Glenda B. Claborne
Comm/Soc 576
Fall 1998
Book Review
The Struggle for Control: A Study of Law, Disputes, and Deviance. By Pat Lauderdale and Michael Cruit. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993. Pp. xviii+256.
Pat Lauderdale and Michael Cruit have produced a detailed study of nine cases of land disputes in the Sierpe region of Costa Rica and have attempted to bring these local details within the broader frameworks of a world system and a general theory of social control. "The cases described have the fullness of an ethnography but not really ethnographic in method," wrote Morris Zelditch Jr. in his foreword to Lauderdale's and Cruit's book. The methodology used in The Struggle for Control maybe what Burawoy (1998, p. 5) calls the "extended case method" by which we "keep ourselves steady by rooting ourselves in theory that guides our dialogue with participants." A general framework of analysis is used but is kept in the background while the particular interactions within particular instances of the general theory are being examined. Around these particular instances is placed a porous moral and geographical boundary through which external forces and agents enter into and exit out of relationships with internal forces and agents. These relationships are defined along lines of outsider/insider status, informal/formal social control, and simplex/multiplex relationships. These lines intersect at different points for each of the cases of disputes examined and are brought into a cyclical relationship with ever larger and encompassing boundaries.
Within the above framework of analysis, the definition, control, resolution, and management of laws, disputes and deviance are rooted in social and systemic structures that are continually in flux. Laws are interpreted through the coexistence and interaction, in different proportions, of formal social control and informal social control. Disputes are never really resolved but are either diffused or buried only to resurface later in different guises. Deviance is defined by the particular conditions under which disputes are created.
The above structural approach has brought out a complex web of interactions running along underlying structures that define forms of social control within a limited geographical area but has not adequately brought these local data into a clear relationship with a world system and a general theory of social control. This inadequacy can be traced to the kind of question regarding general theory that the authors asked: How far is a theory of disputes and social control derived from a North American experience simply ethnocentric? This question does not do justice to the richness of the data nor to claims of a world system analysis. Against this question, the authors are forced to reduce the richness of their data to a mere comparative study and are obliged to bridge the discrepancies between the U.S. and Costa Rica in terms of differing stages of management of disputes and law. Against this question, the idea of a world system is no more than a static circle that is unhinged from the axes on which it turns.
The above critique of Lauderdale's and Cruit's book highlights the impossibility of making a clean and clear delineation between social structures and human actions and between abstractions and concrete realities. The authors tried to overcome the problem by looking at the data from different levels of analysis but the progression of knowledge is not quite what Burawoy (1998, p.5) calls the "growth of knowledge" or "reflexive science," in which analysis "starts out from dialogue, virtual or real, between observer and participants, embeds such dialogue within a second dialogue between local processes and extralocal forces that in turn can only be comprehended through a third expanding dialogue of theory with itself." Somehow, in Lauderdale's and Cruit's analysis, the initial dialogue between observer and participants has not been brought into an "expanding dialogue of theory with itself" because the theory itself has been forwarded in very poor form.
I do not think that a general theoretical structure and ethnography can be successfully integrated into one methodological approach until general sociological explanations overcome their fear of psychologism and their guilt about ethnocentrism. Without a firm basis for accounting for human actions, general structural approaches cannot help but make inconsequential the actions of individuals. Such human strivings as the ingenuity and tenacity of the ordinary Sierpe residents who used all available informal social control to protect their land, as well as the corruption and greed of formal authorities who had the power to dispense and define formal land ownership are no more than quaint irregularities in an unchanging cycle of events. With ethnocentrism as the outermost boundary for general theoretical comparison, general sociological explanations ironically cannot help but reaffirm certain values underlying social structures. The implications for U.S. foreign policy drawn by Lauderdale and Cruit are a subtle reaffirmation of the North American position of dispenser of grace and benevolence to parts of the world yet to attain better stages of law management. Repudiation becomes reaffirmation because the analysis does not know where it begins and where it ends.
Since sociology really cannot delineate an area of study where humans are not the main actors even if it attempts to equalize all units of analysis by ever broadening its frameworks of analysis, as in attempts to make humans and animals equal by moving the boundaries of analysis from traditional sociological categories such as class and ethnicity to species and universes, it might as well begin with a good idealization of the nature of the one who is at the same time inside and outside of the system he/she is studying: the researcher as a member of one finite biological species among many and as a member of a thinking and communicating species unequaled by any other so far. Perhaps then, we can ask better general questions such as: How far is a theory of disputes and social control closer to what we know so far about human beings?
Reference
Burawoy, M. (1998). The extended case method. Sociological Theory, 16, 5-33.