Overview
What kind of things are we talking about when we refer to âgovernmentâ? What sorts of processes, forces, mechanisms, structures, and activities make up the workings of government? In recent years philosophers of social science have rightly urged that we need to better understand the âstuffâ of the social world if we are to have a good understanding of how it works. In philosophical language, we need to focus for a time on issues of ontology with regard to the social world. What kinds of entities, powers, forces, and relations exist in the social realm? What kinds of relations tie them together? What are some of the mechanisms and causal powers that constitute the workings of these social entities? Are there distinctive levels of social organization and structure that can be identified? Earlier approaches to the philosophy of the social sciences have largely emphasized issues of epistemology, explanation, methodology, and confirmation, and have often been guided by unhelpful analogies with positivism and the natural sciences. Greater attention to social ontology promises to allow working social scientists and philosophers alike to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the nature of the social world. Better thinking about social ontology is important for the progress of social science. Bad ontology breeds bad science.
These issues are especially interesting when we consider the nature and role of âgovernmentâ in the modern world. What is government? How does it work? How are the many actors and subjects of government tied together through constraints, actions, institutions, values, incentives, norms, identities, emotions, and interests?
The book seeks to provide a basis for a better understanding of some of the central puzzles of empirical political science: how does âgovernmentâ express will and purpose? What accounts for both plasticity and perseverance of political institutions and practices? How do political institutions come to have effective causal powers in the administration of policy and regulation? And how can we arrive at a better understanding of the persistence of dysfunctions in government and public administrationâfailures to achieve public goods, the persistence of self-dealing behavior by the actors of the state, and the apparent ubiquity of the influence of private interests even within otherwise high-functioning governments?
If we are to think seriously about the ontology of government, it is good to begin with a few obvious ontological truths. Most basically, it is plain that any specific government is not one unitary thing. Instead, it is a composite thing that encompasses many social functions, networks, doings, and powers, at multiple and overlapping levels. Government is not precisely layered in the fashion suggested by an organizational chart. Rather, it consists of multiple systems, organizations, groups, specialists, brokers, and rogues working sometimes with considerable independence and sometimes with great coordination and subordination.
Consider some of these examples of the face of government, and notice the great heterogeneity they represent: the policeman on the beat, the health inspector, the city health department, the state and federal revenue services, the National Science Foundation, the state economic development agency, the mayorâs office, the elected school board, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the President, and so on ad infinitum. There are ties among these nodes, both formal and informal, and there are sometimes organization charts that display functional relationships, authority structures, and flows of information along various offices and actors. But there is also substantial contingency and path dependence in the development of these institutions and relationships and a quilt-like arrangement of jurisdictions and histories.
Another important truth about government is that it is made up of actorsâindividuals who occupy roles; who have beliefs, interests, commitments, and goals; who exist within social relations and networks involving other individuals both within and outside the corridors of power; and whose thoughts, intentions, and actions are never wholly defined by the norms, organizational imperatives, and institutions within which they operate. Government officials and functionaries are not robots, defined by the dictates of role responsibilities and policies. So it is crucial to approach the ontology of government from an âactor-centeredâ point of view, and to understand the powers and capacities of government in terms of the ways in which individual actors are disposed to act in a range of institutional and organizational circumstances. Whether we think of the top administrators and executives, or the experts and formulators of policy drafts, or the managers of extended groups of specialized staff, or the individuals who receive complaints from the public, or the compliance officers whose job it is to ensure that policies are followed by insiders and outsidersâall of these positions are occupied by individual actors who bring their own mental frameworks, interests, emotions, and knowledge to the work they do in government.
This point is all the more important when we consider the range of tasks performed by government. Governments make decisions through legislation and executive agencies; they gather knowledge about complex challenges, both scientific and social; they set priorities for government itself, and indirectly for the society in which they operate; they establish policies and rules; they collect taxes; they wage war; and, of course, they seek to implement the rule of law and the scope and effectiveness of rules and policies. Generally, these tasks require extended processes of collaboration, delegation, coordination, and communication within the organizations that make up the divisions of government. And often enough these processes misfire, leading to outcomes that are counter-productive for both government and society.
Every part of this long list of tasks involves deep complexities that are of interest to political scientists and public administration specialists. And all of these activities involve the coordinated (or sometimes uncoordinated) activities of legions of individual actors. The workforce of the Environmental Protection Agency is over 14,000 men and women, and the Food and Drug Administration is comparable in size; the Department of Justice employs over 110,000 individuals in dozens of major departments and offices; the Department of Homeland Security employs 229,000 individuals and consists of over a dozen large sub-agencies and sub-bureaus. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a relatively small Federal agency with a very important and complex charge, has 3800 employees.
Now think of the possibilities of overlap, interference, and inconsistency that exist among the functionings and missions of diverse agencies. Each agency has its mission and priorities; these goals imply efforts on the part of the leaders, managers, and staff of the agency to bring about certain kinds of results. And sometimesâperhaps most timesâthese results may be partially inconsistent with the priorities, goals, and initiatives of other governmental agencies. The Commerce Department has a priority of encouraging the export of US technology to other countries, to generate business success and economic growth in the United States. Some of those technologies involve processes like nuclear power production. But other agenciesâand the Commerce Department itself in another part of its missionâhave the goal of limiting the risks of the proliferation of technologies with potential military uses. Here is the crucial point to recognize: there is no âmaster executiveâ capable of harmoniously adjusting the activities of all departments so as to bring about the best outcome for the country, all things considered. There is the President of the United States, of course, who wields authority over the cabinet secretaries who serve as chief executives of the various departments; and there is the Congress, which writes legislation charging and limiting the activities of government. But it is simply impossible to imagine an overall master executive who serves as symphony conductor to all these different areas of government activity. At the best, occasions of especially obvious inconsistency of mission and effort can be identified and ameliorated. New policies can be written, memoranda of understanding between agencies can be drafted, and particular dysfunctions can be untangled. But this is a piecemeal and never-complete process.
Recent work in organizational sociology has provided new tools for describing social arrangements within organizations and institutions. Richard Scott and Gerald Davisâs major work Organizations and Organizing (2007) provides an excellent contemporary framework for understanding the workings of organizations, emphasizing rational, natural, and open-systems approaches to organizations. Their analysis sheds a great deal of light on the workings of government agencies. The word âorganizingâ in the title of their book signals the idea that organizations are no longer looked at as static structures within which actors carry out well defined roles, but are instead dynamic processes in which active efforts by leaders, managers, and employees define goals and strategies and work to carry them out. And the âopen-systemâ phrase highlights the point that organizations always exist and function within a broader environmentâpolitical constraints, economic forces, public opinion, technological innovation, other organizations, and today climate change and environmental disaster.
This is a perfect place for application of Fligstein-McAdam strategic action field theory (Fligstein and McAdam 2012). Government is well conceived as interlinked action networks with tighter and looser linkages and strategic actions by a variety of actors. (Think of the jurisdictional struggles between FBI and state and local police authorities.) The theory of assemblages is another suggestive theory of social ontology in this context. Manuel DeLanda spells out some of the details of this ontological framework on the social world (2006). The social ontology of assemblage illuminates the modular and contingent arrangement of offices, networks, and actors that make up government at a period in time. Some of Marxâs theories about politics and government are relevant as wellâthe salience of class interest in the formulation and application of government policy is plainly an important aspect of the ont...