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Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations (1990)

Chapter: Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions

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Suggested Citation:"Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions." National Research Council. 1990. Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1556.
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Suggested Citation:"Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions." National Research Council. 1990. Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1556.
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Suggested Citation:"Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions." National Research Council. 1990. Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1556.
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Suggested Citation:"Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions." National Research Council. 1990. Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1556.
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Suggested Citation:"Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions." National Research Council. 1990. Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1556.
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Suggested Citation:"Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions." National Research Council. 1990. Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1556.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions." National Research Council. 1990. Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1556.
×
Page 28
Suggested Citation:"Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions." National Research Council. 1990. Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1556.
×
Page 29
Suggested Citation:"Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions." National Research Council. 1990. Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1556.
×
Page 30
Suggested Citation:"Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions." National Research Council. 1990. Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1556.
×
Page 31
Suggested Citation:"Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions." National Research Council. 1990. Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1556.
×
Page 32
Suggested Citation:"Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions." National Research Council. 1990. Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1556.
×
Page 33
Suggested Citation:"Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions." National Research Council. 1990. Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1556.
×
Page 34

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

Motives and-Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions VLADIMIR P. AVERCHEV AND PAVEL B. PARSHIN The topic of our review is the American presentations at the two Soviet-American workshops, both dedicated to the broad interdisciplinary problem of international interdependence. From the outset, we would like to emphasize that the aim of this review is by no means to compare levels of work on the problem by the scholars of the two countries. Strictly speaking, mature research on this subject has not existed in the USSR because, until recently, the very concept of interdependence when applied to Soviet-American relations was considered illegitimate. The situation in the United States has been somewhat different, although, judging by publications, interest in the problem has declined since the second half of the 1970s. The decision of scientists from both countries to make the study of interdependence a basic component of the study of the problem of preventing nuclear war was based on a number of different reasons. On the political plane, there is evidence not only of the increased complexity in the structure of interdependency relations in the modern world, but also of the promotion of the concept of interdependence in political thought and rhetoric hence the timeliness of research on interdependence. On a strictly academic plane, the breadth and multifaceted nature of the problem of interdependence provide a welcome basis for productive interdisciplinary synthesis and the comparison and interaction of various research methods, as evidenced in the two workshops. The papers presented can be considered in two possible contexts. First, they can be analyzed in the context of American political science. Following such an approach, we would evaluate the contribution of every paper to research methodology and to the study of the problem, analyze the degree to which it was successful in attracting researchers to the study 22

OVERVIEWS 23 of the structure and dynamics of international interdependence, and, as far as possible, outline the most promising directions of further research. If one looks carefully at the peculiarities of the broader context in which the workshops were organized, however, the task of the review appears to be different. This is the case if we look upon the situation as an experiment in interaction between scientists of two countries who want to make a contribution to the prevention of nuclear war through strictly professional means, that is, through demonstrating the possibility of broadening cooperation. In this process, topics and methods of research may change, as may the composition of the group of participants itself. The experiment is aimed at drawing into its orbit representatives of various social and behavioral sciences, contributing to overcoming prejudices and false stereotypes, forming the elements of a transnational scientific-academic community, and modifying something in those areas of science that have the most direct influence on social consciousness and on the process by which countries create images of one another. What can be learned from this experiment? The most obvious thing is that Soviet scientists can use methods and results from American research in their own work and thus foster cooperation. Another aspect of the interaction between Soviet and American schol- ars is the institutional environment in which the interaction develops. The question is whether it is possible to develop sustained cooperation and thus to develop common frameworks for inquiry and discourse. An important difference between Soviet and American approaches stems from the fact that the methodology of American social science presupposes the analysis of open debates in which every side fully articulates its argument; that is, American social science methodology is designed to be applied to a "transparent" system. In the USSR, we have frequently had to deal with a situation in which the real positions and opinions of the participants in political or other processes can be discovered only through indirect analysis. Another difference lies in the fact that American science has tradi- tionally used symbolic modeling to analyze complex theoretical problems. Let us give the most salient example: the description of much or even most social interaction in terms of game theory can be thought of as part of American political culture. In the USSR, this trend never gained wide currency, except for a brief period of fascination with game-theoretic mod- eling from the 1960s through the beginning of the 1970s. In fact, during the period of tight ideological control (from the 1930s to the mid-1980s, with a short and inconsistent, albeit inspiring break in the 1960s), we lost the basic elements of and the taste for constructive theorizing in social research. In light of this, Estes's paper [1989] had special importance for the development of the methodology of Soviet political research. First, it

24 SOVIET-AMERICAN L)tALOGUE IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES demonstrates the possibility of fairly precise and realistic analysis of the complex situation of interaction among states with the aid of a compact two-level game model. Second, it is an example of the effective transfer of a concept from one area of science to another, in this case from cognitive and social psychology to international relations. Acquaintance with the game-theoretic research tradition in American political science and the demonstration of its possibilities may foster the formation of similar lines of scientific research in the USSR. At the same time, we should note that even purely theoretical ap- proaches to modeling international relations presuppose the existence of somewhat elaborate empirical data. For example, we can easily envisage serious problems in investigating the processes of foreign policy decision making without access to the participants and their records. Thus, one should not overestimate the prospects at least for the time being—of re- search on Soviet politics parallel to Putnam's study [1989] of a "game on two tables," which examines the influence of the domestic political situation on the strategy and tactics of foreign policy negotiations. Putnam's idea of a two-level game may be considered an interpreta- tion of essential features of bureaucratic policymaking that are especially important for negotiation modeling. A very interesting problem related to this idea is how to include reflective processes in the analysis: two-level representations may exist in the consciousness of the participants and fur- ther complicate their interactions. Nevertheless, the idea of a two-level game seems very important, both for theoretical studies and for applied research on international relations. American social scientists should be aware of an important difference between the two countries in the intellectual and political environments for academic research in political science. It was really in 1988 that the final destruction of the iron curtain began; with it began a rather complicated process, both psychologically and intellectually, of liberation from under the rocks of ideological dogma and scholastic schemes that had hobbled theoretical thought. Also, and this is particularly important, the opportunities for empirical research in the study of Soviet society and politics are expanding rapidly now. This is occurring, for the most part, because many important problems, such as ecology, military spending, ethnic conflicts, interference in regional conflicts, and the like, are becoming subject to public debate and personal opinion under glasnost. Empirical research on public opinion, for example, is already a basis for academic discussion as well as political debate.Cooperation with American scientists in social research will be especially important in facilitating the adoption of internationally recognized research methods for producing reliable and trustworthy empirical data.

OVERSEWS 25 The radical changes taking place on all levels and in all functional spheres of our society call for such "tectonic" breaks and shifts that the most fundamental structures of values, belief systems, cultural stereotypes, and doctrines, and ideology, as well as foreign policy, have been deemed problematic. It is not easy to find appropriate methodological instruments for analyzing such fundamental change, especially since Western science has generally not dealt with problems of a similar nature, except, perhaps, some divisions of comparative cultural studies. Discussions of the unity of science and the universal nature of its values and methods generally refer to the "hard" sciences of physics and mathe- matics as paradigmatic cases, which provide a regulatory principle for the development of science. Behavioral and social sciences, however, because they are concerned with human behavior and society, cannot avoid carrying the imprint of a particular culture in their methodologies. These sciences are addressed to the same people, to the same societies they study. The system of argumentation and the conditions of dialogue are argumentation and dialogue within a given culture. For example, the adherence of Ameri- can scientists and theoreticians to game-theoretic modeling and descriptive language is not only stylistic, but also representative of a tradition in which an argument is only considered worthy of discussion if it is presented in the accepted language. Hence, persuasiveness is not a matter of substance, but of form acceptable in the culture of a given research community. The interaction of scientists from the two countries is also a dialogue of cultures in which they mutually enrich one another, get to know them- selves better, and, more than anything else, receive an impetus for further development. What we see is not the elimination of differences between the two sides in some sort of synthesis, but a dialogue of two cultures, each irreducible to the other but inseparable. Modern sociology of science shows us that any science, like any culture, supports conflicting systems of values, as well as conflicting but coexisting research programs. This variety expands horizons of thought. We may well think that what is true of science as an institution is also true of international cooperative ventures such as ours. Our survey of the American presentations follows an ideology proposed by Hintikka and Eco, which we may call a logic of questioning. This logic is a hybrid of descriptive and generative logics of metascientific investigation. That is, we identify key questions addressed in the workshops and then discuss the answers proposed by the American participants and the methods they use for producing those answers. Like descriptive (inductive, taxonomic) logic, the logic of questioning confines the survey strictly to the corpus of reported results; like generative (deductive) logic, adopted by our American colleagues in their review of the Soviet contributions to the workshops, it follows the structure of the object investigated, but

26 SOVIET-AMERICAN DIALOGUE IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES only insofar as that structure is transformed by research questions into the structure of interconnected problems. We have already followed the logic of questioning in a slightly indirect manner when discussing the contribution made to the study of interdepen- dence by Estes and Putnam. Below, we explicitly refer to an unfolding scroll of research questions. Because some of the American papers are summarized in this volume and others were presented only in very general outline, we confine ourselves in this review to discussing the papers that are most fully elaborated or most closely related to our personal scientific interests, or both. The first research question that was addressed in a number of American papers was How does interaction develop where there exists the possibility of affecting one another's interests? A good example is the paper of Axelrod and Dion [1988], which contains a summary of results and prospects for game- theoretic research applied to interdependence and cooperation, based on work initiated by Axelrod in the first half of the 1980s. Axelrod has worked out a concept of the evolution and development of cooperation between two actors whose interaction was modeled with an iterative Prisoner's Dilemma game, with a large but finite number of moves. As shown in the paper, a wide range of political and ethological situations may be subjected to such an analysis. The paper also includes a discussion of the theoretical-methodological presumptions behind the model, the basic premises, and the consequences of changing them. In Axelrod's original research, a computer simulation was carried out (as a round-robin computer tournament of programs) and used to compare the effectiveness of various game strategies (TIT FOR TAT, TIT FOR TWO TATS, ALL DEFECTS, ALL COOPERATES, PERMANENT RETALIATION, "SUSPICIOUS" TIT FOR TAT) for the achievement of cooperation "in a world of egoists." TIT FOR TAT was the winner in this tournament, a simple strategy that turned out to be the most effective. The structure of the simulation and the results obtained may be sum- marized as follows: 1. The game is conducted between two players; The choice of action is between cooperation and conflict; The structure of the payoffs is that of the Prisoner's Dilemma game; 4. The shadow of the future must be long a game typically lasts hundreds of plays in Axelrod's studies and its point of termina- tion must not be known in advance to the participants; Each player knows the history of the game- that is, every previous move is presumed to have been accurately perceived;

OVERVIEWS 27 In the so-called ecological tournament, the prevalence of each strategy was dependent upon its effectiveness in past rounds ("survival" of the strategy); no analogues of change of genetic characteristics (as a result of mutations and sexual reproduction) were taken into consideration; 7. Once established strategies maintain their prevalence in the "pop- ulation" only if they are collectively stable (when there is a long shadow of the future, TIT FOR TAT is a collectively stable strat- egy); and 8. Cooperative strategies can become established in a "population" of noncooperative strategies only in a cluster (cooperative strate- gies are able to avoid extinction only when they have more than random associations with each other, since only in such cases do the payoffs from cooperation outweigh the initial losses inflicted by noncooperators). All of these premises were analyzed in detail both by Axelrod in his follow-up works and by other researchers (see Axelrod and Dion's 1988 paper). It was thus possible to elaborate substantially on the results. It was shown that increasing the number of players increases the difficult of achieving cooperation, and that Axelrod's basic conception could be expanded to include games with payoff matrices other than Prisoner's Dilemma and games with more than two choices of action. Time consider- ations, the role of noise (that is, the difficult of interpreting correctly an opponent's move), and the difficulty of correctly identifying and labeling a move were also examined. The game-theoretic approach, as presented in Axelrod and Dion's paper, holds various prospects for cooperative research. For example, one area of cooperation might be an analysis of the model's presuppositions and the stability and variability of the results. The validity of the eight premises and the extent to which they (and hence the model itself) contain abstractions from reality also deserve further discussion. The authors of the paper recognize the necessity of developing a mathematical apparatus based on a game-theoretic model of cooperation. Discussion of the method and results of Axelrod and Dion, as well as other world; in the same tradition, can facilitate the development of similar lines of research in Soviet political science and thus the integration of Soviet scholarship into the international research community. Although the game-theoretic tradition is alien to Russian-language culture (not just to Russian science), Soviet researchers and Soviet society are now showing an interest in game-theoretic explanations of social phenomena. The problems raised by Axelrod and Dion, such as noise, metanorma- tive games (those including more than two players and in which there is an

28 SOY7ET-AMERICAN DL'4LOGUE IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES opportunity to punish others who have failed to punish those who made a noncooperative move), and the broadening repertoire of moves, lead us to Stern's paper [1989~. Stern sought to answer the following question, How do the interacting subjects perceive and interpret the actions of their partners? His paper examines the existence of standards of nation-state behavior in the international arena that are based on a shared understanding of a cat- ego~y of legitimate state interests, as well as parameters of and variations in such an understanding. One can find similarities between this paper and some Soviet contributions dealing with concept analysis. In our view, Stern is absolutely right when he posits that through detailed and thorough anal- ysis of the concepts used to interpret political reality, it becomes possible to establish productive interaction between rather sophisticated methods of international law, philosophy, logic, and even linguistic semantics, on the one hand, and traditional, informal historical-political research, on the other. An analysis of the category of legitimate national interests, conducted in the context of such notions as "community beyond the state" and "world polity," includes a discussion of the difference between laws, norms, and "rules of the game" as applied to international affairs and a discussion of the functions of an appeal to legitimate interests. Stern enumerates a number of hypotheses relating to perceptions of state actions in the international arena. The aggregation of these hypotheses leads to the proposition that reinforcing a specific international action by a convincing appeal to legitimate interests decreases the potential of that action for conflict and makes a nonconflictual response more feasible (because it is less likely that the response will entail a loss of face or appear to be an expression of weakness). A conflictual answer to a legitimate demand, on the other hand, is fraught with the dangers of escalating a conflict. One might consider Stern's analysis in terms of a metanormative game; however, the recognition that a category of legitimate interests functions in international relations does more than simply reinterpret these relations. In contrast to a game-theoretic account, in which players' moves are given as conflictual or cooperative, Stern's analysis implies that the moves are interpreted as such and that players take legitimate interests into account when doing so. Interpreting a move as conflict or cooperation (along with defining the degree of conflict, since the choice in political games is most often not binary) depends upon the perceived legitimacy of the move. However, interpretations of the legitimacy of a move are themselves open to conflict. Consider the 1982 Falklands conflict, in which both sides appealed to legitimate interests in defense of the policies that led them into war. The prospects for academic cooperation on the problems raised in Stern's paper are vast. The pragmatic stimulus to cooperation is brought

OVERVIEWS 29 about by the fact that the study of such categories as justice and-legitimate national interests permits a working out of civilized forms of international relations and construction of a nonviolent world. Insofar as theoretical and methodological prospects are concerned, they have been enumerated by Stern himself in an extensive list of questions. To this list we would add only cooperation in the working out of a formal metalanguage for describing categories of justice, legitimacy, and so on. Work of this nature has a rather long tradition in Soviet science and continues to develop, with some of the Soviet contributors to the workshops engaged in such work. Finally, with respect to further applications, the paper brings out some new areas that might be investigated, among them reexamination of international negotiations and studies of relations between nationalities from the viewpoint of legitimate interests. These studies would be especially interesting and important in the present-day USSR, where the necessity of improving legal conditions is now widely recognized and where debate about the nationalities problem is beginning to include appeals to legitimate interests. Justice, legitimacy, and so on, are categories belonging not to the process of interaction per se, but to the cognitive structures of its partici- pants. It is thus a natural step to the third and fourth research questions, associated with the papers by Tetlock [1988, 1989] and Gamson [19893. The questions are What are the structures of the belief systems of interacting actors? How do these structures change because of the interdependence of the actors? Tetlock's 1989 paper is an immediate development of the 1988 one, and the two can be taken as a whole. Because this collection contains a summary of the 1989 paper made by the author himself, we can move directly to a general evaluation. We believe Tetlock's papers occupy an important place in the structure of the workshops. They are interesting in an empirical respect, but they are most important for their originality on the theoretical and methodological planes. In essence, Tetlock has proposed a new research method, worked out in some detail, that adds much to traditional methods of content analy- sis. The evolution of Tetlock's text-analytic method followed the same path that 10 years earlier led to the creation of the cognitive mapping technique. Techniques from a-psycholinguistic experiment designed to measure the conceptual complexity of an individual's thinking under laboratory condi- tions were adapted to measure complexity using "natural" texts drawn from the media, press releases, speeches, and other political documents. Finally, political interpretations were made of the results. In his presentations, Tetlock dwells in detail on the concrete results of research on the dynamics of the integrative complexity (a measure of

30 SOVIET-AMERICAN DIALOGUE IN THE SOCLi4L SCIENCES the conscious connections made among the components of a political situ- ation) of political leaders in the U.S. and the USSR in the postwar period. However, we consider here mostly Tetlock's basic theoretical results. In our opinion, his achievement lies in the fact that he has succeeded in re- vealing a correlation between specified textual parameters and competitive versus coordinated foreign policy, mediated by integrative complexity as a characteristic of the political actors' cognitive structures. To be more concrete, there is a correlation between political impression- management variables observed in a text, actions observed in political affairs, and nonobservable (hypothetical) perceptual-cognitive variables: namely, greater cognitive complexity corresponds more with coordinative policy and less with competitive policy. Additional variables influence the correlation, namely, the identity of the side involved (the United States or the USSR) and the temporal relationship of language to policy: changes in Soviet cognitive complexity tend to precede changes in Soviet policy, while changes in American complexity tend to coincide temporarily with policy changes. In addition, the covariation of political impression-management vari- ables, actions, and perceptual-cognitive variables depends on the ideological preferences of the political leadership, on changes of leadership (even if ideology does not change substantially), and on changes in corresponding variables of the other side. The last circumstance seines as a convincing example of interdependence in the political and ideological spheres. In brief, Tetlock has uncovered evidence that the distance between words and deeds in foreign policy is not as great as is often assumed. This recognition opens up new possibilities for the coordination of research into the verbal and action components of political processes. In part, Tetlock's results make it possible to set a task of game-theory modeling of Soviet-American relations based on changes in integrative complexity, since decreases in integrative complexity may be interpreted as conflictual, and increases as cooperative. Inking into consideration that for the Soviet side, according to Tetlock, a change in political actions is usually preceded by changes in rhetoric, we see that Tetlock's approach allows researchers to include rhetorical events along with actions in the set of analyzed events, thereby making the event chain longer and contributing to the reliability of the analysis. Among the lines of cooperation opened up by Tetlock's work, the following seem to have the best prospects. On the theoretical and method- ological planes, it would be interesting to clarify the extent to which the text-based assessment of integrative complexity can be represented by an al- gorithm (at present, texts are processed by specially trained human coders). In particular, do there exist more or less unambiguous identifiable linguistic correlates of integrative, or at least differentiated, complexity? In the latter

OVERVIEWS 31 instance the answer would probably be positive; in the former it is far from obvious. Traditional content analysis and cognitive mapping yield algo- rithms with great difficulty. In any case, it is obvious that a comparison of Tetlock's methodology with other methods of politically-oriented text anal- ysis would be of interest and of independent value. As to applying these methods to novel research objects, the task of constructing a typology of the dynamics of and influences on integrative complexity appears promising. To obtain a typology, one may study the texts and actions of countries other than the United States and the USSR, perhaps Third World countries. It is reasonable to surmise that this process would reveal topological distinctions not already found between the USSR and the United States. Gamson in his paper [1989] proposes a descriptive framework and empirical research on the historical evolution ("careers," in his wording) of "packages." Packages are complex structures used for interpreting reality and "constructing meaning." They contain a central organizing idea, or frame, defining an issue; a range of variations within the frame; and a number of framing and reasoning devices that provide for the functioning of packages. Gamson's technique is less formal than Tetlock's, but rather more flexible. This difference is due to the fact that the very object of Gamson's research, namely, the social construction of meaning, is obviously more vague and overarching than the highly structured category of integrative complexity. Concrete examples analyzed by Gamson (the packages of PROGRESS, RUNAWAY TECHNOLOGY, and DEVIL'S BARGAIN) are taken from public discussions about prospects for the development of nuclear energy; however, the proposed conceptual apparatus has broad utility and may be used for research not only on careers, but also on "migrations" of various packages. Packages undoubtedly participate in processes of cultural-ideological and scientific-intellectual interaction; by virtue of their capability for influencing the consciousness of many persons, they can promote or discredit opinions and viewpoints and, by doing this across national borders, can be significant in the realm of interdependence. Gamson's paper is the only one at the workshops to present a theoIy of mass communication, a field highly developed in the United States but embryonic in the Soviet Union. As part of cooperation within the workshop framework, such a possibility indicates the great potential for conducting comparative metascientific research. Concepts set forth by Gamson have equivalents in other disciplines that are more familiar to the Soviet participants, however. For example, "frame" is a category not only of sociology and the theory of mass communication, but also of artificial intelligence and cognitive science; framing devices such as metaphors, examples, catch phrases, depictions, and visual examples,- are well-known to semiotic and literal theory; the reasoning devices are, in essence, logical mechanisms. The treatment of framing devices in these disciplines and in

32 SOVIET-AMERICAN DIALOGUE IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Gamson's model could be composed within the framework of theoretical and methodological cooperation. The development of glasnost in the Soviet Union, and the rebirth there of what Gamson called "the challenger discourse," also makes possible the application of a model like Gamson's to an analysis of Soviet mass media. For instance, it would be interesting to examine whether the environmental discourse in the USSR is in some sense dependent upon an analogous debate in the United States and, if so, what the concrete mechanisms of the dependence are. We can also consider the adoption by Soviet mass communication theorists of sampling and empirical data-gathering standards developed in the United States. The corresponding standards in the Soviet Union are, for well-known reasons, substantially lower. The ecological problems that Gamson touches on are central to Mitchell's paper [1989~; however, its place in our review does not fol- low from this, but from its attempt to answer one more research question, In what way do beliefs about the world, interacting with value systems, become a stimulus to act and participate in goal fornication? Since Mitchell's paper is summarized in this report, we limit ourselves to simply noting that the problem of collective mobilization studied by Mitchell looks rather peculiar when seen from the angle of game theory. Interdependence in the ecological sphere is an undeniable fact, al- though its structure is very different from interdependence in, say, the military sphere. Ecological interdependence, no matter on what level it functions (Mitchell himself examines the domestic level), is characterized by an inherent multiplicity of subjects, among which cooperation is hin- dered, according to Mitchell, by three barriers: Why should I contribute if I will get the benefits anyhow? Why should I contribute if my contribution will not really make a difference? Why should I contribute since there is such a slight chance of success? In order to explain how mobilization occurs under such conditions, the author sets forth a "Projective Loss Hypothesis" based on the premise that the future is valued in relative terms (gains and losses) and not in absolute ones and that, consequently, the most effective stimulus to action is the recognition that the future will be worse. This hypothesis was generally confirmed by the reanalysis of survey research data. Aside from the value of advanced methods such as Mitchell's to so- ciological research, the prospective value of Mitchell's work to scientific cooperation is clear, especially if one takes into consideration the author's expressed hope that his analysis would be succeeded by analogous research in the USSR. In a situation of rapid growth of ecological consciousness in the Soviet Union, such an inquiry would be extremely interesting for its revelation of correlations among ecological, social, and especially national- ities issues. Moreover, the problems of collective mobilization and stimuli

OVERVIEWS 33 to it are vital under perestroika from the political point of view; hence the importance of Mitchell's study to the USSR. Tilly's research [1989; stands apart from the other American contri- butions. The author's emphasis is not so much on principles and general prerequisites for the functioning of an interdependent system as on par- ticular features of the participants in interdependent relations. In Tilly's paper, the participants under investigation are states, and the topic of his study relates to the problem of interdependence only indirectly. The re- search question toward which the author has directed his paper completes a logical chain in which the problem of interdependence is present only at the beginning. Tilly is interested in the structures of interdependence in the "North-South" system. These structures are undeniably distinguished by great peculiarities; the peculiarities to a significant degree follow from a considerable difference in the "institutionalization of violence" in the North versus the South (a much greater difference than in the case of "East-West" relations). In part the difference is due to the role of the army in the life of society. Thus, What are the differences? Do they exist? To what extent are they stipulated by the present system of relations between the North and the South and to what extent are they capable, in turn, Of influencing these relations? The mam difference, in Tilly's account, lies in the fact that in the North the apparatus of violence is institutionalized in an army under state control and is directed mostly outward, whereas the use of violence internally is rather limited. ("A Cartoon History of Europe," he remarks, "must reflect the movement from the king wearing armor, carrying a sword, and commanding his own army, to a president or prime minister in a civilian costume, negotiating with representative organs.") On the other hand, in the South the distance between civil society (if there is one) and the apparatus of violence is much smaller. This state of affairs is explained historically, in the context of the military build-up in Third World countries and the political role of the military in those countries. In the example of African states, factors causing the army to interfere in political life were examined in some detail. The identification of such factors put the author in a position to question the responsibility of the North for the violence of many regimes in the South. The contemporary situation, according to Tilly, was for the most part caused by the rivalry of East and West for influence in the Third World. This rivalry is also related to the reverse dependence of the North on the South, for raw materials and for profits from the sale of weapons. If Third World countries are to develop civil societies more or less of a Western type, they should no longer be objects of East-West rivalry in the bipolar world. Tilly's research stands out from the other American research presented in the workshops and demonstrates at least stylistically

34 SOY7ET-AMERICAN DIALOGUE IN THE SOCL,4L SCIENCES an unexpected closeness to Soviet research on the problems of developing countries. Thus, it opens a variety of prospects for comparison and possible cooperation. ACKNOWLEDGMENT We are greatly indebted to Paul Stern, who gave us so much pa- tience and contributed considerably to transforming the draft into more or less plain English. Of course, we take responsibility for any mistakes or deficiencies of the survey.

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