Why does social science matter?

What is the good of social science knowledge? In the natural sciences the answer is often pretty simple and pragmatic: natural science knowledge allows us to predict and control aspects of the natural environment.  Physics underlays engineering. That's not always true, and it's not the only reason we value research and theory in physics, chemistry, or biology. Some areas of physics and biology offer neither prediction nor control. And surely we also value physics for the abstract understanding it offers for how the world works. But prediction and control are convincing and common reasons that many people would give for valuing natural science.

The situation is different in sociology, political science, and economics. Social science hypotheses and theories rarely give rise to important and usable predictions.  The reasons for this lack of predictive power are many. Social ensembles (e.g. cities) are causally heterogeneous and open-ended, so even if we have a strong basis for predicting the behavior of a component system, the aggregate behavior of the ensemble is indeterminate. Social processes are composed of contingent but causally important actions by many agents, leading to path dependency and contingency in the outcome.  And even isolated processes (e.g. demographic transition) are often under-determined and path-dependent.

So prediction is very limited in the social realm. What about control? Once we have done some theorizing about a social process or problem, we will often have arrived at some ideas about which factors have a positive or negative influence on an outcome of interest. If we are interested in high school graduation rates or delinquency rates, social science research may advise us that "improving attendance improves graduation" or "neighborhood violence enhances delinquency". These hypotheses suggest interventions and policy reforms.

That said, the same circumstances that reduce our ability to predict social outcomes also limit our confidence in the efficacy of given interventions. The impossibility of designing reliable strategies for regional economic development or job creation are cases in point. If graduation rates are influenced by a handful of inter-related causal circumstances, it is difficult to have a lot of confidence in a single-factor policy reform.

Where the social and behavioral sciences can offer the greatest confidence is in several important areas. Demography is one; the ability of demographers to forecast population size and composition is extensive. Discovery of behavioral patterns in a variety of circumstances is another. Education scholars can learn how children commonly respond to this or that feature of the classroom environment; sociologists can learn how drug offenders usually respond to various treatment programs; rural sociologists can discover how small farmers respond to the availability of new seed varieties. And political scientists and social network specialists can work out the system tendencies of various voting systems or communications network architectures. So there is no shortage of reliable, useful results in the social sciences. What is more problematic is the idea that these sorts of findings might add up to a body of knowledge that permits predictions at the aggregate level of complex social ensembles.

We might say that sociology or political science offer some guidance about population and behavioral tendencies, system characteristics, and rough estimates of the causal properties of various social structures. And we can use these hypotheses and theories to make some informed guesses about the likely direction of change that will result from a given intervention or environmental change. But we are forced always to concede that our expectations take the form of bounded ceteris paribus predictions rather than confident and reliable point estimates of outcomes. So policy formation and social science research have a looser fit than engineering and physics.

I think this assessment fits pretty well with the idea that the social sciences are at their best when they focus on identifying and documenting a range of social mechanisms and processes, or when they pursue Merton's ideal of "theories of the middle range." And this leads us to recognize the limits that surround the possibility of  aggregating these kinds of mechanisms into confident assertions about the behavior of the large social ensemble. Social policy is not an exact science.

Do these ideas lay a basis for answering the basic question, why does social science matter? They do. It is an unmistakable reality that we are embedded within social and political processes that have enormous consequences for human wellbeing and human suffering.  The complex interactions of human behavior contribute both to some of the greatest successes of our civilizations and to the worst failures -- persistent poverty, violence, civil wars, climate change, environmental exhaustion, and hunger. We need to solve these "wicked" problems (link), but the interventions we choose need to be as well designed as possible to lead to better outcomes. The tools and methods of the social and behavioral sciences are the best hope we have for guiding our efforts as we strive to solve humanity's most intractable problems. And it is crucial to keep before us the way that progress in social understanding takes place: through careful and persistent research on a great range of mid-level social processes and patterns of social behavior.

(Here are a few posts on the limits of prediction in the social sciences; link, link, link. And here are a few that tease out ways in which the social sciences can be used to probe alternative possibilities for social outcomes; link, link.)

Neighborhood effects

In Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect Robert Sampson provides a very different perspective on the "micro-macro" debate. He rejects the methodologies associated both poles of the debate: methodological individualism ("derive important social outcomes from the choices of rational individuals") and methodological structuralism ("derive important social outcomes from the features of large-scale structures like globalization"). Instead, he argues for the causal importance of a particular kind of "meso" -- the neighborhood. He takes the view that neither "bottom-up" or "top-down" sociology will suffice. Instead, we need to look at processes at the level of socially situated individuals.

In this book I proposed an alternative to these two perspectives by offering a unified framework on neighborhood effects, the larger social organization of urban life, and social causality in general…. Contrary to much received wisdom, the evidence presented in this book demands attention to life in the neighborhoods that shape it. (357)

I argue that we need to treat social context as an important unit of analysis in its own right.  This calls for new measurement strategies as well as a theoretical framework that do not treat the neighborhood simply as a "trait" of the individual. (60)

Sampson offers his own instantiation of Coleman's Boat to illustrate his thinking:

But unlike Coleman (and like the argument I offered in an earlier post about meso-level explanation; link), Sampson allows for the validity of type-4 causal mechanisms, from "neighborhood structure and culture" to "rates of social behavior". So neighborhoods are not simply outcomes of individual choices and behavior; they are social ensembles that exert their own causal powers.

Sampson offers an articulated methodology for the study of the social life of a city, in the form of ten principles. These include:

1. Focus on social context
2. Study contextual variations in their own right
3. focus on social-interactional, social psychological, organizational, and cultural mechanisms of social life
4. integrate a life-course focus on neighborhood change
5. look for processes and mechanisms that explain stability
6. embed in the study of neighborhood dynamics the role of individual selection decisions
7. go beyond the local
8. incorporate macro processes 
9. pay attention to human concerns with public affairs 
10. emphasize the integrative theme of theoretically interpretive empirical research while maintaining methodological pluralism (67-68)

The heart of "neighborhood sociology" can be summarized, Sampson asserts, in a few simple themes:

First, there is considerable social inequality between neighborhoods, especially in terms of socioeconomic position and racial/ethnic segregation.  

Second, these factors are connected in that concentrated disadvantage often coincides with the geographic isolation of racial minority and immigrant groups.  

Third, a number of crime- and health-related problems tend to come bundled together at the neighborhood level and are predicted by neighborhood characteristics such as the concentration of poverty, racial isolation, single-parent families, and to a lesser extent rates of residential and housing instability.  

Fourth, a number of social indicators at the upper end of what many would consider progress, such as affluence, computer literacy, and elite occupational attainment, are also clustered geographically. (46)

This set of themes asserts a series of important correlations between neighborhood features and social outcomes. The hard question is to identify the social mechanisms that underlie these correlations. "It is from this idea that in recent decades we have witnessed another turning point in the form of a renewed commitment to uncovering the social processes and mechanisms that account for neighborhood (or concentration) effects. Social mechanisms provide theoretically plausible accounts of how neighborhoods bring about change in a given phenomenon" (46).

This is a fascinating and methodologically innovative piece of urban sociology. Sampson's use of large data sets to establish some of the intriguing neighborhood patterns he identifies is highly proficient, and his efforts to place his reasoning within a more theoretically sophisticated framework of multi-level social mechanisms is admirable. In an interesting twist, Sampson shows how it is possible to expand on the very costly video-based methodology of the original PHDCN study by making use of Google Street View to do systematic observations of neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities (361).

(Here is an earlier post on Sampson's ideas about neighborhood effects.)

Social sciences and the Civil Rights movement

The American Civil Rights movement was (and is) a complex, extended series of events, actions, and interactions in the United States between roughly 1950 and 1970.  (It of course has roots that extend backwards in time through the Civil War and centuries of slavery, and it has consequences that reverberate in American society to the present day.)  There are a variety of causes we can point to as explanations of various important events -- the Montgomery bus boycott, the Voting Rights Act, the murder of Emmett Till. And there are signal individuals whose actions played pivotal roles in the period -- Orval Faubus, Stokely Carmichael, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr. So telling this story requires a complex blend of narrative organization, inferences about personal motives, and reconstruction of existing social relations and structures in various places in the country.  It is perhaps significant that many of the histories of this movement have chosen to focus their stories around the biographies and careers of significant individuals -- for example, Taylor Branch's biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Parting the Waters : America in the King Years 1954-63).

My question here is a limited one: what role can the social sciences play in constructing a history of the Civil Rights movement that contributes to better explanations and better understanding of the period?

Here are several areas of research in the social sciences that seem to be especially valuable for interpreting the history of the Civil Rights struggle in the United States.

Doug McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, 2nd Edition is an outstanding example of the results of research that have proceeded from the point of view of the methods and theories of sociology. McAdam works within the framework of the sociology of social movements, and his key question is this: what factors encouraged or inhibited social mobilization of the victims of segregation in the 1950s and 1960s?  He offers a "political process" theory of social mobilization:

I will argue that the emergence of widespread protest activity is the result of a combination of expanding political opportunities and indigenous organization, as mediated through a crucial process of collective attribution. Over time, these same factors continue to shape the development of insurgency in consort with one additional factor: the shifting social-control response of other groups to the movement. (2)

McAdam doesn't proceed in a hypothetico-deductive way, assuming that a theory will permit the researcher to deduce the twists and turns of the history. Rather, he looks at resource-mobilization theory as a reasonably well-grounded account of causal factors that underlie mobilizations of groups in response to their grievances, and he looks to identify the historical conditions that were present that can be teased out as important historical causes of the growth of the movement.  In language he eventually develops further with Tarrow and Tilly, he identifies causal mechanisms that either inhibited or accelerated mobilization (Dynamics of Contention).

Quantitative sociologists have made a different kind of contribution to our understanding of various aspects of racial politics in the United States.  One very good example is the work of Douglas Massey, who has provided throughout a long career a careful quantitative assessment of racial inequality and segregation.  Massey and Denton's American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass  (1993) is a key contribution, as well as Massey's later Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (link). This work is important because it helps to provide a better understanding of the structure of racial inequality in the United States -- the structural conditions within which collective efforts for oppression and emancipation played out.  More descriptive approaches to the situation of race in the post-war period have proven useful as well -- for example, Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy Volume 1.

Comparative sociologists also have important contributions to make in the study of the Jim Crow period and the Civil Rights movement.  These researchers have often highlighted the key role played by power and exploitation in many social orders, and the ways in which rulers and ruled have sought to improve their situations within the context of those social relations.  Michael Mann's writings stand out here, and particularly his study of ethnic cleansing within contemporary societies in The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Mann's analysis of Bosnia and other recent examples provides a model for seeking to delineate and explain the strategic and collective behaviors of people on both sides of the Jim Crow line. And he offers a good example of the ways in which it is possible to combine large structural factors (segregation, exploitation) with local-level behavioral factors (resistance, mobilization).

Another important area of the social sciences that is relevant to explanation and interpretation of the Civil Rights movement is social psychology.  This is the individual side of the study of collective behavior: what motivates people to act as they do in a racialized or unequal society? How do participants in such a society frame the social relations they perceive around themselves? Is there a psychology of domination and resistance that is socially imbued in members of a given society? Measuring racial attitudes and dispositions to behavior is one aspect of this field of study -- for example, as summarized in work by Dambrun, Villate, and Richetan here. But social psychologists have also given very fruitful attention to the ways in which racial attitudes and schemata are reproduced in young people -- the more developmental side of racial thinking. And some social psychologists like Elizabeth Cole have emphasized the idea of "intersectionality" as a way of understanding people's political and social identities (link). (There is a good discussion of this approach in Michele Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz, eds., The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy through Race, Class, and Gender.)

This work is important for historians because it provides a more nuanced and empirically grounded set of theories about motivation and identity when it comes to contested social relations like race and gender.  This means that the historian has more ability to interpret the behavior of the participants who emerge in the historical record and whose behavior is sometimes surprising. The concept of intersectionality is particularly useful; since African American women had identities that were both racial and gendered, it is less surprising to find that their behavior did not always correspond to a simple script.

Another area of social science research that is relevant to understanding the Civil Rights era is political science.  Civil Rights struggles generally originated in particular places; but they were often aimed at legislation and constitutional interpretation. So it is valuable to have some research on the institutions and processes of the Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court (as well as state government) in order to be able to piece together the complicated back-and-forth between mobilization and legislation. Abigail Thernstrom's Whose Votes Count?: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights provides some of this analysis with respect the the Voting Rights Act of 1965. John Griffin and Brian Newman's Minority Report: Evaluating Political Equality in America is a representative study of the role of race in electoral politics. Dennis Chong's Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement is a rational-choice analysis of collective action in the Civil Rights movement.

What these areas of research seem to have in common is that they shed light on some of the mechanisms that may have been in play during the complex history of the Civil Rights movement. Some of these mechanisms are at the local population level -- the factors that allowed Montgomery's African American population to sustain a successful bus boycott. Others are at the individual level -- the features of identity and motivation that were present in white and black participants. And yet others are couched at a higher level of organization -- the mechanisms of the Congress and Supreme Court, the economic effects of segregation. None of these authors imply that we can replace detailed historical research with theoretical social science applications. But they do support the idea that the findings of the social sciences can shed light on social mechanisms and processes that are not necessarily perfectly evident in the historical sequences under study, and they support the idea that historians can gain a lot by immersing themselves in these adjacent areas of social-science research.

(Here is a nice review article by Aldon Morris, "A retrospective on the Civil Rights Movement: Political and Intellectual Landmarks" in Annual Review of Sociology, 1999.)

Hempel after 70 years

Carl Hempel published his sole contribution to the philosophy of history in 1942, almost exactly 70 years ago. The article is "The Function of General Laws in History" (link), and it set the stage for several fruitless decades of debate within analytic philosophy about the nature of historical explanation. Hempel argued that all scientific explanation has the same logical structure: a deductive (or probabilistic) derivation of the explanandum from one or more general laws and one or more statements of fact. Explanation, in Hempel's view, simply is "derivation of the explanandum from general laws." Here is the opening paragraph of the essay.

It is a rather widely held opinion that history, in contra-distinction to the so-called physical sciences, is concerned with the description of particular events of the past rather than with the search for general laws which might govern those events. As a characterization of the type of problem in which some historians are mainly interested, this view probably can not be denied; as a statement of the theoretical function of general laws in scientific historical research, it is certainly unacceptable. The following considerations are an attempt to substantiate this point by showing in some detail that general laws have quite analogous functions in history and in the natural sciences, that they form an indispensable instrument of historical research, and that they even constitute the common basis of various procedures which are often considered as characteristic of the social in contradistinction to the natural sciences. (35)

And here is the logical structure of such a "covering law" explanation, according to Hempel:

(1) a set of statements asserting the occurrence of certain events C1, . . . C, at certain times and places,
(2) a set of universal hypotheses, such that
          (a) the statements of both groups are reasonably well confirmed by empirical evidence,
          (b) from the two groups of statements the sentence asserting the occurrence of event E can be logically deduced. (36)

He is emphatic, moreover, in insisting that valid explanations in history must have this form:

We have tried to show that in history no less than in any other branch of empirical inquiry, scientific explanation can be achieved only by means of suitable general hypotheses, or by theories, which are bodies of systematically related hypotheses. (44)

Hempel concedes the point that few existing historical explanations actually look like this, with explicit law statements embedded in a deductive argument; but he argues that this shows only that existing explanations are elliptical, incomplete, or invalid. And often, he finds, what is offered as a historical explanation is in fact no more than an "explanation sketch" (42), with placeholders for the general laws.

What kinds of general laws does Hempel think that historians have in the back of their minds when they offer elliptical explanations? He refers to regularities of individual or social psychology (40), regularities of collective behavior ("groups migrate to regions which offer better living conditions"), or at the macro level, regularities linking growing discontent to the outbreak of revolution (41). Further:

Many of the universal hypotheses underlying historical explanation, for instance, would commonly be classified as psychological, economical, sociological, and partly perhaps as historical laws; in addition, historical research has frequently to resort to general laws established in physics, chemistry, and biology. (47)

This set of assumptions leads to big trouble for historical explanation if we accept Hempel's account, however, because it is hard to think of a real historical research question where there might be a set of social or individual regularities sufficient to deductively entail the outcome. Bluntly, the social and behavioral sciences have never produced theories of individual or collective behavior that issue in statements of general laws that could be the foundation for a covering law explanation. And given that social phenomena are formed by actors with a range of features of agency and decision-making, we have very good reason to think that this lack of regularities is inherent in the social world. The social world is simply not governed by a set of social or individual laws. Let's look at that point at several levels.

Individuals. The social sciences provide a good basis for advancing theories of agency, which in turn support certain generalizations about action. For example: People act out of self interest. People act morally. People pay attention to the example of others. People care about their families and friends. People follow charismatic leaders. People follow the precepts of their religious beliefs. People are emotional and short-sighted. People make decisions based on specific heuristics and rules-of-thumb. Each of these statements takes the form of a generalization. And each is true -- of some delimited groups of agents some of the time. But there is no generalization about agency that is true of all agents all the time. Rational choice theory attempts to provide a single theory of agency and decision making that replaces all of these variant grounds of action. But rational choice theory has proven notoriously unsuccessful as a foundation for explanation of a large and complex event -- war, revolution, economic crisis.

Groups. Here too we can identify some partial regularities: Groups tend to coalesce in action when they have prominent shared characteristics.  Groups are more prone to panic than individuals. Groups tend to fail to accomplish collective purposes. Groups are hyper-sensitive to racial and ethnic markers.  And so forth. It is evident that these are partial, tendential, exception-laden, and inexact; not at all like the generalizations that characterize metals, liquids, or proteins.

Organizations and institutions. What about mid-level social arrangements like labor unions, congregations, and terrorist cells? It's not that there aren't any generalizations to be had concerning items at this level; it is that there are too many, and they are highly contingent, conditioned, and contradictory. Certain types of organization are more prone to accidents than others.  This is true; but we have more confidence in our analysis of the most important features of the high-safety organization than we have in the corresponding generalization.  So there isn't a stockpile of laws that might be produced to apply to a social situation and then turn the crank and derive the deductive consequences.

Finally, what about large-scale events and structures -- wars, revolutions, civil conflict? Here too there are some generalizations that social scientists have asserted. For example: Democracies don't go to war with each other. War is made more likely when two powers have conflicts of interest over important resources. Wars create propaganda.  Revolutions don't happen when the general population is satisfied. But generalizations about these sorts of social entities too are bounded and unreliable. They are conditional, we recognize immediately that they have exceptions, and they don't permit prediction.

So the strong, governing generalizations that would be needed for a covering law explanation do not exist. As I argued a number of years ago, social regularities are phenomenal, not governing (link); they reflect characteristics of the actors rather than governing the behavior of the ensembles.  Does this mean that historical explanation is impossible?  No.  But we need to turn our attention from regularities to causal mechanisms and powers in order to see what a good historical explanation looks like.  A good historical explanation identifies a number of independent mechanisms and processes that are at work in a particular circumstance, and then demonstrates how these mechanisms, and the actions of the actors involved, lead to the outcome.

Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Chuck Tilly advanced a boldly different approach to analyzing and explaining complex historical phenomena, with special application to social contention.  They rejected the idea that there might be "laws" of revolution, civil unrest, or ethnic cleansing. They argued instead that there are a number of recurring "social mechanisms" of contention that can be identified in many instances of contention, and whose influences can be traced out to result in the observed outcomes.  Here is how McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly proceed in Dynamics of Contention.

We begin with a question: What led normally accepting accepting African-Americans both in Montgomery and throughout the South to risk their livelihoods and their lives in support of civil rights? Recall from Chapter I that in the "classical social movement agenda" the following factors come into play: 

• Social change processes initiate a process of change and trigger changes in the political, cultural, and economic environments. 
• Political opportunities and constraints confront a given challenger. Though challengers habitually face resource deficits and are excluded from routine decision making, the political environment at any time is not immutable; the political opportunities for a challenger to engage in successful collective action vary over time. These variations shape the ebb and flow of a movement's activity. 
• Forms of organization (informal as well as formal) offer insurgents sites for initial mobilization at the time opportunities present themselves and condition their capacity to exploit their new resources. Despite some evidence to the contrary (Piven and Cloward 1977), a large body of evidence finds organizational strength correlated with challengers' ability to gain access and win concessions (Gamson 1990). 
• Framing, a collective process of interpretation, attribution, and social construction, mediates between opportunity and action. At a minimum, people must both feel aggrieved at some aspect of their lives and optimistic that acting collectively can redress the problem (Snow, et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988). Movements frame specific grievances within general collective action frames which dignify claims, connect them to others, and help to produce a collective identity among claimants. 
• Repertoires of contention offer the means by which people engage in contentious collective action. These forms are not neutral, continuous, or universally accessible; they constitute a resource that actors can use on behalf of their claims (Traugott, et al. 1995). The use of transgressive forms offers the advantages of surprise, uncertainty, and novelty, but contained forms of contention have the advantage of being accepted, familiar, and relatively easy to employ by claimants without special resources or willingness to incur costs and take great risks.

That classical agenda made three enduring contributions to the study of social movements. First, it made strong claims regarding the close connection between routine and contentious politics, helping to reframe the study of social movements as the proper province of both sociology and political science. Second, calling attention to the role of "mobilizing structures," it represented a powerful challenge to the stress on social disorganization and breakdown in the older collective behavior paradigm. Third, it produced a credible picture of mobilization into social movements that was supported by a good deal of empirical evidence correlating the factors outlined above with increases in mobilization.

There are low-level generalizations offered throughout this series of statements. But all those generalizations are soft and exception-laden.  What MTT are interested in doing when they attempt to explain what they call "episodes of contention" is rather to identify the occurrence and interaction of a number of common mechanisms of contention.  And in fact, they explicitly repudiate the covering law model:

Our emphasis on recurring mechanisms and processes does not mean that we intend to pour all forms of contention into the same great mold, subjecting them to universal laws of contention and flattening them into a single two-dimensional caricature. On the contrary, we examine partial parallels in order to find widely operating explanatory mechanisms that combine differently and therefore produce different outcomes in one setting or another. To discover that third parties influence both strikes and ethnic mobilization by no means amounts to showing that the origins, trajectories, and outcomes of strikes and ethnic mobilization are the same, any more than identifying similarities in memory processes of mice and men proves mice and men to be identical in all regards. To discover mechanisms of competition and radicalization in both the French Revolution and in the South African freedom movement is not to say that the Jacobins and the African National Congress are the same. We pursue partial parallels in search of mechanisms that drive contention in different directions. Only then, and in Part III, do we examine how mechanisms combine in robust political processes.

Seventy years after Hempel's classic article, the covering law theory is now generally regarded as a fundamentally wrong-headed way of thinking about historical (and social) explanation.  Logical positivism is not a convenient lens through which to examine the social and historical sciences.  There is too much contingency in the social world. Rather than being the result of law-governed processes, social outcomes proceed from the contingent and historically variable features of the actors who make them.  So the attention of many people interested in specifying the nature of historical and social explanation has focused on social mechanisms constituted and driven by common features of agency.

(Renate Mayntz's discussion of causal mechanisms represents one of the best current treatments of the subject; link.)

Neil Gross on mechanisms

Neil Gross offers a friendly amendment to the growing literature on social mechanisms within sociology in "A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms" (link). He offers general support for the framework, but criticizes the main efforts at specifying what a social mechanism is. (James Mahoney makes a major effort to capture the main formulations in "Beyond Correlational Analysis"; link. Mahoney identifies 24 statements, all somewhat different.) Gross argues that the existing formulations are too tightly wedded to the metaphor of a physical mechanism -- for example, the cogs, gears, and springs of a clock. And the existing frameworks are too dependent on the assumption of rational actors, rather than a more fluid and relational understanding of social action. In some respects his arguments converge with those of Andrew Abbott considered in an earlier post.

The account of social mechanisms that Gross puts forward is a "pragmatist" theory. Here is how he puts the point in the paper's abstract.

Building on the insight increasingly common among sociological theorists -- that action should be conceptualized in terms of social practices -- I mobilize ideas from the tradition of classical American pragmatism to develop a more adequate theory of mechanisms. (358)

Gross praises the mechanisms approach for its ability to go beyond positivism in the philosophy of social science -- the general idea that social explanations depend on discovering strong social laws.  But he finds the literature to be amorphous when it comes to definitions.  He identifies five main themes:

1. Mechanisms as not necessarily observable structures or processes
2. Mechanisms as observable processes that do not require the positing of motives
3. Mechanisms as lower-order social processes
4. Mechanisms as triggerable causal powers
5. Mechanisms as transforming events (359-361)

Out of these themes Gross extracts a degree of consensus:

1. Social mechanisms are causal in that they mediate between cause and effect.
2. Social mechanisms unfold in time.
3. Social mechanisms are general, although in varying degrees.
4. Because a social mechanism is an intermediary process, it is necessarily composed of elements analyzed at a lower order of complexity or aggregation than the phenomenon it helps explain. (361-363)

He believes these four points capture the "theoretical consensus" that exists among the main expositions of the idea of a social mechanism.  He then identifies several points of difference among these accounts:

1. Methodological individualism versus social ontologism.
2. Formal versus substantive mechanisms.
3. Analytical versus realist models. (363-364)

Now, finally, his own specific definition:

A social mechanism is a more or less general sequence or set of social events or processes analyzed at a lower order of complexity or aggregation by which -- in certain circumstances -- some cause X tends to bring about some effect Y in the realm of human social relations.  This sequence or set may or may not be analytically reducible to the actions of individuals who enact it, may underwrite formal or substantive causal processes, and may be observed, unobserved, or in principle unobservable. (364)

A key part of Gross's critique of existing expositions of the social mechanisms approach, largely within the framework of analytical sociology, is the reliance these researchers make on the framework of rational choice theory.  Gross believes this is too narrow an understanding of human action, and therefore serves poorly as a foundation for our thinking about real social mechanisms.  Gross prefers a "pragmatist" understanding of action and actors, one that is closer to the field of symbolic interactionism than to economics.  This approach links action to "practices" and habits more fundamentally than to means-end rationality and goal-seeking behavior.  "Pragmatists maintain that instrumental rationality itself, when it does appear, is a kind of habit, a way that some humans can learn to respond to certain situations, and that we should be as interested in the historical processes by which the habit of rationality -- in its various forms -- develops and is situationally deployed as we should be in its effects" (367).

Gross brings these ideas about action and practice into the mechanisms framework with this basic idea.

Pragmatists would view social mechanisms as composed of chains or aggregations of factors confronting problem situations and mobilizing more or less habitual responses. (368)

This approach understands action as more fluid and interactive than deliberative and pre-planned.  And it emphasizes the contingency of interactions with other actors that influence the development and unfolding of the swirl of activity and the constitution of the actor him/herself.

Fundamentally Gross's critique comes down to a plea for a better understanding of social action itself, and of the actor, than the mechanisms approach is inclined to offer.  And the framework within which to conceptualize action that he prefers is one that derives from inter-action, spontaneity, and adjustment as much as (more than?) the deliberative and calculating processes postulated by rational-actor models.

I think that Gross's approach is fairly consonant with that taken by Chuck Tilly and Doug McAdam in various places.  McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly emphasize the "relational" nature of social action in Dynamics of Contention.  And here is a nice statement of McAdam's summary view of social action in Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970.

One of the virtues of the perspective sketched here is that it is as amenable to the analysis of routine as to that of contentious politics.  Too often analysts have reified the distinction between routine politics and social movements, revolutions and the like, and have wound up proposing separate theories to account for the two phenomena.   Since I see the latter as almost always growing out of and often transforming the former, I am motivated to propose a framework that is equally adept at explaining both. (xvii)

The account of contentious politics that McAdam favors considers four ideas:

1. Exogenous change processes.
2. Interpretive processes and the collective attribution of opportunity/threat.
3. Appropriation of existing organizational space and routine collective identities.
4. Innovative collective action and the onset of contention. (xvii-xxviii)

This account emphasizes much of Gross's agenda as well: adaptiveness, contingency, a fluid definition of action through inter-action with other actors, and the significance of culture and identity in action.

Social things, kinds and meso causes

Consider a social entity -- say the IBM corporation -- and consider the group of individuals who currently make up the entity. What is the relation between the social entity and the individuals? There are several things that are plainly true: the entity is composed of the individuals. The behavior of the entity supervenes upon the individuals. But other issues are less clear. Does the corporation have causal properties of its own? Is this corporation an instance of a broader class of social entities with similar properties? Do we need to explain the corporation by deriving its properties from the properties of its constituents?

There are analogous issues in other areas of the "special" sciences. Take weather, for example. We have a fairly complex vocabulary of weather ontology and causation: El Nino, warm front, high pressure cell, hurricane, windshear, etc. Two things seem evident. First, weather phenomena are composed of lower-level physical components: bodies of water at a range of temperatures, non-homogeneous gases (atmosphere), inputs of energy (sunlight), and the like. Weather phenomena are "nothing but" ensembles of micro-cells of gases, water, land masses, and energy. Weather states might be exhaustively described as a set of micro-states with no reference to weather vocabulary; we could, if we wanted, reduce weather statements to micro physical statements. At the same time, we can legitimately describe weather phenomena at the meso or macro levels -- storms, etc. There is no compelling scientific reason to insist on reduction or elimination. And we can explain weather outcomes in terms of causal statements that invoke other meso factors. The fact that there are no autonomous weather phenomena does not mean there are no autonomous weather explanations.

There isn't much of a problem in defining or identifying entities at the level of social aggregates. The IBM corporation is no more ontologically suspect than Hurricane Irene. Both are high-level entities composed of lower level things and processes. What is more problematic is when we consider whether there are "kinds" of social entities; whether there are law-like generalizations that are true of those kinds of things; and whether kinds of social things have distinctive causal properties and processes.

Candidate social kinds might include armies, bureaucracies, and religions. I take the view, however, that none of these concepts identifies a set of social entities that have enough in common to call them a kind. They are heterogeneous in all the ways that have made them intriguing to historical sociologists. Caesar's army, Rommel's army, and Ho Chi Minh's army had some things in common; but they also had enormously important differences at the level of organization, technology, and leadership structure. So it isn't plausible to look at them as constituting a kind of social entity.

This high degree of heterogeneity among the items classified under social concepts also provides the basis for a negative answer to the question about laws as well. Armies are not like metals; they don't have a common set of generating processes, and they don't give rise to significant regularities. We can't say things like "all armies fight to exhaustion within 12 months."

We can, however, identify common processes and challenges that confront all armies, and we can consequently tease out some causal mechanisms and processes that recur across armies in a wide range of contexts. This is the thrust of McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly's analysis of mechanisms underlying contention.

This discussion illustrates three rather different points. First, there is the level of descriptive concepts we choose to use. Second is the issue of whether explanations need to proceed from more fundamental to more complex. And third is the issue of the ontological status of composite entities.

These topics have been addressed under the rubric of inter-theoretic reduction for almost forty years. Jerry Fodor's "Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis" (1974) (link) and "Special Sciences: Still Autonomous After all These Years" (1997) (link) present core arguments for the autonomy of the special sciences. He distinguishes between token-token identity and type-type identity, pointing out that it might be the case that the first kind of identity obtains while the second does not. His central argument is that the possibility of multiple functional realizability demonstrates that it will not be possible to reduce higher-level laws to lower-level laws.

Jaegwon Kim has addressed the issue of physicalism throughout his career, most recently in Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. He holds that the concept of supervenience provides a basis for finessing the demand for reduction from higher kevel to lower level. Julie Zahle raises some of these problems in her contribution to Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology: A Volume in the Handbook of the Philosophy of Science Series, "Holism and Supervenience."

My general intuition is that the issue of inter-theoretic reduction and an insistence on a strong version of methodological individualism are much less important to the philosophy of social science than they have appeared to be. Once we have sufficiently understood the ways that individuals, institutions, networks, and values work at the local level, we are in a good position to characterize meso-level social entities like organizations and value systems. And we are intellectually empowered to try to discover the dynamic properties of these systems of actors and social arrangements. So meso level causal properties seem entirely legitimate in the social sciences.

Steinmetz on colonialism

George Steinmetz offers a comparative sociology of colonialism in The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa.  More specifically, he wants to explain differences in the implementation of "native policy" within German colonial regimes around the turn of the twentieth century.  He finds that there are significant differences across three major instances of German colonialism (Samoa, Qingdao, Southwest Africa), and he wants to know why. (For example, the Namibia regime was much more violent than the Samoa or Qingdao examples.) This is a causal question, and Steinmetz is one of the most talented sociologists of his cohort in American sociology. So it is worth looking at his reasoning in detail.

One reason this is interesting to me is that it seems to represent a hard case for the perspective of analytical sociology (link, link), with its goal of providing an overarching model of all valid sociological explanations. On its face, Steinmetz's analysis doesn't look much like Coleman's boat -- identify a macro pattern of interest, look for the actors whose behavior gives rise to the pattern, and try to identify individual-level circumstances that cause the pattern through the individuals' actions.  So let's look in a little bit of detail at the explanations that Steinmetz offers.

Here are the guiding research goals for Steinmetz's study.

Social theorists have often treated colonialism as a monolithic object, a uniform condition. Yet even a cursory overview of the historical literature indicates that colonialism is actually an extremely capacious category, encompassing everything from pillage and massacre in the Spanish conquest of the New World to the peaceful coexistence between British rulers and Chinese subjects in late colonial Hong Kong. The colonies that made up the German overseas empire, which lasted from 1884 until the end of World War I, exemplify the enormous variability even within the more delimited category of modern colonialism. This specifically modern variant of European colonialism, as opposed to the early modern (or earlier) forms, is my focus in this book.  I have selected three colonies to illustrate the wide spectrum of colonial native policy, which I will argue below, was the core activity of the modern colonial state.  These colonies are German Southwest Africa, forerunner of modern-day Namibia; German Samoa, precursor of the contemporary nation-state of Samoa; and Kiaochow, a colony that consisted of the city of Qingdao and its surrounding hinterland in China's Shandong Province. (1)

What I try to account for in this book -- my "explanandum" -- is colonial native policy. Four determining structures or causal mechanisms were especially important in each of these colonies: (1) precolonial ethnographic discourses or representations, (2) symbolic competition among colonial officials for recognition of their superior ethnographic acuity, (3) colonizers' cross-identification with imagos of the colonized, and (4) responses by the colonized, including resistance, collaboration, and everything in between.  Two other mechanisms influenced colonial native policy to varying degrees: [5] "economic" dynamics related to capitalist profit seeking (plantation agriculture, mining, trade, and smaller-scale forms of business) and [6] the "political pressures generated by the international system of states. (2)

This book does not attempt to identify any singular, general model of colonial rule.  Indeed, general theory and general laws are widely recognized as implausible goals in the social sciences.  Historians have always preferred complex, overdetermined, conjunctural accounts, but sociologists and some other social scientists have been reluctant to abandon the chimerical goals of parsimony and "general theory." Rather than attempt to use colonial comparisons to fabricate a uniform model of the colonial state, I will seek instead to identify a limited set of generative social structures or mechanisms and to track the ways they interacted to provide ongoing policies. Even though each instance of colonial native policy was shaped by a different constellation of influences, the four primary mechanisms named above were always present and efficacious to varying degrees. (3)

Note that Steinmetz proceeds here in a clearly comparativist fashion (three cases with salient similarities and differences); and he proceeds with the language of causal mechanism in view.  The comparativist orientation implies a desire to identify causal differences across the cases that would account for the differences in outcomes in the cases.  He suggests later in the analysis that all six factors mentioned here are causally relevant; but that the general structural causes (5 and 6) do not account for the variation in the cases.   These structural factors perhaps account for the similarities rather than the differences across the cases. But Steinmetz emphasizes repeatedly that general theories of colonialism cannot account for the wide variation that is found across these three cases.  "The patterns of variation among these three colonies are as puzzling as is the sheer degree of heterogeneity" (19).

So what kind of account does Steinmetz offer for the four key mechanisms he cites?  Consider first factor (2) above, the idea that the specifics of colonial rule depended a great deal on the circumstances of the professional and ideological "field" within which colonial administrators were recruited and served.  (Here is a posting on Bourdieu's concept of "field"; link.)  "Social fields are organized around differences -- differences of perception and practice.  It is difficult to imagine what sorts of materials actors could use in their efforts to carve out hierarchies of cultural distinction if they were faced with cultural formations as flat and uniform as Saidian 'Orientalism'" (45-46).  The idea here is that the particular intellectual and professional environment established certain points of difference around which participants competed. These dividing lines set the terms of professional competition, and prospective colonial administrators as well as functioning administrators needed to establish their program for governance around a distinctive package of these assumptions.

Was the colonial state characterized by common perceptions of distinction and stakes of conflict? German colonial administrators did in fact compete for a specific form of cultural distinction within the ambit of the colonial state, and this struggle guided each individual toward particular kinds of native policy.  ... The colonial stage thus became an exaggerated version of imperial Germany's three-way intraelite class struggle. (48, 49)

This mechanism is a fairly clear one; and it provides a promising basis for explaining some of the otherwise puzzling aspects of colonial rule and native policy.  It derives, fundamentally, from Bourdieu's theories of social capital.  Consider an analogy with current military policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Suppose there are two large ideas of strategy in the air, counter-insurgency and state-building.  Suppose that each of these frameworks of thought has resonance with different groups of powerful political leaders within the government.  And suppose that senior military commanders are interested in establishing their credentials as effective strategists.  It makes sense to imagine that there may be a competition for choosing on-the-ground strategies and tactics that align with the grand strategy the theater commander thinks will further his long-range career success the best.

This mechanism is consistent with an agent-centered theory of explanation: actors (administrators or generals) are immersed in a policy environment in which conflicting ideas about success are debated; the actors seek to align their actions to the framework they judge to be most likely to prevail (and preserve their careers).  No one wants to be the last Curtis LeMay in Vietnam when the prevailing view back home is "winning hearts and minds."  The explanation postulates a social fact -- the prevalence of several intellectual frameworks about the other, several ethnographic discourses; and the individual's immersion in these discourses permits him or her to act strategically in pursuing advantageous goals.

We can often begin to understand why one strand of precolonial discourse rather than another guided colonial practice once we know who was put in charge of a given colony. (54)

So this illustrates the way that factors (1) and (2) work in Steinmetz's explanation.  What about (3)?  This falls in the category of what Steinmetz calls "symbolic and imaginary identifications" (55).  Here Steinmetz turns away from conscious calculation and jockeying on the part of the colonial administrator in the direction of a non-rational psychology. Steinmetz draws on psychoanalytic theory and the theories of Lacan here. But it remains an agent-centered analysis.  Steinmetz refers to elements of mentality as an explanation of the administrators' behavior, and their possession of this mentality needs its own explanation.  But what proceeds from the assumption of this mentality is straightforward; it is a projection of behavior based on a theory of the mental framework of the actor.

The fourth factor in Steinmetz's analysis turns to the states of agency of the colonized.  Here he refers to strategies of response by the subject people to the facts of colonial rule, ranging from cooperation to resistance.

Resistance is located on the opposite side from cooperation. Colonized peoples were able to modulate and revise native policies. By signing up as a native policeman one might be able to temper colonial abuses of power. More frontal forms of resistance could bring a regime of native policy to an abrupt halt and force the colonial state to seek a new approach. (66)

This aspect of the story too is highly compatible with a microfoundations approach; it is straightforward to see how social mobilization theory can be fleshed out in ways that make it an agent-centered approach.

Here is how Steinmetz sums up his account:

The colonial state, I have argued here, can best be understood as a kind of field, one that is structured around opposing principles and interests and around conflict over specific stakes.  Actors in the field of the colonial state competed to accumulate ethnographic capital.  This field's internal heterogeneity and the fact that a field is "a space of possibilities" with an "immense elasticity" meant that colonial policy was never a smooth, continuous process but was prone to sudden shifts in direction. The relative autonomy of the colonial government from the metropolitan state and its independence from other fields in terms of its definition of symbolic capital meant that it was, in fact, a kind of state, even if political theorists have paid little attention to it. Just as it is impossible to generalize about the contents of ethnographic discourse or the policies of the colonial state,neither can one characaterize the "mind of the colonizer" in general terms, except to say that it was as complex and internally contradictory as the subjectivity of the colonized. (517-518)

It should also be noted that a great deal of Steinmetz's account is not explanatory, but rather descriptive and narrative.  He provides detailed accounts of the history and behavior of the colonial regimes in these three settings, and much of the value of the book indeed derives from the research underlying these descriptive accounts.

So Steinmetz's account seems to have several important characteristics.  First, it is interested in providing a contextualized explanation of differences in nominally similar outcomes (different instances of German colonial rule).  Second, it is interested in providing an account of the causal mechanisms that shaped each of the instances, in such a way as to account for their differences.  Third, the mechanisms that he highlights are largely agent-centered mechanisms.  Fourth, the account deliberately highlights the contingency of the developments it describes.  Individuals and particular institutions play a role, as well as historical occurrences that were themselves highly contingent.  And finally, there is a pervasive use of collective concepts like field, ideology, worldview, and ethnography that play a crucial causal role in the story.  These concepts identify a supra-individual factor.  But each of them can be provided with a microfoundational account.  So Steinmetz's analysis here seems to be largely consistent with microfoundationalism.  It diverges from analytical sociology in one important respect, however: Steinmetz does not couch his explanatory goals in terms of the idea of deriving social outcomes from individual-level actions and relations.  Rather, it is for the reader to confirm that the mechanisms cited do in fact have appropriate microfoundations.

(Steinmetz discusses his theoretical approach to colonialism in his interview included in the "interviews" page. Here is an appreciative review of The Devil's Handwriting; link.)

More on The Spirit Level

There are quite a few interesting comments on my earlier post on The Spirit Level on Economist's View. I can't respond in detail to all of them, but here are a few additional thoughts.

A few commentators seem to think I'm unsympathetic to the book, which isn't accurate. So let me be more direct in my assessment of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. I find the empirical data presented to be highly suggestive and interesting. Pickett and Wilkinson demonstrate simple trend relationships between the income inequality score of a set of countries and states and a series of social problems. I myself do not have reason to doubt their statistical methods, though other critics have done so, including Lane Kenworthy in a balanced and reasonable critique in 2010. What troubles me about the central argument of the book is what I find to be a flatly unconvincing hypothesis, that the psychological states created in a country’s population by status conflict and income inequality suffice to explain the variation in health outcomes for individuals in these societies. There are many determinants of a person’s satisfaction with his/her life besides income inequality; and there are many social factors that influence health outcomes for individuals besides their perception of income inequalities and the level of stress that those inequalities create in them.

In my view, a good causal explanation requires an analysis of the mechanisms that bring about the relation between cause and effect. I find only one mechanism underlying their accounts of this relationship – essentially a psychological mechanism linking the individual’s perception of income inequalities to health and behavioral outcomes. They flesh this out with a description of the physiology of stress induced by rising income inequalities leading to rising mental illness; perceived status differences leading to decline in trust; stress based on perceived inequalities leading to increased “comfort eating” and obesity; status competition leads to increased violence; etc. This is what I mean by monocausal; there is just one causal process at the heart of their analysis.

The variety of causal mechanisms that seem pertinent to me in consideration of their data include several different kinds. First, as I mentioned in my post, there are serious and systemic sources of separation between individuals within societies that have nothing to do with income inequalities and that might be expected to have the same kinds of psychological and physiological effects on individuals: racism, ethnic hatred, sexism, economic conflicts that do not have to do with inequalities, and so on. For example, in the United States there are credible efforts to explain racial disparities in health outcomes on the basis of the effects on individuals living in circumstances of endemic racial discrimination and prejudice. (See, for example, Arline T. Geronimus, ScD, Margaret Hicken, MPH, Danya Keene, MAT, and John Bound, PhD, "“Weathering” and Age Patterns of Allostatic Load Scores Among Blacks and Whites in the United States"; link.) These effects are unrelated to income inequalities and derive instead from another aspect of social separation. So race rather than income appears to explain this set of health disparities. So perhaps this implies that if we had a way of measuring a “composite index of non-economic social separation” we might have a similar set of graphs, with societies with a lot of racism and ethnic hatred at the upper right quadrant of the graph. I don’t suppose that this index would be highly correlated with the quintile-quintile ratio that the authors use as their proxy for economic inequality.

Second, there are structural influences on a population’s health outcomes that do not derive from the degree of income inequalities that exist in a society but are nonetheless highly influential on health status of the population. For example, the quality and accessibility of rural healthcare has a large influence on the health status of rural people; the accessibility of health insurance to inner city residents has a large influence; the targeting of food marketing in favor of “comfort foods” has a large potential influence on the whole population; and differential treatments and discrimination within health systems for different populations of patients have large potential effects. None of these factors derive from the ratio of quintile incomes – the degree of income inequality – in the society; they are independent causes of differential health outcomes across sub-populations.

I’m not an expert on statistical reasoning; but of course every reader knows that evidence of correlation between two variables A and B is not conclusive evidence of a causal relation existing between those variables. There may be a common factor that causes variation in both A and B, or the correlation may be flatly spurious. It is necessary to frame a credible and testable hypothesis about how the putative causal condition leads to the putative effect. On the other hand, finding that a proposed mechanism is not in fact valid does not establish that there is not a causal connection between the variables; it only mandates that we then search further for a mechanism that does in fact obtain. Only if we are ultimately convinced that there is no possible mechanism would we come to the conclusion that the correlation is spurious. So my position in the posting under discussion is simply that the authors have not established a mechanism linking income inequalities to bad health outcomes that satisfies me.

One can be opposed to extreme and rising income inequalities in one’s society – as many of the readers of The Spirit Level are – without being convinced of the particular causal connections that the authors assert. And this matters quite a bit; if we want to reform society, we need to have well grounded theories of the causal processes that lead to the outcomes we want to reduce or avoid.

Spartacus, Kitty Genovese, and social explanation

What is most interesting in paying attention to social life is noticing the surprising outcomes that often materialize from a number of uncoordinated choices and actions by independent individuals. We want to understand why and how the aggregate-level social fact came to be: was it a set of features of the individual actors' preferences or decision-making?  Was it the unintended result of strategic choices by various actors?  Was it simply the path-dependent and contingent outcome of a serial interactive process?  Was it brought about by structural conditions -- power, wealth, race -- within the context of which actors made their choices?  And what were the mechanisms of constraint, aggregation, contagion, and escalation through which actions and processes at the more proximate level came together into the outcome at the distal level?

Consider a pair of examples. Kitty Genovese is attacked by an assailant over an extended period of time in a dense neighborhood in Queens, many people observe the crime, and no one intervenes.  The woman is eventually murdered.  The question here is, why was there a total absence of intervention by any individual or group in this crime?  And a parallel surprise: General Marcus Licinius Crassus, having trapped the rebellious slave army of Spartacus, announces that the slaves will be spared death if they give up Spartacus for crucifiction.  Spartacus rises to his feet to say, "I am Spartacus." And in minutes the army of men rise as well, all declaring "I am Spartacus."  Here the question is the reverse: why do these men expose themselves to death to stand in solidarity with Spartacus?  In each case, there is an occasion for action presented to a group of individuals, in which members of the group can attempt to save the life of another person.  The collective behavior is fundamentally different in the two cases.   Why so? What are the mechanisms, psychological and social, that led to non-intervention in the first case and fatal solidarity in the second?

We might form a number of hypotheses about both of these cases in order to explain the very different outcomes.  In the Kitty Genovese case, we might cite anomy and anonymity as possible causes of the lack of response by bystanders.  With a low level of civic bonds, perhaps city dwellers have such a low level of emotional involvement with each other that even the slightest effort is unjustified.  Or perhaps it is the fact that each potential responder is anonymous to the others that leads to the result; he/she can make the decision to refrain from offering aid without fear of criticism from others.  Or perhaps collective behavior is strongly influenced by the actions of the first few, with later observers mimicking earlier non-aiders.  So the outcome might have been highly different if the first or second witness had intervened; others might have followed suit.   In the case of Spartacus, we might hypothesize that the bonds of solidarity forged by a history of fighting the Roman army gave the soldiers the moral motivation to support Spartacus; or perhaps it is the publicity of the scene, or the early example of the first few supporters, that spread to the behavior of the others.  Or perhaps it is an expression of fundamental mistrust by the soldiers of the good faith of Marcus Crassus; "he will kill us anyway." With nothing to lose, the army makes its symbolic statement of rejection.  These are each social psychological hypotheses, concerning the ways that individuals choose to involve themselves in an emergency and a situation of potential sacrifice.

Each of these hypotheses represents a social mechanism that can be incorporated into a narrative explaining the aggregate outcome.  In order for such a story to be scientifically compelling, we need to have some way of using empirical evidence to evaluate whether the postulated mechanism actually works in the real world of human behavior.  Is there empirical evidence for a social psychology of mimicry?  Do we have evidence to suggest that members of a crowd are more likely to do X or Y if a few others have already done so?  Is there empirical support for a theory of solidarity as a social motivation: do combat teams, groups of deep-ground miners, or emergency room doctors develop a higher willingness to conform their behavior to the good of the group or of other individuals in the group?  These examples of social mechanisms all fall in the category of putative behavioral regularities, and it should be possible to investigate them experimentally and statistically.

The challenge of explanation for any social outcome, we might say, is that of constructing an interpretation of the states of minds of a set of actors; the constraints and opportunities within which they choose a course of action; and the interactions that are created as they act within a common environment, leading to the outcome in question.  This is what we can refer to as an aggregative explanation, and it lies at the heart of Thomas Schelling's methodology in Micromotives and Macrobehavior.  As Schelling points out, sometimes the explanation turns on specific features of agency (the actors' preferences or their modes of decision-making), and sometimes it turns on the specifics of the environment of choice (the fact that the outcome of action is a public good).  But in general, explanation proceeds by showing how agents with specific features, acting within a social and natural environment with specific characteristics, bring about specific kinds of outcomes.

This, in a nutshell, represents a simple but powerful statement of a philosophy of social explanation.  It also represents the rudiments of a social ontology: higher-level social features are composed of the actions and states of agency of a set of actors within the context of locally embodied rules, norms, and expectations.  This is what I refer to as "methodological localism":

This theory of social entities affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes. But it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals. The “molecule” of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rule. (link)

Social explanations derive their force from empirical research into the nature of the actor, the nature of the locally embodied social environment, and the processes of aggregation through which actions by multiple actors coalesce into social outcomes.  The explanation satisfies us when it demonstrates the pathways through which individuals, constituted as they are found to be, located in institutions of the sort described, contribute to collective outcomes of the kinds described.

Doug McAdam on contentious politics and the social sciences

Doug McAdam is hard at work shedding new light on the meso-dynamics of contention.  What are the specific social and psychological mechanisms that bring people into social movements; what factors and processes make mobilization more feasible when social grievances arise?  Recently he has done work on the impact of Teach for America on its participants, and he and his graduate students are now examining a set of environmental episodes that might have created local NIMBY movements -- but often didn't.

McAdam's most sustained contribution to the field of contention is his 1982 book on the dynamics of the struggle for racial equality, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970.  The book was reissued in 1999 with a substantive new introduction, and it has set the standard for sophisticated sociological study of a large, complex movement.  McAdam collaborated with Sidney Tarrow and Chuck Tilly in articulating a new vision of how to approach the politics of contention in Dynamics of Contention.  And he has co-authored or co-edited another half dozen books on social movements and popular mobilization.  So McAdam has been one of the architects of the field of contentious politics.  Most importantly, he and his collaborators have brought innovative new thinking to the definition of problems for social research.

So it is valuable to dig into some of McAdam's thoughts and his sociological imagination as we think about how the sociology of the future might be shaped.  I conducted an extensive interview with Doug earlier this month, and it opened up quite a few interesting topics.  The full interview is posted on YouTube (link).



There are quite a few important turns to the conversation.

1. Segment 1: Why is the study of contention a central topic within the social sciences?
2. Segment 2: How can we approach contention without looking only at the successful cases?  How about the moments where contention might have developed but did not?  We can combine quantitative and qualitative methods -- perhaps in an order that reverses the usual approach.  Maybe we can use quantitative studies to get a general feel for a topic, and then turn to qualitative and case studies to discover the mechanisms.
3. Segment 3: Another important theme: "We are voracious meaning-making creatures." Human beings have a cognitive-emotional-representational ability to attempt to represent meanings and their own significance within the larger order.  Rational choice theory has too narrow a conception of agency.  Why did the Black community stay off the buses in Montgomery?  Because people were strongly enmeshed in communities of meaning and commitment that framed the bus boycott in terms of meaning and identity.
4. Segment 4: The psychology of mobilization is complex.  It's not just "rational incentives".  Organizers and leaders use the affinities and loyalties of the community to bring about collective action.  For example, an interesting strategy by SNCC to "shame" church leaders into supporting activists.  Movements happen very suddenly; this seems to reflect a process of "redefining" the situation for participants.  Another interesting issue: what is the right level of analysis -- micro, meso, or macro?  Doug favors the "meso" level.
5. Segment 5: More on the meso level: disaggregated social activity.  McAdam argues that government actions are themselves often at the meso level.  And he makes the point that Civil Rights reform was strongly influenced in the United States by the issues created internationally through the tensions and ideological conflicts of the Cold War.  This explains why it was Truman rather than Roosevelt who endorsed the need for Civil Rights reform.  You can't explain the broad currents of the Civil Rights movement without understanding the international context that was influencing the Federal government.  (This is an example of a macro-level effect on social movements.)
6. Segment 6: Now to mechanisms and processes.  There are no laws of civil wars.  So we need to look downward into the unfolding of the episodes of contention.  Comparative historical sociology is a very dynamic movement today.  Your work isn't quite as comparative as that of Tilly or McAdam.  Doug indicates that he favors comparison; but he tends to choose cases that are broadly comparable with each other.  Tilly often made comparisons at a much higher level of variation.  Q: Would you have been comfortable framing your study of the American Civil Rights movement as a comparison with the Solidarity Movement in Poland?  A: no.  There is too broad a range of differences between the cases.
7. Segment 7: McAdam offers some interesting observations about the relationship between general theory and the specific social phenomena under study.  An important point here is a strong advocacy for eclectic, broad reading as one approaches a complex social phenomenon.  We can't say in advance where the important insights are going to come from -- anthropology, political science, history, sociology, ....
8. Segment 8: We can dig into the social features that make certain figures very successful in bringing a group of people into a readiness to engage together.  Is social status a key factor?  Is it that some people are particularly persuasive?  Doug wants to break open the black box and get a lot better understanding of the meso-level processes and mechanisms through which mobilization occurs.  A closing topic: what about protest and mobilization in Asia?  Do you think these ideas about mobilization are relevant and illuminating in China or Thailand?  Or has it developed in too specific a relationship to democratic societies? Does the current understanding of popular mobilization help us when we try to understand movements like the Redshirt movement in Thailand?  Doug believes the framework is relevant outside the democratic West.  The ideas need to be applied loosely and flexibly.
9. Segment 9: So the theory is really a "sketch" of the space of mobilization, rather than a set of specific hypotheses about how mobilizations always work.  And in that understanding -- the field is very relevant to research on the Thailand movement.

(Note the strong connections between this discussion and a few of the earlier interviews -- Tilly, Tarrow, and Zald in particular (link).  My interview with Gloria House about her experience with SNCC in Lowndes County is very relevant as well (link).)

Scientific realism for the social sciences

What is involved in taking a realist approach to social science knowledge? Most generally, realism involves the view that at least some of the assertions of a field of knowledge make true statements about the properties of unobservable things, processes, and states in the domain of study.  Several important philosophers of science have taken up this issue in the past three decades, including Rom Harre (Causal Powers: Theory of Natural Necessity) and Roy Bhaskar (A Realist Theory of Science).  Peter Manicas's recent book, A Realist Philosophy of Social Science: Explanation and Understanding, is a useful step forward within this tradition. Here is how he formulates the perspective of scientific realism:

The real goal of science ... is understanding of the processes of nature. Once these are understood, all sorts of phenomena can be made intelligible, comprehensible, unsurprising. (14)

Explanation ... requires that there is a "real connection," a generative nexus that produced or brought about the event (or pattern) to be explained. (20)

So realism has to do with discovering underlying processes that give rise to observable phenomena. And causal mechanisms are precisely the sorts of underlying processes that are at issue.  Here is how Manicas summarizes his position:

Theory provides representations of the generative mechanisms,including hypotheses regarding ontology, for example, that there are atoms, and hypotheses regarding causal processes, for example, that atoms form molecules in accordance with principles of binding. We noted also that a regression to more fundamental elements and processes also became possible. So quantum theory offers generative mechanisms of processes in molecular chemistry. Typically, for any process, there will be at least one mechanism operating, although for such complex processes as organic growth there will be many mechanisms at work. Theories that represent generative mechanisms give us understanding. We make exactly this move as regards understanding in the social sciences, except that, of course, the mechanisms are social. (75)

Manicas's illustrations of causal powers and mechanisms are most often drawn from the natural world. But what basis do we have for thinking that social entities have stable causal properties -- let alone a profile of causal powers that are roughly invariant across instances?

Consider an example, Theda Skocpol's definition of social revolutions:

Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of socio-economic and political institutions, and--as Lenin so vividly reminds us--social revolutions are accompanied and in part effectuated through class upheavals from below. It is this combination of thorough-going structural transformation and massive class upheavals that sets social revolutions apart from coups, rebellions, and even political revolutions and national independence movements. (link)

Realism invites us to consider whether "social revolutions" really have the characteristics she attributes to them.  Do social revolutions have an underlying nature distinctive causal powers that might be identified by a social theory?  More generally, what basis do we have for thinking that certain types of social entities possess a specific set of causal powers?

The answer seems to be, very little.  Types of social entities -- revolutions, states, riots, market economies, fascist movements -- are heterogeneous groupings of concrete social formations rather than "kinds" along the lines of "metal" or "gene".  Each of the extended historical events that Skocpol offers as instances of the category "social revolution" is unique and contingent in a variety of ways; these historical episodes do not share a common causal nature.  It is legitimate to group them together under the term "social revolution"; but it is essential that we not commit the error of reification and imagine that the group so constituted must share a fundamental causal nature in common.  So the most direct application of this kind of realism to the social sciences seems somewhat unpromising.

But we are on firmer ground when we consider a particularly central type of assertion in the social sciences: claims about underlying causal mechanisms or social processes.  So what does it mean to assert that a given social mechanism "really exists"? 

Take the idea of "stereotype threat" as one of the mechanisms underlying an important social fact, the racial and gender differences in performance that have been observed on some standardized tests (Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, "Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans" (link); see also this article in the Atlantic).  We can summarize the theory along these lines: "Prevalent assumptions about the characteristics and performance of various salient social groups can depress (or enhance) the performance of members of those groups on intellectual and physical tasks.  This provides a partial explanation of the observed differentials in performance."  This mechanism is hypothesized as one of the ways in which performance by individuals in various groups is socially influenced in such a way as to lead to differential performance across groups.  It postulates a set of internal psychological mechanisms surrounding cognition and problem-solving, all related to the individual's self-ascribed social identity.

The realism question is this: do these hypothetical psychological effects actually occur in real human individuals?  And do these differences in cognitive processes lead to differential performance across groups?  If we confirm both these points, then we can conclude that "stereotype threat is a real social psychological mechanism."  The microfoundations of this mechanism reside in two locations: the concrete cognitive processes of the individuals, and the social behaviors of persons around these individuals, giving subtle cues about stereotypes that are discerned by the test-taker.

So we might say that we can conclude that a postulated social mechanism "really" exists if we are able to provide piecemeal empirical and theoretical arguments demonstrating that the terms of the mechanism hypothesis are confirmed in the actions and behavior of agents; and that these patterns of action do in fact typically lead to the sorts of outcomes postulated.  In other words, we need to look at our hypotheses about social mechanisms as small, somewhat separable theories that need separate empirical, historical, and theoretical evaluation.  And when we are successful in providing convincing support for these mechanism-theories, we are also justified in concluding that the postulated mechanism really exists.  The social world really embodies stereotype threat if individuals are really affected in their cognitive performances by the sorts of subtle behavioral cues mentioned by the theory, in roughly the ways stipulated by the theory.  And we will feel most confident in this assertion if we also find new areas of behavior where this mechanism also appears to be at work.

This approach has an important implication about social ontology.  The reality of a social mechanism is dependent on facts about agents, their characteristics of agency, and the environment of social relationships within which they act.  So there is a close intellectual relationship between the ontology of methodological localism and realism about causal mechanisms.

(The smokestack image above illustrates a different kind of social mechanism -- the workings of externalities in a market economy, creating pollution by dumping public harms to save private costs.)