A working integrated institutionalist paradigm

The section ties together the various pieces from the three institutionalist schools of thought to build an integrated explanatory framework for institutional change from the perspective of knowledge and power. The framework accommodates both methodological collectivism and methodological individualism, which is a co-evolutionary methodological framework. The Northean School demonstrated that social agents invest in knowledge as a function of net returns in order to build a strategy for lobbying for certain changes that they desire in the institutional structure. It also postulated bidirectional causality between knowledge and ideology, suggesting that ideology, fads and dogmas sometimes have a major influence on institutional change. This line of thought was conceptually refined with input from feminist literature that focuses on the role of instituted social imaginaries and epistemic violence.

Generalising the concept of violence from armed conflict to socio-cognitive violence facilitates generalisation of the limited access and open access order hypotheses to explain the role of knowledge- and ideology- based epistemic violence in shaping institutional change. Epistemic violence is a manifestation of power – monopoly over the sanction of ignorance. The sanction of ignorance implies that epistemic communities that have sovereign power can silence others, through the mechanisms of testimonial quieting and hermeneutic injustice, in institutional change processes.

To interrogate the transmission mechanisms of epistemic violence in shaping institutional change, John R Commons’ principles of sovereignty, futurity and working rules as well as the negotiational psychology of command-obedience, argumentation-pleading and persuasion-coercion are relevant here. Since sovereignty is a process of monopolising economic and political violence (Commons 2009, Dawson 1998), and since the logics of LAO and OAO are about monopoly over violence, a special case of which is epistemic violence, the two schools coalesce into a useful lens for theorising institutional change. The LAO/OAO social orders

86 | P a g e provide an ontological framework for John R Commons’ negotiational psychology. Insofar as epistemic violence has the greatest claim on sovereignty when an epistemic community manages to partner with governmental agencies, and since government is a process characterised by the continuous flow of transactions between officials of the state and the citizens (Commons 1924b), the LAO/OAO contains the logic of negotiational psychology.

While in the Commonsian School, property is central to accessing sovereign power, the modified LAO/OAO suggests that knowledge and ideologies are potential sources of sovereign power especially considering the potential role of knowledge and ideology in John R Commons’ negotiational psychology. Further, since a democratic setting lowers political transaction costs of expressing social agents’ opinions (North 1990), liberty and property combine with epistemic violence in John R Commons’ negotiational psychology to create a potentially wicked institutional adjustment problem. As Commons (1931, p.654) would argue, “It is from forbearance that the doctrine of reasonableness arises,” but forbearance is the opposite of epistemic violence. Wickedness is the absence of reasonableness.

To the extent that property, liberty and epistemic violence can be used to advance narrow group interests or broader societal interests, the Veblenian Dichotomy enables classification of various power configurations and manifestations of sovereignty into ceremonial and instrumental categories. The relative prevalence of ceremonial motives over instrumental motives (or the converse) in the unfolding institutional change dynamics, helps evaluate the extent to which change is progressive or regressive, and to explain the nature of dynamic forces hindering or propelling progressive institutional change. The definition of a problem as the difference between ‘what ought to be’ and ‘what is’ ties all the three schools – the Northean, the Commonsian and the Veblenian – in the concept of purpose. Although the Northean view uses the price system for valuation, it also ascribes purpose to knowledge acquisition and generation.

87 | P a g e Figure 3-1: Institutionalist theory of social change

Source: F Gregory Hayden (1982, p.643): The Institutionalist Paradigm

Figure 3-1 illustrates Hayden’s (1982) synthesis of the institutionalist paradigm. Figure 3-2, which is a modification of Hayden’s (1982) framework, synthesises the potential interlinkages of the three schools in terms of the knowledge-ideology-power interactive dynamic in explaining institutional change. The two sides AB (ceremonial knowledge system) and CD (instrumental knowledge system) are antagonistic. Social ceremonies include institutions and values. They are past-binding. Under this category, property rights also belong in the event that they are used to justify a regressive outcome. For example, based on a property rights argument, a group might withstand an environmental policy that probably is democratically and socially desirable. However, property rights also incentivise desirable behaviour such as investing in sustainable land management practices (Armsworth et al. 2006, Kontoleon et al. 2007, Leal 2010, Swanson 1994). In that sense, they are instrumental institutions.

88 | P a g e Figure 3-2: Framework for analysing knowledge and power

Source: Modified from F Gregory Hayden (1982): The Institutionalist Paradigm

There is a fundamental point of difference between Hayden’s framework (Figure 3-1) and the one depicted in Figure 3-2. To Hayden, given his utilisation of the Ayresian framework that takes institutions to be ceremonial and technology to be instrumental (Rutherford 2011), all institutions such as property rights, judicial precedent, government statutes and the constitution are ceremonial institutions. An attempt is made in Figure 3-2 to match every component of social ceremonies in Hayden’s framework with an instrumental aspect.

Ceremonial values have instrumental values as their antithesis. Ceremonial beliefs have instrumental beliefs as their antithesis. Since values are a form of knowledge (Bush 2009), there is no reason why instrumental values cannot be classified under technology.

It is somewhat doubt-inducing that the Veblenian Dichotomy classifies the judiciary system as a ceremonial system on grounds that it is an authority system (Ayres 1996, Hayden 1982, Hickerson 1982; 1987, Mayhew 1981). Insofar as the basis for new technology is already

89 | P a g e existing technology, which makes it a referential system, one wonders why the judiciary becomes ceremonial if the basis of common law is existing/previous knowledge (precedent).

Since technology is a combination and recombination of previous and current knowledge, skills and tools, one wonders, too, why the process of growth in common law precedent is a ceremonial system when it operates on the same principle as technological evolution. It is a process of knowledge production and growth. Judiciary systems do not only utilise precedent, they also listen to testimonies of scientific experts if the case requires it and they combine all such new and existing knowledge into a new rulings which grow the knowledge fund of the legal foundations of the social system (Hiedanpää and Bromley 2011, Rutherford 2011). The new rulings become new reasonable institutions.

Veblen (1914, p.291) classified judicial systems under ceremonial system at the time of his writing because instrumentally valuable matters of “current preconceptions touching human rights” had no place in existing legal discourses or could not be accommodated because the jurists were habitually given to establishing legal principles in statutes/precedent that confirmed existing doctrines and avoided finding new principles that might have contradicted their existing judicial social imaginaries. Changing social conditions required utilisation of the efficient cause logic rather than sufficient reason (Veblen 1914). The problem was not “authentication in terms of sufficient reason”, but it was an absence of investigative interest in “any question of the causes to which these [legal]

principles owed their eternal fitness in the scheme of Nature at that particular time”

(Veblen 1914, p.292). The jurists were not questioning the foundations of the legal principles they so depended upon. Judicial change was falling short of third-order change.

Commons (1924b) traced the evolution of United States judicial precedent over time from the transformation of the meaning of property from physical possession to economic power and the creation of a new category called liberty, which was important for human rights (the human life process that is so central to the Veblenian tradition of the OIE). It is here argued that this fundamental transformation of the habitual mental models of legal thought in judiciary practice as democratisation unfolded implies that some reclassification of this source of institutional change from the ceremonial category to instrumental category is long overdue. Commons (1942, p.369) described the new judicial way of reasoning that

90 | P a g e transformed US precedent as “experimental reasoning”, which was quite distinct from the

“historical doctrine of the rule of reason” (Commons 1942, p.382).

In showing the evolution of judicial reasoning from backward-looking sufficient reason to forward-looking experimental reasoning (principle of futurity), Commons’ logic suggests that classifying the judiciary as ceremonial is a misclassification (Ramstad 1989, Rutherford 2011). Appreciating this fundamental change in the scheme of evolving political and judicial institutions, makes for easy reconciliation of Commons’ system build on the logic of sufficient reason (final cause/purposeful explanation) and Veblen’s system build on the logic of efficient cause (pure/objective causal process explanation). Bromley’s (2006) theory of volitional pragmatism, which utilises the experimental reasoning logic, and is a posterior set of the reasonable valuation epistemological framework of John R Commons (the anterior set), naturally coalesces with instrumental theory of valuation despite being based on the logic of sufficient reason. Sufficient reason carries a different meaning in Bromley (2006) from the Veblenian connotation. It now carries a futuristic meaning rather than the past-binding meaning.

In Hayden’s framework, philosophy provides the valuation framework, which is the Deweyan instrumentalism based on the logic of efficient cause. In the Commonsian School, valuation is based on the logic of sufficient reason (final cause) as volitional agents interact, hence volitional pragmatism. Both forms of valuation yield the same result although they apply different logics. Instead of having philosophy as a guide to social value, Figure 3-2 introduces a transdisciplinary framework as a guide to valuation. Max-Neef (2005) raised two fundamental issues: there are multiple levels of reality in the first instance, and in the second, a theory relevant to a particular realm of reality does not exhaustively explain it.

Thus, all disciplines yield partial truths about social and natural phenomenon, and the complete truth is possible when various epistemic communities congregate around a policy issue to integrate their domain-specific warranted assertions to come up with a grand valuable assertion. Unlike Max-Neef’s (2005) view that theology and philosophy provide guidance on social valuation, it can be argued that value is generated through transdisciplinary reasoned discourses. Bromley (2008a, p.238) supports this line of reasoning arguing that volitional pragmatism requires social agents to overcome the modernist “Myth of the other”. The theological view is that whenever human society

91 | P a g e started, God had predetermined the values for humankind, but modernism eliminated God and enthroned philosophy as the new source of values.

“Philosophy became our new Other… The Myth of the Other is precisely concerned with the idea that tough choices cannot usefully be turned to God, or to philosophers, or to welfare economists. There is no Other – there is only us”

(Bromley 2008a, p.238, emboldening in original, italics added).

The precise point he is making is that problems are resolved by deliberation through a

“particular game of giving and asking for reasons” (Price 2013, p.31) and that valuable knowledge (reasonable value) is a product of that reasoned process (Norgaard 2007).

Philosophers alone cannot guide us to social value. The age of High Philosophy is over.

Transdisciplinarity suits Bromley’s view because all epistemic communities bring their warranted claims to the discussion table and the rest of the listening epistemic communities jointly evaluate the claims. Those that pass the joint valuation are the truth and the reasonable values for the time being. The essence of having a transdisciplinary valuation framework is to avoid truth claims of one epistemic community graduating into institutions that bind the democratic community before it has evaluated them, which would be a manifestation of epistemic violence.

Since volitional pragmatism and instrumentalism are premised on different logics, Figure 3-2 introduces the four instrumental principles of institutional adjustment (technological determination, minimal dislocation, socio-ecological co-evolution and recognised interdependences) as the sufficiency criteria. The social legitimacy of institutional adjustment in Figure 3-2 is evaluated on the bases of constitutionality, legality and judicial muster, which operate on the logic of sufficient reason (final cause). Both these sufficiency and social legitimacy evaluation criteria depend on the democratic process of participation in the determination of the sovereign will through the Commonsian negotiational psychology, which now also includes a new category called epistemic violence.

BD specifies evaluation criteria, while AC represents environmental/ecological systems (Figure 3-2). The transdisciplinary framework allows humanity to have a holistic view of the environmental/ecological systems. Instead of viewing it through a uni-disciplinary lens, which only gives the theoretical claims of a particular epistemic community,

92 | P a g e transdisciplinarity consummates humanity’s view of the environment/ biodiversity through an instituted process of deliberative valuation that yields reasonable value (Bromley 2006;

2008d, Norgaard 2007, Waller Jr and Robertson 1991). From this lens, one can evaluate the extent to which a policy process was transdisciplinary or uni-disciplinary thereby detecting the role of epistemic violence.

Another fundamental difference between Hayden’s scheme (Figure 3-1) and the one in Figure 3-2 is that the Hayden scheme treats all knowledge from the arts and sciences as instrumental. However, if the Northean School is correct in postulating that knowledge also generates ideologies, fads and dogmas in addition to technology, and that some ideologies lead to regressive institutional change, then some knowledge produced by the arts and sciences might be ceremonial. This reconceptualisation of knowledge implies that there are two dialectical knowledge systems – the ceremonial and the instrumental. This reconceptualisation helps to capture problems such as scientism and fundamentalism in science, which are ceremonial in nature and are mechanisms of epistemic violence.

Hodgson (2003a) and Rutherford (2011) support this view when they critique Clarence E Ayres for being a technological and cultural determinist and for attributing all knowledge production in sciences and arts only to “instrumental ways of thinking” (Rutherford 2011, p.335).