Lindenberg, Siegwart

Siegwart Michael Lindenberg was born in Munich in 1941 and educated in both Germany and the United States, receiving an MA in sociology from the Mannheim School of Economics in 1966 and a PhD in sociology from Harvard in 1971. His first faculty position was assistant professor of sociology at Princeton from 1969 to 1973. He then moved to Groningen University, where he is currently professor of sociology. While at Groningen University, he cofounded and codirected the Interuniversity Center for Social Science theory and Methodology (ICS), a major research graduate education center focusing on developing and extending formal social theory, and making that theory relevant to public policy issues.

The range of Lindenberg's work is broad, including macro-social analyses of revolts and social revolutions, the role of the state in structuring market economies, determinants of group solidarity, and female labor market participation. It also includes organizational-level analyses of cooperation and conflict in contractual relationships, governance of employment relationships, and contributions to the new institutional economics. Finally, it includes microsocial-level analyses of preferences and preference formation, selective attention, and shortversus long-term rationality. Despite the diversity of these topics, Lindenberg's body of work is based on a tightly integrated theoretic core, and thereby demonstrates the broad scope of this body of theory. The key ingredients of this core are a theory of bounded rationality (Lindenberg 2001a) and a theory of interdependencies and groups (Lindenberg 1997). There is only room to present the former in limited detail.

His analyses depart from the core assumption of behavior as goal-oriented activity, an orientation that places him within the theoretic domain of rational choice. He fleshes out this conception in ways that represent a stark departure from the rational maximizing models of neoclassical economics. A consistent theme running through all of Lindenberg's work is the challenge of reconciling rigor with realism. That is, how to construct models simple enough to remain analytically tractable while not being so unrealistic as to be trivial. To provide guidance in striking an appropriate balance, he introduced what he terms the “method of decreasing abstraction” (Lindenberg 1992a), a [Page 451]theory construction principle that underlies much of his work. This principle is based on two insights. First, it is incorrect to merely dismiss the economist's conception of rationality as incorrect, because there are identifiable contexts within which it fits quite well, including some of the traditional explanatory domains of economics and even some areas of traditional concern to sociologists. Instead, analyses should identify the contexts in which these simpler, unbounded, conceptions of rationality are appropriate (e.g., generally conditions where information is abundantly available and motives are instrumental) versus contexts in which they break down and more complex bounded concepts of rationality are needed. Second, he emphasizes the need to do more than merely contrast the (generally) unrealistic instrumentally oriented economic view of social actors with an equally (generally but not always) unrealistic stereotype of social actors as oversocialized creatures who absorb their beliefs and preferences from those around them. Instead, he proposes a sequential form of analysis in which simple rational maximizing approaches are the models of first resort. They are given this position of priority because of their superior tractability. If they fail to provide an adequate explanation, as can generally be expected to be the case, the analyst does not then switch to an oversocialized view of actors, but instead draws from a hierarchically arranged menu of options for making the model both more complex and more realistic. In essence, this menu involves fleshing out the vague conception of bounded rationality propounded by Herbert Simon, based on specific mechanisms by which rationality departs from simple optimizing. It is in identifying these mechanisms that Lindenberg made his contributions to microsocial analysis, and it is in applying these principles to larger-scale phenomena that he has made important contributions to organizational and macrosocial analysis. Having these fleshed-out conceptions of bounded rationality also allows one to judge how bounded even the simplest model must be in any particular analysis (using what he calls “the principle of sufficient complexity”; see Lindenberg 2001a).

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