>Resent-date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 06:40:51 -0005
>Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 03:36:53 -0700
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>From: Ron Roizen <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Ramblings on reading Blomqvist (1998)
>Sender: Kettil Bruun Society <[log in to unmask]>
>Approved-by: Ron Roizen <[log in to unmask]>
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>Comments: cc: Jan Blomqvist <[log in to unmask]>
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>I have a special affinity for Jan Blomqvist's recent and excellent paper,
>"The 'Swedish model' of dealing with alcohol problems: historical trends
>and future challenges" (Contemporary Drug Problems 25:253-320, 1998)
>because Jan tackles in it the same problem I've tied to tackle in the U.S.
>context -- namely, how do we get a conceptual handle on the changing
>conceptualization, social management, and institutional structuring of the
>(so-called) alcohol problem over historical time?  I see Jan's paper,
>therefore, as offering something of a parallel to, for example, in my "How
>Does the Nation's 'Alcohol Problem' Change From Era to Era? Stalking the
>Social Logic of Problem-Definition Transformations Since Repeal"
>(http://www.roizen.com/ron/postrepeal.htme)--though, and to be fair, Jan's
>paper is a  more theoretically ambitious enterprise.
>
>I read Jan's paper, therefore, with two comparative questions or planes in
>mind:  (1) How does the Swedish history he describes compare and contrast
>with the U.S. history? and (2) How well does the theoretical framework Jan
>offers work --both as a logical framework, per se, and as it may apply to
>U.S. transformations?  There were, to be sure, many points of similarity
>between the Swedish and U.S. historical stories -- especially as his
>account approached closer and closer to the present.  Here in the U.S., for
>example, we've also seen an increasingly money-minded sensibility toward
>alcohol treatment with the rise of managed care, the legacy of the
>recession of the early 1990s, and a return of the "moral model" to the
>national debate over substance abuse.  Jan's account of the 1980s in Sweden
>also had close resonances with contemporaneous U.S. changes--as for example
>are recounted in Schmidt and Wiesner's (1993) excellent summary of the
>decade ("Developments in Alcoholism Treatment: A Ten Year Review," pp.
>369-396 in Marc Galanter (ed.), Recent Developments in Alcoholism, vol. 11,
>New York: Plenum, 1993).  Such echoes across national settings beg for (a)
>explanation that involves a trans-national set of explanatory factors or
>(b) an internal historical logic that in effect generates the same
>transformations at roughly the same historical moments or (c) a bit of
>both.  Such echoes also call for close attention to how national situations
>actually vary in the details and nuances--a focus made possible by Jan's
>paper's rich supply of nuanced detail.  It makes me want to assemble a very
>fine-grained chart organized by decade, by similarities, and by differences
>in the Swedish/U.S. unfolding alcohol-social-management story.
>
>But yesterday I was sitting in my car in the parking lot in Coeur d'Alene,
>waiting for my wife who had gone in for a clinic appointment, and a
>different set of thoughts came over me re Jan's paper.  I started asking
>myself:  Where are we ever going to find general theory for Jan's problem.
>This prompted a feeling of (let's call it) measured hopelessness about the
>prospects.  After all, the more nuanced the explanatory situation, the more
>dimensions are potentially brought into explanatory play.  I was reminded,
>sitting there, of the excitement of, as an undergrad sociology student in
>the Sixties, reading for the first time Fuller and Meyers (1941) paper
>arguing that social problems had discernable "natural histories"--taking
>them through predictable stages of development ("The natural history of a
>social problem," _Am. Sociol. Rev._ 6:320-329).  And I wondered about their
>simple and yet remarkable insight as it applied to "the alcohol problem."
>What might be the "end stage" of the alcohol problem--do societies rattle
>around with this or that tension surrounding alcohol until they at last end
>up with either the normalization of wine-drinking cultures or the
>abstinence of strictly Muslim states?  Or was "natural history" an idea
>that just didn't apply l to alcohol--because of "the problem's" enduring
>presence in one form or another?
>
>Beyond "natural history" theory is cyclical theory--which we have available
>in for example Blocker's (1989) loosely structured account of U.S. alcohol
>history as well as in Bruun-ian notion that change in this social arena
>consists of a Mad Hatter-like tea-party table with place settings for
>different institutional rubrics all around -- and "history" thus comprises
>a (senseless?) tea-party progression from one setting to the next as the
>utility and patience of each institutional rubric is exhausted or shown to
>be lacking.  This was the spirit, I think, of Robin Room's use of the term
>"intractable" in his dissertation's title:  namely, the "alcohol problem"
>is always out there -- like a stubborn ghost -- and human society simply
>shifts its social definition from institutional assumptions to
>institutional assumptions around Bruun's tea-party table.
>
>And yet reading Jan's paper also suggests the metaphor of some kind of
>on-going, alcohol-arena grand opera -- with new ACTS (outfitted with new
>characters, new melodies, and new sets) always somehow coming forward to
>fill the future's stage.  The opera is unending -- and our task becomes
>that of (a) opera critic (i.e., evaluating the merits and demerits of the
>latest act) and (b) cultural seer (i.e., trying to decipher--as Jan does at
>the close of his paper--where the hidden cultural-political Mozart may be
>taking the opera next).  Or is a hidden Mozart not the place to focus the
>attention at all, but rather the changing kaleidoscope of the cast of
>characters that animate and struggle to find useful alliances and new
>patches of common ground in the unfolding story?  Focussing on the changing
>cast of players has led me before to explore Paul Sabatier's "advocacy
>coalition framework" as it sheds light on changes in the alcohol problems
>social arena (see, e.g., "An advocacy coalition framework of policy change
>and the role of policy-oriented learning therein," _Policy Sciences_
>21:129-168, 1988 and "Toward better theories of the policy process,"
>_Political Science & Politics_ 24:147-156, 1991).  Resource Mobilization
>Theory also represents, I believe, a potentially useful but largely
>untapped realm of potential theoretical structuring for the "change
>problem" (e.g., Morris, A.D. & Mueller, C.M. (eds), _Frontiers in Social
>Movement Theory_, 1992).
>
>All this (useless?) rumination sprang, I suppose, from the sense of rich
>complexity that Jan's paper offers.  This symbolic arena is crowded with
>social handling possibilities and their moral-conceptual coordinates.  Even
>in one perspective's heyday the other perspectives are still there, are
>still structuring some aspect of the situation, and stand ready to exert
>more influence if the contextual circumstances change in a direction
>favorable to them.  And so we have overlapping, layered, and
>interpenetrating "frameworks" to try to comprehend -- in a complexity even
>more greatly elaborated perhaps in Valverde's (1998) recent book.  And like
>Valverde, we might be wise to put trying to understand "the alcohol
>problem's" transformations on hold for a time and focus instead on how that
>"problem" offers a lens for inventorying and structuring the staggering
>complexity and multi-faceted character of social control, per se.
>
>But some hints of theoretical possibility shine through too in Jan's paper.
> Seeing the old jockeying with the new (and on surprisingly equal terms) in
>Jan's paper makes me more convinced than ever that a general
>historical-structural theory of this domain will incorporate the strain
>between modernization and traditionalism -- and "the alcohol arena's"
>peculiar quality as a symbolic outpost of traditionalist cultural capital
>(coming and going!).  We also see in Jan's account the prospect of using
>alcohol as a medium for viewing border disputes and warfare across the
>major institutional domains and baronies of modern society.  And finally,
>and of course, there is the merit to a continuing exploration and
>discussion of Jan's own four-fold moral-conceptual model of the property
>space that this theater of historical change occupies.
>
>I think it was T.H. Huxley who paid Darwin's _Origin of Species_ the
>compliment that "He'd liked it so much he'd wished he'd authored it
>himself!"  I had the same feeling reading Jan's paper!
>
>Ron
>
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