The Global Sociology Blog

It is on the heels of reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided that I decided to read Karen Cerulo’s Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning The Worst. In the book, Cerulo tackles what she calls positive asymmetry, that is, our inability to envision the worst and the consequences of constantly imagining and evaluating best case scenarios, best practices, etc.. Positive asymmetry is widespread and has socio0cultural (and partly biological) roots and is sustained by cultural practices. Of course, positive asymmetry also has social consequences: imagining only the best prevents preparing for the worst.

“Failing to conceptualize the worst is not simply the hallmarks of particular individuals who cannot or will not imagine calamity, catastrophe or ruin. The phenomenon proves much broader in scope. The inability to conceptualize the worst happens in corporate boardroom across the world, when organizational planners routinely prove unable to articulate a worst-case scenario. It happens among scientists and engineers who seem nearly blind to the most negative experimental outcomes. The inability to conceptualize the worst happens when governments fail to anticipate the most devastating foreign attacks or natural disasters, or when schoolteachers and officials fail to foresee the very worst reactions of troubled students. It happens when couples or newlyweds plan their futures, clearly envisioning the best of fates and typically disregarding signals of dangers and destruction. And it happens when risk-takers who visualize triumph while all but ignoring potential failure.” (5-6)

After an overview using brain biology, Alfred Schutz’s typifications, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family resemblances, and Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus (that generates thought communities) as the way our brains process information based on cultural categories (I confess, the most boring part of the book), Cerulo reviews the very wide array of social domains where positive asymmetry prevails while recognizing that positive asymmetry may be especially American.

How is positive asymmetry sustained? Through different type of cultural practices:

“For [sociologist Ann] Swidler, cultural practices are means by which individuals, groups and communities ‘reproduce, resist, or change social structures and rules.’ They do so not in a vigilant or fully cognizant way but by invoking ‘unconscious, embodied, or habitual actions.’ Thus cultural practices are not openly articulated plans. Rather, they are ‘the routines of institutions and actors.’

First, while unconscious or habitual, cultural practices are nevertheless highly directed action. Thus, in the context of this study, one can say that the practices used to distance the worst from our perceptual portholes are not haphazard or accidental. Rather, they are strategic and oriented toward practical outcomes – outcomes, I would argue, of shared relevance to the group or community in which they occur, outcomes often reflecting the core interests of that group or community. Second, practices involve both doing and thinking. While they are behaviors, they are behavior that are systematically organized by the habitus, the internalized system of durable, transposable dispositions that arises from the pattern of action that structure social domains. (…) Becausse cultural practices are routine, they often seem second nature. As a consequence, they can disappear into the fabric of everyday life.” (72-3)

What are the cultural practices that sustain positive asymmetry?

1. Eclipsing practices (render the worst functionally invisible, obliterated after brief recognition)
   • Banishment
   • Physical seclusion
   • Shunning
2. Clouding practices (render the worst visible but vaguely defined)
   • Impressionism (broad strokes description with unclear contours)
   • Shadowing (spotlight the successes and leaves the worst in perceptual darkness)
3. Recasting practices (redefine the worst as something positive)
   • Rhetorical recasting
   • Prescriptive recasting

When the best is present in thought communities and so culturally sustained, then, what happens when the “worst” label is slapped onto individuals, groups, organizations or event? It depends on social factors. One such factor is intended durability:

“When those labeled the worst have no opportunity to escape the designation, the consequences of the label can be far more serious than they are for those who have the ability to rectify or change their status.” (140)

We know, as we all studied W. I. Thomas and Howard Becker, that labels are powerful as they reflect the power of the labelers, and the stigmatized status of the labeled. And once these labels are taken as real, they are real in their consequences.

So, being a member of the lowest caste or a stigmatized and oppressed gender or minority is an inescapable fate unless structural conditions change. And the more permanent the label, the more severe the consequences, see, for instance, honorable murders.

Who gets labeled “worst” is, of course, a matter of social power exercised by dominant groups and implemented through social institutions. The more powerful the group issuing the label, the more severe the consequences. Genocides can be the outcome of such labeling.

After power and durability, social context also matters. In social settings where criticism and debate is welcome (Cerulo calls these kinds of contexts “caldrons“), labels have less impact:

“Caldrons present us with a context in which competition is always bubbling, alliances are fluid, social bonds are constantly forming and reforming in accord with groups’ and individuals’ current interests and goals. In such settings, criticism functions as the currency of competitive exchange, and the label of worst is showered on opponents without hesitancy or concern. But in an environment where such a serious label proves commonplace, prevalence can easily detract from the label’s ultimate impact.” (156-7)

The reverse setting is what Cerulo calls a fraternity:

“In fraternities, criticism is generally smothered through the exercise of power; it is routinely stifled by demands of community loyalty. And in those rare moments when criticism is expressed, it is done in accord with the strictest guidelines.  Thus, in fraternities, criticism typically flows from dominant to subordinate; it is expressed within a group but forbidden from traveling beyond the group’s borders. These rules  greatly influence the impact of the label ‘worst’ for when criticism is so vehemently discouraged, the label becomes a dangerous anomaly – one capable of infecting more than those who carry the title. Given its seriousness, the label must be met with swift, forceful consequences. Only rapid and severe response can limit the label’s effect on the broader community.” (159)

Think “the blue wall of silence” or the Catholic Church when faced with the mass abuse by its members.

Now, as much as positive asymmetry prevails, there are exceptions to the rule. According to Cerulo, two social domains seem to be able to escape and actually engage in worst case scenarios analysis, sometimes for the better: medical community (as illustrated by the excellent handling of the potential SARS catastrophe which did not happen thanks to negative asymmetry) and COPS (as in Computer Operators, Programmers and System Analysts as illustrated by the Y2K non-disaster). Why are these two communities less likely to engage in negative asymmetry and resist the sirens of positive asymmetry.

According to Cerulo, there are specific aspects of communities that facilitate engaging in negative asymmetry:

• service orientation,
• substantive rationality (result orientation),
• porous community boundaries (that is, information is more or less free to circulate in and out of the community),
• professional autonomy

These characteristics facilitate the emergence of what Cerulo call emancipating structures, that is, social structures where members are less constrained by conventional thinking and therefore positive asymmetry. They are therefore more free to explore negative scenarios. These emancipating structures were present in the case of SARS and Y2K. And they were absent in the case of  the Challenger disaster, 9/11 terrorist attacks or hurricane preparedness where positive asymmetry won the day. The book goes into fairly extensive details of all four cases and is pretty convincing in its analyses. Ultimately, negative asymmetry is a form of cognitive deviance that emerges only in conditions where member of communities can escape conventional thinking and constraints.

Bottom line here: structural arrangements matter (great diagrams in the book of structural webs supporting negative asymmetry and of M-form structures supporting positive asymmetry). A structural web (supporting negative asymmetry) usually has a center of operation (core) coordinating the network’s information and resources and making sure that these circulate throughout the network where they are needed. It both collects and diffuses information and resources through regional subsidiaries, national and local units. Information circulates both in bi-directional vertical and horizontal fashion. In the case of SARS, the World Health Organization was the core. In the case of Y2K, it was the International Y2K Cooperation Center (both UN-established, incidentally, or not so incidentally). In other words, the core functions to coordinate, not to control. Service orientation supersedes authoritative control.

The structural web has all the traits listed above whereas M-forms function in an opposite fashion: information flows to the top but does not get redistributed. There is no porous circulation of information. Units are not expected to function autonomously and cooperatively (think NASA or FBI before 9/11). The control center is secretive with the information it receives and issues strict rules to the other units of the structure. Power and resources flow downward not necessarily where they are needed. Actors function within the confines of their specific divisions according to ritualistic procedures.

And:

“While structural webs favor the fuel of formal knowledge. M-forms are more likely to be fueled by traditional knowledge. (…) I defined traditional knowledge as a system of well-articulated but inflexible beliefs that present themselves as fixed and essential parts of the arenas in which they appear. In relying on traditional knowledge, the participants in M-forms can become hopelessly tied to operational rituals and rules. Their decisions are steeped in a system’s historical experiencevrather than the unique characteristics of any single events.” (229)

Cerulo summarizes the structural differences with a set of propositions (230):

• Structures that emphasize service over competition are most likely to enable cognitive deviance.
• Structures containing porous versus impenetrable boundaries are most likely to enable cognitive deviance.
• Structures that favor autonomy over strict centralized control are most likely to enable cognitive deviance.
• Structures that favor formal knowledge over traditional knowledge or common sense are more likely to enable cognitive deviance.
• Service orientation, porous boundaries (and the multiplex communication channels they spur), knowledge type, and levels of autonomy are intricately connected and must “move together” if cognitive deviance is to ensue.

This reads like a set of recommendations to turn M-forms into structural webs (which is the topic of the last chapter of the book which is a call for cognitive symmetry, not the abandonment of positive asymmetry altogether. The idea is to treat both cognitive styles as separate but equals.

As mentioned, except for the early chapter, this was a great and entertaining read. It is a great illustration of the power of sociological analysis and how a focus on structures along with cultural practices unveil real-life phenomena without having to resort to the usual moralization or phony psychology.