ARTICLES–STUDIES
Ł u k a s z A f e l t o w i c z , K r z y s z t o f P i e t r o w i c z
SOCIAL MACHINES. SOCIAL ENGINEERING FROM
A NEW PERSPECTIVE
1. Introduction
One of the central problems of the methodology of the social sciences is an en-deavour to explain the diff erence between the natural sciences (chemistry, physics and biology) and the social sciences1. Th e eff orts have been undertaken most oft en in the context of struggle between naturalism and antinaturalism2. Th e social sci-ences (or the widely understood humanistics) are contradicted with nature-stud-ying disciplines not only in the epistemological layer, but also in the area of tech-nological applications. It is quite commonly assumed that social researchers generate knowledge or theories which have a smaller explicative power than the ones formed by nature experts. Similarly, it is said that humanistics fi nds few tech-nological uses. While physics, biology or other disciplines of nature studies can boast with a number of technological uses of the instruments and artifi cial con-fi gurations created by them. To illustrate, such quite obvious applications as in-1 See e.g.: S. Cole, Why Sociology Doesn’t Make Progress like the Natural Sciences, “Sociological Forum” 1994, no. 2, pp. 133–154; R. Collins, Why the Social Science Won’t Become High-Consensus,
Rapid Discovery Science, “Sociological Forum” 1994, no. 2, Vol. 9, pp. 155–177; J.A. Davis, What’s Wrong with Sociology?, “Sociological Forum” 1994, no. 2, Vol. 9, 1994, pp. 179–197; A.S. Stinchcombe, Disintegrated Disciplines and the Future of Sociology, “Sociological Forum” 1994, no. 2, Vol. 9, pp. 279–
–291.
2 See e.g. E. Mokrzycki, Filozofi a nauki a socjologia. Od doktryny metodologicznej do praktyki
badawczej, Warszawa 1980; S. Ossowski, O osobliwościach nauk społecznych [in:] idem, O nauce. Dzieła, v. IV, Warszawa 1967; K.R. Popper, Jedność metody w naukach przyrodniczych i społecznych
novations in the area of material engineering, communication – information tech-nologies, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, water – earth engineering, quantum electronics, robotics or medical innovations can be mentioned here. Numerous innovations created as part of the above currents, are commonly used today. Spe-cial attention should be drawn here to a number of machines which can be seen everywhere, such as cars and other means of transport, computers and mobile phones, refrigerators, microwaves, or the countless uses of laser technology (CD readers, gyroscopes, dental drills).
Th e social sciences cannot provide analogical achievements. When talking about the technical use of the social sciences, the sociotechnique is most oft en mentioned3. Th e sociotechnique (in the classical sense) is mainly based on using the knowledge of social psychology or microsociology. Technological applications of the social sciences identifi ed with social engineering can most oft en be boiled down to the formation of some methods and techniques of social infl uence, basing on experimental experience, observation and theoretical knowledge. It remains i strong contradiction with the scope of the technical uses of nature study. Indeed, they are not only limited to providing clues as to possible behaviour or to design-ing the methods and techniques of problem solvdesign-ing, they are predominantly con-centrated on constructing machines which are to a considerable degree autono-mous artifi cial systems.
A number of questions arises: Is a social engineering possible which would not be limited only to the narrowly understood social techniques or to off ering exper-tise that help politicians or businessmen in making decisions? Are social research-ers able to generate technological innovations that are analogical to the machine creations of the natural sciences? What would be the hypothetical cost of building such “social machines”? In the following text we will try to convince the reader that sociologists and other social researchers are able, in some areas of social reality, to realise engineering ventures of creating machines similar to the ones generated by the applied natural sciences. What is more, we will try to show that a number of such creations of social engineering already functions in the surrounding world. It seems though that a lot of social researchers does not think about the innova-tions as about machines, analogical ones to what the laboratories of the natural sciences have to off er.
3 See e.g.: C. Czapów, A. Podgórecki, Socjotechnika – podstawowe pojęcia i problemy [in:]
Socjo-technika. Style działania, A. Podgórecki (ed.), Warszawa 1972, pp. 9–35; A. Kojder, Podgórecki Adam
Nevertheless, before we present here our, quite specifi c, understanding of social engineering and discuss the limitations of such ideas, we would like to defi ne what exactly our understanding of a social machine is. To do so, we will refer to the observations of the sociologist Randall Collins, a philosopher of Ian Hacking’s teachings, as well as of science anthropologists: Bruno Latour and Karin Knorr-Cetina, who deal with the factors and techniques due to which nature researchers and engineers are able to create effi cient technological systems. Beginning with the analysis, we will consider whether an analogical attitude is possible in the area of sociology or other social sciences. We will especially focus on the case of educa-tional system.
2. From a laboratory to technological application
According Randall Collins, most of the successes of the applied natural sciences have been achieved due to the construction of technological closed systems. Ma-chines, such as petrol engines or refrigerators, operate because in a confi ned space, selected and well known from standard experiments processes are designed to take place. For effi cient operation of machines, it is valid to isolate them from the factors that could distort the fl ow of the designed processes4. In a sense, the machines reproduce inside them the experimental conditions in which the processes and eff ects studied by physics or chemistry can take place. As we will see in a moment, the fact that machines replicate inside them the conditions in which they were constructed is especially important for the understanding of how nature research-ers generate technical innovations.
Let us begin with the observations of Ian Hacking, an Anglo-Saxon philosopher of science, who founded the innovative movement called new experimentalism. It shows that in practice, scientist can rarely deal with unprocessed Nature. Usually, they have to reproduce the objects of their study in artifi cial laboratory circum-stances (they oft en create phenomena that have no refl ection in nature). Outside laboratories, nature is usually too complex or chaotic. Th e reproduction of natural phenomena as experiments is more oft en than not the necessary condition to use such procedures as measure, observation, or intervention and recombination5. 4 R. Collins, Th e Confusion of Modes of Sociology [in:] Postmodernism and Social Th eory: Th e
Debate over General Th eory, S. Seidman, D.G. Wagner (ed.), Blackwell, Cambridge 1992, pp. 182–
–192.
5 I. Hacking, Representing and Intervening. Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural
Nevertheless, reproduction leads at the same time to artifi cial changes in natural phenomena. Karin Knorr-Cetina even claims that in laboratories we do not deal with nature, but with artifi cial arrangements of elements – materials which con-stitute the conclusions of complicated scientifi c and technological processes: chem-ical compounds and elements are synthesized, water is distilled, epidemics are stimulated, and laboratory rats are deliberately bred6.
An example of a science that reproduces its object of study is molecular biol-ogy7. Its interest is in life, and more specifi cally, the molecular processes that lie at its basis. However, to understand life, biologists do not study the naturally living organisms – they are too complex and not prone enough to laboratory manipula-tions. Instead, they build synthetic (non-existent outside the laboratory) living systems, which are called “molecular machines”. Th ey are relatively simple, artifi cial arrangements of biological elements (which oft en have a long technological origin themselves). Using, among others, transgenic rats, artifi cially bred lines of cells, nucleases or especially prepared phages and plasmids, molecular biologists create even more complicated forms of life that cannot be found in nature. Th e elements, basing on which they work, were chosen from the point of view of the complexity of their operation – they must be the simplest possible to avoid unpredictable reac-tions among genes.
Th e fact that molecular machines and their components are relatively simple systems results in the situation where biologists are able to use the approach that can be most precisely defi ned as tinkering. Th e term is used to describe a number of practices commonly used in scientifi c and engineering work. A working defi ni-tion of tinkering could be physical, usually manual manipulani-tion of samples, tools and experimental devices to achieve reliable and reproductive systems. Tinkering usually takes the form of experimenting with various confi gurations of materials and techniques, which is not necessarily accompanied by theoretical refl ection. Davis Baird8 and Bruno Latour9 show multiple discoveries and inventions which resulted from the laboratory tinkering with experimental instruments and devices. A similar image of scientifi c work is presented by Ludwik Fleck in his famous study
6 K. Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures. How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Cambridge 1999, pp. 26–32.
7 Ibidem, pp. 138–158.
8 D. Baird, Th ing Knowledge. A Philosophy of Scientifi c Instruments, Berkeley–Los Angeles– –London 2004.
9 B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Th rough Society, Cambrid-ge 1987.
of the discovery of the Wassermann reaction10. It should be added that such an understanding of tinkering is close to what Claude Levi-Strauss defi ned as “brico-lage”. Nevertheless, the researcher did not apply the term to scientifi c practices, but to mythical thinking. Simultaneously, contrary to us, he creates an opposition be-tween a tinker and a professional11.
Th e process of tinkering is pragmatic in character. It is not an endeavour to change theoretical methodology into practice. To illustrate the nature of a prag-matic research approach, let us once again refer to the example of molecular biol-ogy. As Knorr-Cetina shows, when the representatives of this discipline encounter a research problem, e.g. they are unable to repeat an experiment, the techniques designed by them fail, or the samples do not react as predicted, they focus not on the caused of the problem but foremost on an eff ort to deal with them. Instead of specifying the reasons, biologies will experiment with new solutions to turn their techniques and experiments into smoothly and reliably functioning mechanisms, which will always operate in the same manner – it does not need the traditionally understood theoretical work, perceived as something separate from practice (vide neopositivism), it needs more tinkering and manual recombination of the devices and samples. In other words, instead of focusing on a theoretical problem and on eff orts to explain phenomena, the researchers focus on an engineering problem and on building reliable experimental sets and standard methods of dealing with samples12.
Transport of the designed in experiments and laboratory tinkering systems or processes outside the laboratory walls causes similar diffi culties to the reproduc-tion of Nature in scientifi c workrooms. It is usually impossible as long as the envi-ronment into which we intent to implement the technological innovations is not comparable to some extent with the laboratory itself13. In practice, it means devel-oping the infrastructure inevitable for the functioning of the innovations and turn-ing it into a closed system, isolated from disturbturn-ing environmental factors (vide R. Collins). It does not solely refer to the technological application of science. Simi-larly, registering phenomena and making predications needs, according to Latour, spreading scientifi c practices and instruments far beyond laboratories. He states, “Each time when a fact is confi rmed, and a machine works, it means that the
labo-10 L. Fleck, Powstanie i rozwój faktu naukowego: wprowadzenie do nauki o stylu myślowym i
ko-lektywie myślowym, transl. M. Tuszkiewicz, the introduction to the Polish issue Z. Cackowski, Lublin
1986.
11 C. Levi-Strauss, Myśl nieoswojona, Warszawa 1969, pp. 31–32. 12 K. Knorr-Cetina, op.cit., p. 91.
ratory conditions have been somehow extended. (…) Admiring the smoothness of facts or the effi cient operation of machines, having at the same time forgotten about the extending of instruments, would be like admiring the road system, fast cars and trucks having forgotten the [role of] water – earth engineering, petrol stations, mechanics and spare parts”14.
To conclude, it is possible to state that the natural sciences act in numerous cases according to the following scheme:
1) reproduction of natural phenomena through experiments in a laboratory; 2) standardisation of experiments to generate phenomena in a routinised
way;
3) interventions and modifi cations of the phenomena achieved in such a way, as well as the widely understood tinkering;
4) endeavours to move the artifi cial systems created in the above manner out of the laboratories (e.g. in form of instruments, machines, or technological processes);
5) laboratorisation of the world (changing the world outside the laboratory to refl ect the experimental conditions; extension of the necessary infrastruc-ture) or reproduction of the laboratory processes in isolated closed sys-tems.
3. Social engineering, i.e. how to build social machines
Th e practice of laboratory reproduction of the studied phenomena is rarely seen in the social sciences. Experimental sociologists usually try to recreate as closely as possible the social processes. Biologists practice something opposite, instead of studying life in all its richness, they refer to its artifi cial, processed versions. Oth-erwise, they would be cognitively paralyzed by the complexity of the studied sys-tems. Microsociologists and social psychologists manage to identify some correla-tions and microsociological effects. The researchers of macrostructures face considerably bigger diffi culties since they do not have access to reduced represen-tations of the phenomena analyzed by them, which would function similarly to the molecular machines of modern biology – they are limited to observation of social world which is not reconstructed in a laboratory, thus accessible only in its full complexity. Still, coming back to the researchers focused on the microlevel, it must be emphasised that they have problems with technological use of the experience
gained in research. Th ey usually have to limit to forming techniques of social infl u-ence which are not always eff ective.
At this point, it is worth referring to the following remark of Collins: “In total, the problem with practically applied sociology contains in the fact that we cannot build social machines. In the social world there are very few closed systems; even formal organisations, which refl ect some eff orts to build a social machine, are oft en entwined in some relations with the environment. We can achieve a practical suc-cess if we do the following: we build a temporarily closed system and make it small enough to keep low complexity or hierarchy; we try to gather in it uniform indi-viduals, especially as to their motivation to belong in the given group. Social psy-chologists know how to preserve group pressure for volunteers to give up smoking. An encounter group achieves results since it constitutes a highly concentrated machine to analyse emotions and to transfer to its members emotional energy. However, the problem is that emotional batteries of people deplete when the meet-ing of the group ends, when the system is open once again to all countless interac-tions of a wider social context”15.
In the above quote there is a vision of social engineering that would be some-thing more than a social technique. To receive the desired social eff ect, it is not only necessary to know the dependencies among various factors or to know how to manipulate them. Firstly, it is essential to create conditions in which the proc-esses will take place undisturbed, just like in an experiment. In other words, a social machine must be created – a system as simple as possible, isolated from the wider social context. A paradigmatic example of such a machine is the encounter group described by Collins. Referring to such a group, social psychologists are able to channel the emotions of its members, shape their attitudes and eff ectively motivate to action. However, their infl uence is confi ned – the eff ect of psychologists’ work disappears fast when the members leave the group. Th e encounter group itself also seizes to exist when its social isolation is distracted. As Randall Collins puts it: “emotional batteries of people wear down when the meeting of a group ends, when the system is open once again to all countless infl uences of the wider social context”16. However, as we remember, the technologies generated as part of the nature studies function in a similar way: a number of devices operates most oft en basing on a few well known processes, which are isolated from the chaos of soci-ety by their casing; usually operate effi ciently only in the environment that to some extent has been simplifi ed and equalised with laboratory conditions. Social
engi-15 R. Collins, p. 191. 16 Ibidem.
neering techniques require analogical treatment – for them to work, they must be performed in proper social conditions, usually in isolation from the disturbing context factors. A sociologist-engineer should learn how to select individual social eff ects, should learn how to evoke them in laboratory conditions, and next to try and recreate the experimental conditions in isolated areas of social reality. As a stage of experimental work, the creation of artifi cial social systems in laboratories (analogical to molecular machines) should be an aim, no matter whether such systems can be found in social reality or not.
Secondly, provided that we desire to achieve high technical eff ectiveness, we must accept the fact that every technological innovation requires a transformation of the world outside the laboratory so that artifi cial laboratory creations could function outside its walls. It brings us to the issue of the technological and mate-rial surrounding in which the social processes take place. As the example of an encounter group shows, the work of psychologists is as important as the social isolation created by the walls of buildings or specially built secluded institutions in which the aim is to help people addicted to drugs. Th e plan of rooms alone (so called proxemics17) as well as other material factors are of considerable importance for the nature of social processes and the formation of attitudes. Nevertheless, as Latour suggests,social researchers do not pay enough attention to such techno-logical factors that frame our behaviour. Th e social sciences neglect, among others, the fact that social control and norms of behaviour are delegated to material ob-jects. To illustrate, a speed hump (the so called “lying policeman”) forces us to follow the norm of speed limit, which has been in a sense “build” into it. Such physical factors as door locks, the infrastructure of buildings, or modern informa-tion – communicainforma-tion systems18 comprise the frames of our interactions, by limit-ing the freedom of our actions, or even imposlimit-ing on us specifi c behaviour – they force us to act according to the norms or social interests build into them. Of course, such a kind of technological support that consolidate some forms of social rela-tions, takes most oft en the form of complex nets, in which numerous factors, both social and technological, overlay and intensify one another, fulfi lling some speci-fi ed goals.19 Th e social sciences should (at least partially) depend on analysing and
17 See E.T. Hall, Ukryty wymiar, Warszawa 2003.
18 See T.H. Eriksen, Tyrania chwili. Szybko i wolno płynący czas w erze informacji, Warszawa 2003.
19 See B. Latour, Technology Is Society Made Durable [in:] A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on
Power, Technology and Domination, J. Law (ed.), Routlege–London–New York 1991, pp. 103–131;
B. Latour, Where Are the Missing Masses? Sociology of a Few Mundane Artefacts [in:] Shaping
manipulating the surrounding material and technological objects, i.e. everything that can be called “the infrastructure of social life”. It is of course about suggesting a kind of analogy with the process of “laboratisation” of the world: if the technical creations of the natural studies, to function properly, require an extended infra-structure, why should we expect of the uses of the social sciences to be able to act in an untamed environment? From the perspective suggested above, we will be able to realise truly successful sociotechniques only when we focus on shaping both social relations and the physical world in which we function.
Recapitulating the above remarks concerning social engineering, it must be emphasised that it is essential both to experiment with various social systems by pragmatic tinkering and to interfere with the widely understood infrastructure of social life. Expressing it by the use of the title metaphor of our article, let us create social machines, and let us then build social tissue into them.
4. Exemplary endeavours to build social machines
Encounter groups are not the only kind of social machines that social researchers managed to construct. Numerous representatives of the theory of organisation seem to express the engineering attitude to social reality. Th e researchers have introduced a number of innovations in the organisational structure of various industries to enhance their functioning. Th e industries off er the means that facili-tate experimenting with various confi gurations of social machines and with trans-ferring the already prepared models. Th ey allow, among others, to: eff ectively in-tervene into human relations (imposing directives), isolate them (the walls of buildings and the security system), observe (the electronic means of work monitor-ing), or even to modify what has earlier been called “the infrastructure of social life”. It is possible to try to reproduce the systems worked out in the above manner in other industries. Such innovations are oft en introduced by more practically oriented organisation theoreticians. Simultaneously, the market competition makes the innovations spread rapidly in the corporations’ world. A great illustration is the popularisation of Japanese organisational inventions, such as the just-in-time sys-tem20. Nevertheless, the inventions were characterised by the transfer of the popu-larisation of the behaviour and organisational models that came into being
spon-225–258; see also Ł. Afeltowicz, Czy technika pozbawia nas pracy? Bezrobocie technologiczne
w per-spektywie Teorii Aktora-Sieci, “Studia Socjologiczne” 2007, no. 1, pp. 107–126, 109–112.
taneously and appeared eff ective. While here, we suggest an approach which is more systematic and orderly – a research programme that is based on methodo-logically conscious experimenting with social machines.
Th e team of Elton Mayo has made an eff ort to identify systematically the factors that decide about the eff ectiveness of working teams (among others, a research in the Western Electric industries). It is important here, that Mayo focused not only on the social factors, but that he also took into consideration the characteristics of the surroundings (e.g. the level of brightness)21. Nevertheless, the research was destined to form general knowledge, which was supposed to fi nd usage later. In other words, Mayo created abstract rules of work management and implementing social infl uence, and not a reproducible system of relations, roles and environment elements that could be successfully transferred and build into other social contexts, like it happens with the closed technological systems of the natural studies.
It is not only industries and offi ces that make it possible to construct social machines. A similar operation fi eld for social engineering is created by shopping malls and other places of the kind. It is perfectly illustrated by such an attitude as the one applied by an environmental psychologist, Paco Underhill, the director of Envirosell22 company. Assuming that the surroundings infl uence our behaviour, he ventured into research on the infl uence of the arrangement of space in shopping malls on the behaviour of consumers. In his works, he refers to the long-hour observation of the taking part and the registered on cameras customer behaviour. Basing on the data gathered in the above way, Underhill does not only identify the general models of consumer behaviour, but, what is more important, accurately structures the space of shopping malls (among others, he plans the arrangement of wares on the shelves, windows and hangers) to maximalise profi t. Underhill tried to generalise his observations by specifying some commonly valid marketing rules based on his environmental approach. Practically, though, the application of his sociotechnical suggestions needs conducting an arduous analysis of a specifi c shop and a pragmatic matching of individual elements through tinkering. In other words, although Underhill does not give us any general, universal rules of social infl uence, he presents a paradigmatic attitude that allows us to transform the space of a given shop into a relatively effi cient machine that serves maximalisation of profi t23.
21 See J. Szmatka, Małe struktury społeczne, Warszawa 1989, pp. 124–134. 22 See http://www.envirosell.com/?gclid=CND7hfL99ZACFRciZwodAjyAsw 23 P. Underhill, Dlaczego kupujemy?, Warszawa 2007.
Similar practices of tinkering can be found in neuromarketing24. Th is discipline is based on using the techniques of neuroimaging, such as fMRI (functional Mag-netic Resonance Imaging), which represent the states of neuro functioning of the brain analysed as moving images. A lot of researchers face the problem of reliabil-ity of the respondents’ answers, who could for example be under the infl uence of the reactions of other members of the experiment. At the same time, it has been revealed that the decisions to buy a product are not taken entirely consciously, which presents a considerable limitation for surveys. Neuromarketing escapes these problems since functional neuroimaging allows to look inside the head of a respondent and to observe which parts of the brain are stimulated with experi-mental incentives. Th is fact, along with the information on which parts are respon-sible for the feeling of pleasure or which ones are active when the respondent lies, helps in creating highly attractive products. For example, it is possible to study neuro reactions of a respondent to various kinds of commercial messages or pack-aging projects. It can be in the form of the trial and error method, where we present a few versions of a given product to a respondent, observe his reactions and choose the best solution. Neuromarketing researchers do not have to head in the direction of generating abstract rules that specify generally how to approach a customer – each specifi c project, service or image can be subject to analysis through neuroim-aging of a respondent’s reaction and perfected by tinkering. What we want to draw attention to, is the fact that neuromarketing methods make it possible to project not only products or a media message, but the shop surroundings, as well. It is possible to design a shop space or the arrangement of shelves and wares so that a desired reaction of a consumer is achieved. Neuroimaging allows to perfect giv-en solutions by trial and error. Analysing neuromarketing, it should always be re-membered that even a perfectly designed product or shop can fail when the mar-keting influence is distracted by the behaviour of other objects or when it contradicts the cultural norms. In such a case, even if the product is attractive for the brain, the refl ected self will win. In other words, neuromarketing, just like other sociotechniques, requires the separation of an individual from a wider con-text and isolating it from the potentially distracting factors. It is somewhat possible due to the properly arranged proxemics of shopping malls.
To our judgment, analogical practices, aiming at constructing social machines, can be found in the current of political marketing. Obviously, it is not about the
24 A. Cybulska, Neuromarketing – zajrzyj do mozgu konsumenta. Brief.pl 59/2004, at: http://www. brief.pl/magazyn,artykul,1881,102.html; J. Stradowski, Głowa nie od parady, “Wprost” 16.05.2004, no. 1120.
traditional techniques associated with the discipline: caring for the appearance of politicians, working out the line of argumentation, speeches, rhetorical techniques and catchy political slogans; increasing the attractiveness of political programmes and adjusting them to the contemporary social mood, or designing commercials and posters. An important element of every political campaign are the meetings and pre-election rallies organised by politicians, as well as party congreses. Ana-logically to encounter groups, they serve to strengthen the positive attitudes of a chosen part of the electorate. Th e complicated techniques of managing interac-tion and infl uencing the gathered crowd can be more successfully applied in a properly structurised environment (e.g. in an earlier prepared building), provided that the members of a meeting have been preselected to eliminate the people that could undermine the political message or distract the interaction between the politician and the electorate. Such meetings serve not only gaining new electorate, but also keeping the old one – it is necessary to sustain the ideological involvement and continually reproduce the bond with voters. Nevertheless, let us mention that the remarks referring to political marketing are hypothetical in character – they require a deeper analysis of election rallies and of the practices of using the envi-ronment modifi cation as a part of political campaigns.
As we have tried to show, social engineering does not have to be restricted to the methods of social infl uence traditionally associated with sociotechnique, which are prepared basing on psychological and microsociological knowledge. Th e above attitudes, to a greater or lesser degree aimed at building social machines, which was connected with channelling of emotions, eliminating the distracting elements and using – as we have called it – “the infrastructure of everyday life”. To our minds, there is one more reason for which social engineering cannot be identifi ed with the narrowly understood sociotechnique. Social engineering should deal with more ambitious goals than the ones of sociotechnique. It is not only about the marketing tricks that door-to-door salesmen use, possibly the rhetorical tech-niques used in a public discourse by politicians. Apart from such salient issues as perfecting or modelling the organisation of businesses, engineering should be focused on the problems concerning the conduct of social policy, on collective behaviour, or on the problems referring to the functioning of the system of educa-tion. Th e following part of the article is devoted to a wider analysis of the use of social engineering in the area of education25.
25 Th e authors realise that examples of the functioning of social machines can be also found in the media world. However, the subject is too extensive to deal with in this article.
5.
The possible costs of building social machines: the example
of the educational system
It is not only the modern social researchers that have tried to build social ma-chines. Analogical endeavours in social engineering have been present with various eff ectiveness for many centuries. It is possible to mention here the endeavours to create enlightening forms of social life organisation just aft er the French Revolu-tion26. However, the scope of the experiments was too extensive. Social machines cannot simply be made up or written on paper and introduced in practice – just like with any other technological invention, they must be sorted out in conditions that allow to reduce the complexity of problems, referring to escalated models and prototypes. It is laboratories that enable the above, but also the areas of culture outside science that undergo some inevitable modifi cations (a shopping mall with a system of collecting and processing data that is the object of Envirosell’s activity can be an example here).
While the projects of philosophers described by Bauman were doomed to fail-ure, the situation seems much brighter from the engineering point of view as to industries (isolation, a considerable freedom of change, a result monitoring sys-tem). Similar conditions for engineering work are obviously created by the described by Ervinga Goff man closed institutions, such as psychiatric hospitals, convents, or army quarters27. However, they are only some fragments of society – areas strictly isolated from the rest of social life due to norms, rituals and physical obstacles. Th e isolation of the areas can be proven by the fact that they have been moved from below the umbrella of the commonly valid moral norms. Th e condi-tions are especially benefi cial when constructing social machines.
Nevertheless, social engineering does not have to be associated with military discipline or prison bars. A system that has been much more common and func-tioning like a social machine is the educational system. Th ere are numerous ap-proaches that specify the aims of education. Th e educational system on various levels has been ascribed such distant, oft en contradictory functions as: transferring knowledge, equalising social opportunities, reproducing the given authority, social control, social progress, passing the parents’ status to their children, involving peo-ple in social practices and the culture of a given society. It is not our goal to venture into discussion with the representatives of particular options. First of all, we would
26 Z. Bauman, Prawodawcy i tłumacze, Warszawa 1998.
27 E. Goff man, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Others Inmates, Garden City, NY 1961.
like to remark here that the realisation of most of the above mentioned functions needs creating specifi c conditions. One of the eff ective means is creating a net of schools (possibly boarding schools), in which a young person is separated from his or her previous educational context and trusted into the hands of professionals, who formats him or her once again. For the education to be eff ective, the scope of control over a student must be the widest possible. Th us, the idea of unifying the clothes of students and of a number of rites of passage. We could also refer here to the habit of corporal punishment or the described by Michel Foucault artefacts serving to discipline students (i.e. benches constructed to evoke attention). In ad-dition, also meaningful were the long courses of calligraphy and other analogical ways to squeeze a person into pre-set frames of thinking and acting28. Due to this kind of a rich net of factors, schooling constituted a relatively closed system, in which the education of next generation could be effi ciently conducted.
Th e schooling that still in the nineteenth century was a relatively tight system that served to format and discipline young people, has been opened today. It al-lowed countless factors to penetrate the until recently almost entirely controlled school environment. A teacher has been successively devoid of the means of im-posing the defi nition of a situation and of control over a student. Simultaneously, he is forced to compete with alternative means of knowledge or with other groups of reference for the student. According to Weber, the school constituted an em-bodiment of rationalised practices of transferring knowledge and social norms. An individual, crossing the threshold of school, abandoned a part of his identity, turning into a student, possibly a teacher. Today, the roles and their relations are not so clearly defi ned, since a part of the rites of passage, discipline techniques and isolation has disappeared. Using the language from the previous parts of the article: the crisis of school appeared when it seized to be a kind of social machine. Perhaps this is how the desire for school uniforms or closing school gates during classes should be explained. Th e outward function of these practices is based on equalis-ing the social status or on protectequalis-ing the youth (e.g. against drug dealers), whereas in practice they serve to extend the range of control over student and to make it possible, at least partially to regenerate the damaged social machine. If the recon-struction of the work of the natural sciences, presented earlier, is correct, we are dealing with two possibilities: either schools will become again closed systems, or we will still struggle with the crisis of the institution.
However, the issue of costs is the key one here. Putting it quite controversially, it is possible to claim that the reconstruction and sustainment of education that
would function with similar effi ciency to a petrol engine, a refrigerator or another mechanical invention of the natural studies, needs not only huge investments into the development of the infrastructure of everyday life, but also deep (“violent” re-ally) interventions into the tissue of social relations. Th is, in turn, means a strong resistance of numerous groups. In our culture, such reforms would be easily dis-credited by reminding the historical experience of totalitarian regimes. It would not have enough meaning to show plentiful examples of social quasi-machines, which are present everywhere in the social world. We accept a number of closed institutions because of their social functionality. Analogically, in the area of market competition, quite fat-fetched organisational experiments are allowed because they serve the maximalisation of the eff ects of work. However, in a multitude of other spheres, an engineer or a reformer that tries to build a lasting system of relations is almost instantly entwined in controversy, resistance groups or party oppositions appear. Classical engineers face a profoundly smaller resistance – when introduc-ing their technological innovations, they can exercise an incomparably greater freedom, and it is easier for their inventions to get rooted in social practices. Nev-ertheless, it does not change the fact that their innovations also deeply modify social processes or ourselves29. To conclude, it can be noticed that people – disci-plined every day by various kinds of technologies (which are results of the work of the natural sciences) – react with outrage to the thought of a similar nature of the social sciences. we accept the laboratisation of the living world conducted by the technological creations of the natural studies, rejecting at the same time simi-lar practices coming from the environment of the social studies.
6. Conclusions: on the close relation of technology and discipline
Andrzej Zybertowicz, in his work “Przemoc i poznanie”30, analyses the tight rela-tions between cognitive processes and such sociological categories as power, social control or discipline. Following the sociologists of scientifi c knowledge31, he shows how the aforementioned sociological factors infl uence the shape of our scientifi c knowledge. Th is article could be considered as a specifi c synthesis of Zybertowicz 29 Comp. B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge 1993; A. Zybertowicz, Przemoci poznanie, Toruń 1995.
30 A. Zybertowicz, op.cit.
31 See among others: B. Barnes, D. Bloor, J. Henry, Scientifi c Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis, London 1996; H.M. Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientifi c Practice, London 1985.
on the relation between scientifi c knowledge and violence. As the works of science anthropologists show, especially of Latour, scientists are able to register regularities in nature, provided that they “discipline” it somehow earlier – that they reproduce it in a laboratory or perform some extension of instruments or the laboratory itself to the outside world. Similarly, the technological uses of the natural studies require a laboratisation of the world – for machines to function properly, the world outside the laboratory must be reshaped and subdued to scientifi c regime. In other words, nature researchers must discipline the world to achieve engineering – cognitive success. It is a radically diff erent perspective from the one off ered by the tradi-tional philosophy of education. It suggested that scientists, in a laboratory isolation, work out abstract rules, which can next be technologically applied at minimal expense. Whereas ethnography shows that it needs a costly restructuring of nature to make it similar to laboratory conditions.
Let us come back now to the social sciences – if we expect that sociology and other humanistic sciences will start achieving spectacular success, we have to ac-cept the considerable cost accompanying it. Just as it is impossible to design a well functioning car without water-earth engineering, a net of garages, services and driving licence institutions, neither should it be expected that the social sciences will be able to introduce the desired change without integration into the social tissue, which aims at turning Lebenswelt into a costly social machine. In other words, social engineering is possible. A question arises, though, whether we are ready or able to discipline social life to such an extent. Even if the huge social re-forms seem to be out of reach for the engineering social sciences (due to the cost and the strong social resistance to the change), there is still a number of enclaves, in which it is possible to create closed social systems analogical to the ones de-scribed in the fourth part of the article.
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SUMMARY
Th e starting point of the article is an indication of the diff erence between the natural sci-ences – chemistry, physics and biology – and the social scisci-ences. Th e authors use the theo-ries of Randall Collins, Ian Hacking, Bruno Latour and Karin Knorr-Cetina to understand this diff erence in a new way. Th e paper points out the factors and techniques by which scientists and engineers are able to create the technological systems. Key issues are the position and importance of laboratories in the natural sciences. Th e conclusion is that sociologists and other social researchers are able, in certain spheres of social engineering to carry out projects involving the creation of machines similar to those generated by natural science. One of the cases discussed in this article is the case of the school system, treated as a specifi c kind of a “social machine”.
