Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

stimulus-response theory (1896). Instead of constituting an arc, in which the stimulus leads to a response (a dualistic conception), Dewey argued that they are merely moments in an overall division of labor in a reciprocal, mutually constitutive process (a dialectical conception). Central to those dialectics was communication, which according to Dewey was the foundation and core mechanism of social order. He developed an instrumentalist theory of language (1925)—language as a tool—which was generalized into a broader instrumentalism. One of his central interests was moral and social repair through the application of intelligence and scientific methods. He merged theory and practice in the view that ideas are instruments for reconstructing and reconstituting problematic situations. Those ideas may be moral judgements or scientific findings, but both take the general form of hypotheses, which are proposals for action in response to difficulties. Dewey thus built upon Peirce’s and James’s pragmatic rule by arguing that validity and truth statements, whether theological or scientific, are established by examining the consequences of action derived from hypotheses.

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) sought understanding of emergent human properties, such as the ability to think in abstractions, selfconsciousness, and moral and purposive conduct. His central argument was that these properties are grounded in the development of language and social interaction as humans adjust to the conditions of their environments and group life (Mead 1934). His position is said to be one of social behaviorism, in which the social act is the unit of analysis and out of which minds and selves develop. The act has covert and overt phases. It begins in the form of an attitude (an incipient act), is constructed through role-taking processes (imaginatively placing oneself in the position of others), and is manifested in overt conduct. All social behavior involves a conflation of subjective and objective processes through which persons adjustively contend with the facts of their environments and simultaneously create social situations. Mead’s explicit theory of time and sociality places these adjustments squarely in the dialectics of continuity and discontinuity (Maines et al. 1983).

In these five brief summaries can be seen how the early pragmatists wove together strands of

scientific method, evolutionary theory, language, and behaviorism into a radically new perspective. Pragmatism provided a clear alternative to perspectives based on Cartesian dualisms and reconstituted science, morality, aesthetics, political theory, and social development in terms of dialectical transactions. Philosophical idealism and realism were brought into a common framework in the proposition that human experience and facts of nature and society (the ‘‘world that is there,’’ as Mead called them) are only phases of ongoing social processes that mediate persons and their environments in terms of transacted meanings. The variation within pragmatism hinges largely on individual affinities for idealism and realism: James and Cooley tended toward idealism, Peirce toward realism, and Dewey and Mead toward a transactional midpoint between the two. Moreover, there is variation in pragmatism’s influence in the social sciences and humanities. Dewey has been enormously influential in education and communication, Mead and Cooley in sociology and social psychology, Peirce in semiotics, and James in psychology. That variation, however, only represents modal tendencies, since pragmatism as a whole has had a significant impact across disciplines.

INFLUENCE IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

Since 1980 there has been a major resurgence of interest in pragmatism (Bernstein 1986). Its compatibilities with quantum mechanics and relativity theory have been articulated, as has its relevance for the development of a more social semiotics and discourse analysis (Perinbanayagam 1986). The relation of pragmatism to hermeneutics, from the tradition of German Idealism, has been reexamined (Dallmayr 1987), as has its relation to critical theory in the work of Jürgen Habermas (McCarthy 1984), literary criticism (Rorty 1982), phenomenology (Ricoeur 1985), cultural studies (Carey 1989), and modernization theory (Rochberg-Halton 1986). According to some, such as Richard Bernstein and more recently John Diggins (1994), this resurgence indicates that the early pragmatists were ahead of their time. Some scholars in the 1990s have continued to revise pragmatist thought on its own terms. Wiley (1995) has proposed a sophisticated modification of Mead’s theory of the self through Peirce’s triadic,

semiotic perspective. Joas (1993), while not writing on pragmatism, per se, has shown how pragmatist precepts have been intrinsic both to classical and contemporary theory. He also (Joas 1996) has retheorized creativity, long at the heart of pragmatism’s emphasis on novelty and indeterminism, for dominant sociological models based on structural differentiation, rational adaptation, and self-enhancement.

Other scholars have sought to reinvigorate pragmatism’s relevance for contemporary political and cultural agendas. Noting that the seeds of a feminist pragmatism existed in the work and practices of the classical thinkers (Mead, Dewey, James), Seigfried (1996) politicizes pragmatism in the common struggles of women, ethnic minorities, and the sexually marginalized. While retaining the traditional center of the perspective, she seeks to move it toward a reconsideration of contextual ethics and reciprocal moral responsibility and to promote the search for pragmatic truths that would emancipate people from distorted beliefs and values that become sedimented into accepted fact. These scholars also include Cornell West (1989), who articulated his version of ‘‘prophetic pragmatism’’ in The American Evasion of Philosophy and followed it with his influential Race Matters (1994), which was more politically engaged and contributed to a more vibrant democracy that better empowers local participation in institutional concerns. Still others have sought more radical revisions of pragmatism. Denzin (1992, 1996), drawing in part from West, provides a revision of pragmatism in postmodernist, cultural studies terms that seeks to transform it into a mechanism of cultural critique. Such works find audiences in humanistic circles, but have met with mixed reactions among social scientists. Farberman (1991) and Lyman (1997) reject the postmodernist project partly on the grounds of its nihilistic implications, Van Den Berg (1996) because of its limited vision of Enlightenment philosophy, and Maines (1996) because its core concepts are already contained in pragmatist thought. Others, such as Seidman (1996) have attempted more even-handed critiques and seek the common ground of postmodernism and pragmatism. Regardless of recent interpretations of pragmatism, the collapse of hegemonic theories and the corresponding import of post-positivistic debate in social scientific theorizing has brought

the basic tenets of pragmatism back into the search for new paradigms in social theory.

These recent influences and developments notwithstanding, there has been a long tradition of direct influence of pragmatism on social science research and theory. Sociology’s first research classic was Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1918–1920) study of Polish immigrant adaptation to American urban life. They were interested in questions of personal adjustment, family relations, neighborhood formation, delinquency, and cultural assimilation, and they used the principles of pragmatism, especially as expressed by G. H. Mead, to answer those questions. Their monumental five-volume work presented their attitude-value scheme as a general theory of the adjustive relations between individuals and society. ‘‘Attitudes’’ referred to the individual’s tendencies to act and represented human subjectivity; ‘‘values’’ referred to the constraining facts of a society’s social organization and represented the objective social environment. Both are present in any instance of human social conduct, they argued, but the relationships between the two are established in processes of interpretation that they called ‘‘definitions of the situation.’’ Thomas and Znaniecki thus placed human agency at the center of their explanations, and they conceptualized society as the organization of dialectical transactions.

That research contained pragmatist ideas pertaining to the social psychological and social organizational aspects of human behavior. These aspects were developed during the 1920s and 1930s at the University of Chicago by Ellsworth Faris and Robert Park. Faris (1928) examined attitudes, especially in terms of the nature of their influence on behavior. He argued that human subjectivity is a natural datum for sociological research and proposed that wishes and desires, not attitudes, have a direct bearing on overt conduct. Park (1926) was more interested in largescale historical issues such as urban organization and racial stratification. He directly applied Dewey’s focus on society as communication to his research on urban communities. These communities, he argued, have objective spatial patterns, but those patterns are not separable from human consciousness. Urban ecology thus has a moral dimension composed of meanings that collectivities attribute to urban areas. The pragmatist roots of Park’s sociology recently has been reemphasized

in his theory of human ecology (Maines et al. 1996), his influence on applied sociology (Reitzes and Reitzes 1992; see also Maines 1997), and as a framework for describing and theorizing urban public space (Lofland 1998).

The pragmatist themes of individual/society inseparability and human behavior as transactions were pursued by other sociologists. In 1937, Herbert Blumer coined the phrase symbolic interaction to refer simultaneously to how humans communicate and to a sociological perspective. He applied that perspective to a wide range of research areas such as social psychology, collective behavior, race relations, and social problems (Maines 1989). Blumer’s posthumous volume on industrialization and social change (1990) elaborates the Thomas and Znaniecki formulations by presenting a conceptualization of causal influences that hinge on human agency and interpretation. Stone’s research on clothing and fashion (1962) similarly focuses on human behavior as transactions. In particular, his analysis of identity establishment identifies dialectical processes of communication through which individuals are located and placed in the social organization of society. His treatment of interpersonal identities is sympathetic to Cooley’s emphasis on the importance of primary groups, while his treatment of structural relations corresponds with Thomas and Znaniecki’s concept of values and predates contemporary social psychological research on individuals and social structure.

Studies of social organization have been directly influenced by pragmatist principles, as previously mentioned, but that influence has been especially apparent since the early 1970s (see Hall 1987 and Fine 1993 for summaries). Anselm Strauss’s research on occupations and formal organizations has been prominent in this recent work and has led to the development of the ‘‘negotiated order’’ perspective (Strauss 1978). Negotiations, he argues, are processes through which collective actions occur and tasks are accomplished. These processes are influenced by actor characteristics, the immediate situation, and larger structural contexts. However, those larger contexts are also influenced reciprocally by actual negotiations and their situations. Strauss’s model of social organization thus is a recursive and dialectical one. Stryker (1980) presents a slightly different version but one that is no less pragmatist. He incorporates

traditional role theory to argue that social structural arrangements limit options and opportunities by channeling people into status and role positions. So located, people construct their identities in terms of social meanings that are hierarchically organized. Both Strauss’s and Stryker’s applications of pragmatism have stimulated considerable research and theoretical development.

Such development has continued with some vigor throughout the 1990s. Pestello and Saxton (2000) draw on explicit principles of pragmatism to reframe the study of deviance in terms of the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion. While closer to the classical statements, they share with the neopragmatists such as West, Seigfried, and Rorty the interest in reclaiming the vision of emancipatory democracy that has always been present in the perspective. Other scholars have used pragmatist principles to further develop areas of sociological theory. Fine (1992) addresses the relationship between agency and structure, and theorizes both the obdurate and interpretive dimensions of the relations among contexts of action. Musolf (1998) shows how agency and structure relations are expressed in an array of standard sociological areas (socialization, gender, deviance, power, society), while Hall (1997) offers an updated version of his earlier conceptual framework (Hall 1987) that allows analysts to better specify dimensions of agen- cy-structure relations. Five dimensions are identified: strategic agency, rules and conventions, structuring situations, culture construction, and empowering delegates. He then shows how power is expressed along these dimensions and links together situations and contexts.

In a related approach to matters of agency and structure, Strauss (1993) builds on his earlier theory of negotiations to focus analysis on ordering processes. He begins by articulating over a dozen assumptions drawn from pragmatism that guide his analysis. He then presents a ‘‘processual order’’ theory that focuses on how larger scale processes and structures condition organizations and situations within which people interpret and construct their conduct and how local decisions have consequences for larger scale processes and structures. This theory has been used in research by Fischer and Dirsmith (1995) to examine organizational strategies and technology use in large accounting firms. Ulmer (1997) also has used the theory to

explain how state sentencing guidelines are filtered through state and local political processes, and how local court communities set ‘‘going rates’’ for actual criminal sentencing. Ulmer’s research is especially relevant because it simultaneously presents data on statewide sentencing outcomes and the contextual practices that produce those outcomes.

Yet another related line of development has focused on what W. I. Thomas ([1927] 1966) called ‘‘situational analysis,’’ which examines the interplay of actors’ interpretations and the obdurate qualities of situations. Katovich and Couch (1992) draw on Mead’s theory of time to show how pasts are used by people to become socially situated. Situations, they argue, are not merely settings in which human conduct occurs, but rather are forms of conduct themselves and exist as transactions of pasts and futures. Gusfield (1996) presents his long line of research on alcohol problems, and addresses how those problems are constructed. He discusses various claims-makers within the alcoholism movement, and then dissects actual alcohol problems in terms of their situations—situa- tions of drinking, of driving, of accountability— and the ideologies and logics-in-use that connect them. Hall and McGinty (1997) analyze educational policy processes from the ‘‘transformation of intentions’’ perspective. In a statewide study of the Missouri career ladder program, they show how various contexts (state legislature, advisory committees, bureaucratic offices, school districts, local schools) influence the original intended policy. Actual policy effects, accordingly, are strongly influenced by situational contingencies that render policy processes themselves less-than-rational. Similarily, Deutscher and colleagues (1993) analyze the contradictory findings from decades of attitude-behavior research, and provide a situational approach for explaining the inconsistencies between attitudes (what people say about themselves) and behavior (what people do). To understand consistency and inconsistencies between attitudes and behavior, they argue, we must understand the situations that produce those kinds of relationships.

One of the distinctive characteristics of social science research and theory that has been grounded in pragmatism is the reluctance to give credence to dualisms such as micro–macro or individual–so- ciety. While issues of scale have always been acknowledged and used, as the work of Park, Blumer,

Stone, Stryker, Strauss, Hall, and Fine has demonstrated, the focus has been on the examination of social processes that produce, maintain, and change social orders. These social processes have generally been conceptualized as communicative in nature, and the central thrust has been on how largeand small-scale phenomena are simultaneously or similarly transacted by individuals and groups. The focus on those processes has maintained the action orientation of pragmatism, and the central precepts of the perspective are finding increasing currency and relevance in contemporary work in the social sciences and humanities.

(SEE ALSO: Social Philosophy; Social Psychology)

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DAVID R. MAINES

connect the before to the after, and carry the before to the after, and lead from the starting point to the end-point. Without this scientific attention to the passage from the former point to the latter, prediction could simply be a matter of taking the present and reading its evolution by means of an external ‘‘operator,’’ such as a magic formula, casting stones, or the interpretation of animal innards.

This scientific attention to the process leading to the end-point—the prediction—is so crucial because by identifing elements of the process we can modify their developments to bring about the prediction we postulated. In other words, the variable now to be discovered and defined is not so much the prediction (with the extrapolative method) as the scientific process to be predicted so as to achieve a situation we desire (with the normative method).

In the light of the above, the term ‘‘prediction’’ as a name for this discipline is clearly less appropriate than others, such as ‘‘futurology,’’ ‘‘future thinking,’’ or ‘‘futures studies.’’ A distinction may be drawn between two of these in that ‘‘futurology’’ is more of a disciplinary name and ‘‘futures studies’’ is more of an agenda of scientific activity aimed at achieving and discriminating between possible, probable, and desired futures.

PREDICTION AND FUTURES STUDIES

PREDICTION AND SOCIETY

Meaning. Prediction (previsione) is ‘‘seeing beforehand’’ how the future will be; that is, the situation that will come about in the short, medium, and long term. This, however, is a ‘‘seeing beforehand’’ that is not content with simply knowing what the final situation will be but it is also concerned with knowing with how it will be reached. It is concerned not only with the end-point but also with the process that the present situation will undergo to transform itself into (or remain as) the end-point. This two-part nature of prediction (endpoint and development/process) enables us to take prediction into a scientific dimension, because the process by which the end-point is reached is comprehensible by means of the elaboration of a standardized method of identifying variables and their positions in a model of relationships that

In fact, if prediction is all of these things, it is of fundamental importance for taking action; that is, for deciding a priori how to achieve a given objective or to discover what a particular action will lead to.

Prediction is basically a scientific process in both of the senses just described, but it is also strongly related to other cognitive dimensions, such as ideology, ideas of utopia, action, and change. The theories underpinning prediction therefore combine or conflict with the theories and cognitive dimensions of reality. The links between these concepts should therefore be made clear.

Prediction, Utopia, and the Future of Traditional Society. A link of some kind between prediction, ideas of utopia, planning, and change certainly exists. We shall try to highlight it, starting from the problematic identified for prediction. Utopia is a ‘‘nonplace’’ in which is located a perfect society (perfect for he who first conceives it) dominated by a ‘‘cold synchrony,’’ that is, by mechanical

relations that serve only to maintain the utopian system without creating the emotional ‘‘warmth’’ or interests, including conflicting interests, whose relational outcome is unpredictable and therefore transforms the time-one system into something different from the time-zero system. Utopia is therefore the end-point of prediction, static and without relations, whose outcome cannot be pre- dicted—an absolute end-point beyond which is nothingness. And between the present and the utopian state is ‘‘non-sense,’’ that is, a black box whose contents do not interest us—the contents being the process that enables us to pass from the past to utopia.

What relation is there between prediction and utopia? We can interpret utopia as a residue of traditional society in which everything is tied to the past, but experienced in the pre-modern European society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In traditional society, real prediction, and therefore the future situation, is deduced by the past: Action is prescriptive, change is an aberration, organizations are similar because they all have the same structural contents and perform the same functions. Everything comes from the past: Rules are written in the past and actions are already perfected in the past. In these conditions, the process generating the future is a dejà-vu—not a perfect one, but a human condition and a destiny. The end-point that is different from such a prediction is not of this earthly condition but of the other life, in heaven or in hell. Utopia represents a sort of rebellion against the placing of heaven beyond earthly life—it is the secular dream of human omnipotence because it dares to place social perfection ‘‘not here’’ but nonetheless on earth. This utopia, an expression of the rebellion—no matter how fantastic—of traditional man, comes to represent a piece of ‘‘heaven’’ brought to earth, in which relations between people and social structures are so ‘‘sweet and delicate’’ as to strengthen the sweetness we have inside us rather than producing new situations and without automatically creating new equilibriums and new states. Because of all this, we can understand why constuctors of utopia do not need to know the process enabling us to pass from the present to the future (because it is a copy of the past) and why it is dominated by a static equilibrium that does not change once it has been achieved.

Thus prediction, utopia, and change in a society in which change is an aberration mean at the

most bringing the perfection of the nonearthly world into the earthly world, but leaving it detached from reality, which also remains immutable. In other words, prediction is a game left to forces that are untameable and therefore ineluctable and at bottom mechanical, perpetuating positive and negative flows ad infinitum.

Prediction and the Objective as a Reference for the Plan: Ideology and the Future of Modern Society. Prediction becomes practically useful— able not only to reveal what will be but how this future may be controlled—when we lose sight of the perfections of the state we have called utopia and it takes on the role of an objective to be striven for, when an active value is ascribed to social ideals and single individuals’ capacity for action. Here, society activates ideology as a resource and at the same time recognizes the ability of individual action, and above all the synthesis of individual actions, to create new situations.

Modern society thus shifts the focus from the perfection of utopia, which needs no modification since it is by definition perfect, and which is (an unreachable) vaguely defined objective, to the laboratory of process, which is concerned with relations and objectives to be achieved. If such an objective happens to be clearly defined, it is so accepted as provisional and therefore ‘‘adjustable,’’ because certainty is only to be found in highly generic values such as justice, equality, and self-fulfillment in a fair, egalitarian, individual-enhancing society. This process of achieving the desired or probable prediction is guided by two resources activated by society. The first is ideology, the cognitive representation of the world used to guide practical action toward the objective that is the subject of prediction. The second resource is trust in the individual whose initiative may contribute to achieving the prediction, with the proviso that the action of this individual must be combined with that of other individuals to thus produce positive results for the predicted state of interpersonal and social relations.

In this view of modern society, it seems that the focus—aside from the objective defined in the probable or desired prediction that in its most complete form takes on the configuration of a plan—shifts for the most part to the process from which the prediction (and the predicted plan) emerges and thus to how this process is rationally

manifested, how it may be scientifically explained, and what may be done to bend it to the achievement of the prediction.

All this comes about in modern society because change is conceived as normal, a factor built into the trajectory toward the future, tendentially and plausibly different from the present and above all from the past. All that remains of the past is the genetic origin of the present and a certain limited influence on it. If we have thus conceptually severed the deterministic link (at least in ideological terms) between past and future, modern society clearly has to focus very sharply on the processes and interdependent relations of the present in order to predict and dominate the future.

Determinism and Creativity in Prediction.

To understand how prediction is to be orientated and manifested, rationality and the scientific method are essential because rationality and the scientific method provide the most effective and efficient ways of bringing about the realization of what we want to happen or what ‘‘must’’ happen. Hence the importance of method in obtaining a prediction and controlling it.

Methods have both deterministic components and creative components that are selected and embedded into techniques proper; these will be considered below. For the time being, it is sufficient simply to mention some features of these components. Deterministic components ground the formation of the end-point (prediction) in relations among the social, economic, environmental, and value structures defined in a model. Creative components include those that highlight the identification and pursuit of new and ‘‘invented’’ ways of controlling or accelerating the achievement of a prediction. Around such components, objective or subjective methodological techniques are developed that highlight the workings of a model and its simulation or formation of decisions.

METHODS OF PREDICTION

The Scientific Problem of Prediction. Not only is the scientific nature of social sciences considered suspect by people outside the social sciences, but certain social scientists themselves consider the social disciplines nonscientific because the most they can do is provide a way of ‘‘reading’’ a social reality composed of individuals, groups, mutual

relations, and formal organizations. For such people, the social sciences are not sciences but opinions. The reason is that—apart from some concepts providing interpretative keys for human, social and organizational action, mutual relations, and the products of those relations—interpreta- tive theories stand the test of falsifiability only for a short time, often only until an event outside the phenomenon under investigation undermines the equilibrium and internal stability achieved by the phenomenon and explained by the theory. In the short term, the interpretative weakness of the theory even throws doubt on the ability of social science to explain the phenomenon. And this weakness of explanation obviously affects the strength of the prediction and consequently what has to be done to change it, that is, what is to be done to carry the present into the future.

Yet particular attention has been focused on four of the activities or purposes of which science is composed: (1) description as a pre-scientific stage and (2) explanation, (3) prediction, and (4) control as scientific activities proper. In point of fact, causal explanation is the central activity of the scientific process, since prediction is deduced from explanation and control is a ‘‘political’’ manipulation (and as such outside the phenomenon explained) of the variables of the explanatory model, undertaken deductively to achieve a modification of the prediction.

It may therefore be said that induction is at the root of description and explanation and deduction is at the root of prediction and control. But it is for precisely this reason that the first two activities are ‘‘more scientific,’’ in that they are caught up in the bond between theory and theory-testing empirical research, whereas prediction and control are more rooted in utilization and change, in the final analysis in technical application. It is probably in this logic that we should see the contradiction between prediction as a science, whereby methods and techniques are elaborated as a deductive extension of methods for description and explanation or the perfection of methods, and prediction as techniques to help elites who have to make decisions to modify predictions and the explanatory picture deriving from them.

In other words, making predictions becomes scientific activity on the basis of data that are

absent but that are plausible or possible or probable or desired, and whose relations may give rise to situations and scenarios that are equally possible, probable, and desired, but not certain.

The scientific nature of prediction is therefore based on rationality and the logic implicit in the links between events that have already come about and implicit in the possible reactions of, or to, a behavior that may come about. It is thus a matter of reasoning by analogy: Such-and-such has happened before in certain situations, so it may happen now in similar situations.

The scientific nature of prediction is also based on the fact that from the level of spatial analogy (if we have verified that an effect comes about here, we may infer that it will come about there in culturally analogous conditions) we may pass to the level of temporal analogy (if we have verified in the causal explanation that something comes about today, we may infer that it will come about tomorrow).

In more general terms, in prediction there is a ‘‘low-profile science,’’ which becomes the rational study of what could happen in the future and above all how this might be more adequately dealt with so as best to guide or govern it.

Given these epistemological premises for prediction, the techniques that manifest its methodological paths are the result of the combination of certain features of the methods: qualitative and quantitative, those based on objective data or the opinions of elites (of power or knowledge), and extrapolative or normative. The predictive specificity of these three features increases from the first to the third. Quantitative and qualitative refer to the level of research and knowledge concerning a given phenomenon; the higher the level, the greater the chance of having indicators that are tried and tested and therefore more practically defined. Objective data and elite opinions are more closely tied to the usefulness ascribed to prediction. The objective datum reconstructs the model in a system, identifies the causal process and objective to which it leads, and starts from the assumption that it is ‘‘technically’’ possible to act on the structure of the process to modify its consequences. Leaders’ opinions are privileged in that the basic assumption is that it will be their ideas and expectations, ‘‘true’’ or ‘‘false’’ as they may be, that condition, or even produce, the change in the

objective/end-point. In the first of these approaches, there is extreme confidence in the scientific character of the epistemological canons of science; in the second, there is substantial lack of confidence that science can produce reality con- trol—it becomes merely a formal exercise, though rationally useful. The extrapolative and normative features introduce action aimed at controlling the objective/end-point: Extrapolation is the projection of present processes and mechanisms into the future to postulate how it may possibly and probably be configured; the normative feature is fixing the desired future to identify the processes and mechanisms to achieve it. This is a dual approach to the future that is complementary rather than contradictory, in that its second (normative) part begins where the first (extrapolative) has served its purpose.

Table 1 shows the various techniques of prediction in relation to the three dimensions defined by the three features: qualitative–quantitative, ob- jective–leaders’ opinions, and normative–exploratory.

This plotting enables us to make some statements and develop some assessments of methods, especially of their function in establishing the various dimensions of prediction in terms of future studies.

Objective and Quantitative Techniques. Objective and quantitative techniques are common to all research. They are standardized and consolidated in practice. Scenarios, time series, causal models, simulations, and so on provide potent instruments for translating quantitative results into explained variance and high probability, although their considerable rigidity leaves them unable to cope with interference from new and sudden exogenous variables. These highly statistical methods are more effective in short-term prediction and for circumscribed rather than global events. They are also used in combined form to achieve both exploratory and normative prediction. Here the methodology may be used to explain the causal process by means of which a given trend is manifested, after which a ‘‘mission’’ is decided upon—a defined objective, such as a plan—and modifications are introduced into the contextual variables and their relational flows in order to achieve the objective. An example of these combined methodologies may be found in the research carried out

on the Italian situation by Alberto Gasparini under the auspices of the Istituto di Sociologia Internazionale di Gorizia (ISIG) (Gasparini et al. 1983, 1988).

The first research project set out to identify how to meet the housing needs of a metropolitan area in accordance with a preestablished norm, which in this case was the habitation standard expressed in terms of the acceptable ratio between living space and family sizes. Housing needs were identified by applying several habitation standards,

after which exploratory techniques were used, simulating natural demographic and social trends, simulating new housing markets and vacant housing markets, introducing factors such as filtering and vacancy chains. The result was the determination of how much of future housing needs (for example, ten years later) would remain with no intervention, that is, by leaving the area’s housing situation to develop under its own impetus. Subsequently interventions were carried out on single variables: incentives for building new housing or for putting vacant housing on the market or for