Globlization and Normative Dissonance

Samuel Barkin

Department of Political Science

University of Florida

P.O. Box 117325

Gainesville, FL 32611

barkin@polisci.ufl.edu

(352) 392-0262, ext. 222

Paper prepared for delivery at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting,

Philadelphia, PA, August 31, 2003

2Introduction

One of the most often talked about contemporary phenomena in international

organization is globalization. A key aspect of globalization is policy harmonization.

Harmonization, in particular, is a central part of the case made against globalization, both by

academics and by activists. At the same time, a generally accepted norm in contemporary

international organization is multilateralism. Students of IO generally look upon multilateralism

as a good thing after all, it means countries cooperating rather than conflicting in areas of

common concern. The irony here is that the overlap between the norm of multilateralism and the

observation of harmonization is really quite large harmonization of policy in areas of common

concern is the natural result of a multilateralist approach to international organization. Why is

the norm of multilateralism then so often viewed as benign, even by some of the people who

view the result, policy harmonization, as problematic?

The argument here is that this apparent contradiction is explained by a case of what I call

normative dissonance. By normative dissonance I mean a situation where actors (and observers)

of international politics hold in common two norms that are not fully mutually compatible. It is

related to the theory of cognitive dissonance, as taken from psychology and political psychology.

There are, however, two key difference. The first is that cognitive dissonance applies to

processes of individual cognition. Normative dissonance works as well through individual

processes of cognition, but describes only those situation where generally held ideas are

dissonant. The second difference is that cognitive dissonance can apply both to information

(data) and to ideas that inform decision-making. Normative dissonance applies only to norms,

not to cognitive inputs more generally.

3The two norms that are dissonant in the case of harmonization and multilateralism are the

idea that the social contract is central to legitimate governance, and the idea that nationalism and

national self-determination are the underpinnings of legitimate sovereignty. The social

contractarian norm, when applied at the international level, suggests that rule-making by

common consent, which is to say multilateralist harmonization, is the most legitimate form of

global governance. But the nationalist norm generates a negative reaction to the resultant

harmonization. The tensions between harmonization and multilateralism in the debate on

globalization can be traced back to tensions, mutual incompatibilities, between these two central

normative structures underlying contemporary governance.

This paper will first discuss these two normative structures specifically, and underline

their mutual incompatibilities. It will then discuss normative dissonance more generally, and

posit ways in which psychological and social theory in international relations might interact.

Finally, it will suggest some of the effects, both theoretical and practical, of this case of

conflicting norms.

Social Contracts and Nationalism

The two particular norms in question here are the social contract and nationalism, the

former underlying the appeal of multilateralism and the latter underlying the reaction against

harmonization. The nationalist norm is that each self-identified group has the right to rule itself

as it sees fit, without outside interference. The social contract norm is that government should be

by common consent, to the common good of the governed. Both of these norms have been

central to the development of popular sovereignty, and the two are in fact perfectly compatible,

4even mutually reinforcing, in the realm of the development of popular sovereignty.1 The very

idea of popular sovereignty, in fact, implies both: that the people (the nation) have the right to

decide for themselves (social contract).2 The two norms do not necessarily overlap. There can

be nationalist governance in the absence of norms of social contract, as is the case in the more

virulent cases of nationalism, particularly its national socialist variants. And there can be social

contract without nationalism. Lockes social contract was not inherently limited to national

groups, whereas Rousseaus social contract was in ways designed sub-nationally, being best

suited to politics of civic, rather than national, size.3

But there is clear potential for overlap between the two norms, particularly between what

Ernst Haas calls liberal nationalism4 and what might be called the liberal democracy approach to

social contracting, with its emphasis on property, the rule of law, and representative democracy.

It is these two variants of the respective ideas that provide much of the normative structure for

contemporary sovereignty. Statements of this normative structure can be found, among other

places, in the various human rights treaties that a large majority of the worlds states have

signed.5 These generally list both the right to self-determination and to the components of liberal

democracy listed above. As long as nationalist norms allow for the protection of the social

contract rights of minorities, as liberal nationalism does, and social contract norms allow for the

1 On the development of popular sovereignty, see Martin Wight, Systems of States

(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977).2 Lee Buchheit in fact sees these two norms as integral parts of the norm of self-

determination; he labels them external and internal self-determination respectively. Buchheit, Seccession: The Legitimacy of Self-Determination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 13-16.

3 See, for example, the discussion of Rousseau in Lewis Mumford, The City in History:

Its Origins, Its Transformations, and its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961), p. 261.4 Ernst B. Haas, Nationalism, Liberalism, and Progress, Vol. 1: The Rise and Decline of

Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 19-21.5 See, for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles 6-11, 17, and 21.

5expression of group self-determination, as liberal democracy does, the two norms are not only

mutually compatible, they are mutually reinforcing.

This mutual compatibility, however, only works within individual states. There is likely

to be no problem with dissonance between these two norms, then, as long as it is generally

accepted that a different set of rules works internationally, that norms of state behavior to other

states are different from norms of behavior among individuals within the state.6 But part of the

process of globalization is the internationalization, the application to international organization,

of the two normative structures, and they are not as compatible internationally as they are

nationally.

This distinction between the realm of the domestic and the realm of the international is

easily maintained with respect to the norm of nationalism. After all, nationalism is all about

making distinctions between the us-group and the them-group. Even liberal nationalism, with its

protections for minorities from the national majority, is still premised on a distinction between

those within the national group and those without it.7

The distinction can be more problematic with respect to social contract theory. It is

somewhat sustainable with respect to some approaches to social contract theory, particularly

those of the modern continental theorists. Rousseaus social contract, for example, is viable only

insofar as the contractors have a common general will.8 This does not require an out-group, in

6 It has in fact been the historical pattern that these two normative realisms be separate,

that legitimate behavior with respect to the in-group be different from legitimate behavior with respect to the out-group.

7 See for example Haas discussion of nationalism in Nationalism, Liberalism, and

Progress, chapter 2.8 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Political Writings, trans. Frederick Watkins (Madison: The

University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 25 (or, in other words, Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book II, chapter I).

6the way that nationalism does, but suggests a relatively small polity, and hence the need for

many separate polities.

The distinction is much less sustainable, however, with respect to the English, or

Lockean, tradition of social contract theory, the variant of social contract theory most compatible

with liberal nationalism.9 In this tradition, the barriers among countries are practical ones rather

than philosophical ones. This tradition assumes the centrality of the autonomous individual,

what C.B. Macpherson called the possessive individual,10 to political life, and sees the role of the

state as protecting that autonomy to the greatest extent possible that is compatible with the

autonomy of others. There is in this tradition no group, no national, no general will, that is

politically prior to the autonomous individual. As such, there are no inherent philosophical

barriers to the social contract operating at the level of the global polity. There are practical

barriers, both technological and social. But as these barriers are lowered, the limitation of social-

contract groups to national boundaries makes less and less sense.

In short, then, the compatibility between the two norms at the domestic level is clear, as

long as national rule is suitably liberal. But the idea of the social contract, at least in its English

variant, can also be applied to an international polity, whereas the idea of nationalism does not

make sense applied to an international polity (it would argue for breaking it up into national

polities). In other words, the one norm mitigates towards the creation of an international polity

as barriers to effective governance on a global scale are overcome. The other norm mitigates

towards the maintenance of separate and mutually exclusive political units, and is therefore a

barrier to the creation of an effective international polity.

9 See the discussion in Haas, Nationalism, Liberalism, and Progress, pp. 42-49.

10 C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke

(Oxford: Clarendon press, 1962).

7This distinction is becoming increasingly relevant, because the English tradition of social

contract theory provides the philosophical underpinning of neoliberal, or Washington

Consensus, globalization.11 By neoliberal globalization I mean the current pattern of what has

been called competitive liberalism,12 in which policies and regulations are harmonized across

countries to reduce as much as possible barriers to market exchange. This is in contrast to the

Bretton-Woods era pattern of embedded liberalism, in which international infrastructure was

provided multilaterally, but much more scope was allowed for state interference in markets for

the purpose of social welfare.13 The diffusion of neoliberalism norms, and neoliberal

globalization, since World War Two,, and especially since the demise of Bretton Woods, goes

hand in hand with the diffusion of English social contract norms (note that I am not making a

cause-and-effect argument here; rather, I am making a co-constitution argument). It also, not

coincidentally, mirrors the rise of the practice (lagged several years behind the norm) of

multilateralism.

The norm of multilateralism is basically the English version of social contract theory in

which it is states, rather than individuals, who are the participants in the contract. Neoliberal

globalization is the process of regulating international interchange through an analogue to the

social contract in which it is corporate actors that are the primary participants in the political

process. In some instances of harmonization these corporate actors are non-governmental, either

11 For the argument that what we refer to as globalization is in fact a particularly

neoliberal form of globalization, see Kathleen McNamara, Globalization is What We Make of It? The Political Construction of Market Imperatives, paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, 1997.

12 The phrase competitive liberalism is taken from Kathleen McNamara, The Currency

of Ideas: Monetary Politics in the European Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

13 John Gerard Ruggie, International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded

Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order, in International Organization vol. 36 (1982), pp. 379-415.

8firms or NGOs.14 But the most celebrated instances of harmonization the actors are states.15 In a

way, social contract theory fits better at the interstate than domestic level, because it is a system

of actual, rather than implied, contracts. Social contract theorists generally accept that

individuals cannot for practical reasons all participate in the continued negotiation and

renegotiation of the social contract. It is thus an implied contract, one that citizens agree to

implicitly rather than explicitly. But, with some exceptions,16 states actually can opt out of

individual bits of the multilateral contract; they can choose which aspects of the social contract

to accept and which to reject, and still remain within the system.

The GATT provides a useful illustration of multilateralism as social contract. It began as

an agreement not to discriminate among trading partners, driven by a largely defensive logic

(defensive both against the beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies of the Great Depression and

against the security effects of the exclusive economic blocs that preceded World War Two).17 It

was multilateral, but it was a fairly basic multilateralism, more at the level of principle associated

with embedded liberalism than at the level of regulatory detail associated with neoliberal

globalization. It was not until the tail end of the Bretton Woods period, with the Tokyo Round

agreement, that the GATT began to be an exercise in neoliberal globalization. Since then, both

the regulatory scope of the GATT (and more recently the WTO) and the degree of specific

14 For example, see Dale Murphy, Bringing the Firm Back in and Elizabeth DeSombre,

NGOs and IGOs, Cooperation and Convergence on the High Seas, respectively, both papers presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Boston, August 2002.

15 See for example Daniel Drezner, Who Rules: State Power and the Structure of Global

Regulation, paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Boston, August 2002.

16 These exceptions being primarily customary international law and those issues of

international security that fall under the purview of authoritative collective security organizations.

17 Samuel Barkin, Social Construction and the Logic of Money: Financial Predominance

and International Economic Leadership (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), chapter 6.

9regulatory harmonization called for by its rules have consistently expanded. But they have

expanded in ways explicitly agreed to by member countries in multilateral negotiations, and

member countries retain the right to withdraw from all of, or in some contexts from specific

instances of, the rules.

The GATT, a set of rules for international trade, is a good illustrative case because social

contract theory, at least in its English variant, is designed to create a market society. Individuals

within the society are thus committed to participate in a market society; social contract theory

presupposes that they want to participate, as an assumption about human nature.18 Social

contract theory at the international level similarly involves states in, and presupposes that they

want to participate in, a global market. In other words, it presupposes collective decision-

making about a collective (global) economy rather than individual decision-making about

distinct national economies. This allows for the benefits at the international level that social

contract theorists ascribe to government. But it undermines nationalism.

The nationalist norm allows national governments to make political/executive decisions

about national policy. The social contract norm allows the national government to participate in

the international legislative process, but not, within those areas governed by the international

social contract, to take political action that is dissonant with the legislative result (this applies to

those governments that choose to participate in the contract. Some choose to not participate, but

very few). In other words, the social contract norm applied internationally leads to state

participation in global rules that states must then obey, while the nationalist norm suggests a state

not bound by common regulation, not bound in its internal behavior by international law. Hence

18 This can be traced back to Lockes definition of a state of perfect freedom as the ability

to dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 309 (Second Treatise, Chap. II, 4).

10

the normative dissonance. The norm of government by social contract, applied, as it logically

should be, at the international level, is one of consensual multilateralism. The norm of national

self-government is one of national autonomy.

Normative Dissonance

What happens when two sets of norms, two sets of commonly held intersubjective

understandings about the legitimate basis of governance, are incompatible? Intersubjective

beliefs differ from subjective beliefs only in that they are held in common by a group of people

interacting within a system, in this case the international political system. As such, one way of

getting at the effects of norm incompatibility in international politics is through the cumulative

effects of this incompatibility on subjective, which is to say individual, perception. The place to

look for discussions of individual perception is in the literature on political psychology, and the

central theories presented in this literature on incompatible perceptual inputs include the theories

of cognitive dissonance and cognitive consistency.19

The theory of cognitive dissonance suggests that people are made psychologically

uncomfortable by dissonant, or mutually incompatible, information.20 This is particularly the

case once people have committed themselves to a particular course of action. The theory

suggests that once people have committed themselves, they will attempt to justify their decision

by re-evaluating the information in a way that minimizes the dissonance. Two ways of doing

19 See, for example, Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).20

Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 13.

11

this are by maximizing the difference between the dissonant pieces of information, and by

distinguishing dissonant information from underlying beliefs.21 Maximizing the difference

between the dissonant pieces of information involves re-evaluating the information after the

decision has been made, to increase post facto the perceived benefits of the choice made and

decrease the benefits of the choice not made. Distinguishing dissonant information from

underlying beliefs means that if you believe both A and B, and have to choose between behavior

based on either A or B, you are likely to distance the behavior you did not choose from the

underlying belief. This allows you to simultaneously hold both beliefs and minimize dissonance.

Theories of cognitive consistency, meanwhile, suggest a strong tendency for people to see what

they expect to see and to assimilate incoming information to pre-existing images.22

The concept of normative dissonance draws on these theories, to suggest that people deal

with incompatible norm sets, or more precisely with dissonant aspects of commonly held norm

sets, by using similar cognitive strategies. The concept of normative dissonance differs from the

theory of cognitive dissonance in a number of ways. It applies only to dissonant norms (beliefs

about how things should be done), not to dissonant informational input more broadly. And it

applies only when these norms are intersubjective, are held in common by various actors within a

system. Normative dissonance thus refers to ways in which people tend, when faced with

incompatible norms, to react, to deal with the incompatibility. Once they have made a decision

favoring one norm over the other, they should tend to redefine the norm not chosen to make it

less appealing, to distance the behavior or opinion not chosen from the underlying norm, and to

assimilate new information in ways that support both the redefinition and the distancing.

21 Jervis, Perception and Misperception, pp. 382-406.

22 Ibid., p. 117.

12

A number of limitations on the concept of normative dissonance should be noted at this

point. The first is that the theory of cognitive dissonance from which it is drawn, like all

psychological theories, it is somewhat indeterminate and imprecise. It yields statistically

significant results in laboratory settings, but it can be difficult to tell how strong the predicted

effects will be in real-world settings, and to predict how any given individual will react.

Normative dissonance averages out individual effects, because it looks at cognitive tendencies

across the political system in question, but other general problems faced by political psychology

approaches remain. The second limitation is that cognitive dissonance is a post-decision theory,

and it is unclear what counts as a decision. In other words, it is unclear whether deciding on an

opinion on an issue counts as the sort of decision that might trigger the behavior associated with

cognitive dissonance, or whether some form of action is required.23 Finally, the concept of

normative dissonance, as suggested above, aggregates from patterns of individual cognition. It

does not capture any interactive, social, or systemic effects. In particular, it is not clear a priori

whether these effects will reinforce the cognitive effects of normative dissonance (through such

phenomena as groupthink)24 or moderate them (through such phenomena as communicative

reasoning).25

Norms and Globalization

23 Jervis, Perception and Misperception, p. 385.

24 Groupthink would reinforce these effects by creating separate groups around each

norm, that lose the ability to communicate successfully with each other. On groupthink, see Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of policy Decisions and Fiascoes, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982).

25 On communicative reasoning, see Thomas Risse, Lets Argue! Communicative

Action in World Politics, in International Organization vol. 54 (2000), pp. 1-40.

13

What would the concept of normative dissonance suggest about the incompatibilities of

nationalism and social contract theory when these norms are applied at the level of global

governance? It would suggest that we should expect proponents of multilateralism to distance

themselves from nationalist norms, to argumentatively weaken the connection between

harmonization and the undermining of legitimate nationalism, and to interpret information about

globalization in ways compatible with social contract theory. Similarly, we should expect

opponents of harmonization to distance themselves from social contract norms, to

argumentatively weaken the connection between multilateralism and social contract, and to

interpret information about globalization in ways compatible with liberal nationalism. And in

fact we see exactly this happening.

Proponents of multilateralism tend to take one of two approaches to dealing with the

contradiction between nationalist and social contract norms. The first is to distance themselves

from nationalist norms, by focusing on the problems of nationalism, and by associating

nationalism generally with its more virulent forms. In one of the seminal academic discussions

of the norm of multilateralism, for example, John Ruggie repeatedly presents as the antithesis to

multilateralism the economic system that Nazi Germany created with several Eastern European

countries in the 1930s.26 To the extent that the Nazi movement is commonly seen as the ultimate

in virulent, unacceptable nationalism, this juxtaposition serves to cognitively reinforce

multilateralist norms by radicalizing the dissonant nationalist norms.

The second approach weakens the link between multilateralism and the undermining of

legitimate nationalism in a way that allows harmonization to be interpreted in a way that is not

dissonant with national self-interest and autonomy. This is the rational structuralist approach to

26 John Gerard Ruggie, Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution, in

International Organization vol. 46 (1992), pp. 561-598.

14

multilateralism, often referred to as neoliberal institutionalism, or simply institutionalism.27 This

approach assumes a national interest that is most efficiently furthered by multilateral

cooperation. If liberal nationalism is assumed to favor multilateral cooperation, or at least the

sorts of economic goals best furthered by multilateral cooperation, then any state that does not

favor these goals is by definition illiberally nationalist.28 Harmonization and liberal nationalism

thereby become compatible by definition, and normative dissonance is averted. We see the same

effect in practice in the EU, with integrationists (and the European Commission) dedicated to

neoliberal functionalism within Europe, leaving little room for any nationalism that does not

conform with neoliberal norms (although at the same time being much more accepting of

nationalist norms as they might apply at the European level).

Those who, conversely, oppose neoliberal globalization, are, in effect, arguing for a

renationalization (or relocalization) of international politics and international political

economy.29 They tend to rely on one of two approaches to dealing with the dissonance of

nationalist and social contractarian norms. The first is to distance processes of harmonization

from social contract norms by focusing on the more communitarian aspects of social contract

theory, at the expense of the autonomous individuality of the English variant. Thus the behavior

being criticized, harmonization, remains dissonant with social contract theory, but the theory

itself is marginalized by emphasizing what is seen to be its most problematic aspect.

27 The seminal work of this approach is Robert Keohanes After Hegemony: Cooperation

and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). The defining assumptions of this approach include rationality, state-centrism, and collective action problems.

28 James Fearon, beginning with institutionalist assumptions, argues that states that do not

favor cooperation over conflict are pathological. Fearon, Rationalist Explanations for War, in International Organization vol. 49 (1995), pp. 379-414.

29 E.g. Jerry Mander and Edward Glodsmith, eds., The Case Against the Global

Economy, and For a Turn Toward the Local (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996). The title speaks of the local, but in practice this often means the national.

15

Harmonization itself, in this view, is not what is causing dissonance, but rather the neoliberalism

that has come into international relations under the guise of harmonization.30

The second approach to dealing with this dissonance is by separating the behavior being

criticized, harmonization, from the norm, social contract. One of the most common ways of

doing this is by focusing on democratic process. Democracy as currently practiced to a large

degree comes to us through social contract theory; they are part of the same general norm set.

Yet opponents of globalization often focus exclusively on democracy, minimizing other aspects

of the social contract (such as due process and the rule of law) in ways that are generally not

done in domestic political discourse. For example, many criticisms of international judicial and

monetary institutions, such as the WTOs Dispute Settlement Mechanism and the IMF, focus on

their lack of democratic process.31 Yet the equivalent domestic processes, courts and central

banks, are intentionally undemocratic, and are accepted as justifiably so.

Similarly, international organizations are often criticized for not having directly elected

executives, and not having legislators elected by the population at large.32 But the former is true

of Parliamentary systems generally, and of a wide variety of administrative and executive

organizations within most governments. The latter is true in any direct-election (as opposed to

proportional representation) system. The legislative functions of international organizations are

fulfilled, by and large, by representatives of governments, which in turn are supposed to

represent their populations, much like the legislative functions in most democratic legislatures.

30 For an example of this line of argument with respect to international environmental

governance, see Lee-Anne Broadhead, International Environmental Politics: The Limits of Green Diplomacy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2002).

31 See, for example, David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, 2nd ed.

(Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2001), pp. 169-169.32

A good example of this is the discussion of the democratic deficit in the European Union. This is not suggest that such a deficit is not there, rather that it probably exists in many of the EUs constituent countries to a similar degree.

16

There is a problem of representatives of countries where the government is not democratic, but

this problem is rarely at the core of critiques of harmonization. In other words, with respect both

to the executive and judicial functions of international organizations, and with respect to their

legislative functions, normative dissonance is addressed by holding international society to

standards that are not applied to national society.

Conclusions

The normative dissonance between nationalism and the neoliberal social contract points

to a real problem with the debate about globalization. It suggests that many of the disputes about

the course and development of contemporary international organization, particularly with respect

to policy and regulatory harmonization, and simply not resolvable, because the norms really are

to an extent mutually incompatible. It reminds those supportive of international organizations as

engines of harmonization that nationalism is not an atavistic idea that is going away. Liberal

nationalism is a key component of the normative structure of contemporary sovereignty, and is in

fact undergoing a rehabilitation in places like Germany and Japan, where for a generation

nationalism of any kind was considered problematic. It points out to those who consider

harmonization to be problematic that processes of international harmonization are not as far

removed from accepted patterns of domestic governance in liberal democracies as they are often

portrayed. More generally, it suggests to both sides of the debate that successfully engaging the

other side of the debate requires overcoming the psychological tendencies associated with

dissonance and tackling the question of norm incompatibility directly and communicatively. At

the same time, as long as both nationalism and the neoliberal variant of the social construct

remain core elements of the normative structure of global politics, the conflict between these

17

norms will likely continue to play itself out as a profound dissatisfaction about the nature and

course of globalization.

On a theoretical level, two conclusions are worth pointing out. The first is that, quite

simply, norms need not be mutually compatible. Conflicting intersubjective ideas about

legitimate governance can be held by the same groups of people at the same time. No-one in the

constructivist community (to my knowledge) has denied this, but at the same time few have

discussed the problem explicitly. The study of how norms work in international relations

requires looking not only at the effects of individual norms and norm sets, but also at the

processes of interaction among norm sets, whether or not they are mutually compatible. This

paper suggests one way of doing so, but other ways are necessary as well, to get at the effects of

norm interaction that cannot be aggregated from the individual level.

Finally, the second theoretical conclusion is that there is scope for successful cross-

fertilization between the constructivist and political psychology research communities. Norms

may be intersubjective phenomena, social constructs that cannot be reduced to processes of

individual cognition. But it remains the case that in order to be intersubjective, they must also be

subjective, be held, accepted, and internalized by individuals. To the extent that political

psychology can show the ways in which individuals tend to deal with cognitive inputs, it can

illuminate the patterns of subjectivization that underlie the creation and acceptance of

intersubjective norms. Theories of cognitive dissonance and congnitive consistency are but two

of many such theories that might prove fruitful in this process.