I am listening with interest to the debate on cognitions, constraints
and so forth. These are major questions which sociology over the
years has approached in different ways. Some of what colleagues are
saying reminds me of the 'community power debate' of the 1960s. In
one study, it was not the most predictable people (middle class)
for example who opposed the closing of a local
Grammar school and replacement with
comprehensive, until you realise that most middle class parents
planned to go private, move to better areas etc, or already had.
It seemed that the mistake here was to see everyone as
occupying the same social space when in fact different
social groups occupied different ones.Likewise, who would have
predicted the outcome of the removals of the constraints on men
and women when the divorce laws were liberalised?
Or the disappearance of domestic servants in the full
employment period post WW 2 followed by their re-appearance in the
1980s? Could the ideas being discussed on this list at present be
used to address these sorts of questions?
Mel B
> In between these extremes you will likely not be so lucky. People have
> been wrong by assuming optimistically that one is at one of these
> 'simple' extremes: traffic modellers have in the past wrongly assumed
> that behaviour is sufficiently constrained to avoid the complexities of
> driver cognition and economists continue to assume that much human
> 'irrational' behaviour can be reified out as random noise.
>
> Corrollary:
>
> If you are at the constrained end of the spectrum, adding constraints
> may well make the situation more predictable, if you are at the other
> end adding constraints may well make it more unpredictable.
>
> Regards.
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Bruce Edmonds,
> Centre for Policy Modelling,
> Manchester Metropolitan University, Aytoun Bldg.,
> Aytoun St., Manchester, M1 3GH. UK.
> Tel: +44 161 247 6479 Fax: +44 161 247 6802
> http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/~bruce
>
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