Jury Duty–Two. A Case of a Negotiated Verdict

A few decades back a detective charged with accepting a bribe went on trial. The State’s Attorney had a very tight case built around a tape recording of the actual felony which took place in a popular local restaurant-bar.

This was the first case of a new judge who as a successful defense lawyer had made frequent appearances on local television talk-shows. He seemed a reasonable and rational man. Not vindictive. Not a hanging judge.  The trial was held during spring break for the local universities and colleges so a disproportionate number of academics were on the jury including, to everyone’s shock and delight, two iconic world famous men—one a hugely successful film director, the other a top-flight literary critic.and creative writer Otherwise the jury contained eleven men and one woman, nine Euros and three Afros. The defendant was Afro.

The defendant, who didn’t take the stand in his own defense, was asked by the judge to stand and answer a simple question to give the jury a measure of his voice for comparison to the voice on the tape. He was a sympathetic figure in appearance and demeanor. The judge assured the jury that the determination of the nature and degree of any punishment was his responsibility. The jury was only to consider the question of guilt. Period.

In presentation of the facts the jury saw that the technician who wired the setup for the recording had been turned by the police and the prosecuting attorneys. There was a hint of entrapment of the charged detective but neither element was developed or explained.

On the facts there was no doubt, reasonable or otherwise. The detective had not carried out his duty  for a monetary consideration. He was guilty. There were four counts—one each for specific statements he made as recorded on the tape—four counts but actually a single act.

The jury retired to its assigned room for discussion. A long table, five chairs to each side, and two chairs at head and foot. A high ceiling, airy room with tall windows on two sides. The clear sky and trees and bushes visible; the bustle of the city distanced. The initial vote was nine to three for guilty on all charges. Two of the negatives were advanced to assure that the panel would have a round of opinion and analysis to get a general sense of the rationals offered for the vote. And after this review a second ballot saw the the  vote on the guilty side rise to eleven. There was one hold-out.

The hold-out: a young Afro man, who worked a pressing machine at a tailor shop, was adamant in his opinion and over several hours the combined logic of the academics could not budge him from his view of the case. His refutations were no stronger than those of the defense attorney and after another period of give and take it became obvious to the majority that his intransigence could not be swayed by reason and logic. His motive for holding out was somewhere else.

The jury process takes two general forms–(1) A unity in opinion. All members quickly, or after at most a short period of discussion, agree on a verdict (no matter whether up or down).  (2) A disunity in opinion. Members split in their opinions. They disagree and can find no easy way to resolve their differences.  The numbers on each side (or even the number of sides) while important to the dynamic of the process are not the critical point—just the disagreement itself.is the measure.

This inability to reach a decision frustrates the presumption that a rational decision can be made. The hung jury actually is as valid an outcome as any other, but the logic of the order pushes for a pure unanimity. And in fact when a hung jury seems to be developing the judge applies pressure—keeping jury in session, answering questions of law and providing transcripts and items of evidence, encouraging members to be reasonable and to listen to each other. The jury is pressed to reach a unified conclusion. Their feet are held to the fire.

The jury becomes more emotional, suffers an increase in tension. The contention of the sides in the trial is now replicated in the jury room. As the hours pass with no progress, with all the logic and issues recycled endlessly, the group recognizes that it is at an impasse. Words no longer work. There is no more to say. The jury is hung, can’t reach a decision. If the judge doesn’t relent, if he insists that they continue, the heat inside the jury room continues upward. Their lives in abeyance, the task futile, the power of the judge to limit their freedom transparent and working.

If you go back a step and consider again the situation of the lawyers and the judge who are all trained and talented and experienced far beyond any jury panel you would wonder why they themselves can not reach a unified decision. Actually they are designated to not reach a decision. They, in a sense, can not allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the facts. So they ask the jury to complete their jobs for them

The judge sequestered the jury—that is he limited the movement of its members radically. His guards took them to a local restaurant for a late dinner and then to a midtown hotel where they occupied a closed off wing  with guards present at all times in the hall. Members needed permission to telephone their families and a guard had to be present. An unexpected outcome: the trial, a limbo of no decision, and now the jurors in jail.

The next day the group was assembled again in their special room, around their  special table and again put to the repetitive grind—members were losing hope, all their arguments without effect and the hold-out standing finally not on reason but on willfulness. Sort of a they-shall-not-pass mind set. Tempers heated as the day wore on, emotions of anger and frustration toward a high pitch, The possibility of a second night locked in the hotel looming—their regular lives on hold and receding into the tunnel where no daylight peeps from the far end.

A high point. One man otherwise sensible and quiet spoken shouting that he could not stand any more of the impossibility of the task stood and suddenly  raced toward the nearest window obviously aiming to jump—it involved at most a ten foot drop. But the others grabbed him and calmed him down. Another juror had a  beatific experience earlier at breakfast at the hotel when he announced that he was Jesus reincarnated—at that moment his appearance changed—long, reddish straight hair, pale skin, soulful look, head slightly back eyes raised toward the heavens. The group wasn’t sure whether he was frivolous or serious. Maybe he didn’t know either. It seemed another expression of the tension the group was experiencing.

The foreman and the intransigent juror #2, sitting side by side through the trial and at the table had become friendly and finding themselves  a private moment during a break engaged in a frank  and informal talk. Juror #2 admitted that he actually agreed with the conclusion of the rest that the detective was guilty but he did not want his vote to lead to what he felt might be an unjustified punishment. He was reluctant to vote guilty because of the possible consequences for the defendant. The faith that the judge could be relied on to be fair and just was lacking.

This was also a concern for the foreman  but he and the others had accepted the judge’s claim that it was his problem alone.  The question of whether to trust the judge’s discretion had been buried.   So the two men found a common ground here. And they reached a compromise—guilty on one count and not on the other three. This would send a message for  leniency and hopefully  limit the judge’s own option. It would also free the jury of its burden and get them out of another night  away from home.

The deal: guilty on the first count and a hung jury on the other charges. The foreman promised to vote with #2 on these extra charges and to assure the judge that there was no hope of reaching a unified decision beyond the one charge.

The strategy worked. The judge accepted the verdict, thanked the jury and sent them home. Case closed.

The foreman talked to a few other members about the deal and they expressed ambivalence to downright rejection. The idea of negotiating a fact was not welcome. Yet with the plea bargain the lawyers and the judge play with two realities–the fact of the crime and the fact of the confession. In the case at hand it was either bargain or have a guilty man walk free (even if only until a possible retrial).  Admittedly no jury is ever encouraged to bargain. In fact, a real fact negotiated becomes something else, an I-don’t-know-what.

Note on a Second Review of Blogs Past. Science Nixed.

Please visit our second in the series of recollections and comments on past blogs. Click on “Two. The Question of a Scientific Sociology” above to access.

It is an important topic because there is some residual confusion in the field.  One must see a hard social science as an unfortunate error. Then the jump to the real question of what next becomes possible.

Note on a Forward Looking Review

Please visit the page titled “Review, Reprise, and Reconsider.”  I aim to reopen  topics here we have not touched recently. Today I begin with comments on our initial post titled “What, Then, Is Sociology?” You will get some idea of our purpose from the introductory material there. We call attention and carry on developing

Somali Piracy

Approach the concrete through the news media instead of through direct experience. Start at a remove from the real.  Either way there is distortion.  The grunt on the ground who only knows what he can see, hear and sense directly versus the abstract overall visualization of the senior cadre. Or compare the viewpoint of the sailor on a freighter outrunning a speedboat of men firing rifles and grenades with that of the  statistician summarizing reports of piratical incidents.

All of my  attempts at concrete analysis are based on a very crude method. I am not there at the scene of the action. I work with patterns built on the data of others.  I do not know what is false, exaggerated. diminished. Or what is missing. So what I offer with this rough carpentry is a way of doing this kind of work. The better our materials, the better our results.  In each case I want to think through to my own understanding. Even members of an audience far distant from the actual are not sentenced to the passive, uncritical acceptance of the cadre given. It is possible to find one’s own way.

Crime is a piggy-back activity.  Observe what the other is doing, find the vulnerable spot and moment and then strike. Ships whose tracks funnel through narrow passages are subject to ambush. Ports  that  support illegal acts with service and safe harbor are nearby. A minimal level of equipment to start–a rowboat and a gun or club.  A willing criminal. And there you have it–piracy in the ocean environment, the floating hold-up-nick. A very old dodge.  It has several kinds of pay-off:  directly  steal cash and goods;  kidnap and hold  crew, ship and cargo for ransom, threaten and extort tribute to allow peaceful passage.  There can be purely terror attacks with the aim to destroy property and kill actors and bystanders but so far on the Somali front the motives and acts have been commercial, pure and simple.

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Piracy has a romantic side.  The freebooter, the ultimate entrepreneur  out for himself. The letter of marque, acting privately but in the name of your government’s policy, attacking enemy shipping. Indentured convicts and slaves rebel in transit and raise the Jolly Roger and hit back, with profit, at their oppressors.

On the other side, the official fighting back. Early in the 19th century, the still young U.S. Navy sending a small expedition against the Barbary Coast pirates in the now Algiers-Tripoli area of the North African coast where captured sailors were held at hard labor, awaiting ransom.

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Somalia, supposedly ungoverned but actually only without a dominant center.  The various armed gangs, the warlords, the heads of established kin groups have their various sectors under control. Accepting an overlord state is simply not in their interest  The only central authority to arise lately represents the local fanatical religious crazies. It is antithetical to most of the rest of the world and when it made its move for power it was suppressed by the Ethiopian Army. Don’t get me wrong. I am not urging on the fanatics,  only pointing out that the alternate provisional regime, our government seems to support, neither frightens nor has any  house with any of the local players.

Lawless? Yet the media tell us that heads of piratical groups build mansions for themselves–an organized activity for sure requiring international trade and building crafts. There is an organization in place there and it is doing exactly what it wants.  The senior cadre in Somalia only work for themselves.

The piracy game has progressed.  We are told that gangs are improving their equipment, increasing the size of their organizations.  More people are entering the business.  Talk about social mobility! People emulating the the CEOs of advanced industrial societies and the chiefs of illegal drug groups in Mexico and Columbia and Afghanistan.  The money rolling in.

It is not easy to confront.  A ship has no defilade. The high explosives bunch through the steel plates.  Each meeting of pirates and intended victims is a dance.  Maneuver, threaten, posture, but when the drop occurs, as in get the drop on, there is a giving up.  Prisoners (hostages) are taken.  No one wants the all-out shoot out.

There are a few  exceptions but mainly there is an avoidance of extreme violence.  The civilian crews of the commercial ships are unarmed.  Once the pirates clamber aboard and point their guns, captain and crew give up. The vessel now under the command of the criminals sails to the local port, anchors.  The crew and ship are held while negotiations for ransom proceed between the  pirate intermediaries and the ship owners.

The international flotilla of naval ships sent to intervene appear to be under rules of engagement that strictly limit what they can do. Once the pirates have captured a ship the navies might sail alongside but they will not try to take the vessel  back.  Suspected pirates who are picked up and who claim to be simple fishermen or on peaceful passage are let go. Few are held for trial.  To save the cargoes, the ships, and the crews there is a general willingness to pay the ransom (some might call it tribute) rather than risk the mayhem and death that might be the result of an aggressive military (police) action. Any attack on the sanctuary ports on the coast would endanger civilian populations in residence.

 This hesitancy in finding the maximal response to a threat is particularly visible in the post-cold war era we are now in.  To find the reaction to a provocation takes a lot of testing and waiting for the possible invention of the easy way that gives maximal results. But there is no assurance that the answer will come in time. Or even that it exists. The  decades long delayed discovery of the use of a charge of conspiracy to jail the leaders of syndicated crime. The difficulty limiting rogue nations breaching the anti-proliferation treaty against the spread of the number of nations manufacturing and holding nuclear weapons.  The failure of civilized nations to block the genocide in Rwanda.  The unbelievable failure of the African Union to resolve the long-running anti-democratic  Mugabe crisis in Zimbabwe.  On and on.

There is a Gordian Knot and the sword that cuts through it awaits to be discovered.  So the hidden zinger in the analysis of a crisis that does not resolve is the analysis of the block to the invention and discovery of the maximally correct way.

Proviso.  The point-of-view again.  For the pro-active movers behind the crisis, in the current example the criminals,  the way things are now is the maximal way.  Stop searching Pal, we are already there.

Clear the deck.

Taking Advantage

The job is one’s connect to the economy.  It is called making a living.  The first step is subsistence–to get enough food, shelter and associated necessities for self and dependents to survive.  That we do so many things not linked directly to the basic continuity of life is a measure of our civilization. There is a surplus over the basic needs, an exhibit of our success.

Control over the surplus takes two forms:  (1) Demand, usually expressed as money, that determines the shape and content of the goods and services into which our surplus work is converted.  And (2) the actual taking up and using these items.  While under democratic capitalism the distribution of the surplus is unequal the tendency over time, especially under liberal-progressive  regimes,  is a general participation in the surplus. The  standard of living is   above survival.  In fact among countries in the global system there is a similar disparity in the distribution of surplus measured by the balance of trade.  The USA consistently draws in more goods and services than it ships out.

I have been arguing that a system of advantage is at work.  It is partly an established motive–called a looking out for number one. But it is also determined by an advantage  of inherited place and by the rules set by the legal system–a complex of taxes and rights that assure an uneven playing field.  But the emphasis upon egoism, self-interest, individual social mobility is not total.  The motive of the solidarity of the group and society is also in play.  Alms and altruism in religious ideology, in the sharing of the nuclear family, the mentoring and loyalty of kin and friends are also at work.

Not all of us grasp for advantage alone. We find the intrinsic interest of our work, the pleasure in the charm and antics of our companions, the attractions of our pleasures of equal significance. The security of a living wage is the limit of our striving for economic advantage.  But there is a general awareness of the advantage of advantage and we will usually not turn away from a legitimate opportunity.

There are laws that limit advantage. Insider trading, conflict of interest, unfair competition, anti-trust laws and so on. Yet there is always a gray area of doubt.  Actions on the border of the permitted. Politicians have been elected who had, at the least, informal understandings with local political machines. One vice-president is reputed to have received bags of bribes and pay-offs in office.

The excesses of our cadre leaders are shocking yet we share the basic premise with them.

Jobs

Transition at the top. Two sets of senior cadres, one incoming, the other outgoing. Concern is not over unemployment. All of these people have alternate places. No matter the election outcome, they all keep working. Money will be rolling in.  They’ll be earning a living. Food, housing, clothes, travel, medical care, entertainment, all the necessities covered.

They are in a coveted spot, a base of comfort and security. It has three levels: economic income (eat good), social prestige or honor (feel good), political power (do good).  It doesn’t assure beyond itself. No matter socio-economic position, we all share in the  openness of the next minute; the tough moments of illness and death, the element of chance and fate. But to be on the up side is still a definite advantage. And these revolving elites have it.

^^^^^

But my interest here is in the job switches.  At time one  you are a senator, governor, investment banker, university president, a general in the army,  at the next time  you are a cabinet level officer, an executive counselor to the president, the president himself.  Their opposites are moving on to universities, think tanks, law firms.  A life of lucrative lectures, fabulous book deals.  Concurrently they become television talking heads, and consultants for a fee. .

^^^^^

A job is a particular kind of activity toward a defined end and purpose. It usually implies an employer, an initiator, who sets the goal and the organization and the conditions of the work. There is a contract, work exchanged for wage, salary, fee.

The job is a way to connect with society’s economic system. A product is made, a service given, and in return one gets  money and the ability to demand goods and services in return.

Money, once in circulation, follows its own logic.  As gift, inheritance, as dividend and interest, as advantage in exchanges, as savings, as debt and leverage, as insurance payments for death, injury, disability, unemployment. Dependence is rewarded  by a share in the income of another.  Job of work is not the only way to accumulate moola. But that is also another story.

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What one does, one’s preferred job, is not randomly determined, but neither is it fixed and beyond our wishes. . For all of us there is a complex of opportunity, talent, training, experience and our own will.  An element of lottery of which we are only dimly aware. It is like finding a mate.  For the individual wending his/her way the discovered links to a socio-economic place and to another person feel like  miracles. But from the side of the group this is a sorting out. It has  a logic and  a pattern.

There are two sides to any job–activity required by biological and ecological necessity (labor) and activity generated by psychological preference (work). Different kinds of pleasure and pain. Direct versus sublimated. Digging up the earth for planting or for a road or for the foundation of a house against working out in the gym.  Both exercise: one against the demands of the environment, the other in service to the self. Jobs usually contain aspects of both.

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Some kinds of jobs offer limited access to the mass of applicants.  More are attracted to the work than there are places available. Many who identify with a particular job  are unemployed or underemployed.  The wage for the work  might not cover one’s needs. Actors, for example, especially those starting out.  The line through to a singular career, the repetition of jobs of the same kind of work, may be socially hazardous, very problematic.  Many do not attain the ideal of steady work in the position they want. The actual career is something else.

The political life has a similar pattern but it is not articulated in the same way in language and myth.  The young actor knows the drill. The young politico’s position is more nebulous.  There are after all more theatrical stars than presidents of the United States.  But both  careers require compromise from the vast majority. Making do with less. All the elective and appointive offices as way-stops. All the odd pick up jobs. Many workers  frozen short on the way to the top.

So for the actor there is a second job: in restaurant, in office, blue collar or white collar, any kind of labor to get through to the time of real work. One lives in parallel worlds: the as if (the struggle to get to one’s real work) versus the nightmarish now (what one does to stay alive meanwhile.) (It is not always a bad dream, sometimes only like dead-heading or mildly boring.)

For the politico this second job is in law, finance, military, teaching. Outwardly it seems to be the primary career, but the politico is distinguished from the rest by a poorly hidden wild ambition.

But for most of us there is a unitary work reality.  The job we have now is within our preferred (or finally accepted) career line. We might get incremental promotions. We improve and hone our skills. and our worth to our employer and the strength of our trade union might get us an ascending wage over time. But the blow-out moment of sudden achievement of the longed for place of the actor and the politico is replaced by the hope to hit the number or to win the big prize of the state lottery. The desire to go up and up, if it exists,  becomes a fantasy.

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There is another way: the avocation, sometimes downgraded to hobby (an avocation that is treated as not serious.)  The one job world while secure has a monomaniacal quality. Most of us need to sublimate in more than one direction. So the idea of the second job that connects us to another part of ourselves. It is separate from the need to earn money.  Its only connect to money is in the cost of required material and space.  This supposedly gives us the freedom to project self to the external object. The doing that expresses the hidden self. Commercial compromise is rejected.  (Vacation is a form of  unrecognized avocation. Popularly thought of as not work everyone recognizes that it is only another job with an alternate set of rules.)

This separation of loved work from the question of money seems to me an error.  It is the dilemma of the fine artist whose primary task is the confrontation of self with the intractable object–which in a way exemplifies the general problem we all face. Can one work for self and for market at the same time?

For the moment let us compromise and say that avocation and job are both work.  One for self, the other for another. Let the money roll or not.

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Unemployment is the question of the day.  If the wage is one’s only connect with the economic system it becomes a very serious  biological and social issue.

The self-reliance of the productive adults of our society upon whom the continuity of our species depends is challenged in a very fundamental way. The retreat to hunting and fishing and gathering and herding and vegetable plot is almost impossible for those who follow the urban way.  Beside lacking the training and experience of the rural way there  is not enough space or time or resources for all of us to make an old style living. So everything turns on the  patch-up the specialists can concoct for the post-modern socio-economic world that we have constructed. A patch in and on the historical present.

 We have been arguing that the patch-up is part of the system. It continues apace with the ups and downs. We even have a class of specialist economists  dedicated to this task–hampered and infiltrated by the ideologues and the special interests and the lobbies–but with remarkable success so far in avoiding a second Great Depression. Broadening  the resolutions to questions of necessary and productive work makes sense. Introduces a new phase and possibly a new type of cadre–maybe people closer to the ordinary experience.

 The sociological consequence of the crisis unresolved is the recognition of the need for critique and dialogue which will include canvasing  the possibility of trading in the way of the patches for a new suit.

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Caught out.  Stay  self-reliant. Do not confuse a flaw in the economic order with a flaw in yourself. Yet avoid blaming others. If the system is broken we are all responsible. After all it is our economy.

Participating in a Socio-Economic Order

Encounter:  One group meets another and interaction begins. Or there is a natural manifestation against which the human group acts. There is an onset, a beginning, something happens.

Participation can be ordered according to involvement. We have do, see, hear, or ignore categories. Some play a part, act and are acted upon. Others are spectators. Others receive news of the event at a distance. Still others are unaware

We classify encounters into known types.  It is as though we have a catalog that we consult. When we identify the contour of the developing event, we call up similar previous experiences and begin to apply the remedies already developed.  What we do is orient toward the happening using our available culture.  Anything new will require us to invent a new response.

So the identity of the other is a critical issue.  Who or what is apposed and external to us and  offering  the challenge?  The mystery is the workings of the other.  When solved, the way discovered becomes part of the catalog, a newly minted segment of culture.

Being in culture does not mean totally controlled.  There are elements of mystery in our constructs, our institutions, our ways of doing and being.

The automobile breaks down.  But we made it, invented it, supposedly understand it. Yet it has capacities and limits that only emerge for us with actual experience.

Institutions and social organizations are also our  inventions and they have the same quality of not being entirely in hand.  Instead of being tools that are extensions of ourselves they become unknowns, like the other who presents  the challenge. Think of it as a second order mystery.  The first is the strange, the objective and external other. Then is the familiar becoming suddenly the unexpected. The placid riding horse bucks.

The socio-economic crisis of the autumn of 2008 is a second order mystery. Our machine is suddenly gone awry.  It takes the form, in media discussions, of the encounter, the happening.  It is our machine, now viewed as though it were the blob-from-outer-space.

But our economy is not merely a series of startling pictures of moments of high drama.  It is in process, a continuing system-like movement of production and consumption.  In its way of being it is a proved cycle of boom and bust,  expansion and contraction, bull and bear,  up and down.  It is not only a crisis but another phase of an unreeling.

The system though is not the same as it had been in its earlier stages. Let them make! Let them pass! And all that. The rallying cries of the revolutionary capitalists. The old ideology now festooned with plug-ins and cleaned with wipe outs. Laws, interventions, special interests, political favors, subtle influences. The name is the same, the look different. .

Most extraordinary has been the emergence of a senior servant cadre to ride herd on the economic cycle.  Made up of academics and practical banking types, usually centered in the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department in the U.S., it constantly acts to smooth out the cycle with perhaps the ideal of maximizing the up and minimizing the down.

These interventions to save the system are themselves new plug-ins that further change it.

This tension within the social order is endemic.  Each institution has its own built-in dynamic.  There are distortions of the ideal that supposedly governs.  The logic of the correct way piles up and exaggerates some outcomes–like extreme incomes for successful participation. The repressed or excluded tendencies return in secret and informal ways. Alternate ideologies emerge as critiques and as underground political movements.  And, as noted above, the attempt to maintain the system itself leads to changes.

The practical sociological problem of identifying the  order of participation in the struggle over the economic downturn remains a difficult question.  From the media we get certain distinguishable groupings.

(1)  The financial-banking industry and the industrial production industries–outstandingly the automobile corporations. The senior cadres of each sector request intervention of government.  They are supported by allies or  seconded representatives from the industry working in Congress and the governmental bureaucracy  The government’s power of supervision and intervention traditionally is self-limiting. They start changes but then pull back. It could tip over to a state managed economy and in some ways already has.

(2) Emphasis on support of laid-off workers and employees from governors and legislators. These are associated with public works–repair and extension of physical infrastructure like roads and bridges and would operate through state governments and construction companies. Workers also slated to get enhanced unemployment benefits, re-education for new jobs, health benefits.

(3) Emerging industries in the alternate energy, greening, and climate change fields will be encouraged by increased government support. The expanding worker base here is equivalent to a public works program.  A double since the new reigning government has pledged to move in this direction in any case.

As far as I can see there is no significant independent  political movement among workers, consumers, and the small investors who took losses when the stock market and the financial industry tanked.  No organized try to intervene in or change the way we go,.  Most of these groupings have been co-opted to the ordinary political parties in the last election.

The trade unions have little reach.  They have been in retreat–attacked and limited by the center-right politics of the last half of the 20th century abetted by the availability of cheap competent foreign workers  for runaway plants . The access to American markets of foreign goods is supported by free trade agreements that have an anti-trade union bias on both sides.

So the order of participation in this current unnamed turn-down has (1-A) senior cadre from legislature, bureaucracy, industry and finance as its pro-active players. These set up programs of intervention and support .(1-B) The players who are acted upon are laid-off workers and investors who suffered losses in the downturn. Consumers and retail merchants seem to be caught on the bounce with frozen credit and uncertainties in prices and income. (1-C) Certain selected financial executives in industry have been replaced and executives in general are under some pressure to take reductions in income. How serious this is and how it will work is not clear.

The distinction between see and hear in this situation is very narrow.  The crisis is discovered in statistics.  The attacking other is us.  We as system past confront ourselves as system now.  The doing is against the image of time past. The front is against a phantom.who has run off with the boodle. The costs of the previous up are paid by the losses of the present down.  .

And a  rising hand for any  like the three monkeys who  see  and hear  nothing of their  surround.and avoid any possibility of mobilization.  .

.Hip. Hip. Hooray.

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Participation In Happenings

If we order any  happening by the amount and kind of participation of those involved  we get a simple model for a very large number of concrete sequences. There is the event and the four ways we relate to it.

(1)  Players who are directly involved and confront the issue as presented and join in the action sequence.  They grapple with the challenge.

(2)  Observers who watch, look, stare, standby.  They are the spectators, active in their own realm but  not at stage center. They are near enough to see but do not engage.

(3)  Knowers who receive information about the event but are not present.  They are at a distance and have a  medium as link to the event–formal news sources, propaganda, rumor. They have reaction options, mainly statements of  empathy, solidarity, financial and practical support.

(4) Ignorants who remain not aware of the event. They tend to emphasize local concerns, turn their backs on the larger encompassing order.  For some it is a active rejection, for others a passivity and a withdrawal.

The four categories can be summarized as the do, the see, the hear, and the ignore. Our orientations toward the happening are based on which of our senses are primarily engaged.

All who are not players can be rhought of as a standing reserve that may possibly be mobilized.  This possibility of calling them out is a latent political  issue.  Critiques and comments and opinions that accompany a happening are part of the information transmitted about it.   We not only learn what happened but get hints on how to evaluate and understand–and how if necessary how to act in turn.

These categories are only fixed in the moment.  People may move from one to the other as the sequence continues and as options, orders,  opportunities and moods change. While once you hear the news you can not return to unknowing unless you fall into amnesia, you may still turn away, turn off the television or radio and from then on give the incident no attention. Ignore it going forward. All switches are possible.

Participation itself has an order.  The soldier on the line who can’t square what he does  with the stated objectives and the orders of his commander.  He may not be sure he is serving in the same campaign. The line–those in the happening who  see and act against what is directly before them–have a starkly different experience  than the senior cadre with their staff support.  So we can start with the line, command, staff distinctions.  The ideas of what is happening  diverge.

With the participation schema we stay close to common sense yet we touch on the mystery of knowledge based on place. Anyone within an on-going action (or looking back later at what happened) will sense the differences.  We (each of us) must ask, does what I am doing, seeing, hearing  fit into a larger pattern? Or is there a larger social order within which my  place  and actions mesh?   Or more generally, is there a mosaic of seemingly separate acts that form a larger discernible image? Within the happening we ask what is happening.

These questions do not have fixed answers.  We have to  gather information and analyze each case, keep an open mind.  The possibility of degrees of difference of experience of the happening  and the understanding of it turns up along three types of social division.

(1)  The abstract description (theory) and the parallel concrete connect of acts (facts) may be disjunctive to some degree. Think of the theory as the idea of a completed and intact jig-saw puzzle.  The fact would be the actual mound of separated puzzle pieces.  The possible mismatches:  The real pieces may not fit together. The completed jig-saw puzzle may not emerge as expected. It could be a different image.  Or the original picture may appear but with extra bits left over.  The histories of wars have this quality. They sum up and seemingly offer the whole story yet there are always masses of left over actions.  The soldiers’ memoirs and the official tale only partially overlap.

(2)  Differences of experience due to place.  The command, staff and line distinction is the example here.  One’s physical and social place sets the environment and conditions the acts.  It is another form of division of labor.  In formal organizations there are strong attempts to control and coordinate to maintain the desired  outcome of the whole.  The assembly line in the factory limits options, insures precision and sequence and gets working automobiles or whatever as the end product.  The orchestra has the skill of the musicians, the central role of the conductor and the coordinated arrangement of the music scores to assure the ensemble effect.

In the crisis, in the large event extending over time and place, in the situation of uncertainty, in the on-going interaction with a willful other these controls work even less  precisely.

This place qualification should also  include simple physical differences.  People with the same social place  but with different physical locations might find different environments  and opponents and diverge in understanding as well.

(3)  The categories of participation will also have differences in understanding based on their vastly different encounters with the happening.  Because I am not at a bombing in Iraq does not mean that I do not have an image of what it is. That it will not be the same as that of the person at the scene is obvious.

In all these cases there is a Rashomon-like effect, named for the famous Japanese film (1950. Director: Aikira Kirosawa) where different images of the same event were vividly dramatized.

Note that we have been dismantling a favorite sociological presumption of a certain kind of order. In the regular old-time-past sociology we argue that we  impose on ourselves the order we find in  social life. First with our shared culture and law, then through our social organizations that supply us with supervising cadres who plan, mobilize, direct, coordinate our actions. But even in these placid, fixed, repetitive happenings we have elements of mismatch. If a crisis comes unexpectedly like an old fashioned swarm of locusts  and we have a situation for which we do not have the measured pattern, the possibility of an exact fit of the elements is even less  assured.

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In the Mumbai incident over the three days of November 26. 27. 28 of 2008 we have a small group  of armed men in their twenties invading an entertainment and hostelry section of the city and attacking people at their peaceful pursuits with lethal force. The speculation in the news media suggests that these attackers had been gathered, trained, supplied, coordinated and directed through a planning cycle.  For them this happening had a precision approaching or exceeding ordinary life. They methodically carried out a  macabre job of work.

They multiplied their effect by shooting up public targets in their transit through the neighborhood–train station waiting room, restaurants, cinema, hospital and so on, and then on to two elite hotels with many foreign patrons and to a small religious cultural center. Two or three terrorists holding  each place awaiting the counterattack which appears to have come from specially trained units of the army who  went in and carried out their deadly chore.

Our model works here rather well.  Essentially three groups of players.  (1) The small group of terrorist attackers, (2) Their peacefully engaged targets who were killed, wounded, forced to retreat, hide, (3)  The special forces, called commandos in the news reports, of the Indian government who  carried out the counter-attack.

There were obviously others in support or dealing with special aspects of the situation–local police, firemen, medical personnel in ambulances and hospital emergency rooms. Also odds and ends of people lending a hand, especially members of hotel staffs.  Stories of escapes of intended victims.  There was mention of hostages but in fact no hostage scenario seems to have developed.

Then a circle of observers: professional journalists and photographers who would routinely follow up such an event, officials not on the firing line but representing higher governmental authority, police and military staff people whose jobs are to keep track of what is going on–inside reporters.  And then a circle of gawkers, out to see the sights and vicariously share in the adventure.  Police tend to block this latter gang out.

The happening had a startling onset, catching the city off-guard. Except for the terrorists it was an unexpected, horrifying  (as the terrorist seem to have intended) situation. In the fighting the key players were in ordered social units–the terrorists and the military.  But even the civilians managed (those who survived the onslaught) to organize socially –hiding in rooms, receiving cell calls of advice from hotel staff, using sheet ropes to rappel down the side of the building, escaping through the back exit.  Not the usual order of life but ordering responses.

The knowers are all of us who stay current with the news and follow such stories. We have no direct contact but we use our pasts to interpret the flood of statements and descriptions offered and this gives us our murky images of what went down.  Sometimes a master journalist like Edward R. Murrow  will give us a hint of the feelings in the acts.

Those who turn away and do not know are an interesting bunch.  Who can list all the reasons why?

For the sociologist these categories, these groupings, may have some unique set of associated identities and qualities that link to prior and parallel social orders. Religious convictions and territorial ambitions, the police and military workers, the foreign travelers and business-persons, local people at work or seeking entertainment or simply passing through–give a start but closer study is needed here

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A socio-economic crisis that may last for months or years is a happening over time–think of it as an era wide incident–is something else.  In the complex socio-economic world the disjunction between the abstract pattern constructed to explain and the concrete actions and the possible emerging action mosaic is even wider.

We’ll save this for later posts.

Rumor and Experience

Each life is unique. What is sensed and done by each of us can not be replicated in time or space. The individual makes and lives in his own universe. We can think of this as another pattern against which our constructs of culture and social order are measured.

We also share (language, law, DNA sequences, history, the way we are) but not perfectly, sometimes  finely, sometimes grossly. The distinctions among us can push toward zero as with matching twins or toward the astonishingly different as with giants and pygmies. Football and chess are both contentious games (similar) but in their acts quite different.

The tension of unity and diversity.  The group life made up of individual lives.  The biographical life (unique) and times (shared).

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The individual  versus the group and the concrete versus the abstract crisscross. Yet there is a tendency that connects here. The concrete usually comes up from the individual and the word usually comes down from the group

These distinctions tend to be glossed over in everyday discourse. They are understood, presumed, do not have to be repeated endlessly.  The group experience and the individual experience are not the same. A tsunami hits in the Indian Ocean and people around the world know about it within hours if not minutes. A bombing in the Middle-East resonates to the far corners of South America. At ground zero is the  special reality, the direct confrontation.  For the rest of us is the word. The concrete against the abstract.

No news is no news. Not everything gets through. A crime, a marriage, a birth or a death, a child starts school, a festival, someone reads a book. The news outward is constricted.  In the very private sphere it closes down. The act is held secret.  We have neither the time nor the capacity nor the desire to know all the acts going down now.  We can appreciate that they exist. Many, even most, are familiar, we suspect, because like our own. And that is enough. So long, friend, it’s been good not to know you.

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But within our own country, our own city or town, even our own household this same process is at work.  Something happens (or is happening) in which we neither have a part nor witness. Our only access to it is in a tale told us by another (or via some substitute method like a news report or a detective’s investigation.) It might be important to us now or in upcoming time–we can not shrug it off as a superfluous event in another local place. Yet it is a certain distance away. We have not experienced it directly. It is not us. Not direct experience. It is hardly distinguishable from a rumor. Its truth value is a matter of faith. It is hearsay and has a different factual value on its face than see-say or do-say.

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There is an order to experience that goes from direct participation and witnessing to sharing at a remove via our various ways of communicating.

(1)  Those directly involved from the onset (if such can be discerned) as actors and witnesses.  As the event stretches out over time more people may be drawn in and this initial group can have its own order.

(2) Responders. Those drawn in, by happenstance or duty, as the incident continues or to deal with consequences and continuations. Among these two categories are reporters who pass the word about the event to others.

(3) Auditors.  Those at a distance who receive news or rumors about the event. With modern technology this can be a profoundly large grouping  of people from around the world. It  also can be an expanding category over time.  Reading about ancient history or any past event or era makes one a second order witness from a distance.

(4) Non-involved.  Those who for some reason never receive word about the event. For a football game between two local high schools these no-knows can be a vary large grouping. What is very intense for those inside leaves the rest of us indifferent. For a very large nation-wide or international happening the measure of those who never become aware can suggest isolation or separation–a socio-cultural reason.

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These categories are not exclusive.  One can fit into more than one.  For example, a war veteran can first participate directly in a battle and later swap stories with friends and even read histories summarizing what happened. Still these categories are useful analytically for they build on the distinction of rumor and experience and on the balance between  the individual and the group.  So on 9/11/01  we can recognize  these several orders of involvement.  This same kind of ordering can be applied to hurricanes, sporting events, advertising campaigns, wars, flights into space, inventions, and so on.

Something happens. An initial grouping of people are involved.  Others are drawn it and the sequence continues. Still others are not directly involved but become aware.  Some non-participants never get to know.

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When we come to a combination financial and socio-economic event like the Great Depression of the 1930s and the current dramatic financial saga (Fall 2008)  that is compared to it, an unexpected complexity becomes apparent.  The event is presented as a numerical and statistical action. Its locale is within a globe-encircling institutional space. The face of the victim shifts from company to company but in the anxious and  indistinct yet threatening voice of the primary media there is a definite warning that eventually it will clarify and be revealed as our (shared) image.

All in, that is.  The direct experience continues expanding until it approximates the universal.

Jury Duty–One

The American jury is a small group. A limited number of people, in the range of six to twelve in number, are brought together and asked to make a joint unanimous decision. A crime has been committed and a defendant charged. The primary question: Is there enough evidence available to convict him or to find him not guilty?

Each unique jury is within a larger trial event  that occurs inside of a social order and process.  What will happen, the sequence of acts  and the decisions made, is problematic, but the event is blocked in by the larger governing pattern.  How the event is initiated, planned, convened, and supervised is fixed within a narrow range.  As in baseball where each game played is an example of the possibilities inherent in the system of abstract rules, there is the abstract institution of the trial by jury governing each actual case.

At any trial there are participants and observers who are vitally concerned about the outcome. The defendant whose life,  liberty, wealth, and reputation are in balance.  The participating lawyers who are  professionally  responsible to present the best case for their own side. The victim (if alive) with friends and kin who want justice and, sometimes, retribution.

The sociologist, unless he is an actual party in a case, primarily wants to know how the game works.  Truth, in the sense of approximating an exact understanding and reconstruction of what happened during the commission of a crime, is of critical importance within the trial process and the sociologist is  interested is this as well but his main attention is on the actions and processes used by the people doing the work.

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There are several  levels of description and understanding about juries and their actions…

(1) The institutional order, the pattern to which all jury trials adhere.  This is given in law and in custom. There is a general knowledge of this abstract order derived from direct experience and from literary sources–movies, television, books.  And of course there are the experts with wide knowledge of the system–its history, variations, changes, and challenges.

(2)  The special acts of the particular juries. The concrete order.  Each trial has its own jury made up of unique people who in carrying out their given task construct their own track.

(3)  The professional lawyers and judges who work with juries and have detailed observations of how they work from an external but close up perspective. This gives us  anecdotal observations of types of juries. The lawyers usually have their own sociology and psychology about how the process works.  So how they  participate in the selection of the jury, the rhetorical form of their arguments, their skill in questioning witnesses is part of a sociology in action.

(4)  The general study of small decision making groups, mainly by academics who base their work on experiments with specially constituted groups of volunteers.  They offer concepts of the group processes that occur in all such groups no matter the subject content.

(5) For jury trials past (either recent or distant) some have a  literature (books, movies and etc.)  produced in the main by journalists, historians, jury members, lawyers, judges.  Some of these contain details of jury actions and process.

But all levels have  a literature of reports and notes.  It may be possible to  work through these sources of data and  find a classification of types of patterns.  For example there is the notion of the run-away jury.  It challenges the control of judge and lawyers to limit and channel its attention by trying to move to a more pro-active role like making statements to the press, making critical observations, offering new interpretations of the legal data and such. There is a technical term, nullification, for cases where the jury challenges the very law it is assigned to enforce.

One informal way of collecting and disseminating cases  is to encourage any participant with sociological training (academic or ordinary) in a criminal trial jury to write up and publish a report of the experience (what happened) as a case study.  These cases in themselves would add to the range of the base for classification–a form of low level theoretical work.

There is a web site, JuryExperiences.org, operating where jurors describe in detail their past jury work. The reporters of the few cases I have read are not sociology pros but their voices stay very close to their own version of the  reality in which they participated They are witnesses of the concrete and sociologists manque.

There are three types of pattern for jury process and outcome that immediately jump out on going over even a few reports of participants:

(1) The run-away jury already discussed above.

(2)  The pattern of agreement.  The clarity of the weight of the facts presented by the lawyers and the instruction on the law by the judge lead all jury members to agree on their decision quickly with little discussion.  Whether the decision is pro or contra the form and process work with little stress of confrontation.

(3)  The pattern of disagreement.   After discussion and voting the jurors realize  that the group has split into sides. The form of the split varies by numbers and intensity of the disagreement but the presentations of the lawyers and the judge have lead to two or more views on what the facts are and to what conclusions they lead. How the jury and judge try to resolve these differences and find their way to a unified response or to a hung jury unable to find its way through to the expected decision becomes the significant question.

We will add more posts on this topic.

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