrong with our society. Chronically ill; working poor people who cannot afford health insurance fall into this category. Not only do the rationales for determining who is needy vary, but there are different kinds of needs—from the commonly canted basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter to more amorphous and esoteric needs such as self-actualization or the maintenance of cultural identity. Different kinds of needs may be justified or not by the different humanitarian, utilitarian, and entitlement rationales. Most kinds of need are ambiguous because people qualify on some dimensions and not others. We have mentioned some of these. Addicts may be sick and they certainly endanger the general public health by sharing needles, but they often are not motivated to help themselves. School children receive

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education, regardless of their level of motivation, because it is good for society to invest in educating young people. Being unable to care for themselves, children also are inherently needy—that is why they have a right to education. Things change when students get older. Graduate schools give money to the best applicants because they are impressed with their ability and motivation—they fit the value orientation of the institution. Students may get money even though their families are wealthy and despite job shortages. Meanwhile, poor people who could work, but do not, fail to meet any of the three criteria that define need. They are the people who deserve to remain needy. Similarly, people who go out of their way to hurt others deserve no sympathy. It is not the place in this book to elaborate on this typology of need at greater length. Our point is simply that need is a concept that is defined by several dimensions. On each one, individuals may be evaluated in terms of how much they deserve help and what kind. People who score very highly on any one criterion are likely to get help, even if they are not needy in terms of the other two dimensions. Many needy people represent ambivalent cases where it is hard to decide whether or not to give this or that kind of help. One could imagine that a truly rational society might develop a scale that would rank the relative importance of different kinds of need and allocate resources accordingly. Our society has a more arbitrary approach, but one that none the less is effective. We have a vast array of institutions that provide social services. Each has limited resources and so it selects only particular groups of needy people to help. If an individual happens to be in a group that receives help, then his or her needs are likely to be addressed. Otherwise, people are neglected. Pragmatic liberalism values the ingenuity of these diverse institutional arrangements. In fact, we will argue later in the book that the unsystematic collection of institutions that provide social services is the most important resource we have for providing help on a large scale. Yet it also is important to recognize that not all needs are equally worthy of attention. We ought to pay attention to the hierarchy of urgency—or dissoluteness. Social policy ought to be specially directed at helping the truly disadvantaged. Institutional arrangements that give help to people who do not really need it ought to be challenged and restricted. Meanwhile, strong measures should be taken to discourage the undeserving needy from sapping the resources and energy of society. Giving Aid In answering the question “Why help?” we have argued that there is more agreement about helping than most people think and most pundits profess. Who should receive help is a complex question that we will talk about in the coming chapters. But the task of distinguishing between the deserving and the undeserving needy should not paralyze people to the point where they do not help anymore. This also should not be allowed to drive us into ideological

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squabbling that causes us to ignore sensible suggestions made by our ideological opponents. We will develop this theme in the coming three chapters because ideology is again implicated in the most difficult problem about helping—how to carry out social programs so that they actually do some good. Our impression is that discouragement about the question of whether many people in American society are willing to help really masks a feeling that government and social institutions are just not very good at attacking and resolving social problems. In this chapter and the previous ones, we have tried to dispel the idea that talk about reform is fruitless because of disagreement about issues coupled with Americans’ seeming self-involvement and disinterest in helping others. We think there is substantial consensus about the kinds of lives people ought to be able to live in America as well as about when people deserve assistance. Now it is time to talk about how to help people who need it.

CHAPTER 4

The Conservative View: Markets, Inequality, and Social Efficiency

T

he conservative perspective has many variants but the dominant one today is allied with capitalism as an economic system that considers the free market the central institution of society. This is in contrast, for example, to the older perspective of cultural conservatives such as Edmund Burke (Freeman, 1980) who made tradition and the preservation of central values and institutions the focus of concern. Milton Friedman (1962/2002) and the conservative economists of “the Chicago School” were originally seen to be a small band of iconoclastic advocates of minimal government and free market economics in a more liberal political/economic order dominated by institutional economists and Keynesian theories highlighting the central role of the state (Galbraith, 1952; Keynes, 1936). Since that time the conservative perspective has moved into the mainstream, and the thinking of neoclassical economics has informed many policy innovations and has even entered into judicial and legal reasoning (Posner, 2003). Several key ideas and assumptions underlie this neoconservatism ideology. The starting point of conservative ideology is that the basic unit of society is the individual—not groups, not social classes, not even the society as a whole, but the isolated individual who in the words of Milton Friedman is “free to choose.” (This is in contrast to other social thinkers, for example, Adam Ferguson (1995/1767) of the Scottish Enlightenment who posited that the isolated individual is a “myth” and that empirically everywhere one looks one finds that mankind has always been found in “troops and companies.”) Furthermore, these individuals are seen to be rational utility maximizers. Personal choices are the engine behind the laws of supply and demand and the interactions between numerous suppliers and consumers create the central institution of society, the market. Individuals evaluate their situations in the world by considering the range of choices available to them. They identify a rank ordered set of preferences and use the finite resources available to them to select options that give them the most satisfaction. They assess alternatives with

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the objective of finding the best mix of quality in products for the lowest cost. They calculate the costs and benefits of different courses of action and weigh the choices they make to seek a mini/max solution—minimum costs for the maximum gain. They also seek to mix consumption with investment in a way that will allow for a continuing flow of resources to fund the future. The market is a system comprised of a large aggregate of such rational individual actors, each of whom tries to maximize her or his self-interest in a process of exchange with other individuals. According to Adam Smith, this is the result of a “natural propensity to truck, barter and trade.” People come together in the market to exchange with one another and, given the large number of buyers and sellers, each is seeking to maximize their own advantage, this results in the establishment of a “fair market price.” When a very large number of individuals want or demand a given good or service, it becomes profitable for entrepreneurs to create enterprises to produce these products for sale. The efforts of producers and consumers are shaped by laws of supply and demand that shape the decisions producers make about offering products to consumers, and that consumers make about which products to purchase. Competition with other suppliers creates a discipline in the marketplace. Suppliers try to find products that appeal to consumers and they try to produce them in a way that produces a mix of quality and low price that allows them to compete with other firms. When either consumers or suppliers make poor decisions that result in unwise purchases or in producing unwanted products or in producing them in an inefficient way, those individuals suffer losses caused by their bad thinking. For the market to work, individuals must suffer the consequences of these poor choices. Those that make optimal choices will succeed. Only with this kind of discipline can the market operate efficiently. An error of liberal approaches, conservative critics say, is that they soften the impact of poor personal choices, investment decisions, or business actions. This makes the economy inefficient and ultimately costs jobs and productivity and reduces the potential wealth and welfare of the society as a whole. Rational actors and firms that compete together create a huge interactive system of many different markets, not just a single market, and the system operates efficiently and rationally but in a way that cannot be centrally directed. According to the economist Paul Samuelson this interdependent system of markets results in a “general equilibrium” for society that ultimately determines “what” will be produced, “how” it will be produced, and for “whom.” The market rations out the scarce goods of society. “Who did the rationing: a board? a committee? No. The auctioneering mechanism of competitive price did the rationing” (Samuelson, 1980, p. 67). This is the market economy of modern capitalism based on capital flow and investment, a highly specialized division of labor, and money as a mechanism of exchange. One of its key attributes is that its participants automatically adjust to each other and to changes in their behavior and their desires. This adjustment happens in a way that rewards efficiency and insight into consumer demand. In contrast to a system that is centrally controlled or that cushions the punitive impact of bad market decisions, a free market system will produce greater efficiency, more accurate responses to

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consumer desires, and greater dynamism and growth in economic activity. And ultimately, it becomes the global system of interdependent markets that makes up modern world capitalism, or as Samuelson (1980) succinctly concludes, “No market is an island unto itself ” (p. 67). While economists tend to posit a world where each individual is an autonomous, rational actor, sociologists argue that a market system can only function if participants accept and adhere to shared underlying or overarching values. For example, consumers and firms can only carry out transactions if both are willing to adhere to the conditions of contracts and submit to legal control if they cheat or fail to hold up their end of a bargain. Similarly, individuals can only participate rationally in labor markets, we argue in this book, if social and cultural systems are in place that allow them to be supported as they wait in a queue for job openings to appear. Most of the observations we make about how pragmatic liberalism relates to the conservative ideology has to do with these underlying social values and embedded social structures that support market arrangements and that economists often ignore in their analyses or too often take for granted as assumptions. Conservative Conceptions of Social Problems and Their Solutions What many people define as social problems conservatives see as “natural” consequences of market processes, and furthermore, solutions to these problems are seen to emerge through the unimpeded, self-correcting actions of the market itself. Government intervention is one reason markets become distorted, constrained, and cannot act freely, so conservatives have worked to reduce the size of government and its role in markets by cutting programs and reducing spending. Inequality of outcomes is not in and of itself a social problem for conservatives (as we shall see it is for liberals and radicals). Inequality is not only natural, but it is a necessary and useful outcome of social and economic competition. Without incentives to gain wealth, market theorists argue, people have no incentives to build skills, assume responsibilities, take risks, or be creative and entrepreneurial. Society needs this sort of energy and productivity for growth and prosperity, and for new products, services, and institutions to be created. Material inequalities created by this competition can, however, also destabilize society, creating conflicts and tensions. Conservative sociologists, following the path of Talcott Parsons and his structural functional theories, recognize that these tensions are unavoidable (Parsons, 1964; Smelser, 1963; Coser, 1956). Stratification systems in society are ubiquitous and they serve necessary functions, allocating people by competence into varying positions of responsibility and motivating them to continue to perform at an optimal capacity (Davis and Moore, 1945). A challenge for social theory, in Parsons’s view, was to understand how society achieves an overarching cooperative order when there are these obvious pressures brought about by competition that could make the system explode and fly apart.

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The real world’s actual markets do not fit the idealized, formal models economists have proposed over the years. Conservative analysts recognize that these imperfections exist in the form of corruptions and constraints on free competition. One of the main goals of their arguments is to show how these flaws operate to reduce the efficiency, effectiveness, and equity in competitive markets. Many social problems, they would claim, are the direct result of restrictions on access to markets. Bottlenecks occur when power or privilege, conspiracy or corruption, discrimination or deceit, or monopolistic government programs give some individuals and groups competitive advantages and differential access to the means for competing successfully in markets. Special interventions by government or by special purpose institutions such as nonprofit organizations may be necessary to level the playing field and free up market competition. But this can happen only if government first gets out of the business of preventing free and open competition as it does, for example, by running a monopolistic public school system. Robert Merton’s (1968a) classic analysis of anomie—the social situation in which individuals are morally uprooted in their norms and values and literally “demoralized”—is an excellent example of a sociological application of some of the key ideas of a conservative approach to social problems created as the result of “imperfect markets.” Merton used this idea to explain deviance and delinquency among low-income youths. Anomie derives from a break or rupture in the chain of cause and effect, a separation between means and ends, between norms and values, between the practical means available to people and the achievement of their desired life goals. The framework by which realistic paths or means to success become available are called opportunity structures, which, following the logic of market competition, form the bedrock of society. If staying in school and hard work do not result in market payoffs such as higher paying jobs (or, worse, if they result in no job at all), then individuals and groups find themselves in an anomic condition. Norms they have been taught do not apply to the real life situations they face. Merton argued that young people in this situation are likely to seek refuge in a variety of deviant lifestyles such as participating in gangs or abusing and selling drugs. At some minimal level, these deviant alternatives provide satisfactions in what is otherwise a meaningless and empty world, a world that quite literally does not make rational sense to people mired in stagnant, impoverished communities. For conservatives, people must be able to see the world as a rational place in the sense that causes are connected to results. Without the predictability provided by a realistic connection between efforts and results, actors cannot make necessary calculations—about how opportunity costs and benefits are related—in order to know whether investment and sacrifice are worthwhile. Without this predictability, the market cannot function. The same conditions of blocked access are responsible for the emergence of fully developed alternative markets or shadow economies. Some industries in the shadow economy—drugs, prostitution, and gambling, for example—involve criminal activities. Some are simply outside of the law, being beyond or beneath the supervision and surveillance of the state. Shadow economies in goods and

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services such as child care or maid services often are illegal only insofar as they avoid taxation and restrictive regulation. Many of these activities also shade over into self-help systems and barter economies where goods and favors are exchanged in preexisting networks of friends and kin. These networks have been especially well documented in racial and ethnic as well as in third world countries (Stack, 1997/1979). Though sometimes described as effective survival strategies for destitute people who otherwise have few opportunities, such systems spawn social problems like a hurricane produces tornadoes. We have a drug problem in the world because so much money is there to be made that syndicates and adventurers are ready to take any risks to challenge and evade state control, creating a massive illegal drugs industry. Even when they trade in less dramatic black market goods, indigenous economies generally produce little real social mobility even though a few people may get wealthy. Usually the resources available to underground economies are too limited for their entrepreneurs to compete with legitimate industries or to challenge the authority of the state. The global market in drugs and the power of the drug cartels are a significant exception. There are ironies in these underground economies as well. Observers have seen that for illegal economies to succeed, participants must develop and obey norms that emphasize strong interpersonal ties and mutual responsibility. This is necessary for the development of trust upon which exchange networks depend. This interdependence tends to undercut mobility because it creates what Norbert Wiley graphically referred to as an “ethnic mobility trap” (Wiley, 1967). The obligation to share one’s gains with friends and family members makes it hard for lower-class people to make self-interested choices and to build the farflung, loosely connected networks of acquaintances basic to middle-class success in the job market (Stack, 1997/1979; Granovetter, 1995). But at the same time, mutual support and interdependence makes it possible for poor people to survive in what seem to be impossibly deprived economic conditions, and it also creates communities of mutual concern and care that we can admire. The above examples lay stress on the conservative view that for people to prosper in a just and equitable society, they need ready access to open, legitimate, and fair markets. When access is blocked and opportunities are lacking, needs are likely to go unmet or they will be met in ways that are negatively sanctioned by the larger society. Only then may state intervention be needed to open up or restructure these market opportunities. We will now explore three major ways conservatives have conceptualized social problems and potential solutions to them. We will assess the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, recognizing full well that the three are not comprehensive but are the most commonly invoked in conservative discussions of social policy. Three Conservative Approaches to Social Improvement The conservative model has been especially effective at conceptualizing causes of economic inequality in the context of civil society because it focuses on a

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balance between individual responsibility and society’s obligations to provide open access to success. It sends out tough messages that society cannot reward destructive behavior, that it must recognize when people have no opportunities to work, and that people have to work hard, plan for the future, and not cheat society. But it also offers practical steps one can take to work out of the intransigent poverty that affects so many. We shall discuss three models by which conservatives believe we can reverse unjust social inequality. The three models are, respectively, (1) the queuing model, (2) the human capital model, and (3) the incentives model. The first section talks about labor market queuing and how trust in the reality and efficacy of the labor market allows the development of community institutions that support people who are waiting for vacancies to open. The second section talks about the development of human capital and the importance of equal access to effective schooling and other training opportunities. The third section talks about incentive models and the importance of building personal accountability into social policy programs. All three begin from a basic view of the opportunity structure of society as a pyramid. It is broad at the base and narrow at the top. Individuals enter at the bottom and over time through hard work, ingenuity, and chance they climb the pyramid to greater rewards, or as high as they can go. This supports the basic view that, in principle, inequality is functional for societies in ensuring that through competition in the labor market more productive and talented people will rise to positions of wealth, power, and prestige. For the conservative theory of social efficiency to work effectively and justly, a number of assumptions must be met (Friedman, 2002). If they are not, then “market failures” occur leading to unmet needs and social problems. First, there must be clear and rational criteria for entry into the pyramid and for advancement up the opportunity structure. Decision rules should make sense and be clear in terms of means and ends. They should rely on criteria that are readily and universally accepted as being fair and capable of being assessed and applied. These sets of concerns are precisely where the “queuing model” focuses its attentions. Second, individuals must compete on a level playing field. They should begin on a somewhat even footing, or, at a minimum, have the necessary resources (usually thought of as “skills”) to enter the pyramid and to begin their climb. Further, as people move along their career paths, they should be able to acquire the skills they need for further advancement. These are basic concerns addressed by the focus on what the Nobel laureate Gary Becker (1993) has labeled “human capital,” or capital investment in human skills. Third, the opportunity structure as a whole must grow, an overall expansion of the pyramid that can absorb increases in populations entering the system. If the pyramid is stagnant or shrinking, then bottlenecks occur. Incentives must be structured to reward activities that stimulate the overall growth of the pyramid. Expansion at any level of the pyramid creates vacancy chains, cascades of opportunity that open slots or positions that “trickle down” as individuals themselves “percolate up” the chain of advancement. The incentive model focuses its attention precisely upon the structure of the “incentive system” that can promote

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necessary growth in the whole system and accelerate rates of advancement for participants (Levitt and Dubner, 2005). We can see that the three models are likely to be interdependent. For example, those who do not have any skills (human capital) may rightfully see that even if they had skills, there would be no jobs (queuing). They have little chance of competing successfully and so may not even desire to participate in the game even if outlandish payoffs such as fancy scholarships (incentives) are offered. Alternative outlandish payoffs such as playing the lottery may seem just as reasonable. The Queuing Model The central metaphor of this model is the line or queue where the latest entries, the newest arrivals, take their appropriate place at the back of the line. As those who are served exit at the front of the line, everyone advances in an orderly sequence. The central principal of justice is “first come, first served” (Hassin and Haviv, 2003). This fits the conservative worldview in two ways. First, it emphasizes the importance of maintaining the stability of the system, even though there is some inequality between individuals. That people who have “paid their dues” get the first chance for new opportunities suggests that social stratification is rooted in pluralistic opportunity. Second, the queuing model draws upon a market rationale since one of its justifications is that those with more experience ought to have first chance to get new jobs. The queuing model is applied to both individuals and to groups. Major groups of new entrants have either been new cohorts growing up and entering responsible positions in society or new immigrant groups. The time at which they may enter the workforce and the length of the wait people suffer are functions of “chance factors” in this model. The size of the baby boom cohort tells us why those born between 1945 and 1965 have had more difficulty finding work and advancing in their careers than people born in the preceding decades. The structure of the economy has shifted from production to service and from markets that are national to ones that are global. The demand for unskilled manual labor has declined as a result, and this helps to explain why recent migrants to cities have found it more difficult to become integrated into the American economy than did immigrants in the first decades of the twentieth century. There are few good working class job openings, so newcomers live with inadequate jobs and hardship as they wait for a slot to open. There is injustice in this model if people gain jobs before it is their turn. Thus, patronage and the “old boy” system spoil the queuing since connections and payoffs rather than talent and acceptance of the order of things put people at the head of the line for scarce jobs (Granovetter, 1995). While personal favoritism and graft destroy a queuing system, group discrimination also wrecks it if one group finds it easier to move ahead in the queue than another. African Americans have been an historic target of discrimination. Even today, such discrimination may continue in low-income black communities as recent immigrants seem to find more economic opportunities even though they arrived in American cities much later than American blacks. This would represent a

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violation of the queuing system. Some observers have argued, however, that new immigrants succeed because they are more tolerant of low-wage, entry-level jobs and unstable work. Low-income American blacks have become impatient at the injustices of the queue and look at jobs, for example, in fast food restaurants as dead ends. For some immigrants, these same jobs provide an entrée into the labor market that prepares them for more demanding and rewarding work later. Two value components of the conservative view support the queuing explanation for inequality. First, conservatives believe people should earn and work for the benefits they receive from the social system. This “work ethic” is an echo of a key point made in Max Weber’s (1992) seminal work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. If people are to remain contented in the queue and are to remain motivated to work hard, it is important that they have the personal values of patience and perseverance, and an abiding faith in the system’s continuing openness. Second, faith in the market and in the legitimacy of institutions encourages conservatives to believe that the decision rules that govern entry to and promotion within an opportunity structure are reasonable, equitable, and just. These values and beliefs are fragile, however, and if they are violated then a sense of injustice may lead to claims of discrimination. These feelings will undermine the psychology of commitment that is necessary for people to accept their position and their slow movement up through the queue. When workers are given low wages in unstable jobs, it is natural for them to see the system as exploitative. Starting with low-reward work may be a necessary first step in building a new business or gaining the experience one needs to earn a better job; but if workers feel that the job system provides no future opportunities and that opportunities for good jobs are based on class and race preferences, they are not likely to accept those positions as fair. Inequality that is due to fate or chance or to discrimination and prejudice, rather than to the sober application of effort within a “rationalized” queuing system, will produce at best anomie and retreat, or worse, deviance and rebellion. Personal and community experiences that show people that the system is unfair and that the economy offers no real chances for success undermine trust and commitment to the society as a whole. The conservative perspective may at times recognize these failures as due to unfair actions that warrant governmental intervention to restore the sense of a just and free market. Too often, however, it fails to recognize this as a system failure and instead tends to fault the individuals who have withdrawn their commitment from the system and sees this as their moral failure. Thus, handicapped people have challenged the criteria of entry and promotion that often eluded them. Such claims, if generally accepted as valid, are reparable and, indeed, the last twenty years have seen a variety of civil rights protections extended to the handicapped (Groch, 2001). They qualify individuals for special services or entitle them to designated social benefits. Such claims are valid in the queuing model when they are justified in terms of past discriminatory decision rules or chance factors that represent bad luck beyond the control of the individual, factors such as catastrophic illness or natural disasters. Those reforms have to do with reversing discrimination and removing concrete barriers that had blocked disabled people from achieving independence.

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They do not mesh with other complaints voiced by disabled liberation activists who attack the social system in general for equating illness with helplessness and for socializing people into handicapped, dependent roles. In the conservative view, civil rights for disabled adults may create a positive obligation for society to remove physical and social barriers that would make potential independence a reality. Beyond that, people must recognize how they are buying into dependent roles if they are being artificially limited, rather than being allowed to act independently, challenge illegal discrimination, and push the limits of their abilities by seeking to master challenging work. Dependency is seen as a personal, not a structural, problem. Some interventions that current politics pigeonhole as liberal turn out to be conservative in terms of the way we are framing things. The queuing perspective emphasizes private, civil solutions to social problems. Where discrimination occurs we increase costs to those who are culpable, require them to provide remuneration, and provide special opportunities for advancement to victims of discrimination. Thus, affirmative action programs that emphasize equal access but select people competitively based on skills fits the conservative point of view. When society acknowledges that certain difficulties such as severe physical disabilities result from unavoidable acts of God, some form of compulsory social insurance is the likely solution. Thus we have social security to protect against old age and disability, and federally sponsored flood insurance for river towns to protect against this type of natural disasters. Responsible conservatives would support these measures even if they require that government programs be expanded and taxes increased. The privatization of social problems and their solutions is consonant with the view that the basic structure and operation of the system is sound and unassailable, and that, therefore, solutions should not be socialized or borne by the civil society as a whole. Rather, solutions are ideally sought in the private realm of philanthropy through organizations such as the United Way and small religious or social welfare organizations. Ideally, under this model, even major catastrophes and disasters such as floods and hurricanes are dealt with by the nongovernmental civil society of private relief organizations such as the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. Taken as a theory of society, the queuing model has some major shortcomings. It assumes the presence of a number of social conditions that the operation of the model itself serves to undermine. For example, the model assumes that perfect economic markets for labor determine the allocation of jobs. If there are new job openings, they will go to the most qualified aspirants. The converse of this is that for individuals to receive jobs they have been waiting for, they must have good information about the range of openings available in the job market and they must be ready to move to fill an opening. The trouble is that the very values of solidarity and community support that make people willing to put up with waiting and with the inherent inequities of queuing systems conflict with the rational individualism implied by labor market theory. The queuing model either assumes that there is no conflict between communal values and market rationality, heralding them as basic underpinnings of the system, or views communal values as anachronistic constraints on rational market behavior.

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The simple matter is that one cannot have it both ways. One cannot expect that the solutions to numerous social problems should be sought among private and personal obligations and assert that the cause of many social problems is due to the breakdown of the family and local community ties, while simultaneously demanding that individuals should rationally break from the constraints and obligations of extended personal ties of friends and kin in pursuit of social mobility. With its emphasis on highly individualistic rational market status striving to move up the pyramid, the queuing model has never adequately resolved its conception of mobility as a group process (the prototype being the movement of successive waves of ethnic groups through the system). The queuing model sees groups moving up the system as merely an aggregation of individual mobility. Yet its proponents ignore the contradiction that although group solidarity is important for people to survive while they wait for opportunities, the labor market requires that, in order to prosper individually, they must abandon these same community ties. Communal sentiments are heralded as virtues but they cannot be rationally incorporated into the model. This dilemma is still most clearly expressed in William Foot Whyte’s (1993) comparison of two cliques in his classic Street Corner Society: Doc and his street corner boys versus Chick and his college men. The former live in a constraining tight network of parochial sentiment and support, while the latter are an aggregate of highly motivated individuals striving for personal advancement. The same dilemma is expressed for the black community in William Julius Wilson’s (1987) analysis of the truly disadvantaged and the permanent underclass of black Americans in urban ghettos. Middle-class blacks have found the personal means for social and geographic mobility, while all that remains for inner city blacks are the impoverished social networks of support described by Carol Stack (1997/1979) in All Our Kin. The Human Capital Model A newer conservative orientation used to define and attack social problems emphasizes the need for investment in human capital (Becker, 1993). The perspective purposefully blurs the boundary line that traditional economic analysis draws between labor and capital as two central factors of production. It rather emphasizes the need for investment in human beings—or more specifically in their skills—as a major capital investment that is as important as investment in physical plant and machinery that were traditionally viewed as the only components of the fixed capital of production. There is a touch of irony in the elevation of human skills to this central position, since it occurred only after the machines in which capital investment was occurring (namely automated production systems and computers) themselves became more like humans. In short, only when people were viewed as analogs to computers did economists realize their true economic and productive value. Above all, what the human capital perspective focuses on is the need for an educated, skilled labor force. Only with a rapid capacity to “retool,” or “reprogram,”

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the human component in the production equation can we strengthen our ability to respond efficiently to the rapidly changing demands of unknown future markets and compete in the world marketplace. The investment side of human capital stresses both the need for a continuing education of the workforce and also the need to educate children effectively. General information, language skills, and mathematical literacy provide the foundation necessary for more specific later skilling and thus bring a return throughout the life span to early investments in schooling. Conversely, lack of skills is seen in this perspective as one of the primary causes of poverty and the social problems associated with it. A primary intervention strategy in the human capital perspective, therefore, is for both private and public funding to be intensively directed at improving the quality of public schools. The focus of the model is primarily on an individual’s first entry into the pyramid and secondarily on his or her continuing capacity to stay in the competitive climb to the top. This emphasis on skills creates some sharp contrasts between the queuing and human capital perspectives. Compared to the queuing model, the human capital perspective lays less stress on the internal dynamics and decision rules of advancement. Emphasizing a concern for seniority and experience, the queuing approach necessarily values old (and perhaps outmoded) knowledge. Human capital theorists are sharply critical of this value, arguing that to be competitive in the market we must emphasize dynamism and change. Unions that protect seniority systems are accused of featherbedding and of crippling industries that must take advantage of new technologies to compete with other countries. Thus, the human capital approach is more purely market oriented than the queuing perspective and recognizes less intrinsic value in preserving existing structural arrangements. Both models emphasize the importance of entering the opportunity pyramid and remaining an effective participant over time. Thus from both perspectives, a major reason social problems happen is that people drop out. There are sharp differences, however, on why dropping out causes social pathology. The queuing model, emphasizing hard work and persistence, sees the drop out as someone who rejects values necessary to gain success. The human capital perspective is morally ambivalent. People may choose not to develop their skills and to remain poor. That is their choice. Dropping out is nonetheless serious because one does not continue to build skills—moral and emotional ones as well as those that depend on intellect and training—all of them essential if one is to compete for good jobs in the labor market. However, the human capital model does not necessarily place or fix blame at an individual level, blaming the victim, the drop out, because dropping out may be due to structural changes in the economy. A shift in the nature of jobs themselves from unskilled, manual labor to more highly skilled information and service based occupations makes old skills outmoded and may leave sober, hardworking people unable to find work. It is hard to blame people laid off in the coal fields of Pennsylvania or in the steel fabricating towns of the Ohio Valley or the Great Lakes for being unemployed. They may lack the skills they need to gain new jobs but they grew up in communities that prepared them only

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for work in doomed industries. Such changes may be far beyond the control of individuals. These labor tragedies fuel the criticisms human capital theorists aim at those responsible for the fate of children. Families, local communities, and the national government, all must work to improve education so that today’s children can escape economic stagnation when they grow up (Clinton, 1996; Blank, 1998). Though it may be expensive in both money and effort and its payoffs are hard to see, investment in education is defined as a necessary sort of deferred gratification that will reap big future payoffs. This is a calculus of saving and investment: current sacrifices will allow long term prosperity. For investment in building human capital to make sense to either individuals or communities, however, the system must work in such a way that there are indeed meaningful long-term returns on investments and that the payoffs are greater than those that might result from alternative ways of spending time and energy. For graduate education to be a worthwhile investment, for example, the income benefits provided by an advanced degree, say, a Masters in the Arts of Teaching (MAT), ought to be greater than the returns one would gain by working at a less sophisticated job and putting the money one would have paid for education in the bank or in the stock market. If this is not the case, then dropping out may be a rational individual choice with resulting negative consequences for the society as a whole. This sort of calculation is one reason why there is a shortage of science teachers in public education today. Extending this logic to a significant but extreme case, it may be difficult to convince a black youth in an urban ghetto that he should stay in school and graduate with a high school diploma when there is an urban unemployment rate of over 40 percent for young black males (Spaights and Dixon, 1986). The investment of time, energy, and trust that would be required for him to graduate has a low probability of producing a job that would pay enough to support a family or that would carry a potential for career advancement. His investment in schooling is less attractive if it interferes with an alternative investment in illegal industries that prosper in the ghetto. Why invest in an unlikely long-term gain when the alternative of dealing in drugs is more immediate and produces a bigger profit? The risks and criminal costs of capture and incarceration, or even possibly death on the street, may not outweigh the rational comparative benefits of the two options (Padilla, 1992). As we saw with the queuing model, the legitimacy of the human capital perspective requires that reality reinforce the values promoted by the model. When there is a disarticulation between the investment stage and the productive stage, reasonable people question the value of investing to improve skills. Unfortunately, research shows that this disarticulation is the rule rather than the exception. The causal link between the costs of education in both time and money and the future rewards students will receive is not as tight as our myths (and the theories of economists and psychologists) would have us believe (Jencks, 1979). Getting ahead in the current system is due less to human capital investment in formal education than it is to investments by parents in early childhood, the prestige or elite status of one’s social networks, and the social

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position of the family into which one is born. In other words, the accidents of birth and chance are the primary determinants of adult status. One reason the human capital model has achieved currency is that its proponents have been aware of its shortcomings and have tried to address the disjuncture between theory and reality. One way to bring about reconciliation is, of course, simply to change the myth to match reality. Some have argued that realistically there is little that can be done. Differences in social status are a function of skills that are subtly transmitted within families. “Breeding,” both social and genetic, will ultimately show. There are many who take this “aristocratic” elitist position as a consequence of these findings from social science research. Arthur Jensen (2002), for example, launched his discussion of the intellectual inferiority of blacks by pointing to the ineffectiveness of school reform programs. Those who think the presence of a permanent “underclass” is inevitable tend to resist elaborate programs intended to educate the poor or to otherwise sharply reduce inequality. At best they grudgingly accept the costs of training the poor for minimal survival skills and providing them with sustenance, if for no other reason than to forestall riot and revolution and to reduce their reproduction rate. Human capital proponents with a more democratic bent tend to locate the ineffectiveness of linking schooling to job success not in genes but in family interaction patterns (Lareau, 2003). They see the need for disentangling the more subtle components of this early socialization, this “breeding,” such that a truer meritocracy, not an aristocracy, will prevail. Unwilling to accept the aggregate wastage represented by such an underdeveloped resource, they would argue for a system in which inequalities, though an unavoidable outcome of the educational process, are less rigidly determined from the beginning. Another egalitarian human capital argument avoids the nature/nurture debate about the causes of talent and educability altogether. When we invest in education for the poor we are depriving prosperous people of their property and reducing the rewards they receive for being productive workers while providing relatively little benefit to the poor. Supporters of this position will argue that redistribution from the rich to the poor is, in the aggregate, irrational because benefit gains for the poor will not equal what we have taken from the rich. Contrariwise, we should recognize that the cost of an individual wasted— either in terms of lost human potential or in terms of public resources that must be spent later when drop outs go on welfare, are put in prison, or must be cared for under Medicare—is greater than the benefit an elite individual gains saving a few tax dollars. Such critiques as those found in Christopher Jencks’s (1972) book Inequality are, in short, a closed loop, a circuitous argument that serves to support the prevailing inequality. In summary, the human capital perspective provides a central concept for understanding the market value of labor and for explaining the link between skills and the structure of inequality. Because the real world does not conform to the perfect market envisioned by human capital theory, most of the arguments surrounding this model concern how government and society should act in light of these imperfections. One set of observers sees little to be gained from investing

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in human capital and they see the state providing a minimal caretaking welfare function with respect to the poor, operating, in short, from an enlightened noblesse oblige. Minimal support and training are recommended for those mysteriously relegated to the lower rungs of society by their inadequate breeding. By contrast, human capitalists whose primary goal is to foster economic growth take a more democratic stance, arguing that only by restructuring incentives and payoffs can one then calculate the true later returns to early investment. Under such a purified system, the argument runs, the data and the models would as likely show that early investment results in an aggregate benefit for society as a whole. It is interesting to observe that this debate is a debate not only about the models and the data of the social sciences but also about values. Within the discourse of pragmatic liberalism, both data and values are considered necessary points of discussion. Both must enter and be interrelated in the debate. Incentive Models The human capital model introduced us to the idea that the pyramid is an incentive system. It offers a carefully balanced system of costs and benefits to individuals and to the society in the aggregate for engaging in alternative courses of action such as investing early in education to reap future rewards. The way these incentives are structured defines the substance and internal operation of the system. As human capitalists suggest, these arrangements most critically determine who can enter to become players in the system. In their view, social problems arise primarily because the system erects barriers to entry; there is a disjuncture between costs or efforts and commensurate rewards. Incentive theorists criticize the human capital approach because it implies that failure is due only to bad luck or discrimination. Sharing the assumption that people will be economically rational, the incentive model asserts that in many cases the system of incentives presented to individuals is so wacky that they are not encouraged to build their human capital or to behave in ways that operate to the aggregate benefit of the society. An important example was the old welfare system that was changed in 1996 (Sugarman, 1995). When people lived in communities where there are few jobs, the federal program Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) encouraged teenaged women to have illegitimate babies both so they could live on their own and so that their parents would no longer have to support them. There also were disincentives discouraging people on welfare to seek work. Wage rates at which people lost their eligibility for welfare and for Medicare were so low that they often lost money by going to work. Particularly if they suffered serious, nondisabling chronic diseases, the consequences of taking a job that provided no health insurance could have been catastrophic. One of the dilemmas confronting those wishing to reform welfare, therefore, has been to find ways of structuring benefits so that the safety net of coverage is available to help people during intermittent periods of unemployment without trapping them financially so that they cannot afford to go back to work.

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The welfare example illustrates one of three major concerns in the incentives approach. First, social programs, while striving to do good, at the same time may encourage behavior that makes the problem worse. Usually these are unintended consequences that arise because of complex interactions between programs or because of what seem to be inherent dilemmas in programs. The task of policy analysis is to uncover the complex mix of incentives and revise programs so that they more often encourage clients to invest time and energy in ways that are positive rather than negative for the society as a whole. A second application of the incentives approach involves efforts at social control. Many of our current programs to prevent criminal or socially dangerous activity—environmental pollution, for example—involve direct regulatory efforts. These are cumbersome, expensive, and often ineffective. It is often easy for criminals to elude detection and, if they are caught, it is often hard to convict criminals because of due process protections guaranteed by the courts. This means it is hard to make the disincentives to crime sufficiently powerful to convince criminals that they should give up their illegal activities. Sometimes an indirect approach that changes the incentive structure for law violators would work better. We must note that incentives involve a carrot and a stick. Rational actors weigh the cost of negative sanctions against the benefits of positive rewards. There is a basic asymmetry here in that the costs to society of applying negative sanctions are often greater than the costs of positive rewards. The asymmetry is due to the fact that negative sanctions often are applied post-hoc, after a negative act has already been committed, which is costly for society (repairing a broken pane of glass, bailing out a savings and loan). Positive rewards are, however, often pre-hoc. No negative act has yet occurred and society has therefore not yet incurred this cost. The “war on drugs” is an example where control efforts are failing to change the incentive structure for pushers and abusers (MacCoun et al., 2001). Most of our current efforts are directed at interdiction and control. The federal government invests heavily in preventing drug smuggling and stopping American farmers from growing illegal substances such as Marijuana. Meanwhile, city police departments arrest many people on drug related charges. Courts, operating under mandated sentencing rules, must imprison those convicted on drug-related charges. Despite these efforts, critics have pointed out that the street price of drugs has gone down over the past ten years. Even in the wake of major drug busts, it usually has been impossible to demonstrate a rise in price. The volume of drugs available is so high that interdiction efforts do not dramatically reduce the amount available to users. Meanwhile, the cost of smuggling is such a small fraction of the total cost of drugs that importers can easily double or triple their spending on smuggling without raising the street price. It appears that we are getting little return from the war on drugs in terms of lowering drug abuse by trying to raise the price of drugs. Meanwhile, the criminal justice system is breaking down under the weight of increased prison population and court delays. In response to this discouraging situation, Minnesota and some other states have begun taxing illegal drug sales (Myron and Zwiebel, 1995). They sell

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stamps that pushers must purchase to provide evidence that they have paid tax on their illegal sales. The stamps are sold anonymously. One might wonder why pushers would buy these stamps, or why states would seem to support illegal activity. Supporters point out that this is little different than the technique used to deal with bootleggers such as Al Capone who ultimately were convicted on tax evasion charges rather than for illegally selling alcohol during prohibition. Pushers buy stamps because if they are captured and cannot demonstrate that they have paid the tax, the state can confiscate their assets and add more time onto their prison sentences. Meanwhile, the tax helps fund control and rehabilitation programs while it directly increases the costs of operation for dealers. This changes the structure of incentives for dealers without creating a large or cumbersome enforcement bureaucracy. A third, and some say primary, role played by the state in the incentive model emphasizes providing positive incentives to change the overall structure or shape of the pyramid itself—namely, reward for the entrepreneurs who create and expand the number of new positions in the pyramid. The conservative model sees such institution building primarily as a private market activity, often voiced in the old adage that true economic growth occurs only in the private productive sector. Government should not be the employer of first or last resort. Rather it should function primarily to ensure appropriate incentives to stimulate growth in the private sector. At a minimum, the state should not provide disincentives to the emergence of innovative private initiatives through its taxing policies, through excessive bureaucratic regulation, or through political favoritism. The incentive model of rewarding institution building extends beyond efforts to increase productivity and employment in the business economy. It is easily grafted onto a conception of social welfare programs designed to deal with society’s social problems. The discipline and other virtues of the market have stimulated a push toward the privatization for profit of many welfare functions. Private providers of day care, enterprise zones to rebuild the job base in central cities, Section 8 housing vouchers versus public housing, educational vouchers, the building and running of private prisons, and the restructuring of health care delivery are a few examples of this newest approach to welfare that above all emphasizes public-private partnerships (American Academy of Political Science, 1986). The private sector provides for the competitive and competent organization and administration of services, while the state provides the incentives of public funds for this new market. Social problems, whatever their source, must be reconstrued as an unmet, potential market, a vacuum that rational entrepreneurs and clients will rush to fill once appropriate incentives are provided. Models of Government Pragmatic liberalism recognizes three strengths in the conservative model. First, it bonds a respect for individual common sense or rationality with an insistence that values be central to a discussion of social reform. Second, conservatism emphasizes that institutions grow and decline to the extent that they serve

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people. It is important that bureaucracy, political domination, and simple elitism not get in the way of the processes that allow this evolution of programs and services to happen in response to public demand. Programs also have to be allowed to wither away and die if they are not meeting a need as defined by public demand. Third, by drawing on the metaphor of the classical economic market, conservatives favor local action, local decisions, and decentralized, entrepreneurial action over rational planning and centralized government. While pragmatic liberalism recognizes that centralized planning is essential, effective solution of many social problems demands an adaptive strong grassroots structure of self-help, mutual assistance, and enterprise. All three of the conservative models that we have described share a similar conception of the role of government with respect to the definition and solution of social problems, of government’s role in meeting the needs of its citizens. Though each of the three has a slightly different emphasis or focus of attention as to the etiology of problems and their different solutions, differences that appear at the more grounded level of specific programs, they all emphasize the central role played by markets. Government’s role is therefore an ancillary one of aiding and abetting markets, of ensuring that they are structured and regulated with appropriate incentives to provide for the common welfare. In this sense, the conservative models of social welfare emphasize a true political economy, not an economic politics (Godfrey and Unger, 2004). All three see social needs arising for two broad reasons, because people have differential access to resources of the society through markets and because people have differences in their abilities, inclinations, and opportunities to act rationally within markets. Both explanations imply that people can, in principle, provide for themselves and thereby avoid making demands on society for public welfare. Following in the classical American tradition of Emerson, fostering this possibility for selfreliance constitutes the central policy concern of the conservative models. Rationality and Values Though there are overlaps, at the level of specific programmatic solutions to foster individual responsibility, the queuing, human capital, and incentive models nonetheless differ in their priorities. The queuing model most clearly addresses government’s role in promoting a legal structure of nondiscriminatory rights of access. This includes specific programs that focus on job discrimination by minority status (such as race or gender), handicapped status, and the like as well as rights to consumer markets such as housing and mortgage markets. The queuing model does not directly address resource expenditures to prepare people through skilling to enter markets themselves. Rather it sees these as a longer-term, private, social process carried out within the care of the family and the confines of the local community. Because of this the queuing model is most emphatic of the three in extolling the virtues of traditional institutional arrangements and values. By contrast, the human capital model directly addresses the need to give people the necessary skills to enter markets and to successfully compete within

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them. Specific governmental programs, therefore, focus on early socialization, learning, education, and job training. Through these programs the human capital model envisions active governmental programs to attack social problems. Yet it remains conservative because it does not necessarily see the federal government’s role as a direct provider of such services. Rather, it is a provider of resources and incentives that will permit or encourage individuals, local communities and private associations to emphasize and develop such skills. Voucher systems, master teacher programs, tax deductions to poor families for enrolling their children in head start or day care, and tax incentives to corporations that offer job training to low income people are but a few examples of this more indirect governmental role in promoting private human capital investment. Again, the emphasis is on fiscal and tax incentives for local and private institutions, rather than on direct provision of human services through federal government programs. Finally, the most indirect welfare programs of the conservative perspective emphasize an incentive system that will promote competitive mobility within the system and economic expansion and growth of the system as a whole. By selectively rewarding individual and institutional initiatives promoting such mobility and growth, the argument runs, opportunities will “trickle down” and best serve the needs of even the currently disadvantaged at the bottom of the pyramid, and such indirect incentives are preferable to direct governmental welfare that is ultimately seen to be an entrapping disincentive to competitive productivity and growth. The clearest example of this “trickle down model” is in the housing market. Conservatives of this stripe would argue that the best way to provide better housing for the poor is to expand the amount of housing to the wealthy. The rich will leave their old housing to the middle class and move into the new housing, and the middle class will in turn leave their housing to the working class who will in turn abandon their housing to those previously without housing. All segments of the society, including the bottom rungs, will, “naturally” through the “natural” operations of the market, experience an increase in housing quality. One shortcoming is that the amount of time it takes for this process to trickle down through the system is seldom addressed as a concern by its proponents. All three conservative perspectives make a sharp theoretical distinction between the deserving and the undeserving needy, although when it is applied in specific programs the distinction often becomes blurred and hard to maintain (Trattner, 1999). The distinction between those who do and do not deserve help to overcome a social problem rests at base on their degree of individual rational choice and culpability in causing the problem. Further, given the prevailing faith that the current competitive market system is, by and large, functioning efficiently and equitably, conservative models tend to place the burden of proof for legitimating claims of public welfare on the needy themselves. Only if acts of God, chance, and factors beyond the control of rational actors can be clearly shown to be the cause of need, are such claims deemed legitimate. Even in such circumstances, however, the conservative perspective still sees government’s role primarily as an indirect one of promoting parochial and private solutions rather than directly providing for the public welfare.

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Institutional Implications The conception of institutions that may be gleaned from the conservative perspective above all stresses their emergent quality. Institutions are seen to arise as collective outcomes of rational actors pursuing their self-interest within a competitive market structure. Individuals are seen as informed, rational actors who calculate the costs and choose among alternative courses of action in the light of expected future benefits. The sum of these individual, rational activities produce institutional outcomes. As exigencies and environmental conditions change, individuals will alter their cost-benefit calculations and new social arrangements will emerge to respond to the changing circumstances. Old institutional arrangements will falter, fail, and ultimately fall as more efficient and equitable solutions are sought. Only when institutions are crystallized by tradition and power, will inefficiencies and inequities arise as bottlenecks and structural blockages interfere with this rational calculus. The bureaucratic power and regulations of the state may produce these inefficiencies. At times, however, this same state power can be used to counter deceit or discrimination that interfere with rational and fair operations of the market. Such a model sees continuous experimentation—both alterations of individual actions and changes in the arrangements of collective institutions—as necessary. The rise and fall of individuals and the related rise and fall of institutions represents, therefore, a necessary process of adaptation. The social and individual costs of these short-term negative consequences are off-set by aggregate, long-term benefits. Thus a declining industry creates hardship for individuals and leads to a waste of talent while those people try to find their way back into the productive economy. While society may help those individuals, it should not intervene to protect such a failing enterprise. Inefficient units need to be pared off and people must suffer the consequences of bad economic decisions in order for everyone to enjoy the much greater benefit of an expanding economy. As Donald Campbell (1969) once observed, in referring specifically to social programs, we are an “experimental society.” One of the often unrecognized consequences is that although some experiments will succeed, some will inevitably fail. A second feature of this emergent, conservative conception of institutions is an emphasis on a multiplicity of parochial, local solutions, of programs tailored to the exigencies of individuals’ immediate local circumstances. This perspective is antithetical to centralized, singular programs promulgated by a bureaucratically removed national state apparatus. Conservatives want to use the metaphor of the market to guide social problem solving, thus launching many local experiments rather than a singular national experiment. This localism is deeply ingrained in American values and this, no doubt, is one of the sources of strength for conservative social policy arguments. The central function of a national government is to indirectly translate this metaphor of social services provided through a decentralized, market-like arrangement into a social reality. To conservatives, a strong, centralized government is anathema, with the exception of the need for a common national defense

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where one can legitimately claim that there is a need for a large-scale, centralized state and so values and power converge on this critical need. In other areas of policy, conservatives prefer that the convergence of institutionalized power and values needed to deal with large-scale social interventions should occur in a multiplicity of small, parochial, and private organizations rather than in institutions created by some national, public intervention process. Because of this private, localistic preference, conservative models have a logically difficult time dealing with the increasing scale of the world economy and articulating the state’s role in relationships with other nation-states in a corporatist global economy (Derber, 1998). This is especially true as many domestic welfare needs, especially in the realm of employment, are traced directly to the world economy and to competition from foreign labor. If we resist centralized, national programs to address social needs and demand that they be solved privately, then firms and employers must direct an increasing fraction of their spending to performing these functions. Without socialized medicine, for example, employers must help fund adequate health insurance. Private control of the health services industry has produced more rapid inflation in health costs and less cost-effectiveness in the U.S. system than in more centrally controlled health care systems. It will not be long before the benefits portion of wages in some basic industries will be greater than the take-home pay of workers. These costs are passed on to consumers in prices and this makes it difficult for, say, the domestic automobile industry to have prices that are competitive with foreign companies that operate in economies where basic services are provided more equitably and more cheaply by the government (Jones, 1987). Many liberals and radicals contend that the difficulties of the conservative perspective in dealing with the welfare needs of its citizens have to do with the ubiquitous application of the market metaphor to social problems. Pragmatic liberalism accepts the value of the market metaphor, but it suggests that the weakness of the conservative approach is its inability to handle the contradictions, the disarticulation, between, on the one hand, the increasing scale of institutional arrangements that are the source of many social problems and, on the other, the myopic value conservatives place on parochial and local solutions to them.

CHAPTER 5

Class Conflict and the Radical View of the Common Good

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n the radical perspective, the most important quality of society is a deep class cleavage between an elite or wealthy class and the much larger class of working people (Marx et al., 1998; Lasswell, 1958). The radical perspective argues that we should be profoundly cynical about institutions that claim to provide human services such as police, schools, health care, charities and philanthropies, religious institutions, and public welfare. In general, these further the interests of the elite more than those of the needy they claim to serve. Whether or not we accept the radical theory of society, this cynicism is important for making sense of human services because so often they do in fact work against the interests of their clients. Indeed, most of the body of social science research on services is devoted to demonstrating this unpleasant truism. Whether or not Marx was right about the inevitable collapse of capitalism and the final emergence of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Marxist analysis of human service institutions is powerful because it is descriptively accurate. Often these institutions seem more effective at using their authority to prevent sensible interventions than at solving problems. Pragmatic liberalism draws three insights from radical theory and these are the focus of the present chapter. First, it is important to distinguish between the manifest or explicit functions performed by human services and their latent functions. Latent functions are sometimes unintended consequences of organizational activity. This is a major sociological insight about the central irony of social life. More importantly, radicals teach us that there are systematic reasons why the latent functions of service institutions are hidden. These have to do with their usefulness in maintaining the dominant position of elites and for controlling workers and the poor (Merton, 1968b; Smith A., 1967). Second, pragmatic liberalism draws from the radical perspective that it is important to recognize how the activities of human service institutions advance moral goals at the same time that they address need. Some of these moral objectives

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fit easily in the manifest statement of organizational purposes, as is the case with the goal in public schools to teach citizenship and beliefs related to American democracy. Other moral objectives represent moral entrepreneurship that would make many of us cringe. Some services manifestly billed as humanitarian efforts to help the needy, such as some homeless shelters, latently seek to promote religious ideology and deny services to those who reject their moral guidance. Others use moral language to hide efforts by elites to dominate or exploit the poor. The moral functions of human service institutions sometimes make us uncomfortable or even angry. Nonetheless, pragmatic liberalism acknowledges that fostering an ideology of the collective support for core social values is a key function performed by these institutions. Third, pragmatic liberalism accepts that radical analysis is innately polemical and political. It fosters a political analysis of human services and it implores people to bring a larger critical, analytic perspective to bear on activities within the limited sphere of a particular organization; C. Wright Mills (1959/2000) called this “the sociological imagination.” It represents an important moral principle for those concerned with furthering civil society. This political orientation also provides an important incisive tool for analyzing and understanding organizational behavior. The political orientation of the radical approach thus provides analytic tools every bit as powerful as the market metaphor offered by conservatives. How (and Why) Elites Influence Human Services The basic assertion of the radical view is that the state and human service institutions serve the class interests of the elite. This is as true of nonprofit organizations, which may act as a sort of shadow-government, as it is for public institutions. The people who make the most important decisions for the state are either members of the elite or people who owe their positions of influence to support by members of the elite (Mills, 1956/2000; Domhoff, 2002). Because of this, the theory goes, political decision makers generally are more responsive to demands made by economic elites and members of wealthy families than those made by ordinary citizens. Further, since these social and economic leaders often assume positions of civic leadership—being elected to the school board or being asked to join the board of the United Way or the Symphony— they are in a position to claim the legitimate right to speak for the community. What are elite interests and why would they undermine the formal or overtly stated goals of human service institutions? In the radical view, capitalism undermines whatever natural human inclination to altruism there might be in humankind. Once a class of owners emerges to seize control of the means of production, the essential nature of society becomes exploitative. This not only means that owners appropriate surplus value from employees’ labor, it also means that all social action by capitalists is rationalized and legitimated in terms of a desire to maximize self-interest. If a member of the elite is to act as a community leader, the only reason for doing so is that community leadership furthers personal interests in accumulating and protecting their wealth.

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Self-aggrandizement need not entail fraud—although radicals point to many examples where capitalists have used human services fraudulently, as in the devastating analysis of the public assistance system given by Piven and Cloward (1993) in Regulating the Poor. Elite leaders may simply assume that the community’s best interests are the same as their own best interests (Baltzell, 1964; Lasch, 1995); or as the president of General Motors is purported to have remarked, “What is good for General Motors is good for America.” Three versions of the convergence of elite and community interests are commonly heard: (1) Human services are an important vehicle for socializing people into the ideology of the state and for convincing them that society, despite its inequities, is just and legitimate; (2) Human services are an important vehicle of collective social control over disruptive or deviant people who threaten social order; (3) Human services deliver technically complex services that, being expensive to supply, provide massive amounts of direct income to owners of certain industries. Socialization for Civility One of the fundamental puzzles of modern capitalist society is why low-income people and those who are needy accept in such a docile way a society with enormous and obvious inequality. Think for a moment how dependent American society is on all citizens accepting that cities, governments, corporations, institutions, and families should live in a generally orderly way. Readers may object that there are criminals, drug abusers, those who beat spouses and children, environmental polluters, and all types of other abusers of orderliness in society. None of these abuses are as self-consciously directed at shattering the routines of society as are terrorist acts in Europe and the Middle East, however. A small number of committed terrorists could disrupt communications, foul water supplies, cripple basic industries, and disable transportation systems. Think what a systematically organized, committed revolutionary class could do to throw the American economic and political system into crisis. Even in the most disruptive times of our recent political history this has not happened. Marx, pondering this docility among workers in nineteenth-century Europe, argued that a variety of forces work to make the disadvantaged blind to their own class interests. He called this blindness “false consciousness” because workers would often be committed to causes and programs of personal improvement that did not recognize or address the economic causes of the hardships they faced in life. They turned away from obvious causes of their difficulties in life, subscribing instead to tortured explanations of why society was structured as it was and what sorts of behavior would bring one the greatest benefits. These explanations, or ideologies, are created and taught by institutions that, although claiming to serve the people, are also committed to maintaining social order and to supporting the economic order by encouraging workers to apply themselves to their work in a sober, industrious, and disciplined way. Many radicals view religion, the opiate of the masses, as an important source of false consciousness (Boyer, 1976; Comstock, 1976). Religions pacify for

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two reasons. First, they emphasize individual action as the most important cause of social outcomes. People do well or poorly in life, and in the eyes of God, if they act morally. If they fail it is their own fault—they are immoral. Individuals are discouraged from finding the source of their misfortunes in the acts of others and, consequently, from blaming broad patterns of social inequality for their personal misfortunes. They are turned away from defining their personal situation in collective terms. Second, religions push hard the idea that people should adopt overarching, metaphysical theories about the origins and purposes of life and that they should use these overarching theories to guide their everyday behavior. The trouble with religion is that it encourages people always to see hidden meanings behind simple, concrete events. But believing in the ideology of their religion, people do not look for or accept patterns in events that might seem obvious if they were more pragmatic and concrete in their way of reasoning. These observations about religion are important to our discussion of human services because one of the main functions service institutions perform is that of socializing people into an ideology supportive of the government, the economic system, and the social order. This socialization historically has been a central function of religion. Schools are another obvious example of this kind of socializing institution. They teach docility and compliance both through their overt messages and through the content of history books, repeated emphasis on patriotism, and expulsion for deviant acts, such as getting pregnant, that are unrelated to education (Foucault, 1977). They do this by making children believe that they are involved in a meritocratic system that selects people for success competitively. Schools teach docility in a way that is more profound and insidious than is the case with institutions that are simply coercive. The daily grind of public education communicates two messages. First, success in school depends on obedience and regularity. One must show up on time, sit quietly, complete many tasks that seem pointless and are boring, and accept the absolute authority of the teacher and principal. Some refer to this as the “hidden curriculum” of schooling (Snyder, 1973). Second, schools teach that success derives from individual competition. Smart people get good grades, get placed in the highest reading groups, and end up with the greatest rewards from the educational system. That is what children are told. Combined with student obedience, intellectual talent supposedly predicts success in school and economic success later in life. While one certainly must possess intellectual skills and personal discipline to succeed in modern capitalist society, it turns out that schools are not very good at transforming those qualities into personal good fortune for students. There is tremendous social pressure on schools to overlook poor performance and disobedience among middle-class children and not reward talent among lowincome and minority students. This often happens in subtle ways and the process of selection is one that gradually develops over the decade each child spends in schools. Despite this slow impact, social science evidence—from both conservative and radical scholars—overwhelmingly shows that schools respond systematically to class background and serve as a mechanism for reproducing the

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class structure. This suggests that schools are just instruments for handing out credentials, perhaps under false pretenses, and for preserving the status quo from one generation to the next including most centrally the existing patterns of ethnic and economic inequality (Heyns, 1974). The competitive psychological environment fostered by schools is most important for establishing the legitimacy of social inequality. Important as are the concrete rewards education provides, the fact that schools require children to perform intellectual tasks in a competitive way teaches them emotional and cognitive habits that become intrinsic to their ways of thinking. Children are given continual feedback on where they stand in an intellectual pecking order and therefore “thought” becomes meaningful primarily as something connected to improving one’s status ranking. One of the powerful “facts” of social science is that IQ and school achievement are highly correlated with social status (McCall, 1977). Since the tasks children must complete are ones that middleclass children are more likely to have practiced at home and that are more congenial with the culture they live in with their families, the big and little rewards of schooling go to the wealthy. This means that most poor children constantly have concrete experience proving to them that they are inferior to others. They know in a direct, immediate way that they cannot read nor can they do arithmetic as well as others. Quickly they also may learn that their lives are not as well organized as those of other children. Perhaps they do not come to school on time as often as others or maybe they cannot pay attention as long as can others. These deficits may happen because they did not have a big breakfast or because they did not go to bed early or because friends distracted them. There are many reasons other than cognitive ability as to why disadvantaged children may suffer in competition with their more advantaged colleagues. However, within the regime of the school, these underlying reasons are not easy to identify or address. School officials often painfully confront their inability to help the disadvantaged to prosper in schools. The structure of the institution, the limitations of their roles, and a shortage of resources hamstring them. It is hard for educators to accept this impotence. It is especially difficult when so many in the larger society—not least of all, the poor themselves—expect educators and the schools to perform miracles, equalizing many different sources of disadvantage. Because they struggle daily with the inability of poor children to succeed in the system it becomes hard to see past their students’ personal flaws as educators try to make sense of school problems. Thus, even though they may realistically appreciate the destructiveness of educational policies, educators communicate to students that personal flaws are responsible for failure (Kozol, 1991). In this way, poor children learn through direct, concrete personal experience that they cannot perform as well as more advantaged children. Schools convey this message in such a convincing way that students, after leaving, tend to believe that people prosper in adult life to the extent they have skills gained in schools. While some school skills are important in work, the reality is that actual day-to-day school performance does not have a lot to do with adult job success. People learn most of their skills on the job (Rosenbaum, 2001). The main

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contribution of schools is to work as selection devices. This is both overt, or manifest, in the sense of providing credentials, and covert, or latent, in that schools convince certain children not even to bother trying. Poor people tend to believe that they are poor because they have failed. Having failed, they believe that they not only deserve poor jobs and a low income, but also that there is nothing much they can do to improve their situation. Class theorists argue that the main purpose of schools is precisely to achieve a division in attitudes of self-worth. In this division, the poor are passive, self-deprecating, and compliant while members of the middle class are confident, entrepreneurial, and aggressive. With this argument in view, we can see how radicals would suggest that the main function performed by school is not the manifest one they claim: effective education for all. Schools do not exist to teach intellectual curiosity or to effectively transmit intellectual skills equally to all children. Although some poor children succeed in and through schooling, schools do not exist to promote equality. Their function is the opposite, to make inequality seem unavoidable and rational—when in fact elite domination and random chance control it. If schools were actually effective at promoting equality, then, radical theorists suggest, the system would be changed by the powerful and wealthy to guarantee that their children would continue to enjoy an edge in the competition for social advantage (Cornoy, 2000). One is inclined to hear in this theory of the relationship between schooling and inequality that there is some conspiracy of elites overseeing the whole process, making sure it turns out right. While that happens in some instances, the radical socialization theory of human services is not primarily concerned with whether or not rich people are cheating or conspiring. It rather is concerned with how an ideology of society is built and taught and how these beliefs foster a cohesive social order that legitimates the inequality. Schools do this powerfully, even though our constant national obsession with the “crisis of the schools” makes it seem as though they are not effective. What is true for schools is also true for other human service institutions, including institutions such as the mass media (Negt, 1978). A central purpose of human services is to guarantee compliance, orderliness, and support for basic cultural institutions. This being true, in observing, describing, and evaluating these institutions, we must keep in mind that overt or “manifest” functions may not be clear reflections of more fundamental or “latent” functions. In the Gilbert and Sullivan play Pinafore, poor little Buttercup sings, “things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream.” So it is, the radicals say, with human service institutions. Control and Social Order Some social service institutions more directly control their clients, people whom elites consider dangerous, or by shaping identities through labeling in ways that make it difficult for people to be “normal” or successful participants in the dominant culture. Obviously these are functions performed by the criminal justice

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system, a group of human “service” institutions specifically acting as official agents of coercive force to enforce law and order. Other institutions, outside of the police and courts, also are important as agents that control morality and misbehavior. The public welfare system is an important example, and schools play an important role when they discipline students. Also important are institutions that use medical explanations to describe the limitations of their clients—alcoholics, the retarded, the mentally ill, defective delinquents, the disabled, and the chronically ill. Their social control role is subtler and pointing out that they serve these functions is usually taken as a harsh criticism of the institutions in question (Conrad and Schneider, 1992). Representatives of institutions such as the system of public welfare or the health care system claim to be serving needs and ensuring that poor people enjoy certain social rights. Yet often it seems that social control concerns are most important in making decisions about which services should be offered and how money should be spent. Concerns about meeting needs appear secondary. Questions then arise about whether these institutions exist to help those in need or whether they serve the rich by undermining class-consciousness among the needy, poor, and powerless. Coercive Control Social control, in this context, involves efforts by those in positions of authority to use the services and resources of their institutions to threaten, coerce, or bribe poor people or to undermine their efforts at collective political or economic action. It does not just include direct punishment. One method of control is to give people small payments to convince them that they should continue living in an unfavorable situation. Piven and Cloward’s (1993) book Regulating the Poor made this argument, showing that welfare departments in rural areas may allow people to remain on welfare primarily to guarantee local farmers a labor force during the harvest period. Although the book was written in the 1960s, their story about how welfare could be used to coerce people to take low-wage jobs seems very contemporary. Public support creates a dilemma for poor people since once they accept it they must then make decisions in their lives to be sure that they will retain access to benefits. In Piven and Cloward’s account, people on public assistance would find their benefits cut off when work became available locally in the fields. Welfare programs today require that people demonstrate that they are looking for work or receiving training, even though there may be no jobs in their local areas. If they find work, people are likely to lose important benefits such as Medicaid or subsidized public housing, so that by working they end up losing money. This cycle of receiving minimal public support and then working at badly paying, unstable jobs makes it impossible for people to mobilize the emotional or material resources to escape abject poverty. This is a story that has been told by social scientists. Jonathon Kozol (1989) describes this problem repeatedly in his book on homelessness, Rachel and her Children, as do Carol Stack (1997) in All Our Kin, Eliot Liebow (2003) in Tally’s Corner, and Barbara Ehrenreich (2001) in Nickel and Dimed. Sadly, this dependency is useful for certain

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businesses that depend on the availability of a low-wage, transitory workforce. Radical economists describe this as the secondary economy and it includes sweatshops, menial construction jobs, farm labor, and what the census describes as “service work.” Giving inadequate benefits, enmeshing people in an irrational bureaucracy, and forcing them to look for work to receive payments, the welfare system works hand in glove with exploitative employers. Although the system has become more complex and subtle since Piven and Cloward wrote, the basic truth remains that the welfare system seems to work more effectively to guarantee the availability of workers to the secondary labor market than to meet the needs of poor people. Radicals would suggest that this is not an accident, arguing that the public welfare system exists not to help people but rather to maintain order and a supply of labor at the lower reaches of the economic system (Gans, 1972). Controlling Identity The economic constraints used in the welfare system are relatively overt, material types of control. Institutions that serve deviants and the chronically ill exercise control in a different, more symbolic way. They impose stigmatizing labels on clients and enmesh people in careers of deviance. This certainly happens in the criminal justice system, and many people would argue that such stigmatizing is legitimate in these cases. It is more troubling when labels are inaccurately applied or when they imply character defects that cannot be objectively proven to exist. Retardation is not a label that is applied often today. However, past research has shown that the label was often applied to people without a physiological deficit. Having trouble in school or identified by police, welfare officers, physicians, or other service providers, individuals would find themselves placed in institutions for the retarded. Stigmatized as stupid and kept isolated in large residential institutions over a span of years, individuals would come to act retarded even if they were not cognitively disabled. Longitudinal studies done with comparative control groups showed that people released into the community and placed in supportive work and residential situations would “recover” from their retardation and become indistinguishable from the rest of the population in terms of personal achievement (Baller et al., 1968; Edgerton, 1967). Powerful people holding professional positions and responsible institutional roles label the powerless in a stigmatizing way. Those individuals then become socialized into their roles as deficient and begin to play the part. This has had horrible outcomes for those called retarded. While there certainly are “real” retarded people, this construct has been used to legitimate racism and to legitimate programs to “serve” the retarded, among other things, to carry out mass sterilizations of people judged socially unworthy. Over 30,000 people were sterilized in California alone before laws allowing the practice were repealed in the 1930s (Tessler, 1976). Retardation is an example of how a medical model of behavioral deficiency is used to define a problem and to justify services that create and maintain a surplus population of the unemployed—an underclass. Critical researchers in this area claim that services for the retarded never were

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intended to help clients. They existed to justify punitive social policies, such as the immigration quotas enacted in the 1920s, or to explain the presence of a large, intransigent contingent of the unemployed who were judged beyond help and who thus would not benefit from “truly constructive” social services. Racism is a related but rather different variety of control that some observers have described as a sort of labeling. They argue, first, that it is a mistake to view racism as a personality flaw in people who do not like members of other ethnic or racial groups. Often intergroup hostility has identifiable political or economic roots. Groups are hostile because they are competing for the same scarce resources. This becomes part of our discussion of human services when organizations, using their policies to further their economic and class interests, encourage ethnic conflict (Olzak and Nagel, 1986). Relations between the owners of steel plants and the unions of workers have been described in these terms. The unions were fractionated among competing ethnic groups whose conflicts among themselves distracted attention from issues such as de-industrialization that threatened all workers. Owners and managers of the steel plant in one study fostered these ethnic tensions through their hiring and job assignment policies and in their negotiations with unions. The union—supposedly operating as a service organization for the workers— was co-opted by the steel plant, structuring its organization around ethnic cleavages. Because the union cooperated in and became dependent upon a system of allocating jobs through ethnic groups, it helped the companies cut off disputes focusing on issues of collective concern for the workers. In this way, the union became a means for controlling and limiting legitimate conflicts around labor issues (Kornblum, 1974). One does not have to view these examples of control institutions from a radical perspective to acknowledge the validity of these examples. Middle-of-theroad social scientists such as Talcott Parsons have readily admitted that society must have powerful social control mechanisms to maintain order and that order is essential for political, cultural, and economic institutions to function. Parsons has even used some of the examples given here and labeled them radical to illustrate the nature of social control in society. He also acknowledged that there must be a certain amount of subterfuge in institutions so that control functions would not undermine the ideology or myth of equality (Parsons, 1964). It is radical to talk about the control functions of human service institutions primarily because it is jarring and morally offensive to many when they confront the blunt realities that prevail in helping organizations. Maintaining capitalist society requires that someone do the dirty work of keeping things running smoothly. As a society we enthusiastically sponsor the formation of institutions that handle problem people so that the rest of us can work productively and feel that we are good people. Think about nursing homes that warehouse old people, many of whom could be living more productive, rewarding lives if they could live in supportive communities and receive support from loving families. We prefer to shut out of our minds the deadening conditions that prevail in nursing homes. Yet for many children of the infirm, as Doris Lessing (1984) shows in The Diaries of Jane Sommers,

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having available a facility that will remove a demanding relative from one’s care is important to economic success and to social comfort. The nursing home industry in its present vastness is not necessary in any absolute sense and it does not really serve the interests of the old—except insofar as their residents would otherwise starve or freeze to death from neglect. Nursing homes are institutions that control the old—the parents—primarily to serve the interests of the young—their children. Human Services as Profit Centers Some human services, health services in particular, generate enormous business profits. Critics argue that too often economic interests are more important than values related to need in setting social service policies. In health care, the focus of this attack is that acute health care and high-technology interventions are given enormously greater emphasis in the American health care system than are prevention of illness and helping those with chronic illnesses manage tasks of daily living. Critics attack general health care policy and also give many specific examples where treatment modalities appear to have been emphasized over alternatives. This happens, they claim, mainly because there were huge profits to be made or because politically powerful individuals were able to prevent alternative programs that promised unfavorable outcomes for them or for the institutions they represent. A good example was the effective television ad campaign run by health insurance companies in 1993 to attack President Clinton’s proposal for national health insurance (Skocpol, 1996). There is a mountain of evidence that money spent on improving nutrition, giving low-income mothers better access to prenatal care, controlling industrial pollutants, and encouraging people to change certain habits would produce greater payoffs for the national health than investing huge amounts of money on complicated machines such as lithotripters or elaborate surgical procedures such as open-heart surgery (Califano, 1992). Critics have pointed out that our health care system, although the most expensive in the world, is less cost-effective than others where socialized medicine guarantees care to all citizens. They also have reported detailed case examples where medical policymakers apparently ignored evidence on the ineffectiveness of certain expensive treatments—one such study reported research showing that high-priced coronary intensive care units were no more effective at saving heart attack patients than regular hospital wards (Waitzkin, 1983). These kinds of examples suggest that the health care industry is not organized primarily to provide the highest quality care. Rather, it provides huge economic gains to health providers who have come to dominate the political process and the economic system where health policy is concerned (Strauss et al., 1985). For many years physicians, represented through their lobbying organization, the AMA, were the primary power group determining medical policy. In the early years of this century, they organized politically to eliminate competing models of health care and to establish their monopoly over healing (Starr, 1982). Since the medical model emphasized the germ theory of disease and

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laboratory medicine, the growth of physician-focused medicine meant also the growth of acute care. After World War II, hospitals, the health insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies, and medical equipment suppliers became increasingly important players in the health care industry. Their role expanded even more rapidly after enactment of Medicare and Medicaid opened a large source of government funding for health services. All of these industries are organized to respond to acute care needs and they have grown enormously to the point where health care spending accounts for about 15 percent of GNP. The only brake on their expansion is that health costs have expanded so rapidly that other government and business resources became strained. There has been a continual preoccupation with cost control in medicine over the past quarter century, resulting in dramatic changes in the institution of health care. Reimbursement changes did hold costs down for a couple of years. The larger effects of these reforms are that the power of hospitals relative to physicians have been greatly increased and it has undercut the funding base of long-term hospital care, favoring instead capital intensive, group medical practices that provide specific services. This favors corporate investors over private physicians and also serves to increase institutional power in medicine. Not only has the general course of health care policy been controlled by economic interests with a stake in maintaining the dominance of the acute care model, there are many examples where specific medical problems were handled badly because the focus was on protecting business interests or because some low-status population group was the only one to suffer a problem. ●

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Tourette’s Syndrome is a rare behavioral disorder that can be controlled by drugs but so few people suffer the disease that it was not worthwhile for drug companies to test or produce the drug involved. Congress finally dealt with this problem by passing the orphan drug bill. According to Massie and Massie (1975)—in their compelling autobiographical story, Journey, about their hemophiliac son—the Red Cross would not make available inexpensive Factor XIII that promotes blood clotting as long as there was danger that they would compete with a drug company that produced the drug at a much higher price. According to Shilts’s (2000) book And the Band Played On, the political and health care establishment continued to ignore building evidence about the infectious nature of AIDS long after evidence was incontrovertible and a public health disaster faced the world, primarily because AIDS was defined as a gay disease. Legionnaire’s Disease and Toxic Shock Syndrome made headlines and brought massive political reaction with many fewer cases because disease sufferers were not stigmatized. Diseases such as multiple sclerosis and sickle cell anemia for many years were unable to attract much public or private funding because they competed with diseases such as polio and muscular dystrophy that, though affecting no more people, involved cute children rather than blacks or were supported by celebrities—such as President Franklin Roosevelt.

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There are two levels of argument, then, that support the claim that economic interests shape social service policy. First, there are massive industries whose enormous political power sets in concrete the general orientation to health care that prevails in this country even though that orientation is not very cost effective and robs funds from alternative kinds of social spending. Second, health policy in specific instances is based on competition in the economic and political arenas. Decisions about what diseases to spend money on is based on the political and economic power of constituents. Decisions by service providers, especially by nonprofit organizations, are shaped more by economic concerns than by altruism or by concern for the public good. In this framework, social services are not very different from business, being primarily concerned with their bottom line and with protecting and preserving the social, political, and economic elite. The Radical State Since radical social analysis is most often polemical, we are inclined to decide whether we accept or reject elitist arguments about social services by first relating them to our own political orientation and then asking whether we want to be associated with the cynical, iconoclastic, rebellious arguments of radicals. Pragmatic liberalism requires that we set these ideological judgments aside for a moment to think about how radical arguments handle the facts and to look at the strengths of the radical conception of how society and government work or should work. The radical model makes two important contributions to our understanding of social policy. First, the model forces us to take seriously general but latent social functions performed by human service institutions that are different from or that contradict their manifest or publicly articulated purposes. The polemical pull of the radical viewpoint is responsible for our accepting that these latent functions are systematic and central. A radical analysis convinces us that schools are primarily about legitimating inequality and reproducing the cultural order of capitalism. From the radical viewpoint, the conventional conservative and liberal analyses of school reform are simply confused about why poor children do not learn and why reform is so often ineffective. Liberal organizational theory is emasculated because analysts continue to take manifest purposes seriously. Things do not work out as they should, we are told, because, for example, schools are loosely coupled organizations, decision makers face great ambiguity and use “garbage can” models for making policy, and because, in people processing organizations, leaders generally “muddlethrough” as best they can. Good-old-fashioned structural-functionalism would never explain disastrous results by championing confusion as their most powerful explanatory variable. The trouble with contemporary liberals is that they cannot cheerfully admit, as Talcott Parsons, Daniel Bell, Robert K. Merton, or Everett Hughes did a quarter century ago, that the latent purposes of institutions are often as important as the main goals they purportedly work to achieve. People could just fess

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up to what human service institutions are really about. Then we could argue about whether schools should really promote inequality or whether we should abandon the (not quite accurate) notion that economic rewards are given to people who try hard and are smart. We could have these discussions knowing full well that our belief about schools being meritocratic is a myth that helps keep poor people in their place. The problem, of course, is that as a society we cannot come out and say that schools are really set up to make sure that the same socioeconomic status is passed on from generation to generation. We cannot acknowledge that the dishonesty built into the myth of meritocratic competition is central to whatever success schools achieve. Our society—like all societies—depends on social stability, economic order, and political compliance to take care of the little details of everyday life. If people were really rational in the economic or political sense of the term, they probably would not be tolerant of our present social inequities or of the excessive actions of the powerful. Fortunately (or frustratingly, depending on your political orientation), people are mostly compliant and mostly willing to accept the dominant myths of society. Individuals like to be told that things make sense and that they are good people because they are doing what they are supposed to do. Institutions that define goodness, explain misfortune, spotlight evil, and punish transgressors are important because they make people feel good about living seemingly ordered, circumscribed lives, focused on getting through their everyday routines. This gets us to the second reason that a radical analysis of social services makes an important contribution to pragmatic liberalism. While radicals dwell on economic inequality, the bedrock of radical theory is a concern with the collective, with society as a social organism. Traditional liberals in the Lockean tradition see society as essentially fragmented and individualistic. The flaw in that approach is its inability to recognize or give weight to institutional maintenance activities that foster social cohesion either in particular groups and institutions or in society as a whole. In the radical model, the primary reason the state exists is to support elite interests and to protect against threats to social order. Social order is defined as a derivative of economic order in this model. But the strength of the radical tradition has been its recognition that elites maintain control most effectively by manipulating culture. This has led radicals to ask how culture is produced and how culture serves the interests of the ruling class (Zukin, 1995). Culture in modern industrial society strengthens the social order as it creates a myth of the state, as it fosters an individualized moral consciousness, and as it legitimates state action that favors the elite. This may happen as theories of deviance are produced that tell why the poor deserve their misfortune—that they are all thieving addicts seems to be the popular current story. The idea that diseases are the result of mechanical breakdowns in the body (not a result of social conditions) is a different sort of myth, it is one that justifies huge profits by medical service suppliers. These stories are a vital part of the machinery that allows things to go on in an orderly, routine fashion. Human service institutions are among the most important producers of social control through culture.

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The radical viewpoint, then, sees human service institutions as essential instruments of the state because they are the primary means by which social order is achieved and maintained. Given that social control is their primary function, we should not take their overt or manifest statements of purpose very seriously in trying to figure out what human service institutions are doing, why they are doing it, or what they ought to be doing. The trouble is that while this cynical view energizes the radical perspective, it is profoundly disquieting to conventional liberalism. If liberals acknowledge the essential dishonesty of the myths that support the democratic state, they lose the spiritual or generative source of their desire to be socially active. They become politically passive. An alternative is to pretend that the myths are actually true and that service institutions do what they say they are doing. This approach is fine as long as one does not take too seriously that social interventions rarely do what they are supposed to do. One can explain this ineffectiveness in terms of the ambiguities of social life and the unpredictability of the market. Unfortunately, having to continually acknowledge that service institutions are ineffective invites the kinds of spending cuts and the attitude of benign neglect we have witnessed in recent decades. This is fine, as long it is not really important for service institutions to control people, as long as there is no serious movement of political dissent among the disenfranchised people of society. An Institutional Theory of Socioeconomic Class Radical critiques of social services, like conservative theories, are driven by a central concern with inequality in society. Both poles of the political continuum try to explain why inequality happens, what makes less or more difference a matter of concern for all of us, and they find that the central motivation for the existence of social service institutions is in the need to reduce the extremes of socioeconomic difference. Advocates of these opposing viewpoints would agree that inequality is an objective aspect of the social landscape and a central motivating force that drives people in political, economic, and social activity. Pragmatic liberalism differs from both in arguing that inequalities and class identifications are socially constructed, rather than being objective aspects of the social landscape. This is not to say that classes, wealth, and deprivation do not exist as concrete, material aspects of people’s existence. Pragmatic liberalism asserts only that how people are placed in particular class situations, what chances they have for escaping a situation of deprivation, and how social service institutions help them or foster continued neglect and deprivation is a creation of society and of the culture. As such they can be changed, and changed at the structural and programmatic level. Radical analyses of social service institution make this clear. There is little doubt that schools contribute mightily to the disability of lower-income people when it comes to competing successfully in the economic system. Certainly, education helps some poor children change their lives dramatically and enter

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the middle and professional classes in society. For most poor children, however, schools are an oppressive, constraining institution that teach them not to learn, not to have hope, and to accept that there are very good reasons why other people deserve wealth, power, and satisfaction at work. The meaning of being lower class in this society would not be the same if we did not have compulsory, universal education structured as it is in America today. The same is true of the criminal justice system, the welfare system, the system of organized labor, the health care system, and the arrangements we have for providing (or denying) housing to people with very little money. Class is defined in response to and as a consequence of institutions. To say that service and economic institutions determine the nature of socioeconomic class is to argue at the same time that things could be different. As complex organizations, they are human inventions subject to revision and drastic change. The radical orientation teaches us not to be too optimistic about the prospects for this sort of revision, however. To say that institutions shape the experience and nature of social class is simultaneously to recognize that these institutions do not exist independently of the surrounding social world. They are instruments of the powerful. Just as they shape culture, they are trapped by it. We may be dissatisfied with our present system of education but, because we all learned what schooling is by going through the present arrangement, it is awfully hard for us to imagine other ways to organize instruction. This is one reason why a logical consequence of taking the radical view is to recommend revolution. Change in contemporary institutions is nearly always co-opted because it must be approved by the powerful and filtered through the lenses of organizational cultures that were responsible for creating the unfortunate practices we wish to change. For pragmatic liberalism, that institutions are so deeply embedded in the society and in the culture is not so discouraging. One reason for this is that our perspective opposes the notion that we must bring a metatheory or a single overarching method of analysis to our understanding of institutions. An abstract model of society and human behavior guides both radical and conservative analyses. Trying, as they do, to make the world fit market theory or Marx’s theory of the evolution of capital is what makes it so discouraging to see the dependence of human services on the surrounding culture and on the distribution of power. Pragmatic liberalism is pragmatic in the sense of accepting as real the fact that service institutions themselves are complex cultural systems. We cannot wish this away. We would not want to. Service institutions are not tools or instruments by which some omnipotent planner may surgically transform particular features of society. They are living systems, often as profoundly controlled by the members with lowest status as by those with legal and fiduciary responsibility for planning and control. While we do not rush to urge a revolution, pragmatic liberalism does take from the radical view its sense of outrage at injustice and a sense that something can be done. It restores agency and efficacy. Institutions are malleable because they are human inventions. The only way to think about how to change them, however, is to view institutions in political terms. That is, one must accept that current

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arrangements almost never represent the most careful or most logical design for carrying out a particular task. They are a complex agglomeration of alliances, efforts at domination by some powerful group, and self-interested action by assertive constituencies. Institutions depend on having established social and cultural orders that rest on axiomatic beliefs and constitutional agreements. Changing institutions for the better requires recognition of the political contours that define their structure. Political leverage must be found or built that will help break up and redirect established arrangements. We cannot always anticipate what effects will follow from launching our political efforts nor will we always succeed in mobilizing the political support needed to bring about changes. The radical model reminds us that if we do expect to succeed in reform, we have to work with powerful allies. Beyond this political analysis of social policy, what pragmatic liberalism draws from the radical analysis is a conviction that good people have a political orientation (or in Plato’s terms, they are not “idiots”!) and have a concern for welfare and justice in the whole society. This contrasts with perspectives that value short-term gain and self-interest, even when negative consequences for the community are a result. This is a moral argument, but organizing one’s life around a political orientation is not just or primarily a matter of morality. A fundamental claim of the radical view is that humanitarian concern and civic values are pragmatic. Social service institutions may use their resources to buy off the poor so they will not start a violent revolution. They may promulgate false consciousness so that the poor are not so outraged at the arbitrariness of the system of social inequality. They may legitimate a coercive regime that makes the police little more than an occupying army in the ghettos. But these institutions also continually send out the message that they are operating out of principle, out of concern for the people that they are helping, and with a desire to promote democracy and equality of opportunity. They provide the means by which people understand their place in society, understand how they may generate political support to change things, and understand in cultural terms what is wrong with the existing order. Get rid of these institutions and we get rid of the foundation of our social order. We also would get rid of the means by which we might reconstruct our ways of helping people. Thus, radicals view energetic efforts to cut social programs with mixed emotions. On one hand, they take this as evidence of the fundamental callousness of conservatives. On the other hand, they trust that by dismantling the social service apparatus, conservatives are also dismantling the most powerful instruments available for channeling and controlling the energies of the poor. Institutions that create false consciousness, that use labels to stigmatize, or that manipulate resources to coerce provide the means for stopping organized revolutionary political action. There is a real possibility of political action among the increased numbers of a discouraged, impoverished population that today makes up nearly one-third of our population. This possibility does not bother radicals. They would see it as confirmation of their theory. The possibility ought to frighten conservatives and liberals—including pragmatic liberals.

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onservatives want to get rid of government. Radicals think that government is just working to advance the interests of the elite. The third ideology—pluralism—sees government as the central, most important means for taking care of social needs. According to pluralists, the various institutions that make up government are the concrete embodiment of the society, the means by which social service work is carried out, and the vehicles through which new policies are implemented. The decision-making processes of government have a profound impact on the kinds of programs that can be implemented. These processes also force citizens to join together, voice their concerns through associations, and compete for influence. The decision process shapes the way we participate in society and in collective action. And the process of participation is not simply a means to other ends or outcomes, but it is also an end unto itself. Pluralism is roughly equivalent to what most Americans think of as liberalism (Dahl, 1998; Warren, 2001). We have chosen a different term for this political ideology so that it is not confused with pragmatic liberalism, which we have suggested is different in key ways. Pluralism, however, is not really the same as New Deal or Great Society liberalism because it does not urge government to solve our social problems; it simply treats government as the central institution of society, just as conservatives and even radicals think of the economy as the central institution. Whether we like it or not, the pluralists say, government will act and when it does so, government will intervene often in its characteristically cumbersome, chaotic fashion. If we are sensibly realistic, we will work within the constraints it imposes on our efforts to change society. Or, like ideologues of the right and the left, we can pretend that government is (a) unimportant or (b) easy to manipulate; then we will suffer the consequences of oversimplification. This phrasing makes pluralism sound more pragmatic than ideological. What makes pluralism an ideology, an oversimplification of the world guided by a great theory? Pluralism is not given to grand rhetoric, but rather encourages a religion of the state. For pluralists, change must go “through the system.” In this

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pluralism is a “legal” ideology and, unlike the radicals, it stresses the absence of violence and conflict and, unlike the conservatives who see minimal government as desirable, pluralists stress engagement, involvement, and the central idea of homo politicus. The modern rational legal system and its corollary of an efficient bureaucracy were central components of Max Weber’s (1946/58) conception of the central role of the state in modern social life. A key moral value of pluralism as an ideology is the idea of “order” itself—as in a “rational legal order.” This is a particular type of order for it celebrates the seeming chaos of competition of ideas and values in the political arena as long as one follows the rules. This competition results in accommodation and compromise, what some define pejoratively as “playing politics.” But, this “game” avoids out-and-out conflict and above all it eschews the use of force and violence, which the state claims as a legitimate monopoly and the sole prerogative of government. In the pluralist ideology one can accept the idea of losing a given political skirmish, recognizing that in the next round, the next game, one may come out on top through a more clever strategy and by best capturing or defining the public will of the moment. The process of democratic pluralism is based on a broad consensus about the legitimacy of the rules of the game. Such beliefs place a high value on tolerance of and by both winners and losers, recognizing that in the next moment one could be in the minority. Therefore, to maintain pluralism it is important to protect the rights of the momentary minority through such legal institutions as the American Bill of Rights or the British House of Lords. At times the values of the ideology of pluralism may seem to be at odds with one another, as when the value of rational efficiency confronts the chaos of competing interests attempting to influence policies of governmental decision makers. However, the meaning of “rationality” may be broadened to include emotional, passionate, and seeming irrational behavior in the pursuit of selfinterest within a system that is itself exemplary of a higher rationality. It is a system that in the words of Albert Hirschman (1977) can turn the irrational “passions” into the calculus of rational “interests.” In sum, to be intolerant, inefficient, irrational, devious, violent, or apathetic is to be immoral within the pluralist ideology. While pluralism may seem sensible if the system works, it is a recipe for bureaucratic domination and institutional corruption when the system does not work. The Russian word apparatchik conveys this sense that maintaining “the system” can be an end in itself. The black humor of Franz Kafka (1956) or Vladimir Nabokov (1959) tells us about unjust and labyrinthine official bureaucracies that crush the spirit and mock justice. To these authors, institutional doublespeak (to use Orwell’s term) is the expression of the ideology. “Business as usual” becomes a profound expression of this ideology when people know that existing institutions do not work and are not responsive to the public. The sociologist Robert Merton (1968c) referred to this slavish allegiance to the rules of the system, doing things by the book even when the rules obviously are not operating to produce desired outcomes, as “the bureaucratic mentality.”

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Since ideologies are moral systems, we also can see the ideological character of pluralism more clearly if we ask how it approaches moral questions. At first glance, pluralism seems to be amoral. It values moral relativism, emphasizing as it does the process of making decisions and carrying out actions. The idealized goals and objectives that radicals and conservatives espouse have little place in pluralism since it champions the public will, a will that changes over time. This public morality does not mean pluralists have no personal values that may be offended by some specific interest group that seeks to affect government. But the system must be morally neutral. This is expressed in Voltaire’s famous statement “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” or ironically by Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor, to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” The way to deal with obnoxious political movements is to organize against them and to prevent them from getting power. If nasty groups gain control, that represents a failure by the good guys. They need to work harder, and, if they do, the power structure can be changed after the next election. This tolerance for obnoxious political groups can evolve, however, into a technocratic mentality that confers legitimacy on bureaucrats, professionals, and political power blocs simply because they manage to dominate others and to control key resources. Max Weber saw this development of professional and bureaucratic legitimacy as a fundamental but oppressive feature of modern Western society, and Roberto Michels went so far as to refer to it as “the iron law of oligarchy” (Weber, 1992; Michels, 1949). Accepting the basic structure of the system means that we also accept the subtle ways that business influences government or the encrusted standard operating procedures of bureaucrats or public school personnel that so dominate public affairs. Pluralism seems to tell us that because government is big, confusing, and hard to change, we should think of it as inevitable and even desirable. Recognizing the ideological side of pluralism is not to reject its value, however. In this chapter we will discuss three important contributions pragmatic liberalism draws from pluralism. These are (i) the centrality of government, (ii) the organization of values and interests, (iii) the emergence of satisfying outcomes from chaotic processes. First, pluralism gives us a framework for taking government action seriously. Both conservatives and radicals encourage us to treat social programs as a by-product of something else—of the market or of elite dominance. This takes our attention away from the simple needs we have emphasized again and again in this book. We need houses for people to live in. We need food for them to eat. Children need to be educated and cared for. Sickness has to be treated. Pluralism treats these needs in a commonsense way: they are important and it is government’s job to make sure they are addressed. These basic jobs might not get done, of course. But the analyst’s task, then, is to ask why not, and what can be done to make programs work better. Be simple, not complicated. Talking about social policy, how it works, and how it should be changed, is the bread and butter of pluralism. Similarly, for pragmatic liberalism to work, people have to talk about social policy.

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A second strength of pluralism is that, although it is amoral in a general sense, it gives us a way of taking values seriously in specific cases. The needs we just mentioned are addressed under pluralism because people demand that the issues get attention. In principle, the government is neutral about whether this or that need deserves to be addressed. But the decision-making process that lies at the center of government rewards groups that clearly articulate their values and desires and effectively present their cases. These groups are partisan, infused with belief, and willing to fight with other groups so that their point of view dominates—think about the conflict between pro- and anti-abortion groups (Staggenborg, 1991). Official responses—and program structures—are shaped in response to these value-laden demands. Thus, for pluralists it is impossible to think of social programs as value neutral or defined solely by scientific objectivity. Scientific rationality might be an ideal to work for; but realistically, pluralism argues, scientific rationality makes a small contribution to most of the political and organizational resolutions that shape policies and programs. Even if the overall worldview of pluralism is amoral, we can learn from pluralists how to think about the moral implications of social interventions. A third and final benefit of pluralism is that it treats decision making and program implementation as chaotic processes. At the outset of this book, we talked about how social scientists’ recognition that organizations operate in contexts of uncertainly and ambiguity has been one of the things that has undermined public discussion about social policy issues. We seem to believe that social programs should be easy to understand and control, and that “irrationality” in programs means that we cannot produce effective results. Pluralism tells us to calm down and gives us a variety of tools for making sense of nonlinear organizational situations. Pluralism and Government Decentralization Pluralism is the philosophy of how grassroots democracy works, especially tailored to the American style of government. To pluralists, the basic fact about the American system is that government responds to pressure from myriad interest groups (Dahl, 1956; Habermas, 1998). In contrast to parliamentary governments, that generally are politically centralized and linked to a powerful civil service, power in the American system is decentralized. This is not immediately obvious, however. Our government is, of course, very large. It concentrates power in the hands of a few offices, and we also have a huge civil service system. Yet, in America you cannot understand how decisions are made or policies are implemented unless you take into account the tremendous power wielded by groups outside of the centralized federal government. To an American observer, parliamentary systems, like those in England or France, give surprising power to political parties, and the leader of the majority legislative party seems to run everything. Pluralists argue that in America there are a huge number of outside groups with the power to shape government practices. At the federal level, there are so many that no one can keep track of them all, making it impossible for any small

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elite group to dominate the system—a long-standing point of argument with the radicals. What makes American democracy especially complicated is that the most powerful groups will often choose to be bystanders as an issue is debated. They only become involved if decisions seem to be going against their interests, and then their only role may be to block a resolution, stalemating the political process. Because of the system’s complexity, politicians are most effective when they are good coalition builders (Banfield, 1961; Laumann and Pappi, 1976; Laumann and Knoke, 1987). In European eyes, this suggestion that American political leaders are most effective when they work behind the scenes building cooperation may seem odd since presidential politics seem to demand that people be charismatic, moral leaders. The president is often described as the most powerful person in the world. In Europe, parties dominate by controlling the legislature. Prime ministers often are not particularly attractive public figures; they are one step removed from the voters since the parliamentary party in power chooses them (Duverger, 1972). Yet, while American leaders may be personally powerful, they have limited means of exercising that power. Personal popularity is important as a way of convincing legislators and heads of important administrative institutions—such as the Federal Reserve—that the president represents the popular will. Ignoring a popular leader threatens a popular uprising—a movement from outside government to replace current policymakers. A Society of Groups To pluralists there is a characteristic American ethos that opposes strong, centralized control of anything. The main barrier to centralization is a phalanx of voluntary groups that stand between individuals and formal institutions of all kinds. Americans create groups to socialize with each other, to do work in their communities, and to represent political concerns and interests (Warren et al., 1974). These groups are the building blocks of local social life as well as of constituencies that elect people to political offices. They mobilize people to vote or protest and to disseminate information about upcoming government actions and regulations. Their leaders interpret information and educate their followers about government activities. Voluntary groups may directly lobby government, help to educate policymakers on issues, and mobilize resources for political campaigns or for the promotion of specific political concerns. A good example of this influence is the system of health charities (Bennett and Dilorenzo, 1995). The most familiar of these organizations are national fundraising organizations such as the American Cancer Society, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, or the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. Together, these organizations raise over $2 billion in charitable gifts each year. This is a relatively small amount compared to the federal health budget of about $250 billion, but these organizations have tremendous power for influencing government policy. One reason for their influence is that many health charities began as grassroots organizations of family members and friends of people affected by debilitating chronic diseases. Over twenty or thirty years, groups such as the

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Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society grew from community-based groups into technically sophisticated, national organizations that fund research, provide services, and lobby government. Many of these organizations retain active local chapters that strongly affect national policy. This is especially true in cases where individual crises affect many disease sufferers, as happened when those with hemophilia were swept by the AIDS epidemic due to contaminated blood supplies. While they help to organize self-help groups or provide services in communities around the country, these organizations also are powerful lobbyists at the state and national level. The Juvenile Diabetes Foundation and the American Foundation for AIDS Research have been especially outspoken about the importance of their playing a strong political role. One of the most important functions of fundraising campaigns is to raise public awareness of specific diseases and to communicate that there is a problem. The Juvenile Diabetes Foundation (JDF) was founded by people who thought that the older American Diabetes Foundation was undercutting efforts to build federal research funding by advertising that diabetes was a “good news” disease—since with insulin, in many cases it could be managed for years. JDF from the outset emphasized that diabetes is the third biggest chronic disease killer in America and demanded an increase in research funding. Over a ten-year period funding increased by more than 400 percent. Beyond public relations, health charities may have an important role in shaping policy. Some years ago, Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Sun, 1982) reported that a proposal to create a National Institute for Arthritis was nearing approval despite objections from the professional staff of the National Institutes of Health. Staff argued that a new organization would greatly increase administrative costs and cut the amount of money that could be spent on research and patient care. Previously, arthritis research and programs were funded through the National Institute of Arthritis, Diabetes, and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, which was part of the National Institutes of Health. When the National Institute for Arthritis was proposed, the diabetes interests objected. If arthritis was to have its own institute, the diabetes groups also wanted one. For a time this opposition effectively blocked the new institute. According to Science, however, the impasse was broken when representatives of the arthritis interests pointed out to the diabetes lobbyists that after creation of the new institute, diabetes would dominate the old institute the two diseases shared. The diabetes interests then supported the new institute that ultimately was created—the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. Many people—the radicals, for example—would see this story as an example of powerful elites shaping government policy to suit their own interests rather than the public interest. Pluralists would disagree. Like it or not, this is the way much policy is made at all levels of government in America. The only way to shape policy is the way the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation did it. Organize a strong lobby and force other powerful groups to negotiate.

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Pluralists also would argue that the health charities give effective representation to many groups that would simply be swept aside if a utilitarian approach to policymaking dominated. People in kidney failure simply would not get the dialysis they need—as many do not in Great Britain—because it is too expensive. About 30,000 people who receive dialysis account for about 0.5 percent of all health spending by the federal government—an enormous amount of money given their tiny numbers (Rodby, 2004). Effective lobbying shapes policy. Although skyrocketing spending threatens the entire health care system with collapse, the American system does provide the best care in the world—to those who can get access to it. One reason for the extensiveness of our health care system is that national disease associations self-consciously play a role as advocates at the same time that they are fundraising charities, marketing their causes to the public using the most compelling humanitarian messages they can create. The public tends to think of these organizations only in terms of their marketing images and some critics attack the lobbying role of these charities. In response, observers of the nonprofit sector increasingly emphasize that charitable organizations must pursue advocacy as well as service. Professionals working for leading nonprofit organizations are often better informed about their focal issues than are public officials; and only if they educate and pressure those in government, will public officials know how to direct government policy. This is a clear expression of the pluralist philosophy at work. The Market in Influence Rather than being dominated by powerful, centralized elites, American politics is dominated by multiple groups (Laumann and Knoke, 1987). Pluralists argue that political decisions are shaped by conflicts among many competing interest groups. Because there are so many of these groups, one can make an analogy to economic markets that are made up of many competing firms. The currency of the political arena is not money, of course. Instead, the system is guided by political influence; and power brokers are the influentials who shape outcomes by managing a sort of barter economy based on the exchange of favors. In the economy, actors are moved by the desire to maximize profits and build wealth. In the political system, leaders are moved by a desire to build influence and to gain prominence as leaders of coalition formation. Economic markets are guided, in theory at least, by an invisible hand (rather than by powerful individuals). To say that the political system is managed by coalition-building leaders—who are functionally equivalent to the entrepreneurial owners of firms in the economic market—rather than dominated by great and powerful individuals is another way of saying that it is the inherent dynamics of the system, not powerful elites, that control what happens. Unfortunately this economic language unnecessarily bogs down the pluralist approach in arguments between elite theorists and extreme individualists, the people responsible for modern economic theory. Having thrown in with the economists by adopting market thinking, pluralists have been drawn into a

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battle in which they must oppose others who seek to show that wealth and power have a disproportionate effect on shaping public policy (Lindblom 1977). We believe this hostility to the real impact of elites on the political system is foolish on the part of pluralists since we think elite influence is palpably real. On the other hand, pluralists also pay attention to individual political actors. They focus on the “rationality” of individual policymakers as an important unit of analysis. Rather than seeing policymaking and representation of constituents’ interests as essentially social and value laden, pluralism has focused on the individual policymaker as the important unit of analysis. Fortunately, studies of governance have always given as much credence to grounded case studies as to theoretical deduction in research design, so that within political science there remains a rich appreciation for the complexity of the political process (Dahl, 1961; Fenno, 1973). However, the deeper insights these studies have given to pluralism are underemphasized and poorly integrated into its theory of civic life, government, and social services. Their ideology has oversimplified their analysis of the beautifully complex cases individual scholars have produced. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize the observational or ethnographic insights of pluralist theory. If we duck our heads below the lofty clashes of great philosophical systems, what can we see in the pluralists’ close study of political processes and what can we learn that will help us to solve our social problems? What We Learn from Pluralism Pluralism supplies three insights to pragmatic liberalism and each of them necessarily distances pluralism from the market/individualist and radical/elitist camps of social theory. First, pluralists emphasize that the political system is chaotic, decentralized, and organized around value competition between different interest groups. Second, because the system is so unruly, we cannot assume, as do radicals (who emphasize elite domination of society) and conservatives (who emphasize the power of the economic market), that social needs will be taken care of by processes outside of government. Third, we need to take government seriously as a system that serves no dominant group. By doing so we gain some ways of thinking productively about how to implement social policy and how to bring moral thinking back into policy analysis. Chaos A strength of pluralism is to describe how it is that the political system is unknowable. Because decision making is shaped by the initiatives of many groups, government, in the pluralist view, has no dominant group, but rather is decentralized. Power is diffused in the system, so that it is very hard for any one group to impose its will on others. The system also is so large and complex that no one can know everything that is going on, making it hard for any one contingent to control much. Decentralization is important mainly because it means the political system cannot, in principle, be completely known or controlled by any actor

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or any group of actors. This simple observation is a potent challenge to both the conservatives and the radicals. The market theory of the conservatives assumes that actors can have enough information to make informed and rational decisions. One of the shortcomings of economics is that analysts try to avoid messy situations dominated by fluid social processes because they cannot be reduced to mathematical expressions of the sort that form the heart of econometrics. Radicals too do not like to acknowledge the chaotic nature of the political world since they believe that a cohesive elite shapes and determines government policy. The lack of dominant elites in the pluralist scheme of things does not mean that there are no powerful actors or that wealth and proper connections can have enormous impact on decision outcomes. Elites may exist and be very important but they do not run everything that goes on—or even most of it—because they cannot. It is convenient for us to believe in elites because if control of a political system is centralized, then it is easy to keep track of what is going on and to explain why things do not work. A chaotic system is hard to keep track of. It is hard to figure out what is important, and what forces have been responsible for important political events. We do not know how to reduce the events of particular government programs to a common denominator. Both radicals and conservatives try to do this by talking about everything in terms of elite control or in terms of the market. Pluralists have made sense of the chaotic nature of the many players in the political cosmos by focusing on smaller units of action—institutions, organizations, and individual programs. Radicals and conservatives may dismiss this as a-theoretical description. They are saying that it is as though pluralists are dealing with the overwhelming complexity of the forest by looking at each tree in detail. However, Max Weber, one of the great social theorists, discovered the power of what Robert Merton calls “middle range theory” to make sense of political complexity. He argued that ours is an organizational society and then proceeded to lay down a theory of bureaucracy that has, since he wrote in the first quarter of this century, become as familiar to us all as Freud’s theory of the subconscious or Marx’s theory of class conflict (Weber, 1958; Merton, 1968d). Interest Groups The second basic insight of pluralism is that actors in the political system represent interest groups. This disarmingly simple observation undermines the market analogy because interest groups are, by their nature, collective and valueoriented. The market and the interest group perspectives contrast sharply. One of the reasons market analysis is powerful is that it reduces all behaviors to the selfinterested action of individuals. People do not care about consequences as long as they come out ahead in their calculations of utility. Such a mode of analysis is conveniently amoral. One does not have to worry about whether a program that grows abundantly and employs many people is doing the job it was designed for. The market line of reasoning can be applied to associations that operate in the political sphere, but it does so in a way different from the interest groups

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framework. It operates in the economic mode. The important question it asks in evaluating an organization is whether it is in partnership with and is serving influential constituencies and whether, engaging in exchange with these supporters, the organization will survive and prosper. Never mind whether the constituency it now serves is different from the one it was created to work with. As an illustration we can think of some disaster relief organizations that were brought into existence to help feed and house people in the wake of natural disasters, but which proved so effective as fundraising organizations that it became easier for them to outsource their disaster work. Fundraisers who became organizational leaders did not want to stay up all night or miss important business meetings to actually help those who have become homeless because of a tornado or a flood (Barton, 1969; Form and Nosow, 1958; Sontag, 2001). People concerned about the “values drift” that has occurred in such an organization could use the interest groups perspective to ask what other groups actually are serving the needs of disaster victims. They then might ask why our focal organization has become different and what could be done in the future to prevent fundraising goals from superseding the original service objectives. But someone working in the market perspective would not be bothered. They would note that the organization meets needs, grows, and pays its staff. People within the organization’s system of exchange seem to be satisfied with the work that is being done. It is people outside the system of exchange (the immediate political “market”) who ask, what can be done to get actors to do what we (the outsiders) want them to do? This is one way in which the British and the American systems of charity differ. The British Charity Commission has a societal mandate to more closely monitor the activities of such organizations to ensure they are pursuing their primary goal, and if they are not, it can shut them down or force them to change their activities. Monitoring in the American case is much loser and consistent with a free-market mentality (Personal Interview with Sir Robin Guthrie. Chair of the British Charity Commission, 1991) (Guthrie, 1991). When federal officials approach the problems of changing health care practices or instructional methods in public schools, they ask, what levers and incentives are available to change actors’ self-interest so they will do the “right thing?” This represents market thinking, and it follows from the assumption that they cannot just explain to street-level practitioners what is not working and how they must change to improve practices. We know, however, that at the street level there is a kind of art to keeping practices the same despite the best efforts of people in Washington or in the state capital to force changes. Seymour Sarason (1971) in The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change evokes the old French principle “la pus la change, la plus la meme chose” [the more things change, the more they stay the same]. Usually this involves trying to minimize the impact of externally imposed changes from distant policymakers who have little understanding of the texture of local life and the creative demands that shape the arts of teaching, medicine, and other frontline professions. Distant from the scene of the action and unable to incorporate the complexity of local organizational life into their theories about how to intervene, policymakers in federal and state government cannot use a sympathetic understanding of this

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local world to shape their policy changes. They have to use the simplifying models of the market and of incentives to try to make recalcitrant local actors change. An interest-group approach, in contrast, would be concerned with how conflicting needs and desires of groups within the polity function and in their own terms achieve effectiveness. The fate of these groups and how they are represented is central to the theory. But groups alone are not important. We cannot pretend that groups are just “corporate individuals” to whom economic principles of rational self-interest will apply. The individuals who make up those groups may have crosscutting affiliations—they may simultaneously belong to different groups that clash with each other. Thus a policy called “diagnosis related groups” (DRGs) was created in the health care system some years ago in an effort to reduce costs that reorganized reimbursements for medical services so that preset fees were paid for particular medical conditions, but it had a cascade effect (Geist, 1992). The number of patients admitted to hospitals declined because physicians began identifying more discrete conditions in diagnosing patient cases. They also began treating more patients on an outpatient basis. Costs did not go down, but hospital finances suffered and this was one factor that pushed hospitals (and the health care system in general) to consolidate. The crosscutting relationships, affiliations, and obligations of the many organizations and practitioners in the health care system subverted what appeared to be a sensible market inspired reform. We can understand what broke down by tracking down the many interests that shape policy at the local level and this reflects the interest-group approach. Decentralization and the Importance of Government By emphasizing values and decentralization as the empirical bedrock of their theory, pluralists make it sound as though rational, orderly government is not very likely. How can decisions be made in a radically decentralized system? Given limited resources and imperfect information, how are choices made among competing interest groups within a polity? Pluralists encourage their audience to imagine the decision problems that confront administrators in large bureaucracies, budget makers in congress, political leaders in city halls, or grants officers in huge federal programs. The concrete problems these decision makers face are the strongest retort pluralists have to offer in response to the flashy, ideologically attractive theories offered from the left and the right. While grand theories may appeal to one’s sentiments, they must get the details right to be intellectually convincing and to suggest reforms that are pragmatically doable. Those who try to prove ideologies or grand theories usually fail to get the details right. Grounded theories, in contrast, are messy but accurate. Pluralism is important to our discussion of pragmatic liberalism because it makes government and public services central to the analysis. The amount government spends, the kinds of programs that receive support, and the means used for making decisions and for allocating resources, all will change over time, but

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these are all just changes in surface details. It makes no sense to say we can have “less government,” as the conservatives recommend because there are zerosum conflicts between interest groups that must (and will) be resolved. Government is the legitimate means for resolving those conflicts and so government will go on. It also makes no sense to say that routine governmental processes are unimportant in shaping policies, as the elitists argue. Whatever interests are involved in shaping policies, the actual shape of programs is necessarily filtered through a complex organizational system of budget makers, rule enforcers, program administrators, legal controllers, and so on. The character of this filtering heavily affects what programs do. The historical context changes, coalitions shift, styles of government and service delivery evolve from one form to another. This, in fact, is one of the important things to know about public programs—they are not likely to stay the same for very long and today’s popular program may disappear tomorrow. The constants are certain organizational realities of government. One set of realities has to do with how choices are made among alternative interests in a legitimate fashion—this is the issue of governance. The other set of realities has to do with how programs are implemented and how, in general terms, the constraints on government shape service delivery. The Pluralist Model of Government Although the pluralists make government a central part in their discussion, that does not mean that one gets a clear sense from them of what government ought to do. Pluralism is not necessarily more upbeat than are the radicals or conservatives about the possibility that government can bring about important social change. Its theorists go on and on about how irrational government is and about how impossible it is to bring orderly, rational planning to social problem solving. Government decision makers “muddle through” and “satisfice,” rather than getting things right or acting assertively to take care of business (Lindblom, 1959). Pluralists also accept with a certain stoicism that our political system rewards the wealthy and the powerful, leaving the weak and the helpless to hope for charity unless they somehow come to be represented by an effective set of interest groups. This sounds like glum acceptance that bureaucracy and parochialism make coherent thinking about social policy an unlikely eventuality. Things are not so bad. At the heart of pluralism is an important theory of what government is for, what it does, and why we should see the tumult of democracy as a sign of energy, creativity, and hope, not as a simple manifestation of inefficiency. While the political process may be tumultuous, the pluralist emphasis on government places the individual leader above the fray. Leaders are like traffic cops. They do not determine where the traffic comes from or why it gets heavy at rush hour. Their job is only to make sure that it flows smoothly and that people get where they are going with a minimum of delay. People move around the city smoothly to the extent there is a system that works, allowing the vast number of personal decisions and interactions between

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motorists that happen each day to go on without gridlock and without motorists fighting each other. One can imagine ideologists arguing about the overall structure of traffic patterns as they carpool to work. Radicals would note that automobile companies bought and dismantled rapid transit systems in some cities during the 1920s to build demand for their cars. Conservatives might complain that government does not allow the market to operate because it does not build more roads where there is traffic congestion (demand), preferring instead to protect parks or historical buildings. Meanwhile, the pluralist, who is navigating for the driver, tries to figure out whether it would be faster to take the freeway or the Eighteenth Street cut-off. If we want to understand how to make government do a better job of meeting social needs, we need to know something about how it works. We can talk about this in general terms, by breaking the governmental process into phases or pieces that have different effects on how policies work their way through the system. Emphasizing the importance of interest groups and responsiveness to the grassroots, however, pluralism also focuses on political styles. Governmental systems are not all set up in the same way; interest groups vary in the ways that they approach the political process. Analysts have pointed out, for example, that different cities are characterized as having different “regimes” that vary from city to city and may change over time (Stone, 1989). The possibilities for reform depend a lot on the ways that social problems, government structures, and interest-group strategies mesh together. Demand, Decision, and Delivery Pluralists explain government’s ability to act by emphasizing what we call the “3-D model.” The political process has to be seen as the meshing of three elements—demand, decision, and delivery. Demand refers to the way that the public makes its concerns and needs heard by legislators and government bureaucrats. Decision refers to the way those actors in government choose to allocate resources among competing claimants. Delivery is the way that the structural complexities of carrying out decisions shape the content of actual services. Demand Pluralist government rests on the openness of the system to influence by a huge and complex system of interest groups that compete with each other and seek to influence politicians. This is the mechanism that makes politicians accountable to the people they serve. Ignoring powerful groups, or guessing wrong and supporting the wrong ones, can end the career of a politician or a public administrator. Thus, politicians take the demands made by interest groups seriously. It is no simple matter, however, for politicians to figure out how to respond on a particular issue. There is no simple formula for adding up the votes of different groups because interest groups differ in complicated ways. They vary along a number of dimensions: there are single issue versus multiissue interest

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groups; groups differ in the size and numbers of their constituencies, which often translates into votes; different amounts of financial, organizational, and other material resources are available to groups, and this affects whether an issue can be kept alive; and finally, groups differ in their legitimacy to represent an issue, to evaluate information, or to speak for an important segment of the public. Also, groups may engage in varying tactics ranging, on one end of the continuum, from legitimate, routinized electoral politics and voting through organization and mobilization for petitioning and demonstrations to the other end of the continuum of illegal marches and outright civil disobedience and to riots and rebellion. Successful politicians have mastered a craft or skill of balancing these interests and figuring out which decisions most likely minimize discord and later attacks (Banfield, 1961). The reason pluralists argue that politicians are relatively neutral where the substance of issues is concerned (regardless of the ideological flavor of their public pronouncements) is that people must play the game to survive. The system disciplines politicians, and it forces those who would stray off on their own to play by the rules. This means that it is the dynamics of the system that shape policies more than abstract philosophies. What counts are two basic values. First, the demands made by interest groups should be expressed within acceptable democratic and civil procedures—running from voting and lobbying to peaceful demonstrations and above all eschewing violence. Second, people outside the system need to understand that politicians will make decisions that enable them to retain their positions of power. These values make the system, its practitioners, and its etiquette more important than any grand principles that ideologues might advance about equity or justice. Decision Pressure groups are most important in the way that they affect the legislative process. The decision process in government, however, involves the chief executive—the president, governor, or mayor—in the passage of laws. Where legislators are rewarded if they manage to satisfy demands from constituents, chief executives are punished if they give too much away. The values that guide them, consequently, tend to face in the opposite direction from the values of legislators. Where the latter tend to emphasize equity, the former push for efficiency. Members of Congress, state legislators, and members of city councils are the ones most likely to be punished by disgruntled pressure groups since they represent relatively small jurisdictions. Consequently, politicians tend to become advocates for the concerns of the groups that lobby them most effectively. With all members of the body making claims for local or sectarian groups, members of the legislative body find themselves in a zero-sum conflict—if one wins, the other loses. There is a fixed pie that must be divided among constituents, and not all needs can be served. Equity becomes a central value because the legislature must somehow resolve competing demands to the satisfaction of the whole political community by explaining why particular groups will not be more heavily favored, even if they are already getting more than their fair share of

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resources. One way legislators can solve disputes among themselves is to make the pie bigger, so it is no surprise that the emphasis on equity in legislative bodies tends to expand government (Clark T. and Ferguson, 1983). Chief executives in contrast tend to be blamed for taxing the public or running programs in an expensive way. They must implement programs passed by the legislature, so chief executives tend to become involved in the decision process to discourage the legislators from giving away too much. Their rhetoric tends to emphasize the importance of efficiency in government. This does not just involve the administration of programs, but is likely to focus also on programs that give resources to the public without producing results that were promised. From the pluralist perspective, then, the differences between people usually called “liberals” and “conservatives” in political elections mostly involve different emphases on necessary aspects of government. Liberals are more like legislators, eager to maximize equity in government’s relationship to the people. Conservatives sympathize more with the executive’s need to keep spending down and to avoid being “taken” by elements of the public that seek special favors. These have less to do with ideology than with structural pressures in the system that emphasizes competing values at different times (Peterson, 1981). Delivery While programs are created, legitimated, and shaped by the legislative process; pluralists recognize that once launched, programs and institutions gain a life of their own (Pressman and Wildavsky, 1984). If the legislature and executive square off in a more or less continuous battle to promote, respectively, the values of equity and efficiency, established institutions work to expand and protect services they provide. Their efforts are an important reason citizens can think of basic government services as rights—rights that have gradually expanded in number and variety over the last century. The flip side of this expansion of rights is that the institutions that implement government policies have become large, more or less permanent, and politically formidable bureaucracies. Bureaucracies fight to maintain their “turf ” and to control resources allocated by government to specific functions. Because citizens come to expect that services will be available, institutions such as the public schools, public works departments, the Social Security Administration, the criminal justice system, or the welfare department have tremendous legitimacy to function. They are able to claim access to operating funds, and to resist efforts by outsiders to determine the details of how programs will be run. Executives or legislators may try to shape street-level programs by passing general policy guidelines, but pluralists have long recognized that teachers, police, welfare workers, doctors, and other direct service providers are nearly impossible to direct through tightly restrictive rules. Their work tends to be idiosyncratic and the legitimacy of their services makes the organizations that employ “street-level bureaucrats” autonomous from central control (Lipsky, 1980). Since these institutions are quite different from each other,

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making sense of government services requires that we separately examine and analyze the various institutions that implement government policy. Pluralists argue that the kinds of multipurpose understandings the radicals and conservatives recommend with their macrotheories simply do not tell us enough about how different institutions work for their recommendations to effectively shape and improve services. An industry has grown up around central government efforts to control the actual implementation of programs. Economists dominate, as they seek to create models that predict how resource inputs (one of the few things the central government controls) can shape actual implementation. A culture of objective evaluation research and complex statistical analysis has promoted a sense that program evaluation is a scientific, value-neutral operation, and it has been formalized in our governance structure through such agencies as The Congressional Budget Office, The General Accounting Office, and The Office of Management and Budget—all of which engage in various forms of benefit/cost analysis emphasizing effectiveness and efficiency if not equity (Rossi et al., 1999; Shadish et al., 1991; Tomkin, 1998). Pluralists meanwhile have carefully shown how social values and political programs creep in to shape and direct this supposedly neutral culture of professional expertise. Research knowledge is used to legitimate political decisions, more than to inform them. Since politicians shape research priorities by setting policy objectives and controlling research funding, supposedly objective research is made partisan by the way research problems are selected. For example, we have heard a lot about genetic damage caused by psychoactive drugs such as LSD since considerable federal research money has been directed at this issue. We hear little about the genetic damage caused by coffee—the most genetically toxic substance we ingest, according to some geneticists—because it is neither economically nor politically “profitable” to research that issue (Troyer and Markle, 1984). The value neutrality of programs also is sullied by intrusion of political processes into implementation activities. Evaluation researchers assume that teaching or doctoring or housing rehabilitation go on in an atmosphere of laboratory sterility. In the field, practitioners inevitably retool their professional knowledge to fit the social and political demands of specific local situations. This was the lesson of a famous study by Philip Selznick (1949) of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), an organization often held up as an exemplary model of efficient and effective bureaucratic implementation of a national policy to open an economically depressed area to opportunity by making cheap electric power available. The TVA had trouble operating in its early years because there was substantial local opposition to the construction of dams and the destruction of the countryside through flooding—an environmental movement in the 1930s and 1940s! The bureaucracy solved the problem of local opposition by co-opting grassroots leaders. That is, they invited leaders of the opposition movement to help plan TVA programs. Being incorporated in the decision-process made it hard for critics then to oppose TVA programs. Thus, values we might think of as

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good principles of democracy—citizen participation in controlling public service organizations—become an instrument of control since technical experts usually can convince laypeople that the decisions the organization recommends are technically necessary. Scientific objectivity becomes an instrument of political intimidation. Diversity in Governmental Styles Our discussion about the tension between the legislative and executive branches of government around issues of equity and efficiency is the sort of discussion we find in civics textbooks. The discussion helps us understand how government is structured, and how the process works for translating recognition of social problems into legislation and programs. However, the 3-D model makes government seem uniform and static. Realistically, styles of government change from administration to administration. It also changes as we move around the country and look at smaller jurisdictions. Communities favor different styles of government, and problems of governance at the local level are so different from national governance problems that different approaches to policymaking are needed (Peterson, 1981; Mansbridge, 1983). Research has shown as well that smaller communities having more social homogeneity generally have a more consensual based politics, while larger cities having more social diversity have more competitive and conflictual political cultures. The former, with their homogeneity and consensus tend to stress efficiency in government, and the latter with more diversity and inequality tend to stress democratic representativeness to deal with issues of equity (Clark T., 1973). Diversity, unfortunately, can be a source of government inequity. Minorities tend to be more dominated by larger groups in some arrangements than in others, and national priorities or constitutional principles—such as the Bill of Rights—may be attacked or ignored by local governments. The pluralist model, however, recognizes that this diversity is a necessary consequence of a system that derives its energy and public support from an extremely decentralized collection of interest groups. America has many “cultures of democracy,” and they are all needed to give groups adequate means for self-expression. The system works because all groups must come to the arbiter of government to settle differences and to gain resources they seek. Inequities persist. But just as the impersonal rules of the marketplace give different rewards to business firms, pluralists hope that the pervasive climate of political competition will distribute opportunities to many kinds of groups to have their voices heard. Not all oppressed minorities will have their needs recognized and addressed. Some groups will win and some will lose, this time around. But in a pluralist system, there are no permanent winners or losers, and a losing group may accept the outcome this time recognizing that it may win with different coalitions and different issues next time. It is a politics of hope that keeps losers playing the game and accepting the outcomes. To the degree that there are more permanent structures of winners and losers, to that degree the system may lose legitimacy and lead to despondent withdrawal or riotous calls for changing rules and outcomes.

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Consider the encouragement of “public-private partnerships” in local communities (Brooks, et al., 1984; Academy of Political Science, 1986). Some cities and towns are aggressive about seeking new fiscal arrangements that will allow housing renovation and nurturing of small businesses in low-income communities. These possibilities often require a “liberal” government, composed of people willing to decentralize power. Thus, in Milwaukee, local neighborhood housing rehabilitation groups have convinced the county government to form a revolving loan account, funded with public money, to provide the cash flow necessary for successful real estate ventures (Local Initiatives Support Corporation, 2006). This sort of intervention would not happen everywhere—such as in the centralized, patronage-based governmental system of Chicago—because the government style would not encourage it. Other kinds of intervention would be possible in these places. Chicago, for example, would be more successful at interventions that require strong central direction to work—such as urban renewal of the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side that houses the University of Chicago (Rossi and Dentler, 1961). A Variety of Government Roles Consider the following four images of local government offered by Oliver Williams (1961). (1) Government as a conflict arbiter At the local level, political leaders in some communities play the same neutral “traffic directing” role that characterizes national political leadership in the pluralist view. The role often requires more active involvement at the local than at the national level, however. Where national politics mostly involves professional lobbying groups, where the rules of representation and involvement are clearly cut, local politics are often tumultuous, played out on the streets between grassroots organizations that neither recognize nor play by the “rules” of political involvement. This may require energetic efforts by government to build communication between groups and to develop agreements about how legitimate choices can be made. (2) A limited, caretaker form of government This comes close to the conservative perspective of government’s role as an umpire of the games’ rules, remaining on the sidelines, out of play, while the major actors play the real game. This role also emphasizes, as did the Reagan years, low taxes and a minimal provision of services by government under the assumption that most services will be provided privately (even such basic sustenance needs, for example, as water supply, garbage pick-up, and fire protection with volunteer forces). (3) Government is a promoter of economic growth and development This is a focus primarily on satisfying and enhancing the competitive economic position of local business and industry in the community relative to other communities. In this approach, questions of services to residents and taxes are relegated to secondary consideration or are considered significant strategic tools to the degree that they can be used to promote such growth. For example, tax incentives and rebates are used to attract and retain industry and developers. This is the type of

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governmental structure most often reported in studies of local power that emphasize a power elite dominated by economic interests. (4) Local governments whose primary concern is with providing a high level of services Taxes are, again, of secondary significance and are willingly paid and increased as needed to maintain a high level of services to citizens. Rough and tumble competition between competing groups tends to be played down in favor of sober discussion of the merits of alternative programs. One thinks of this governmental style predominating in wealthy communities. However, the socialist government traditions of the rural Midwest (and of traditionally socialist cities such as Milwaukee) also place a premium on high-quality services coupled with efficient public administration. Though derived from, and particularly applicable to, the analysis of local municipal governments, these four governmental “functions” or roles can be extended to governmental levels throughout the American system. Though capturing a range of functions that extend from the more minimal conservative view (the caretaker role) to the more left, political-economic critique (the conflict and especially the economic functions), one can readily see these functions as variables across space (varying from community to community), across time (varying historically from one administration to another), or across levels of aggregation (varying from the local to the state to the federal levels). Correlates, causes and consequences, of these varying functions can be sought in the different social class composition, values, and interests expressed by different groups as they achieve ascendancy in pluralist competitive politics at different levels, times, and places. Levels of Government Paul Peterson (1981) builds on this pluralist model of different governmental functions and explicitly applies it to the intersection of different levels throughout the American system of government. He identifies three primary governmental functions—the economic growth role, the redistributive role, and the maintenance of social order role. The major insight provided by this approach is that local governments appear most significant in the social order and economic growth roles, while the federal government is geared more to the economic growth and the redistributive roles. In short, within the American capitalist system, all levels of government are concerned with promoting economic growth and expansion (Logan and Molotch, 1987). The maintenance of “domestic tranquility” is primarily a function of local or parochial governments. And, most significant from the political liberal’s perspective is that the federal government is best capable of dealing with redistributive politics—the politics of taxing the rich and redistributing resources to the needy and the poor. The primary reason the redistributive role is located at the federal level lies in the fact that inequalities in American society are ecologically and spatially distributed from community to community, and state to state. As the poor and the needy become ecologically segregated in large central cities, city governments are increasingly unable to raise revenues to provide services for the needy concentrated within their boundaries. The wealth and tax base have escaped to

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the suburbs and can only be recaptured by a higher level of government that can match needs with the wealth to meet those needs in the same jurisdiction. As different states also experience economic growth or decline and differential distributions and concentrations of the needy (for example, the declining rustbelt of the industrial heartland versus the booming economies of the expanding sunbelt), the ecological segregation of wealth from need can only be recaptured at the federal level. Therefore, if liberal politics were to be successful in stressing increased equality and the provision of services to the needy, redistributive governmental efforts starting at the local level would need to be “pushed up” the levels of government. If successful, this ultimately would create an expansion of redistributive welfare functions within the federal government. In short, the basic ecology of inequality within the American federal system forces redistributive policies and programs to higher levels of government and creates pressures for an expansion of the federal welfare system. This is perhaps one reason that local governments and the lower house of congress have tended to be democratic while the executive, at the national level anyway, has been conservative for the past several decades. The conflict over redistribution is most actively fought out at the highest levels of government. There is an irony here, however, since conservatives so often argue for strong local governance. Taking Services Seriously From the standpoint of pragmatic liberalism, the most important contribution of pluralism is that it provides a framework for taking social services seriously. In pluralism, we can ask what is supposed to happen in an institution, whether it is happening, and how things could be changed so that things would work better. What is the mystery behind being straightforward about social services? When someone does a careful analysis of nearly any social service, it usually turns out that the organization is not performing the function it is responsible for. Sometimes this is a matter of inefficiency. More often, services that seem simple from a commonsense standpoint turn out to be doing something quite different than we expect, either because there are unintended consequences of programs or because the people running the program disguise or hide important activities. We have talked about some of these problems. One example of an unintended consequence was with Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the federal program that funded assistance payments through the welfare department, rewarding people who have illegitimate children at the same time that it provided an important humanitarian service to support those very children. Disguised activities occur often when organizations are tightly regulated and mandated from the top to perform a function that does not make sense from the standpoint of practitioners on the ground. Physicians routinely make difficult life and death decisions about whether or not abortion should be available, about whether or not damaged babies should be given medical treatment,

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or about whether drug dependent patients should continue to be given prescriptions for controlled substances that could bring about sanctions from government authorities. School officials historically have labeled some children educationally handicapped and placed them in special education classes to deal with social order problems in regular school programs. On the other side of the coin, people who study organizations as independent units of production—the organizational theorists—explain that social services are not tightly controlled from above, and this leads to a situation where the people running programs often do things somewhat at variance from what the public thinks they are doing. It is naive, they say, to accept the surface story about what a social service program is doing because it is always at least an oversimplification—often there is outright deception at work, although quite often it is deception serving a sensible purpose. This makes it hard to take social services seriously as simple clear-cut efforts to take care of very specific social needs. Instead they appear to be engaged in a variety of rogue activities as selfish organizations, concerned more with surviving, expanding their turf, and serving the interests of their staff than with helping their clients. The ideologies we have talked about in previous chapters also make it hard to take social services seriously on their own terms. The shrouds of deception and ambiguity that surround programs push us to look for systematic theories that explain why a commonsense approach does not work. Both the radicals and the conservatives criticize organizational theorists for not seeing the broader context in which programs operate. Discussing them as part of the bigger social system, radical and conservative theories tell us we should expect programs not to work the way they are supposed to. The general social theories they advance often fit the facts of what happens in social programs better than straightforward, commonsense analyses of school programs or health care or public housing. Unfortunately, while grand theories make ineffectiveness predictable, they do not tell us to what we can do to get important things done. Indeed, they tell us to not even try because any effort to make things better will be subverted. They are prescriptions for discouragement, obscurantism, and neglect, benign or otherwise. Pluralism, in contrast, gives us a way of returning to basics, talking about what programs do, and asking how social needs can be met in better ways, and avoiding the traps of the other approaches. Values, Organizations, and Society Pluralism lets us look closely at what organizations do, allows us to appreciate the multidimensionality of program activities and relates specific activities to the whole society. It does this by shifting the terms of analysis. Where we are used to thinking about organizations as rational systems that seek to do work like carefully engineered social machines, pluralism sees them as interest groups that advance particular values. They do this, however, in a context where they are competing with other organizations and where they are trying to influence governing decision makers—people working at higher levels of government or people in charge of distributing resources within complex social systems.

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Pluralism gives us many specific suggestions about how to look at these complex systems, but these details are not important now. We want to focus instead on why paying attention to values and the complex machinations of the broader political situation helps us to escape the narrow traps the other perspectives— that is, the other two conservative and radical ideologies and traditional organizational theory—often fall into. Strategy The first advantage of pluralism is that it shifts the way we interpret organizational activities. Rather than asking how people are rationally planning to complete necessary tasks at work, pluralism tells us to assume that the people in organizations are all strategists, trying to do their work in situations where there are always complicated interpersonal barriers to simply taking care of business. People can become simple bureaucrats, where they fall into routines and carry out their work in terms of unchanging rules and acting as though the surface level of their organizations is all that is real. However, as popular hostility to the label “bureaucrat” suggests, these people generally are impediments to real organizational effectiveness, and their mindlessness is often a source of harm to clients and to the public, ensnarling them in the proverbial “red tape” that finds its ultimate expression in the very title of Joseph Heller’s (1961) novel Catch 22 (see also Merton, 1968c). Strategic workers pay attention to the ways operating dynamics and group competition in their organizations undercut the way things are supposed to work. These people form coalitions, work outside of regular channels, find innovative ways to do their work, and through these means get the organization to help them do their jobs properly. In Heller’s novel this character was the indomitable and innovative Yossarian. People have to be innovative and creative at work; this undermines and frustrates “straight-ahead,” rational approaches to getting work done. Values count for these people because they are the abstract definitions of the job that workers aim for as they do their strategic work. Since no simple means-ends analysis of how to complete a task tells them how to succeed at work, people must keep the big-picture in mind as they juggle the complexities of their daily work-lives. The values these people use for guidance partly represent a personal ethic about work that might come from professional training or moral fiber. However, pluralism does not require that organizational workers be saints. Rather, it suggests that values are imposed on people in a way that forces those who are ambitious at work to take them seriously. This happens because every organizational unit in a pluralist system must relate to a bigger society, and that relationship goes both ways. Organizational workers struggle to improve the situation of their program at the same time that people in the broader environment are trying to get things from them and are making decisions about how to distribute scarce resources to street-level social service units. When workers try to take care of the routine business of their jobs, pressures from the outside world often are imposed on them. This may take the form

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of expectations imposed by clients or supervisors or the constraints of interdependency in the work of people from different service units. Many times these expectations are linked with some power to reward or punish, so that although they may be inaccurate or seem inappropriate, these expectations of outsiders cannot just be ignored. Rather, they become a major source of pressure for ambitious workers to define the values of their job. The ambitious worker who wants to be defined as a success in accomplishing the tasks of their job listens to these outside voices, takes them into consideration, and attempts where possible to meet their expectations. Personal commitments make a contribution to the “value set” a person has at work, but work values mostly come from the work environment itself. They represent individuals’ efforts to balance competing demands and to make an assertive statement about what they ought to be doing at work. Outside pressures push people to ask what the core of their work ought to be; individuals ultimately have to push back against these outside pressures by defining the nature of their work and educating others (through attack if necessary) about the purposes and boundaries of their work role (Weick, 1979). Alliances While demands at work are felt individually, people share their jobs with others. Over time those who face similar pressures from others band together and form coalitions to lay down the rules of the game—the values that the institution should accept as appropriately governing their work. Certainly, most people work in situations where their jobs are defined by other people, by laws and regulations, and by the people who run big organizations. Even in tightly controlled situations, however, workers make informal decisions about how to work, how to resist, and what they may do to take control of their own work. The formal structure of any organization lays over a vast, complex set of informal associations and power relationships that members work out with each other (Blau and Scott, 1962). These shared agreements coupled with relationships to the broader environment are what make organizations so hard to interpret from the outside. But they also are the source of powerful value commitments within organizations to doing certain jobs energetically and willfully. Organizations are alliances of people who share a situation in the world. Often they also are alliances of people who share a commitment to doing a certain kind of work as best they can. Organizations only make sense if you understand both the complex relationships among members and the ways programs relate to and are shaped by forces that lie outside. Organizations act within bigger political systems, and their internal structure is shaped by relationships within that bigger system. One of the realities of the larger political context is that it is always changing in response to influences from all the units of society. Pluralists argue that it does not work to bring a simple means-ends way of rationally analyzing how tasks should be done in complex organizations because priorities are always changing in the bigger political environment. Different political interests dominate the system at different times; also agreements about what are the great social

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problems of the day continually are redefined, so that demands on organizations shift. Organizational leaders often must change the ways they acquire basic resources or revise the way they present the organization’s work to the world. This forces restructuring of internal operations, so that programs cannot remain static. Workers may try to adapt old practices to new conditions—leading to a disconnect from new policy changes proposed at the top and to the persistence of a work-as-usual ethic in the trenches (Prasad and Prasad, 2000). But over time, there tend to be gradual revisions of programs and activities so that no organization stands still. It is part of its political environment and shifts with it. As part of this environment, organizations also are political actors. They promote a point of view and try to have their interests given priority in the bigger political environment. Pluralism lets us look at services in these different simple-minded terms because these organizations are seen as political actors and advocates, trying to advance their particular social function. This is not to say that all service providers are sophisticated or self-conscious about or effective at promoting their political role. But even inattentive, blundering organizations have a political impact. Powerful but inattentive organizations—health charities such as the American Diabetes Association or the Red Cross, for example—may legitimate the stance of being above politics by acting as though politics are unimportant. This itself is a political action that makes it difficult for less powerful groups to have their self-consciously proclaimed political actions recognized as acceptable—breast cancer groups, for example, tend to be branded as radical feminists because they seek to challenge the apolitical stance of the American Cancer Society. Pluralism frames social services as fundamentally political. They try to carry out tasks, but those tasks are presented as value commitments, within which technical competence is one important concern among many that compete for the allegiance of staff. Competence may be sacrificed to making customers happy or to protecting the organization from harsh outside criticism. But the starting point in making sense of any organization is the notion that there is commitment to performing a service, a commitment defined in terms of a set of central organizational values (values that are not necessarily all shared by the different groups of staff or members). This service commitment is advanced strategically, and it is these strategic demands that make it hard to figure out what any particular organization is actually doing, and whether it is operating effectively. Diversity In the pluralist framework, however, “effectiveness” takes on a different meaning than it does when people expect social programs to be rationally designed. Programs are effective when they satisfy their supportive constituencies and make their cases well in the political environment so they can access resources and avoid tight regulation. Pluralists expect that if programs do not do their work well or if they waste resources, the competition in the system will force allocation patterns to be reconsidered. As with business organizations that are disciplined by the economic market, service units in a pluralist system ought

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to be disciplined by the political process. We can recognize that, as happens with businesses, this system of scrutiny and control is partly mythological— important inefficient businesses remain dominant because they have political influence and monopoly power. So too in politics, some pork barrel social service programs persist because they have powerful political sponsorship that cannot be defeated. We may complain about the irrationality of social services when politics so dominate the way programs are structured and run. We also, however, should recognize that making politics the driving force behind the shaping of programs stimulates tremendous diversity in the ways services are provided. As people at all levels of the social services system struggle to advance and improve their programs, they innovate, adapt to difficult circumstances, and tailor what they do to the needs and demands of the people who pay for their work and who use their services. Discussions of social problems tend to overlook the importance of this diversity of how both problems and solutions are defined. When people talk about social problems, they usually talk as though it is possible to homogeneously define “the public interest” for the whole society and to formulate proper social policies to attack problems on the basis of it. Sometimes this central control produces laws and regulations that result in social programs that are impressively similar across society—for example, Social Security benefits or the public school system. Even in these institutions, however, one finds important local variations. Diversity and variety, rather than homogeneity and systematic policy implementation, are the empirical norm. Diversity is one of the reasons it is hard to evaluate specific social programs. We need to know a lot about the context in which a program functions to know how its political difficulties have been managed. Yet, in the pluralist perspective, this diversity is one of the strengths of our system. People invent many solutions to the same social problems and find many ways to formulate the same organizational goals differently when, ostensibly, they are doing the same kind of work. Not everyone gets the same service from the health care system or from a public housing authority or from the schools. At the same time, the richness and variety of the system encourages the social services system to mesh with the local community culture and to respond to the way locals define their needs. We do not mean to idealize localism as part of pluralism. There are many public newspaper stories about elites at the town or county level who put their self-interests before the needs of local residents or who insist that their religious or political values rule the schools, the police, or the public welfare program. Outside powers then need to be brought in to produce more equity and service effectiveness. Gaining support at a higher level of the political system is one strategy disgruntled local interest groups may use to combat exploitive or racist or exclusive local elites. The pluralist model recognizes that service environments are very different across society. Organizations differ as a consequence, even though they may attempt to provide a single service. A dramatic example are the differences in practices and success rates among community hospitals, even within the same

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part of the country. Recent research has shown that physicians in towns only a few miles apart are likely to diagnose and treat specific symptoms completely differently. There seems to be some homogeneity within medical communities, but a lot of variety between them (Greenwald, 1980, Fisher et al., 2003a, 2003b) There is debate about whether this means that medical care is not equally good across hospitals, or whether there just are different styles for practicing medicine that are all more or less equivalent. Similar organizational species find different ways to adapt as the climate changes, just as do animals and plants. One of the dangers of social policy analysis is that people tend to make generalizations too quickly, often from standardized relatively superficial quantitative counts. Pluralists urge us to do case-studies, to recognize the variety of different niches that specific organizations fill, and to move on to generalizations only when we understand the strategic problems that constrain and structure specific programs. This not only leads to a more accurate match between expectations of what organizations should do and what they can do. It also breeds an appreciation for the rich variety of solutions that our diverse system generates in response to social problems. If we take lessons from practitioners, we can bring into focus more approaches to solving a given social problem. We should try to bring to light those philosophical approaches to social problem solving that are buried in the pragmatic, day-to-day efforts of inventive, strategically minded practitioners. With this knowledge, we then might try to push those solutions that are politically successful, that serve neglected but important interest groups, and that reflect a technology for solving social problems that does a good job of fitting national priorities to local realities.

CHAPTER 7

Institutions, Social Policy, and the Death of the Old Social Science

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ur review of dominant policy ideologies has helped us lay a common foundation for a new way of thinking about social policy. Pragmatic liberalism, however, is not at its base a synthesis or an effort to rebuild the intellectual castle inhabited by those who claim to bring a scientific attitude to the study of social policy. Pragmatic liberalism is offered as a shift in the way we perceive and think about collective social action. The Intellectual and Policy Crisis In our view, the established social science disciplines are in a state of intellectual crisis and disarray. This condition arises from the collapse of centralized government models for conceptualizing, planning, and implementing social policy. This has been most obvious with the collapse of communism and the demise of centralized, socialist governments in Eastern Europe (White, 2001). There has been a quieter change in Western democracies, or at least in the United Kingdom and the United States, where there has been a prolonged assault on systems by which the national government controls provision of social services (Pierson, 1994; Razin et al., 2005). Since the 1960s in the United States, a huge collection of nonprofit organizations has been brought into existence. There are more than two million of these organizations with annual budgets of over $25,000 and their revenues constitute about 10 percent of the gross national product (Salamon, 2003). Increasingly they have become the venues where social services, often funded by government, are provided. Privatization of social services has been joined with efforts to reduce the size of government to make independent service institutions increasingly important (Poole and Fixler, 1987). Probably the most dramatic change representing this pattern has been welfare reform. Federally funded, state-managed offices to hand out cash assistance are

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being phased out. Networks of small organizations that train people, help them find jobs, and monitor their compliance with rules about proper behavior, are replacing old welfare offices. Welfare reform will succeed or fail depending on how states and communities work with these private organizations, assuming organizations exist to act as partners with the public authorities. This pattern of turning public programs over to private entities has also been seen with prisons, garbage collection, residential mental health, drug and alcohol treatment, housing, and to a limited extent primary and secondary schools. Not only have established public bureaucracies been broken up and parceled out to private, nonprofit organizations, over the last quarter century as new social services have been invented and implemented, they often have been situated in nonprofits from the beginning. Shelters that protect women from battering spouses and organizations that provide help and support for people with chronic diseases such as AIDS have grown up out of citizen advocacy groups. The groups established voluntary service organizations and over time other service agencies, and state legislatures have been convinced to fund their work and to build them into the established interorganizational network of service providers. Private nonprofits acting as advocacy groups develop the demand for services and then become the vehicle of implementing those services as they become established and routinized in the system. Nonprofit service providers represent a challenge to established policy sciences because the organizations tend to be firmly rooted in local communities and to draw upon the informal resources that are locally available to fill in shortfalls not provided by state or federal funding. Local political arrangements, local civic cultures, the formal governmental structures, and amount and nature of resources available in different places vary hugely around the country. The policy ideologies we have described, however, are all built on the expectation that central tendencies exist that allow us to describe the development and implementation of policies and the responses of citizens. Nonprofits develop interventions locally and there are likely to be a vast number of different strategies and styles for dealing with any single social problem. We certainly have seen this with welfare reform where there not only are different implementation strategies not only among the fifty states, but often also among different counties and even among communities within counties that develop their own unique philosophies and strategies for serving those who lack sufficient incomes. Twenty years ago we had strident debates between scholars in different disciplines, representing the political left and the political right about “the” nature of the welfare problem and “the” proper interventions to support people finding work and to avoid welfare dependence. Politicians also argued about the shortcomings or goals of welfare, always sharing a conception of one model that was shared throughout the country. Now it is impossible to have that sort of simplified debate or to discuss “the welfare problem” using data drawn from a “representative” national sample. One has to know about the strengths of the Wisconsin plan, the shortcomings of welfare provision in New York City, and how welfare in Eau Claire is different from welfare in Milwaukee. All of this variety is grist for the analytic mill of pragmatic liberals. However, the variety of local experience creates a crisis for the traditional social policy

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disciplines and the ideologies that feed them. It is not just that their intellectual models do not work, and are unable to assimilate the chaos and complexity of programs as they now exist. The policy disciplines of economics, political science, and sociology grew up in concert with the development of the welfare state. Welfare state thinking had its origins among late nineteenth-century intellectuals who were concerned about social problems that accompanied the industrial revolution (Trattner, 1999; Fraser 2003). The same people who invented the most important human service institutions—public schools, hospitals, police forces, prisons, mental hospitals, public sanitation systems, public health departments, and so on—invented the modern university and developed its research disciplines. We see this most clearly in Chicago. Professors who built up the School of Social Service Administration or the Department of Education or the Sociology Department were directly involved in creating social service institutions such as Hull House, the Bureau of Child Study of the Chicago Public Schools, the Institute for Juvenile Research, and the University of Chicago Laboratory School (Abbott, 1999). We also see this in London where the original university settlement house, Toynbee Hall, provided meeting and living space for William Beveridge and a galaxy of later social science stars. Together they invented and implemented the British welfare state (Meacham, 1987). Later in the United States, neoclassical economics was invented and implemented by scholars who were centrally involved in Roosevelt’s New Deal and in the implementation of state fiscal controls. The story can be repeated in discipline after discipline. Universities grew up as centers of learning for the social and policy sciences in concert with processes by which big, centralized government was invented and implemented. The policy studies disciplines currently face conceptual crises because there has been a collapse in the social and historical conditions that led them to grow and that laid a basis for their internal stratification systems. If, for example, there is agreement about the objective conditions that define school success or that prevent welfare dependency or that lead to effective economic development in a city, then a few scholars can become preeminent experts and earn chairs at the most famous universities. Politicians and administrators in leading, national institutions can use the pronouncements from these experts to describe and promote initiatives they favor, initiatives that advance their self-interests. Now that local chaos rules, data cannot be viewed as homogeneous and knowledge cannot be so easily centralized and generalized. The hegemony of one or another ideology is hard to establish because everywhere we look there are mixed cases. Should we allow religious schools to teach delinquents? Should we allow nonprofits to lobby government to support their issue or cause? Can family planning clinics perform abortions? Is it acceptable for local governments to pay bonuses to local organizations that clear their rolls of welfare recipients by finding them jobs? Should local school boards approve petitions from exciting, creative nontraditional schools to become publicly supported charter schools? Each of these instances can be construed as a case that mixes ideological values from the left and from the right. What is a good ideologue to do? We find that too many policymakers and professors mostly ignore uncomfortable facts and continue to make the same old tired arguments. Liberals believe in

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the separation of church and state and so they do not think it is a good thing for religious schools to be teaching delinquents, even though delinquency and religion both centrally involve issues of morality. They also do not like charter schools that threaten to undermine support for schools that teach the poorest and most difficult students. Radicals are uncomfortable that private organizations may profit by clearing the welfare rolls or by profiting from the health care services or even from the education they provide. Conservatives dislike the political role played by nonprofits. While they like the independent, market-supporting character of nonprofits, they do not like the advocacy role they play. Neither the left nor the right likes it that, as autonomous firms, nonprofits can amass resources to fight for the “wrong” political position—whichever side that is. As pragmatic liberals, we are frustrated that people in the traditional disciplines tend simply to ignore internal contradictions in the cases they choose to argue about. It is good that liberals are concerned that the poorest and most difficult children should receive excellent education. They are correct to point out that only if children from wealthier families remain in public schools will there be effective parent activists who will argue on behalf of all the children, rich and poor alike. Those arguments, however, also become a de facto defense of school bureaucracy and an educational system that is not accountable for its shortcomings or responsive to the concerns and interest of individual parents. Bureaucracy and insensitivity are what drive parents to propose charter school alternatives. It seems that the monopoly that public education enjoys over schooling creates professional arrogance and wastes resources. Honest intellectuals take both arguments seriously in seeking new institutional arrangements. Conservatives like to talk about how nonprofit organizations represent a market alternative to public provision of services. However, efforts to force nonprofits to be more concerned with bottom-line profits and less responsive to concerns voiced by their constituents in the community changes their organizational character. Nonprofits that resist becoming businesses (although businesses with tax exempt status) may come to serve as effective centers for community organizing around social issues. Conservatives suddenly discover that these “market organizations” are advocating abortion rights or environmental justice or limitations on real estate development in rural areas. Yet what makes nonprofits attractive is that they offer access to in-kind and voluntary resources that can substitute for government funds. Supporting privatization of public services is for many conservatives an indirect way of attacking government funding. But, to the extent the public needs the services in question and to the extent that nonprofit organizations tap self-help networks and informal resources to provide those needed services, conservatives should not be surprised that an effective advocacy movement results. Radicals do not like the way that privatization allows people to make profits from the provision of social services. But interpreting social interventions as hidden efforts by elites to control the poor and to increase their profits does not acknowledge other realities. Some services actually are needed, it costs money to provide them, and giving people money to provide the right service can save money and pain in the long run.

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For example, an extensive emergency medical system has been created in the United States since 1970 (Vosk and Milofsky, 2002 a, b, c). Companies that build ambulances and other emergency equipment made huge profits. Local organizations profited as well since grants became available to create or improve local emergency response units. Medically, relatively few patients actually need the kind of rapid response that now is available nearly everywhere in America, and in some cases paramedics and emergency medical technicians actually slow down access to emergency medical care by physicians as they attempt to stabilize patients in the field. Radicals could build a strong argument that this whole system was erected to further pad inflated corporate profit statements. But meanwhile, if our radical friend has chest pains while visiting her summer cottage we are sure she will be grateful that the ambulance arrives quickly and that a cardiac intensive care unit is available in the small community hospital nearby. These examples illustrate the nature of the intellectual crisis of traditional disciplines and policy ideologies. The old ways of thinking persist, but to make them work their proponents have to ignore inconvenient counterexamples to their arguments. There is growing recognition of the intellectual crisis throughout the social sciences. But the dominant paradigms in established disciplines offer no way to deal with the variety and processual nature of local policy interventions. There just is no way to conceptualize what is happening, what works, and how to design effective change strategies using the old frameworks. We have developed pragmatic liberalism to offer a framework that does offer a coherent intellectual perspective on the contemporary policy context. We have spoken about emphasizing things that work and about valuing local communities as a creative source of social action and change working within and in conjunction with a framework of equity established by a strong federal government. But we must still address the central problem now paralyzing the established disciplines, and that is that the variety and diversity of local interventions frustrates efforts to generalize social theory and to create grand policy programs. Pragmatic liberalism overcomes that problem by making institutions the primary unit of analysis and by drawing on an established set of conceptual traditions available for analyzing them. Placing institutional analysis at the center, we see quickly that privatization and localism are not new methods for dealing with social problems in America. They existed before government grew to the vast monolith we see today and before national welfare states came to dominate the definition of policy analyses and social interventions. It is important to appreciate, however, that a concern with policy is an important historical and cultural phenomenon in modern life. Indeed, the institutions that we place at the center of the discussion in pragmatic liberalism mostly came into existence during periods of intense social policy debate. In the last part of this chapter, we briefly describe the three policy epochs of the last century that were responsible for creating the different major social institutions. Policy epochs have arisen at thirty- or forty-year intervals over the last century and they have been separated by periods of political calm and inactivity.

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Our judgment is that a new policy epoch is about to begin. The earlier policy epochs featured analytic and ideological movements that argued for certain kinds of policy interventions and that made ideological claims about social reality. The emerging epoch will do the same, and we argue that pragmatic liberalism is a way of articulating the analytic focus, the conception of reality, and the kinds of social intervention that will rule the new epoch. Articulating the spirit of this new policy epoch will be the task of the next chapters. Institutions as a Focus of Analysis Institutions are a social science category that has long been a focus of study and for which there is an important body of theory and research. This provides us with a strong tradition to draw upon for our discussion. Students of institutions typically study them on a local level. However, local settings usually are understood to be part of a national system that represents a consistent, national culture. That national culture is defined by professionals trained and placed in a national system and also by policies that are debated, legislated, and implemented at the national and state level. Two authors are exemplars of this institutional approach as seen in their work both at the local level in case studies and at the national level in more general social theory—Morris Janowitz (1952, 1978) and Philip Selznick (1949, 1992). Talking about the strengths and weaknesses of conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism, we have emphasized the importance of connecting national debates and policy formation processes to the practical realities of local life. Especially since nonprofit organizations have become dominant venues for the implementation of policy, institutions have become the places where this local variety is experienced and where practices are shaped. Pragmatic liberalism, therefore, draws on the strong concepts of the institutional tradition as the analytic basis for integrating a rich understanding of pragmatic local action experiences with discussions of national policy formation and implementation. We note that this classic institutional analysis is somewhat orthogonal to the “new institutionalism” that tends to stress organizational forms independent of policy, process, and moral considerations (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991; Abbott, 1992; Brinton and Nee, 1998). Institutions Defined We need to begin the discussion of institutions by defining the term. But it is easiest to start by giving examples of them and then moving on to talk about defining characteristics. The health care system, the educational system, the criminal justice system, organized religion, the network of social welfare providers, and the public housing system, all are examples of major institutions in American society. From the personal experiences we each have had in the context of American culture, we know instinctively that these systems have their own subcultures and rules, their own professions and professional socializing arrangements, their own bases of financing and accountability, and somewhat different legal and historical roots.

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Each system as it matures becomes somewhat autonomous and resists outsiders in two ways. One is at the local level where the organizations and powerful actors within each institution have monopolistic control over certain issues, actions, services, and behaviors. While they are responsive to needs and concerns in the local community, key actors and organizations within each institution are empowered to make decisions for the rest of the community within their sphere of responsibility and expertise. For this reason Roland Warren (1978) has called them community decision organizations. The other is that local actors respond to and resist policymakers working at higher levels of government or organization. Local institutions represent the lowest level of a hierarchy defined bureaucratically, legally, by funding streams, by political and cultural authority, and by professional influence. Saying that local institutions are part of a vertical structure does not mean that those working and participating at the local level of an institution can be ordered around, the way line workers in a factory can be directed by supervisory staff, but they must take these vertical structures, this larger context, into account. One of the important themes of institutional analysis is that “street level” workers usually confront unique problems and situations that require creative judgment (Lipsky, 1983). Many of these frontline workers are professionals like physicians or lawyers or teachers who have spent years being trained in an esoteric sort of knowledge meant to be crafted, shaped, and applied in a practical way. We also find that in some institutions local organizations simultaneously “own” or control higher-level organizations at the same time that they in turn are governed and controlled by higher ups. This is true in churches, for example, where regional organizations are at once owned by congregations that take responsibility for manpower decisions and ritual actions that can be supervised only by the bishop, the regional authority. Local institutions are embedded in and linked to larger organizations, and those larger entities often define policies they must follow, raise and distribute resources they use, shape the laws that govern local practices, and carry on advocacy and marketing or professional discussions that define and legitimate local services. Examining institutions we must pay attention to the way that they are simultaneously local actors and local expressions of mass social, cultural, political, and economic processes. This is what Roland Warren has referred to as the “vertical dimension of community” (Warren R., 1978). We call systems that influence and shape practical action at the local level institutional fields. In one sense they represent a subculture. They are bounded in recognizable ways, and from institution to institution there are sharply different definitions of right and wrong, there are different ways of judging success, there are different historical and symbolic traditions that matter, and there are even different understandings of what constitutes objective reality. We see this clearly when physicians are called into court to testify and when legal definitions, say, of mental illness, given by judges, courts, and lawyers clash with those of psychiatrists. The way that institutions form bounded systems or subcultures with their own norms and values and distinctive kinds of activity are critical in defining them. We prefer a weak definition of institutions, however, because we do not

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want to focus only on highly structured formal organizations as the sine qua non of social service systems. People often refer to the family, the economy, the political system, and aspects of the local community as institutions as well. In some respects this weakens the category to the point where anything might be swept into it. But this inclusive approach emphasizes that it is the culture of ideas and practices that bounds institutions more than the formal boundaries that define the insides and outsides of corporations and other organizations. Institutions have fuzzy boundaries. This happens because individuals are neither equally committed nor equally central to them. Some people seem to live and die for their institutional role—for their professional work or their leadership role. Others are marginal and have simultaneous commitments to several institutions whose values may at times seem to be in conflict with each other. The institution of health care has values that valorize science, objectivity, and money-making and these make the institution seem highly secularized. Yet work with suffering people appeals to many deeply religious people, and many health care workers tell us that a religious ministry guides their work as much as does the bureaucratic and economic authority of the hospital or nursing home. For these professional people the employment contract is just a job—a set of obligations they must adhere to and manipulate to make a living and to have access to the material resources of the corporation or the labor market. It is an occupation. But, their involvement with sick patients represents their true calling, their avocation. This may be an extension of their lives of worship and so it may be hard to discern, as we get to know a particular nurse, whether he is more an agent of a church or more a functionary in the hospital bureaucracy. As Robert Merton reminds us every person has multiple statuses and roles to play (Merton, 1968e). We can see an overlap similar to that between hospitals and churches with families, political networks, and communities. In small towns, for example, it often seems as though the professional offices of institutions are little more than the physical location where the bowling league is organized or the politics of the volunteer fire company are negotiated. This may not appreciably lower the quality of technical services provided by a professional organization. Caring for the “whole” individual is critical in health care and research shows us that this care often is provided more effectively in small towns than in cities (House et al., 1988). If “community” competes with the authority of a medical or legal hierarchy, then we need to ask how the community is organized so as to become such a powerful competing subculture. This leads us to explore the ways in which community has characteristics of an institution. We want to extend the concept of “institution” in this way, even though communities vary in so many ways that we never will be able to define the sort of coherent subculture, professional network, and structure of legal authority that makes the prominent social service institutions important. Policy Implementation within Institutions We need to take institutions seriously as the primary focus of analysis in many areas of policymaking because the culture, professional norms, and internal

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dynamics of local service-providing organizations are most responsible for the ways that policies are implemented. Quantitative data analysis and the mathematical modeling methods used in economics and quantitative sociology have dominated policy analysis since the 1960s. Again and again these methods have failed to portray accurately what is going on at the street level when programs are implemented and interventions are attempted. They seek to define reality in terms of standard lists of measurable variables and static cause-effect relationships. More recently both social scientists and policymakers have come to appreciate the need for a multimethod strategy (Brewer and Hunter, 2006). They recognize that quantitative research (using statistically or experimentally controlled designs) is limited and must be combined with qualitative research (using in depth-interviewing and observation) to document more fully the subtleties of the processes involved in various social problems, to understand their causes and consequences, and to evaluate more fairly and fully intervention programs. Creative Problem Solving The generalized quantitative approach does not work with institutions because they are not static by nature. People in them have jobs that require creative responses. Many are professionals and by definition these workers are asked to work on idiosyncratic tasks that require them to bring esoteric knowledge and practical skills to bear, producing a solution that fits the person they are serving, the context, and that may produce a completely original response. Medicine is the classic example here. It is true that economists have done a good job of modeling general medical knowledge so that today a computer can duplicate the decisions of a general medical practitioner with over 90 percent accuracy (Card, 1973). But as insurance companies have put these computer models to work, supervising prospective medical care, the complaint is that they cannot take the particular needs of individuals into account. They also do not take into account that usually there are several ways to solve any single medical problem. Decision models tend to impose oversimplified linear decision rules so that choices seem more absolute than they are in practice. Should women take hormone replacement therapy? Even if the treatment slightly elevates the risk of heart disease, it does not mean it should automatically be rejected in every case. Patients and doctors have to take personal preferences, other risk factors, and the idiosyncrasies of a patient’s body into account to make an informed decision. No generalized statistical approach (say, that 70 percent of women should not take such therapy) can address the 0 (no) or 1 ( yes) decision that this doctor and this patient must make at this time. Institutional Problems Involve Unfolding Processes Another reason static causal models fail in understanding institutions is that the results we care about often involve interactive processes. The best example here is in schooling, where two decades of econometric modeling never succeeded in identifying variables that would explain school success. In the 1980s, a variety of scholars showed that the way teachers relate to their classes, the extent to which students accept the authority of their instructors, and the collective sense among

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all participants in schools that they were working on a common mission predicted success better than specific variables. Deprived schools that maintained strong rapport between staff and students showed success, while wealthy schools where people felt unsafe, conflict was common, and students were disaffected produced mediocre achievement (Coleman et al., 1982; Wittrock, 1986). To understand school success we need to understand the flow and dynamics of authority and group dynamics. This involves ambiguous realities such as the level of trust shared in a school, the ingenuity teachers demonstrate as leaders with their students, and community traditions that support schools. What variables count will change from school to school, locality to locality, and classroom to classroom. Standard static models simply do not tell us how to accomplish success in these variable contexts (Comer, 1993). Institutional Cultures The creativity of those in institutions and the unfolding, process-oriented quality of institutional life limit the usefulness of causal models that depend on fixed variables and analysis anchored at a single point in time. We cannot use simple cause-and-effect ideas to make sense of institutions. We do better thinking of institutions as cultural worlds in which people use judgment and make moral decisions. The moral decisions are shaped by the special situations of different occupations or institutional groups so we need to think of this morality as contextual rather than universal. This challenges many people’s ideas of how we can understand morality. It is, however, entirely consistent with the sort of pragmatic morality presented by John Dewey (1994) and Philip Selznick (1992). The Big World Intrudes While the idea of organizational culture is basic to having a systematic understanding of how social programs and interventions work in institutions, the other failing of causal model approaches is that they treat programs and organizations as closed social systems. They require that we identify boundaries and separate internal relationships and processes from those that originate outside, in “the environment” (endogenous versus exogenous variables). The goal of causal modeling is to identify a few variables that have strong relationships with each other and hopefully to show that one set of variables causes the other. This approach only works if you can exclude the multitude of other factors that have less significant impacts on outcomes. Modelers often invoke the caveat ceterus paribus, but other things in real life are, in fact, rarely “equal.” The idea must be that the causal model describes a system that is self-contained and separate from the outside. This does not work with institutions because by their nature they are embedded in larger worlds. And even the most careful and rigorous experimental evaluation designs cannot escape a variety of methodological challenges introduced by “real world” contexts (Campbell and Russo, 1999). Communities, Networks, and Interorganizational Fields We tend to ignore the way things in the community-at-large are ever-present in institutions. Because an organization such as a hospital is legally incorporated,

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has a board, and may be owned by a large corporation, we want to treat it as a self-contained entity. But most of the services a hospital provides simply use the hospital as a venue for activity or as an anchor for relationships that mostly exist outside of its walls. The emergency room seems like a self-contained place but you cannot understand what happens without seeing it as part of the community emergency response system. That system includes fire, police, ambulance, and 911 operators and usually these exist as separate institutions that themselves have complex cultures. Most medical services also are embedded in the medical community most of whose practitioners work out in the community, often as private or group practitioners. Although the health care system has changed dramatically in the last decade, sociologists have traditionally seen the hospital as an institution with a dual authority system, one internal and bureaucratic and the other professional and external. The professional system has always seemed the stronger (Perrow, 1965; Greenwald, 1992; Burns, 1994, Smith H.L., 1987). This story can be repeated for schools, the criminal justice system, the welfare system, and the churches. It is easier for us to treat each unit as a selfcontained and self-governing organization. In reality each operates within a matrix of relationships with other organizations and with larger, regional organizations that supervise, supply, coordinate, and advocate. It is true that most of the time we can treat these organizations as though they are self-contained and autonomous systems. But at critical moments the larger system intrudes and crucially shapes events. Without appreciating and understanding the larger interorganizational system, we also cannot understand important events and significant organizations that just cannot be understood individually. Some organizations exist only because large, powerful institutions need tasks done that they cannot do themselves. The smaller organization does things that do not make sense if you take it as a self-contained system and do not see how the larger institutions create a niche within which it can operate. For example, we studied one faith-based organization for delinquents that seemed to carry out programs poorly and operated in a fashion that seemed to violate laws about the separation of church and state. We could make sense of the organization only once we saw that both local schools and the local juvenile probation system had no way of providing inexpensive, highly controlling care for delinquents whom they did not want to put in residential settings. An entrepreneur who saw and exploited an “interorganizational hole” that existed between the schools and the criminal justice system created the smaller organization. You need to know how the larger interorganizational system works to understand the smaller organization. Whole Persons Recognizing that organizations operate within matrices of relationships makes another issue important. Each individual within the organization brings only one part of his or her life to working or learning or being treated. The causal model approach imagines that people have some sort of contract that dominates

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what they do in an organization and that screens out all other concerns and contributions. This approach ignores the vast number of people working in low paid helping professions who do their work as an expression of religious faith. It also fails to deal with all of those patients who fail to comply with the orders of physicians because they have abusive spouses or histories of alcohol abuse or membership in racial groups that have caused them to be excluded and abused by the health care system resulting in chronic under care, or are embedded in other family, ethnic or religious subcultures that express norms that go counter to those expressed by the rational scientific health care system. Where previously such practices were defined as “alternative healthcare,” they are increasingly practiced side by side with the scientific biomedical model and are together referred to as “complementary medicine” (Zollman and Vickers, 1999). We ignore these “outside” commitments as we examine organizational life because they seem just too complicated to be included in our attempts to understand what goes on inside organizations. Unfortunately, they can be factors that most importantly shape what goes on in an institution. A good example comes from James S. Coleman’s comparisons of public, private, and Catholic schools (Coleman et al., 1982). In repeated studies he found that Catholic schools produced the highest rates of achievement with the poorest and most difficult children. Trying to explain this, he proposed that Catholic schools are supported by what he called “social capital.” Children in Catholic schools often attend churches associated with those schools. That would mean that their behavior in school was monitored and guided not only by teachers and principals but also by priests and nuns from the church. Moreover, the likelihood was that their parents participated in parish associations that involved them directly in both church and school activities. Further, the parents would be tied into a network of other families where parents would know the children and show interest and concern for them. Also if the children were disruptive or did not work hard in school, the other parents were likely to report this to the child’s family and thus informal controls would be put in place Coleman argued that the overlapping social systems in which children were embedded as they went to school reinforced the lessons and messages taught in Catholic schools. A simple way of understanding this is that more people knew and were concerned about each child and that each child’s behaviors were significant in several overlapping institutions. The effect goes beyond the way that denser social networks make it harder for children to disobey or be lazy. Children learn a fundamentally different lesson about responsibility in Catholic as compared to public schools. The message in public schools is that each person is an individual, competing with each other and striving for personal advancement. In Catholic schools, children learn that working hard and conforming is good for the community and a responsibility each person has for building and maintaining the common good. Ironically, scholars in this tradition argue, Catholic schools more effectively teach children that they must learn to be citizens whereas public schools teach children to be capitalists.

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Here, we are not siding with one side or the other in the debate about public versus private or religious schools. The point is simply that the larger lives of children matter when we try to understand school success. Middle-class children succeed in schools because the lives they have outside the classroom makes it important for them to succeed and involves their parents and others in their success. Coleman is simply pointing out that the community life that surrounds Catholic schools creates much the same effect. To understand schools, we have to understand how the whole lives of children bear on education. The same is true for any institution. Policy Epochs as Social Movements The institutional approach to policy analysis places front and center the social and historical context in which policies are made and carried out. We recognize that styles of policymaking are shaped by the social and cultural movements that made specific problems significant and particular styles of intervention seem appropriate, effective, and legitimate at a given historical moment. The same issues arising at a different time, affecting a different group, speaking to a different set of cultural symbols because of the different historical moment would not excite attention. Being recognized, given significance, made the recipient of money and intensive participation by people willing to shape their lives around solving some problem gives both an issue and a particular intervention institutional permanence (Beisel, 1997). The historical moment in which institutions are created creates a template and a characteristic style of organization that tends to be reproduced and repeated down through the years. Our system of education was shaped in the 1890s and, even though we might imagine many different ways today of organizing a system to socialize and educate children, we continue to follow the dictates of the Lancastrian Model of classroom instruction that informed the creation of the first public schools (Kaestle, 1983). Until managed care broke through as a dominant form of care in the 1990s, our method for providing medical care was shaped by the professional system put in place in the wake of Flexner’s report in 1914 (Starr, 1982). Thus, policymaking is an institutional phenomenon. Whether or not we have any idea how to produce desired outcomes as we undertake new social programs, looking back over the past century we see that certain periods of intellectual debate, organizational formation, and legislative activity transformed the American social welfare landscape with sweeping changes. The first period was the progressive era lasting roughly from 1885 to 1915. The second was the New Deal era lasting from the beginning of the Great Depression through World War II. The third was the War on Poverty era of the 1960s (Katz, 1997). Each of these eras had a distinct moral ethos linked to strong political movements. Legislation and innovation led to fundamentally new forms of government involvement in the lives of citizens and to new definitions of government responsibility for the welfare of citizens. The eras were each bounded by periods

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of political calm or even conservatism, so they represent periods of sharp change. The new institutions created in each period have also proved remarkably enduring. The basic contours of institutions created in each era remain largely intact and the services provided have come to be seen as basic expectations of American life and culture. It is useful to review the contributions of each era so that as we go forward in this book we keep in mind several things. First, although policymaking ebbs and flows so that today’s innovations seem in decline tomorrow, our social landscape has been shaped and fundamentally changed by this activity. Policymaking matters. Second, intellectuals have been leaders of change in each period. We may be puzzled about how reflective thought by academics feeds into the policy process. There is no question, however, as Lenin recognized, that the discontents and political inclinations of the masses are given voice by those who read widely, collect arcane information, and write freely. Finally, the unit of time one selects for deciding whether change has occurred or whether an intervention has been effective is critical. We see continual short-term revision of policies. Their contours only become clear when we look at patterns of change over a span of decades. The Progressive Reforms We might call the Progressive Era the age of professionalism (Abbott, 1988). The major human service institutions were all given government sanction in this period. Free public schools became available everywhere and education became mandatory for all children. Asylums were erected for a variety of chronic health and behavioral problems—insane asylums; institutions for the retarded; maximum-security prisons; sanitaria for tuberculosis patients and lepers; schools for wayward and delinquent youth (Rothman, 1983; Brenzel, 1983). Police forces were created in major cities and were backed up with newly constructed jails. Settlement houses in large cities and voluntary social service organizations caused development of the social work profession. Scientific medicine came on the scene and the Flexner Report made competing models of health care untenable. The great transition of this era was that American government for the first time became heavily involved in sponsoring and overseeing massive provision of social services. Prior to the civil war, national government was weak and fragmented. To the extent government played a strong role, it was active at the state and local level. However even at these levels, social services were generally provided through religious associations, the philanthropic efforts of individuals, or ad hoc local associations. Services were provided to the extent there was a locally perceived need and the will to address that need. The primary examples we have of these early service efforts mostly involved education, taking care of paupers and orphans, and enforcement of laws and local norms (Skocpol, 1992). Education was usually first an offshoot of religious organization, with local free schools sometimes created by cooperative efforts among various protestant denominations. Poor relief also sometimes received religious sponsorship. Many communities had poor houses or pauper homes

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that required residents to work and receive moral instruction. Since local businessmen and craftspeople could draw upon the labor of these people, support for the poor house became a community responsibility in many places—although it was one supported by charity, not by law. Similarly, the history of public education in much of the country reflects the voluntary contributions by local townships to create the common school (Soltow and Stevens, 1981). Social services became the business of government—a matter of social policy—primarily in response to the waves of immigration that began in the 1860s and continued upto the early 1920s. Massive immigration always creates practical problems of how to house, employ, and control immigrants. When communities triple in size in the course of a decade, with most newcomers being poor and unfamiliar with American ways, simple logistical problems of erecting buildings, finding activities for children, caring for those in need, and finding employment create a continual state of crisis and hardship. In addition, immigration offers natives opportunities for exploitation and oppression of newcomers and their children. Simple greed of capitalists, coupled with the tremendous expansion of the economic system during the industrial revolution, created for the first time conditions of mass urban squalor and the rise of the modern industrial “slum” (Ward, 1984). Four social movements together made social services a national and governmental response (Lubove 1965). First, social disorganization in immigrant communities made those natives living near-by, primarily the urban middle class, feel threatened. Some social innovations, such as urban police forces, were explicit responses to this sense of danger. Second, economic expansion and technological development caused the emergence of an educated new urban middle class. Most of these people came from protestant backgrounds and their religious ideology, together with ideas rooted in academic debates, spawned an aggressive movement for social reform—the progressive movement. A key product of this movement was an effort to create systematic, national philosophies and programs of social intervention. Universities played an important role in articulating these coherent philosophies and in supplying reformers who went forth to proselytize (Deegan, 1988). They were instrumental in creating the field of social work, imposing a uniform administrative system on newly created public schools, making medical training uniform, and creating a variety of asylums for people who were defective—the chronically ill, insane, retarded, wayward, orphaned, and criminal. Third, growth of urban turbulence and emergence of the professional middle class produced a strong moral reaction among the established rural middle class, the petit bourgeoisie. Part of their anger was directed at the cultural pluralism and cosmopolitanism of the cities and of the new middle class. This was expressed as outrage at the sinfulness and moral depravity of urban and immigrant ways. Observers have argued that the gradually declining status of these people who traditionally had formed the national elite fostered special anger and spawned moral improvement efforts such as the prohibitionist movement. However, in many communities, the new and old middle classes were not

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insulated from each other so that reformist and moralist ideas intermingled. A consequence was that progressive reforms often carried with them a strong element of social control and moral improvement of immigrants. The fourth movement involved grassroots efforts by immigrants to improve their communities and to challenge efforts at dominance by the native elites. Those in ethnic settlements often believed they could expect little sympathetic help from either natives or members of other ethnic enclaves and so tight communities emerged with effective self-help and mutual aid organizations that were built around social, religious, labor, and political organizations. Many urban social work organizations have their roots in these ethnic self-help efforts. Ethnic communities also reacted directly against the cultural and economic domination of natives. The urban parochial school system grew up as an explicit rejection of nativist, protestant cultural imperialism in the public schools. Labor unions emerged to challenge the authority of industrial elites. Not only did unions work to achieve contracts for workers but also union/management confrontations created and shaped social welfare institutions. This conflict is responsible for American schools being distinctly more oriented than European schools toward achieved rather than sponsored educational rewards. Labor unions refused to allow public schools to create apprenticeship programs that would compete with union control and exclude poor children from opportunities for educational advancement. Labor unions also fought paternalism in welfare and workman’s compensation programs, establishing rights of the poor and disabled to services rather than having them defined as a variety of charity. The interpenetration of these four movements spawned creation of a diverse collection of service institutions and laid the foundation for a welfare state. Particularly important for our discussion is that social services for the first time became subjects of systematic, universalistic, ideologically committed debate. This debate produced a national conversation about what constituted adequate services that fostered isomorphism within each institutional sphere. National academic and intellectual leaders went from community to community insisting that a particular model be followed in organizing the schools or providing health care. While early progressive efforts emphasized charitable goals, emergence of strong grassroots movements within worker and immigrant communities forced responsibility for services into the public sphere. Attacking progressives as cultural imperialists and as agents of the economic elite, immigrants insisted on self-determination or at least on co-governance in the services they received. The fundamental separation of the native and immigrant communities, and their conflicts over services that all agreed had to be provided, forced government machinery to be created to resolve conflicts and to manage the distribution of scarce resources. The legacy of this period is a system of semiautonomous institutions organized around professions with strong, independent ideologies. Each institution has deep public legitimacy as provider of a basic service and each is firmly controlled by a parochial force of specialists. Intensive discussion of proper social policy is and always has been closely tied to this force of academically trained

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professionals. At the same time, the insulation of each group from outside forces also caused the gradual decline of debate aimed at serious innovation. Professionals are intellectual conservatives, dependent as they are upon an established institutional order. They attack efforts by those outside their ranks to question or reform methods of practice or ways of organizing institutions. Meanwhile, because the main body of public resources are allocated to and controlled by these established institutions, it is difficult to create alternative service provision arrangements that cut across the domains of traditional institutions. The New Deal and World War II The period from 1930 to 1945 brought in the federal government as a major player in the provision of social services and for the first time encouraged people to think about comprehensive national social policy (Smith J., 2006; Milkis and Mileur, 2002; Merrill, 1948; Polenberg, 1980; Winkler, 1986). The Great Depression and the war provided national crises that fostered this comprehensive approach to social action. However, social science was also an important contributor. Competing theories of the socioeconomic system emerged— theories that deepened the sense of crisis and offered solutions. The Russian revolution and the world communist revolution linked misery to an exploitative economic order. The depression gave this hypothesis legitimacy and urgency. Keynesian economics provided a reformist response by giving government spending and action a central role in economic stability. The new social programs created through the New Deal and that persist today generally involve social insurance and regulatory arrangements designed to protect the public from unfair business practices. There were, of course, important changes in economic planning and regulation as well. What is most important for the purposes of this book, however, is that for the first time the New Deal created a national, governmental responsibility for maintaining a standard of minimum social welfare through programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Social Security. Debate about social policy became the business of the federal government, and academic specialties emerged whose task it was to analyze and promote policies for the whole society. Social policy was no longer imprisoned within specialized institutions nor defined as a matter primarily of local concern. There followed a number of fundamental changes in the way we looked at social welfare. First, where many social service programs had previously been rooted in charity, emergence of national social intervention efforts dwarfed philanthropy to the extent that the efforts of foundations and charities began to seem almost trivial as instruments of meaningful social change. Related to this, access to welfare programs was increasingly redefined so that those services no longer were gifts from the privileged to the needy. Increasingly receiving certain basic services was defined as a right all citizens should be able to claim. There was debate about what should be included in the list of citizenship rights— education certainly; a minimum cash allotment to those unable to work; adequate housing; food; medical care. But as these rights were asserted and

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programs created to meet them, recipients came to treat benefits as entitlements. These no longer were discretionary allocations. Government was required to provide these resources to those in need. This shift in government responsibility to—or expansion of government responsibility at—the federal level profoundly changed the relationship between citizen and state. Where the progressive era represented institutionalization of certain ideals of charity championed by the protestant elite and the new middle class, the New Deal codified and resolved political conflicts between workers and capitalists who had been boiling at the grassroots level for half a century. It established as rights of citizenship rights to safety, to basic resources for living, to influence over working conditions, and fostered an expectation of government involvement in managing the economy to protect these rights. In the eyes of social observers T.H. Marshall (1965) and Morris Janowitz (1978), these changes represent the evolution of industrial society (in the United States as in Europe) to a higher state of humanitarianism and service than had previously existed. In a way not true before, these changes also made the nation the fundamental unit of political organization. Although local political jurisdiction retained important powers, the federal government became an important source of resources and policymaking activity at the local level. Through the 1940s and l950s, which included the massive national mobilization for war and its continuation into the cold war, the federal government increasingly challenged and overrode local practices and traditions that, like school desegregation, infringed upon individual rights or led some to be deprived of necessary minimum resources such as housing or public welfare payments (Porter, 1994; Skocpol, 1992). Local politics became increasingly politicized as national problems that would be solved through national action. While these changes made all individuals more fully citizens of the nationstate in the United States, an important consequence of this expansion of federal power was that local political authority was eroded and undercut. This happened in part because the federal government in some cases challenged and overwhelmed local efforts to maintain illegal practices. It also happened because the basis for participation in the political system was changed in a deep way by the great federal expansion. Previously, politics was rooted primarily in a system of local voluntary associations with political affiliations. These allowed the transfer of patronage, on one hand, and allowed social control at the neighborhood level on the other. Benefits were distributed on a conditional basis. One could receive benefits if one belonged to the proper social class or ethnic group, if one accepted the order of the local political machine or social hierarchy, if one sought services or resources that local traditions said could be your due (if you petitioned the powers that be in the proper fashion), or if one was an active participant in local social associations. Those leaders who could build a following, organize their constituents, effectively represent local interests, and mobilize resources on behalf of those narrow local interests that provided the leaders with support could build influence and play an important role in the political process.

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The new federal system undercut this delicate webbing of informal power and local affiliation in two ways. First, benefits no longer would be given out on the basis of privilege and exchange. One could demand them as rights and that meant that local systems of power and influence could no longer punish those who challenged the local social order. The withering of political social control meant that the altruism that emerges from the mechanical solidarity of a local community dried up as well. Gradually, local associations that long had been based on what Richard Titmuss (1970) called “the gift relationship” shifted to what Morris Janowitz (1957) called “the community of limited liability.” Second, those making decisions about program policies and resource allocation had to make their choices confronting a mass society rather than a differentiated network of local politicians. Personal contacts and old boy ties remained important to the extent that elected national politicians were interested in particular programs and decisions. But as the amount of money spent by Washington increased, administrative specialists and bureaucrats became increasingly important as decision makers. They were responsible for serving strangers and citizens who had no special political access to the powerful. Decision-making increasingly was based on the standards set forth by experts and by the shifting fashions of national academic policy debates and by the influence of national lobbyists. Except to the extent that it could gain support from elected national political representatives (congressmen and senators mostly), local political cultures were largely irrelevant to national decision making. Local activists who had strong connections to national political or lobbying organizations could be as effective as local elected leaders in causing change or attracting resources to a locality. In Robert Merton’s terms, it was “cosmopolitans” with external ties beyond the local community who became the new brokers of power, not the “locals” who had built their power base solely on strong but locally limited networks (Merton, 1968e). The overall effect of the New Deal, then was to make the United States into a mass society in a way it had not previously been. This included an important expansion of citizenship rights and of government guaranteed resources and protections. At the same time this expansion undercut local political and community integration while it fostered national debate about political and policy issues. The whole society became politicized in a way it had not been before. This liberated groups oppressed in a particular locality and gave voice to those who were ignored in their local political community. However, this expansion also pulverized the self-help network that was the life-blood of the local political world and was the primary means for political socialization of those citizens who had little personal interest or involvement in the political system. Creation of the mass state meant at the same time a vast expansion of political alienation at the grassroots (Vidich and Bensman, 1958). The Great Society and the War on Poverty The third great period of policy activity in the United States stretched from the time of John Kennedy’s election in 1960 to Watergate in 1972. The signature

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programs of this period were the War on Poverty and the Model Cities Program launched by President Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination (Clark, 2002). However, these efforts rapidly declined and have had little enduring presence in government policy, with the exception of a few successful programs such as Headstart. However, one enduring new process that cut across a number of specific programs was the mandating of local citizen input into the policymaking process. The War on Poverty is important historically more because it provided a template for the two great contributions of this period: creation of federal programs aimed at reforming specific local institutions and grassroots organization for purposes of political protest. The War on Poverty grew out of Kennedy’s concern that, in spite of the vast prosperity of the 1950s that followed American victory in World War II, a substantial portion of the American population remained poor (Harrington, 1962). Seeking causes of this continued poverty, attention focused on local institutions such as the schools, urban renewal authorities, the criminal justice system, public welfare departments, residential treatment institutions, and health care providers whose practices seemed to exacerbate problems rather than solve them. The concerns were twofold. First, many of these organizations were attacked as rigid, insensitive bureaucracies that often “blamed the victims,” labeled children and others as “deviant” in one way or another, and at times carried out institutionally racist policies. Second, social programs were mostly technically narrow, focusing on one social problem at a time such as education or health care while poverty was multidimensional. To ameliorate poverty, the new programs had to simultaneously address many kinds of problems while doing it in a way that gave power to citizens and made service providers accountable to their constituents. The Community Action Program and Model Cities programs, both emphasized comprehensive rather than institution-centered planning and intensive involvement of citizens in community decision making. Combined with the political activism of the civil rights movement and the growing protests against the War in Vietnam, one consequence of these two federal programs was a wild fire of grassroots political organization and increasing militancy among activists. Another consequence was systematic attack on established institutions and the substantial change in some. The deinstitutionalization movement, for example, dramatically changed the settings and services provided for the mentally ill, the mentally retarded, and the chronically disabled. The open school movement encouraged widespread experimentation in schools, although the basic institution changed little. Public housing moved away from concentration on large, high-rise facilities toward rehabilitation and construction of dispersed-site, small, in-fill units. The new federal programs declined rapidly because politicians, especially those at the local level, rebelled against there being government-funded programs that produced such sharp attacks against them. The Community Action strategy was scrapped within five years and by the end of the Nixon administration most of the specific War on Poverty Programs were terminated, cut back dramatically, or transferred to other federal departments. Under the Carter and

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Reagan administrations the dismantling of federally funded categorical grants programs was pursued aggressively until little remained of the formal structure (Moynihan, 1969). Although the manifest signs of the Great Society were attacked and soon dismantled, the ethos of the l960s profoundly reshaped the American policy and political scenes. The New Deal commitment to a national state that would guarantee the welfare and certain basic rights of individuals was dramatically expanded. The leading edge of this development was penetration of civil rights reforms beyond prohibition of discrimination on the basis of race so that protection was afforded to the disabled, to women, and to gays (Richards, 1998). The federal government also took the lead in reforming service institutions that had previously been locally organized and controlled: the schools, health care, mental health programs, public welfare services, and law enforcement (Berry and Lowery, 1987). This effort to reconstruct local service institutions had two important longterm consequences. First, the federal government became sponsor of a research and development industry aimed at social service reform. Foundations, private consulting firms, and universities joined together to form a large, critical audience examining, criticizing, and experimenting to improve programs that for half a century had been controlled almost exclusively by service providers— educators, doctors, social workers, and planners. In addition to funding change efforts and suggesting new ways to organize services, there came to exist a permanent Greek chorus of professional social analysts who could not be eliminated simply by cutting out federal programs. The second important long-term consequence was formation of a horde of small nonprofit service providers specialized in administering innovative services outside of the established social service institutions. By funding many small community social service efforts, the War on Poverty generated this wave of new organizations. Their aggressive grantsmanship meant that when the federal government cut out programs that were politically offensive, especially those related to the War on Poverty, the organizations simply shifted their fundraising targets to other categorical grants programs. Surprisingly, once categorical grants were eliminated in the late 1970s, these organizations continued to survive. They had developed a strong enough constituency of supporters that they were able either to raise funds privately or to successfully claim federal funds withdrawn from categorical grants programs and now placed in block grants to states. Thus, programs for battered women, which began as radical feminist organizations, are now usually funded by state programs and they have settled down to a permanent role as important community service providers (Loseke, 1992). Important as these institutional changes were in the recasting of the social services industry, political changes that followed the War on Poverty have probably been the most profound result of the 1960s. The community organization thrust of the War on Poverty disseminated a technology of political protest developed in Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s by Saul Alinsky. Between the civil rights movement and protests against the War on Poverty, civil disobedience and

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confrontational demonstrations were vastly expanded as a medium of political expression in the United States. These methods involve large numbers of people in intense protest activities while a relatively small number of people serve as architects of the movement. There is more political activism in this sort of expression even though the sort of framework of voluntary association that characterized local politics early in this century was not built up (Skocpol, 2003). The network of small nonprofit service providers generated by the War on Poverty took over as the building blocks of the political infrastructure (Smock, 2004). In addition to its confrontational, activist style of political participation, the political ethos of the 1960s was profoundly antiinstitutional and cynical about the honesty of government. While this was given expression as a cultural style during the hippy and black power movements, cynicism became a society-wide cultural style in the wake of Watergate. Profound distrust and discouragement about the honesty of those in government was deepened by the failures of federal reform efforts undertaken in the 1960s. Although people do not usually think of it as a reform effort, the war in Vietnam was probably the most powerful symbol of the impotence of government. Our inability to impose democracy on the third world was partly responsible for our pulling back on efforts at local domestic reform. These “symbols of inefficacy” no doubt have helped to fuel the assertive policies of the war in Iraq and the educational initiative of No Child Left Behind. However, the domestic retreat was understood to be caused as much by the failure of intervention efforts as by the need for government austerity. We learned that education reform was a bust, that health costs were spiraling upward with our infant mortality rates, and that new housing projects would have to be pulled down because they were crime and fire traps. Policy analysts who might aspire to institutional reform found themselves confronting unpredictable, ambiguous conditions whenever they sought to impose change. The ironic legacy of the Great Society was an industry peopled by professional social analysts dedicated to fine-tuning institutions that provide social services, and to a widespread discouragement about the efficacy of large-scale government intervention to improve the performance of these institutions. The 1960s generated new commitment to grassroots activism. It also defined local issues in universal terms, politicizing all aspects of American life. The Great Society also spawned large numbers of small, nonprofit social service and advocacy organizations that have become an important element in the worlds of political and social service action. Coming in the wake of the political alienation generated by the New Deal’s mass society, these three changes have opened new opportunities for citizens to be involved in social change and governance. There remains, however, a certain impersonality to this involvement. Politics tend to be defined in abstract terms rather than in relationship to the social organizations described as the basis of local political pluralism a generation ago. There also has emerged a corps of experts charged with managing social action. Professional social analysts tell us

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what to think. Professional organizers assemble resources and support for local social and political action. The abstraction of political issues and control of social action by experts allows citizens to avoid accepting responsibility for organizing and acting to bring about social change. The professionalization of social action seems to make civil society unnecessary. The community of limited liability continues (Janowitz, 1957; Greer, 1962; Hunter and Suttles, 1972).

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CHAPTER 8

Moral Policy

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n developing the perspective of pragmatic liberalism, this book has argued that society is a process, not a static thing, and that it can be changed by people who act together in creative ways, guided by values and their moral judgments. We have concluded that there can be no one best model either for conceptualizing the basic relationships in society or for describing and recommending policy interventions to solve social problems. Traditional social science has not offered a satisfactory way of incorporating moral thought into systematic social thinking; and, it is also totalistic or macroscopic in its vision. One of our main arguments is that we have to take local contexts seriously and recognize that the nature of problems and proper interventions that might make things better will change from place to place and time to time. Flexibility like this cannot be incorporated into older social science approaches that have a positivistic focus, emphasizing overgeneralized, cause-effect relationships and closed social system models (Giddens, 1991). The task of this chapter is to bring together arguments for a more processoriented and a local/national linked contextual way of thinking, and also to explain how this allows for a moral approach to social problem solving and policymaking. The morality we offer is not universal and unchanging but rather is pragmatic and rooted in the way that people in institutions and communities create moralities as part of their daily lives and work. And morality is important because it gives meaning to both personal and public life. A Brief Summary of Where We Are The social policy tradition teaches us that efforts to solve social problems are muddled. Our efforts to set a societal agenda are so shot through with special interest politics that we cannot talk about government policymakers seeking to define or serve something we could call the public interest. At our most optimistic, we might say that politicians are like the operators of firms in a complex market. They respond to a bewildering array of interest pressures, try to

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build workable coalitions, and muddle through. Unfortunately, efforts to attack social problems, even those whose causes seem relatively clear cut, are frustrated, deflected, and smothered by the molecular action that makes up American political life. If we try assertively to bring about positive change, we are frustrated by unseen adversaries and blinded by the essential ambiguity and unpredictability of social life (Lindblom, 1990; Levine, 1985). The economic reductionism of market theory tells us not to worry; it is the collective action of colliding molecules that produces change, not the action of committed, purposive individuals. We know from the radical analysis that this story is not good enough, however. Maybe politicians are only the head molecules. However, some molecules carry more molecular weight than others. Those with money and power shape events, not those who are needy and often not those who are doing the productive work that allows society to hang together and prosper. It is descriptively accurate to say that government is so big and the pressures of cross-cutting interest groups so intense that politicians have little control over outcomes. It is not accurate to say that things turn out all right as a consequence. What happens is that policies and institutions are controlled by people with access, and access comes from resources, legitimacy, and connections. Perhaps the genius of modern society is that so many people can get on the gravy train. They still make up a minority of the population; and they are effective primarily in their limited areas of immediate self-interest, being victims in other areas of social policy. Such, for example, are the wealthy retired elite of Santa Barbara studied by Harvey Molotch who were surprised at their powerlessness to stop the pollution of their beaches from the leaking offshore oil wells drilled by multinational oil companies (Molotch, 1970). Specific institutions serve entrenched elites and the economically powerful; while urgent, general public needs have little capacity to change the agendas of specific institutions. Health spending continues to grow as more and more working poor are denied benefits; schools continue to fail with lower-income students as our capacity to compete economically in the world market declines and drug abuse among low-income youth mushrooms. Homelessness increases while savings and loans, institutions supposedly committed to fostering local real estate development, invest speculatively, swindling the public of the savings that could have revitalized communities and then asking for a bailout from the public coffers. Policies in particular institutions have to be informed, directed, and disciplined by some broader social philosophy, by a conception of the general good that guides specific actions. Yet in the first part of this book, we saw that the available macrotheories about social problem solving do not work very well. Two things were wrong. First, none of the grand theories of social life explain the details of social life very well. It is easy to find examples that frustrate or contradict them, and that thus allow us to dismiss their authority. Second, although the theories are presented as mutually exclusive alternatives, it is easy to present facts that support each of them. Indeed, when we reviewed radicalism, pluralism, and conservatism in the first part of this book, we argued that the three perspectives can comfortably exist alongside each other because their

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insights are rooted in different observations about social reality. They explain different facts, and the same facts in different ways. If we think of the macrotheories as comprehensive, scientific explanations, we would like tests that would allow us to accept or reject them, to differentiate among them, and that would allow one to emerge as the best theory. That does not happen. Instead, the theories exist alongside each other in a dialectic dialogue. Often it seems that ideologues who champion one or another model value the contrariness of their ideological opponents and most dislike the indifference of those who refuse to be attracted to ideological thinking in general. As it is with most religions, it is the pragmatists and opportunists who are the enemy, not other religious people who happen to subscribe to a different code of belief. Two Confusions The summary of social policy thinking we have offered in this book presents us with two seemingly irresolvable dilemmas in making sense of social life and in trying to launch social reforms that will work. One is the contradiction between micro- and macro-understandings of the world. The other is the current impotence of moral thinking. The Micro-Macro Problem Social science is paralyzed. Our macrotheories do not allow us to make the kinds of lawful predictions “hard” sciences achieve, and our efforts to understand and change particular social problems seem always frustrated by our inability to predict and control the immediate social contexts in which those problems occur. We might understand this as a technical issue. If the macrotheories we have summarized explain some facts and not others, we might say the proper remedy is to produce better and more encompassing macrotheories so that they can meet the requirements of scientific testing. Meanwhile, if our microlevel explanations of, say, the factors that explain school success are frustrated by ambiguity, we might seek to “more completely specify the model” or to link our microanalyses to macrotheories that more effectively tell us how to select among explanatory variables. We have come to realize, however, that the positivistic goal of producing a unified theory of social life is not likely to be achieved. Such a theory would require that there be an objective social reality that exists and shapes behavior independently of culture or history or social and political change. While there probably are some aspects of social life that are universal and unchanging—such as some rules of small group interaction or “strong attractions” among people— most of the things we really care about cannot be reduced to these atoms of social life; nor can verities produced by laboratory investigation be automatically transferred to the in vitro dynamics of gang warfare or the vicissitudes of ethnic or social class stratification (Smith T., 1992). We study particular issues because they matter to us, and we think of them in terms of the institutions we have created, the behavior styles that typify our

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culture, the conflicts that arise in this political moment, and accidents of nature that confront humanity (even those shaped in part by people, such as the hole in the ozone layer or Hurricane Katrina’s flooding of New Orleans). Our macrotheories have the power they do because they are organized around metaphors and the central values of life that we find compelling and powerful. They try to help us understand and explain some of the things that we care most about; they also help us come to terms with things that cannot be changed— most often aspects of social inequality. The failure of positivism in social science comes from the dependence of social explanation on the context in which it is formulated. Most of the things we want to understand or alter are unabashedly social inventions. If we want to understand the nature of the sick role, given increases in chronic illnesses, we need to recognize the importance of advances in medical technology and the acute illness orientation of the American medical profession. All of these things are products of late twentieth-century culture in advanced or postindustrial societies. Sickness has a dimension of biological reality. But that reality is partly created by the presence of medical interventions, by stigmas attached in our culture to disabilities, to the economics of contemporary health care, and so on. Similarly, there is no best way to teach children so that they master basic cognitive skills and internalize norms important to success in modern society. The skills we judge to be important in school are not tightly linked to the skills people will actually have to master to be a success at work; reading and arithmetic certainly are central skills in our modern technological society but so is an ability to understand machines or to find creative or artistic ways to solve problems. We emphasize certain skills because they have been important in the cultural life of the elite and because they approximate the kinds of cognitive abilities people will have to develop to succeed as adults. The way we teach these skills also is culturally specific. That we teach in classes where children are expected to remain silent and to function as individuals is culturally peculiar. That we expect students to do assignments given weeks in advance is a requirement comfortable in some cultures and not in others. We know that one reason low-income children fail to learn in our schools is because we create socially and culturally uncomfortable environments for them. The question of why children fail is not really a matter of what we can do to improve individual cognitive performance. That is a way to frame the problem, but it ignores the equally valid question of why we expect schools to be egalitarian when we insist on teaching children in an environment best suited to the social and cultural lives of the elite. If we wanted to repair education, the logical thing to do would be to teach in a style that those failing would find comfortable, expecting that the elites are more adaptable and would be able to adjust to the discomforts they would encounter in this new school system. These examples indicate the way that most of the things we study in the social and policy sciences involve historically specific problems that we cannot easily describe in terms of some objective, unchanging reality. This has unsettling consequences for our problem of how to unify micro- and macro-levels of analysis. The macro and the micro remain disjointed not because social science

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is too immature or technically inadequate to achieve unification. It is probably impossible in principle to achieve unification given the way we usually propose these two different kinds of analysis. Microlevel analysis is usually motivated by a desire to solve a particular problem and to describe accurately the forces that shape a particular situation. Macrolevel theories are by contrast created as instruments of orientation—generalized frameworks. Both kinds of theory imply the other. Microanalysis is trivial unless it is justified in terms of some broad concern. For example, we want to know how differences in school expenditures affect learning outcomes because we think improving education for poor children is vital to long-term social stability. We want to know how the natural social supports that exist in communities can substitute for elaborate medical care because the growing costs of health care and its maldistribution are an important source of injustice in American society. Thus meticulous microlevel research makes sense because of some concerns we share about societal—macrolevel—problems of equity and justice. Similarly, grand theories only appeal to us if they help us to understand specific, puzzling, or disturbing things. Radical conflict theory is appealing because it is hard otherwise to understand why so many social institutions supposedly committed to helping people do the opposite. The abstract story radicals tell instructs us as we confront specific, concrete situations. In other words, macrotheories can and do have microuses. While the two kinds of theory imply each other, we are not really interested in turning one into the other—making microtheory into a macrotheory or vice versa. Our ideas about the nature of sickness and the social basis of chronic disease have considerable power when built up into comprehensive abstractions. We can use the concept of sickness to talk about many kinds of social problems— alcoholism, for example. Those who have criticized the “medicalization” of society, however, effectively show that the sickness model distorts our understanding in critical ways. Alcoholism has no specific etiology or developmental course. Research suggests that, in contrast to the lifelong chronic affliction portrayed by the disease model, most people who are dependent on alcohol or illegal drugs spontaneously limit their abuse after several years (Bucholz and Robins, 1989). The disease model of addictions was helpful in the early years of Alcoholics Anonymous, primarily as a way of shifting the moral burden of substance abuse. Where it once was generally considered an individual moral failing, the disease model legitimated the view that alcoholics were victims of a power or force beyond their control. The concept was an important metaphor but apparently its extension from medicine to the control of deviance cannot be defended scientifically. The concept of sickness is essential for understanding the domain of health and illness. Its explanatory power is restricted, however. Extended outside of its domain, sickness becomes metaphoric and moral, not scientifically descriptive and predictive. We find similar distortions when we try to extend macrotheories to account for all kinds of behavior. We see this, for example, when economic theorists try

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to use the conservative theory we outlined earlier to explain altruism (Simon, 1993). Economic theory works best to explain behavior where money is involved so that costs and benefits can be clearly defined and calculated. In his analysis of blood donation, Richard Titmuss (1970) argues that we must obscure or hide obvious individual benefits to the donors that might follow the act of donation, otherwise we run the risk of destroying the altruism necessary for an effective blood system. If people gain calculable benefits from a blood gift, we encourage them to lie about their health, thus endangering the blood supply. This dishonesty was partly responsible for contamination of the American blood supply with the hepatitis-B virus. The potential for contamination caused France to block importation of an American made malaria vaccine, even though this medical advance could save lives. Titmuss also argued that if some people receive payoffs for their blood gifts, it will discourage others to give in the absence of a payment. Economists trying to explain altruism have sought to recast it as a variety of self-interest. Titmuss not only suggests that this is likely to be a futile analytic exercise, he also points out that if we believe we ought to be able to explain altruism in economic terms, we will change our institutions to meet that expectation. Doing so will destroy naturally occurring altruism. Macrotheory is thus not only descriptively inadequate in this case; it becomes an ideology that threatens to undermine the operating rationale of the very situation it is trying to explain. The unity of knowledge, promised when the label “science” is attached to what mathematician Serge Lang (1998) calls “social studies,” is a false promise. The search for what E. O. Wilson (1998) sees as the unity of all knowledge— scientific and moral—in his book Consilience is refuted by those such as Stephen J. Gould (2000) who see the elements of “emergence” and “chance” as factors that generate distinct and different realms of knowledge that defy unification. Without that promise, however, “professional social inquiry”—the term used by political economist Charles Lindblom—seems little more than a cacophony of conflicting voices (Lindblom and Cohen, 1979). For any assertion based on research, one can find an expert who will in good faith challenge that finding with some other research. Social science becomes a moral and political activity, not solely an effort to discover and present truth. One can demand precision and rigor in explaining specific problems; this activity is usually agnostic when it comes to relating concrete analysis to an overarching theoretical or moral perspective, however. Any position is defensible as long as it is consistent with the data. One may choose instead to take a strong theoretical stand; usually these folks do not care too much if the details of the data do not fit. Theories should not be rejected or changed just because they are contradicted by this or that specific empirical finding about the world. Ideas trump facts. It is no wonder in such a fix that policy analysts throw up their hands and give up on the project of trying to have social policymakers base decisions on rigorous, sophisticated thinking and on plausible moral grounds.

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Engineering and Enlightenment Models of Social Policy Attempts to answer substantive social and policy questions outlined in our previous discussion may be summarized in terms of two broad analytical perspectives defined as the engineering and enlightenment models of social science. (The terms of this distinction were first proposed by Morris Janowitz in a faculty seminar at the University of Chicago and elaborated on by Albert Hunter.) This distinction crosscuts, or runs orthogonally through all three broad policy perspectives of conservative, pluralist, or radical. Furthermore, it will be seen to be very useful for organizing the seeming contradictions that have resulted in a policy paralysis in social research. Though similar to the earlier and more pervasive distinction between “applied” and “pure” research, this reformulated distinction is offered as a corrective to the often denigrating connotations applied by practitioners of one side of this polarity to those on the other side. The positive claims for transcendent values asserted primarily by academics in their search for “knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” and the utilitarian values espoused by practitioners mucking about in the world of everyday reality, both of these too often fail to appreciate the mutual interdependencies and contributions of one to the other. Just as “engineers” may become too embroiled within the complexities of their specific problems and thereby fail to see the proverbial forest for the trees, so the academic may err in positing a hypothetical forest that, by his or her own admission, fails to consider the trees that may be falling about their heads. Or, to shift metaphors, the pure scientist when flying to a convention to give a paper on theoretical aerodynamics, must place his faith in the engineer who has designed the wings of the plane to anticipate the flex of the thunderstorm through which he is flying, while the engineer who will eventually read that theorist’s paper in a professional journal may conceive of a new aircraft design that theoretically may have previously been considered inconceivable. In short, both are expressing behaviorally, if not “ideologically,” their interdependence and faith in the knowledge and skills of the other. So too with the engineering and enlightenment models of social science in general and with their more specific focus in institutional analyses of social policy. To evaluate fully and fairly the contribution of social science to social policy, it is necessary to consider both the engineering and enlightenment perspectives. To focus solely upon the “pure” or academically based contributions would be a myopic understatement of one of the central characteristics of contemporary social science, namely, the degree to which it is quickly, and perhaps some would say too uncritically and incautiously, picked-up, utilized, and diffused within the broader society. Such crossovers or diffusions are not simply “ideological” or “ideational” in character but rather are rooted in institutional and structural realities of contemporary society, and in the policymaking process. Social scientists are often caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of viewing their own work as either ineffectual and underappreciated, or as pregnant with powerful potential for impacting policy and generating social reform. A safe passage between these shoals of humility and hubris lies in a more middling assessment.

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Purpose, Process, and Problems: Teleomatics, Systematics, and Problematics For heuristic reasons we suggest three broad categories that may be used to distinguish the engineering and enlightenment perspectives. We recognize that, as with any typology, the various components and subthemes of each of the three categories are logically and pragmatically interrelated, and that therefore these categories are somewhat fluid. With this caveat in mind, we nonetheless suggest that the engineering and enlightenment models of social science differ with respect to the following: (1) their view of the overall purpose of social research, its ultimate goals or ends, or what we might call its “teleomatics”; (2) their conceptions of the processes by which social structures operate, what we call their “systematics”; and (3) their idea of the source and nature of social problems, their “problematics.” Purpose or Teleomatics While both perspectives are concerned with the general question of how knowledge can be brought to bear upon policy questions, the enlightenment model is primarily oriented to “understanding” while the engineering model is oriented to “prediction” (Hess, 1997). Understanding and prediction are rooted in different “epistemologies,” different ideas of what constitutes knowledge and how one generates or acquires such knowledge. These differences are not only debated within the social sciences, they also have important implications for the different roles that social science can play in informing public policy. Though often framed as a somewhat sterile, internecine “either/or” opposition, we maintain that these two orientations are complementary. The enlightenment model in contrast to the engineering model often considers a broader time sweep within its analyses and is especially likely to emphasize historical analyses that see present conditions arising out of a complex constellation of historical factors and forces. Perhaps no title captures this perspective more fully than Charles Tilly’s (1984) Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. Individual human actors are often dwarfed by the might and majesty of such analyses. By contrast the engineering model is more narrowly focused and time bound to an immediate present, a present that arose from an immediate past and which points to an immediate future. It more explicitly searches for conditions that are the causes and consequences of strategic human intervention. As such, engineering analyses are specifically concerned with “causal” theories, developing and testing discrete variable properties and the quantifiable parameters of interdependent covariation. By altering “x,” how is “y,” ceterus paribus, altered? By contrast, enlightenment models are often more Aristotelian in nature and rely more upon “gestalt typification,” and comparative analyses specifying “ideal” deductively derived theoretical “types” or, inductively developed “classes” of phenomena. In a word, they classify different kinds of things. Another way of conceiving this, which has important implications for their ultimate “goals” or “ends,” is that the engineering model is concerned with discrete units having variable properties, and the goal is to

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maximize the aggregated value of some variable (value) across numerous discrete units. By contrast, the enlightenment model is oriented to the whole itself, seeing the goal as the realized construction of an ideal whole; or being more normatively defined with respect to central values, it is concerned not simply with an “ideal type,” but an “idealized type.” For example, where the former may define the ideal “utopian community” as a maximized aggregated sum of individual states of “happiness,” the latter may define it as a constellation of values that are unique to a collective, for example, as “democratic.” The above considerations lead to a central “drift” or tendency within the two perspectives that is historical in origin and today links them to distinct intellectual circles. These are, respectively, the drift of the engineering perspective toward “scientism,” and of the enlightenment model toward “humanism” (Lee, 1973; Gella, 1978). This tendency toward drift is a dynamic tension that may lead to either of the two perspectives falling outside the pale of acceptable social science, and they maintain their “legitimate” place only to the degree that the two remain in constant dialogue thereby correcting the inherent drift of the other. Scientism may be represented by mathematical modelers so enraptured by the elegance of their models that they dismiss with disdain any questions of correspondence of the models to the data of social reality; and humanism may be represented by sentimental rhetorical appeals and moving anecdotes that produce a grounded sense of experiential truth but fail to link to any larger generalizable systematic theory beyond a jargoned summary that could be reduced to some commonsense platitude. Within the social and policy sciences, scientism keeps humanism honest and rational, and humanism keeps scientism relevant and real. Systematics Both the engineering and enlightenment models have a systematic view of social life in general, and of local life and local communities in particular. However, in part derived from their teleomatics, their conceptions of what constitutes the most significant aspects of these systems differs. First, the engineering approach with its emphasis upon variable properties of numerous individual units tends to view systems as “horizontally segmented”. That is, discrete equivalent units are seen to act or respond similarly in terms of their position within the system, and to act or respond differently from units operating in different positions. This “analysis of variance” differs markedly from the enlightenment model, with its teleomatic emphasis upon wholes, which tends to focus upon the “vertically integrated” components of the system and “part-whole” relationships. When this difference turns to an analysis of the institutions of a social system or a policy program in a local community, the engineering perspective tends to focus upon discrete institutional spheres, or at most upon a few institutions in relationship to one another, a singular approach. By contrast, the enlightenment model tends to focus upon the complex constellation of institutions and their unique configuration that serves to define or constitute the whole. For example, where the former might focus upon local educational institutions in relationship with local patterns of juvenile delinquency, the latter might consider a broad

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range of institutions including schools, churches, associations, businesses, and the like and the density of such institutional networks that can be used to type different communities and their patterns of juvenile delinquency. Given this differing institutional focus, a natural consequence that is more historically specific to the contemporary scene is for the engineering model to focus upon the state and upon the power and authority of this one institutional sphere above all others to intervene through specific agencies and policy programs in the social life of a given community. By contrast, as suggested above, the enlightenment model is more apt to view the state as but one institution that must be seen in relationship to a wide number of social actors, both individual and collective, that make up the social life of a community. As such, the state is as much a “dependent” construct as an “independent” construct to be purposefully manipulated toward desired goals. Where the engineering model, perhaps rightly, sees the state as the most (and increasingly) centralized institutional point of power for maximizing social intervention, the enlightenment model sees numerous institutional interlinkages that tend to minimize any singular intervention strategy. As we will see, this distinction was a critical component of the War on Poverty’s Model Cities Program in the 1960s. Problematics We turn finally to the different conceptions of “problematics” contained within the engineering versus the enlightenment models. Specifically, we are concerned here with three things: how social problems are defined, how intervention strategies are designed to solve those problems, and how such interventions are evaluated (Heiner, 2002; Merton, 1961). The engineering model, given its ideas of purpose and process, its teleomatics and systematics, tends to define social problems as “component failures.” This means that one part or unit of a causal system is seen to have “broken down,” leading to dysfunctions or negative consequences. This idea of failure in turn implies that the optimal intervention strategy is to focus in on the broken component or unit, and “fix” it. For example, as an “explanation” of the increasing crystallization of black underclass communities in American cities, defining the “black family” as the “broken component” of the system resulted in the now (in)famous “Moynihan Report” (US Department of Labor, 1965). This is not to suggest that singular component “fixes” are always doomed to failure as intervention strategies. For example, a more notable if not unqualified “success” may be seen in such programs as “affirmative action” that has increased the proportion of minorities in specific positions. The “fixing” of “broken” components as an orientation also calls for an explicitly “experimental” and “episodic” model of social intervention. Once a problem is isolated as a causal set of variable properties of units of the system, then altering one set of variables through specific interventions may be hypothesized (predicted) to alter another set of variables to the desired outcome. One of the more recent clear examples of the engineering approach is the “broken windows” theory of dealing with disorder and crime in urban areas. By fixing a specific component that is broken (symbols of incivility or signs of disorder in the urban physical environment) the causal consequences will positively ramify

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throughout the urban system leading to a decline in fear and crime (Hunter, 1978; Wilson and Kelling, 1982; Skogan, 1992; Taylor, 2001). The enlightenment model, with its longer-term and holistic teleomatics and systematics, by contrast, tends to define social problems as “disarticulations” among component parts of a complex system that have evolved over a lengthy time period. No singular component is therefore seen to be a “failure,” rather the relationships among components are seen to be in continuously shifting alignments. The corresponding intervention strategy involves less a “fixing” of broken components to reestablish some equilibrium in the system, and more of a continuous process of intervention and adjustment of different parts of the system in a continuously shifting (dis)equilibrium. It is a systematic intervention that, for example, equates “democracy” not with any specific policy “outcome,” but with a “process” that moves within a parametric and historically variable range of intervention between anarchy and totalitarianism. The above considerations suggest more specifically how the two perspectives “evaluate” the outcomes of their intervention strategies to solve social problems. The engineering model, with its emphasis upon a “scientific,” “experimental” design of necessity has predefined, predicted singular “dependent variables” as the manifest points of evaluation of the intervention. If the predefined variables of the system that are designated as the critical “outcomes” do not “measure up” to the expected (hypothesized or predicted) values, then the intervention strategy or policy program is manifestly defined as a “failure.” These are very stringent criteria indeed. By contrast, the enlightenment model, less “experimental” in the design of its intervention strategies, is more open to consider a wider range of “outcomes,” some of which may be latent and previously unspecified in a given design. Therefore, engineering evaluation has an inherent “bias” toward finding “failures” of policy interventions, while enlightened evaluation has a “bias” toward finding “some positive consequences” of any given intervention strategy. Furthermore, the latter tends to see any given singular intervention as less than critical and, given its teleomatics and systematics, as always likely to be less than optimal in its outcome. The Confusion Related to Morality From the above we are suggesting that both engineering and enlightenment models of sociological intervention in social life have their strengths and weaknesses. These strengths and weaknesses can themselves be evaluated both intrinsically within the theoretical framework of academic sociology, and within the political realities of everyday social life. Each is an equally valid point of assessment within its own sphere, and yet it is necessary to consider both in evaluating the historical contribution of the sociological enterprise to the values of community life. There is, thus, a gap between engineering approaches to social change and enlightenment visions. We need them both, but a persistent problem is to make the two levels of analysis be mutually responsive in the course of concrete efforts to produce social change. In our view, a civil society is one where this

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articulation exists; it is one where narrow efforts to solve specific social problems are informed by a broader social vision and it is one where broad social vision is informed by the practical realities involved in solving specific problems. The Morality of Institutional Cultures This unity of ideals and reality perhaps sounds like a normative vision—one more prescription by social visionaries wishing that their model of utopia would be carried out by those listening to their lectures. While our vision is idealistic, the union of the abstract with the practical happens often in the routine activities of institutional life. The vehicles for enacting civil society are the cultures that grow up as people live in organizations, advance their careers, and solve everyday problems. The cultures are moral communities. As such they provide people with ways of defining justice and injustice, with conceptions of reality that tell them how to evaluate truth, and they offer myths of action that guide people in their work. Making this assertion about institutional culture is not new; there is a vast amount of social theory that explains its importance and many case studies that seek to describe the emergence and force of local cultures (Martin, 2002). There also is a vigorous critical literature that attacks the notion that moral communities emerging in formal organizations or local communities have much important effect on social life (Frazer, 2000). When Talcott Parsons (1964), for example, suggested that doctors are part of a moral community that defines and controls competence, radicals scoffed, saying that if any moral community exists, one could not describe it. One also could not find much evidence that doctors agreed about how to practice or that they would accept serious control from any central moral authority in their profession. People such as Anselm Strauss (1985) and Eliot Freidson (1988) argued that doctors mostly follow their own self-interest and that the medical profession is more of an industry lobby, seeking to protect a monopoly over medical practice, than an instrument of serious moral leadership or of physician control. Critics did not necessary dispute that there arises in institutions a selfcontained world whose members have idiosyncratic ways of defining reality. There are, however, a number of troublesome questions about what these cultures are, how they work, and what they are good for (Bosk, 2003). The question Strauss and Freidson, among others, asked is how we can tell a culture exists or is meaningful. In our view, this criticism does not negate the existence or importance of institutional cultures. It just points out a flaw in the thinking of those who think all organizations have cultures or that all cultures are the same. For many, the existence of organizational culture is a truism. It is hard to imagine that a school or a hospital does not have one. Yet for the concept to have any value, we have to accept that cultures that matter are a variable. They may or may not be present in an organization and they may or may not have an impact. Social science has not searched for that elusive species—the organizational culture that counts. Because of that, we do not know where it is most likely to occur or what makes an institutional culture have impact.

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Another troublesome question about institutional cultures involves their content. We have said that institutional cultures link the concrete world of social engineering with the abstract world of ideology. Where this linkage is robust and works effectively, civil society exists. This is tantamount to saying that institutional culture is our most important source of moral guidance. If its value for civil society comes from its capacity to link the micro to the macro, then institutional cultures produce morality because of their process. This suggests, however, that any organization that links micro to macro is moral. That would be troublesome to most people because we tend to think of morality as universal and unchanging across people. Morality involves precepts and guiding rules. We might have a relativistic morality in which those rules are flexible. But even then there are rules—albeit ones that are contextually defined. Contextual ethics are not saying that morality arises only from process—that means justify the ends. The notion of institutional culture is inherently process based, however, and this means that the normative worlds they spawn tend to be “cut loose” from universal moral precepts. Organization action is justified and understood in its own terms. As we saw in chapter 6, this occurs partly because people working in organizations confront unique value conflicts or operational dilemmas. They work out with their peers survival or coping arrangements that become the standard operating procedures (SOPs) of the organization and these, in turn, become reified into the conventional understandings of that institution. The processes of institutional life cause people to create cultures that necessarily are historically specific and context dependent. A moral world results, but it is a relativistic, not a universalistic, moral world. This echoes the position of Richard Rorty (1989) in his debate with Jurgen Habermas (1992) over the pragmatic foundation of liberal theory. This creates a familiar problem in organizational analysis. We have been able to study organizations effectively because we can treat them as bounded worlds, cut off from the outside. Viewed this way, organizations become self-justifying machines for survival. They are not instruments for achieving useful social purposes. They are collectivities that maximize their advantage. If they do shoddy work, it only matters if consumers or suppliers or regulators notice and punish bad work. If they accomplish their goals, the organization does not close down. It simply finds new things to do. Similarly, if an organization is serving a perfectly useful function but finds that it can gain more wealth for members by switching to some other activity, then organizations do not hesitate to do so. Organizations may have rich internal cultures but as totalities they are amoral. In this perspective they are unresponsive to broader social imperatives, and this suggests that they cannot be instruments for civil society. They are just another manifestation of the moral malaise that plagues contemporary America. Pragmatic liberalism resolves this difficulty by arguing that we must pay attention to the way that institutions are linked to the broader society. The flaw in traditional organizational analysis is precisely that it capitalized upon a distorting metaphor—that of the autonomous social system. While it is analytically convenient to assume that organizations and communities chart their own

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courses and construct cultures without being influenced in important ways by broader society, the depth of that external influence is a variable—a variable with critical impact on the shape of organizational affairs. Some organizations, in fact, are essentially autonomous and they may construct moral worlds that are blind to broader influences. But, most of the important institutions interact with the outside world constantly and in ways that critically shape members’ activities. Thus, it is technically an error to describe the local moralities organizations create as self-contained. In chapter 6, for example, when we talked about work cultures arising as people sought to cope with value conflicts, the values they juggle are imposed by the broader culture. How does that imposition occur? What are the mechanisms by which a group is made accountable to the broader system? Certainly there are differences in the tightness of the control exercised by value producers on particular work groups. Neurosurgeons and school psychologists, for example, work in worlds where the consequences of their work are vastly different; where the divisions of labor they work in are not equally tight or closely articulated; where their value as measured by income is quite different; where the education and skill required to do the work is not the same; and where there are not the same numbers of people around with the capacity to evaluate the quality of one’s performance. Perhaps both groups are seeking to balance conflicting norms but the moral quality of their work has to be vastly different. Conventional theories of institutional culture do not tell us how to make this comparison. For pragmatic liberalism, morality arises in institutional settings—as a product of efforts by members to balance the needs of their immediate social and work groups with the demands of the broader world. The key to an effective culture is the balance. Some institutions will be heavily shaped by external demands. This is reflected in economists’ ways of studying firms. Their approach suggests that only interactions with consumers and suppliers outside an organization are necessary for us to understand and model organizational behavior. Internal culture is external to that analysis because, where this mode of analysis works, organizations are completely controlled by external demands. Other institutions will be wholly autonomous and capable of resisting pressures from outside to shape internal practices. Erving Goffman’s (1961) discussion of total institutions implies this sort of insulation from outside influences. Moral organizations lie between these two extremes and it is in these institutions that we find the “pragmatic” basis for civil society. Linkage and Accountability The main insight that allows us to imagine a civil society is that moral action involves two separate problems. First, morality requires norms. Not all organizations are norm-producing ones. If they foster self-interest and if they do not generate an internal culture, the organizations are not normative. Thus, not all action is guided by norms: whether or not people will find themselves in settings that encourage moral action is a variable.

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Second, however, both the normative and the nonnormative orders that grow in organizational settings must be linked to and be accountable to a larger moral and social order. We think of organizations as individuals writ large—corporate actors, as James Coleman calls them. That image depicts organizations as essentially selfish, however. Survival and growth become the dominant motives for existence. Organizations may generate internal cultures but they have power and validity, in this individualistic mode, to the extent that they create a selfcontained, self-justifying world for members. These organizations may have strong norms and yet still be amoral and even immoral as in the case of organized crime or white-collar corporate crime (Cressey, 1969; Shapiro, 1987). These organizations pollute the environment to cut costs or educate children in a way that placates the local community while ignoring cognitive requirements of the larger society. Social science has failed to find a theory of institutions that transcends organizational selfishness. An adequate theory must tell us, however, what causes normative organizations to be accountable to the broader society. This must be a theory that both allows for self-interested organizational culture and for sensitivity to the ethical and social mandates of the broader society. The tradition of policy analysis we described in chapter 7 shows that how we conceive of the linkage between the state and particular organizations is as problematic as is the issue of how we should conceive of organizations in other than selfish terms. One might say that if we have selfish organizations, organizations that ignore broader social values and needs, we ought simply to restructure our institutions so that organizations are forced to address broader social values. This implies, however, that we might have centralized, engineering solutions to great social problems. Central planning for most policies is essentially flawed. Planners cannot know all of the details policies must be tailored to handle. Furthermore, individual practitioners must carry out policies. They tend to have ideas of their own and to resist centralized control. The main point of the pluralist vision is that policy planning has to be decentralized; planners must muddle through, they cannot anticipate future events and orchestrate neat, surgical interventions. The puzzle of civil society is that it must be decentralized and rooted in norm-producing (and thus independent) organizations. Yet these organizations must be committed to maintaining the whole and they must be responsive to a larger social vision. This requirement seems like a contradiction, given that we mostly understand organizations to be corporate actors and selfish social systems. With such an understanding, organizations will only respond to broader values if they are held accountable by a more powerful force and if there are incentives that make it in their self-interest to be accountable. If, however, there can be no effective centralized planning force as the pluralists argue, what generates the structure of accountability? If people need God for them to act morally, then if there is no God, can people be moral? That seems to be the dilemma that confounds our efforts to envision moral organizations. From a rational, secular, civil society perspective we come to recognize that it is up to us to construct our own moral orders.

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A New Organizational Model Selfish organizations and the impossibility of central planning present us with an intractable dilemma mainly because they are captive of the engineering view of the world that characterizes so much of contemporary economics. We gain tremendous conceptual power from the selfish strategy of economics, using what Raymond Boudon (1981) calls “methodological individualism” to analyze the social world. This approach asserts that all action can be described by making reference to the decisions of individuals and that the motivation to act can be boiled down to calculations made by individuals about the relative utility—the costs and benefits—of alternative actions. Corporate actors, our selfish organizations, are an example of methodological individualism. Central planners, the people who we need to create incentive programs if we are to have accountable organizations, also fit in the scheme of methodological individualism. This approach cannot generate moral organizations, however, because the basic assumption of the method requires that we ignore the way individuals and organizations are part of and inseparable from a larger whole. Most social service organizations, for example, make no sense as institutions that are disconnected from the broader culture or from the evolving policy initiatives of the state. Yet this disarticulation is precisely what we encourage when we foster an organizational theory based on methodological individualism. We might say this is an unfortunate error in academic thinking were it not that thoughts are things—that theory informs praxis. While social service organizations emerged historically in response to state and cultural imperatives, generations of commitment to the notion that organizations must protect their autonomy and make careful cost-benefit calculations as they plan new courses of action creates a new reality, the reality of selfish organizations. Consider the public schools, for example. Americans have difficulty imagining schools as other than they are: monopolistic, universally accessible, public institutions; organizations that occupy all children, all day, nine months out of the year; organizations that teach children in class with a style of instruction based on lecturing and group focused instruction; institutions that define specific cognitive skills (reading and math) as “essential” and relegate others (arts, music, social science, rhetoric) to subordinate status; institutions that are basically disengaged from the world of work, teaching skills not directly applicable when students take jobs. These attributes arose in response to religious and cultural initiatives in the late nineteenth century, from the emergence of urban society and as a product of labor conflicts. Once set in place, the basic structure of the institution was crystallized and set in concrete as taxing powers and funding arrangements were created, labor agreements internal to schools were worked out, and legal decisions circumscribing the power of local communities to control the content of education were handed down. The structure of school organizations may have functional origins but today their nature is defined mostly by interest groups that strongly defend the autonomy and practices of the institution for its own sake, and not because it effectively performs broader social functions (Street, 1969).

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Thus, schools have become selfish organizations rather than ones that effectively serve society. Studies of school effects that use economic methodology, organizational studies, and research on the psychology of learning all reinforce the autonomy of schools by taking the present structure as given. Most of these studies are presented as descriptive, in the sense that they tell how schools work in their present configuration. But those studies also reinforce the existing structure by claiming scientific legitimacy and making statements about the objective nature of education, learning, and intelligence. The debate about whether or not intelligence as measured by IQ tests is genetically determined is a classic example of this process, since the content of the tests was originally defined by the kinds of questions that would best predict school success. If IQ is genetically determined, then schools teach the only way they can teach. Their structure is not a product of historical, cultural, economic, and political accidents. It rather is an inevitable product of the nature of human beings and of the way we learn. If schools are unresponsive to social needs, that is not a failing of the institution’s architecture. As Arthur Jensen et al. (1973) explore the question “How much can we boost IQ and academic achievement?” he implies that socioeconomic inequalities come about mainly because smart people excel and less-gifted people sink lower in the social order. If black people are poor, it probably is because they are not very smart. This argument ignores the massive amount of data we have that when we change the structure of education, learning outcomes change (Fischer, 1996). Yet Jensen’s conclusion follows logically from the perspective that education is essentially a psychological process that can be understood without paying attention to the broader social, culture, and political context of society. Pragmatic liberalism requires that institutions be responsive to this broader context. If children are to be educated effectively, it only makes sense that the experience they have in schools articulates effectively with the experiences students have outside of schools. The same is true for health care or law enforcement or any other social service. Social services are effective only to the extent they have the support and cooperation of clients. Clients only cooperate if services seem genuinely to serve their needs. This is partly a matter of how services are presented or marketed. However, in most service institutions, being attentive to client needs usually implies a sharp departure from rationalistic, expert-centered services where client motivations are a problem to be finessed and they are not an intrinsic part of designing and providing the service. This rationalistic orientation is characteristic of the engineering orientation while the context-centered approach to serving clients is more consistent with the enlightenment orientation. Building a stronger civil society, thus, requires that we break down the barriers that insulate selfish institutions. We must do so, however, in a way that avoids centrally planned interventions and incentives, solutions that have been tried and have failed because they are as much a product of the engineering orientation as is the logic of selfish organizations. The value of strong institutions is that they effectively create normative cultures for their members and thereby generate a strong sense of mission and

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commitment. However we go about reforming social services, we wish to preserve the strength and coherence of these organizations. At the same time, the failure of current social service institutions is that they have become elitecontrolled monopolies that serve professionals who work in them and businesses that profit from their activities. While we do not object to reasonable profits in social service industries, we must break up monopolies and entitlements that tie up resources given to social services without giving services that clients need. Normative Accountability For social services to be effective, we must shift our attention from goals to values. Goals are specific objectives that can, in theory, be achieved by undertaking a series of specific tasks or procedures. When we talk about identifying and solving social problems, we imply the need for defining goals that should be achieved. This necessarily throws us into an engineering mode for understanding and solving social problems, a mode that rewards expertise for its own sake and encourages specialized organizations—selfish organizations—as the proper means for repairing damage. Our argument from the outset of this book has been that the central social institutions of this society were not historically created out of a need to solve problems. They came into existence to meet moral demands. Some of these moral objectives were prescriptive, for example, the mandate to “Americanize” immigrants through universal, free, public education. Others emerged from a political debate that extended the definition of citizenship and broadened our notion of the rights each member of our society could expect to enjoy. Access to health care, for example, has expanded inexorably in most of the industrial world because there is a consensus that basic health care—emergency services, maternal and child health, and protection from infectious diseases; among other services—should not be withheld from those with low incomes. We do not quite know what constitutes basic health care or where the most serious lapses are. We do know that poor people—especially working poor people— should not be denied basic care. This is a value that drives the institution of health care, not a goal. Social services seem ambiguous to those who wish to carefully spell out “proper” goals and “effective” intervention strategies because these formulations misspecify the social processes that produce effects. We said earlier as we discussed the foundations of organizational analysis, institutional roles are products of value conflicts. Workers—including those doing professional work—find themselves challenged and threatened at work by powerful others, inside and outside of the institution, who assert that certain values are central to the tasks the workers spend their time on. To the extent these demands conflict, workers find themselves in an untenable position and create a work organization and a culture of their work to define the nature of their task, the scope of their responsibilities, and the ways in which accountability can be measured. This work culture emerges in response to value conflicts imposed from outside, created by the broader context of work.

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However, the institutional culture is built by the people living within the institution and doing its work. The culture is a political product, generated through practical conflicts and the accidents of local history. The culture is based in social process and it is a product of the immediate social context. As institutions mature, the features of work culture that people construct to resolve the value conflicts they face on the job each day tend to be reified. They gain permanence as they are recognized in labor contracts, as they are acknowledged in law, as business contracts are written and government grants are let to further the activities of technical workers. All of these arrangements create a crystallized social structure, a structure that seems to give institutions an objective permanence. These are engineering features of an organization and they are essential for getting work done and for providing security and stability to those who work in and are benefited by institutions. It is important to recognize, however, that they are not inevitable; they are not social responses to scientifically verifiable, objective reality. These crystallized institutions are derivative of the value-driven organizations people create as they do actual work. Today we have mostly lost this understanding of how social services came to be and why they exist. By treating services as though they ought to be selfish organizations and by approaching social problems as though they ought to be analyzable as objective problems amenable to engineering solutions, we have encouraged arbitrary social interventions. More specifically, organizations that began with strong value orientations have been systematically changed so that they will conform to the expectations promoted by a goal-oriented, economistic, selfish organization, engineering approach to understanding social problems. Remember that the engineering orientation is useful only for solving short-range problems that can be treated as though context, culture, and history were irrelevant. We still can act as if an engineering orientation is appropriate, however, even if it is not; even if it produces interventions that ignore a wide-range of critical concerns. When this happens, we get interventions that throw resources at problems that do not exist or that support activities that do nothing. These interventions are arbitrary in the sense that they are not coherent, they do not solve anything, and they do not build on each other. At the same time, such interventions are ripe for exploitation. People doing necessary work are presented with continual demands that they do silly things. Ultimately, they decide that they ought to subvert the system so that they can do their work as best they can. Meanwhile, if money is going to be spent in silly ways, individuals figure they might as well make money off the service, help their friends, or set up monopolistic arrangements that limit the power of those who make foolish policies. As time passes, people come to believe that institutions are structured in the only way they can be structured. Those people who profit from the activities of the institution also build up wealth and political influence, so it becomes extremely difficult to break up their fiefdoms and truly change the nature of social services. Being pragmatic liberals, we recognize that frontal assault on these crystallized selfish institutions is not practical. At the same time, there are reasons to

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be optimistic about the potential for change and reform. First, social service institutions as a group are caught in a deepening fiscal crisis. The crisis both threatens their ability to continue functioning as they have in the past. It also threatens their ability to continue satisfying their basic constituencies. Without reform in education, health care, drug treatment, housing, and other areas of need, we are likely to find ourselves with increasingly radical and intractable political opposition to our stable, democratic state. Second, institutional action need not be mysterious, ambiguous, unpredictable, and uncontrollable, if we adopt an enlightenment orientation to social action. Recognizing that values, not goals, drive organizations, we can shape organizations by properly understanding the moral imperatives to which workers respond and by shaping that moral climate to encourage behavior that fosters a stronger civil society. The challenge is to understand how moral intervention works and what we can do to direct it. This might seem an insurmountable requirement given the engineeringoriented traditions of social science. It sounds perhaps like a call for churches to tell us how to set up government. That is not our argument, however. Keep in mind our assertion that social service organizations historically have been shaped by the effective imposition of values on those doing work and by the practical problems workers have confronted as they have sought to implement those values. Although self-interest has grown as a dominant value in American society and in human service institutions, economistic approaches are bankrupt when it comes to the basic work involved in providing health care, teaching children, policing a neighborhood, or setting up an effective neighborhood housing arrangement. We are not preaching that people ought to be moral. We are saying that we must understand what is. Only if we understand how moral organizations work and how they are integrated into civil society, can we gain control of social services. With this control, we can free up resources that are now controlled by monopolistic, selfish organizations and by those benefiting improperly from entitlements. The resources are there. They are just being scattered arbitrarily and ineffectively in ways that encourage and reward selfinterest rather than public service. In most service work, self-interest is mixed with some service orientation that causes people to feel constrained by the dominant values or norms that govern their work. Sociologists have tended in the past quarter century to dismiss the force or importance of these values for guiding social action. This has been a sensible response to the growing role played by selfish organizations and to the self-interested behavior of professionals such as physicians. It also is convenient because we do not know well how to study value-guided behavior or why people will pursue self-interest in one situation and an altruistic, service-orientation in another. It is easier to study social systems if we just ignore altruism for operational reasons. To say that contemporary social science has mostly written off value-driven behavior as a significant causal variable for explaining institutional behavior is not to say that we have no tools for studying them. Social science before about 1960 was centrally concerned with how values, norms, and moral choices guide

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and drive behavior. We have rich analytic traditions that tell us how moral behavior is structured. These are the traditions that ought to inform contemporary studies of how we may control institutions and how values come to gain force and influence over the behavior of social service workers. If we accept that values play some role that we cannot easily disentangle from self-interest, we can gain much by asking why values have any force and how it is that values are generated such that they constrain people. There are hopeful signs that a reemergence of a sociology of morality is occurring and is reconnecting to what Ralph Turner (1980) in reference to the work of Morris Janowitz has called “the forgotten paradigm” of sociology. It is evident in the theoretical work of Alan Wolfe (1991), such as his book Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation, and Philip Selznick’s (1992) The Moral Commonwealth, and in various empirical studies such as Michelle Lamont’s (1992) Money, Morals, and Manners and M.P. Baumgartner’s (1988) The Moral Order of a Suburb. We hope that our work adds a pragmatic and liberal voice to this growing chorus.

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CHAPTER 9

Implementing Pragmatic Liberalism: Leadership, Citizenship, and Community

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civil society is not a product, but a process. It is not a goal to be achieved, nor a project to be completed. Rather, it is a continuously emergent valued state, created and recreated in the everyday actions of its citizens. It is not to be found in the genius of a single constitutional document, but in the common discourse permeating the complex relationships of all its constituents. It is not immutable and immemorial but consciously constructed and eternally emergent. Forever threatened by extremes on all fronts, it must be defended by vigilance and commitment from those of every station. It needs leaders and citizens joined together in a community, committed to the common wealth and the common welfare. In this book we have attempted to suggest how a renewed commitment to a civil society can be achieved, and why pragmatic liberalism is the consensual base from which the pursuit of the public welfare can be launched. We hope this book has offered a convincing rationale based on social science theory and research as to the nature of a civil society, and why it is that pragmatic liberalism, when appropriately conceptualized, is a positive hope in solving many of the nation’s social ills. In this final chapter we will shift gears a bit and proscriptively offer some suggestions that we think will help to implement the processes our analysis suggests are necessary to construct a more civil society. To the Milton Friedmans and the Francis Fox Pivens of the world—and other even more ideological true believers everywhere—we say a pox on all your houses. Singular solutions, simplified econometric models, and historical determinism may produce neat, consistent, rational and logical theories—but, and here’s your fatal flaw, you are incapable of admitting you may be wrong. Pragmatic liberalism not only admits the possibility of failure but fully expects it. Not all experiments work, not all policies are realized in practice, and pragmatic liberalism

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makes no claim to infallibility. It fully recognizes the complexity of varying situations, and by contrast its genius lies in its willingness to act in situations of uncertainty. It will try not one but a variety of solutions, cobbled and inconsistent, inelegant and bumbling, but ones that nonetheless, for the time being, solve the problem at hand and get the job done. Pragmatic liberalism is above all committed to a society that acknowledges its problems and sets about the business of solving them, unconcerned about whether or not the solutions are ideologically correct, or dogmatically pure. This is not to suggest that pragmatic liberalism is solely opportunist and amoral. Acting within the framework of civility, minimal everyday niceties of seemingly little consequence produce in the aggregate a moral environment unequaled in scope and power by any pure transcendentalist system. A civil society may not always be a great society, but it is, above all, a good society. A good society is, however, fragile and capable of corruption and collapse into either selfish anarchy or selfless tyranny. To maintain its necessary balanced perspective, pragmatic liberalism requires a clear vision of and by leaders, citizens, and the community. Each of these must be understood clearly to maintain a civil society, and each, in turn, is required to understand its role in maintaining one. Leadership Leadership in a civil society is an interactive and positional property, not a unique quality of character or personality of given individuals. It is found in the relationship between those designated as leaders and followers, respectively, not in the characteristics of either by themselves. Years of social science research have also shown that leadership is multidimensional and situationally variable (Dansereau, 1998). For example, the training for command in the military academies is built upon a coercive socialization throughout the armed services that produces an unquestioned chain-of-command that runs from the lowest private to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And what are considered the best leadership behaviors or styles for fighting a war may not, however, serve us well in other pursuits. For example, the healthy distrust of authority built into the American character reflects an attitude that more closely mirrors the scientist’s healthy skepticism of claims to truth (Janowitz, 1960). Although the different aspects of leadership may be pushed to deviant extremes, each ultimately relies on an implicit understanding of the “rules of the game” between the leaders and the led. The use of coercion, though at times necessary, more often than not reflects a failure of leadership and the use of raw power of superiors over subordinates. The alternative to raw power is the use of authority, a more benign, less costly, and a civil base of leadership. Requiring authority to account for itself is the basis of authority. Authority lies not in the position of the leader, but in the beliefs of the followers. Pragmatic liberalism requires persuasion, the art of rhetoric in its original and true sense that justifies courses of action. As Kenneth Burke (1989) has noted, rhetoric and persuasion are required where freedom of choice exists—where tyranny and coercion reign, persuasion and rhetoric are moot and mute. Leaders of a civil society must produce demonstrable and observable rationales for courses of action, in the face of

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questioning subjects. Scientists question what one knows by questioning the methods of how one came to know it, that is, substance and method are considered inseparable. They ask not only what do you know, but also how do you know it? Similarly, the citizen’s skeptical stance to leadership within a civil society asks not only what do you command, what do you want us to do, but also how and why do you command this, how and why should we do it? Leadership within a civil society is built on persuasion, not coercion, on positive rhetoric, not negative restrictions. The paramount obligation of leadership is to the civil society itself, not to any one faction, set of interests, or limited constellation of values. This may all too often be among the “taken-for-granted” rules of a civil society. Ronald Reagan was known early in his term as “the great communicator.” He persuaded millions of Americans that his approach to minimal government would unleash new powers of productivity and progress. In substance, however, this amounted to a narrow call to reduce taxes and reduce the powers and programs of the federal government. It was an appeal that spoke to individuals and selected factions; only on the international scene was there any altruistic appeal to aiding others. But, there is rhetoric and then there is rhetoric. The rhetoric of a civil society’s leadership is not a monologue, but a complex dialogue. One must answer critics and skeptics, not silence them. When debate is reduced to symbolic appeals and personal ridicule, neither reason nor the public’s interests are served. This is one of the primary duties of leadership within a civil society, to promote, not silence, dialogue. Demagogues speak with one loud voice to a silenced citizenry, while democracy murmurs in a million mouths of differing dialects. Michael Harrington’s (1962) “invisible poor” in The Other America and Ralph Ellison’s (1952) Invisible Man were both transformed from the invisible to the visible by giving them a voice. This too is one of the significant roles and duties of social scientists, and intellectuals in general, within a civil society—to strip away myth and ideology that mask and hide uncomfortable facts, to shed light on what has been left unilluminated, to make the invisible visible, to give voice to the silenced, and to speak the unspeakable. Their duty is to speak truth to power. A true democracy, contends Jurgen Habermas (1984–87), requires open communication and full participation by all its citizens. The rhetoric (and of course the reality) of leadership in a democratic society should state, and restate, in a clear and loud voice a commitment to the processes of the civil society itself. These, in their substance, are represented by the consensual values we brought to center stage at the beginning of this book. They may, compared to recent patriotic appeals and symbolic image making, seem rather modest and mundane. If these values are clearly articulated, however, they provide more substance than flag waving or saber rattling, and above all they do not disparage opposition but rather encourage all people to speak out, to articulate their interests. In short, leadership must not simply persuade, it must persuade others that it is appropriate for them to enter into the debate. To work, pragmatic liberalism must be receptive to new ideas, whatever their source, for innovation cannot be created, only the conditions that may foster it. Once having encouraged and legitimated debate, leadership in a civil society must then develop a very essential quality for dialogue—the ability to listen. And perhaps most importantly, the ability to listen to those with viewpoints

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differing from one’s own. One aspect of courageous leadership is not merely to listen to those who agree, but actively to seek out those with whom one disagrees. Such behavior is, by definition, innately “disagreeable” and seemingly unnatural, but that is the courage pragmatic liberalism demands of its leaders. By modeling these civil behaviors, leaders must encourage openness and tolerance for opposing viewpoints among others within the society itself. Only by doing so will it provide itself the space needed to persuade. Finally, leadership in a civil society must be flexible to adapt, to be open to being persuaded by those who may offer a better plan. Pragmatic liberalism admits fallibility, and again, the courage to alter a course. Such changes are legitimated when convincing rationales are given, whether these be new information, changing circumstances, or altered priorities. Rigidity to principles that lead to death, destruction, and decay may be ideologically pure and true to some transcendental value, but not thereby true to the central values of the civil society itself. Leadership is not, however, just about words and rhetoric that reinforce the principles of a civil society. It is also about action that translates those words and principles into concrete situations in the lives of its citizens. These actions must be those that foster and facilitate active participation and engagement of the citizenry. Resources may need to be expended on programs to deal with a variety of public issues—from health care, to crime, to unemployment. But, above all, resources must be expended on those programs that develop the ability of people to become active citizens—informed, organized, and sufficiently engaged to add their voice to the debates that will determine their destiny. Only in this manner will the citizenry sense that they are in fact empowered and engaging in selfgovernance. It is this capacity for self-governance that is the root of social control in a civil society, not the arms of the state ( Janowitz, 1991). The state versus civil society dichotomy so central in political theory and political rhetoric is transcended in pragmatic liberalism with the recognition that one of the state’s primary functions, and thereby a central requirement of its leaders, is to use the power and purse of the state to strengthen the structures of civil society itself, and thereby strengthening the civil state as a consequence. The voluntary sector of civil society and the state are not in reality in opposition to one another nor can one displace or dispense with the other. Only in philosophical definition and debate and in dialectical theory are they juxtaposed in stark contrast to one another. This has been the fatal and tragic flaw of much conservative and especially libertarian leadership, to assume that a civil society could exist without the state, and also the fatal flaw of the socialist welfare state, to assume that it could exist without the voluntary sector of civil society. To strengthen civil society requires leadership that not only delegates authority away from the state but in turn also provides and, where necessary, redistributes concrete resources that will enable other levels, spheres, and realms of authority and leadership to have sufficient resources to enact programs, to act substantively and not just symbolically. This has been a crippling reality and policy quandary faced by local governmental leaders from state governors to city mayors as they struggle to provide “unfunded mandates” promulgated by the retrenching federal government

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(MacManus, 1991). A similar set of burdens fall increasingly on leaders of major voluntary and philanthropic agencies as they attempt to fill the vacuum left by the retrenchment of the welfare state. One cannot always anticipate the philanthropic merger of the vast fortunes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to fill the void of state retrenchment and irresponsibility (Steinberg, 1985). This brings us to yet another key characteristic of pragmatic liberal leadership in a civil society, the recognition that leadership occurs throughout the society at all levels and in many different spheres. The convener of a block club meeting sitting around her living room with a group of neighbors concerned with doing something about loitering youth on the corner is engaged in a leadership role that in form is no different from the president’s advisers sitting around the Oval Office deciding what to do about an adversarial nation’s bellicose threats. The substance and significance of the two situations differ, different content but same form. It has long been recognized politically and corporately that leadership often involves a career ladder that moves hierarchically through levels of influence and consequence. Leadership is exercised throughout a civil society insofar as groups of people gather collectively to define a problem, debate courses of action, and act collectively. Some of these gatherings are formally defined as “state” gatherings: the Halls of Congress, a State legislature, a town council, or even a tenants’ organization in a public housing project. Pragmatic liberalism encourages such autonomous gatherings and collective action, not only for the mobilization that results, and the myriad of differing solutions that may be found, but also for the socialization into citizenship and leadership roles that results. Such gatherings are not lower levels in a delegated system of authority, as are the local representatives in a highly centralized state. They have an autonomous sphere within which to act collectively and corporately as a body. This is the classic “cradle of democracy” identified by Tocqueville (2000). (See also Crenson 1983; Crenson and Ginsberg, 2002; Smock, 2004.) The frustrations of leadership are no doubt similar from the position of the president to the precinct captain—the search for some basis of agreement on the better course of action, the need to provide opportunities for all to voice their opinions, and the need to persuade, cajole, and compromise to hold the group together so that it may act as a single collective unit. These are the hallmarks of decision making in a civil society that must be nurtured and celebrated at all levels. Leadership at all levels must foster leadership at other levels, this is the strongest basis for generating the legitimacy of leadership. Such lower-level leadership roles, for example, not only socialize future leaders at higher levels, but perhaps more significantly they also permit citizens to empathize with the agony of decision making of leaders over them. Within a civil society, leadership legitimates leadership, not oligarchically, but through its democratic diffuseness. The ability to understand, appreciate, and legitimate the role of leadership is fostered through the numerous positions of leadership that permeate a civil society. This brings us to another quality of leadership within a civil society, the need for a circulation of individuals through leadership positions (Lipset et al., 1956; Pareto, 1968). A civil society cannot long tolerate inequalities that serve more to

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enhance and preserve existing elites than to reward elites for their commitment and service. Much research has shown that where the same leadership is entrenched, accountability atrophies, dialogue and debate decay, and apathy and fatalism flourish (Rorty, 2002; Michels, 1949). Leadership, though elevated, must remain close to the people in a civil society. Focusing more on the positional and relational property of leadership, rather than on its individualistic and psychological properties, means that many individuals can be rotated through these positions, and the more that are, the more diffuse and yet more legitimate leadership becomes. There is a need to maintain a minimal reward differential, in power, wealth, and prestige such that the loss of a leadership position does not entail a major shift in life chances for former leaders. There is a persistent need for leaders within a civil society to be reminded, and to remind themselves, that they are foremost citizens, and secondarily leaders. Just as there is a style and grace to the ascension of a leadership role, so too there is a different but equally necessary style and grace in the relinquishing of leadership. Some have said, for example, that George Washington’s relinquishing the presidency voluntarily after two terms was his greatest enduring legacy to the nation. Pragmatic liberalism both fosters and is dependent upon this circulation of elites for with change in leadership comes the heightened probability of new approaches and new solutions to new problems. Citizenship To be a citizen is a sine qua non of existence for people in the modern worldsystem of nation-states. Given the mutually exclusive and exhaustive geography of sovereignty, to pass the portals from one nation-state to another requires that one declare simultaneously one’s individual and collective identity as a citizen. But given the increasing scale of states, the routines of daily existence are usually lived within the confines of a single state such that one is rarely aware of or required to declare this individual and collective identity. The ubiquity of citizenship, however, contrary to economic theories of scarcity and value, does not make it any less precious. The value of this unconsciously taken-for-granted status is clearly seen in the process of becoming a citizen, whether this be in the feigned casualness of an anxious eighteen-year-old registering to vote or be drafted, or in the proud demeanor of immigrants raising their hands to take an oath of “naturalization.” These examples also underscore one of the central characteristics of citizenship in that, like the civil society itself, it is a status which, to be fully realized, requires a constant state of becoming. Our central concern here is to offer or prescribe what are some of the more essential rules and roles of citizenship that must be carried out in order to maintain a civil society. Rooted as they are in what we claim is the quintessential American philosophy of pragmatic liberalism, they run the risk of sounding both common and hoary. For all of that, the lessons of citizenship bear repeating (Janoski, 1998). Citizenship, like leadership, is a status that must be defined and understood in its relational reality. Citizenship as we have repeatedly stressed is a status that

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entails both rights and duties, and though the individual may focus on “rights” naturally owed or due to him/her, they are owed and due from “others.” These “rights” are therefore perceived by the individual as the other’s “duty” to them. Given that these are reciprocal relationships, rights and duties are not therefore distinct, they are merely different labels for the same actions depending upon which side of the relationship one is on. There are two reciprocal relationships we will focus on here: the more grounded relationship of citizens with their leaders, and the more abstract relationship of citizens with the state. Citizens’ relations with their fellow citizens, perhaps the most critical of citizenship’s roles, will be discussed later in the context of a community of citizenship. Citizens and Leaders Citizens have a right to information and a duty to acquire information to inform their decision making. The right is manifested in the special status that a civil society accords its media as a critical and autonomous mediator between citizens and their leaders. This information can only be effective to the degree that leaders make information available to the media, and correspondingly to the degree that citizens actively seek out as much information as they can on the public issues of the day. Space and time must be found in the hectic schedules of work, commuting, and family to access information, reflect on it, and to talk about it with family and friends in the great public discourse. Citizens also have a right and duty to express their opinions to their leaders, either individually or collectively, and it is especially important in a civil society to create those myriad of intermediate institutions that mediate between the individual and their leaders. Individuals must be informed and seek out information from those who are better informed. They must listen and learn, and research has shown that citizens will informally grant leadership status to those who are better informed on a given topic, that is, they will listen to those they consider to be “opinion leaders” (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955). In a civil society such opinion leadership circulates as different leaders will be recognized for different subject areas or topics ranging from soapsuds to national security. Citizens have a right and duty to hold their leaders accountable. Part of this accountability is to demand from leaders a convincing set of rationales for courses of action, they have a right to a rational rhetoric that will link words to decisions to deeds. Appeals by leaders to sacred icons (the flag) and sentiments (patriotism), though effective in mobilizing mobs, are, in a civil society that values rational behavior, appropriately viewed with a degree of skepticism if not fear. The citizen’s duty to follow the collective decision making by leaders is needed in a civil society, but only to the degree that an informed, rational, and ultimately convincing argument has been made for a given course of action. Patriotism in a civil society is not the jingoistic “my country right or wrong,” but rather a pragmatic commitment to a society that fully acknowledges its imperfections and yet is persistent and passionate in the pursuit of correcting those imperfections.

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Citizens have an obligation and a right to voice their opinions such that leaders will be informed of the degree and dimensions of their devotion or discontent. It is not only a right, but a duty to speak out. Silence may be golden, but in a civil society based upon endless debate, it is more likely to be leaden. Everyone’s opinion counts, and to the degree that citizens seek out information before forming their opinions, they are value-added as informed opinion. Citizens and leaders in a civil society must walk a tricky line of scrutiny and skepticism and yet maintain a closeness of identification, or at a minimum differentiated respect. Citizens and leaders must fully understand the fact that they do occupy superordinate and subordinate statuses, and yet, these distinctions should never become so exaggerated as to transform their mutuality into a “we” versus “they” mentality. Two factors help to mitigate this. First is the need to maintain the most minimal of status differentiation that is necessary to exercise authority, and second is the circulation in and out of citizen and leader roles. Not only must leaders be prepared to return to the august rank of citizen, but also citizens must be prepared to assume the transient status of leader. It is in and through the myriad of local institutions that these qualities of the relationship between leader and citizen are most clearly realized, and it is at this level that the essence of citizenship is most manifest. Citizens and the State The state and citizen relationship is an abstraction, but one that becomes most clearly concretized in the monopoly of violence claimed by the state. From this perspective, citizen violence can be legitimized, as our founding fathers declared; only when the state has abrogated its legal responsibilities to its citizens. When the state is with all due process faithfully executing the laws, then the use of citizen violence is illegitimate and illegal. Now all who occupy positions of authority within the administrative apparatus of the state have, as their ultimate “backup of authority,” the threat of coercion for compliance. The policeman and the parole officer, as well as the teacher and the truant officer, those frontline “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky, 1983), all may lay claim to this state authority. And it is at this local level that the true relationship of citizens to the state occurs. It is not an abstraction, but a concrete set of relationships. These relationships are most frequently mediated in and through local institutions, at meetings of local neighborhood groups, local schools, and the like. Within our federated governmental structure, as one moves up the levels of government, such contacts are likely to be more formally abstract, citizen/ bureaucrat encounters. The administrative structures of the state become largescale self-contained moral worlds with their own cultures, including codes of conduct, career ladders, and esoteric expertise (Janowitz et al., 1958). The result is a loss of the sense of direct service to citizens, and the mission of civil service becomes an aggregated abstraction of processing cases in a vaguely defined public trust, not a trust relationship between a service provider serving the needs and

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solving the problems of clients. Therefore, commitment to service must be built into the culture of the professional bureaucracy itself. Relying on this appeal and commitment to public service, personal exchange calculus may operate in contrast to, or above and beyond, principles of the private market. The appeal to public service is not, however, merely an appeal for civil servants in public bureaucracies to develop an institutional ethos of service. It is the basis as well of recent calls for a national service for all citizens. The ethos is, in short, one that must permeate the civil society, such that all citizens are public servants. The more limited professional parallel is seen, for example, in the case where all attorneys who are members of the bar are designated “officers of the court.” This is the positive diffusion of public sentiment and service that may counter what Foucault (1977) sees as the more ominous diffusion of social control through mutual surveillance. The distinction between the civil society and the state, upon which so much previous analysis has been based, is merged in the model of a civil society based on pragmatic liberalism. Above all, pragmatic liberalism emphasizes the small “d” democratic ethos at all levels throughout the society. Citizens are not solely clients of the state, nor state bureaucrats merely servants of the civil society, rather the roles are merged. To the degree that citizens are encouraged and rewarded for participating in the self-governance of a civil society, to that degree they are actors within the state, can identify themselves as being part of the state, and can possessively claim the state as theirs (Hunter, 2005). Identification with the civil state is not the result of oratorical appeals and the symbolic massing of mobs. Modern citizenship in the state permeates, encompasses, and diffuses through all of our everyday encounters. The everyday civilities of a civil society are not merely norms for etiquette and polite interaction, as in the many analyses of everyday public encounters among strangers; they are interactions that are ubiquitously—though unconsciously—framed by the overarching presence of the state and the civil society in which they occur (Goffman, 1963; Lofland, 1973; 1998; Hunter, 1985; Sennett, 1992). The civil society is no longer separate from the state, but each is mutually defined and makes sense only by, in, and through reference to the other. Citizen identification with the state is the basis of patriotism. However, at its core this is not simply an identification with the abstract symbols of the state, such as “the flag,” but a patriotism of participation. Many analysts have noted that the superpatriotism so often displayed by veterans of war tends to be inversely related to their proximity to the front lines (Parenti, 2004). Citizenship in the civil society is manifest by participation in local institutions of numerous kinds at many levels, a participation that brings to the fore the pragmatic work required to be a patriot. In sum, we are suggesting that the citizen-state relationship is one that is found in the myriad of institutions that pragmatically mediate between the abstractions of the citizen and the state. It is at this level that the collective work of a civil society gets done. It is at this level where one encounters the “immediacy of the middle,” where nothing is too small, and few things are really that big.

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Community: Citizen to Citizen Community is the keystone to our argument. It is the apex of the arch of a civil society where leadership and citizenship come together. Poised precariously in a dynamic tension it is held in place by the constant interplay of forces represented in pragmatic liberalism. It is in and through communities that the civil society is constantly constructed and reconstructed by its members. Like the cathedrals of old, it is the century-long process of construction and not simply the finished edifice that evokes awe before the beauty and power of enduring virtues and faith in an unknown future. Cathedrals are named and known by the communities that built them—Chartre, Canterbury, or Cologne. They required leaders to envision them, skilled artisans to craft them, and a commitment of time, labor, and material resources from and for the collective good. Not the presidents of Mount Rushmore, Chicago’s corporate skyscrapers, nor Hollywood’s film fantasies are the enduring and living legacy of America to the world—it is rather the civil society of the New England commons, the Main Street of the Midwest, and the Western culture of the roadside café. Pragmatic liberalism does not buy into an overromanticized communalism that attempts to reconstruct some utopian myth (Etzioni, 1993). Our conception of community is one that is rooted in the current pragmatic reality of the modern nation-state. We argue most forcefully that local communities are shaped by and are an integral part of the national and world system (Hunter, 1978). They cannot be and should not realistically be viewed as autonomous from these systems. But, we also argue, perhaps more challengingly that the modern world system and institutions of the nation-state are constructed and shaped by the activities of people coming together in their locally grounded institutions. The local community and the nation-state are mutually dependent upon one another. One has both “the state construction of community” and “the community construction of the state.” There are three overarching dimensions to the concept of community itself as we are viewing it, and each must be carefully understood in relationship to pragmatic liberalism, for each is critical for the building and maintenance of a civil society. The three are community as sustenance, community as social structure, and community as sentiment. Sustenance From the ecologists we have learned that human as well as biotic communities are above all complex webs of interdependence. They provide for mutual adaptability for the purpose of gaining sustenance from the environment. Such adaptation is collective not individual, and community is the collective form necessary for the survival of any species, or any individual. Ecological consciousness above all produces an awareness of interdependence; a realization that one’s actions, especially when multiplied by the actions of others, have not only specific consequences but generalized consequences that ramify throughout the environment and ultimately end up affecting one’s own environment and one’s own survival. Such webs of interdependence have oft been noted

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through the ages as in John Donne’s “no man is an island,” or in Charles Darwin’s “complex web of life.” Interdependence for sustenance is a key point as well within pragmatic liberalism where once again a seeming dialectical opposition of self-interest and collective interest are fused, neither is given priority over the other, the mutuality is consciously acknowledged and valued. Survival itself is a collective process and, to continue Donne’s lines, “the death of another diminishes me as well.” Communities, unlike organizations and even individuals, do not have some externally oriented explicitly stated goals, rather, their legitimate sole function is to provide for the survival and welfare of their members. The good community, therefore, is one which is to be judged and evaluated by the degree that it does so. Providing for the welfare of its members is the central communal function. Membership in a community, therefore, is a necessary and valued status. As a consequence, how the boundaries of membership in the community are drawn becomes critical, for to be excluded or banished from the community (by either external expulsion or internal incarceration) is to lose one’s networks of sustenance. This too then becomes another fused value of community within pragmatic liberalism, wherein the rights to the communal welfare are fused with the duties to help sustain it. The ecological boundaries of a community are, however, to some degree permeable and arbitrary. They cannot be hermetically sealed from the larger surrounding environment. Competition among individuals, species, and communities for resources is tempered by the realization that the webs and networks of sustenance extend outward and upward to ever larger ecological interdependencies. This fact of larger-scale interdependence serves to temper and constrain what might otherwise be an unbridled competition at lower levels. Once again, pragmatic liberalism requires a balancing of two seeming contradictory forces of competition and cooperation. The civil society is one in which the competitive games, of whatever kind, are tempered by a long-term realization that seasons repeat, the game is ongoing and the unpredictability of a complex evolving system may bring about shifts in relative welfare—today’s competitors may be tomorrow’s allies, and vice versa. Therefore, both winners and losers of the moment are valorized and valued. And given this unpredictability, pragmatic liberalism requires a celebration of diversity and difference, not from some transcendental philosophical position, but from a grounded ecological realization that through diversity adaptability to changing circumstances and survivability are enhanced (Gould, 2002). Social Structure As with the chicken and the egg, it is foolhardy to continue to debate the temporal primacy of the individual versus the collective. The mythical “noble savage” and the equally mythical utopian collective of the “garden of Eden” represent the worst of deductive first principles when applied to the pragmatic question of how best we should organize and govern our social life. Throughout our argument we have stressed the need to move beyond simple dialectical dichotomies of either/or (for example, civil society versus the state) to

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a recognition that such polarities are only mutually intelligible, that each can only be defined in terms of the other, that one without the other is meaningless. This is true of the individual and the collective as well. The modern concept of citizenship has meaning only in relationship to the modern conception of the nation-state, just as the state has meaning only in relation to the idea of citizen. Civil society is the functional equivalent of the ecological community raised to the level of culture and social structure, that is, raised to the level where symbolic interaction, communication, and meaning— not mere material sustenance—are the media of exchange. The communal base of the civil society is not found in the family, nuclear or extended, it is not tribe or clan, mythical or modern, it is not, in short, the “granfalloons”—the presumptive togetherness or “we-feeling”—of Kurt Vonnegut (1974); rather, it is found in the social relationships among those who have no necessary basis of relationship other than that they are members of a collective that is mutually interdependent for survival, a collective of shared fate. It is not the biological drive of the selfish gene of altruism, not the tribal loyalties of a mythical past, but the pressing problems of the day that require people to come together to solve their problems. When they come together, they create institutions to solve their recurring and fundamental problems of everyday existence. Community is played out at various scales and levels between the microprivacy of the home and the macro-order of a world system of nation-states. Diversity and adaptability among regions, states, municipalities, villages, and neighborhoods are the natural social experiment of American civil society. Though different and diverse, as befits their different and everchanging circumstances, each is, like a fractal structure of natural geometry, a variation on the same theme, a part of an interconnected whole, in a word, not the same but similar, and that similarity is defined by the repeated iterations of the same equation—the same formula slightly altered by chance and circumstance—the playing out of civil society (Mandelbrot, 1982). It is at this level of “middle earth” that the community base of the civil society becomes apparent. Community is an institutional arena, an institutional field, a complex system of interrelations among diverse institutions that are mutually interdependent, and, perhaps more significantly, mutually accountable to one another. We have noted that a central concern of pragmatic liberalism is to ensure that within institutions morality happens, that institutions not remain amoral, autonomous rogue elephants. Accountability within the community institutional field is critical for producing the constraints of morality, at a minimum by raising the central question, however answered, is this decision or action ultimately for the public good? It is within the community institutional field that this question of institutional morality becomes not an abstract ivory tower debate, but a grounded question that must be answered pragmatically in relation to specific others. To the degree that institutions are grounded in communities, they are more likely to be moral actors. By contrast, for example, the central problem posed for a civil society by the rise of multinational corporations is that they have become insular structures, operating often in that gray area of amorality at a scale above and beyond any given state’s legal

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code, any given community’s moral order. To paraphrase the antitrust busters, it is not that big is bad, but that bigness creates isolated, amoral worlds where good and bad lose any meaning beyond bigness itself. Sentiment The sentiments of community found within a civil society are not the passions of the zealot; rather, they are the quiet pride and the sense of collective accomplishment that come from participating in a community that works (Hunter, 1978). It is patriotism not jingoism. Pragmatic liberalism produces a community that is inclusive of its problems and goes about the business of solving them, not one that is exclusive, rejecting those in need. The latter may produce a semblance of well-being—an island of homogeneous serenity, but one which is ultimately isolating—and can survive only by expending resources in erecting defensive barriers, an anxious and fearful community under siege. Those barriers may be physical and forceful, political and ideological, or simply the result of purposeful ignorance and denial. The sentiments of community within a civil society are rooted in the overarching fact and reality of interdependence. Just as with the “ecological web,” here too, this means that my altruism will feed into a system of networks that will rebound and reverberate until the harmonic waves cascade back in goods and the good life that, not with a certainty but a probability, will enhance my own life and the lives of those close to me. The penumbra of equality that surrounds and governs citizen to citizen interactions permits diversity and difference to be mitigated and even celebrated within the overarching shadows of a civil society. Within the civil society the fearful infantilism of selfishness and the anxious adolescence of envy must give way to the magnanimous maturity of mutuality. The sentiments of civil society are to a degree rational, reserved, and removed. To invoke Edward Shils (1991), the “civil tie” is one that is distinctly calculating compared to the engulfing primary ties of friend and kin, dispassionate compared to the ties of the religious zealot, and voluntaristic compared to the primordial, often mythical evocation of ethnic loyalties. The sentiments produce what Morris Janowitz (1978) and others have called a “community of limited liability.” The civil tie preserves a healthy balance between the individual and collective, and avoids what Richard Sennet (1992) sees as the blurring of this distinction with an undue invasion of the public realm by private considerations, and of the private realm by public institutions. The “fall of public man” results in a loss and degradation of both the public sphere of civil society and the private sphere of the individual citizen. Maintaining the civil tie requires a precious balance unrecognized by those who would champion the need to inject the personal into public discourse, and by those who see the personal as defined primarily by public displays of a limited repertoire of models of morality. The sentiments of a civil society are expressed and found in the everyday common courtesies of civil behavior. Democratic decorum is not merely a gloss, an epiphenomenon erected to mask the deep tensions, strife, and struggle of social existence; rather, it is the base and the basis by which those struggles may

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be worked on, dealt with, but probably, never resolved. Pragmatic liberalism is the process that shapes the emerging institutions of the civil society, that everevolving product that balances the individual’s good with the public’s welfare. The ultimate celebration of the individual, “individualism,” is not the egoism of self-interest, but a deeper understanding and appreciation of what Goffman (1971) calls “the sacred self,” an inherent property of each and all. From common courtesies to collective compassion this is the understanding that is expressed in a mutual concern for the welfare of others. It is the moral basis of a civil society built on pragmatic liberalism.

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Index

acute care medicine 80–81 Addams, Jane 7 affirmative action 59 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) 5, 44, 64, 106, 129 AIDS 30, 81 Alcoholics Anonymous 34, 141 Alinsky, Saul 7, 8, 133 All Our Kin 60, 77 alliances, in organizations 109–110 altruism 35–36 American Cancer Society 92, 110 American Diabetes Association 92, 110 American Foundation for AIDS Research 92 American Medical Association (AMA) 81 And the Band Played On 81 Anomie 54 Asylums 10 Baumgartner, M.P. 157 Becker, Gary 39 Bell, Daniel 82 Beveridge, William 115 big picture 39–40 Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons 144 blaming the victim 132 blood donation 35, 142 Boudon, Raymond 152 Bowles, Samuel 41 Bowling Alone xiii British Charity Commission 96 British welfare state 115 broken windows 146 Brown v. Board 44

Buffett, Warren 163 bureaucratic mentaility 88 bureaucrats, in government 101 Burke, Edmond 32, 36, 51 Burke, Kenneth 160 Bush, George H.W., President 7 Campbell, Donald 69 Capone, Al 66 Catch 22 108 categorical grants programs 133 Catholic schools 124–125 chaos, in social policy 90, 94–95 charities 8–9 charities, and fund raising 8–9 charities, marketing their causes 8–9 charities, political advocacy 10 charity 7–9 Chicago School (of economics) 51 Chicago, political culture 104 citizen, defined 22, 26–27 citizens, and community 168–172 citizenship 164–172 citizenship, defined 3–4, 22 citizenship, rights 43, 44 citizenship, two-sided concept 3 civil society 29 civil society, advanced by social programs 1 civil society, and civility xii, 7, 16 civil society, and voluntary associations xii civil society, defined xii, 18–19, 161, 162, 164, 167, 259 civility 31, 35 class, reproduction 74–75

188

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Index

Clinton, William J., President 80 Cloward, Richard A. 44, 73, 77 coercive control 77–78 Coleman, James S. 124–125 Community Action Program 132 community decision organizations 119 community ecology 169 community of limited liability 38, 131, 135, 171 community organizing movement 7–8 community community, and sentiment 171–172 community, and social structure 169–171 community, and sustenance 168–169 complementary medicine 124 Congressional Budget Office 102 conservatism, humane 35 conservative perspective 51–53 conservatives xi conservatives, and market analysis 5 conservatives, moral 30 Consilience 142 controlling identity 78–80 cooption 102–103 coronary intensive care units 80 corporate individuals 97, 151 cosmopolitan 131 creative problem solving 121 cross-cutting affiliations 97 culture, in radical analysis 83 cultures of democracy 103 cystic fibrosis 42 Cystic Fibrosis Foundation 46, 92 Darwin, Charles 169 Decentralization 94–95 decentralization, and government 97–98 decision-makers 98 decision-making processes 87 de-industrialization 79 demand, decision, and delivery 99–103 deviance 54, 58 deviant careers 78 Dewey, John x, 122 Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) 97 Diaries of Jane Sommers 79 disaster relief groups, and values drift 96 discrimination 57–58, 67

diversity, of problem solving approaches 111 Donne, John 169 dropouts, from school 61 Durkheim, Emile 17 economic reductionism 138 economistic rhetoric xiii Education for All Handicapped Children Act 44 education, value of 61 Ehrenreich, Barbara 77 elites 72 elites, social control by 41 elites, weakness under pluralism 94–95 elitism, cultural 42 Ellison, Ralph 161 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 67 engineering model 13, 143–147 enlightenment model 13, 143–147 entitlements 30, 32, 42–46, 130 ethnic mobility trap 55 experimental society 69 false consciousness 73 Family Planning 45 Ferguson, Adam xiii, 51 Flexner Report 125 Foucault, Michel 167 France, Anatole 89 free-rider problem 38 Freidson, Eliot 148 Freud, Sigmund 95 Friedman, Milton xii, 51, 159 Galbraith, John Kenneth xii Gates, Bill 163 General Accounting Office 102 gift relationship 35, 38, 131 Gilbert and Sullivan 76 Gintis, Herbert 41 Goffman, Erving 10, 150, 172 Gould, Stephen J. 142 government government, as a central institution government, as conflict arbiter 104 government, as high-level service provider 105 Great Depression 129

87

Index grounded theory 98 Guthrie, Sir Robin 96 Habermas, Jurgen x, 8, 149, 161 handicapped people 58 Harrington, Michael 161 Headstart 132 health care industry 81 health care health care, as social control 77 health care, criticisms 80 health care, economic orientation of 80–81 health charities 92 health cost inflation 70 health maintenance organizations (HMOs) 43 Heller, Joseph 108 help help, not deserving of 30–31 help, rationales for 29–32 help, why? 31 helping helping, and identity 34 helping, ideologies of 29–49 hemophilia 42 hidden curriculum 74 Hirschman, Albert 88 HIV disease 30, 42 Hobbes, Thomas xi homo politicus 88 “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Academic Performance?” 153 Hughes, Everett C. 82 human capital 39 human capital model 56, 60–64 human services, as profit centers 80–82 humanitarianism 30, 32–37 humanitarianism, and professional work 32–34 humanitarianism, and social control 36 Huntington Disease Foundation 46 ideologies 31, 73 ideologies, of social policy 4 illegal industries 62 illegitimate birth 64 immigrants 127 incentive models 56, 64–66

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189

incivility 30 individual, autonomous as an invention 15 individualism 31 individualism, as a myth 15 individualism, neoconservative 17 Inequality 63 inequality, legitimation 75 institutional institutional analysis 117, 118, 119 institutional culture 148, 149 institutional theory of social class 84 institutions 118–125 institutions, defined 118–120 institutions, policy implementation within 120–122 interactive processes 121 interdiction 65 interest groups 95–97 interest groups, and market analysis 95 interorganizational fields 122–123 Invisible Man 161 IQ, and genetics 153 Iron Law of Oligarchy 89 James, William x Janowitz, Morris 118, 130, 131, 143, 157, 171 Jencks, Christopher 63 Jensen, Arthur 63, 153 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, President 132 Journey 81 Kafka, Franz 88 Kennedy, John F., President 131 Kesey, Ken 10 Keynesian economics 129 kidney dialysis 93 King, Martin Luther 7 Kozol, Jonathon 77 labor market 63 Lamont, Michelle 157 Lang, Serge 142 latent functions 71 latent purposes 82 leadership 160–164 legitimacy 25 legitimacy, crisis of 23 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich 126

190

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Index

Lessing, Doris 79 Leviathon xi liberalism liberalism, classic xi liberalism, defined xi liberals xi, 6 Liebow, Elliot 77 Lindblom, Charles E. 142 lobby, citizens 10 lobbying 93 localism 69–70 locals 131 Locke, John 17, 19 Lockean tradition 83 macro-theory 139 manifest purposes 82 market 52–53 market, social problem solving and 69 Marshall, T.H. 130 Marx, Karl 5, 71, 73, 95 Marxism 17 mass society 131, 132 Massie, Robert and Massie, Suzanne 81 Medicaid 81 Medicare 81 meritocratic schools 83 meritocratic system 74 Merton, Robert K. 54, 82, 88, 95, 120, 131 methodological individualism 152, 153 micro-macro problem 139–142 middle-range theory 95 Mills, C. Wright 72 Milwaukee, political culture 104 Model Cities 132 Molotch, Harvey 138 Money, Morals, and Manners 157 Moore, Wilbert 17 Moral Commonwealth 157 moral goals 71–72 moral organizations 152 morality 137, 147–157 morality, and institutional cultures 146–151 morality, citizens 3 morality, social science and 3 Moynihan Report 146 muddling through 98 multimethod research 121

multiple sclerosis 81 Multiple Sclerosis Society 92 Muscular Dystrophy Association

92–93

Nabakov, Vladimir 88 National Arthritis Institute 92 National Institute of Arthritis, Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases 92 National Institutes of Health 92 national service 167 National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) 44 needle exchange 30 needy, deserving and undeserving 48, 68 neo-conservative 51 New Deal era 125, 129–131 new institutionalism 118, 130–131 Nickel and Dimed 77 NIMBY 10 Nisbet, Robert xii Nixon, Richard Milhouse, President 132 No Child Left Behind 134 nonprofit organizations 113, 116, 133 norm-producing organizations 151 Office of Management and Budget 102 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 10 opiate of the masses 73 organizational culture 122 Orwell, George 88 Parsons, Talcott 17, 41, 53, 79, 82, 148 paternalim, and religion 33 paternalism 32–34 Peirce, Charles x Peterson, Paul 105 physical disabilities 58–59 physicians, and service 33–34 Pinafore 76 Piven, Frances Fox 44, 73, 77, 159 pluralism, and government 98 pluralists 87, 90–91 policy crisis 113 policy epochs 117–118, 125–135 policy, and special interests 7 political “market” 96 political economy 67 political influence 93–94 politicians, as coalition builders 90

Index pollution, business accountability and 11 positivism 140 pragmatic liberalism 31, 53, 85, 149–150, 159–160 pragmatism, defined ix–x preventative medicine 80 privatization, of social services 113 problematics 144, 146–147 professional social inquiry 142 professionalism 126, 128 Progressive era 125, 126–129 Progressive movement 33 protest movements, and social services 41–42 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 58 public interest 111 public welfare, as social control 77 public-private partnerships 104 Putnam, Robert xii queuing model

56, 57–60

Rachel and Her Children 77 racism 79 radical state 82–84 radicals 5–6 radicals, polemics and 82 rational actor sociologists 53 Reagan, Ronald, President 133, 161 Red Cross 59, 110 Regulating the Poor 73, 77 relativism 17, 32 relativism and values 3 religion, and Marxism 73–74 retarded people 78 Reveille for Radicals 8 revolutions, radicals and 85 right right, to freedom from pain 20–21 right to freedom of action 21–24 right, to life 19–20 rights 19–27 rights, and duties 19 rights, as a function of programs 101 rights, economic 23 rights, freedom from violence 24–25 rights, of citizens 129–130 rights, to food, shelter, and clothing 26

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191

rights, to health and protection for the defenseless 26–27 Roe v. Wade 45 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, President 81 Rorty, Richard xi, 149 rule of law 24 Salvation Army 59 Samuelson, Paul 52, 53 Sarason, Seymour 96 Satisfice 98 schools schools, as selection devices 76 schools, equalizing performance 75 schools, rationalizing inequality 76 schools, student failure 76 Science 92 Scottish Enlightenment xiii, 51 secondary labor market 78 selfish organizatons 152, 153, 154–157 selfishness, pure 37–39 Selznick, Philip 102, 118, 122, 157 Sennett, Richard 172 sentencing rules 65 service work, as census category 78 shadow economy 54 Shils, Edward ii, 171 Shilts, Randy 81 sickle cell anemia 81 sickness, as social construction 140 Simon, Herbert ix Smith, Adam xi, 5, 17, 18 social capital xiii, 124–125 social control, service agencies as aspects of 76–80 social insurance 43 social policy 90 Social Security 129 social services, as political 110 socialization socialization for civility 73–76 socialization, function of human services 74 society of groups 91–93 sociological imagination 72 Stack, Carol 60, 77 standard operating procedures (SOP) 149 state state, and legitimate use of coercive force 24 state, as a construction 16

192

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Index

sterilization 78 stigmatizing labels 78 strategy, in organizations 108–109 Strauss, Anselm 148 Street Corner Society 60 street-level practitioners 96, 101, 119 subcultures, institutional 119 surplus population 42 systematics 144, 145–146 Szasz, Thomas 10 Tally’s Corner 77 Teleomatics 144–145 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 102 Terrorists 73 The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change 96 The Gift Relationship 35 The Independent Sector 8 The Moral Order of the Suburbs 157 The Myth of Mental Illness 10 The Other America 161 third sector xii three-D model 99–103 Tilly, Charles 144 Titicutt Follies 10 Titmuss, Richard 35, 37, 38, 131, 142 Tocqueville, Alexis de xii, 163 total institutions 150 Tourette’s Syndrome 81 Tradition 35 trickle-down model 68 Turner, Ralph 157 twelve-step program 34 tyranny, defined 22 underground economies 55 unintended consequences (of policies) 5, 65 United Way 59 Utilitarianism 30, 32, 37–42

Utility 37 utility maximizers

51

value set 109 values 29 values drift 96 values, and organizations 107–112 values, and politics 90 values, and scientific objectivity 90 values, conflict 31 values, consensus about 16–18 vertical dimension of community 119 vertical structure 119 Voltaire 89 Voluntarism 11 voluntary associations 91–92 voluntary sector, and the state 162 Vonnegut, Kurt 170 Vouchers 66 War in Vietnam 132, 134 war on drugs 65 War on Poverty era 125, 131–135 Warren, Roland 119 Washington, George, President 164 Wealth of Nations xi Weber, Max 17, 24, 58, 89, 95 welfare reform 113, 114 welfare state thinking 115 Whose Keeper? 157 Whyte, William Foote 60 Wiley, Northrop 55 Williams, Oliver 104 Wilson, Edmund O. 142 Wilson, William Julius 60 Wiseman, Frederick 10 Wolfe, Allan xii, 157 World War II 129 zero-sum conflict

98, 100