Institutions are claimed to serve latent signalling functions quite different from their stated purposes, so school is not about learning and medicine is not about health.
Hanson's approach asks what a practice would look like if its stated purpose were the real one, and treats the gap as evidence of a different function, usually signalling loyalty, status or affiliation. The method is productive and unfalsifiable in the same motion, since a gap can always be found and always be read this way.
In practice
- A firm whose training budget produces no measurable capability may still be buying something it values.
- A ritual that persists after its stated purpose is obsolete is doing something the stated purpose never described.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanation is signalling: a practice that would look different if its stated purpose were the real one is serving a latent function instead, usually loyalty, status or affiliation.
- In its favour
- The method has produced testable claims in particular cases, notably the finding that additional medical spending at the margin shows small measured health effects, and it names a real gap between stated and revealed purposes.
- Against it
- It is a general interpretive frame rather than a testable claim: applied to any institution it will produce an answer, the latent function is chosen by the analyst, and it was published on a blog rather than in a reviewed literature.
- Standing
- Published on a blog rather than in a reviewed literature, and spread by linking. A general interpretive frame rather than a testable claim. Applied to any institution it generates a story, and the pattern is difficult to distinguish from cynicism with a formula. Individual applications, such as the medical spending work, have been argued on evidence.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change