Rethinking Analytical Sociology

My current book Rethinking Analytical Sociology has now appeared in print. The book is intended to provide a sympathetic but critical review of analytical sociology as a relatively new sub-discipline within sociology. Here is a video preview of the book.

The book argues that the "generativist" approach offered by analytical sociologists is suitable to a fairly specific range of problems within sociology, and that it has achieved genuine empirical and theoretical successes within that range. However, the field is hampered by an overly rigid commitment to methodological individualism and to a fairly thin theory of the motivations and mental frameworks of the actors who make up social processes. The book also argues that the field also minimizes the "autonomous" causal role that is played in social processes by social arrangements, institutions, and cognitive schemes. Third, the generativist paradigm has led practitioners of analytical sociology to place too much explanatory reliance on agent-based modeling. 

The book generally applauds the importance given by analytical sociologists to the role played in social explanations by well-developed accounts of the causal mechanisms that bring about an outcome of interest. But their commitment to methodological individualism hampers the analytical-sociology tradition from adequately understanding the causal processes in the social world because they are led to insist that "all causal mechanisms take place ultimately at the level of individuals". This is to say, social institutions, normative systems, cultural schemes, or organizational imperatives cannot be invoked as independent social causes or included in descriptions of social mechanisms. And, crucially, it is then impossible to capture the dynamic processes through which structures influence individuals and their actions, and individuals in turn alter some of the characteristics of the structures they inhabit and constitute.

Against these methodological premises, Rethinking Analytical Sociology argues that many tasks of sociological investigation require attention to a "thick" understanding of the actor's mentality (culture, norms, ways of reasoning). Second, many social processes cannot be properly understood without recognizing the dynamic and fluid causal role played by higher-level social structures. And third, agent-based modeling unavoidably requires a level of abstraction about actors and social situations that forces the researcher to ignore important and particular features of both actors and structures. The book suggests, for example, that Doug McAdam's account of the US Civil Rights struggle and extended events like the Montgomery bus boycott cannot be explained on the basis of a fixed set of institutional-context parameters and a simple set of "desire-belief-opportunity" features of the actors. (McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency provides an outstanding example of a comparative historical sociology analysis of an extended, complex, and multilayered social process.)

Rethinking Analytical Sociology closes with a set of problems for sociological research that would currently be difficult to handle within the strictures of existing methodological dogmas in analytical sociology, but for which the tools of analytical sociology could nonetheless contribute fruitfully if these dogmas were relaxed. The examples include -- 

• explaining racial health disparities in the United States, 
• explaining the rapid rise of radical populism in liberal democracies, 
• explaining large technology failures, 
• explaining the pathways through which new disciplines of thought emerge in academic fields, and
• explaining the worldwide surge of migration and how this has led to political and economic turmoil in numerous countries.

Each of these areas of ongoing social processes involves actors who are embedded in history and culture, social arrangements that interact with individual behavior in sometimes unexpected ways, and causal influences that operate on multiple levels of social life. There are some aspects of these problems that are very suitable to generative models, network analysis, and models of contagion from individual to individual; but there are also aspects of these problems that involve dynamic and interactive causal influences between individuals and meso-level institutions and cultural systems.

In short, Rethinking Analytical Sociology offers an appeal for a more pluralistic and collaborative approach to sociology. There are obvious points of intersection between numerous sub-fields of sociology -- for example, the study of contentious politics, comparative historical sociology, or the new institutionalism -- where collaboration would be fruitful. The social world is heterogeneous and contingent, and we need a plurality of theories and methods in order to make sense of the processes and crises we now experience.