Jack Knight
Biography
Jack Knight is a professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. He has a B.A. and a J.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He recieved his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His works include Institutions and Social Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Explaining Social Institutions (with Itai Sened) (The University of Michigan Press, 1995), and The Choices Justices Make (with Lee Epstein) (CQ Press, 1997), in addition to articles in several journals and edited volumes.C
Jack Knight: The Argument Against Functionalism
In his book, Institutions and Social Conflict, Jack Knight recognizes three basic kinds of evolutionary theories of institutional change. First, there are classical statements of cultural evolution which explain social institutions as some form of natural selection. Second, there are theories of social convention, which explain institutional emergence and change as the product of unintended consequences of decisions by individual actors. Third, there are theories which employ methods from both of the previous theories, usually market-based accounts describing emergence as a process of exchange and competition (94-122). Knight, however, proposes an alternative theory which focuses primarily on the strategic conflict over distributive issues and the mechanisms by which these conflicts are resolved. He rejects the theory of norm driven action, which is the basis of Hayek and many others in the spontaneous order tradition, for a theory of rational choice based action. One of the primary arguments behind this shift in theoretical focus is the rejection of the functionalist logic upon which most other theories of institutional emergence and change depend (14-15). Failure to provide a mechanism for why collective benefits override distributional conflict requires that a functionalist arguement be used. That is to say that in these theories, institutional change is explained by the social system's changing functional needs. In addition, the rationality of Pareto-superior movements, upon which many theories of social institution emergence are based, are brought into question. This is because Pareto-superior moves actually restrict the future options of relative changes of benefits of other players, even if there are no outright negative utility consequences for that player (34-37). Knight focuses upon the effect of external changes which influence the interests of social agents and the ensuing conflict between relevant individual actors. Although, when market competition conditions hold, the market-competition theory can provide an adequate explanation for social institution emergence, Knight argues that exchange and market competition is simply a special case of the more general bargaining theory which he presents. The bargaining theory of spontaneous emergence can explain social institutions in many addition contexts, including redistributive change which rational-choice based theories cannot explain.D
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