Jim, whether they followed Adorno & Horkheimers critical theory, C. Wright Mills, Louis Althussers strucuralism, Gerald Cohens functionalism, or Bowles & Gintis etc. etc., the Marxists almost all accepted the structural functionalist concept of role. All they did was to add in different values, and conflict theory, etc. I assume you know what I mean, since you cited sources. I explain this more in one of my papers (you will have to wait for it).
As regards Herb Gintis, his powerpoint argument is that: Economics and biology each has a common core of analytical theory that all practitioners learn as a common basis for discourse, testing, and revision. Sociology lacks such a common core. Rather, every sociological theorist develops a grand intellectual structure that rejects rather than building on past theoretical successes. For this reason, sociological theory is widely ignored by the other behavioral disciplines, leading to the exclusion of sociology from the current move towards the unification of the behavioral sciences. Gintis then provides a précis of what he thinks core sociology is. His take on role is lifted from Durkheim, Mead, Linton, Parsons and Goffman: The social division of labor consists of actors filling social roles (George Herbert Mead, Ralph Linton). Attached to a social role is a content, consisting of a set of rights, duties, expectations, material and symbolic rewards, and behavioral norms. In social equilibrium, the content of social roles is common knowledge; i.e., all know and agree on the content of social roles. Ascriptive states (e.g., man, woman, Korean, accident victim, prisoner) are not social roles. Economic theory has attempted to model role performance as motivated by pure self-regard, but this has failed because complete contracts are unfeasibly costly to enforce, and because principals (government, supervisors) have incomplete information concerning performance in complex economic roles. Contracts based on a strong element of trust are superior to complete (but unenforceable) contracts. See, for instance, Brown, Falk, and Fehr, Econometrica 2004. When social roles are not strongly legitimated, role-performance will deteriorate. Often this is called corruption. Similarly, if unethical role-performance is not appropriately socially sanctioned, social cooperation will generally unravel, leading to widespread non-compliance. How does an actor know what role he currently occupies? Every social situation has a social frame that supplies the sensory cues as to the social situation in which the individual is situated, and the particular social role the individual occupies in this social situation. In equilibrium, the set of social frames is common knowledge. Definition: A state s is common knowledge if all actors know s, all actors know that all actors know s, all actors know that all actors know that s, and so on, to whatever depth of recursive knowledge is required. Herb Gintis asks a good question: How does an actor know what role he currently occupies? But his answer is fairly ridiculous. He is still stuck in equilibrium economics. Sociology was basically an American invention, but things become very confused when American sociology thinks that its models apply to the rest of the world without further qualification. J.
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