Stealing Signs: How Broken Rules Structure Identity.

Abstract

I investigate how individuals’ identities and social networks shape not only their knowledge of the law, but their tendencies to obey or disobey it. Using elite amateur baseball players and their illicit relationships with agents as a case study, I reveal a complex social structure that ties agent use to elite status, while at the same time hiding the NCAA rules violations associated with it. I create a dialog between political heuristics (cue theory) and legal consciousness to examine the ways that cultural structures create the conditions for individual cognitive shortcuts to replicate their social world. Many players mimic rational behavior by elites despite differing incentive structures. This dissertation argues that players’ narrative identities shape who they think of as relative peers and encourage them to act in ways that replicate the norm of agent use despite a cost to those who perpetuate it. Baseball’s embedded practices of self-confidence and self-deception affect both the existence of cues and the ways those cues are taken. The cultural roles that players and coaches perform with each other abjure the business of baseball, forcing players into the pattern of agent use and hiding from them alternative ways of playing their social role. Legal consciousness and cue theory offer each other ways to enrich their inquiries. Cue theory gives legal consciousness a new, productive way to think about how people navigate social structures and act in ways that replicate them, while in return getting a way to think about how cues are constructed in the first place, and how identity and culture can shape how we take them. What happens in amateur baseball shines a light on the ways we all try to find our way through complex rule-bound systems, and on how those systems push us along predefined paths.