In March I presented some of these ideas online at the Institute for Analytic Sociology in Sweden, and in April I had the chance to make several specific arguments on this subject to small groups of students and faculty in Como and Torino, with lively discussions following. In Como I focused on the need for a much more nuanced and “thick” theory of the actor, using the example of the US civil rights movement and the current surge of right-wing extremism in many liberal democracies. In Torino I focused on organizations as “meso-level” social entities with dynamic and relatively autonomous causal properties. This is a view rejected by the founders of analytic sociology, who champion a generativist view of the social world that leaves no place for relatively autonomous meso-level social entities. Attributions of apparent causal properties to meso-level structure should ideally be replaced with the individual-level mechanisms that constitute these properties. I argued that this position makes it impossible to explain the sociology of episodes like the Montgomery bus boycott, where dynamic organizations played a crucial role in bringing about the course of events. Doug McAdam’s detailed historical sociology of the period does a great job of uncovering the multi-level dynamics involved over the thirteen months of the ultimately successful boycott, whereas no “generativist” account leading from grievances to a sustained social movement has come close.
The comments I received from analytical sociologists at the Torino talk suggested that I’ve overstated both the commitment to methodological individualism and the rejection of social structures at the heart of analytical sociology. The commentators suggested that practitioners are more open-minded about research methods than I suggest, less committed to generativism, and very open to collaboration with sociologists who proceed from different premises. And agent-based modeling is just a tool, not a way of treating every sociological puzzle.
I don’t think I’ve overstated the core ideas of the “manifesto” of analytical sociology, as put forward by Hedström, Demeulenaere, and Manzo. And Joshua Epstein’s dogmatism about generativist social science stands unparalleled. But I’m very glad to hear that the discussants from the Gen Z generation of sociologists in this tradition are more open to pluralism in methods and approaches. I suggested to them that the time is right for a new manifesto, one which is explicitly open to a range of research approaches. This would mean at least three things: recognizing the need for thicker descriptions of actors, recognizing the causal importance of mid-level social entities like organizations, and abandoning the commitment to generativism as the sole legitimate model of explanation. And most importantly, it would emphasize the synergy that results from collaboration with other research approaches within sociology when treating a complex and extended social process.
As for computational tools like agent-based modeling — perhaps the most an updated manifesto should say about the relevance of agent-based simulation techniques is that they are valuable but limited tools for exploring some of the dynamics of the assumptions we make about inter-agent influence in the setting of mobilization and activization around a set of grievances and demands.
What does this leave from the original premises of AS? It leaves a commitment to empirical rigor, a preference for “theories of the middle range”, an insistence on the importance of discovering causal mechanisms, and a special interest in computational models of simple agent-based processes. This no longer looks like a declaration of a new and general approach to all sociological research — a claim invoked in the earlier manifestos for analytical sociology — but it looks like a much less constraining set of prescriptions than the guiding precepts of the earlier formulations. It is more receptive to a pluralistic approach to sociological research. And it therefore serves better as a guiding framework within which talented researchers can pursue productive research agendas.
Another point was made during the discussion in Torino that deserves comment. A listener suggested that this kind of discussion of “methodology and ontology” has taken up way too much space in the social sciences, and that we would be better off if sociologists just went ahead with their empirical work without worrying too much about the meta-issues. But this seems incorrect to me. Scientific research requires some antecedent ideas about how the world works and how to fruitfully investigate its properties. These ideas are of course provisional. But the history of science shows us that bad “framework” assumptions often lead to bad science. I think here of the harmful effects that radical behaviorism had on psychology in the first half of the twentieth century. So it is important to be as insightful as we can manage as we design research programs in the sciences. And this means that debating the assumptions involved in the analytical sociology research tradition is not wasted effort.
A focus for discussion and comment in the Como presentation was the need for a much deeper understanding of the development of the attitudes and values of young people. How can we explain the rapid rise of extremist right-wing ideologies and values among young people in the United States and many European countries, including Italy? One or two of the people in the Como lecture room were faculty with their own early-teenage children, and they expressed bewilderment about what was driving the surge of support for neo-fascist groups like CasaPound in Italy among young people. Students of contentious politics have not paid enough attention to the mechanisms and pathways through which political attitudes and values gain traction with young people; and yet answering this question is crucial for understanding the success of recruitment and mobilization of followers for organizations and parties like CasaPound. Here is a brief description and history of the neo-fascist CasaPound movement (link).
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