CRA Inc

8 May 06 @ 10:01 am

Why?

One of the books making the rounds at CRA this month is Why? What happens when people give reasons … and why by Columbia’s Charles Tilly.

The book is about explanations and how we give them, and how reasons stem from and shape relationships. Malcolm Gladwell recently reviewed the book in the New Yorker; read it if you’d like the survey-class version of the book. In it, Gladwell reviews Tilly’s four general categories of reasons:

• Conventions: Conventionally accepted explanations
• Stories: A very specific account of cause and effect
• Codes: High-level conventions that can invoke procedures and rules
• Technical accounts: Stories informed by specialized knowledge and authority

What’s interesting is that we tend to use different reasons for, well, different reasons, and those reasons are relationally driven. Gladwell:

Reason-giving, Tilly says, reflects, establishes, repairs, and negotiates relationships. The husband who uses a story to explain his unhappiness to his wife—“Ever since I got my new job, I feel like I’ve just been so busy that I haven’t had time for us”—is attempting to salvage the relationship. But when he wants out of the marriage, he’ll say, “It’s not you—it’s me.” He switches to a convention. As his wife realizes, it’s not the content of what he has said that matters. It’s his shift from the kind of reason-giving that signals commitment to the kind that signals disengagement. Marriages thrive on stories. They die on conventions.

Consider the orgy of reason-giving that followed Vice-President Dick Cheney’s quail-hunting accident involving his friend Harry Whittington. Allies of the Vice-President insisted that the media were making way too much of it. “Accidents happen,” they said, relying on a convention. Cheney, in a subsequent interview, looked penitently into the camera and said, “The image of him falling is something I’ll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there’s Harry falling. And it was, I’d have to say, one of the worst days of my life.” Cheney told a story. Some of Cheney’s critics, meanwhile, focussed on whether he conformed to legal and ethical standards. Did he have a valid license? Was he too slow to notify the White House? They were interested in codes. Then came the response of hunting experts. They retold the narrative of Cheney’s accident, using their specialized knowledge of hunting procedure. The Cheney party had three guns, and on a quail shoot, some of them said, you should never have more than two. Why did Whittington retrieve the downed bird? A dog should have done that. Had Cheney’s shotgun been aimed more than thirty degrees from the ground, as it should have been? And what were they doing in the bush at five-thirty in the afternoon, when the light isn’t nearly good enough for safe hunting? The experts gave a technical account.

Here are four kinds of reasons, all relational in nature. If you like Cheney and are eager to relieve him of responsibility, you want the disengagement offered by a convention. For a beleaguered P.R. agent, the first line of defense in any burgeoning scandal is, inevitably, There is no story here. When, in Cheney’s case, this failed, the Vice-President had to convey his concern and regret while not admitting that he had done anything procedurally wrong. Only a story can accomplish that. Anything else—to shrug and say that accidents happen, for instance—would have been perceived as unpardonably callous. Cheney’s critics, for their part, wanted the finality and precision of a code: he acted improperly. And hunting experts wanted to display their authority and educate the public about how to hunt safely, so they retold the story of Cheney’s accident with the benefit of their specialized knowledge.

Academics tend to call reasons “account giving,” and there’s a wealth of literature on the topic. To plumb the depths see this Google Scholar search. One article I’ll be reading from that search: Account-Giving for a Corporate Transgression Influences Moral Judgment: When Those Who “Spin” Condone Harm-Doing.

posted in category(s): Who We're Reading, Spin