Intentional Social Change. A Rational Choice Theory

Citation

Opp, K. (2007), "Intentional Social Change. A Rational Choice Theory", Equal Opportunities International, Vol. 26 No. 1, pp. 77-80. https://doi.org/10.1108/02610150710726552

This book addresses a very practical and interesting question: why do some intentional social changes succeed and others fail? In order to answer this question the author applies rational choice theory and game theory in particular.

The book begins with two examples. In 1970 the Japanese government decided that senior citizens received free medical care. This measure of the government – an intentional social change – had the effect that the demand for medical treatment increased dramatically. A consequence was a shortage of beds, nurses etc. Furthermore, the nation's medical costs increased so that the health system got severe financial problems. In 1983, this measure was abolished. This is an example for an unsuccessful intentional change – unsuccessful in the sense that the change agent (the government) did not achieve its goals. A second example describes a successful change: a social movement in the southern USA in the 1880s achieved its goal to improve the situation of the farmers. How can such successes or failures be explained? The basic idea is that between the “implementation of the plan and occurrence of the consequence … lies a multi‐level transition process, in which people affected by the plan respond in diverse ways at the micro level and such responses accumulate toward the macro level” (p. XI). The author applies the well‐known micro‐macro model (the so‐called Coleman‐boat which was in fact first suggested by David McClelland in his book The Achieving Society on p. 47). This is his basic theoretical framework (see p. 6): the plan or policy (macro event) of the change agent presents a new situation for other social actors called decision makers or target actors (macro‐to‐micro transition); they then respond to the new situation (micro‐to‐micro effect). Their behaviors then aggregate to social consequences on the macro level (micro‐to‐macro transition). These consequences may be unintended because there may be several consequences and because the change agent lacks information (although he or she disposes of resources to implement the decision and although the change agent behaves rationally in the sense that utility is maximized). Let us look at the contents of the book in more detail.

Chapter 1 expounds the basic idea of the book more extensively and delineates some advantages of looking at micro‐macro processes. This chapter further shows how game theory can be used to answer the basic question: before intentional changes are introduced the situation can be modeled as a game. The behavior of the change agents affects the payoffs in the game matrices. The behavior of the decision makers (those who act according to the intentional changes) again changes payoffs for others.

Before Sato provides the answer to his question he discusses in chapter 2 several existing theories that explain or might explain intentional social change: structural functionalism, marxism, self‐organization theory (the latter in the version of T. Imada), social planning theories and social movement theories. The question is to what extent these theories or approaches are suitable to answer Sato's question. Although some of the theories, the author argues, provide ideas that can be incorporated into his theoretical argument, the author's main critique of these approaches is that they do not explicitly address in detail the processes that bring about change, i.e. micro‐macro transitions.

Chapter 3 begins with the first steps in formulating a theory of intentional social change. The author advances a rational choice approach as the theoretical foundation for answering his question. He argues that this is the only approach that allows a rigorous modeling of multi‐level transitions. Sato first introduces a classification of the types of actors who may be involved in intentional social changes. The goals of the change agents are discussed: their ultimate goal is to increase their own utility – via the utility of the target actors. “Success” or “failure” of goals is defined as the degree to which the (intended) utility of the target actors is improved. The action principle of the actors is that they try to maximize their utility – the author assumes a wide version of the theory of rational action that takes account of the actors' beliefs that may clash with reality. The final section of chapter 3 provides a more detailed discussion of the multi‐level transitions that obtain if a change agent tries to effect intentional change.

Chapter 4 offers a detailed game‐theoretic analysis of a failed intentional change by focusing on the case of the free health care of senior citizens that I mentioned already. The author discusses multiple equilibria and his major idea is that they come about not because of the limitation of game theory but because of uncertainty in the situation (see also 111‐112). Further, under multiple equilibria there is the possibility of failure of intentional change. Failure is thus not due to “irrationality” or to limited resources.

The next chapter, 5, turns to another case of intentional social change: the author addresses mass movements. Here the movement members are the change agents and at the same time (mostly) the target actors whose utility is to be increased. The author analyzes “the processes through which people decide whether to participate in a social movement or not, in order to achieve a collective goal, and ultimately enhance their utility” (p. 83). He argues convincingly that existing theory and research in the sociology of social movements did not sufficiently analyze this process. Sato then provides a detailed game theoretical analysis of the process of participation in social movement activities.

Chapter 6 begins with a summary of previous chapters and then discusses some implications of the previous theoretical argument. Of particular interest is the integration of a “structural system approach” into game theory (pp. 114‐117).

In the final Postscript the author criticizes some objections against methodological individualism – which underlies the present book – which were raised by K. Seiyama. A Mathematical Appendix explains the concepts of Nash equilibrium and Perfect Bayesian equilibrium.

This is a very clearly‐written and understandable book with many original ideas. In particular, the formulas, game matrices and game trees are explained at length so that the reader who is not a specialist in game theory can follow easily. The book is of interest to a wide audience. To be sure, the book advances a clear rational choice perspective, but one of its strengths is that it also discusses general and specific alternative theories and approaches. It further shows how some of these alternative approaches can be integrated into game theory and rational choice theory. Therefore, this comparative theoretical analysis should be of interest to sociologists and other social scientists in general.

The study is further important because it undergirds Karl R. Popper's arguments for piecemeal and against utopian engineering. Although the author does not mention it, the study confirms the impossibility of successful utopian and the limited viability of piecemeal engineering – which are, in the author's terminology, kinds if intentional social change. If governments are not even able to predict the effects of tiny little measures such as providing free health care to senior citizens one can imagine how much will go wrong with large‐scale measures that affect the population of a country at large such as tax increases or new measures in social welfare.

Game theoretic modeling often makes simplifying assumptions in order to make the analysis tractable. Sato uses this strategy as well (see, e.g. p. 88). It would have been useful to address the question whether perhaps computer simulations are superior to game theoretic analyses to model complex situations that can not be handled in game theoretic models.

The book is concerned with the effects of institutional settings introduced by a change agent. This is a topic of the vast literature on institutions, especially of the new institutional economics and of “law and economics.” The author does not mention these literatures. I am not sure whether his argument would have been different if the author had taken account of this literature. But I think a discussion of this literature and their relevance for explaining the effects of intentional change, which is in fact institutional change, would have been in order.

The book is concerned with the extent to which the goals of a change agent are achieved. Although the author speaks in general of unintended consequences I think a distinction should be made between the consequences of the intentional changes in regard to the explicit goals and side‐effects. One could thus distinguish between first‐order and second‐order consequences of a plan (i.e. first‐ and second‐order benefits or costs). The first‐order consequences refer to the immediate goals. For example, assume there is a law that restricts dismissing older employees. The direct and first‐order effect may be that indeed employers follow this rule and the number of older employees who lose their job decreases. But there may be second‐order effects: the number of older employees who are hired may decrease because employers do not want to take the risk to keep an employee whom they may want to dismiss. Many rules regarding the protection of certain groups have such unintended and undesired second‐order effects – the so‐called discriminatory effects of anti‐discrimination laws. I think it is important to distinguish these first‐ and second‐order effects in order to draw the attention of the researcher to effects that are often only apparent after careful analysis. In Sato's example it would be interesting to what extent the free medical care changed life expectancy or perceived well‐being of senior citizens due to interactions with physicians.

My final question concerns micro‐to‐macro level transitions. In the common graphical scheme the transition from the micro behavior to the macro level is drawn as an arrow. This symbolizes a causal relationship (see the graphs on pp. 5, 6, 63, 69, 87). Is this transition really always an empirical one? Let us look at Sato's example of the free health care for senior citizens and the “congestion of medical institutions” as the “effect” of the behavior of senior citizens at the macro‐level (p. 69). This is clearly an analytical and no empirical aggregation: “congestion” is equal to (and not a causal effect of) the number of senior citizens who utilize medical service. The procedure to arrive at this macro effect is to model each actor's payoff function. Then the argument is that for a majority of actors D (defection, i.e. to use the medical system extensively) was the dominant strategy (or was the equilibrium). “Congestion” is the macro‐property which is simply a sum of the individual behaviors.

Another “consequence” of the congestion (i.e. the behavior of the senior citizens at the micro‐level) was that the system “broke down” and that the law of granting free health care was abolished. This is an empirical relationship: one of the causes for abolishing the law was the increased use of the medical system by senior citizens. Apparently, this situation affected the incentives of politicians to change a law. Similarly, political participation of citizens and solution of the problem (p. 87) is an empirical relationship. Modeling these empirical macro effects requires to look at the decision process of the change agents, in this case of the governments. But here again the procedure is to model individual payoff functions and argue that for most members of the government a certain behavioral alternative had the highest payoff. This is again an analytical micro‐to‐macro transition, from the behavior of the government to the collective outcome which is equal to the number of government members who are in favor of a certain decision (including a voting rule). One weakness of rational choice approaches in general is that the empirical and analytical relationships between micro and macro transitions is rarely distinguished and, thus, modeling these relationships becomes imprecise. In this regard, Sato is not more precise than most of the rational choice literature. Nonetheless, this is an important and readable book and hopefully will not only be read by rational choice scholars.