![]() One extreme of these cultures is better conceptualized as “past-oriented” than the other. Consider a continuum of sociological institutions ranging from the rigid, formal, bureaucratized, and traditional to the flexible, casual, improvisational, and innovative. It opens the question whether Parsons’s concept of culture is too past-oriented, or if some cultures, more than others, may be more past-oriented, rigid, or reified. The criticism of Parsons as being ‘past-oriented, objectivist and reified’ is striking. The aim of Parsons, and to some extent also Nissenbaum, is to remove the contingency by establishing reliable institutions. Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity theory depends rather critically on consensus around norms and values the appropriateness of information norms is a feature of sociological institutions accountable ultimately to shared values. It is striking that in the first pages of this article, Hildebrandt begins by challenging “contextual integrity” as a paradigm for privacy (a nod, if not a direct reference, to Nissenbaum (2009)), astutely pointing out that this paradigm makes privacy a matter of delinking data so that it is not reused across contexts. This paragraph says a lot, both about “the problem” posed by “the double contingency”, the possibility of solution through consensus around norms and values, and the rejection of Parsons. As could be expected, Parsons’s focus on consensus and his urge to resolve the contingency have been criticized for its ‘past-oriented, objectivist and reified concept of culture’, and for its implicitly negative understanding of the double contingency. Consensus on the norms and values that regulate human interaction is Parsons’s solution to the problem of double contingency, and thus explains the existence of social institutions. The circularity that comes with the double contingency is thus resolved in the consensus that is consolidated in sociological institutions that are typical for a particular culture. His point is that the uncertainty that is inherent in the double contingency requires the emergence of social structures that develop a certain autonomy and provide a more stable object for the coordination of human interaction. Parsons was less interested in personal identity than in the construction of social institutions as proxies for the coordination of human interaction. I just now happened on this very succinct account of double contingency in Hildebrandt (2013), which I wanted to reproduce here. ![]() ![]() I’ve tried to piece together double contingency before, and am finding myself re-encountering these ideas in several projects.
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