Identity and Control

by White, Harrison C.

• ISBN13: 9780691003986
• ISBN10: 069100398X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1992-09-01
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

In proposing a comprehensive network theory that cuts across the range of social sciences, Harrison White rejects conventional hierarchical models and focuses instead on efforts of control in a social structure described as a tangle of locked-in practices. He argues that the widely held conceptions of person and goal grounded in traditional political economy do not provide a basis for social theory that is either coherent or consistent with current developments in psychology and anthropology. White replaces person with identity, which, in a distinctively human sense, emerges from frictions and social noise across different levels and disciplines in networks. Likewise he reshapes the notion of goals, maintaining that they merely inhabit sets of stories used to explain agency, and that action itself comes through selective strategies to break through formal organization. As his main empirical basis, White uses case studies covering a wide range of topics, including tribal religions, changing rhetorics of industrial administration and the premodern Church, practices of State-building, and change of style in popular music. His analyses draw from English social anthropology, natural science, French rhetorics, mathematics, German industrial history, control engineering, and American pragmatism.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Preface
Introduction to Identity and Control	p. 3
Identities from Contingencies	p. 5
Control and Decoupling	p. 9
Scope and Terms of Social Organization	p. 14
Disciplines	p. 22
Pecking Orders	p. 23
Three Species from Valuation Orderings	p. 28
Embedding and Variations	p. 32
Interfaces	p. 38
Arenas	p. 48
Councils	p. 54
Catnets for Black Hole in Index Space	p. 60
Network and Stories	p. 65
Ties and Stories	p. 66
Tracings of Social Space	p. 70
Network as Population	p. 78
Types of Tie	p. 84
Blockmodels of Structural Equivalence	p. 93
Ambiguity versus Ambage	p. 102
Institutions	p. 116
Village Caste and University Science	p. 118
Boundaries	p. 126
Values	p. 136
Corporatism	p. 142
Clientelism	p. 150
Norman Feudalism	p. 156
Positions across Role Frames	p. 160
Styles and Person	p. 166
Styles	p. 167
Profiles	p. 177
Entourages	p. 191
Persons	p. 196
Careers	p. 212
Professionalism and Regimes	p. 222
Getting Action	p. 230
Further Control in Time	p. 232
Hieratic Styles	p. 237
Agenda for Agency	p. 245
Getting Action	p. 254
Dual Hierarchy and Servile Elite	p. 267
General Management	p. 273
Annealing	p. 281
Rhetoric and Theory	p. 287
Rhetorics and Systems	p. 288
Rationality	p. 297
History and Natural Science as Guides	p. 303
Identity and Control	p. 312
Appendix 1: One Hundred Topics	p. 317
Conjectures 1-27	p. 317
Speculations 1-19	p. 321
Questions 1-54	p. 323
Appendix 2: Some Models	p. 328
Disciplines and Networks	p. 328
Space-Times	p. 337
Persons as Kalman Filters	p. 346
Appendix 3: List of Software	p. 350
Works Cited	p. 351
Index	p. 415
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