Hi Tom,
[quote=Tom OC;28222]Marc; I hope it's not just you and I having this conversation. Not that I don't mind the company, but I'd love to hear from some others too because some of the prior comments about my (ontological) take on Durkheim and Weber were helpful to me.
As Rob noted, "others are listening". I suspect that our current conversation is sort of acting like a round table discussion for our ongoing "graduate seminar".
I'd love to see a copy of it if you don't mind shooting it my way.Originally Posted by Tom OC
I've always been favourable towards some form of functionalism. Over the years, I read quite a bit of it, but I always felt that most of the Sociology side of it tended to be wearing some heavy blinders where both biology and pre-industrial societies where concerned. I mean, really, if the goal is to create a GUTE (Grand Unified Theory of Everything), then we really have to include both biology and pre-industrial societies in our models (along with Psychology, History, Economics, etc.).
On the whole, that led me to looking more closely at Malinowski's work, which seemed to be the only real attempt to tie everything together in a manner that would cover both pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial societies. Not that he didn't have a lot of theoretical problems, he did. Probably the worst of which was that there wasn't a mathematical language that could describe his insights. Also, his level of biological knowledge, while it was definitely up to speed for the 1920's and 1930's when he was writing, has been so far surpassed these days that it is almost laughable (especially in the neuro-cognitive area). Still and all, I think his basic outline works (with one major and some minor adjustments).
Yup, it makes sense to me and I do know what you are trying to do. Let me toss out a couple of suggestions that you may have already thought about and just not included in the above.
1. Institutions operate in environments and the vast majority of their "sensory mechanisms" are aimed at those parts of the environment that assure their survival and replication. This means that the strongest media ties will be with those institutions that are most likely to help or hinder that survival and replication and not, necessarily, with their ostensive social function. BTW, a really useful distinction that Malinowski made regarding institutions was between the Charter (sort of a combined foundation myth and official function) and the function (what they actually do). This becomes especially important when the two diverge under environmental stress. Even more importantly, for Malinowski at least, institutions may destabilize their social environments catastrophically under their own survival imperatives (Mary Douglas argues much the same and, IMO, makes a much better case for it that Malinowski did, in How Institutions Think).
2. Cybernetic loops are fine, but they only operate well if the elements in the loop refer to the same "level" of social reality. Any really good COIN model operates either fractally, such as Dave Kicullen's one here, or on an assumed (if not always stated) 4D model (e.g. Mao, Lenin, etc.). This means that you are going to ave to account for emergence from one level to another and for miscommunications between levels (i.e. stuff like the irhabi spin playing out on al-Jezira and finding its way into CNN).
Marc
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