Sociological analysis rests fundamentally on irony: demonstrating that what appears is not what is; that surface belies depth; that the apparent irra-tionality of criminals, rioters, and murderers, is in fact patterned rairra-tionality.
This turn, showing the workings of such mannered rationality, presumes an analytic metalanguage that recasts the concrete, the grasped, as something quite different. The synthesis of rationality performed by Weber and recast by Parsons remains the sociological touchstone. A number of interpretive approaches consistent with qualitative work are discussed below. They have built on this synthesis. Recent theorizing glossed as postmodernism (Poster 1990; Lemert 1995) reverses the enlightenment tradition reflected in sociology.
This writing transforms rationality from a constant ‘figure’ of modernity, understood best against irrationality as a ‘ground’ in which the occasional appearance of rational action is notable, into a ground, a governing mode of irrationality, from which occasioned and occasional rationality emerges.
Rationality, science, technology and modern civic administration, are mis-leading and false or at best factious. In many ways, what passes for the rational is merely the conventional wisdom, which serves those in power.
These turns on rationality leave little room for focused and context-based fieldwork that begins with a context within which deciding takes place.
This chapter traces the most important consequence of such movements of thought in the emergent role of rationality in qualitative sociology.
Following an overview of some of the ways in which modern social science has grappled with rationality, I present an alternative focus using framing, the field and the surround, and characterize homicide detective work as situ-ated and situational rationality. It is argued that the situational rationality of detective work is ill suited to easy rationalization.1The implications of this formulation for qualitative work are examined in a final section.
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Parsons’s magisterial work, The Structure of Social Action (1936), established a working agenda for an entire generation of sociologists, drawing upon German idealism (Kant, Dilthey, Rickert, Weber), while fashioning versions of Durkheim, Marshall and Pareto. Parsons, working in the idealist tradition, emphasized the value-bases for the three types of social action identified by
Weber. Traditional, rational and charismatic were bases of legitimization for subjective meanings attached to rules and commands. This ideal-typical construction set the stage for modern studies of rationality; it was based on the notion that means and ends were connected within sets of elaborate rules and offices that constitute modern bureaux. The idea of rationality stood on the methodical linking of efficient means to well-accepted ends, and these procedural devices were replicated in the courts, bureau and other forms of public discourse and administration. In many respects, this instrumental rationality was invisibly grounded in other assumptions about social life such as Protestant aestheticism, science, enlightenment values and a rational politics (Merelman 1998: 351). The broader context of rationality grounds the specific instances and concrete examples of it.
This Parsonian synthesis obscured Weber’s very complex and subtle posi-tion (see Sica 1988; Espeland 1998; Merelman 1998). ‘Raposi-tional’ in his vocabu-lary pointed to diverse processes, meant many things, and signified complex historical developments and substantive content. It was set always in the context of deciding. Weber delineated individual irrationality, the passions, feelings, sentiments and impulses of people, from the cumulative, ‘objective’
rationality associated with institutionalized procedures, transcendental values and patterns of choice. Weber, furthermore, saw that given a commit-ment to, for example, an aesthetic cluster of values such as modern art, one could act to sustain such values rationally, as in organizing a gallery exhibi-tion. Similarly, courts, while adhering formally to stipulated procedures, can decide cases using concrete, substantive rationality based on the offender, the offence, the victim or its symbolic importance (e.g. a ‘hate crime’) rather than on formal rationality based on legal procedures, precedents, guidelines, doctrine, rules and evidence.
The rational in the Weberian scheme did not stand alone. Many kinds of rationality, seen as a process of associating ends and means, with diverse his-tories exist, and are in tension with forces of institutionalized rationality.
This formulation not only means that competition emerges between forms of rationality within organizations, but also suggests tensions between objec-tive and substanobjec-tive rationality, between situated deciding and the long-term legitimized rationality. The underlying issue was comparative analytic sociology – how can generalizations about social order be produced given the tensions between forms of rationality, individual subjectivities and collective rationality?
The diverse meanings of rationality were for Weber displayed in the ten-sions between culture, politics and the state administrative structure, and the forces of irrationality that constantly arose from cults, religions, antinomial movements and nihilism. As Antonio (1995) elegantly demonstrates, Weber knew of Nietzsche’s profound distrust of the modern rational state and its suppression of passion, culture and personal autonomy. Concrete forms of rationality, both substantive and formal rationality, and resistance to them shape modern social life, and their tensions underlie change. The interplay of values, norms and meaning was always embedded in broader questions
of legitimacy. In many respects, the modern state obscures the seething and unresolved conflicts and passions of competing groups. In many respects, Weber’s grand synthesis of rationality is tenuous (Sica 1988) because it seeks to identify the governing forces that embed deciding, an ideal type that must be stretched to cover the instant case or example. This is background for the modern attempts to explicate in social research the place of rationality.
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Shifting now to the application of conceptions of rationality, some six modes of constructing the rational can be demonstrated using well-known field studies.
Symbolic anthropology
Social scientists influenced by Clifford Geertz (1973) ground their arguments in detailed explications of context such that the deciding, whether concern-ing the self, sustainconcern-ing a culture, gamconcern-ing or cannibalism, has an apparent rationality. They have elevated substantive rationality to demonstrate the perverse rationality of even the most exotic, macabre and isolated cultures.
As a result, the details become fascinating and self-explanatory. Science, or formal rationality, rules some matters, such as canoe building, or in modern periods, treatment of infectious and many chronic diseases (Fabrega 1998), while substantive rationality shapes the ritualistic or broadly ceremonial decisions. The weight of evidence strongly supports an emergent rationality that is grounded in sanctioned deciding that incorporates the mix of values featured in the culture. In this sense, the language games that obtain in pre-literate societies are expressive exercises in which the values are played out in known forms. For example, a healing ceremony in south-eastern Mexico among the Zinacantan (Fabrega and Silver 1973) implores the gods to heal or be propitiated, requires gift exchanges that function to integrate and bind parties, families, relatives and healers, renews belief in norms of religious piety, forgiveness and obligation, as well as requiring manipulation of religious phrases, bodily motions and gestures, and use of symbols. The expressive and the instrumental aspects of this cannot be disentangled.
Furthermore, outcomes and consequences, return to health, chronic incapaci-tation or death cannot be easily distinguished from the belief system in which they are cast and which always contains an explanation. This system remains a cultural gloss because it explores the powerful and consistent consequences of a unified culture rather than of individual deciding.
Semiotics
The assumption here is that the appearances of the world, mainly given to us via words, are ‘surface’ features, which cannot be understood without
reference to a code. The logic of symbols obtains, once one discovers, or uncovers, the ‘code’ or the means by which the messages are seen as com-municating. Semiotics is not a method, but is a technique for describing the logic of symbols. The two principled kinds of semiotics differ radically in their assumptions about deciding. First, the posited rationality of semiotics found in de Saussure (1966) is the logic of mathematics, economics and Aristotelian thinking. It continues the notion of binary decisions, the law of the excluded middle, hierarchical and consistent governing principles.
Given a sign composed of signifier and signified, both connected in the nature of the arbitrary meanings of a given culture, the primitive meaning connections between the signifier and the signified are assumed, not discov-ered. Variations exist, but are built into the analysis. If in western European societies the colour ‘black’ signifies reverence and a distant thoughtful mood, it is displayed at ceremonies honouring people, dead or alive. White stands as a contrast, signifying a different mood and attitude. The colours also connote ‘good’ and ‘evil’, but these poles are subsumed under the for-mal code as less salient than the mood they convey. In Japan, the significa-tion is reversed. White signifies honouring and reverence. These opposisignifica-tions are based on general readings of culture and have shaped structuralism’s sometimes rather thin caricatures of culture. Second, pragmatic semiotics, based on the work of Pierce (1936, 1958) and more recently of Eco (1979), relies on the identification of the ‘interpretant’ or basis for interpretation that links X and Y. In this formulation, pragmatic deciding is the basis for the links, and the complex constructions of meaning within given domains. This connects the semiotics of Eco with the work of Mead (1934), his student, Charles Morris, and Morris’s student, Thomas Sebeok. In many respects, this draws on the Meadian proposition that meaning arises in the completion of the gesture toward an object. Since the powerful device is the code rather than individual actors’ sense-making activities, semiotics is a marvellous tool for simplification and disaggregating of complex materials but over-looks historical variations on usage, and overemphasizes the constraints of culture’s codes.
Context-based rationality
Mannheim (1960) and Elster (1983, 1984, 1989, 1999) argue for a situated rationality. Consider Mannheim’s (1960) and Garfinkel’s (1967) arguments that rationality was determined by the situation, weighing the factors and deciding. The continuity in social life arose as deciders look for a pattern at the same time that they seek instances of it in events. Playing a video game or chess presents a good example, as players are both trying to develop a strategy, reflect back on their previous moves and decisions, and project them forward as a pattern to imagine how to play. The individual moves are not seen alone, but in a prospective–retrospective perspective. This argument from situational rationality is consistent with pragmatism in
general because it locates the dynamics of deciding in the here and now, and the gestures and actions toward the problem. This truncates issues of the competing rationalities that may play into the deciding, and how they are resolved, and in general obviates questions of power. Although more structural in orientation, Jon Elster’s approach explores the patterning of choice by context. He points out that there are occasions in which non-rational forces shape deciding almost in spite of non-rational ‘impulses’ which he explores in his Ulysses and the Sirens (1983) or that non-rational motiva-tions lead us to deny things we fancy, a topic of Sour Grapes (1984). The time and energy one might devote to an ideal solution is inconsistent with an efficient outcome; there is often in life no guarantee that more informa-tion, greater thought, of weighing of options will increase satisfaction derived from an outcome. Conversely, Elster explores the forces of rational choice that obtain in spite of irrationality. Perhaps the most powerful of his writings explores Solomonic Judgments (1989) in which randomness in out-come may be preferred because of limited time or information constraints.
In this sense, random processes may be the closest approximation to ‘just’
or fair decisions. Short-term and long-term rationality may be in conflict.
We may be required to act irrationally in a market-driven society, and so not compete in a commodity race with neighbours, if we espouse long-run rationality. Often, decisions are made in line of ‘indirect goods’ or the ‘side bets’ and satisfactions we encumber almost in spite of rational deciding.
Because we cannot predict outcomes, and the consequences of most deci-sions are situated and unfolding, abandoning an attachment to rationality is the best course of action (or non-action). The problem repeatedly is that we are unclear about how rational to be, and are wedded ‘irrationally’ to rationality. In many respects, Elster argues that people oscillate from nor-mative guidance via rules to rationality or principles that reflect the ends we wish to accomplish in interaction with others. This latter, of course, requires that our others are also on the whole acting rationally! Elster’s rationality is a situated and contextual rationality which might be called
‘becoming rational’ as situations require modes of self-understanding and
‘predicting’ what the other as a rational being is intending or will do. Much necessary wisdom is grasped, intuitive and situated, and is independent of discourse. Elster’s brand of rational choice is based on empirical realities rather than hypothetical models or attributed motives and values. His works explores the conditions under which, rare indeed, that rationality obtains and is reasonable and rational. It is often the irrational attachment to rationality that creates paradoxes. Having said that, Elster, a logician and historian, posits rationality as a kind of working framework, which has great promise, and uses examples from literature, philosophy and history to support his claims. In sophisticated analysis of such key emotions as honour, jealousy, envy and shame, he concludes that social emotions and their expression are shaped by the social context in which they arise (Elster 1999: 203). It is the problem of fieldwork, then, to describe and analyse the social context in which emotions arise.
Higher rationalities
Following the Second World War, a reaction to the rationality of both Marxism and fascism arose in France and blossomed in due course into various versions of structuralism (Dosse 1997a [1991], 1997b [1992]). Its early thrust was to sustain humanity in light of the growing spurious rationality of modern life that suppresses feelings, emotions, and sexuality in particu-lar. (These themes are echoed in Foucault, who is the ‘son’ of these luminar-ies of the generation before his own in French universitluminar-ies.) For purposes of illustration, let us take the idea of ‘negative gratuity’ in Kojeve (Drury 1994) adopted by members of the Collège de Sociologie – Bataille, Callois and Leiris. While enlightenment values stressed transcendental knowledge and development, the triumph of reason, and a slow developmental evolu-tion, post-war French thought shaped by Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger emphasized the consequences of the death of history, and the importance of excess, the non-rational in the sense of the playful or aesthetically meaning-ful. Stripped of meaning and necessity, being must be constructed in light of the threat of death, or non-being. The adaptation to this existential quandary was various: playful and gamelike in the work of writers Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau, surrealists such as Breton and Dali and abstract artists such as Kandinsky. Others tried to create a dialogue to assert meaning and significance through an attack on reason and rationality itself, and counter-asserted the negative gratuity, a dark and romantic idea what might be called the joys of sex, risk and anti-rationality. This is mirrored in current preoccupation with risky experience. The underlining proposition, found in Heidegger, Kojeve and their followers, was that the denial of death, or non-being, meant that grappling with the meanings of non-being, being in the world, was impossible. The profundity of that proposition shapes the ideas about the nature of society, the rational and rationalizing processes. Since rational-ity drives the development of a more market-based society, it is only through opposition to rationality itself, in its several forms – education, corrections, policing and governance – that resistance is sustained. This position elevates feeling over thought, and has global and non-empirical echoes of grand phi-losophy, while its themes are quite provocative to explore in the context of organizational life.
Self-presentation as a driving social force
Goffman’s (1959) form of situated rationality is shaped by existentialism, a derivative of the above French movements of thought. Goffman posited a central dilemma of the actor-being or doing – terms from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1953), his reworking of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1953). The being question was often side-stepped in favour of doing, acting, presenting an impression and sustaining a self. The inability to act, to assert a self to be validated by others, is a consequence of dread and fear. The stripped person
whose self is at risk for Goffman is a pitiful and pitiable manqué. Language is a part, but only a small part, of performing convincingly because people discount what they see, and do not trust impressions that can be easily manipulated. In this existential situation, we see echoes of Heidegger’s notion that man denies his being, or the nature of it, because he denies death.
The self is never a thing, always becoming, caught in temporality and in opposition to the other with whom the self is easily conflated. Goffman, fol-lowing Sartre, argues for a humanism in which some mutual regard and shared fate is delegated to a team, or a dyad, or a loose assemblage of per-formers. Goffman’s rationality is that of the situation, its dynamics and forms not fully understood, long-term goals and purposes blurred, and the strategic being highly bounded. Goffman eschews a goals-purpose model of action, even in organizations, and rejects a ‘pipeline theory of communica-tion’ which sorts out messages by their instrumental aim and the rest as ignorance and error. Goffman, like Elster, assumes an ironic pose, one in which actors can seek expressive fun, or ‘action’, rationally, yet be unclear and uncaring about the long-term consequences of their actions. While self-presentation is a fundamental drive, it is always contingent upon the vali-dation of others and as such is a compromise formation.
Revisionist structuralists
Bourdieu (1977) and Giddens (1981, 1984, 1990, 1991) find rationality embed-ded in process, obscured by habitus, institutional rationalizations and the broader processes of sense-making. Notions like agency, or resources, and rules or means, are invisible ordering devices for these theorists as ‘minds’
and ‘souls’ disappear into the codes of action they circumscribe. There is little room for the negotiating, sense-making, actor in the scene. Giddens poses the reflexive process as the background to sustained rationality, even as a weak alternative to a formally grounded legitimate society. Reflexivity reflects weak authority and competing rationalities (Espeland and Stevens 1998) as well as irrational forces at play. Technical solutions to the tensions between rationality and irrationality as system properties have given rise to the current fascination with rational choice theories and the metrification of economists. This suggests a quest for statistical ordering, using techniques, scaling and formulae, among apparently disparate properties and entities (Espeland and Stevens 1998). These nevertheless are unsatisfactory because they begin by positing rationality, interests, choice and the evaluative act(s) of deciding prior to examining context and aims.
In summary, these approaches all remain limited as working fieldwork per-spectives. I would suggest an understanding of rationality-in-the-field requires us to first describe in detail the key processes and routines that organize collective action. This then permits identification of the key deciding points and uncertainties that attend them. In such uncertain circumstances,
people must decide without adequate or full (or too much) information about the consequences of their actions. This means that the values and norms that they hold and the working rules that have evolved are employed to pin down meaning. Often, this means that schemes of typification and generalization, ‘profiling’ are used to reduce uncertainty to manageable dimensions, and to coordinate with one’s colleagues in organizations. Fur-thermore, since variations in individual decisions can never be fully captured in explanations (time, energy and the attention of others will not permit it) stock phrases, clichés and rules of thumb are exchanged to rationalize and account for the deciding done. These accounts in turn are only as good as the audience(s) that accepts them. In this way, organizations are arenas in which situationally justified actions are made non-problematic. That is, when deci-sions are complex, non-routinized and the technology is ‘human’, sense making requires a wait and see attitude, trust and tacit knowledge. In short, it is not possible to understand rationality outside of a particular, specified context. Having said this, it also must be said that the features of such deciding may in fact be general and generalizable, but this remains to be empirically investigated, once the features are isolated analytically in that context.
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Frame analysis
A useful approach to the investigating rationality in fieldwork is derived from later Goffman (1974). Only the bare tenets are outlined here. Let us begin at the most abstract social level, the surround, and work ‘down’ to the concept of a frame. All deciding is embedded or layered in social orders.
Beginning at the most distant, the broadest political environment is the sur-round or that which clearly cannot be controlled or altered by those who decide. The field, a set of subjective and objective forces, is located analyti-cally within the surround (Bourdieu 1977). The field is an institutional struc-ture, or set of norms and procedures that shape careers, grant meaning to objects, and constrain dynamics. The field contains many frames that give rise to action and define the nature of the event or situation confronting the actor. To some degree, the situation of deciding is a given; one is thrown into life and must come to grips with its meanings. Framing is deciding ‘what’s going on here’, given a primary face-to-face social reality. I want to use frame in a generic sense, as answering the question of what is going on here. In social life, actors require meaning. They encounter a situation ‘primary reality’ and try to see if meanings in context indicate a secondary reality emerging. Given that events are ambiguous, and can be cast as stories, little dramas, regrounding of events, rehearsing them, and so on, we often have to use cues to make sense of how realities shift. In a sense, Goffman argues that all social reality is contextual, none has a hegemonic grip on ‘reality’.
Goffman names five frames (drama, play, ceremonies, rehearsals and technical