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Credit and BlameReview - Credit and Blame
by Charles Tilly
Princeton University Press, 2008
Review by Debbie A. Foster, MLIS
Mar 10th 2009 (Volume 13, Issue 11)

Charles Tilly (1929-2008) was Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. Among many honors, he received the Albert O. Hirschman Award in 2008 from the Social Science Research Council. In 2006 Tilly published Why?, which dealt with social practices of giving reasons. As Tilly suggests in the preface, the current volume, Credit and Blame, can be regarded as a sequel, concerned with social aspects of the assignment of credit and blame. Both books are accessible to a nonacademic readership.

Tilly identifies four factors that are weighed in assigning credit and blame: agency, competence, responsibility, and value of the action, and even provides an "All-Purpose Justice Detector" that can be used to calculate the degree of blame or credit on a scale from -1 (maximum blame) to 0 (neither credit nor blame) to +1 (full credit).

Tilly stresses the significance of stories in social life in general, characterizing stories as "explanatory narratives incorporating limited numbers of actors, just a few actions, and simplified cause-effect accounts in which the actors' actions produce all the significant outcomes" (p. 20). Because stories typically reduce complex webs of cause and effect to simpler accounts that focus on the actions and dispositions of just a few agents, they facilitate the assignment of credit and blame. Culture plays a role in determining what agents are considered plausible or implausible but the basic process is quite similar across cultures and functions at all levels of society from personal to international relations. Throughout the book, points are illustrated with a wide range of examples, from South African witchcraft to the Oscars and the 9/11 Commission (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States).

In this sociological approach, attention is paid to how credit and blame affect "us-them boundaries." Giving credit puts both the receiver and giver of credit on the "good" side of an us-them boundary, for example, while blame is easier to cast to the other side. Sometimes the same action that receives blame from one side will be given credit by the other. One of the asymmetries between credit and blame, however, is that blame tends to sharpen or reinforce us-them boundaries. Thus Tilly especially cautions against collective reparations that would legitimize us-them divisions by writing them into law instead of attempting to overcome them.

Looking more closely at credit, Tilly finds four basic forms for giving credit: tournaments, honors, promotions, and networks, but "credit-giving stories share a common structure. In all stories, responsible, competent performance produced an increase in the value of an activity that insiders share and value. Recognition of the performance sharpens the boundary between worthy insiders and less worthy outsiders. It dramatizes a moral division of the social world." (p. 90)

Whereas "... blamers estimate loss in value of some important activity ... They judge the competence and responsibility of actors for the loss. They weight the loss for that competence and responsibility and seek compensation equal to the weighted loss." (p 93-94)  Tilly notes certain asymmetries between credit and blame, as mentioned above, and I wonder if that might be related to the phenomenon of "loss aversion" in Tversky and Kahneman's prospect theory, in which there is a similar asymmetry in response to prospective losses versus gains.

The book also explores the role of justice in relation to credit and blame, and ends with a chapter on collective memories of "victory, loss and blame."

As Tilly suggests, stories of credit and blame pervade social life and his book provides welcome insights into this significant social phenomenon.

The Social Science Research Council has a website on "Memorials to Credit & Blame" as part of their tributes to Charles Tilly at http://www.ssrc.org/essays/tilly/creditblame.

© 2009 Debbie A. Foster

Debbie A. Foster, MLIS, is a librarian who blogs about books on the mind at http://www.mymindonbooks.com.


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