The Rationality of Rational Institutions -- Studies on Education, Science, and Technology 2023 Chapter uri icon

Abstract

  • This paper applies recent anthropological work to sociological debates on structure versus agency. Positivist sociology presumes rationalized macro institutions naturally frame a micro time horizon human agents occupy. These structures enable and constrain agency. Recent anthropology, particularly The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, suggests humans rationally embodied the capacities for creating social systems for most of their history, using dialogue to constitute symbolic imagined orders within face-to-face networks. Human agency created macro structures. Modern structures would emerge by containing this agency, with the European colonialist project closing spaces where such orders might be imagined. Following a synthesis of Foucault and relational sociology, I argue modern macro institutions are generated by the logics of rationalizing systems shaping human agency recursively to maintain their social form. Implications suggest that linking the micro and macro requires conceptualizing the rationality of institutions more concretely as possessing synthetic agency deployed in synthetic environments. However, sociology’s positivist generalizing of agency and structure as though modern dynamics have existed similarly across space and time creates theoretical blind spots, hiding this agency in sight, obfuscating potentialities where human power could aggregate to challenge institutional power.

Publication Date

  • 2023-10-01