Social choice theory and the “Centre de Mathématique Sociale”: some historical notes

In this paper we describe some research directions in social choice and aggregation theory taken at the “Centre de Mathématique Sociale” since the fifties. We begin by presenting some institutional aspects concerning this center. Then we sketch a thematic history by considering the following questions about the “effet Condorcet” (“voting paradox”): What is it? How is it overcome? Why does it occur? These questions were adressed in Guilbaud's paper (Guilbaud GTh (1952) Les théories de l'intérêt général et le problème logique de l'agrégation, (Theories of the general interest and the logical problem of aggregation) which will mark the beginning of our inquiry. The conclusion outlines some more recent research developments linked to these questions.     

Social choice theory in the case of von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities

Part I of this paper offers a novel result in social choice theory by extending Harsanyi's well-known utilitarian theorem into a multi-profile context. Harsanyi was contented with showing that if the individuals' utilities u _i are von Neumann-Morgenstern, and if the given utility u of the social planner is VNM as well, then the Pareto indifference rule implies that u is affine in terms of the u _i. We provide a related conclusion by considering u as functionally dependent on the u _i, through a suitably restricted social welfare functional (u ₁,...,u _n)u=f(u ₁,...,u _n). We claim that this result is more in accordance with contemporary social choice theory than Harsanyi's single-profile theorem is. Besides, harsanyi's initial proof of the latter was faulty. Part II of this paper offers an alternative argument which is intended to be both general and simple enough, contrary to the recent proofs published by Fishburn and others. It finally investigates the affine independence problem on the u _i discussed by Fishburn as a corollary to harsanyi's theorem.The authors are indebted to L. Haddad, A. Sen and two anonymous referees for useful written comments. They also benefited from stimulating remarks in seminars and helpful conversations with their colleagues. The usual caveat of course applies. One of the authors acknowledges partial financial support from the ARI Communication of the C.N.R.S., Paris.     

Uncovering a politics of livelihoods: analysing displacement and contention in contemporary India

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we use livelihoods as an organizing concept which brings together questions of production, social reproduction, and the conditions for these, to describe and reflect upon three ‘moments’ of displacement and contention in India. Our first moment, a massive flash strike by workers in the export garments industry in Bangalore, is located in the present neo-liberal context of jobless growth, increasingly unregulated and precarious forms of employment, and market-based forms of service provision. Our second moment concerns popular struggles in defence of the commons in settled rural fishing communities in south India, and the third, the tenacious efforts of pavement dwellers in Bombay to make place, the political condition for production and social reproduction. The originary context for these last two moments was the state-led, technology-driven, capitalist modernization of agriculture and fisheries of the early post-‘independence’ decades, tied to projects of state-building, self-reliance, and sovereignty. The three moments chart the long history of processes of precarization under postcolonial capitalism but, equally, a constant politics of livelihood, grounded in claims to rights earned through labour, and addressing itself to both state and capital as complicit in structuring access to livelihoods under capitalism.     

Social network and family business: Uncovering hybrid family firms

What does it mean for a private enterprise in China to be embedded in a family? Our purpose here is twofold: (1) use social network analysis to describe what it means for a firm to be embedded in a family, (2) reveal from the application a new kind of firm, not family, yet akin to family. Armed with data on a large probability sample of private enterprises — a third of which meet ownership and employment criteria of being family businesses — we uncover a category of “hybrid family firms” that look modern in the style of firms that exclude family, but operate socially in ways similar to family firms. Our conclusion from summary statistics on the sample is that there are no differences in average performance level or network advantage for the three categories of businesses: family firms, hybrid family firms, and family-excluded firms. The fact that CEOs of family firms and hybrid family firms more often turn to family as key business contacts is a fact about network composition that raises no question about network mechanisms. Whether the CEO turns to more or fewer family contacts, government help is more likely with stronger political connections, and business success and survival are more likely with a large, open network. That said, the look-modern, act-traditional hybrid family firms stand alone in prospering with a CEO embedded in a closed business network. Recognition of hybrid family firms adds to the literature’s illustrations of social network analysis used to distinguish types of businesses and business people, and extends the population of organizations within which governance and strategy are likely to be better understood when viewed through a family logic.     

Psychodynamic theory within the politics of social work theory

Abstract

It is argued that social work theory has a politics in which supporters of theoretical perspectives are in discourse. The political position of psychodynamic theory has varied in each of three phases of social work theoretical development: the pre-influence, dominance and alternatives phases. In the dominance phase social work theories usually derived from psychoanalysis, psychodynamic ideas permeated basic social work practices and non-psychodynamic perspectives were influenced by it. In the alternatives phase, these influences continued, psychodynamic theory became a player in a wider discourse, was incorporated into or incorporated other perspectives and continued its dominance in specific settings. However, intensity of criticism of it, non-therapeutic approaches in much of social work, restricted training programmes, poor media of professional communication, the novelty of newer perspectives and poor transfer of new developments in psychodynamic theory have implied an insecure position for psychodynamic theory. But many of these problems are shared by alternative perspectives and its historical strength, strength in related occupations its adaptiveness and inclusiveness and the development of post-qualifying training offer continuing avenues to strengthen its political position within social work theory     

Social choice and the indexing dilemma

This paper distinguishes an index ordering and a social ordering function as a simple way to formalize the indexing problem in the social choice framework. Two main conclusions are derived. First, the alleged dilemma between welfarism and perfectionism is shown to involve a third possibility, exemplified by the fairness approach to social choice. Second, the idea that an individual is better off than another whenever he has more (goods, functionings, etc.) in all dimensions, which is known to enter in conflict with the Pareto principle, can be partly salvaged by adopting the fairness approach. This paper has benefited very much from comments by M. Salles and from stimulating interactions with K. Basu, P. Pattanaik, B. Tungodden and the participants at the Philosophical Aspects of Social Choice conference in Caen.     

Social choice and the closed convergence topology

This paper revisits the aggregation theorem of Chichilnisky (1980), replacing the original smooth topology by the closed convergence topology and responding to several comments (N. Baigent (1984, 1985, 1987, 1989), N. Baigent and P. Huang (1990) and M. LeBreton and J. Uriarte (1990a, b). Theorems 1 and 2 establish the contractibility of three spaces of preferences: the space of strictly quasiconcave preferences P _SCO, its subspace of smooth preferences P _infSCO ^supS , and a space P ₁ of smooth (not necessarily convex) preferences with a unique interior critical point (a maximum). The results are proven using both the closed convergence topology and the smooth topology. Because of their contractibility, these spaces satisfy the necessary and sufficient conditions of Chichilnisky and Heal (1983) for aggregation rules satisfying my axioms, which are valid in all topologies. Theorem 4 constructs a family of aggregation rules satisfying my axioms for these three spaces. What these spaces have in common is a unique maximum (or peak). This rather special property makes them contractible, and thus amenable to aggregation. However, these aggregation rules cannot be extended to the whole space of preferences P which is not contractible and therefore does not admit continuous aggregation rules satisfying anonymity and unanimity, Chichilnisky (1980, 1982). The results presented here clarify an erroneous example in LeBreton and Uriarte (1990a, b) and respond to Baigent (1984, 1985, 1987) and Baigent and Huang (1990) on the relative advantages of continuous and discrete approaches to Social Choice.Comments from Geoffrey M. Heal, Andreu Mas Colell, Jean Francois Mertens and Maurice Salles are gratefully acknowledged. Research support was provided by NSF SES 8409857.     

Crip theory and the disabled identity: why disability politics needs impairment

This article highlights the importance of recognizing both the ontology of impairment as it relates to the creation of the disabled identity as well as why articulations of the disabled identity being ‘crip’ obfuscate potential politics. Examining how the disabled identity has been cast as a coherent social and political category, rather than the messy and complicated identity it truly is, I argue the adoption of a post-structuralist orientation by activists and advocates is bad for disability politics. Providing two examples, the first focusing on a publicized rape case of a person with an intellectual disability and the second on the importance of disability rights claims based on visibility of impairment, I show how articulations like those made in crip theory can have serious, negative implications for the lived experience of people with disabilities. I conclude with a call for disability studies scholars to engage disability politics in their work.     

Question wording and the house vote choice : some experimental evidence

Since 1978, the vote reported for House incumbents in the American National Election Studies (NES) has been significantly higher than the actual incumbents' vote in the districts surveyed; in NES surveys before 1978, the reported vote was much closer to the actual vote. The prime suspect for the source of this bias is the new question format introduced in 1978 and used in all subsequent studies. We document the problem and review the results of several question-wording experiments that confirm the superior accuracy of a format that does not mention the candidates' names over the ballot format currently in use. We also find evidence that a modified version of the ballot format may reduce the pro-incumbent bias, so that improvement may be possible without a major interruption of the post-1978 NES times series.     

Postmodern theory and politics: Perspectives on citizenship and social justice

In this paper we consider some contributions made by postmodern perspectives to theoretical and political questions of citizenship and social justice. Postmodern theory is often dismissed as a distraction from pressing questions of material inequality and economic and political exploitation. In the paper we distinguish between ‘ludic’ or ‘spectral’ postmodernisms and ‘oppositional’ or ‘resistance’ postmodernisms. We suggest that the latter provide theoretical resources for analysing the cultural construction of inequalities and struggles around social inclusion and exclusion. The paper is divided into three sections: in the first, three dominant narratives of modernization are addressed and their implications for concepts of citizenship and social inclusion noted; in the second, some postmodern challenges to these narratives are explored in order to disclose some of the key problems with modern paradigms of citizenship and social justice; in the third section we outline two postmodern approaches to the analysis of social struggles and their contributions to debates about citizenship.     

Social movements and the politics of care: empathy,solidarity and eviction blockades

ABSTRACT

This paper develops a perspective of mobilization based on the ethics of care to explore the complexities of political solidarity in social movements. On the one hand, it is interested in the reasons why commonly aggrieved individuals do not always collaborate to confront their oppression. On the other, it explores why sometimes people initiate mobilization for causes that do not benefit them directly. From a care perspective, aggrieved individuals may not mobilize to confront their troubles because some of their caring needs (emotional, identity, and participatory) are not covered. At the same time, empathy motivates people not affected by a grievance to initiate mobilization in support of the oppressed collective. Internal solidarity among those aggrieved may be created during the process of mobilization through care work. The analytical relevance of this model is demonstrated explaining the mobilization of the ‘Platform of Those Affected by Mortgages’, the biggest housing organization in Spain. A care-based approach to mobilization contributes to our analysis of contentious collective action by helping to better understand the complexities of political solidarity and the mechanisms through which organizations foster solidarity among their members.     

Socio-economics and rational choice theory: Specification of their relations

In this paper an attempt is made to put the relationship between socio-economics and rational choice theory into proper perspective. The attempt is motivated by some recent confusions between the two. In particular, there is a tendency among the adherents of rational choice theory to subsume socio-economics and, for that matter, social science as a whole under their theory. On the other hand, many socio-economists or economic sociologists evince some degree of lenience vis-à-vis rational choice theory as if the latter were fully compatible with their discipline. We show that the rational choice reduction of socio-economics and sister disciplines (e.g., economic sociology) to the “economic approach to human behavior” or to a utilitarian paradigm of socio-economic life, is theoretically and methodologically untenable, and thus that many socio-economists' generous attitude to rational choice theory is not entirely justified.     

Social choice without the Pareto principle: a comprehensive analysis

This article provides a systematic analysis of social choice theory without the Pareto principle, by revisiting the method of Murakami Yasusuke. This article consists of two parts. The first part investigates the relationship between rationality of social preference and the axioms that make a collective choice rule either Paretian or anti-Paretian. In the second part, the results in the first part are applied to obtain impossibility results under various rationality requirements of social preference, such as S-consistency, quasi-transitivity, semi-transitivity, the interval-order property, and acyclicity.     

Recoverability of choice functions and binary relations: some duality results

Banerjee and Pattanaik (1996) proved a theorem that the maximal set with respect to a quasi-ordering can be fully recovered by defining the greatest sets with respect to each and every ordering extension thereof and taking their union. Donaldson and Weymark (1998) proved a theorem that a quasi-ordering can be fully recovered by taking the intersection of all the ordering extensions thereof. These recoverability theorems are obviously related, but their exact relationship has never been clarified in the literature. This paper examines the issue of choice-functional recoverability and relational recoverability in a general framework, and establishes several remarkable duality relationships. Thanks are due to Professors Walter Bossert, Prasanta K. Pattanaik, Clemens Puppe, Amartya K. Sen, and John Weymark, with whom we had several opportunities to discuss this and related issues. The first author also would like to express his gratitude to the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, and the Scientific Research Grant for Policy Areas (B) Number 603 from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of Japan for their financial support which made this collaborative research possible. We are also grateful to the referees whose comments have led to several improvements of the paper.