This page is maintained by Raymond D. Gastil to provide general social analytical information and to offer his consulting services.
A general social analysis is a carefully thought-through examination of an issue affecting society. The issue's scope may range from an individual to all humanity. The thought employed may benefit from the natural sciences, although it is not science.
A general social analysis may focus on fact-finding, but is primarily an attempt to develop new understanding. Often it involves the consideration of alternative ways of looking at or approaching a problem. In my work, I have been influenced by two major types of professional experiences: my formal education and research, primarily in social sciences and area studies, and experience in applying this background to the analysis of social and public policy issues.
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"Social Humanities" grew out of personal experience in trying to apply many years of work and study in the social sciences to policy problems at a research institute. It also grew out of a crisis in many social sciences. By the 1970s, many committed social scientists had come to feel that their training did not help them address the problems the country faced. They demanded that social science serve values outside science. For too many, this meant that these values should play a part in determining the "facts" that their respective sciences would "prove". This answer was defended by its advocates on the ground that since all science was largely determined by the values of scientists, they were only making explicit what had always been true. This relativistic doctrine led some to later adopt deconstructionist theories. This approach seemed to me to be a foolish abandonment of the attempts, however flawed, of generations of social scientists to create a science of human behavior.
My alternative answer to the demand that social scientists be more "committed" or "relevant" was to work within two paradigms, the "value-free" scientific framework and the "value-laden" humanistic framework, without allowing the two to be dissolved into one. Problems could then be addressed through an iterative process in which new ideas were successively given a reality test in terms of whatever was known scientifically and a humanistic test in terms of the values of those involved - then another reality test, another humanistic test, etc. Each round in the series should produce a refinement of what was to be proposed. Social Humanities was an effort to argue the case for this approach, provide a framework for social science and humanities (in this sense), and develop some examples.
Social Humanities: Toward an Integrative Discipline of Science and Valueswas published by Jossey-Bass in San Francisco in 1977. The chapters were:
Social Humanities: Defining a Discipline
The Individual: A Model of Economic, Psychological, and Humanistic Aspects
The Society: A Model of Organization, Variation, and External Relations
Humanistic Values: A Framework for Social Analysis
Putting Social Humanities to Work: Examples and Methodology
Marriage Commitment in Modern Society: The Case for the Traditional Ideal
American Indians in American Society: The Case for the Commonwealth Solution
Problems of War: The Case for a Restrictive Doctrine for Initiation and Conduct
Meaning and Responsibility: A Doctrine for Individual Life
Social Humanities: Institutionalizing a Discipline
Appendix: Struggling with the Crisis of Incoherence
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Modern democracy is the result of a long political and social evolution. It provides a reliable rule of law that guarantees both political rights and civil liberties to all adults. Americans, and more particularly their media, have developed a habit of judging political and human rights issues in the world against this standard as it exists in Western Europe, the British Commonwealth, and the United States, and even then as seen with rose-colored glasses. I worked into this field sideways. In 1972, World Without War, a conservative peace organization, asked me to do research on the relationship among economic development, peace, and freedom. As this work went forward, I developed a schema for measuring these classes of indices worldwide, but failed to find a close relation among them. (Much more recently international democracy advocates have argued strongly that democracy and peace are closely related.) Losing the backing of World Without War for continuing the work, I took the rating system I had worked out for freedom, now called a "Comparative Study of Freedom", to Freedom House in New York City. Eventually, I went to New York to join the staff of Freedom House and produced eleven volumes of an annual called the Comparative Survey of Freedom with the assistance of a variety of publishers. In addition to rating all the countries in the world, the annuals contained essays related to democracy, freedom, and self-determination. Special editions brought in experts on advancing democracy in particular areas, such as the USSR, Central Asia, or China. The last volume I was responsible for (1989) contained conference papers and discussion on the problem of low participation in American democracy. During the years I directed the Survey, I advanced a number of ideas relative to strengthening and expanding democracy, including that of an organization of democracies. I later advanced these ideas while participating with others in the Association to Unite the Democracies and the Committee for a Community of Democracies.
After leaving Freedom House, I did extensive consulting work for USAID in assisting its promotion of democracy in the less developed world. Concerned about a tendency to overemphasize the forms of democracy rather than the spirit and laws that must accompany it, I also wrote an article "What Kind of Democracy", in The Atlantic which has been frequently reprinted in the 1990s. For a more extensive discussion of democracy and its promotion from a historical perspective see an accompanying paper by the author. Examples (from Mongolia) of election monitoring may also be accessed: example one, example two. The reader may also be interested in a recent discussion of developing democracy from a Middle Eastern perspective by Abootalebi. Some general web sources on democracy and its promotion are the National Endowment for Democracy and the Journal of Democracy. Information on the government's democracy promotion program may be found at USAID's site. There is also a useful guide that directs the surfer to some public policy research institutions. Here are also good starting points for looking up political information on the web and entering the general area of political consulting. Some more specialized consideration of democracy issues and studies may be found at Sam Kjellman's site (economic democracy) and John Gastil's (small group, citizen participation, political discourse, and campaign advice).
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In the 1980s, outside the worlds of business and natural science, it became increasingly popular for intellectuals to abandon the idea of progress, to believe that humanity had for many years been losing ground rather than advancing. Many devotees of high culture and an increasingly assertive band of environmentalists and ecologists held this viewpoint. I felt this judgment was wrong-headed, but also felt that whether one agreed with it or not would depend on a close examination of the evidence, an examination that would produce alternative conclusions when combined with particular sets of values. To see how and in what way one could argue that "progress" had occurred or not occurred was the first task of my next book. The second task was to build a platform of ideas, adapted in some cases from Social Humanities, that would allow one to seriously consider whether a contemporary or prospective change were "progressive" or not. My hope was that such a serious exposition would change the careless way in which people on all sides of this controversy used the word "progress" as though it merely meant scientific and technical change and material accumulation.
Progress: Critical Thinking about Historical Changewas published in 1993 by Praeger Publishers in Westport, Connecticut. Its chapters were:
Introduction: Beginning the Search for New Ground
The Concept of Progress: Its Development and Refinement
The New Debate: Progress, Futurology, Nature, and Limits
Building the Foundation for Evaluation
Evaluating Evolution in Material Standards and Health
Evaluating Evolution in Political organization and Human Rights
Evaluating Evolution in Art and Literature
Evaluating Evolution in Moral, Aesthetic, and Intellectual Sensibilities and Understanding: After Yi-Fu Tuan
Conclusion: Building a Future beyond Relativism
I have found remarkably few projects on the web or otherwise that take seriously analyze progress. One effort is that at the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington The Progress Project. Currently, the project's emphasis seems to be on pointing out the environmental dangers stemming from unregulated growths.
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As examples of recent and current work, the following papers, reports, and discussions have been chosen. The selections included here will change periodically.
World Anarchy and World Order: Past Trends and Future Prospects
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"Culture" and "civilization" are terms with many and overlapping meanings. Unlike concepts in the natural sciences and mathematics, their precise differentiation and understanding are impossible. In analytical work, the problem can be alleviated by the use of subscripts to differentiate between principal senses of the words. Thus, both terms have a universal, value-laden sense (sometimes referred to as a "big C" sense) which may be labeled culture1 and civilization1. In this sense, the words refer to certain standards of behavior, style, or way of life, standards that the user can usually be assumed to prefer. We speak of a cultured or civilized person. Both terms also have a less value-laden sense that may be labeled culture2 and civilization2. In this sense, the words refer to ways of behaving, thinking, speaking, or living that are identified with particular groups of people in the past or present. These may or may not be preferred by the user. When we speak of the "anthropological" use of "culture", we mean culture2. Assuming that we intend to utilize both words in their subscript two senses, we still face a difficult problem of prying apart the meanings of culture and civilization.
The best way to proceed is to consider the distinction suggested by the different contexts in which these words are most commonly used and then strive to employ this distinction more sharply in our own work. Both refer to learned and material traditions generally associated with particular areas and the past, and often continuing to develop in our own time. However, cultures are generally smaller units and civilizations are larger: individual civilizations, such as the Roman, may have several quite different cultures existing under their umbrella. Cultures often have a rural flavor; civilizations generally have an urban. This reflects original or associated usages. Culture has associated meanings referring to developing plants and animals, as in agriculture and horticulture. Civilization, on the other hand, has associated meanings relating to a more urban life, as in "civil", "civics", or "citizen. Because of these tendencies in usage and association, most speak of "Navaho Culture" but of "Sumerian Civilization". Historically, civilizations have spread widely over large areas, often extending to the fringes of the area within which communication and trade was relatively easy. In the past, this has often meant the effective limitation of civilizations by large bodies of water, high mountain ranges, or broad, nearly impassable, deserts. Civilizations have been definable by many material and spiritual characteristics. However, a single language or religion has not been necessary within the area in space or time that has been occupied by a civilization. Indian civilization, for example, has encompassed many languages and many religions during its long period of development in the subcontinent. A culture, on the other hand, is often differentiated from others with which its bearers may be surrounded by little more than linguistic and religious differences. The Kurds of modern Iran, Turkey, and Iraq have long lived within Islamic civilization while preserving their own language (or group of languages). On the other hand, Middle Eastern Jews and Christians have preserved different religious traditions within Islamic civilization.
Where we have reached in the development of modern civilization and the relation of this development to the simultaneous development and preservation of cultures is an area in which I hope to spend extensive research time in the next few years. First, it is an area of long-term personal interest. Secondly, it is an area that may make considerable difference as the next century unfolds. The danger of misunderstanding this question has been raised by the widespread interest in Samuel Huntington's argument that the next century will see the clash of ideologies replaced by the clash of civilizations (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon & Shuster, 1996). As I define the terms, such a clash is essentially impossible, because modern civilization, like most civilizations before it, has already reached out to the limits of trade and communication - limits that now include the whole world. Although people will surely continue to clash over real and propagandized ethnic differences, they are now constrained to do so within the framework of one civilization. I hope to demonstrate this proposition by examining past and present civilizations and by considering what difference it makes to phrase the problem of coexistence in cultural rather than civilizational terms.(For a fuller discussion of many of the issues addressed here, click on the companion page One Civilization - Many Cultures.
The web is fairly rich in information on comparative civilizations and cultures. One place to begin is an index to sources on ancient world civilizations, actually an index to indexes. A wide variety of sources on cultural regions and world cultures has also been collected in one site. An authoritative paper by McNeill on the Changing Shape of World History approaches civilization much as I do. One exciting activity connected with the work of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations is that of Wallace Gray and his Plott project.
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In rough chronological order, accomplishments of this web site's author include:
National character study of Iran.
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Most consulting in recent years has been carried out in the democracy assistance area for USAID. This has involved the preparation of democracy assistance strategies for regions or single countries. In the latter case, the work was done in-country. Assistance also involved the development of indicator systems that could test the results of assistance and the preparation of proposals or preproposals. Consulting also included assistance to private organizations involved in the promotion of democracy, as well as the OECD. Extensive assistance to the Indian Institute for Public Administration supported by the United Nations had as its focus the improvement of the Institute's policy analysis capability. Minor consulting tasks have included developing ideas for a study of the future of the Seattle area, developing frameworks for foreign and environmental policy, and assistance to the Ohio Public Defenders Office in regard to the relation of a violent subculture to individuals convicted of murder. As can be seen. I have worked in a wide variety of areas. The attached résumé suggests the appropriateness of many issue areas other than the ones mentioned above. Past consultancies have been carried out in small groups or individually. This pattern is expected to continue into the future. If a task requires more than one person or abilities different from those the author possesses, other skilled researchers or analysts will be made available to assist. Aside from the general approach suggested by preceding sections, consulting tasks are approached in a common sense manner. However, it should be added that the influence of Herman Kahn has led me to believe that the social analyst should:
Social analytical consulting is necessarily concerned with future events. For this reason, future studies or futuristics is always incorporated in my work. For more information on this topic, click here. For more information on recent web site consulting, click here.
