The Discourses of Welfare and Welfare Reform

John W. MohrDepartment of Sociology

University of California, Santa Barbaramohr@soc.ucsb.edu

Draft Version April 28, 2003

Forthcoming in the The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture,edited by Mark Jacobs and Nancy Hanrahan. Oxford, U.K.: BlackwellPublishers.

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The Discourses of Welfare and Welfare Reform

John W. MohrDepartment of Sociology

University of California, Santa Barbara

The sociological study of social welfare institutions has undergone a profound

change over the course of the last 25 years. The field has moved from a strongly realist

moment into a clearly constructionist phase. The move is largely attributable to the

impact of feminist scholars such as Nancy Fraser (1989) whose attention to the

construction of gender categories has called into question key analytic assumptions of

earlier research agendas. The cultural turn that took place in this arena depended on the

analysis of discourse. In this chapter I will briefly explain how the concept of discourse

came into and subsequently transformed the sociological study of welfare institutions. I

will then describe what I think are some of the key issues that confront us as we move to

develop a more effective cultural sociology of institutions. I will argue that we must

address the ways that institutional discourse is: (1) semiotic, (2) constructed through

mutually constitutive dimensional orders, (3) articulated within organizational fields, and

(4) amenable to formal analysis. I will develop these arguments by highlighting some of

the findings from my own research on the history of the American welfare state.

Sociology, Social Welfare, and Social Realism

"Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, andnaturalists plumb the actual or superficial to find the scientific lawsthat control its actions, realists center their attention to a remarkabledegree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, andthe verifiable consequence" (William Harmon and Hugh Holman, AHandbook to Literature p. 428.)1

There is a longstanding connection between sociological research and the field of

social welfare. These linkages were especially evident during the Progressive Era when

academic departments of sociology were being founded in American universities at the

1 Cited in the online text by Donna Campbell, 2003. "Realism in AmericanLiterature, 1860-1890." Literary Movements. 2003-02-22. 4-4-03.<http://www.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl311/realism.htm>.

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same time that the profession of social work was being established and the social welfare

sector more generally was undergoing a period of intense rationalization.2 This led to

what could be described as a pragmatic realism that was evident in much that was written

by American sociologists on the topic.3 Sociologists saw the field of social welfare as a

place in which their theories and professional expertise (on the nature of inequality, the

causes and consequences of social problems, as well as other analyses and theories of

social organization) would find practical application.

After the second world war, American sociology underwent a paradigm shift. The

change has always appeared confusing, however, because at the theoretical level it

manifested itself as a refusal of a common theoretical framework, in particular, a refusal

of grand theory in favor of something that Robert Merton called theories of the middle

range (1957). But in fact a new paradigm did emerge during these years, a paradigm

built upon a common epistemology and a methodological imperative that embraced the

systematic interrogation of observational data (both quantitative data as pioneered by

Lazarsfeld and his colleagues but also in the qualitative analysis of social phenomena as

expressed by the phenomenological turn of scholars such as Harold Garfinkel, Aaron

Cicourel, and Harvey Sacks).4 What followed was an enormously productive period of

2 The study of social welfare was a central topic for sociologists in the early yearsof the profession. Early issues of the American Journal of Sociology were filled witharticles on the various dimensions of poverty, related social problems and alternativeProgressive Era responses; Indeed, through much of this period, social work was seen asa primary concern of many sociology departments which were often populated withvarious stripes of social reformers, Christian socialists, and settlement house activists(Add cites).3 Give some examples.4 This is an argument that is developed in more detail in (Friedland and Mohr,forthcoming). See also (Mohr 2000, Mohr forthcoming). Quantitative social science wasgiven a huge boost during the second world war and the subsequent growth ofmethodological innovations in the post-war decade. Indeed, the impact of the war wascritical. Cadres of social scientists were organized into research teams and employed bythe War department to conduct applied research. These teams worked were relativelyrich with resources and they were mixed in with scientists from other disciplines. Oneconsequence was that a major boost was given to the transfer of statistical methodologiesfrom the natural sciences into the social sciences. Propaganda analysis was one area ofspecialization that grew enormously and became transformed into the rudiments ofmodern marketing science. (Cites).

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growth in American sociology, especially in the adoption and application of formal

modeling methods.5

But the advances in scientific methodology came at a price, as they no doubt

always do. The work of science is difficult. Small variations in measurement have to be

noticed, managed statistically and incorporated into an explanatory frame. This demands

specialization and an intense narrowing of the field of vision.6 To maintain its forward

inertia science must be well articulated with a theoretical model. Thus as methods

became more carefully refined, theories began to shrink. Specialists in theory responded

by devoting much of their energy to philosophical studies of method, epistemological

battles over the proper domain of science, and meta-level theories of action and practice.7

You can see this happening in the literature on social welfare institutions.8 The

new empirically oriented research paradigm first found expression in the work of scholars

such as Harold Wilensky and Charles Lebeaux whose book Industrial Society and Social

Welfare (1958) became a classic in the field. Standing at the beginning of what has since

come to be a long and fruitful stream of research, Wilensky and Lebeaux melded well

established structural functionalist theoretical frameworks (especially those associated

5 See comments by Abbott and Ragin and others.6 The best examples of this are the studies of culture. The modernization texts, forexample, where attempts to generate a formal and scientific approach to Parsons ideasabout culture, led to the overly abstract attempts to measure national cultures and theireffects. See Smith (1998) for a useful summary of the history of cultural sociologyduring this period.7 Cites. I can’t this for certain because I haven’t yet looked to see if its true, but it seemslikely to me that there is a tighter connection between theory and method in a field likephysics than there is in sociology today, which is to say that my guess is that a higherproportion of cross talk goes on within the discourse system of the field between thosesee themselves as “theorists” and those who see themselves as practitioners then is truefor the contemporary field of American sociology. It would be a mistake to see this asbeing answerable in a simple minded way as being a reflection of the difference betweensoft and hard sciences. The turn from grand theory was less evident in Europe which iswhy Habermas and Foucault, Touraine and Bourdieu, Derrida and Baudrillard havecontinued to enthrall American scholars. This is the underside of Lamont’s argumentsabout how to become a famous French theorist. Lamont I think had it wrong. It wasn’tjust a natural tendency for egoistic advance. These scholars made something actuallymore natural than that, they advanced the field which is to say they carried the intellectualdiscussion further down the field, maneuvering around particular obstacles that otherswere also encountering.8 This is an abbreviated version of an argument that is more fully developed inMohr (1998).

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with the work of Talcott Parsons) together with an enhanced application of broad scale

indicators of social activity as a metric for assessing a society’s level of development of

its social welfare capabilities.9

Wilensky and Lebeaux define welfare as “those formally organized and socially

sponsored institutions, agencies and programs, exclusive of the family and private

enterprise, which function to maintain or improve the economic conditions, health or

interpersonal competence of some parts or all of a population” (1958, p. 17).10 They

argued that changes from one level of welfare provision to another were the result of the

forces of modernization or what has been termed the “logic of industrialism” (see also

Harold Wilensky, 1975). Other perspectives soon emerged to counterbalance this

explanatory frame. Neo-marxist theories (O'Connor, 1973), state capacity theories

(Skocpol and Ikenberry, 1983), and power resource theories (Esping-Anderson and

Korpi, 1984) provided alternative explanations. All of these projects (lets call them

formal comparativists) share the same underlying form.11 Variations in the level of

provision of social benefits constitute the dependent variable. Independent variables are

any features of the society that are hypothesized to explain this variation.

9 The use of social indicators was not new….(Lazarsfeld, 1961). Their use bygovernment agencies grew enormously at the beginning of the last century, especiallydue to the impact of the First World War, (see publication of Social Indicators volume,1930?). What was new about Wilensky and Lebeaux (1958) was the way they theseindicators were being incorporated into this newly emergent paradigm of explanatoryformal science.10 They go on to distinguish between two conceptions of social welfare. The“residual” approach which views welfare as an appropriate response to other institutionalfailures (the breakdown of the employment market, the dissolution of the family and soon) and the “institutional” model which sees welfare services as “normal ‘first-line’functions of a modern industrial society” (p. 138). According to this latter perspectivesocial welfare services are “designed to aid individuals and groups to attain satisfyingstandards of life and health…which permit the individual the fullest development of theircapacities” (p. 139).11 It is important to note that other styles of sociological research were applied to thefield of social welfare in these years as well. For example there has been important workat the level of the agency that focus on the internal logic of the bureaucracies chargedwith implementing specific policies (Mashaw, 1983; Perrow, 1965), and "street level"studies which describe the cognitive limitations, resource scarcities and administrativecontradictions of the bureaucrats who actually interact with and respond to the claims ofcitizens and clients (Lipsky, 1980). There was also a lot of important work on thecharacter of community and organizational arenas of social welfare provision (Warren,Rose and Bergunder. 1974, , Zald, 1981, etc.).

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Theoretical disputes are organized around differences in the choice of preferred

independent variables.12 Thus the “logic of industrialism” perspective highlights the

importance of economic and technological development as the root cause for the growth

of welfare states.13 State autonomy theorists such as Theda Skocpol (Skocpol and

Ikenberry, 1983) emphasize the character and capacities of state institutions, as well as

the expertise and vested interests of state bureaucrats. Institutionalists and world systems

scholars employ independent variables that reflect features of the global social order and

a particular country's relationship to that order.14 The main point is that within this

research tradition some feature of the broader social organization of society is used to

explain the character of existing welfare states.15

What counts as explanation is that which can be measured. Concrete, well-

metered features of the demography, the economy, the polity or the political economy

come to be defined as the primary (e.g., genuine) causal factors leading to the growth of

welfare activities. Wilensky and Lebeaux (1958) took statistical measures of economic

production, technological development, the degree of professionalization and the nature

of social stratification as markers for the overall level of industrialization. The same is

true of the dependent variable. Initially, variation among welfare states was measured by

12 Driven of course by a particular methodological frame. See Abbott’s commentson the impact of regression analysis on American sociology (Abbott, 1988).13 Wilensky (1975) identifies other factors—the degree of governmentalcentralization, rates of social mobility and the political organization of the workingclass—which account for other more complex variations among developed welfare states.14 See, for example the work collected in Thomas, Meyer, Ramirez, and Boli (1987).15 This type of taxonomy has also tended to be especially visible within thecomparative research literature itself since much of the published work over the course ofthe last two decades has explicitly adopted a theory testing approach. Thus, to cite just afew examples, Walter Korpi (1989) tests the efficacy of industrialization, neo-Marxist,popular protest, state autonomy and power resource theories as predictors of the socialprovision of health care benefits. Charles Ragin (1994) compares the "logic ofindustrialism" perspective against state autonomy (or "state-centered") and powerresource (or "political class struggle") theories in a project designed to explain nationalvariations in types of pension programs. Numerous other examples could be citedincluding many very different choices of theory combinations to be tested. Thus, forexample, Larry Griffin, Joel Devine and Michael Wallace (1983) compare and contrastthe efficacy of various types of neo-Marxist theories—"economic structuralism," "classstruggle," and "political business cycle" approaches—in order to predict changes inoverall relief expenditures and social insurance payments in the United States during thepostwar era.

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overall expenditures in social programs (scaled as proportion of GNP).16 Programs were

either big or they were small. Over time there was a steady improvement in the subtlety

with which welfare institutions were measured. First came more sophisticated measures

of the types of programs. Thus rather than measuring overall levels of expenditures,

researchers began trying to explain the occurrence of certain classes of welfare programs

or categories of social provisions (e.g., Alber, 1981; Coughlin and Armour, 1983).17

While both the measures and the models have become more sophisticated, so too have

the theories improved.18 And yet, like so much of the social science that emerged during

this period, this research often leaves one feeling lost in a sea of details, holding onto

explanatory narratives that feel overly neat, analytic and abstract.19 We can notice this

now thanks to the cultural turn that has taken place, largely at the behest of feminist

scholars.

The Cultural Turn

Feminist scholarship begins from the perspective that what matters is not the

objective quality of sex, but the cultural system of meanings embodied in gender

16 Wilensky (1975) used overall expenditures for Social Security programscompared to GNP and overall military expenditures.17 More recently, efforts have been to include measures of the kinds of eligibilitycriteria that citizens can use in making claims against the state. Gøsta Esping-Anderson(1990), for example, identifies three different types of claims—those grounded incitizenship alone, those established on the basis of contributory inputs and those thatderive from certain needs. By combining these claims categories with styles of serviceprovision, Esping-Anderson generates a far more nuanced taxonomy of welfareprograms. See also Korpi’s (1989) work on this.18 I don’t mean to imply a causal ordering in this statement. There is a dialecticalrelationship between theory and practice. The models have improved in part because thetheories have gotten richer. Indeed Esping-Anderson’s analyses (see previous note) haveclearly benefited from insights and advances of feminist theorists.19 Cite Alexander’s student book on this topic, his introduction essay. The issue here isreally about whether we have the kind of hollow abstractions he described for the earlyyears of formal culture work. —— I have been using the term ‘realism’ to designate thisapproach. I have done so mainly as a way to highlight how a particular kind ofepistemology has dominated so much of postwar research on social welfare institutions.The use of formal methodologies would seem to indicate a style of intellectual naturalismis at work here. While there surely is some of that, it is already important to emphasizethat there is a clear sense of the pushing off against functionalism in this literature thatmarks it as more realist than naturalist

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relations. Thus culture shapes and conditions social distinctions that come to be treated as

objective. When feminist scholars took up the study of the welfare state they brought this

sensibility to bear and quickly began to emphasize how the social categories that underlie

most welfare systems—especially gendered categories such as "widow," "mother,"

"unwed mother," and the like—are symbolic constructs that contain within them

ideologically coded assumptions about gender roles, the concept of a "family wage," the

proper separation of public from private spheres as well as many other morally charged

cultural prejudices. A classic example is how single mothers in the United States (in their

roles as “beneficiaries” of federal support programs such as the Food Stamp or AFDC

programs) have traditionally been held to a type of moral policing that was not imposed

on the beneficiaries of masculinized relief programs (such as unemployment assistance or

retirement insurance). Whether one looks at the food stamp program in which relief

applicants are given content-coded stamp books rather than cash as a way to control

spending habits or AFDC type support programs in which a relief recipient's sexual life is

considered an appropriate object of scrutiny, feminized social welfare programs tend to

view women as being in need of close moral supervision. In Nancy Fraser’s terms,

“welfare practices construct women and women's needs according to certain

specific—and in principle, contestable—interpretations, even as they lend those

interpretations an aura of facticity that discourages contestation” (1989, p. 146).20

The idea that social welfare systems are charged with interpretative ambiguities

and a rich moral discourse is not new. Historians have long emphasized how the

20 In many ways this takes the field back to ideas that had been first elaborated by theEnglish sociologist T.H. Marshall who described welfare states as being organizedaround the response to what he called social rights, "from the right to a modicum ofeconomic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and tolive the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society"(1964, p. 72). In effect, Marshall argued, to be a citizen of a modern state was to possessthe right to demand a certain style of life and to be able to petition the state to insure forits provision. In practice, however, social rights do not exist apart from thebureaucracies which implement them. Thus, as Yeheskel Hasenfeld and his colleagueshave argued, in order to gain access to their social rights, individuals are compelled toenter into "bureaucratic encounters" wherein they are subjected to the classificatorylogics of whichever agencies are charged with the task of evaluating and processing theirclaims (Hasenfeld, Rafferty, and Zald, 1987). In this encounter, an interpretation isinvoked and imposed, a set of meanings are brought to bear, and the individual petitioneris located within a system of discourse.

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contestation over meanings—distinctions between the worthy and the unworthy poor, for

example—are fundamental features of the history of welfare institutions.21 But this type

of interpretative sensitivity was considerably dulled by the formal comparativists whose

attention to the goals of quantification encouraged an uncritical and unrefined acceptance

of received categories. Thus, what the feminists inaugurated was a substantive change , a

cultural turn that shoved the sociological study of welfare institutions away from

positivist duels over which regression line best fit what data towards a scholarly

orientation in which welfare programs are investigated as “institutionalized patterns of

interpretation” (Fraser, 1989). Feminist scholars highlight the complex ways in which

identities are differentiated, eligibilities are given alternative moral weightings, needs are

socially constructed and benefit programs are far more complex than measures of levels

of GNP could express. Indeed, one especially important contribution of feminist scholars

was to remind us of how welfare demeans women at the same time that its supports them,

and thus to reveal the ways in which welfare programs can be intrusive, coercive or

controlling as well as respectful, enabling or liberating.

One way to read this is to say that feminists have raised the bar on the

expectations we have for providing what Geertz (1973) would have called a thick rather

than a thin description of welfare policies. They have argued that without an

interpretative analysis we are severely constrained in our ability to understand and, thus,

to effectively compare (formally or otherwise) the social policies that are enacted at

different times and in different places. More than this, feminists have shown that by

slighting the discursive element of social welfare institutions we jeopardize our ability to

understand the causal mechanisms that bring them into being.22 Without attending to the

complex ways in which social policies are constructed as contested systems of meanings,

we end up focusing our attention on other factors and other (often exogenous) social

processes and we end up accepting very abstract representations of what are

fundamentally cultural processes as adequate indicators for our causal modeling.

21 This was also a basic tenet of the older institutional theories of the welfare state. It wascertainly a critical feature of Karl Polanyi's (1957) account of how the Speenhamlandsystem came to be replaced by the English Poor Law of 1834. Again, this is not news tohistorians who have traced many times the often vicious history of policies to manageand contain the poor (Katz, 1986).

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The cultural turn is however far from complete. Feminists have enabled us make a

huge leap — but where will we land? Clearly we should move beyond the assumptions

of the realist project for a science of welfare institutions, but does that imply that we

should surrender the goal of explaining variations in welfare policies across time and

place? Surely we need to embrace a more interpretative stance and pursue thick

descriptions of institutional processes but does that mean that we should abandon the

tools of quantitative social science?23 I suspect that the way forward, not just in the

study of social welfare but in social science more generally, is to bring a more

interpretative sensibility into the core of the social scientific project itself and I think we

have a long way to go before we really understand what that endeavor will look like. But

I do think we can acknowledge that the changes we are witnessing today are just the

beginning of another paradigm shift, a shift away from the realist sensibilities of the post

war era to a predominantly constructivist social science. This has profound implications

for how we go about doing the work of sociology and it raises questions that will take a

long time to work through. My goal here is to contribute to such a discussion by taking

one concept, the idea of discourse, and showing some of what it implies. In particular I

want to focus in the remainder of this chapter on four specific suggestions for how I think

the study of discourse will affect the way we understand social institutions.

(1) Discourses have semiotic properties.

The semiotic component of institutional discourse that I want to focus on here

concerns the question of how meanings are constructed. A key semiotic innovation that

Saussure introduced was the idea that meanings are synchronic. Rather than

understanding the meaning of a word by tracing its origins backwards in time and

developing a narrative of becoming, Saussure sought to understand how word meanings

were whole and complete in the moment. The key to synchronous interpretation was the

recognition that word meanings (or sounds, or other semiotically defined system

22 For a more elaborate explication of this argument as it applies to organizationalanalysis more generally, see Mohr (forthcoming).23 I don’t mean to suggest that feminist scholars are resistant to such work. On thecontrary, many of the current leaders in the field have pushed to develop researchprograms that bridge between these divides. See,for example, Daly (1994) Gordon(1990a,b), Hobson (1994), Orloff (1993), Skocpol (1992).

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elements) are embedded within a discourse structure or a langue and thus meaning should

be understood as a referential system constructed out of patterns of similarity and

difference within a semiotic field. In Saussure’s formulation, “The content of a word is

determined in the final analysis not by what it contains but by what exists outside it”

(Saussure, p. 114).24 What followed from this insight was a long and hugely important

tradition of interpretative work in anthropology and elsewhere that sought to explain the

meaningfulness of things by understanding their position within a relational system of

elements bound together in particular relations of similarity and difference. This is the

essence of structuralism.

Many scholars have sought to interpret the meaning of discourse systems in the

field of social welfare. Indeed, most of the classic studies of welfare systems include

some analysis of the classificatory distinctions that are embedded within the institutional

logic of the system, especially with regard to the ongoing problem of differentiating the

worthy from the unworthy poor.25 My argument is that these kinds of meaning systems

can be fruitfully studied as semiotic fields and I think that most observers recognize this

implicitly.26 My interest is in pushing a bit harder on the interpretative technology of

structuralism in order to better develop our tools for the cultural analysis of institutional

fields. I can explain this point more clearly and succinctly by discussing an example

taken from my own research. Allow me then to briefly describe a paper I published a

decade ago (Mohr, 1994) on the use of structuralist methods to analyze the discourse

system of the 1907 New York City Charity Directory. I cannot develop the argument in

24 Terrence Hawkes (1977) is still one of the best introductions to this topic. Seealso Caws (1988). Note that this is an incomplete specification of how language works.It is better to think about language as an institutional system (Bourdieu, 1991). This iswhat I am really trying to describe in this essay, how discourse operates within aninstitutional system.25 Abbott (1941), Booth (1892), Brace [1872] (1973), Folks (1902) Henderson[1893] (1901), are examples of classic descriptions. Branscombe (1943) provides aninteresting reading of legal distinctions for the New York case. Classic historicalinterpretations that include interesting attempts to specify the logic underlying thesedistinctions would include Bremner (1956), Himmelfarb (1984), Katz (1986) and Polanyi(1957). Recent innovative work by feminist scholars would include Brush (199x) andFraser (1989), Gordon (1991), etc.26 This does not mean that we should avoid more diachronic approaches to interpretation.Fraser and Gordon’s (1994) essay is a fine example of how useful such an endeavor canbe. Foucault’s (1975) work and others who were inspired by him (Donzelot, 1979, etc)provide other examples.

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any length here but I think I can quickly use the analysis to illustrate my point about the

semiotic character of institutional discourse systems.

First, I want to provide a brief context for the analysis. The New York City

Charity Directory was a large book published annually by the local Charity Organization

Society. It was intended to serve as a practical guide for relief workers in the city. It

contained short (one or two paragraph) descriptions of nearly every organization

operating in the field of social welfare (within the five boroughs) during a given year.27

The directory thus provided a window into what DiMaggio and Powell (1983) have

described as an organizational field, “those organizations that, in the aggregate,

constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product

consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or

products” (1983:148).28 I chose the 1907 directory because it was published at the height

of the Progressive Era, a period during which fundamental changes were occurring in the

field of social welfare. Michael Katz () describes this as a moment of transition between

“the poorhouse era” and something that he labeled “the semi-welfare state.”

The former designates the institutional system of relief that prevailed in American

society during the nineteenth century. The poorhouse was the pivotal organization. This

was a custodial facility, reminiscent of other custodial institutions that characterized the

time — the insane asylum, the orphanage, the reformatory, and the penitentiary

(Rothman; Foucault). Poorhouse inmates suffered an unpleasant fate and the

unpleasantness was at least partially intended as a part of the logic of deterrence.29 The

Progressive Era (including here the 10 or 15 years bracketing the turn of the century),

marked the transition to a more modern institutional logic. The profession of social work

was established, a modern set of scientific discourses were invented, the nonprofit sector

27 It also contained information on state, federal, and private organizations operatingoutside of the city if they were relevant to the local system.28 This project can be seen as one example of a new kind of archival analysis oforganizational data. See Ventresca and Mohr (2002) for a more detailed discussion ofthis style of archival analysis.29 As Katz (1983, 1986) points out, however, even during the poorhouse era the majorityof the poor were not living in poorhouses. The complex of legal obligations andentitlements of the field were modeled on the English poor law system that mandatedprimary responsibility for care to the next of kin. The poorhouse was seen as thetreatment of last resort. In many municipalities, even those for whom no next of kin could

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proliferated, and organizations were rationalized in the Weberian sense of the term. It

was during the Progressive Era that public discourse on poverty was softened a bit

(especially when contrasted to the vilifications of the poor that characterized so much of

the discourse of the 1880s) and intertwined with a proliferating set of discourses on social

problems and “progressive” proposals for their solution.30

Entries in the Charity Directory consisted of self-descriptions by organizational

staff/directors that generally included passages naming the types of individuals who were

the objects of the organizations’ efforts. In this paper I focused on 15 of these

classificatory designations which I refer to as status identities—Blind (or Deaf) persons,

Consumptives, the Disabled, Ex-convicts, High-status individuals, Immigrants, Mothers,

Seamen, Soldiers, Strangers, Tramps, the Unemployed, Unwed Mothers, Widows, and

Working people.31 Because of the theoretical importance of gender, I further divided

each status identity into three subsets, those that were masculinized, those that were

femininized and those that were left ungendered. This yielded a set of 38 distinct status

identities.32

be called upon were either provided with some form of outdoor relief or placed in aprivate facility (or household) that was contracted to provide for their care.30 The Americanization of immigrants was of great concern during this era as wasthe proper moral training of children, especially adolescent boys. The Boy Scouts werefounded during this period, just one of many similar types of organizations established tomold the character of young citizens (Macleod, 1983).31 In the paper I explain the selection criteria in some detail. Essentially I chosewhat struck me as being the most important of the very many different social identitiesthat were referred to in the directory. The total number of identity references includedterms such as: "paupers," "orphans," "widows," "tramps," "ex-prisoners," "idiots" and"lunatics". Many of the descriptions, however, were more complex and evocative.Examples include—"needy stage-dancers," "unmarried women pregnant for the firsttime," "chronic pauper insane," "truant boys committed by courts between the age of 7and 16," "distressed merchants who were members of the chamber in good repute in thecity of New York and whose misfortunes were not the result of any dishonorabletransactions," "blind persons unable to maintain themselves by their own work,""destitute Protestant female children of the better class suffering from incurable diseaseswho are without means or friends able to support them" and "all soldiers of any of thelate wars who are unable from wounds received in the line of duty to earn a living bylabor." For a description of the content analysis procedures that were employed forcoding these kinds of texts as well as the selection criteria employed for these analysessee Mohr, 1994.32 Some status identities were inherently gendered (e.g., mothers, unwed mothers,soldiers, seamen and widows) and it was therefore obviously not appropriate to split themby gender.

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In the paper I argue that we can learn about the meaning that these identity

designations had within the discourse of social welfare if we formally treat them as

elements within a semiotic system. To operationalize this concept I mapped the relations

of similarity and difference among these 38 identities by looking at how each class of

individuals was treated in the welfare system (as represented in this discursive text). To

facilitate this I divided organizational programs into 14 types of core activities that

seemed to capture the range of solutions that were described in the Directory—social

relief, work for pay, assistance in finding a job, temporary shelter, asylum (or long term

shelter), incarceration (put in prison or in a reformatory), job training, domestic training

(instruction on how to keep a proper home), counseling, religious direction, drug or

alcohol (temperance) services, legal prosecution, vacation assistance, and “other”

community services. These were then further subdivided according to the auspice of the

organization performing the activity (public, religious, private nonprofit organization,

etc.) yielding a set of 70 distinct treatment possibilities.33 Each status identity was then

defined by the constellation of activities that were associated with it (including here the

totality of organizational discourse on a given status identity in the 1907 Directory). This

matrix was then subjected to a CONCOR analysis that produced the clustering hierarchy

shown in figure 1.34

33 Organizations were divided into 6 auspice designations—governmentorganizations (including city, state or federal), religious organizations which receivedgovernmental operating funds, private non-profit organizations which receivedgovernmental operating funds, religious organizations (which did not receivegovernmental funding), non-profit organizations (which did not receive governmentalfunding) and churches. (Religious organizations included any organization — other thanchurches — that were explicitly connected to any religious denomination or religiousorder. Catholic orphanages or Methodist home missionary societies are examples of thistype of organization).34 The methods used in this paper come from the research tradition of social networkanalysis, a style of structural analysis with important intellectual and historical linkagesto French structuralism (see Mohr, 2000 and forthcoming for a discussion of theseconnections). For information about blockmodel analysis see Boorman and White(1976),White, Boorman and Breiger (1976) and Wassserman and Faust (1994). For a descriptionof the application of blockmodel analysis to these data see Mohr, 1994.

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ExConvict(NG)Immigrant(F)Unemploy(M)

Unemploy(NG)Unemploy(F)

Blind(F)Blind(M)

Blind(NG)Immigrant(NG)

SeamenSoldiersWidows

Disabled(NG)Stranger(NG)

Unwed_Mother

HiStatus(F)HiStatus(NG)HiStatus(M)

Consmptv(NG)Working Men

Other_MotherWorking BoyWorking Girl

WorkngWoman

Tramp(F)Tramp(M)

Block-1 Block-2 Block-3 Block-4 Block-5 Block-6 Block-7 Block-8

Figure 1. CONCOR Clustering of Status Identities into Structurally Equivalent Clusters,1907 New York City Charity Directory

CONCOR clustered the identities into 8 groups. Identities within each of the groupscan be thought of as equivalent to one another in the sense that they stand in comparable

relations of similarity and difference to all the other identities in the field. The

blockmodel of these clusters is shown in figure 2.35 Figure 3 connects the blockmodelanalysis to an interpretation of the semiotic field that seeks to explain the arrangement of

identities in terms of an implicit and underlying moral logic.36

Figure 2. Blockmodel Structure of CONCOR Blocks,1907 New York City Charity Directory

35 The blockmodel shows the linkage between clusters based on their degree ofsimilarity. An image matrix is constructed for this purpose in which similarities betweenblocks are defined as the average of the correlations between all of the members of eachpair of blocks. After dichotomizing cell entries at the mean the resulting role structure isrepresented here as a simple undirected graph. See paper for details.36 This discussion diverges from the interpretation I offered originally, though Ibelieve this discussion is still consistent with what I said before.

15

Now we come to the point. What I want to suggest with this example is that the

discourse of social welfare systems, like that of other institutional fields, is ordered by a

semiotic system and that an interpretation of that system can be facilitated by the use of

structural methods of analysis. But the proof is in the pudding. Consider figure 3.

Notice that there are three main structural elements in the diagram .37 I suggest that each

may refer to a somewhat separate region of institutional discourse reflecting somewhat

different moral logics. To the right is an arena that I have labeled the “logic of

entitlement.” Identities within this region appear to include those that were deemed to be

legitimate recipients of social relief. Within this are three separate sub-regions that I

have labeled “Guild Membership,” “Class Membership” and “Household Membership”

to designate what appear to be three distinct logics of entitlement. Status identities in

block 4 (especially soldiers and seamen) appear to be entitled to relief by virtue of their

membership within a community defined by their career or a service that they performed.

The status of widowship is almost invariably linked to husbands’ performance of duties

in this type of domain. Immigrant communities represent a parallel type of status claim

as co-members within a community. In contrast, status identities in block 7 (mothers,

working boys, working girls, and working women) are presumably entitled to assistance

as a result of their identification with the domestic sphere itself. Blocks 5 and 6 are

structurally equivalent and thus included in the same element. Both speak to an

entitlement by virtue of membership within a class, working men by virtue of their

membership in the proletariat, high status individuals by virtue of their membership

within the bourgeoisie.

37 The 8 blocks are arranged here according to their structural location in figure 2.Blocks 1 and 8 are equivalent (since they are both isolates) and are thus represented hereas being members of the same structural location. Blocks 2 and 3 are structurallyequivalent (both have one tie to 4). Blocks 6 and 5 are structurally equivalent (havingidentical links to 4 and 7). Blocks 4, 5/6, and 7 are also grouped together here by virtueof their shared location within a subgraph.

16

Figure 3. Interpretive Mapping of Block Structure,1907 New York City Charity Directory

To the left is an arena I have given the heading “logic of exclusion.” Blocks 2

and 3 (being structurally equivalent) are included here in the same element. Both appear

to contain social identities that are more ambiguously connected to relief entitlements.

Block 2 includes strangers (those excluded from the entitlement of community), the

disabled (excluded from the entitlement of labor) and unwed mothers (excluded from the

entitlement of domesticity). Block 3 includes ex-convicts (excluded from legality), the

unemployed (excluded from the entitlement of labor but without the excuse of disability),

and female immigrants (differentiated from other immigrants by the marking of their

gender). Here it is useful to note that this block (along with block 5) contain the highest

proportion of discourse that is explicitly coded in moral terms suggesting that these status

17

categories were especially ambiguous in terms of their moral character.38 It is also

useful to notice how gender is marked in this moral system.39 Gendering tends to occur

on the right side of the diagram, in the same quadrant where stronger moral entitlements

are found.40 The third main element I have labeled as a logic of otherness. It contains the

two independent blocks (structurally equivalent in their isolation) including those

designated as “rounders,” “tramps,” “vagrants,” “wanderers” and the like (block 1) and

those designated with terms such as “blind,” “deaf,” “deaf-mute,” “dumb,” “defective”

and the like (block 8).

I will just end the discussion of this illustration by noting that both the analysis

and its interpretation have to be treated as preliminary contributions to the social process

of developing a science of institutions—think of it as a taste of the pudding.

(2) Discourses are mutually constitutive and dually ordered.

I say this in part because I know (as do you) that the world is not a simple place.

While I think it is true that what I have been calling “discourse systems” exist, that they

38 Moral ambiguity was measured by the level of moral qualification associated witheach status category. Moral qualification was determined by searching for text stringsthat contained morally charged criteria for organizational selection such as “withtestimonials as to character,” “anxious to make the most of themselves,” or “moraldevelopment may have been hindered.” See paper for details.39 The use of marked and unmarked category designations is a topic that has beenwell described by Eviatar Zerubavel (1993). See also Waugh, 1982.40 Some terms are implicitly gendered (mothers, widows, seamen, soldiers). Othersare gendered in the sense that gender qualification appears to have a significant impact onthe status disposition within the moral order. Terms sometimes existed for male trampsor female tramps but these designations had little consequence as the two identities arelocated in the same block (1). Gender does seem to matter for the blind, however, in thesense that those categories of the blind that were gender marked (as either male or female) were located in block 8, while references to the blind that were unmarked with respectto gender are located in a different region of the moral order, in block 4. As with most ofthese findings, the challenge is always to go back to the history of these organizationaltexts to try to make sense of the empirical differences. In the case of the blind it may besignificant that gender marking occurred almost exclusively for those put away inasylums. Other references to the blind were more likely to occur with respect to theworkplace (including work training programs for the blind or pension programs for thosewho were blinded at work). Gender marking is designated in figure 3 by bold faced linesand type.

18

have semiotic features and that by developing structuralist interpretative technologies we

can advance on the development of a cultural science, I also believe that welfare

discourse can be more effectively understood as an element within a larger structural

world. Discourse systems are in no sense pure or self-contained. They are embedded in

the social world and they have porous boundaries. Other discourse systems, other

institutions, other elements of reality are articulated within the meanings of poverty relief,

and indeed, are constitutive of them. In this section of the paper I want to focus on

second important feature of institutional discourse systems that I believe we must take

into consideration — that they are mutually constitutive and dually ordered.

It is useful to see this problem in its intellectual context. One of the principal

failings of traditional (French) structuralism was the problem of difference. What should

count as difference? Most obviously in Derrida (1978) but also throughout the post-

structuralist tradition scholars began to focus on the idea that there is no simple

interpretative truth but rather a multiplicity of interpretative possibilities. The rejection

of truth claims pushed the French intellectual field away from ambitions for scientific

objectivity toward post-modernism. Bourdieu was an exception to this intellectual

trajectory. Though he well appreciated the limits of semiotics as an interpretative project

he sought to hold onto a pragmatic scientism that worked with a post-structuralist

sensibility rather than against it.41 Bourdieu argued that the social world was made up of

a multiplicity of cultural discourse systems and that each was embedded in a given

material reality manifested through a constellation of practices. The duality of this

linkage, the connection between ways of knowing and ways of acting was accomplished

in the phenomenological moment through something he called the habitus, and it was

accomplished at the level of the institution in a social space he called a field.

Bourdieu’s concept of duality is what I want to highlight here. The archetypical

example of duality in Bourdieu (1977, 1990a) is his discussion of the relationship that

inheres between the material and the ideal world, the world of practice and the world of

41 Bourdieu appreciated the limits of semiotics as an interpretative project because he hadhimself begun his career as a practitioner of the craft. A great example is his essay on theKabalye House (1990b).

19

culture.42 Friedland and Alford (1991) provide the classic explication. By their account

societies consist of a number of significant institutional orders (capitalism, the state,

democracy, the family, religion, science, etc.) each of which has a central logic which

they define as "a set of material practices and symbolic constructions—which constitutes

its organizing principles..."(p.248). As with other practice theorists, Friedland and Alford

emphasize the duality that inheres among these components. The buying and selling of

commodities constitutes a set of practical activities that can only exist so long as people

share a set of symbolic constructions that includes the idea of private property. At the

same time the concept of property can only be meaningful in the context of a

commodified world where market behavior is regularly conducted. An earlier generation

of scholars might have called this a dialectical relationship. But another understanding of

the linkage between these domains is structural (in the Lévi-Straussian sense). This is the

concept of duality. Culture and practice exist as independent domains organized through

systems of difference, yet neither order exists without the other because each constitutes

the difference that exists within the other.43

This is of course a classic philosophical problem that has also been pursued by

American structuralists who have been moving down a parallel track.44 The issue of

duality was addressed thirty years ago by Ron Breiger (1974) in his essay on Simmel’s

conception of the duality of individuals and groups. Breiger developed the concept (as

well as his own set of mathematical tools for studying its manifestations) across a variety

of social organization processes.45 It now serves as the pivotal construct in a promising

new research program on the formal analysis of institutions.46 Vincent Duquenne and I

42 For an extended discussion of the theoretical problems of duality in sociology and itsvarious incarnations (material/ideal, subject/object, ends/means and the like) seeFriedland and Mohr (forthcoming).43 Sewell (1992) provides a classic formulation of this problem. His account fails,however, because he like a number of contemporary culture theorists (see Bonell andHunt, 1999) ends up by privileging the material over the cultural. He does so in partbecause he fails to adequately appreciate the mutually constitutive character of theconcept of duality that is afforded by a structuralist approach (see Friedland and Mohr,forthcoming for an elaboration of this argument).44 I discuss the parallels between French structuralism and the American tradition ofsocial network analysis in more detail in (2000, forthcoming).45 On social stratification (1990, 1995), on decision making in the Supreme Court (2000).46 Breiger 2000, Mische and Pattison, (2000) Duquenne, Mohr and Le Papp (1998),Schweizer, (1993), Harcourt (2002), etc.

20

applied Breiger’s concept of duality to the study of poverty discourse in the Charity

Directories (Mohr and Duquenne, 1997). We did this by using Galois lattice analysis, a

field of applied mathematics in which Duquenne has been a leading figure.47

In this paper we focused on a narrower semantic range, restricting ourselves to

seven linguistic distinctions that were frequently invoked as a way of identifying the type

of poor person who was receiving assistance. These include: the “distressed,” the

“destitute,” the “homeless,” the “indigent,” the “misfortunate,” the “needy,” and “the

poor” (think of these as metonymic expressions of a more generalized concept of

poverty). We also included one status identity, the concept of “stranger,” because of its

pivotal role in the discourse on community in the English Poor Law system and one

identity category evoking a critical social problem, the concept of the “fallen,” because it

was a term that also was occasionally applied in a more general sense to those who were

impoverished.48 Last we added two generalized moral qualifiers, the “worthy” and the

“deserving” because these terms were so frequently present and their meanings so

foundational (and contested) within the discourse logic of the institutional field during

this time.49

47 Vincent Duquenne, "Models of Possessions and Lattice Analysis," Social ScienceInformation, 34/2 (1995): 253-267, provides an additional example of the analysis ofstatus orders and material wealth. Vincent Duquenne, "On Lattice Approximations:Syntactic Aspects," Social Networks 18 (1996): 189-200, employ lattice analysis toassess the dual linkage between individuals and their membership in sub-groupingswithin a social network. Duquenne also uses the technique to analyze the structuralassociations between classes of symptoms and handicapped children, "Lattice Analysisand the Representation od Handicap Associations," Social Networks 18 (1996): 217-230,and psychological patients, "Towards an Intensional Logic of Symptoms," CurrentPsychology of Cognition 15/3 (1996): 323-345. Duquenne thinks of his work on latticesas a working through of Frege’s philosophical distinction between intension andextension. It was Lin Freeman and Doug White (1993) who brought the use of Galoislattices to Breiger’s problem.48 More details about the process and the rationale for these selections can be found inthe text. Looking back today, these selection rules strike me as being less purelydeductive (in a positivistic sense) than they are intuitive (in a craft sense), but I don’t seethis realization as undermining the validity of the analysis which still strikes me as beinginformative about some state of the world (referring in this case to linguistic patterns ofco-occurrence within the analyzed text). I think that science is a craft skill.49 The moral status of being worthy or deserving, as I show in these analyses, is adistinct semiotic moment but the general rhetorical organization of this discourse fieldchanges only very slowly. The problem of worthiness and the inherent moral character ofthe poor continues to be a determining feature of contemporary welfare discourse. Recent

21

Our presumption was that these distinctions could be more effectively analyzed if

we thought of them as being embedded within an institutional world of practices, of

actions taken in the world. And so we compared the eleven identity categories to ten

basic types of relief practices. These included: giving advice (advise), giving food (food),

giving money (give$), giving wage-work that could be performed at an individuals' home

(homework), investigating an individual's living conditions, family relationships and

spending habits (investigate), helping the individual to find employment (findjob), paying

a person to do some specified task such as chopping wood or making rag carpets as a way

of testing their willingness to labor (paidwork), providing temporary or overnight shelter

(shelter), offering employment training programs and vocational skill classes (jobtrain)

and putting a person in the almshouse or other long term custodial care facility (asylum).

Table 1. Poverty Practices by Poverty Categories (Binary)—1888

federal welfare reform legislation (the 1996 TANF Act) ended New Deal era guaranteesof federal support for single women raising children (AFDC), mandated life-time limitson relief benefits, instituted a “family cap” which prevents families from acquiring morebenefits when new children are born and shifted the focus away from “relief” typeprograms to “paid work” programs. The rhetoric legitimating these legislativeamendments relied on the arguments of conservative scholars such as Charles Murray ()and Marvin Olasky () both of whom argue that federal relief programs do more harm thangood because they fail to adequately address the underlying moral failings of the poor.

DESERVING

DESTITUTE

DISTRESSED

FALLEN

HOMELESS

INDIGENT

MISFORTUNE

NEEDY

POOR

WORTHY

STRANGER

Total

allocate money give$ 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 8provide food food 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 9

paid employment paidWk 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 5paid work in own home homeWk 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 4

employment search findJob 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 7advise on work/family advise 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 5

investigate home investg 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 3provide job training jbTrain 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 3

give temporary shelter shelter 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 9long-term shelter asylum 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 8

Total 4 9 3 3 6 6 2 9 10 5 4 61

22

We think of this as a dual relationship where the ways of knowing about the poor

are not distinct from the ways of acting with respect to the poor. In Friedland and

Alford’s sense, one domain cannot exist without the other. More concretely, the meaning

of the poorhouse is defined in part by the fact that it is the indigent poor who are

contained there. Table 1 shows the mapping of these practices and identities for the 1888

version of the Charity Directory. This table is binary, it shows whether an identity

category (column) was ever associated with a given practice (row) by any organization

listed in the 1888 Charity Directory.

Figure 4 graphically represents the logical implications of the binary matrix as a

system of sub-setting containments for the poverty classifications. An arrow from one

category to another indicates that the former has a usage profile that is a subset of the

latter. Notice that the category “poor” is at the top of the diagram. It has the broadest

usage profile, suggesting that it conveys the most general concept of poverty. All other

classifications can be seen as more specific refinements (sub-categories) of this general

and all-embracing notion. There is a basic bifurcation between the categories of the

needy and the destitute, a split that seems to speak to the bifurcation of class that we saw

occupying the center of the moral region described in figure 3 as “the logic of

entitlement.” Other categories signifying poverty were either refinements of destitution

(the indigent who were distinguished from the homeless) or a refinement of neediness

(distressed presumably reflecting a more extreme or perhaps a more transient state of

neediness). The only exception, the only class contradictory location among the terms of

poverty was “misfortune” (a term that implied calamities of nature such as floods and

earthquakes). Most other terms were less class specific. The moral category of

worthiness was restricted to serving as a refinement of the indigent, but the deserving was

a class contradictory extension of worthiness to the status of the needy. The same was

true of strangers, indicating a mixing of the categories of the needy with the destitute

homeless.

23

A partial ordering for the practices (not reproduced here) can also be identified

and interpreted. Figure 5 embeds the partial order of practices and the partial order of

poverty categories into a single Galois lattice that preserves both structures.50 Reading

from top to bottom, you will find the same sub-setting order that we observed in figure

4—the destitute and the needy are subcategories of the poor, the distressed is a

subcategory of needy, etc. The partial order of relief practices is also preserved. Reading

from the bottom to the top (tracing the three lines ascending from the lowest point of the

lattice), there are three first order relief practices—give$, give food and give shelter.

Subsets of practices flow upward through the lattice. The practice of finding someone a

job is a subset of the practice of offering short term shelter (in the sense that they are

applied to the same categories of the poor). The difference between them (as revealed by

this analysis) is that no organization in the city of New York in 1888 publicly claimed to

50 Because both orders are projected onto this same lattice structure (the smallest possiblelattice in which these two orders can be embedded), every point in the lattice representsthe co-occurrence of the set of relief practices which are below it and the set of povertycategories that are above it. For clarity, the lattice is minimally labeled—a category islabeled at its highest occurrence, a practice is labeled at its lowest occurrence. Hence, thepoint labeled Needy is the highest point to which the category Needy applies. All pointswhich fall on the lines descending from that point could also be labeled NEEDY. In afully labeled lattice the point marked here as Distressed/investg would be labeled({give$, food , investigate},{needy, poor, DISTRESSED}).

24

be trying to find work for worthy or deserving persons—try as you might, you will not be

able to trace a line upwards in the lattice from Findjob to deserving or worthy (note that

the lowest occurrence of this practice — Findjob— is designated by the inverted triangle

located to the upper left of the label).

Figure 5. Lattice Analysis of Poverty Classifications and Practice Categories,New York City Charity Directories, 1888

A partial ordering for the practices (not reproduced here) can also be identified

and interpreted. Figure 5 embeds the partial order of practices and the partial order of

poverty categories into a single Galois lattice that preserves both structures.51 Reading

51 Because both orders are projected onto this same lattice structure (the smallest possiblelattice in which these two orders can be embedded), every point in the lattice representsthe co-occurrence of the set of relief practices which are below it and the set of povertycategories that are above it. For clarity, the lattice is minimally labeled—a category islabeled at its highest occurrence, a practice is labeled at its lowest occurrence. Hence, thepoint labeled Needy is the highest point to which the category Needy applies. All pointswhich fall on the lines descending from that point could also be labeled NEEDY. In a

25

from top to bottom, you will find the same sub-setting order that we observed in figure

4—the destitute and the needy are subcategories of the poor, the distressed is a

subcategory of needy, etc. The partial order of relief practices is also preserved. Reading

from the bottom to the top (tracing the three lines ascending from the lowest point of the

lattice), there are three first order relief practices—give$, give food and give shelter.

Subsets of practices flow upward through the lattice. The practice of finding someone a

job is a subset of the practice of offering short term shelter (in the sense that they are

applied to the same categories of the poor). The difference between them (as revealed by

this analysis) is that no organization in the city of New York in 1888 publicly claimed to

be trying to find work for worthy or deserving persons—try as you might, you will not be

able to trace a line upwards in the lattice from Findjob to deserving or worthy (note that

the lowest occurrence of this practice — Findjob— is designated by the inverted triangle

located to the upper left of the label).

By incorporating the partial orders for both categories and practices in the same

structure, the lattice helps us visualize the structural duality of the two orders and thus to

better understand how meaningful distinctions regarding the poor are mutually

constituted by the repertoire of institutional actions that are directed toward them.52

Consider the basic bifurcation between the needy and the destitute. I have suggested that

this reflects a moral distinction of entitlement concerning the logic of class. The lattice

suggests that there are two relevant distinctions.53 One has to do with the way that these

linguistic distinctions differentiate among those classes of the poor who were subjected to

the requirement that they work in order to receive aid (paidWk) from those classes of the

fully labeled lattice the point marked here as Distressed/investg would be labeled({give$, food , investigate},{needy, poor, DISTRESSED}).52 In this respect we follow in the steps of the pragmatic approach to the philosophy ofmeaning, generally identified with Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work. See hisPhilosophical Investigations, (New York: MacMillan, 1953). Our approach parallels thesentiment of the pragmatists' aphorism, "Don't look for the meaning, look for the use."For a useful discussion of this school, see William P. Alston's essay on "Meaning" in TheEncyclopedia of Philosophy, Volume 5, Paul Edwards, editor, (New York: MacmillanPublishing Co, 1967), 233-241.53 Formally, the consensus between the DESTITUTE and the NEEDY is defined as the"practice extension" of their lower bound in the lattice. This includes all the practiceswhich are below both of them: (jbTrain, asylum, advise, shelter, food, give$). Theirdissensus can be characterized by what is specifically below only one of them (paidwk,investg).

26

poor who were never required to do so.54 Clearly, this distinction was important. The

demand for labor in exchange for relief was a more punitive approach to social welfare

(in 1888 just as it is today) and was traditionally reserved for those classes of aid

recipients who were regarded as the more incorrigible cases. The lattice diagram

suggests that this difference in treatment was a fundamental basis of differentiation

between the destitute and the needy.

The second distinction concerns the practice of conducting a social investigation,

an endeavor that in the early years of social work captured in these data (1888) was

applied to the needy but not to the destitute. The structural symmetry between these two

practices (paidWk and investg) is quite informative. While it was largely punitive, the

requirement that relief applicants perform some labor in exchange for relief was also a

mechanism for knowing the poor.55 Social investigations were, in a sense, a more

modern (and rationalized) mechanism for accomplishing the same thing. Investigations

were conducted in order to gather two different kinds of information. On the one hand,

relief applicants’ “true” needs were assessed—homes were inspected to determine

whether all assets had been exhausted, neighbors were queried about relatives who might

be able to provide support, local grocers were quizzed about applicants' debts, etc. On

the other hand, investigators sought to determine the root cause of impoverishment. An

applicants' moral character, social habits, housekeeping skills and parenting practices

were assessed in order to help diagnose and treat the root problem that was leading the

family into poverty.

Thus, one could say that, in 1888, the needy and the destitute were primarily

distinguished by the modality of surveillance or the regime of power/knowledge that they

were subjected to and which mediated their relationship to the institutional field of social

welfare.56 Those classes of the poor that were expected to demonstrate their moral

54 Recall that the practice paidWk applies to all those lattice points inclusive of andabove the point so labeled—in figure 4 this includes 1 unlabled point as well as the pointslabeled paidWk, homeless, worthy, indigent, destitute and poor.55 Indeed, these programs were generally referred to as "work tests" (or "labor tests")indicating that an important goal was to obtain information about whether applicants forrelief were truly in need and also to assess whether they had the proper sort of characterand willingness to labor.56 See, Foucault's development of this concept in Discipline and Punish: The Birthof the Prison (1979). See also his very interesting discussion of this topic in Foucault(1980).

27

fortitude and economic desperation by passing a “labor test” were classified as destitute.

Those classes of the poor that were subjected to the more modern, less physical (though

hardly less demeaning) requirement that they subject themselves to a social investigation

were classified as needy.57

(3) The articulation among discourses occurs within a material context (there is amapping between the institutional field and the organizational field).

Up until now I have described discourse systems as if they somehow existed in

thin air, as a part of some generalized cultural milieu characterizing New York City at the

turn of the last century. In fact these are systems of meaning, dually articulated with

forms of action, occurring within a social organizational context. A signature feature of

modernity is the reorganization of institutional fields according to principles of

bureaucratic rationality (Weber, 1968; Perrow, 2002). The third feature of discourse

systems that I want to highlight concerns how they are embedded within (and constitutive

of) the ecological processes of organizational fields.

The modern study of organizational fields was anticipated by Stinchcombe’s

(1965) essay on the relationship between history and organizations and inaugurated

empirically by ecologists and the new institutionalists who began to treat organizations as

data points arrayed across time.58 But there is an important difference between the

ecologists and the institutionalists. The former are realists (in the sense described before)

while the latter are constructivists. We are now in a place where we can more clearly see

what is implied by this distinction.

57 The paper continues by looking at changes in the lattice structure over time (in 1897,1907 and 1917). An important finding is that lattice analysis provides a useful overallmetric for analyzing the level of structuration of the institutional logic. A comparison ofthe consensual orderliness of the different logical sub-components can also be used as away of mapping dynamic properties of the structure as it changes over time (Duquenne,Mohr, and LePapp, 1997).58 In place of the more traditional engagement with historical materials, ecologicalresearch ushered in an era of archival studies in which small amounts of informationgleaned from the life histories of large numbers of organizations was marshaled to tell astory about the dynamics of organizational environments and organizational populationsVentresca and Mohr (2000). This article has a more detailed discussion of trends in theuse of archival materials including the development of an emerging interpretativelyoreiented science of organizations that we refer to as the “new archivalists”.

28

Ecologists study organizational fields by tracking the rise and fall of

organizational forms. An organizational form is a particular way of doing things, a way

— among a range of possible ways — of regularly organizing a subset of activities

carried on within an institutional arena. When one population of organizations supplants

another, then the field changes. The focus is on those features of organizational

populations that are easily metered, organizational foundings and failings is the standard

measure. Early work (e.g., Hannan and Freeman, 1977) tended to build explanatory

theory out of biological analogies, and this work was appropriately criticized for having a

non-humanistic theory of agency. But since then ecologists have increasingly built up

more solidly sociological accounts of organizational behaviors, including the very

constructionist notion of legitimacy as a driving force behind organizational failures and

foundings (Hannan and Carroll, 1992). But, the program is nonetheless realist in the

sense that there is a split between the science of ecology (which focuses on measuring

what are considered to be unproblematically real events and features of the organizational

populations) and the complementary accounts that are offered up about the meanings that

swirl around these events. Thus the science component, which does so much of the

effective work in this domain, is carried on with one hand tied behind one’s back.

Science is kept away from the cultural, from the hermeneutic, from the various social

processes that affect the way that meanings constitute the real.

The institutionalists, by contrast, see the organizational world as a place where

meaning truly matters. Organizational actions are viewed as interpretative maneuvers, as

signals sent to the environment, as efforts to interpret the real, and to behave according to

its mandate. Early work sought to demonstrate the overall effects of organizations

coming to terms with a shared system of understandings. The isomorphism studies were

all about gathering statistical evidence (or non-evidence as the case may be) of the effects

of what Warren, Rose, and Bergunder (1974) described as “institutionalized thought

structures.”59 Later work sought to show, following DiMaggio and Powell (1983), that

there are demonstrable structural features that characterize the channels of information

that flow through the field, organized under three headings—coercive isomorphism

(channels of influence based on command and control relationships), normative

isomorphism (based on professional communities and networks) and mimetic

59 Add a note re: mediation effect of Bourdieu...

29

isomorphism (based on field level properties of visibility and social idealization). The

virtue of this research is that it takes specific features of organizations (types of people,

types of programs, types of governance structures, etc.) as measures of meaning, as

markers of shared cultural understanding. Thus the institutionalists highlight in the

measurement process itself, in the scientific moment, features of the hermeneutic space.60

-2.5

-2.0

-1.5

-1.0

-0.5

0.0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

-2.5 -2.0 -1.5 -1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5

Dispensary

Dietkitchen

DayNursery

Lodging

IndSchool

Shelter

Mission H.

Youthclub

MR Assoc.

Benevolent

SWrkBurcy

Missionary

Church

Other

Figure 6. Organizational Forms as Arrayed in Institutional Space —New York City Charity Directories, 1888

Once again, let me try to quickly illustrate these distinctions by turning to discuss

figure 6.61 Every small circle represents one organization with an entry in the 1888

Charity Directory.62 The circles are located in relations of similarity and difference to

60 There are also many limitations to the institutional project. See Ventresca andMohr (2002) and Mohr (forthcoming) for a critique.61 This figure is extracted from Mohr and Guerra-Pearson, forthcoming.62 In this paper we look only at the sub-sector of organizations concerned with providingoutdoor relief. In another paper (Mohr and Rawlings, 2002) we apply a similar analysis to

30

one another (here in 2 dimensional space though we actually use 5 dimensional space in

the paper). The organizations are coded according to their type (their organizational

form). Thirteen types of organizations and 1 residual category are included. Like the

ecologists, our interest is in tracking changes over time in the organizational field by

monitoring the rise and fall of different organizational forms. The paper itself is mostly

concerned with two forms — settlement houses and bureaucratic social work agencies.

The former (which begin to appear after 1888) are relatively progressive organizations

that focus on the impact of neighborhoods and more general social conditions as causes

of poverty. The latter represent a competing branch of social work theory and practice

(with roots in the scientific charity movement) that treated poverty as a clinical pathology

(affecting individuals and families).63

the in-door treatment facilities. In that paper we explicitly compare the efficacy of threealternative modes of identifying organizational forms.63 The two styles of social work were embodied in these alternative organizationalforms, each with its own champion. Jane Addams (of Hull House fame) represented thesettlement house workers while Mary Richmond (of the Russell Sage Foundation) bestarticulated the scientific social work point of view. See the paper for a more completediscussion of these differences.

31

DietKitchens

DispensariesMissionarySocieties

Churches

MissionHouses

IndustrialSchools

Youth ServiceOrganizations

DayNurseries

SocialWorkBureaucracies

Shelters

LodgingHouses

Mutual ReliefAssociations

BenevolentSocieties

Figure 7. Structure of Competition Among Organizational Formsin New York City Community Welfare Sector, 1888

One difference between this analysis and that of organizational ecologists is that

we do more than track the raise and fall of organizational forms, we try to understand

how these organizations are arrayed across the institutional space. Figure 7 shows a

structural mapping of the organizational forms within the field. This is a just a more

succinct summary of the type of information presented in figure 6.64 The methods for

this representation come from the work of Miller McPherson (1983), a leader in the field

of community ecology research. McPherson studies voluntary associations. He plots the

organizations in terms of the degree of overlap between demographic characteristics of

the organizational members. Our analysis is similar except that we conceive of these as

64 Diagram 7 orders the organizational forms according to the degree of overlapwithin their institutional space. Organizations with greater than average proportion ofniche space overlap are linked in figure 7. The ties are asymmetric because of theasymmetry of niche sizes. An overlap may be a small or a large proportion of a givenniche region depending upon the overall size of the niche. See the paper for details.

32

constructed social categories rather than as categories of the real.65 The distinction is

more than semantic since our goal is to understand how the institutional arena is

discursively constituted (in the sense elaborated here). Concretely this means that we try

to bring to bear (1) the semiotic properties of discourse analysis and (2) its mutually

constitutive character as a way of more effectively understanding how organizations are

arrayed across the institutional terrain.

We do this by extending the stream of work on discourse categories in the

following way. Again we identify the types of people who are identified as the targets of

organizational action, as well as the types of actions that the organizations deploy.

McPherson’s techniques allow us to relax the classification scheme a bit to include 22

different organizational technologies (T), 16 separate status categories (S), and 15 types

of problems (P). We combine these into what we call a TSP profile for each

organization. For example, the Midnight Mission (founded in 1867 and operated by the

Protestant Episcopal Sisters of St. John the Baptist) published the following description

of its activities in the 1888 Directory: "For the reclamation of fallen women; rooms open

at all times for conversation and advice; after several months of probation, should a girl

remain, a place is found for her in some country town" (Rowell, 1888, p. 371). Here the

status (women) and the problem (fallen) is coupled with three different social practices

(temporary shelter, character reclamation and relocation to a place in the country).

Hence this organization is coded as having the following TSP profile: (S15*P10*T3),

(S15*P10*T8) and (S15*P10*T15) (see the appendix for a listing of the categories and

their designations). The similarity and difference between organizations is then

calculated as the degree of similarity and difference of their TSP signatures. The

resulting matrix is translated into a 5 dimensional MDS space. The coordinates of each

organization in these 5 dimensions becomes the basis for plotting their location within the

organizational field (thus producing the sort of mapping we saw in figure 6.

While it is not a perfect representation, it is we think a better approximation to the

measurement of ecological processes because it allows us to talk about organizations as

being arrayed within an institutional space, constructed out of discourse systems that are

dually ordered, mutually constitutive and embodied within alternative organizational

65 McPherson conceives of his work as an analysis of the way that organizations arearrayed within what he terms “Blau space”, referring to Peter Blau’s articulation of the

33

forms. In the paper we go on to use these techniques to show how the history of the

social welfare sector during the Progressive Era can be interpreted as a struggle between

these two dominant organizational forms, each of which sought to give an account of the

nature of the social world which was embodied in the particular discursive expressions on

what categories of the poor, understood according to what moral precepts should be

subjected to what styles of organizational practice. Our contention is that these

constructions were “the real” in the sense that they became the basis for the allocation of

resources — funding, legitimacy, personnel, government contracts, private donations and

the like. And that by looking to understand how this happens, how meanings operate as a

determining logic of the social organization of an organizational field, would be a better

way to understand the dynamic processes of ecological change. Simply put, you do

better when you use the tools of science to analyze the constructed character of the real

because it is this constructed world that we live in as if it were the real.

(4) Discourse Analysis can be scientific.

By now it is surely apparent that one of my interests is to develop a more

scientific approach to understanding the cultural properties of an institutional field.

Before concluding the chapter I want to just say something about what I think the role of

science can and should be in such an endeavor. I think that science is really about two

kinds of things. On the one hand, it is about a particular type of professionalization and

rationalization of the knowledge production process. A lot of ink has been spilled over

these qualities of scientific life, not all of it productively.66 But science is also about the

fundamental differential qualities of age, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and the like.66 This means that there are bounded groups that are authorized to participate in themaking and the evaluating of knowledge claims, that these groups usually reflect certaincareer trajectory systems (including both systems of training and systems of reward), thatthese career systems are manifest in particular institutional and professional communities,and that these groups share styles of acting, speaking and understanding. In modernscientific communities this last feature tends to include the embrace of conventions aboutthe importance of sharing detailed procedural accounts of knowledge generating activitiesas well as a clear and actively policed set of moral principles concerning the need fortruthfulness of these accounts. Much of the literature on the philosophy of science in thelast century was concerned with these features of science and a good deal of thisliterature is less than useful to us today.

34

use of technology in the production of knowledge and I think this is the part that seems

most relevant to the current discussion.

Astronomy strikes me as a useful example. Technology is an obviously critical

feature. Astronomers conduct their science on the basis of information compiled from

sophisticated signal detection equipment created to measure various wave particles that

the human senses are incapable of perceiving. Beautiful images of the distant universe,

iconic representations of the cosmos (think of recent news magazine covers) are

essentially aesthetically rendered statistical summaries of these data-streams.67

Astronomers use these images (and analyses of the statistical systems that underlie them)

as a way to construct an informed community dialogue about what might be going on out

there. Astronomers’ relationships to this dialogue, and the instruments that enable it, are

wholly human (as science studies scholars have assured us) which means that we should

not be too persuaded by those who would claim that true science involves some sort of

privileged relationship to objective reality.68 Astronomers and other natural scientists

are no less tied to the plodding and all too human trajectory that is institutional life. But

what astronomers do have—as I also have, sitting here at my computer—is a technical

system that is productive in the sense that it substantively facilitates the endeavors we

pursue.

My suggestion is that cultural sociology should invite technology in. Though it

is surely less than perfect, technology is nonetheless useful in furthering the pursuit of

human ends.69 Like the astronomers, we should put our machines to work sifting

through streams of data taken from the textual universe.70 Like the astronomers we

should work with these machines, tinker with them, coax them to become ever more

effective signal rendering devices. My sense is that we can gain a great deal from this

endeavor because there is so much more textual information out there than we can

67 Aesthetics is actually an important part of the way that data is analyzed. SeeTufte (1997).68 (Add note about teleology).69 Nor is it guaranteed to be a force for good in the world, as the recently concluded Warin Iraq sadly demonstrates Add note about the problem with overly technicalexpectations about epistemological objectivity (cite).70 The textual universe would include anything that is written and also anything that issaid. Writing is after all a sub-category of speaking, though an admittedly distinctivesub-category at that. See Ventresca and Mohr (2002).

35

possibly hope to perceive as an embodied human reader.71 I have tried through these

examples to suggest some of the features of institutional discourse that I think a more

scientific (e.g., a signal collection, analysis and enhancement) approach to interpretation

ought to consider.72 What remains to be shown is whether science has the ability to add

anything substantive that is above and beyond what a more qualitative approach might

offer. Just as there are mainstream sociologists who continue to resist the cultural turn,

so too are there many humanists who resist the application of scientific methodologies to

the study of meaning.73 Even if it is true that technology may facilitate the study of the

cosmos this is no guarantee that it can advance our understanding of Shakespeare.74

There are really two positions staked out here by defenders of the humanist faith.

The strong position contends that wherever science steps, so does it obscure the

hermeneutic tracks. Interpretation is an art form and science is something all together

different. Thus, for some, there is no possibility of science participating in a hermeneutic

endeavor and this is an analytic fact derivable from a proper knowledge of the nature of

meaning and the nature of science. 75 As should be apparent by now, this is a position

that I reject. But I think there is another perspective here as well, one that I would call

justifiable humanistic skepticism, which contends that the best work, the best cultural

interpretation, is carried out by hermeneutic scholars (those engaged in cultural studies,

literary theory, other humanistic endeavors, social scientific ethnography and other so

called qualitative investigations).

By this account, interpretation is an art form and the more skilled the artist the

better the rendering. The problem with science is not that it can never be artistic, but that

it is feeble and clumsy in its attempts. This is a criticism that I think has a lot of merit.

But I also think that it reflects more on the state of the art than on the state of the world. I

think that when modern science came into sociology in the postwar period, it did so with

71 Our relationship to the text has traditionally been as that of a single human reader,whose job it is to effectively notice and creatively summarize what is in the text. But ofcourse as the post-structuralists have asserted, no one is a reader outside of the textualworld. It is just as surely the texts that read us when we encounter them72 By now it should be clear that …73 See Friedland and Mohr (forthcoming).74 On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to dimiss the really interesting work that hasbeen done under the aegis of “scientific computing” in the humanities. E.G….

36

a realist sensibility, which meant that quantitative sociology grew big and strong but it

did so by splitting interpretation off, by moving meaning away from the work of

scientific measurement (Swidler and Jepperson, 1994). The goal of formal sociology

became that of identifying social structures, not mapping out the features or the

acrobatics of mind.76 Moreover, this was a strategy that made some sense. It focused

the field on tool building and it spawned a series of craft communities within the

discipline. These communities wanted nothing of the big ideas of structural

functionalism (Tilly, 1984). And they cared little for the hypothesis testing frameworks

that pitted value systems against social systems (cite). They focused instead on a fierce

and pragmatic sociological realism and they did so with good effect.

Social network scholars are a good example of this. By turning their back on

cognition and meaning, by rendering the agentic self as a black box, early network

theorists were able to invent a set of pliable tools, a canon of principles regarding the

relevant features of social life, a community of scholars, and some impressively insightful

scholarly works. They did this by ignoring the problem of meaning all together. But, as

Harrison White, the founding patriarch of social network analysis has recently written in

this regard. :

… mathematical and interpretative approaches should become indispensable toone another, partly because of this increasing scope and flexibility of mathematics… It is equally evident that, in avoiding and sidestepping the interpretative — andthus any direct access to the construction of social reality — mathematical modelshave come to an era of decreasing returns to effort. Another way to say the samething is that interpretative approaches are central to achieving a next level ofadequacy in social data…" (White, 1997:57-58).

I think this means that we are moving into a period where sociologists will be

increasingly likely to deploy the tools of science in the service of a more interpretatively

oriented analysis of institutional fields. In this respect I find it encouraging to see that

75 I take this to be Gadamer’s (1996) position.76 At least in the world of mainstream sociology. Other work has proceeded onmeasuring interpretative processes. I would point to the work by cognitiveanthropologists (D’Andrade, 1995) as well as the very useful work of those socialpsychologists who have set to the task of understanding the cognition of practice(Chaikin and Lave, 1993) and situated cognition (Hutchins, 1995).

37

scholars who have built their careers advancing the technological side of sociology are

increasingly coming over to explore the cultural terrain.77 But even more important is

the evidence of the work itself. There is a lot of fine scholarship emerging and I believe

that we are not far from a time when it will be much harder to assert such skepticism at

the hermeneutic powers of scientific sociology. The formal approach to culture is well

on its way out the gate.78

T

PS

T

PS

T

PS

T

PS

T

PS

T

PS

T

PS

T

PS

2% 3% 10%

2% 14% 25%

43%1%

Figure 8. Institutional Precedence Analysis —Prevalence of TSP Precursor Formations

I want to turn now to one final illustration of what I hope might count as an

illustration of how scientific methods can make visible qualitative features of the

institutional world that would not otherwise be available for human observation and

comment. Figure 8 comes from an unpublished paper (Mohr and Guerra-Pearson, 1997) ,

77 Bearman and Stovel (2000), White (2000), Breiger (2000), Lieberson (2000), etc.78 Here I would cite John Evans’ (2002) efforts to use text analysis techniques to measurethe shifts that occurred in the forms of rationality employed on either side of the debateabout genetic engineering . Also see Mische and Pattison (2000), Breiger (2000), Dowd(), Martin (19xx), Shin-Hap (), Guerra-Pearson (), Noah Mark (), Bearman and Stovel(2000), Harcourt (2002), etc.

38

a follow-up to the essay on organizational fields discussed in the last section. In this

paper we ask where institutional innovation comes from? How do new ways of

imagining and treating the poor come to be invented, come into material embodiment,

and perhaps, come to be regularized as new institutional forms? In this paper we define

an innovation as the occurrence of a new combination of technological (T), status (S)

and problem (P) discourses. We measure innovation by looking for statements published

in the Charity Directory that claim to provide a type of service (T) to a class of people

(S) characterized by a specific moral designation (P) that has not previously been

described. Without going through the details of the analysis I want to just highlight some

of the paper’s findings.

This analysis collapses data from 4 Directories (1888, 1897, 1907 and 1917) in

such a way as to correlate particular innovation events with their historical context.

Figure 8 characterizes the state of the art as it existed in the Charity Directory that was

published ten years before the first occurrence of the innovation in our data.79 Most of

the time (in 43% of the innovation events), the creative leap was not so great. The fully

connected T-S-P triangle indicates that 10 years before the innovation appeared, all of the

binary combinations had already been tried. Some organization had already applied this

technology (T) to people identified by this social status (S) though the linkage may have

been under the moral authorization of a different social problem (P). Similarly, some

organization (10 years earlier) had already linked the technology (T) to the problem (P)

though the linkage may have occurred with reference to a different category of person

(S). And finally, some organization a decade earlier had already associated the problem

(P) with persons designated by that status (S) but may have done so in the context of a

different technological (T) project. Thus 43% of the time that a new innovation

appeared in our data, all that was required was for some organization (perhaps an all

together new organization) to come along and create a program that combined the three

pair-wise combinations into a new triplet, thereby changing the institutional space in an

79 Note in this paper we only have data coded at ten year intervals. A better test ofthis relationship would make use of a more frequent (annual) coding of the data. Event

39

innovative way. This kind of innovative activity was far more prevalent than the

invention of a new TSP combination where nothing had existed before. This “whole

cloth” style of invention characterized just 1% of the innovations in our data (represented

here by the triangle with no links).

The interesting cases are in the upper two rows. Notice that having one pre-

existing linkage between a technology and a status (T-S P) accounts for 10% of all

innovations. But having a linkage between a status and a problem (T S-P — 2%) or a

technology and a problem (P-T S — 3%) is much less likely to lead to the development

of a full-blown institutional triplet coming to be embodied within an organizational form,

hardly more likely to lead to this outcome than the empty set combination (T S P — 1%).

Even more striking, look at the second row. When a technology has already been linked

to a class of persons and to a type of problem, then it is a relatively trivial matter to then

go on and associate that problem with the status (S-T-P — 25%). In contrast, the fact

that a problem linkage occurs between a status and a technology (S-P-T — 2%) is of little

consequence. It is still nearly as unlikely that the technology will come to be applied to

that status 10 years hence as if there were no pre-existing linkage at all. Morality is a

weak discursive link, technology is strong. It is much easier to find moral failings in

individuals that are already embedded within a power/truth system than it is to bring that

system to bear on classes of people simply because they have already been associated

with a similar moral or practical failing. Or, to put this in a different context, identifying

a new social problem is not very likely to increase your chances of garnering enough new

organizational resources so as to be able to create a new institutional niche. But once you

innovate technologically, so too is the path made more clear for future resource claims.

These are claims that are deserving of further study and I guess that is my ultimate point.

Applying these tools to the study of texts may indeed teach us something about

institutional discourse that we would not have been able to notice by looking at these

Directories with the naked eye. And from those insights perhaps we gain new

knowledge.

history models could then be employed and this would allow us to gain a more precise

40

Discussion

The shift away from a realist to a constructivist orientation has occurred across

many sub-disciplines of American sociology. In this chapter I have focused on what this

cultural turn has come to mean in the case of the study of social welfare institutions. I

have argued that the feminists were a critical catalyst for bringing this change about. I

have also sought to show how a constructionist perspective will necessarily change the

way in which we approach the empirical study of institutional fields. In particular I have

focused here on the concept of discourse and I have suggested some ways in which

attention to this contstruct leads to a very different approach to the study of social

welfare.

I have suggested four implications. First, that we must begin to approach the

cultural dynamics of these institutional processes as systems of meaning that are ordered

according to fundamental principles of semiotics. Thus, we must look to understand how

categories of people and practices are arrayed within systemic fields of difference.

Second I argued that we must recognize the interpenetration of these discursive fields and

seek to understand how they are dually ordered and mutually constituted. Third I have

suggested that we must seek to understand these processes by attending to the way in

which discursive practices and effects are embedded within organizational fields and

indeed, are constitutive of the dynamic processes which occur within these fields.

Finally I have argued that meanings are approachable with formal methodologies but that

such an endeavor is most likely to be effective when approached from a perspective that

recognizes these complexities and seeks to respect the implications of these properties of

institutional discourse.

Put another way, what I have sought to suggest to those sociologists who employ

formal methods are some ways in which they can begin to much more seriously study the

mechanisms of meaning that interpretative scholars have thoughtfully assembled for our

use and to begin to return the complement by adding some devices to that toolbox

(Breiger, 2000). What I have tried to convey to interpretative scholars is that these

methods may yet have some utility.

measure of these effects.

41

The discussion of these four topics (semiotics, duality, organizational fields, and

scientificity) should not be interpreted as an exhaustive list. Indeed, it is hardly more

than an assemblage of some of the things that I have chosen to study. There are so many

more sides to this puzzle. What about the existential qualities of subjectivity ()? What

about the role of rhetoric (Bazerman)? Of narrative (Abbott, 2002)? Of temporality

(Abbott, 2001)? What about the kinds of institutional networks models that Latour (1999)

has highlighted in his work? Etc….

42

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Appendix: Text Strings Used to Trigger Social Status (S),Social Problem (P), and Solution Technology (T) Variables

S1 Able-Bodied Able and willing; Able to (split, stow, saw, speak, read and write) work; Able-bodied ...S2 Aged Aged; Decrepit; Elderly; Failing mental powers; Feeble; Infirm; Invalid; Old; Pensioners...S3 Boys Boy; Lad.S4 Children Adolescents; Babes; Babies; Brought before the Children’s Court; Child; Children...S5 Ethnic Alastians; Arabic; Arabic-Speaking; Arabs; Armenians; Austrians; Belgians; Bohemian...S6 Girls Girls.S7 Member Communicants; Connected with the Parish; Dependent on (next of kin of) member....S8 Men Gentlemen; Males; Men.S9 Mother About to (be confined) become mothers; After (before) the birth of their babies; ... Mothers...S10 Race Africans; Afro-American; Caucasians; Coloreds; Indians; Negroes; People of Color; Whites.S11 Religion Baptists; Catholics; Christians; Co-Religionists; Creed; Episcopalians; Jewish; Hebrew...S12 NeighborHd Below Grand Street; Community; District; From the (East Side, judicial district, lower part of ...S13 Sailor At naval stations; Boatmen; Mariners; Officers of vessels; Sailors; Seafaring; Seamen.S14 Traveler Strangers; Travelers.S15 Women Females; Gentlewomen; Women.S16 Working Accountants; Actors; Are at work; Are employed; Are obliged to work; Are the breadwinners...P1 AlcoholDrug Addicted; Addictions; Addicts; Alcohol cases; Alcohol habit; Alcohol habitues; alcoholics...P2 Crime Awaiting trial; Brought (coming) before the women’s (children’s) court; Brought into the courts...P3 Delinquency Delinquency; Delinquents; Disobedients; Disorderly; Do not attend school; Inmates of Truant...P4 Disability Blind; Crippled; Deaf-mutes; Debilitated; Defectives; Deficient in intelligence; Deformed...P5 Dependency Cannot earn a living; Dependents; No means of gaining a livelihood; No near relatives legally ...P6 Friendless Friendless; No relatives or friends able to support them; Whose friends cannot provide for them in...P7 Homeless Evicted; Excluded from their homes; Homeless; Needing temporary shelter; Not having homes...P8 Immigrants Aliens; Emigrants; Foreign born; Foreigners; Immigrants; New Comers...P9 Vulnerable Drifting towards a life of crime; Entrusted for protection; Exposed to the temptations...P10 Immoral Courtesans; Degraded; Depraved; Dishonorable; Erred; Erring; Fallen; Having lived a bad..P11 Parent Probs Abused; Cases of (ill treatment, cruelty against children) neglect; Children of poor working men ...P12 Poverty Applicants for relief; Beggars; Deprived of the labor of the breadwinner; Deserving; Destitute…P13 Sickness Accidents; Acute; Afflicted; Ailments; Anemic; Beyond the need of constant attention from...P14 Unemployed Able and willing to (labor) work; Awaiting permanent employment; Desire to support themselves...P15 Widowed Deserted; Fatherless; Widowed; Widows.T1 Health Care Community (Dental, Homeopathic) Clinic; Home Visit Health Care (e.g., visiting nurse, etc.)...T2 PublicHealth Milk Station (e.g., where mothers with infants can go to obtain pure milk); Diet Kitchen ...T3 Shelter Temporary Housing or Shelter; Boarding (Lodging) House; Convalescent services...T4 Daycare Day Nursery (usually a place where infants can be brought while their mothers work); PreSchool...T5 Educate Montessori Method School; PreSchool (includes Kindergartens); Children's School; Night School...T6 VocationEd. Vocational School; Industrial School; Industrial Training (e.g., any job related training ...T7 HomeEc. Domestic Training (e.g., home economic skills—teaching women and girls how to manage home...T8 Character Military style training; Moral training; Moral instruction or "rescue work"; Mentoring ...T9 Citizenship Americanization programs (includes English language classes etc.); Good citizenship classes ...T10 GenRelief General relief; Provides: food, coal (heating fuel), money (including money for rent or other direct...T11 SpecialRelif Provides: amusements, flowers, clothing, ice, infant care equipment, toys, transportation...T12 Employment Provides: boarding (employment) positions in families, sewing to do in home, work for pay...T13 Financial Eduational loans; Loans; Pensions (retirement funds); Savings plans (e.g., community banks...T14 Visits Home Home visit health care (e.g., visiting nurse, etc.); Visits and comforts the sick (often bringing ...T15 SocialWork Social Service Work; Conducts social investigation (e.g., home visiting or investigations ..T16 Religious Religious Education (Bible classes, etc.); Religious work; Evangelicalism (Home Missionary ...T17 Settlement Settlement House; Mission House; Neighborhood House.T18 Recreatonal Recreational classes (e.g., dance classes, basket-weaving classes, etc.); Music classes...T19 Community Social or Community activities (social evenings, dances, etc.); Sewing Circle...T20 Vacation Provides (or funds) Fresh Air excursions (or classes); Summer (Fresh Air) Home; Summer Camp...T21 MutualAid Mutual Relief Associations (or Beneficial Societies) providing unemployment or health insurance...T22 Drug/Alc. Temperance/Drug work; Holds temperance meetings; Temperance Society or Club or House...