These basic sociological ideas were lost not by accident, but because sociologists did not allow the definition of some activities as "wrong" (whatever term was used to register that judgment) to become an object of investigation. Who successfully defined some activities as deviant and how they did that were not discussable questions. Conventional social scientists treated those definitions as obvious or God-given...
In the same way, studies on education often focused on why students did not learn what they ought to have learned in school...They never looked for the answer in the teachers or in the organizations of school life...
In short, sociologists forget their own theories when anything important in the world is at stake. They fail to follow the clear instructions those theories imply, and to look at all the people and organizations that contribute to a result.
The Machine Trick is meant to deal with this problem, to push us into not leaving out crucial elements of the situation...Here is the trick:
Design the machine that will produce the result your analysis indicates occurs routinely in the situation you have studied. Make sure you have included all the parts - all the social gears, cranks, belts, buttons, and other widgets - and all the specifications of materials and their qualities necessary to get the desired result. Since social scientists often study "problem situations," the machine's product will often be something we wouldn't in fact want to produce, and the exercise of figuring out how to produce it is inevitably ironic, but that shouldn't prevent us from taking it seriously...
We have to do what people in the computer business call "reverse engineering". We will take this machine apart, find out how it works, what the parts are, how the parts connect, and what goes on inside the black box, so that we too can cause exactly this wonderful result to occur...
Remember that we don't really want these results, but engage in this machine-designing exercise as a way of systematically looking for everything that contributes to their occurrence.
It works best when the social world acts in a very repetitive way, delivering essentially similar products by following a systematic procedure, no matter how complicated that might be.引自 Imagery - Society as a Machine
表示其中内容是对原文的摘抄