Causal Power of Social Structures
* Books: The Causal Power of Social Structures. Dave Elder-Vass. Cambridge University Press,
Description
Dave Elder-Vass:
"organisations are composed of people (though perhaps of other things too - I'll come back to that in a later post). Those people are related to each other in this context in ways that are defined by their roles in the organisation. As long as they perform their roles they are acting as parts of the organisation, and when the members do perform their roles the resulting organisation is a social entity with capacities to influence the world that its members would not have if they weren't collectively formed into that entity. A barbershop quartet, to pick a relatively simple example, has a power to produce harmonious music - a power the individual singers would not have if they weren't organised into this group. I discuss much more complex and interesting examples in the book, but that one will do to make the basic point.
To give a more useful account of social events, we need to theorise many different forms of social entity and their powers, and consider how they interact - not only with each other but also with non-social forces - to produce individual events. There's a huge amount of complexity in such explanations, but that's also true of explanations of non-social events. In both cases a wide range of powers interact to produce events, and in both cases we explain those events by identifying the powers involved and the mechanisms that produce those powers.
If all that I've said above is sound, then we have a way of rooting the social in the material: social events are produced by interactions between the causal powers of social and other entities, and all of these entities get their powers from interactions among their material parts. Here, then, we have a materially social world." (http://materiallysocial.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/why-materially-social-part-one.html)