harre social reality and the myth of social structure

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2002 5: 111European Journal of Social TheoryRom Harré

Myth of Social StructureRom Harré on Social Structure and Social Change : Social Reality and the

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S Y M P O S I U M

R o m H a r r é o n S o c i a l S t r u c t u r ea n d S o c i a l C h a n g e

Social Reality and the Myth of SocialStructure

Rom Harré GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, USA/LINACRE COLLEGE, OXFORD, UK

AbstractThe question of whether social structures are efficacious can be tackled byexamining how they are produced. There are roles and rules, and there arepeople. Only the latter have the necessary powers to generate social worldsas products. Changing the social world can be achieved only by changing therules and customs active people follow. Selectionist models of change alsodraw our attention to rules. Finally, there are obstacles to social change in‘reductions’ – the minute social practices that shape actual social orders.

Key words■ change ■ discursive ■ micro ■ reductons ■ structure

Introduction

I want to address the underlying problem of both social psychology and soci-ology: could social structures be causally efficacious? A positive answer to thisquestion is taken by Roy Bhaskar (1989: Chapters 6 and 8) to be perfectly uncon-troversial. Consequently, if one wants to change the social order, in particular themicro-social order, one should change whatever causes that order to be what itis. The difficulty for me is to get some clear idea of what macro-social structuresmight be that they could have causal powers. Only particulars can have suchpowers. Is it obvious that the referents of social structure expressions areparticulars of the right sort? Not to me. The critical realist crowd is inclined tosay ‘yes’ to the big ontological question – could social structures be causallyefficacious? But that is because they are not clear about what these causallyefficacious Platonic beings might actually be!

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I do not think we can answer this question just like that. My discussion willbe focused on the unattended details of unaddressed assumptions, a bit of nit-picking. I want to go through some fine-grain stuff to look quite carefully at allthe bits and pieces that make up this supposition. If we try to come to a judi-cious conclusion about the question it will not be a simple yes or no answer. Thequestion of the question itself is a critical one, that is whether it makes any senseat all, in short does the question that the referents of social structure expressionscould be causally efficacious make sense.

At the end of the day I hope to show that such referents are not the kind ofentities that could be causally efficacious. I’m not saying that there are no suchthings as social structures, but they’re not the right kind of thing to do the sortof work that ‘some people’ would like them to do.

Causality: Some Reminders

We are all post-Humeans, I suppose. There are two post-Humean conceptionsof causality that seem to be at work in both everyday commonsense under-standings of the world and at the sharp end of the physical sciences. The firstkind is ‘event causality’ where we take the causal relation to be between events aspairs of instances of certain event types. The question for an investigator wouldbe what is the causal mechanism which is activated by the prior event and engen-ders the subsequent event. We need to provide an ontological link – for example,what sort of process in what medium is going on between the sequence of eventsthat make up a lifetime of smoking, and the event of the onset of one of the manynasty diseases smokers contract.1

This will not do for the whole story of causality. There is the question of thesite of the efficacy, of causal power to bring about effects. This is agent causality,the idea of a continuously existing being, continuously active which can bringabout events without being stimulated in any way. It displays its activity whenvarious obstructions to action have been removed. Here we have a familiar storyof potentials, active relationships between charges, fields and their dispositions.

By removing the support I can provide the occasion for the gravitational fieldto display its powers to make a thing accelerate at 9.8 metres per second in avertical direction without giving it a shove. I simply remove the obstacle to themanifestation of power by the continuously active gravitational field. In thismode we are not ascribing causality to events, but to things and substances.

By and large, agent causality has been defended by most philosophers recentlyin the context of personal activity – arguing that persons are the relevant, activeagents. I want to take another direction by trying to establish the legitimacy,indeed the necessity of the notion in the physical sciences. If it is a viable conceptin the physical sciences we do not need to defend the generic concept beforeapplying it to people.

Let us return to what Kant has to say on the subject. Kant (1788) is trying topersuade us that there are two transcendental realms involved in the concept of

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personal efficacy. There is the transcendental unity of apperception, the unity ofconsciousness, and there is the transcendental ego, that which has the power toperform certain sorts of actions not having to be stimulated by any contingentcondition. There are occasions in life, lots and lots of occasions, where we areable to see the stimulus that will bring about a response. However, there are alsooccasions (and Kant gives us the criterion for identifying them) when we cannotapply that schema, since there is no empirically discernible stimulus. As he says,we have the experience of spontaneity, of being able to act unconditionally. Thereis then a manifestation in the flow of events of something which we could identifyas a genuine agent. It is not that we have to guess about this – we do have acriterion. As we exhaust all the possibilities of the conditional production ofaction, and we feel that reason has prevailed, and we have an intuition of spon-taneity, we have an empirical ground for postulating the non-empirical tran-scendental ego. This being is not observable. It is not part of the empirical ego.

From the presentation of the general case for agent causation in terms ofconcepts that we use in the physical sciences, and the Kantian conception of thespontaneous activity of the person as transcendental ego, we can see that the nextstep is to ask how we would apply the concept of agent causation in the Bhaskar-ian case. Kantian criteria might be one way of doing it.

However, it is more complicated because it gets folded back on itself. Kant didsay that the noumenal is the realm of reason and the empirical is the realm ofcausality. I want to avoid getting stuck in the finer points of Kantian scholarship.I will simply project onto Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and phenom-enal, the transcendental and the immanent, a distinction between event causal-ity and agent causality. That is what we need to investigate – the question of whatit might be to declare that social structures are causally efficacious.

Are they causally efficacious in event mode, in which case we would look forcausal mechanisms, or are they causally efficacious in the agent mode? Then wewould have to invoke criteria to identify which particular is the agent. We wouldhave to satisfy some pretty stringent criteria – such as the agent must be contin-uously potentially active and exercising its powers when obstructions are removed,as magnets, gravitational fields, electric fields do.

Social Construction

The next thing I need to look at is the notion of social structure. But before Iturn to the specifics of the social version of structure, I must give an account ofstructures as entities having a certain character. They consist of elements whichare related to one another. Some of these relations must be invariant under trans-formation. A thing which disintegrates every time the wind blows is not astructure. This is a fairly simple but strict criterion for what is to count as a struc-ture. Refinements include whether the relations must all be internal; that is, partdefinitive of the type of being which is to constitute the elements. The kind ofstructures we are concerned with in the debate between critical realists and social

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constructionists are those in which the elements are related by internal relations.A familiar example in micro-sociology, the family is an internally related struc-ture because the categories of family membership are defined partly with respectto the relations in which they stand to one another. Some of these relations mustbe invariant under transformation. For instance the organization of the family atany given Christmas party may reflect internal relations partly definitive of thesocial status of the persons in question. Who sits where round the dining tableat Christmas, and where they are sitting is a spatial relationship which is partlyinternally definitive of a category of person who is in that place. Granny alwayssits in a certain place and so on. Of course, there are also the external relationsin the family.

I want to make a distinction between two different sorts of continuing situ-ations in which we might want to say that we have structures in the social sciencesense. First of all, there are institutions. I suppose most people would reckon thatan institution was a social structure and to ask what it is that is constituent ofthe institution. One might think that it is the people who are the elements. Whenyou think that through a little bit further it becomes obvious that there are veryfew institutions the elements of which are just the people who currently happento be there. One must think of the elements of an institution as the roles, andthe relationships as a relational net that picks up the roles.

An institution will not go out of existence when one of its members is replacedby another human being, provided that role continuity is established. So the rolesare naturally appropriately taken as the elements and there will be some relationsbetween them, which will have to be invariant under transformation, for examplethe substitution of different people in roles. ‘The King is dead, long live the King’precisely reflect this principle. There will be some sorts of institutions which arehighly dependent upon the exact individual who happens to be in command.The German Third Reich depended on one person. Take Hitler away and therewas not much left. It was a very different organization from the United Statesgovernment where you can substitute presidents one after another, while therelationship between the president, the congress and the judiciary remains asadversarial now as it ever was.

There are other ontologies possible in the social domain. I have in mind thesort of case where the elements are neither people nor roles, but rather the actsthat are performed. For example, such a social construction might be a rugbygame. The game consists of a whole sequence of acts. The people can be replaced,and individuals are not all that tightly related to roles. The way modern rugby isplayed, forwards can run and pass in much the same way as the backs.

Where are the people in these examples? The people play the roles and thusthey generate the structure. The people are like the magnetic poles we invoke toexplain the pattern of iron filings through which the structure of the field ismanifested. They are the underlying generators of the structure. They are a neces-sary foundation on which the possibility of social structures depends.


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People as Actors

Articulating roles in a different way from the generating act, roles are generatedthrough custom, legislation and so on. There are all sorts of activities peopleengage in to create roles. And they are maintained in various ways – collectiveremembering, enacting and publicizing statutes, and all kinds of things.

Acts are generated by people in orderly sequences of actions that constitutesocial structures of another kind. If you ask in the Christian context, is the insti-tution foreshadowed in the New Testament composed of the Apostles, or is itconstituted of the Acts of the Apostles? We can take either away. This is a keyfeature of the ambiguity that infects the very idea of social structure. Is it dynamicor is it static. It might be ‘the Apostles’ – because to be an Apostle is to occupyor manifest a role. In the latter part of the New Testament – reported in the Actsof the Apostles – Peter, Matthew and so on are generating the Christian Churchas a series of acts and in these are living out certain roles. One could focus eitheron the roles or on the acts or on both.

Social structures, be they roles or acts, are secondary formations or productsof the activity of people acting according to rules, customs and conventions. Therules and conventions have to be tidy enough to produce act-sequences as struc-tures. Sixty or seventy men used to contend for a pig’s bladder in village contestsin England before rugby was invented. I imagine it was pretty chaotic. Gradu-ally certain conventions came into being and hardened into rules. Rugby haspassed from being a game to rugby as an institution.

Rules and Conventions as Social Reality

We have to be very careful about what we say about rules, customs and conven-tions. Those who started the anti-experimental, analytical movement in socialpsychology were trying to point to the way in which people acted in creatingsocial institutions and carrying on their social life. They acted in a way that wasfairly neatly described by talking about following rules and conventions.However, the concept of ‘rule’ was reified into a quite unjustifiable systematicsense, in which rules were given far too concrete a character, as if they existedindependently of the practices they ‘guided’. This metaphor and others like itfocused attention on some special cases, such as starting to learn a foreignlanguage or assembling a piece of knocked-down (flat-packed) furniture. An evenmore misleading idea was to infer that if rules are not accessed consciously thenthey must be being accessed unconsciously. Such a use of the concept of ‘rule’cannot possibly be right.

There is much merit in the use of such concepts as ‘rule’ and ‘convention’but their treatment in social theory and research methodology must be tied in withWittgenstein’s subtle treatment of normativity (Wittgenstein, 1953: 138–242). Incases in which the people are acting in a regular and coordinated way, a sociolo-gist or psychologist might write down his/her intuition that the performance took


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account, somehow, of norms by writing down a proposition expressing a rule. Thismight express two quite different psychological hypotheses.

It might suggest that the people were following a rule or it might suggest that people were acting in accordance with a rule. These are quite differentprocedures. Following a rule is typified by the sort of thing one does when thereis a written instruction; one reads the instruction and then does what it says.Acting according to a rule is quite different. Acting according to a rule is typi-fied by the sort of thing one does when driving cars, playing musical instrumentsand so on, correctly, that is in accord with some usually publicly acknowledgedstandard. There are several possible cases here too. Once upon a time there wasan instruction, and now the competent actor follows it. But sometimes one justcopies what someone else does, say in choosing which piece of cutlery to use ata ‘posh’ dinner, where the ‘rule’ written down in etiquette books is immanent inthe practice. Garfinkel has remarked that no amount of following the writtenrules will ever allow one to accomplish the task completely. In the instructionsfor assembling a garden chair, or using a computer, the manual always omits amove which ‘everybody knows’, such as the direction in which the nuts shouldbe tightened on the bolts.

These examples illustrate the deep difference between norm guidance thatworks through explicit instructions and that which works through the imma-nence of ‘right ways’ in the practices of a community. When social construc-tionists say that social acts are rule-guided or take account of conventions, theymay be referring to one or other of these paradigms. But most importantly ineither case, the person is the active agent, and the rule, convention or custom atits most explicit just a means to the coordinated management of meanings. Socialreality is exhausted by what people do. The rules by which they manage it mustnot be reified into a transcendent realm from which they exert their benign influ-ence. What reality do they have? Again we must distinguish a mode of being asimmanent in practices, many of which are discursive, and a mode of being asconcrete instructions, which are real as instances of discourse. In short, the onlyreality norms and rules have is of the same ontological status as the activities they‘govern’, namely discursive acts.

Institutions and their Possible Efficacy

Now, if this analysis of the joint roles of actors and the discourses they jointlycreate is adequate to the nature of the case, there are just people and the productsof their activities. We can now ask ‘Could either rules or institutions as productspossibly be causally efficacious?’ The answer is plainly ‘No!’ The advice of J.L.Austin (1969) to use humdrum examples to investigate such grand theses as theCritical Realists offer us is well taken. The thesis to which I have both moral andmetaphysical objections is simply put. Operate on social structures, and then, loand behold, people will be happier, nicer and richer. For example, it might besuggested that one should perform these amazing feats on ‘the economic system’,


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whatever that might be, which somehow exists over and above the mundaneactivities of people engaged in buying and selling, performing such discursive actsas setting up budgets, balancing the books and so on. I can understand what ismeant by that pregnant phrase if it is a summary expression for the myriad discur-sive acts people actually do, and the various story-lines they use in talking aboutwhat they have done, are doing and might do in the future. But the thesis thatthere is something else in play I simply do not understand.

My moral objections follow directly from these metaphysical objections. It iseasy to postpone the hard task of transforming story-lines and making face-to-face ameliorations to the real social world by moving to the realm of the tran-scendental. It is easy to talk grandly of ‘the social system’ as if it, as somethingover and above the mess of actual social interactions, brought about all thosesocial interactions. But the only efficacious being in the game is the person. Howcould that be proven?

The Conditions for Ascriptions of Causal Efficacy

Let us see whether any of the candidates now on the board can satisfy theconditions that would be necessary for something to be causally efficacious. Inthe analysis of causality above we saw that the concept of ‘cause’ gathers up bothevents and things. The causal efficacy of events is tied to the causal mechanismsthey activate.

Quite plainly the causal ontology of events will not apply in the social casejust because a social structure, though composed of events, is not an event. Thealternative is to be causally efficacious as an agent, a powerful particular, some-thing like the earth as a source of gravity or the north magnetic pole on thisparticular magnet. Both are the right sort of particular, continually efficaciousunless the activity is blocked.

Now we have to ask whether any of the social things we have identified couldpossibly meet these conditions for ascriptions of causal efficacy. There were roles,rules and the acts that people jointly performed within the frames of possibilitythat they determined. But both rules and acts are discursive products. What is thecategory of efficacious agent that brings them into being? Only persons. No ruleor convention is the kind of thing that could be an efficacious agent.

Of course people can be trapped into story-lines, taking the constraints onwhat they are able to use to make sense of their situations as if these weresomehow transcendent to those situations. But they are just story-lines. TedBenton described the situation of an applicant for welfare who did not manageto achieve her just aims. The anecdote made it abundantly clear that the clientperson did not know how to tell a story that fitted the story-line conventions ofthe welfare agency. Garfinkel long ago showed how this commonplace phenom-enon can take on the appearance of an inaccessible social order. Benton’sacquaintance’s misfortune was not lack of access. There is nothing to gain accessto. It was her inability to tell her story according to the ‘right conventions’.


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Criteria of Identity

We need to take this discussion a step further to complete the analysis in aconvincing way. If one wants to explain some social phenomenon one might saythat it was the rule or the convention that made one do it, so that was where thesource of causal efficacy in the social world is to be located. Can we dismiss rulesand conventions as candidates for agency in a more fundamental way? Is a ruleor convention something which has the right sort of characteristics to be a power-ful particular? One way to carry the discussion further would be to ask aboutcriteria of identity. What counts as the same rule on different occasions? Whatcounts as numerically the same rule, and what counts as qualitatively the samerule?

The two senses of ‘same’ seem to collapse into one in the case of rules. This isbecause we can only judge that a rule is the same by comparisons between whatpeople do in accordance with it. Sameness of rule is inherited, it seems, fromsameness of human performance. And that in turn is inherited from somemeaning of the action, in the sense that the conforming action, whatever it is, isused to perform the same act. We might make a similar point about the identityconditions for conventions.

Candidates for Powerful Particulars

There seem to be only two candidates – people and rules – for the role of thecausally efficacious particulars. To try to make a final selection between them, letus look at the psychological processes which we might want to hypothesize ineach case.

If it were the case that a rule were to be cited as the causally efficacious particu-lar in the production of either of these kinds of social structured sequences ofsocial events, or institutions, that is structured arrays of interconnected roles, thenit would not be possible for the people involved to fabricate the rule, to abandonit, to refuse to follow it, to do something different in order to be bloody-minded,and so on. There are a million ways in which the relationship between rules andpeople and their actions is weak. If there were infringements one would have tosay that there was another rule, sneaking in, the rule for abandoning this rule.When you want to be bloody-minded and act in such and such a way, therewould have to be another rule specifying the right conditions for applying thebloody-mindedness rule. Wittgenstein argued that one could not construct apsychology on the basis of an infinite regress of rules. At some point you have tosay: ‘This is how I go on’. I’m a person and I’m going to follow a certain rule,acting in accordance with it. That is the sort of person I am.’ A number ofphilosophers, for instance Charles Taylor (1977: Chapter 4), have argued moreor less the same point. In relation to rules and the forms of life they constitute,people have radical freedom. If it were the case that the rules were the efficaciousbeings, then many things that we can do would not be possible; or if they were


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possible, they would involve a potentially infinite regress of rules. All we have leftnow is people. People are the effective agents who are creating the social world,creating social structures in accordance with the rules and conventions that havecome to them historically, and, for the most part, are immanent in social prac-tices.

Amelioration of the Social World

This is the preliminary part of the argument – now we turn to the substantivepart: questions about social change. Suppose that the argument offered so far ismore or less right, that the efficacious agents in the social world are people andthey shape their world, creating social structures, by following the rules of socialengagement or acting in accordance with them. So what would we act upon tomake things better? What would be the weak point in a society, the point of anapplication of the attempt at amelioration of the lives and fortunes of the citi-zens? Since social structures are products, they are not appropriate targets forameliorative acts. If the people are the causally efficacious agents, one might think‘Oh well, let’s act on the people’. But do what to them? What could we conceiv-ably do to anybody that would make human life better?

The only possibility I can think of is the sort of thing that sometimes happens,like St Paul’s conversion experience on the road to Damascus. However, gener-ally these experiences cannot be achieved to order, and unless they happen to theperson who is the leader of the show, nothing much of consequence follows. Soit is not going to be much good acting on the people. What is left? One couldact on the rules and conventions. If one’s aim is really the transformation ofsociety, the place to act is at that point where the people actually generate theroles and acts that are constitutive of institutions and other social realities. Thisis the place for political action: on the rules. It is no good talking about takingaction on the social structure, the economic system, because there is no suchthing beyond a useful discursive category. Let us take a model example. I knowwhat it is like to change the rules and so to change the institution and the activi-ties it makes possible. Let us turn to rugby. It has changed a good deal over thelast fifty years. There are all sorts of ways in which rugby is a different kind ofsocial entity, not only in the scoring but also in the very nature of the game. Theplayers following the rules engender the new game like the old game. Change therules, and the game thereby changes. Rugby is an institution, and that haschanged. The institution did not engender rugby games. Nor was it changes tothe structure of that institution that changed the game. It was changes in the rulesand conventions of how the game is managed and played.

There are complications to be faced in taking the discursive turn. I am justgoing to mention them in passing because I want to say a little bit more aboutthe way all this works in practice. The complications arise because of the differ-ence between following the rules as instructions and those cases which Wittgen-stein called acting according to a rule. In both cases sociologists, linguists and


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other tidy-minded persons set about writing down rules to express the regular-ity/orderliness that they have seen in the world. But this is not the basis for apsychological hypothesis about how it was brought into being. That is the kindof mistake that I and others made in the early days of this development, think-ing that writing down a representation of the regularity is a short-cut to an expla-nation of it. Only if those rules were instructions, then you can say that theexplanation of the subsequent orderliness of life is that the people were follow-ing an instruction. But a huge amount of social life is not carried on that way. Itis more or less comprehended under the paradigm of according to the rule.

Selectionist Explanations Again

The final thing I want to talk about is the currently revived selectionist theory ofsocial change. The idea is that we should be able to understand social change bycreating an analogue of selectionist explanations in biology. Susan Blackmore(1999) has taken up Richard Dawkins’ (Dawkins, 1976) terminology of memes,cognitive units of selectionist social explanations and used it in a very surprisingway. The last thing those of us who have used the biological analogy had in mindwas to identify the meme with some molecular goings on in the brain – it wasnot a chemical concept. But in Susan Blackmore’s version memes are representedchemically in the brain and chemical things can happen to them. If there are anyrepresentations at all, they are to be found in written sets of rules. They could becandidates, along with the practices they support, for the social versions of theDawkins concepts of replicators (rules) and interactors (practices). It is practicesthat survive or perish in social environments, and on their fate depend the fatesof the rules and customs that are involved in the way people engender such prac-tices.

Selectionist explanations require variation, generation by generation. We haveto ask how mutant practices could arise. According to the theory, they must arisefrom mutant rules or customs, so there has to be a way by which mutant rulesand customs come about. One plausible suggestion is that there are tensionsbetween people’s perception of their position in the economic order and theirperceptions of their position in the expressive order of status and honour. Thesetensions are expressed in a locally established rhetoric, which suggests new rulesand customs to be used to ‘make a new life’. One account of the rise of femin-ism thirty years ago is in the description of such a tension in terms of a politicalrhetoric. Women experienced a disparity between their role in the economicorder and how they were regarded in the expressive order. Expressed politicallythat led to ideas about new rules and customs for the management of relationsbetween the sexes, new ways of doing things. New ways of doing things start byproposing new rules.

The idea then is that we look for sources of rule change. There are those thatcome about through social processes such as I have just described. Then there arethe less effective means of change that are instituted by legislation. The bottom


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line of this argument is that if one is to provide a formula for bringing aboutsocial change, it is no good focusing on the mythic large-scale social structuresto achieve it. It is no good talking about changing the social structure, changingthe morphology of the institutions of education – that is just hot air – the waychange does occur is through processes that focus on the minutiae of the rulesand customs that go into the management of the social practice constitutive ofeach and every social order.

One last point. It is a very striking feature of large-scale revolutions that over-turn the apparatus of the state, such as the transformation of France from monar-chy to republic, that so little happens as a result of the revolution. In no timeNapoleon takes on the characteristics of Louis XIV. How is it that large-scalechanges like changing the constitution of India left everything pretty much thesame? The common phrase for Nehru’s regime was ‘the brown sahibs’.

With my colleague Ali Moghaddam at Georgetown (Moghaddam and Harré,1997), I have been developing the concept of a reducton to describe the under-lying basis of the way that revolutions are soon marked by a return to the regimethat they purported to have overthrown. A reducton is a minute social practice,so small, so insignificant that it is far too small for parliaments and committeesof peasants and workers to bother about. A reducton is how we shake hands, whosits where at the table, how we pass in the street and so on which seem to be thehighly resistant bits of the social world that keep on keeping on, thereby repro-ducing the old regime. You can change the political status of India; you canchange the rules by which that country was governed, yet at the post office, theordinary people will still step aside for a sahib. Dogs in India are very good atreducton management. They distinguish visitors by their dress. If you go to visitsomebody you should dress like a sahib and not like a peasant, to avoid the atten-tion of the housedogs. These minutiae maintain the social order.

I have been arguing for the importance of paying attention to the way in whichone might change the rules because the rules are the source of new practicesbrought about by the only category of powerful particulars around, namelypeople. Nevertheless, there is something yet more minute than rules, and moreintransigent to change, the defining reductons.

Summary and Conclusion

So let me sum up this rather complicated and very provisional line I have beentaking. I have been trying to identify what it is that bothers me about theenthusiastic and well-intentioned claim that social structures are causallyefficacious and therefore if we want to ameliorate our lives we should changethem. The focus of Critical Realists and other such well-meaning but metaphys-ically misguided people being on constituted authorities, economic systems andmythical things of that sort. I claim that these exist only as discursive categories.

After the debates of the last thirty to forty years there seem to be two well-established uses for the causal notion. One appears in describing relations among


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events, and the other in describing the capacities of agents. For event causalityone must postulate causal mechanisms. Agent causality is equally important. Welive in a world of continuously active beings that bring about events whenobstructions are removed. We have a Kantian way for recognizing the presenceof such an agent. We have to look at the social candidates for causal efficacy, forthe role of basic powerful particulars. Critical realists, Marxists and others havetaken for granted that social structures are just right for this role. What might acandidate social structure be: perhaps institutions? But institutions are theproduct of various kinds of rule-following, where the active agency is plainly tobe ascribed to people, with the institution to be seen as its role structure or as theacts that its members produce in fulfilling their roles.

How do they do that? That is when rules and conventions come into the story.So we have to ask – how is it that people act according to rule? People are notjust passive vehicles for the activity of rules. Rules are not that kind of thing.There are all kinds of reasons, ordinary, everyday reasons for thinking that rulesare not that kind of thing. If they were, Mr McEnroe could not have thrown hisracket on the ground and shouted four-letter words at the umpire – but he did.Nearly everybody in England drives ten miles over the speed limit whatever itmight be, illustrating the difference between rules and customs and practices.

What could be the basic category of powerful particulars – what could some-thing be that would have the necessary efficacy to follow rules, act in accordancewith norms and to break them? We have to come back to the idea that it is peoplewho are the efficacious agents. How to improve the social world – change therules, change the customs, change these overt things which people could writedown. But that turns out to be not quite right. There is yet more that escapes theeye of legislators. There are all those little things that turn out to play an import-ant, even dominating, role in the reproduction of society. How we would changereductons, goodness only knows.

Let me tell you one reducton story to finish up with. When I was little mymother was very firm about the rule that a man walked on the outside of thepavement and a lady on the inside. Whenever I tried walking any other way Iwas promptly switched to the ‘proper’ side. In time this became a reducton. OnceI was walking with a rather fierce Australian feminist, and after crossing the road,I did my little switch. I was then subjected to a formal ticking off in the middleof a street in Washington, DC, for this quite unacceptable male behaviour. Ihadn’t even realized I was living out a reducton until suddenly it was brought tomy attention. Little gentlemen walk on the outside, and ladies, of whatever age,walk on the inside.

Note

1 You know the smoker’s proof in the existence of God – if you smoke it causes your skinto wrinkle. At the same time your smoking increases the rate at which your cataractsdevelop. You look in the mirror and your sight is so bad you can’t see your wrinkles –it must have been a divine arrangement.


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References

Austin, J.L. (1969) Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Bhaskar, R. (1989) Reclaiming Reality. London: Verso.Blackmore, S. (1999) The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Kant, I. (1788) [1929] Critique of Pure Reason. [Riga], trans. N. Kemp Smith. London:

Macmillan.Moghaddam, F.M. and Harré, R. (1997) ‘Psychological Limitations to Political

Revolutions: An Application of Social Reducton Theory’, in E. Hesslberg (ed.) DerDialogbegriff am Ende der 20 Jahrhundert, pp. 229–39. Berlin: Hegel Insitute.

Taylor, C. (1977) ‘What is Human Agency?’, in T. Mischel (ed.) The Self: Psychologicaland Philosophical Issues. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Ancombe. Oxford:Blackwell.

■ Rom Harré is Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington, DC,and Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. He has written and edited over fifty books,the most recent of which are The Singular Self (1998), One Thousand Years of Philosophy (2000) and Cognitive Science (2002). Addresses: Department of Psychol-ogy, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA [email: [email protected]];Linacre College, Oxford OX1 3JA, UK.


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harre social reality and the myth of social structure

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social theory 5