Sarason is clearly using the notion of setting in a somewhat more inclusive
way than the space/place notion. I take it he is talking about something
more like a small-scale social institution, a system of interdependent
activity types with some material anchoring in systems of artifacts,
bodies, spatial arrangements, etc. across some space and time scales that
we can, not entirely arbitrarily, cut off or bound -- while still
recognizing that the existence of the institution depends on its insertion
into the larger social ecology.
There is a basic problem today in ecosocial theories about how to define
local systems so that they stay local. Extreme flat-network models (like
some brands of ethnomethodology) regard all 'subsystem' notions as
artifacts of the analyst's practices (they are surely products of such
practices in one sense, but they may also be products of members' practices
in such a way that you can't get what you want out of a social theory
without them or something functionally similar in the model). Traditional
hierarchical systems models rather take for granted the quasi-autonomy of
subsystems (like institutions) on the organic model; their weakness is that
this model doesn't apply equally well to all kinds of related-practices,
and it may tend to overestimate autonomy and underestimate meta-stability
and dependence on larger systems.
I think that Sarason certainly had an early insight into the limitations of
the traditional systems models, and his 'what-if' epistemology accords well
with the Contingency principle of not only ethnomethodology, but
self-organizing systems theory: things are the way they are, and happened
they way they did, mainly because a lot things that could have gone wrong
didn't. Ethnomethodology explains institutions by saying people work hard
to keep them going (willy-nilly), and this is certainly true in part.
Neo-systems theory says institutions keep going because at some scale
larger than the institution there are emergent, meta-stable synergies among
processes in the networks of eco-social interactions (with all matter, not
just people) on which the survival of the institution becomes parasitic
(cf. M. Serres). In traditional ecological terms, there is a niche for the
institution. But this model is of course recursive, so there is still
contingency even in the niche-creating patterns.
This way of thinking certainly seems to have led Sarason to a more
permeable view, in space and in time, of the boundaries of institutions (or
what we might gloss as 'active-settings'): their survivability depends not
just on 'their' properties (the inadequate view of some designers and most
post-hoc analysts, cf. Latour's wonderful _Aramis_), but on their genesis
(i.e. what led to them, a trajectory view in which time-scales are
crossed), and on their ecological relations with their larger environments.
Two identical institutions, defined in a single time-slice (on their
natural time scale of activities), can have different survivabilities
depending on their histories of genesis (ie. survivability is a question
about over-time trajectories, not time-slice units of analysis). Likewise,
such institutions described by their internal operations, may be identical,
but survivability depends on how they couple to 'externalities'.
Survivability is not a question about institutions as such, but about a
larger social ecology.
Institutions as situated-trajectories are unique individuals. I would be
skeptical about how useful generalizations might be across such a class,
but what can be of general usefulness would be to understand the kinds of
considerations relevant to survivability of classes of institutions, of the
four sorts: considerations of history and development, considerations of
internal organization and functioning, considerations of linkage into local
and extended networks of 'external' practices and institutions, and the
conditions on the larger ecosocial system in which the institutions is
embedded which are necessary for the maintenance of viability of the
'niche' which it fills. Of course the genesis of an institution, and the
operations of an instititution can themselves contribute to the creation,
maintenance, or destruction of the niche-sustaining larger patterns. _How_
these things happen may be different in each case; _what kinds_ of things
are relevant may be generalizable to some useful extent. JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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