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The of Public Problems: Culture
The of Public Problems: Culture
Introduction
The use of the automobile is a microcosm on a large scale of the problems created by the conflict of restraint and release in American life. The issues embedded in the use of alcohol and the auto present the tensions and complements of a world at once at work and at play. Driving has accentuated the difficulties in keeping the borders between self-control and self-release closed. The contemporary motorcar is a piece of mechanical equipment inherently dangerous and yet relatively unsupervised in its use. Driving requires a high degree of motor coordination, rational judgment, and a level of skill that must be maintained by constant practice and attention, qualities of mind calling for a rational attitude and a serious intent. But this area of rational existence intersects day and night, work and play. Unlike the airplane, the railroad, or mass transit it is not in the care of highly trained, paid, and certified personnel. The automobile is available as an accesory to the gamut of our moods, our arenas of living, and our daytime and nighttime tasks and adventures. This book is about how situations become public problems, but it is also about drinking and driving. The particular case informs us about the macrocosm, the more general case. In general, this is a book about culturepublic meaningsand social structureauthority, control, and deviance. It is about consistenciesand inconsistencies between public ceremony and routine behavior. In particular, it is also a book about motorists, police, judges, lawyers, scientists, journalists, doctors, and government officials, about how and why driving an automobile under the influence of alcohol is an act publicly condemned yet privately observed. The introduction is a ritual of transition which permits the reader to become acquainted with the writerhis style, his outlook, his intent. It is a literary device that enables me to ease you into this study. If I have written well and you have read well, it will outline what is to come and foreshadow the thrust and significance of the work. The phrase "research essay" conveys both what this book is and what it is not. It is a book of general ideas developed and expressed in the context of a particular subject matter and experience. The phenomenon constituting the public issue of alcohol and auto safetythe "drinking-driving problem"is the occasion for creating a theoretical perspective with which to examine public problems. This is neither a conventional report
on research nor an essay setting forth an abstract system of theoretical ideas or propositions, not grounded in specific subject matter. Perhaps it is both. In the word research I call attention to the grounding of my ideas in the experience of performing a detailed analysis and description of a specific body of data on a particular issuedrinking-driving. Some of the data are original with me; some are the result of reading, activity, and exposure to the field. By the word essay I point to the effort to create a theoretical perspective, grounded in the particular phenomenon of the empirical research, but reaching for a general and wider application. I am less bound by data here than in the research report; more constrained by them than in the essay of abstract theory. The door of my book is now opened. Let us move into the foyer.
The Construction of Social Problems: How Phenomena Become Real There is an apocryphal tale about the American philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen. He was reputed to begin a course in ethics with the following problem for his students: Suppose an angel came down from Heaven and promised the people of the United States a marvelous invention. It would simplify their lives; enable the injured to receive quick treatment; decrease the time of transportation by a large magnitude; bring families and friends closer together and create a life of far greater ease and convenience than exists today. However, in grateful return for this boon to human welfare, the angel demanded that every year 5,000 Americans be put to death on the steps of the Capitol. Having posed the question, the philosopher then asked the class what answer should be given to the angel. After the ethical dilemma had been discussed for some time, the professor pointed out that every year many more than 5,000 were killed in automobile accidents in the United States. Of course, public issues seldom emerge in such clear-cut fashion. Only in seminars can a philosophical problem be posed in so hypothetical and deliberate a manner. The problems connected with most public issues emerge long after events and processes have been set in motion. No seminars on the ethical consequences of technological change were held in Henry Ford's shop to decide if the venture was a wise public action and worthy of continuation. Technological assessment comes later. The Plurality of Possible Realities At the outset I have had the problem of naming the problem. To talk about the "drinking-driving problem" is already to assume the character of the phenomenon (automobile safety) and to define it as having such and such a shape. Human problems do not spring up, full-blown and announced, into the consciousness of bystanders. Even to recognize a situation as painful requires a system for categorizing and defining events. All situations that are experienced by people as painful do not become matters of public activity and targets for public action. Neither are they given the same meaning at all times and by all peoples. "Objective" conditions are seldom so compelling and so clear in their form that they spontaneously generate a "true" consciousness. Those committed to one or another solution to a public problem see its genesis in the necessary consequences of events and processes; those in opposition often point to "agitators" who impose one or another definition of reality. The existence of a "drinking-driving problem" is the result of a procedure by which the automobile and fatalities have been construed as a problem of societal concern, to be acted upon by public officials and agencies. Alcohol has already been perceived as important in the genesis of such fatalities and accorded an importance as a target in the resolution of the problem. That target character is not a given, is not in the nature of reality as a Ding an sich (a thing in itself), but represents a selective process from among a multiplicity of possible and potential realities which can be seen as affecting auto fatalities and injuries. Before the nineteenth century drinking and drunkenness were seldom used to ac-
count for accidents or crime (H. G. Levine 1978). The problematic character of the "drinking-driving problem" is the first concern of the sociologist interested in understanding the character of public problems. He must account for its status as a matter of public concern rather than accept it as given in the nature of things. The sociologist has come to recognize that many human situations and problems have histories; they have not always been construed and recognized as they are today or will be in the future. What is now labeled and seen as "mental disorder" has a history in which the same behavior was accorded different statuses in different historical periods, and sometimes seen as valued, sometimes as condemned and irremediable. Its present place in the spectrum of medical "illnesses" is another way of talking about it. Recent criticisms of the concept of "mental illness" have built upon this theme of its historical diversity (Rosen 1968; Foucault 1965; Rothman 1971). The same has occurred with the phenomenon now labeled in American society as "poverty." At some periods in Western history, the poor were objects of reverence; at others they were the objects of condemnation. In the 1950s the issue of poverty was a minor one in American public consciousness. In the 1960s, with little changed in the levels and distribution of income, it became a significant part of public actions. Where poverty had once been a term for a margin below which incomes fell it has become instead primarily a matter of the distribution of income; a question of equality rather than penury (Matza 1966; Bell 1972). It is then a major effort of this essay to illuminate the process by which the association between alcohol and driving has come to be a public problem. In this we follow the advice of Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse (1973): "the process by which members of groups or societies define a putative condition as a problemis the distinctive subject matter of the sociology of social problems."1 Pressed to the wall to solve the problem of drinking-driving I can only shout "Why do you ask?" The Public Character of Social Problems Some years ago I passed a movie marquee with the title Marriage Is a Private Affair. And so it is in American life today. Much attention, time, and money are devoted to problems of marital relationships. Divorces are daily lamented, accepted, or exulted over in public communications, but the situations, perceived as painful or problematic or even immoral, do not result in public actions to assure their resolutions. Marital happiness, parent-child satisfactions, sexual frustration, unrequited love, disappointment in friendships are among the most keenly felt of human experiences and their joys and sorrows the occasions for some of the deepest and most profound aspirations. Yet no public agency exists to provide for their quick or beneficent satisfaction. Only in musical comedies do political parties campaign on platforms that promise to bring everyone love and sexual fulfillment. It is useful to distinguish public problems from private ones. That is why I prefer the term "public problems" to that of "social problems." All social problems do not necessarily become public ones. They do not become matters of conflict or controversy in the arenas of public action. They do not eventuate in agencies to secure or in movements to work for their resolution. Whether or not situations should be public problems is itself often a major issue. The abortion question is today a source of great
and bitter political conflict in the United States. It poses the question as to the place of public authority in accepting responsibility for providing sanction to private abortions and entitling citizens to facilities for achieving abortions. It is not straining the imagination to perceive a somewhat similar destiny in store for sexual pleasure. In the past decade sexual dissatisfaction has become the source of a new, growing occupation sexual therapist. I can imagine in the next quarter-century the movement to define sexual disappointment as illness and a governmental program to provide sexual therapy as part of medical insurance. What may be visible and salient in one period of time may not be so in another. Issues and problems may wax and wane in public attention, may disappear or appear. How is it that an issue or problem emerges as one with a public status, as something about which "someone ought to do something"? In analyzing the public character of a problem it is vital to recognize again the multiple possibilities of resolution. Who and what institution gains or is given the responsibility for "doing something" about the issue? As phenomena are open to various modes of conceptualizing them as problems, so too their public character is open to various means of conceiving their resolution. It is only in the past ten or fifteen years that automobile safety has been seen as a matter of responsibility for the federal government and the automobile industry through the development of public standards for safe automobiles.2 Income security in old age has ceased to be left largely to personal and familial obligations. Social security legislation has established a public, governmental responsibility. The problem of responsibility has both a cultural and a structural dimension. At the cultural level it implies a way of seeing phenomena. Fixing responsibility for preventing accidents by laws against drinkingdriving involves seeing drinking-driving as a choice by a willful person. Seeing it as a medical problem involves an attribution of compulsion and illness. At the structural level, however, fixing responsibility implies different institutions and different personnel who are charged with obligations and opportunities to attack the problem. Here, too, change from one set of causal definitions, of cognitive conceptualizations, to another carries implications for institutions. The relation of causal responsibility to political responsibility is then a central question in understanding how public problems take shape and change. In the case of drinking-driving this has involved such institutions as the church, the courts and police, government, medicine, and the world of engineering. That there is transition or conflict between institutions claiming or rejecting claims to authority in controlling the phenomenon of drinking-driving leads us to a recognition of the categories in which the phenomenon is conceptualized, thought about, becomes a matter of consciousness. For example, to see alcohol problems through the metaphor of medicine, as diseases, has consequences for efforts to utilize law enforcement measures in their resolution. Such modes of conceiving of the reality of a phenomenon are closely related to the activities of resolution. They affect the claims to authority over the area and over the persons connected with the phenomenon. The Structure of Public Problems My obsession with the uses of knowledge as a basis for authority in public problems was aroused by an earlier phase of what has become this
study. In 1971 local traffic safety officials in San Diego County asked me to undertake an analysis of the effectiveness of court sentencing practices on recidivism in arrests for driving under the influence of alcohol (Gusfield 1972). While completing that initial study, it seemed to me that all the parties with whom I came in contactpolice, offenders, judges, attorneys, academic colleagues, Department of Motor Vehicle officials were locked into a consciousness of drinking-driving which narrowly shut out possible alternative conceptualizations and solutions. There were other ways of "seeing" the phenomenon, other resources that might have been explored as solutions to the problem. The definition of the problem, which participants to the process took for granted, was to me problematic. This situation became something that required my explanation and understanding. An alternative consciousness was possible, and it seemed the task of this sociologist to develop it and to understand how the existing consciousness persisted. The people whom I talked with in the course of that original study presented a fairly uniform view of the problem. Alcohol leads to impaired driving and increases the risk of accident, injury, and death. Since drinking coupled with driving "causes" auto accidents, solutions lie in strategies which diminish either drinking or driving after drinking. The available strategy is to persuade the drinker not to get behind the wheel of the car. Law enforcement and punishment perhaps supplemented by education are the most useful and acceptable means to diminish auto accidents due to drinking. Some people thought in longer range terms and wanted drinking-drivers screened for alcoholism and treated for their illness. This homogeneous consciousness of alcohol and automobile use appears to the sociologist as a salient form of social control. It eliminates conflict or divergence by rendering alternative definitions and solutions unthinkable. This subtle, unseen implication of cultural ideas is perhaps the most powerful form of constraint. Unlike the conflict of power it goes unrecognized. What we cannot imagine, we cannot desire. Earlier in my academic career I had studied the American temperance movement and Prohibition (Gusfield 1963a). That study had sensitized me to other modes of seeing issues of alcohol. It made me critical of the intensively individualistic character with which the auto safety problem and the drinking-driver problem were seen by those I studied and met in the San Diego courts research in 197172: it was taken for granted by those I studied that the problems of auto safety and alcohol use were chiefly problems of individuals, of motorists. Institutional explanations and loci of responsibility were eloquently absent from the consciousness of officials, observers, and offenders. Two things struck me as especially significant by their absence: the lack of involvement of alcohol beverage distributorsbartenders, sellers, manufacturersand the inability or unwillingness of people to see the problem of drinking-driving as a problem of transportation. The producers and distributors of liquor and beer were almost never represented in the conferences, meetings, classes, and committees which fill the organizational agenda of local alcohol agencies. But so, too, was there little representation from medicine, government, planning, or other possibly interested groups. In speaking to audiences throughout the country as a presumed "alcohol studies expert" I often pointed out that the city of San Diego had developed an area of hotels alongside a major interstate highway. The hotels all had public bars which provided part of their income and depended on more than their temporary residents for clientele. Autos were almost the only means of transportation to or from such bars in a
part of the United States where the spatial spread made taxis expensive. Research on drinking-drivers was similarly silent on alternative means and possibilities of transportation. Little was known about where drinking-drivers were going or had come from. Although such questions were part of the standard arrest form in these cases, the item was not deemed important and answers were inconsistent and poorly asked.3 My attention was in this way led to the realization that there were alternative ways of being conscious of the drinking-driving problem. I came to conceptualize the issue in a number of different ways, even to conceive of it in terms of consequences, rather than causes (Gusfield 1976). It was possible to drop attention to drinking and to think only about the injury or fatality incurred, concentrating only on preventing that and not the crash. Later I discovered that indeed there were a whole literature and a set of programs and movements since the mid-1960s that had done exactly that (cf. chapter 2, below). Causal imputation in itself, of course, is ambiguous and open to multiple attributions and imputations. The absence of alternative modes of transportation is logically as much a cause of drinking-driving as is the use of alcohol. To see public problems as the application of values to an objective set of conditions puts the car in front of the motorist. The conditions are themselves part and parcel of the process through which problems are attacked. There was a structure of thought and action, of institutions and groups within which the problem was contained and alternatives were excluded. The idea of structure implies an orderliness to things. Ideas have structure insofar as they follow from generalized rules of thought. Behavior has structure when it, too, is orderly. Analyzing public problems as structured means finding the conceptual and institutional orderliness in which they emerge in the public arena. The public arena is not a field on which all can play on equal terms; some have greater access than others and greater power and ability to shape the definition of public issues. Nor do all ideas have public problems as their consequences. The social construction of public problems implies a historical dimension. The same "objective" condition may be defined as a problem in one time period, not in another. But there is more to the analysis of public issues than the idea of historicity. As my experience with the initial study suggested, there is a pattern to how issues and problems arise, emerge, and evidence a structure. At any specific moment, all possible parties to the issue do not have equal abilities to influence the public; they do not oossess the same degree or kind of authority to be legitimate sources of definition of the reality of the problem, or to assume legitimate power to regulate, control, and innovate solutions. To describe the structure of public problems is to describe the ordered way in which ideas and activities emerge in the public arena. The concept of "structure" lends itself too much to a distorted sense of public events as having a fixed, permanent, unchanging character. I do not want to convey that interpretation. At any moment the "structure" itself may be fought over as groups attempt to effect the definitions of problems and authority to affect them. At any moment the structure is itself problematic in its implementation. Structure is process frozen in time as orderliness. It is a conceptual tool with which to try to make that process understandable. What is important to my thought here is that all is not situational; ideas and events are contained in an imprecise and changing container.4
Cognitive and Moral Judgments As ideas and consciousness public problems have a structure which involves both a cognitive and a moral dimension. The cognitive side consists in beliefs about the facticity of the situation and events comprising the problemour theories and empirical beliefs about poverty, mental disorder, alcoholism, and so forth. The moral side is that which enables the situation to be viewed as painful, ignoble, immoral. It is what makes alteration or eradication desirable or continuation valuable. The moral side of a problem suggests a condemnable state of affairs from the perspective of someone's morality. Even medical conceptions of illness contain the moral admonition that sickness is not preferable to health, that the patient should want to be well. Someone who elects to continue an unhealthy occupation because of the value of its rewards may decide, however, that illness is preferable to health. Issues of equality, of justice, of economy all involve judgments of goodness, badness, and morality. But events and situations are also cognitively assessed. A world of fact is posited. Crime may be seen as a result of broken homes, poverty, genetics, community disorganization, or any number and type of variables. Significantly there are beliefs about the alterability of phenomena. They are, but need not be. The aging process is seen as physiologically painful and unwelcome in contemporary societies, but it also is seen as inevitable and unalterable. Inequality between races is also seen by many as painful and unwelcome but believed to be alterable. In that is its status as a problem. "Without both a cognitive belief in alterability and a moral judgment of its character, a phenomenon is not at issue, not a problem. In recent years biologists have begun to take the aging process as potentially alterable and have begun to study it. It may become a problem and the reality of aging itself a center of public controversy. At present it is not. The reality of a problem is often expanded or contracted in scope as cognitive or moral judgment shifts. The composition of the criminal has been open to considerable argument over such phenomena as "war crime," "white collar crime," "victimless crime," and "juvenile delinquency" (Quinney 1971; Cressey 1953; Plan 1969; Schur 1965). The Ownership of Public Problems The concepts of "ownership" and "responsibility" are central to this work and are used in a very particular manner. Much of the study examines the fixation of responsibility for public problems, and the concepts must be discussed with care. At the outset I will separate three aspects of the phenomenon of responsibility. The first will be given the term "ownership" and the other two discussed as different types of "responsibility." The concept of "ownership of public problems" is derived from the recognition that in the arenas of public opinion and debate all groups do not have equal power, influence, and authority to define the reality of the problem. The ability to create and influence the public definition of a problem is what I refer to as "ownership." The metaphor of property ownership is chosen to emphasize the attributes of control, exclusiveness, transferability, and potential loss also found in the ownership of property.
I have pointed out that the status of a phenomenon as a problem is itself often a matter of conflict as interested parties struggle to define or prevent the definition of a matter as something that public action should "do something about." At any time in a historical period there is a recognition that specific public issues are the legitimate province of specific persons, roles, and offices that can command public attention, trust, and influence. They have credibility while others who attempt to capture public attention do not. Owners can make claims and assertions. They are looked at and reported to by others anxious for definitions and solutions to the problem. They possess authority in the field. Even if opposed by other groups, they are among those who can gain the public ear. Thus the American Psychiatric Association has been the owner of the problem of homosexuality, and their support or opposition to the definition of homosexuality as a psychiatric problem has been significant. What the Chamber of Commerce does about homosexuality is far less significant in its influence on others.5 Different groups and institutions have authority and influence for different problems and at different times. The orbit in which religion has control over health has greatly diminished while that of medicine has expanded in Western countries. At one stage in the history of the social organization of health, ecclesiastical authorities possessed great power and influence; today they do not. The history of the control of alcohol problems illustrates the concept of ownership in an area central to this study. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States, the Protestant churches wielded a heavy club over alcohol problems, providing by themselves, or through allied organizations, much of the public, persuasional material on temperance and Prohibition. When they defined the legitimate cognitive and moral approaches toward alcohol use, many listened. The churches, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the Anti-Saloon League all acted to place and keep alcohol high on the public agenda. The churches came to "own" the problem of drinking in American society. They set the pace and much of the framework of the debates, Other possible sources of competing ownership were absent. The medical profession was poorly organized and unable to gain a loud voice in suggesting alternative perceptions of the problems of drinking and drunkenness. The same was true of the universities. They were far from autonomous from religious influences. The sciences were less well organized and equipped to play a role in public affairs than at present. The effort of the Committee of Fifty, a group of private citizens, to be arbiters of fact in the area was short-lived. Government was less the initiator than the recipient of alcohol policies. With Repeal, the authority of the churches to be judges of public tastes was "disowned." Whatever the desires and attempts of temperance and Prohibitionist organizations, theirs was no longer the authoritative voice. Their pronouncements no longer commanded attention but were the "kiss of death" for proponents of alcohol control policies. Ownership passed to the universities, the medical profession, and the problem drinkers themselves. In recent years government has entered the field as federal agencies have been charged with solving alcohol problems (Room 1979). Disowning Public Problems Some groups, institutions, and agencies are interested in defining, affecting, and solving public problems. Others may be especially interested in
avoiding the obligation to be involved in the problem creating or problem solving process. They deliberately seek to resist claims that the phenomenon is their problem. For much of the active period of the temperance and Prohibition movements the liquor and beer industries made little effort to counter temperance assertions, took little notice of the issue, and derogated the importance of alcohol as a cause of suffering, crime, or other public woes. Today theirs is a similar, though unstated, aloofness from attempts to provide definitions or solutions to the problems associated with alcohol. The slogan of the alcohol beverage industry is "The fault is in the man, not the bottle." Little money is spent by the alcohol beverage industry in research on problems connected with its use. The industry makes no claims to ownership of the alcohol problem and, in word and deed, disown it. In a somewhat similar fashion, the automobile safety problem has been characterized until recently by a less than benign neglect. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) came into existence in 1968. Prior to that, automobile safety on a federal level was the purview of the Public Health Service. At the state level it was usually an arm of the department of roads or of motor vehicles. The automobile industry, while it has sponsored some safety research, has not devoted much of its resources to questions of safety improvement. Prior to 1966, the total spent by American automobile companies on safety research was a small fraction of that expended on style research.6 Similarly the insurance industry has, until the late 1960s (cf. chapter 2 below), played a minor role in developing or supporting research or education on auto safety. The National Safety Council, discussed at length in chapter 2, has been a source of public information and a source of agitation chiefly for improved drivers' education. The major research on automobile safety, until the late 1960s, was sponsored by the U.S. Army and the U.S. Public Health Service (U.S. Senate 1966). The question of ownership and disownership is very much a matter of the power and authority groups and institutions can muster to enter the public arena, to be kept from it, or to prevent having to join. The power to influence the definition of the reality of phenomena is a facet of a politics of reality. Senator Abraham Ribicoff stated this in one form during the Senate hearings on the National Traffic Highway Act in 1966: "I think Detroit has fostered the idea that the whole problem was the 'nut behind the wheel'... and they brainwashed Americans into thinking that the automobile did not have a real role to play in the safety field (U.S. Senate 1966, p. 47). Ribicoff's remarks imply a set of empirical assertions and a theory of how public consciousness is formed. Without judging those assertions and that theory at this point, the implications of the remarks are pertinent. Public problems have a shape which is understood in a larger context of a social structure in which some versions of "reality" have greater power and authority to define and describe that "reality" than do others. In this senseof responsibilitythe structure of public problems has a political dimension to it. The existence of overt conflict and debate makes the politics of an issue manifest. The lack of such conflict may hide the very features of the structure which make for its absence, which prevent the opposite forms of consciousness from being observed. They contribute to "what everyone knows," what is "common sense"the taken-for-granted by which the objective world is made into experienced life. This absence of alternative modes of consciousness is also the subject of analysis of the structure of public problems. Acceptance of a factual reality often hides the conflicts and alternative potentialities possible. Ignoring the
multiplicity of realities hides the political choice that has taken place. Responsibility: Causal and Political Ownership constitutes one piece of the structure of public problems. It indicates the power to define and describe the problem. It tells us who but not what: it does not specify the content of description and solution. Here we need to add two other concepts: causal responsibility and political responsibility. The Dual Meaning of Responsibility To say that "cancer was responsible for someone's death" is to use the term responsibility in a manner different from saying that "parents are responsible for preventing their children from making noise." The first usage looks to a causal explanation of events. The second looks to the person or office charged with controlling a situation or solving a problem. The first answers the question, How come? The second answers the question, What is to be done? The firstcausal responsibilityis a matter of belief or cognition, an assertion about the sequence that factually accounts for the existence of the problem. The secondpolitical responsibilityis a matter of policy. It asserts that somebody or some office is obligated to do something about the problem, to eradicate or alleviate the harmful situation. The second usage is close to the legal use of "responsible" in much of Anglo-Saxon law: Usually in discussions of law and occasionally in morals, to say that someone is responsible for some harm means that in accordance with legal rules or moral principles it is at least permissible, if not mandatory, to blame or punish or exact compensation from him. In this use ... the expression "responsible for" does not refer to a factual connection between the person held responsible and the harm but simply to his liability under the rules to be blamed, punished or made to pay.... There is no implication that the person held responsible actually did or caused the harm. [Hart and Honore 1959, p. 61] The political, or policy, concept of responsibility has a wider scope than the legal one but is similarly distinguished from causal explanation. In my usage the responsible office or person is the one charged with solving the problem and open to reward or punishment for failure to do so. To look to government agencies and actions to diminish inflation is to hold governmental officials politically accountable, subject to electoral and other responses for the continued or curtailed existence of the economic problem, although government may not be seen as its cause. The medical profession and medical science are not seen as causes of cancer, but they are seen as sources of potential solution. Priests, astrologers, civil engineers, and sociologists are not responsible for curing cancer or nephritis in American society although they may be in some others. Ownership and the Fixation of Responsibility A primary question of this study is the relation between these three aspects of structureownership, causation, and political obligation. While all three may coincide in the same office or person, that is by no means necessarily the case. Quite often those who own a problem are trying to place obligations on others to behave in a "proper" fashion and thus to take political responsibility for its solution. The environmental "lobbies," operating under a theory of causal responsibility which finds the source of "impure air" in the automobile, have used their ownership of the pollution problem to fix political responsibility on the automobile
industry. Government shares that responsibility through undertaking to determine standards of gasoline fume emission. In the example of clean air, causal and political responsibility are related. The design of the automobile is seen as cause, and the designers are looked to for liability and repair. The Prohibition movement owned the alcohol problem during the early part of the twentieth century. Whatever the causal theory of alcohol problems, the movement tried, succeeded, and later failed to fix responsibility for solution on the beer and liquor industries. Government and law intervened but not as solvers of the problem. The definition of alcohol problems, their cause, and their cure were given by the programs of the movement.7 The unique position of the state makes it a key figure in fixing responsibility. In some historical periods and for some issues it may be a processing machine, taking in inputs in the form of demands and processing them into policies that meet the demands, serving as a broker of inconsistent and equally powerful demands.8 This was the case in the Prohibition period, but seems less and less so in many areas of contemporary life. Today the state appears more often as an active agent, the owner of the problems it seeks to solve. Governmental officials and agencies operate to define public issues, develop and organize demands upon themselves, and control and move public attitudes and expectations: To explain political behavior as a response to fairly stable individual wants, reasoning, attitudes, and empirically based perceptions is therefore simplistic and misleading. . . . Government affects behavior chiefly by shaping the cognitions of large numbers of people in ambiguous situations. It helps create their beliefs about what is proper; their perceptions of what is fact; and their expectations of what is to be done. [Edelman 1971, pp. 2, 7] Knowledge and Responsibility The structure of public problems is then an arena of conflict in which a set of groups and institutions, often including governmental agencies, compete and struggle over ownership and disownership, the acceptance of causal theories, and the fixation of responsibility. It is here that knowledge and politics come into contact. Knowledge is a part of the process, providing a way of seeing the problems, congenial or contradictory to one or another way in which political responsibility is fixed. It may emerge from religious institutions, from science, from folklore. Whatever its source, the appeal to a basis in "fact" has implications for the practical solutions sought to public problems. In analyzing drinking-driving, I arn examining the theoretical and scientific perspectives which have emerged from universities and technical institutes and which have operated in attributing causal responsibilities. These perspectives constitute the "state of the art" in explanations ofautomobile fatalities and provide the consciousness of the auto safety problem. The ownership of that problem in different and sometimes conflicting circles of alcohol occupations and engineering and legal agencies provides the arenas within which the drama takes place. The spectatorism and occasional participation of the liquor, beer, auto, and insurance industries provide absent actors whose empty chairs must also be explained. The interaction between these elements of ownership, causal theories, and political responsibilities is the central focus of this study. The crux of the political issue of drinking-driving lies in the
choices of one or another theory of cause and one or another locus of political responsibility. The consciousness of the drinking-driving problem is my subject. In the midst of profound issues of war, human equality, and violent crime, the case of drinking-driving may seem too prosaic and unimportant to merit the attention of the sophisticated reader let alone the time and energy of a mature sociologist. But that very prosaic and unimportant quality of drinking-driving is itself the incitement for curiosity, because of its theoretical importance. If drinking-driving seems not to excite political passions, it may tell us something about how dissensus occurs. That a matter seemingly connected with so many deaths and injuries arouses far less demand for cessation or resolution than did the Viet Nam War may tell us something about how public demands do arise. Thus do we "by indirections, find directions out." The Cultural Perspective toward Public Actions The perspective which informs this study represents a departure from the characteristic way in which sociologists have approached the study of public actions. It has more in common with the orientations that have been in use among cultural anthropologists and literary critics than those that have marked sociological studies until recently. The view of public actions as cultural forms can be introduced by analyzing two terms used in this book: rhetoric and ritual. The terms are drawn from literature and anthropology. They describe behavior as language and drama. Their usage thus appears as an aspect of cultureof the systems of symbols by which meaning is constituted and conveyed (Sahlins 1976; Geertz 1973a). "A symbolic system of meanings is an element of order 'imposed' as it were on the realistic situation" (Parsons 1951, p. 11). As a generalized perspective on human behavior sociology has emphasized the cultural realm as "superstructure," as implicated, generated, and supported by human interests located within the diversities and hierarchies of social structure, of group life and position. "Our primary aim," wrote Robert Merton in his classic paper on nonconformity, "is to discover how some social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons to engage in nonconformist rather than conformist conduct" (Merton 1949, pp. 12526). This is not to maintain that I am uninterested in the social structural side of the coin of behavior. How culture and social structure affect one another is a significant piece of the puzzle of social life, and in a complete analysis both must be explored (A. Cohen 1976). I am, however, approaching the phenomenon of drinking-driving and the public actions connected with it while keeping their status as cultural forms uppermost in my bifocals. Only after I have viewed them as cultural products can I analyze the structural relationships.9 There are then two levels of social life: that which is constructed in the act of talking about it, defining it, and organizing our thought about it; and that which exists in social action itself. The former presents an ordered, consistent, understandable set of rulesa social structure. It is what sociologists and others construct in describing a "society." The latter is the raw data of existence, the initial acts which we, as human beings, cast into types in order to think about them. Edmund Leach, in his classic work on highland Burma, has made us aware of the sharp discontinuity between these: social structure in practical situations (as contrasted with the sociologist's abstract model) consists of a set of ideas about the dis-
tribution of power between persons and groups of persons. Individuals can and do hold contradictory and inconsistent ideas about this system. They are able to do so because of the form in which their ideas are expressed. The form is cultural form; the expression is ritual expression. [Leach 1954, p. 4] In practical field work situations the anthropologist must always treat the material of observation as if it were part of an overall equilibrium, otherwise description becomes almost impossible. All I am asking is that the fictional nature of this equilibrium should be frankly recognized. [Leach 1954, p. 285[ The two termsrhetoric and ritualwill appear here in contexts of incongruity. Each will be used as a primary term of reference to describe an area in which the term is unfamiliar and even contradictory. They emphasize the nonutilitarian, uninstrumental quality of the products of science and law. It is precisely this noninstrumental quality, the cultural character of these products, that lends such areas of life their potentinstrumental and cultural consequence. My attention is fixed more on how meaning is constituted, less on how behavior is influenced. Part 1 treats the product of sciencethe "state of the art" in drinking-driving researchas a form of rhetoric. To describe science as rhetoric diminishes or ignores its status as a means to an enda way of determining a factual reality. It emphasizes the research document and its presentation in communities of science and in the public arena as a form of argument. To complete the metaphor, I analyze documents and public presentations as performancesas materials which dramatize the drinking-driving phenomenon as both a cognitive and a moral matter. Considering science as a form of art means in practice examining its style, its modes of persuasion, its fictional componentsin short its literary substance. That science is not literature is accepted. I treat it as if it were literature in order to bring out those aspects which are better understood through literary analysis. The significance of this cultural analysis for social structure lies in understanding how the construction of a factual reality rests on the au thority of research and scientific study. That "reality" has a definitive, consistent facticity which enables the social control of drinking and driving to proceed. The artistic rhetoric of science has produced a cognitive and moral order which appears external and unyielding to human choice and design. Part 2 continues the analysis of authority and drama, this time placing them in the arena of law. It is a story of contradictionsof the gap between formally stated intentions and aspirations of law and legislation and the day-to-day routines of courts and police. It is a story of moves to decrease automobile accidents and deaths that prove to be ineffectve and inconsequential. In law, drinking-driving is a delinquency which differs from ordinary traffic violations in its moral status and its prescribed punishments. In everyday action, it appears more like traffic violation than crime. The legal punishments exacted are far below those prescribed and advised. The law of drinkingdriving has only a limited effect in deterring the phenomenon of driving while under the influence of alcohol, a limited effect in preventing the accidents which are the objects of attention. 10 The key terms in part 2 are myth and ritualthe consideration of law as a stylized form of public drama whose impact is not only in its instrumental consequences as a utilitarian means to an end. As a cultural performance at levels of both formal and routine activity, law embodies and reinforces meanings. It creates a day-to-day authority
and legitimates control through building the image of a social and natural order based on moral consensus. It presents a public version of the ethical and social character of drinking-driving which has its own existence as a public performance. The public drama creates a public culture whose relation to private culture is as problematic as the relation of the stageplay to the life of the audience. In part 2 the issue of law and deterrence becomes the occasion for analysis of public performance as an effort to establish a public authority among private people. The Illusions of Authority In the chapters to come I make some assertions about the modes of authority and develop a general theory of public acts as carriers of meaning. These can only be foreshadowed in this introductory chapter, but it is essential to sketch them out at this point so that the substantive material can be visualized in the framework which the author has in tended. In describing authority as illusory I am intentionally creating an ambiguity of meaning. In one sense authority is illusory in that its sources are illusory. The base of knowledge about drinking and driving is not so certain, consistent, and constant as is claimed when experts speak in a voice of authoritative wisdom. The analogy between alcohol problems and disease is a metaphor, and their affinity to other medical ailments is a matter of discretion and choicenot scientific truth. The claim of techni cians to moral neutrality hides ethical and political values at work. There is still another meaning to the illusion of authority, in which the fact of authority is illusory. The effectiveness of legal sanctions as methods for deterring drinking-driving and for preventing accidents is more limited than the legislative and judicial acts that fill libraries will lead one to think. The medical model of alcohol problems, so carefully nurtured over the past thirty years, has not given medicine a dominant voice in the healing of this sickness or convinced more than a slim sliver of the body politic of its validity. 1 here is a third side to the problem of authority, especially in relation to knowledge but also relevant to the issues of law and deterrence. This point of view is derived from sociological perspectives which place at the center of human action the image of the actor interacting with his social and natural surroundings selecting, choosing, typifying, generalizing. The seminal theorists here are George Herbert Mead (1934) and Afred Schutz (1967). What this perspective does is to emphasize the activity of the human actor in creating and constructing the world in which he lives, in carving out of the "big, buzzing, blooming confusion" (William James's phrase) a consistent and orderly universe in which to act. The concept of "ethnomethodology" contains in its etymology an entire theory of human behavior. It suggests that ordinary peoplethe ethnos, the folkalso follow a methodology, make the world logical, consistent, and operative in theoretical terms. Thus Garfinkel: "Every feature of sense, of fact, of method, for every particular case of inquiry without exception, is the managed accomplishment of organized settings of practical actions" (Garfinkel 1967, p. 32). Translated from the abstract pages of theory into the particular acts of men and women this leads us to ask how it is that the illusions of certainty, consistency, effectiveness, or political and ethical detachment are constructed into realities. It is a one-sided version of human activity
which sees only an external stimulus and a responding animal. That is not what is happening in the public arenasthe media of communication, the courts, the experts' professional endeavors, the scientists' studies in which auto safety, alcohol, drinking, and driving are topics of analysis and targets of policy. Knowledge and law are not shiny marbles lying on the beach and awaiting only the sharp eyes of skilled men and women to be found. The "facts" of alcohol are picked out of a pile, scrubbed, polished, highlighted here and there, and offered as discoveries in the context of the particular and practical considerations of their finders. The Artful Realm of the Public The last of the illusions is that public authority is only a bridge to private behavior, a mechanism through which control is attempted. That illusion is the premise, as I will show, behind the disappointment with law as a deterrent device. It has been the incitement for much of sociology in its use of empirical study to establish the great divide between official versions of what is and what really is. A great deal of modern sociological work has been debunking writ large, showing that the clean face of organizations, movements, governments, forms of social organization hides from public view the dirty backside of hierarchy, narrow interests, and group antagonisms. The hiatus between the public and private sides of reality is interesting or shocking or provocative only as the observer expects or demands a closer fit, assumes that public authority is a means to a private end control of the behavior of persons. Suppose that instead, or in addition, public actslaws, legislation, official speeches, mass media descriptions, brochures, and the other mechanisms of public actioncan be considered sui generis, as events in and of themselves without reference to possible functions as means to ends? If we drop the premise that drinking-driving knowledge, as portrayed in the policies of governments and the opinions of experts, conveys much about drinking-driving, and operate on the premise that it tells us much about how public actors behave toward this phenomenon in public arenas, what then? If we assume that the legislation and appellate court decisions about drinkingdriving are dramas for the consumption of an audience and not a technique for controlling alcohol abuse and automobile use, what would law and legislation look like? Like any methodological device, this form of study, now called dramaturgical analysis, says more than it can frequently show. 11 But using it uncovers more than was there without it. I will retreat to less radical conclusions than implied above but will still find that the analysis of drinking-driving knowledge and policies as forms of literary art casts a strong footlight on some of the problems of policy implementation. It helps reveal the otherwise unrecognized political and moral conflicts that public presentations disguise and camouflage. Although the dramaturgical perspective has not been well developed in social science or applied to social behavior by literary analysts, its use is not unique or new. Erving Goffman's development of it in analyzing interaction has been the major source of its introduction into social science (Goffman 1956, 1974). I build on the past work of several writers who have used it in analyzing politics, including Murray Edelman (Edelman 1964, 1971). In my own earlier work I distinguished between instrumental and symbolic political acts (Gusfield 1963 a). Instrumental acts, such as social security legislation, effect behavior in a direct fashion. Symbolic acts "invite consideration rather than overt action" (Wheel-
wright 1954, p. 23). I interpreted the temperance movement and Prohibition less as politically significant through controlling alcohol use than as ceremonial actions which affected the social status of those who supported or rejected an abstinent style of life and a moral condemnation of alcohol. In this study I am more conscious of the mix of the instrumental and the symbolic and much more aware of the complexity of symbolic actions as modes by which public consciousness is itself constructed and defined. Kenneth Burke, the literary critic who has been the seminal figure of dramaturgy, has taught us to be attentive to the language of metaphors by which phenomena are presented, and in this study I am concerned with knowledge, law, medicine, and technology as cultural patterns, as metaphors by which a reality is presented.12 This method of analysis is itself dependent on a metaphor, that of the theater. To see public actions and public policies as theatrical is to emphasize the ritual, ceremonial, and dramatic qualities of actions. It is to see public actions, like plays, as artistic, as constructed within conventions particular to that genre of actions, just as dramas are staged within conventional understandings between audience and performers.13 To see public actions as performances does not negate group interests in the character of those performances, as I stressed in rinding social status interests in the temperance issue. Nor does it absolve the sociologist from looking for self-serving and instrumental elements in otherwise symbolic and ceremonial behavior. Metaphors are important for what they ignore as points of difference as well as for what they include as marks of similarity. 1 am also better informed about language and about the social construction of reality than was the case when I developed the view of symbolic politics more than a decade ago. The belief that language and logic are analyzable only as means of making statements about a factual world has undergone much criticism in recent years under the influence of J. L. Austin and other linguistic philosophers, as well as rhetoricians and linguists (Austin 1962, 1971; Perelman and Olbrechts-Tytecka 1969; Jakobson 1966). To see that language can be itself action is crucial to how 1 interpret the theater of public lifeas modes of presentation of the speaker. To say that "there are nine million alcoholics in the United States" is more than a statement about numbers; it is an expression of the concern of the speaker with alcohol issues and his commitment to their seriousness. Public consciousness is then drawn into the actions of policymakers, experts, and journalists. The rules of public performance "front stage" are not those of private behavior "backstage." In their behavior in the public arena they create the order and consistency with which "society" is endowed. Public authority is engaged in preserving the illusion of a predictable, consistent, and morally controlled universe, one in which the facts about drinking and driving are clear. Consensus exists about heroes and villains, and policy can be made because the moral and rational grounds of authority are discoverable and evident. Jack D. Douglas has phrased my viewpoint well: In such an uncertain and conflictful society, the belief in an absolutist set of moral rules is important not only because it is reassuring and because it helps one to control his nightmares of social chaos and violence, but also because it helps the individuals involved in political action to solve the fundamental problems of constructing or- der... the belief that a rational and ordered society is both possible and already existing gives individuals the belief that their attempts to construct social order will be
successful. [Jack D. Douglas 1971, p. 308] In its utilitarian and rational emphasis, social science has sought to replace mysticism, irrationality, and blind conflict in public policy with reason, knowledge, and scientific method. This study is less than enthusiastic about the success of this Enlightenment attitude. Peter Gay's description of the confidence of and "ideological myopia" of the Enlightenment philosophes is appropriate: "They never wholly discarded that final, most stubborn illusion that bedevils realiststhe illusion that they were free from illusions" (Gay 1966, p. 27).