Experimental methods in sociology

An earlier post noted the increasing importance of experimentation in some areas of economics (link), and posed the question of whether there is a place for experimentation in sociology as well. Here I'd like to examine that question a bit further.

Let's begin by asking the simple question: what is an experiment? An experiment is an intervention through which a scientist seeks to identify the possible effects of a given factor or “treatment”. The effect may be thought to be deterministic (whenever X occurs, Y occurs); or it may be probabilistic (the occurrence of X influences the probability of the occurrence of Y). Plainly, the experimental evaluation of probabilistic causal hypotheses requires repeating the experiment a number of times and evaluating the results statistically; whereas a deterministic causal hypothesis can in principle be refuted by a single trial.

In "The Principles of Experimental Design and Their Application in Sociology" (link) Michelle Jackson and D.R. Cox provide a simple and logical specification of experimentation:

We deal here with investigations in which the effects of a number of alternative conditions or treatments are to be compared. Broadly, the investigation is an experiment if the investigator controls the allocation of treatments to the individuals in the study and the other main features of the work, whereas it is observational if, in particular, the allocation of treatments has already been determined by some process outside the investigator’s control and detailed knowledge. The allocation of treatments to individuals is commonly labeled manipulation in the social science context. (Jackson and Cox 2013: 28)

There are several relevant kinds of causal claims in sociology that might admit of experimental investigation, corresponding to all four causal linkages implied by the model of Coleman’s boat (Foundations of Social Theory)—micro-macro, macro-micro, micro-micro, and macro-macro (link). Sociologists generally pay close attention to the relationships that exist between structures and social actors, extending in both directions. Hypotheses about causation in the social world require testing or other forms of empirical evaluation through the collection of evidence. It is plausible to ask whether the methods associated with experimentation are available to sociology. In many instances, the answer is, yes.

There appear to be three different kinds of experiments that would possibly make sense in sociology.

1. Experiments evaluating hypotheses about features of human motivation and behavior
2. Experiments evaluating hypotheses about the effects of features of the social environment on social behavior
3. Experiments evaluating hypotheses about the effects of “interventions” on the characteristics of an organization or local institution

First, sociological theories generally make use of more or less explicit theories of agents and their behavior. These theories could be evaluated using laboratory-based design for experimental subjects in specified social arrangements, parallel to existing methods in experimental economics. For example, Durkheim, Goffman, Coleman, and Hedström all provide different accounts of the actors who constitute social phenomena. It is feasible to design experiments along the lines of experimental economics to evaluate the behavioral hypotheses advanced by various sociologists.

Second, sociology is often concerned with the effects of social relationships on social behavior—for example, friendships, authority relations, or social networks. It would appear that these effects can be probed through direct experimentation, where the researcher creates artificial social relationships and observes behavior. Matthew Salganik et al’s internet-based experiments (2006, 2009) on “culture markets” fall in this category (Hedström 2006). Hedström describes the research by Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006) in these terms:

Salganik et al. (2) circumvent many of these problems [of survey-based methodology] by using experimental rather than observational data. They created a Web-based world where more than 14,000 individuals listened to previously unknown songs, rated them, and freely downloaded them if they so desired. Subjects were randomly assigned to different groups. Individuals in only some groups were informed about how many times others in their group had downloaded each song. The experiment assessed whether this social influence had any effects on the songs the individuals seemed to prefer. 

As expected, the authors found that individuals’ music preferences were altered when they were exposed to information about the preferences of others. Furthermore, and more importantly, they found that the extent of social influence had important consequences for the collective outcomes that emerged. The greater the social influence, the more unequal and unpredictable the collective outcomes became. Popular songs became more popular and unpopular songs became less popular when individuals influenced one another, and it became more difficult to predict which songs were to emerge as the most popular ones the more the individuals influenced one another. (787)

Third, some sociologists are especially interested in the effects of micro-context on individual actors and their behavior. Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel offer detailed interpretations of the causal dynamics of social interactions at the micro level, and their work appears to be amenable to experimental treatment. Garfinkel (Studies in Ethnomethodology), in particular, made use of research methods that are especially suggestive of controlled experimental designs.

Fourth, sociologists are interested in macro-causes of individual social action. For example, sociologists would like to understand the effects of ideologies and normative systems on individual actors, and others would like to understand the effects of differences in large social structures on individual social actors. Weber hypothesized that the Protestant ethic caused a certain kind of behavior. Theoretically it should be possible to establish hypotheses about the kind of influence a broad cultural factor is thought to exercise over individual actors, and then design experiments to evaluate those hypotheses. Given the scope and pervasiveness of these kinds of macro-social factors, it is difficult to see how their effects could be assessed within a laboratory context. However, there are a range of other experimental designs that could be used, including quasi-experiments (link) and field experiments and natural experiments (link),  in which the investigator designs appropriate comparative groups of individuals in observably different ideological, normative, or social-structural arrangements and observes the differences that can be discerned at the level of social behavior. Does one set of normative arrangements result in greater altruism? Does a culture of nationalism promote citizens’ propensity for aggression against outsiders? Does greater ethnic homogeneity result in higher willingness to comply with taxation, conscription, and other collective duties?

Finally, sociologists are often interested in macro- to macro-causation. For example, consider the claims that “defeat in war leads to weak state capacity in the subsequent peace” or “economic depression leads to xenophobia”. Of course it is not possible to design an experiment in which “defeat in war” is a treatment; but it is possible to develop quasi-experiments or natural experiments that are designed to evaluate this hypothesis. (This is essentially the logic of Theda Skocpol’s (1979) analysis of the causes of social revolution in States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China.) Or consider a research question in contentious politics, does widespread crop failure give rise to rebellions? Here again, the direct logic of experimentation is generally not available; but the methods articulated in the fields of quasi-experimentation, natural experiments, and field experiments offer an avenue for research designs that have a great deal in common with experimentation. A researcher could compile a dataset for historical China that records weather, crop failure, crop prices, and incidents of rebellion and protest. This dataset could support a “natural experiment” in which each year is assigned to either “control group” or “intervention group”; the control group consists of years in which crop harvests were normal, while the intervention group would consist of years in which crop harvests are below normal (or below subsistence). The experiment is then a simple one: what is the average incidence of rebellious incident in control years and intervention years?

So it is clear that causal reasoning that is very similar to the logic of experimentation is common throughout many areas of sociology. That said, the zone of sociological theorizing that is amenable to laboratory experimentation under random selection and a controlled environment is largely in the area of theories of social action and behavior: the reasons actor behave as they do, hypotheses about how their choices would differ under varying circumstances, and (with some ingenuity) how changing background social conditions might alter the behavior of actors. Here there are very direct parallels between sociological investigation and the research done by experimental and behavioral economists like Richard Thaler (Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics). And in this way, sociological experiments have much in common with experimental research in social psychology and other areas of the behavioral sciences.

Processual sociology

Andrew Abbott is one of the thinkers within sociology who is not dependent upon a school of thought -- not structuralism, not positivism, not ethnomethodology, not even the Chicago School. He approaches the problems that interest him with a fresh eye and therefore represents a source of innovation and new ideas within sociological theory. Second, he presents some very compelling intuitions about the social world when it comes to social ontology. He thinks that many social scientists bring unfortunate assumptions with them about the fixity of the social world -- assumptions about entities and properties, assumptions about causation, assumption about laws. And he shows in many places how misleading these assumptions are -- not least in his study of the professions The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Institutions), but in his history of the Chicago School of sociology as well (Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred). Processual Sociology presents his current thinking about some of those important ideas.

The central organizing idea of Processual Sociology is one that finds expression in much of Abbott's work, the notion that we should think of the social world as a set of ongoing processes rather than a collection of social entities and structures. He sometimes refers to this as a relational view of the actor and the social environment. Here is how he describes the basic ontological idea of a processual social world:

By a processual approach, I mean an approach that presumes that everything in the social world is continuously in the process of making, remaking, and unmaking itself (and other things), instant by instant. The social world does not consist of atomic units whose interactions obey various rules, as in the thought of the economists. Nor does it consist of grand social entities that shape and determine the little lives of individuals, as in the sociology of Durkheim and his followers. (preface)

This isn't a wholly unfamiliar idea in sociological theory; for example, Norbert Elias advocated something like it with his idea of "figurational sociology" (link). But Abbott's adherence to the approach and his sustained efforts to develop sociological ideas in light of it are distinctive. 

Abbott offers the idea of a "career" as an example of what he means by a processual social reality. A person's career is not a static thing that exists in a confined period of time; rather, it is a series of choices, developments, outcomes, and plans that accumulate over time in ways that in turn affect the individual's mentality. Or consider his orienting statements about professions in The System of Professions:

The professions, that is, make up an interdependent system. In this system, each profession has its activities under various kinds of jurisdiction. Sometimes it has full control, sometimes control subordinate to another group. Jurisdictional boundaries are perpetually in dispute, both in local practice and in national claims. It is the history of jurisdictional disputes that is the real, the determining history of the professions. Jurisdictional claims furnish the impetus and the pattern to organizational developments. Thus an effective historical sociology of professions must begin with case studies of jurisdictions and jurisdiction disputes. It must then place these disputes in a larger context, considering the system of professions as a whole. (kl 208)

His comments about the discipline of sociology itself in Department and Discipline have a similar fluidity. Rather than thinking of sociology as a settled "thing" within the intellectual firmament, we are better advised to look at the twists and turns various sociologists, departments, journals, conferences, and debates have made of the configuration during a period in time.

These examples have to do with the nature of social things -- institutions and organizations, for example. But Abbott extends the processual view to the actors themselves. He argues that we should look to the flow of actions rather than the actor (again, a parallel with Elias); so actions are as much the result of shifting circumstances as they are the reflective choices of unitary actors. Moreover, the individual himself or herself continues to change throughout life and throughout a series of actions. Memories change, desires change, and social relationships change. Individuals are "historical" -- they are embedded in concrete circumstances and relationships that contribute to their actions and movements at each moment. (This is the thrust of the first chapter of the volume.) Abbott extends this idea of the "processual individual" by reconsidering the concept of human nature (chapter 2).

For a processual view that begins with problematizing that continuity, an important first step is to address the concept of human nature, asking what kind of concept of human nature is possible under processual assumptions. (16)

Here is something like a summary of the view that he develops in this chapter:

Human nature, first, is rooted in the three modes of historicality—corporeal, memorial, and recorded—and the complex of substantive historicality that they enable. It concerns the means by which those modes interact and shape the developing lineage that is a person or social entity. It is also rooted in what we might call optativity, the human capacity to envision alternative futures and indeed alternative future units to the social process. (31-32)

Ecological thinking plays a large role in Abbott's conception of the social realm. Social and human arrangements are not to be thought of in isolation; instead, Abbott advocates that we should consider them in a field of ecological interdependence. A research library does not exist uniquely by itself; rather, it exists in a field of funding, institutional control, user demands, legal regulations, and public opinion. Its custodians make decisions about the purchase of materials based on the needs and advocacy of various stakeholders, and the operation and holdings of the research library are a joint product of these contextual influences. In an innovative move, Abbott argues that the ecology within which an institution like a library sits is actually a linked set of ecologies, each exercising influence over the others. So the library influences the publisher in the same activities through which the publisher influences the library. Here is a brief description of the idea of linked ecologies:

I here answer this critique with the concept of linked ecologies. Instead of envisioning a particular ecology as having a set of fixed surrounds, I reconceptualize the social world in terms of linked ecologies, each of which acts as a flexible surround for others. The overall conception is thus fully general. For expository convenience, however, it is easiest to develop the argument around a particular ecology. I shall here use that of the professions. (35)

The central topic for a sociologist in a processual framework is the problem of stability: given the permanent fact of change, how does continuity emerge and persist? This is the problem of order.

I am concerned to envision what kinds of concepts of order might be appropriate under a different set of social premises: those of processualism. As the first two chapters of this book have argued, the processual ontology does not start with independent individuals trying to create a society. It starts with events. Social entities and individuals are made out of that ongoing flow of events. The question therefore arises of what concept of order would be necessary if we started out not with the usual state-of-nature ontology, but with this quite different processual one. (200)

Here Abbott's thinking converges with several other sociologists and theorists whose work provides insights concerning the persistence of social entities, institutions, or assemblages. Abbott, Kathleen Thelen and Manuel DeLanda (link, link) agree about an important fundamental question: we must investigate the mechanisms and circumstances that permit social institutions, rules, or arrangements to persist in the face of the stochastic pressures of change induced by actors and circumstances.

Sociology circa 2008

I often find handbooks in the social sciences to be particularly valuable resources for anyone interested in thinking about the big issues and challenges facing the social sciences at a particular point in time. Editors and contributors have generally made intelligent efforts to provide articles that give a good understanding of a theme, methodology, or issue in the given field of research, without diving into the full detail of a scholarly monograph on the minutiae. Earlier posts have highlighted a number of such handbooks (link, link, link).

An excellent example of such a volume is Hedstrom and Wittrock, Frontiers of Sociology (Annals of the International Institute of Sociology Vol. 11). This volume took its origin in the 2008 meeting of the IIS, supplemented by a number of additional pieces. It includes excellent contributions from highly impactful sociologists from Europe and North America.

The editors describe the motivation for the volume in these terms:

There may be a greater urgency today than for a very long time for sociology to examine its own intellectual and institutional frontiers relative to other disciplinary and scholarly programs but also relative to a rapidly changing institutional and academic landscape. In this sense, current sociology may be in a situation more analogous to that of the classics of sociology and of the IIS than has been the case for a large part of the twentieth century. (1)

A core theme in the volume is the idea of intersections between sociological research and adjacent disciplines.

The large topic areas include:

1. The legacy and frontiers of sociology
2. Sociology and the historical sciences
3. Sociology and the cultural sciences
4. Sociology and the cognitive sciences
5. Sociology and the mathematical and statistical sciences

A handful of chapters are particularly relevant to themes that have come up frequently in Understanding Society. Here are a few representative ideas from these chapters.

Peter Hedstrom, "The analytical turn in sociology" [analytical sociology]

What I find particularly attractive in analytical philosophy is rather the general style of scholarship as well as a number of specific conceptual clarifications that are of considerable importance for sociological theory.

The style of scholarship one finds in analytical philosophy can be concisely characterized as follows:

• An emphasis on the importance of clarity: If it is not perfectly clear what someone is trying to say, confusion is likely to arise, and this will hamper our understanding. 
• An emphasis on the importance of analysis in terms of breaking something down to its basic constituents in order to better understand it. 
• An academic style of writing that does not shy away from abstraction and formalization when this is deemed necessary. 

By adopting principles such as these, it is possible to devise a more analytically oriented sociology that seeks to explain complex social processes by carefully dissecting them, bringing into focus their most important constituent components, and then to construct appropriate models which help us to understand why we observe what we observe. Let me try to briefly indicate what I have in mind, starting with analysis in terms of dissection and abstraction. (332)

Philip Gorski, "Social 'mechanisms' and comparative-historical sociology: A critical realist proposal" [critical realism]

A second important principle of critical realism, which follows directly from the above, is ontological stratification. This principle is a familiar one for social scientists, who often speak of the various “levels” or “dimensions” of a particular “system” or “phenomenon.” But critical realism provides a basic principle for identifying these levels: namely, the principle of emergence. Consider the pin factory example once again. A modern manager or engineer could undoubtedly increase the output of the factory’s workforce simply by making various kinds of organizational or technical adjustments—to the sequencing of tasks, the spatial layout, the introduction of new tools or machines, and so on. From the perspective of critical realism, then, the factory qua organization or institution is an autonomous reality.

This is not to deny that the output of the pin factory could also be increased by changing the composition of the workforce—e.g., by hiring more skilled or dextrous or energetic workers. The principle of stratification should not be confused with the principle of holism. To say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts is not to say that the composition of the parts is of no consequence. This brings us to a third important principle of critical realism: explanatory a-reducibility. A-reducibility is not the same as irreducibility. Irreducibility implies that one level or strata of reality cannot be explained in terms of another at all, that decomposing that strata into its constituent parts is useless; a-reducibility, on the other hand, merely implies that one level or strata cannot be fully explained in terms of another. So, to say that the output of the pin factory is a-reducible to the composition of its work force is not to say that the latter has no effect on the former, only that no individual-level property or power can fully explain the collective output of a factory, which is to say, that the factory has emergent powers and properties—that it is real. (148-149)

Richard Breen, "Formal theory in the social sciences" [agent-based models]

Game theory and social interaction models follow the rational choice model, but there is another approach to modelling the way in which context influences aggregate outcomes which has not developed from, nor necessarily makes use of, rational choice: this is agent based modelling. Agent based models (or ABMs) are simulations, usually computer based, of the interactions of agents. These simulations are used to generate aggregate properties of the agent population using very simple characterisations of the agents themselves. As Macy and Willer (2002: 146) put it in their review of the field: ‘ABMs explore the simplest set of behavioural assumptions required to generate a macro pattern of explanatory interest’. The roots of this approach are deep, but it is only within the past 15 years or thereabouts that agent based models have become popular. Nevertheless, one of the most influential pieces of agent based modelling predates the availability of powerful computers: this is Schelling’s (1971) model of residential segregation. The Schelling model consists of a set of agents, each of which is of one of two types—call them red and blue—arrayed on a network structure such as points on a circle or a lattice. These agents have a preference for a balance of neighbours of each type and in each round of the simulation those agents who are dissatisfied in this respect are allowed to move to any other available location. The strength of preference can be varied in the Schelling model, reflecting the extent to which agents want to be with a majority of their own type or are willing to be in a minority. It transpires that, even if agents’ preferences for neighbours of their own type are very weak, after several rounds of the simulation there is complete segregation, so that the network consists of areas that are completely red or completely blue but lacks any mixed areas. This outcome is a stylized version of residential segregation by race in the United States, but the model suggests that a strong desire for such segregation on the part of the agents is not necessary to generate segregation: it can arise from only weak preferences for residing with one’s own type. The Schelling model nicely illustrates the characteristic feature of agent based models: namely that a complex social outcome is generated as an emergent property of the interaction of agents who follow very simple rules of behaviour. A more recent and almost equally well known, but much more elaborate, example of an agent based model is the Sugarscape model of Epstein and Axtell (1996) in which a population of agents, again following simple rules, exploits the natural resource of a landscape and in so doing generates social outcomes, such as a distribution of wealth and cultural distinctions which, according to the authors, closely resemble their real world counterparts. 

In obvious contrast to the agents of rational choice models, those of agent based models of the sort I have referred to follow simple rules of the kind ‘if X then do Y’—so, in the Schelling model, the rule is: if your preferences are not met move; if your preferences are met, stay where you are. To the extent that agents change their behaviour they are adaptive, rather than forward looking. (218-219)  

Hans Joas, "The emergence of universalism: An affirmative genealogy" [new pragmatism]

The type of sociology I am representing here tries to understand—as I said—creative processes. The creative process that interests me most at the moment is the creation of new values. I prefer not to speak of the creation, but of the genesis of values, because it is one of the seemingly paradoxical features of our commitment to values that we do not experience them as being created by us but as captivating us, attracting and grasping us (“Ergriffensein”). There is a passive dimension in all creative processes that has always been described in terms like “inspiration”; but in the case of values it is clearly only from an observer’s standpoint that we can see values as created. The participants in these processes do not feel committed to an entity of their own making, but consider values as being discovered or rediscovered.

A sociological study of major innovations in the field of values is neither a philosophical attempt to offer a rational justification for these values nor a mere historical reconstruction of the contingencies of their emergence. Philosophical justifications do not need history. In the case of human rights, they mostly develop their argument out of the (alleged) character of reason or moral obligation as such, out of the conditions of a thought experiment or the fundamentals of an idealized rational discourse. The history of ideas is then mostly seen as the pre-history of the definitive solution that can be found in the work of Kant or Rawls or Habermas. —Historiography, on the other hand, certainly has some implicit elements of an evaluative character and of their justication and it can be a historiography of philosophical, political, or religious arguments concerning human rights and universal human dignity. But as historiography it seems to be nothing but an empirically tenable reconstruction of historical processes and not a contribution to the justification of values. In their division of labor philosophy and history support a strict distinction between questions of genesis and questions of validity. (18)

Jack Goldstone, "Sociology and political science: Learning and challenges" [internal organization of sociology as a discipline]

Both economics and political science have relatively simple structures to their academic fields. Economics divides itself, roughly, among micro- economics, macro-economics, trade or international economics, and economic history. Of course there are myriad specialties that cross these lines: labor economics, price theory, general equilibrium theory, development economics, finance, welfare economics, experimental economics, health economics, environmental economics, the economics of public goods, the economics of innovation/R&D, etc. etc. Nonetheless, economics gives itself great coherence as a field by having a simple fourfold division to guide its basic undergraduate and graduate foundation courses, and its staffing of departments.

Political science similarly has a four-fold division: American (or other home country) politics, comparative politics, international relations, and theory (actually the history of political thought). This can be even more simply conceptualized as the politics of my country, the politics of other countries, the relations among various countries, and the intellectual history of the field. Again, political science has myriad subfields that operate within and across these divisions: comparative democratization, legislative politics, the presidency, deterrence, political psychology, opinion research, public administration, etc. etc. But the basic four-fold division gives a certain coherence to structuring pedagogy and hiring.

Sociology, sadly, has no such internal structure. There is no reason for this, except for the history of the field as succumbing alternately to grand unifying visions (Marxism, Weberianism, Functionalism) and fractioning into a large number of different specialties. Sociology certainly could set itself up as having four basic fields: American (or the national society in which the department is located) society, comparative macro-sociology (the sociology of other societies and their relationships, including most of development and political sociology), micro-sociology (social psychology, small-groups, social identity, race/ethnicity/gender), and organizational or meso-sociology (professions, organizations, net- works, business, religion, education, medicine, etc.).

Of course sociology, like economics and political science, could retain its hundreds of sub-specialties that cut across these divisions. But requiring all students to take a course in each of these four areas, and specialize in one of them, would give much greater coherence and institutional structure to the field. Right now, sociology presents itself through one vast intro survey course and an unstructured mass of specialized courses that have little intellectual organization. (60-61)

Aage Sørensen, "Statistical models and mechanisms of social processes" [social mechanisms]

Understanding the association between observed variables is what most of us believe research is about. However, we rarely worry about the functional form of the relationship. The main reason is that we rarely worry about how we get from our ideas about how change is brought about, or the mechanisms of social processes, to empirical observation. In other words, sociologists rarely model mechanisms explicitly. In the few cases where they do model mechanisms, they are labeled mathematical sociologists, not a very large or important specialty in sociology.

We need to estimate relationship in order to figure out if our theoretical ideas have some support in evidence. For this purpose, we use statistics. Statistics is a branch of mathematics and might seem alien to sociologists for this reason. However, while sociologists are not very eager to formulate their theories as mathematical models, sociologists are very eager to learn statistics, and quite good at it. They therefore use statistical models to estimate the relationships that concern them in research. These statistical models are usually presented by statisticians as default models, to be used when a substantive model is lacking. The models are invariably additive, at least as a point of departure. They have the virtue of being parsimonious. The statistical models have the defect that they sometime are poor theories of the processes under investigation. (370)

I have argued that the integration of theory and evidence in sociology must take place by choosing theories that allow for such integration by producing ideas about what generates change in social processes. In order to be fully successful, this strategy should result in the formulation of mathematical models for change. These ideas are not novel. They form the justification for the creation of a specialty in sociology called mathematical sociology and the power of the ideas is illustrated with numerous examples in Coleman (1964) and related work. Nevertheless, sociologists have largely chosen a different strategy for going about testing their ideas with evidence. They adopt ad hoc statistical models as described in textbooks and they have become quite sophisticated at statistics. I have tried to show that this use of statistical models and the fascination with their elaboration has blinded sociologists to exploring fundamental properties of the processes they investigate, such as social mobility processes. In turn this has sometimes produced quite unreasonable substantive models for the processes being investigated, as in the case of research on schools effects.

There are several reasons for why statistical models came to dominate. I have argued elsewhere that the increase in computing power allowed sociologists to estimate what with less computing power had to be modeled (Sørensen 1998). So instead of formulating stochastic process models for the mechanisms of what we are interested in, we proceed directly to estimate how parameters of these processes depend on independent variables in hazard rate analysis. (396-397)

These are talented sociologists, searching for some new ways of approaching the task of understanding social change, social variation, and social stability. Further, like the larger universe of sociology today, there are important tensions among the approaches highlighted here -- from historical and comparative research to causal mechanisms to statistical inference and causal modeling. And yet, in spite of the range of approaches offered in the volume, sociological methods and sociological theorizing would benefit from an even greater range of pluralism and innovation. Understanding the contemporary social world requires new appreciation of the complexity and heterogeneity of the social processes in which we live, and new tools for investigating and theorizing those processes. (Here is a post from 2008 that makes the case for theoretical and methodological pluralism in sociology -- ironically, from the same year in which the Hedstrom and Wittrock volume appeared.)

Gorski on critical realism

Earlier posts have considered the reception of critical realism by two major historical sociologists, Peggy Somers and George Steinmetz (link, link). These researchers believe that the philosophical issues and positions raised by Roy Bhaskar in his evolving theory of critical realism are insightful and useful for the conduct of post-positivist sociology. Philip Gorski is a third contemporary sociologist who has weighed in on the relevance of critical realism for the practice of sociology. Gorski's primary research divides between sociological theory and comparative historical sociology, and he is the most explicit of the three in his advocacy for the philosophy of science associated with critical realism. Several articles are particularly direct in this regard, including What is critical realism? (2013) in Contemporary Sociology, The poverty of deductivism (2004) in Sociological Methodology, and the concluding chapter in his recently edited and very interesting volume, Bourdieu and Historical Analysis (2013) (discussed earlier here).

The 2013 article offers both exposition and polemic. Gorski wants to make the case that sociologists benefit from the philosophy of science because it serves as an intellectual support for research and theory -- there is a reason for sociologists to be concerned about debates in the philosophy of science; and that the alternatives on offer are woefully inadequate (positivism, interpretivism, constructivism).

Gorski makes the important point that sociological research needs to be pluralistic when it comes to methodology. Interpretation requires contextualization (662); causal hypotheses are often supported by statistical evidence; it is reasonable for realists about structures to look for the constitutive actions of lower-level powers that make them up. There isn't a primary method of inquiry or empirical reasoning that works best for all social research; instead, sociologists need to define significant research topics and then craft methods of inquiry and inference that are best suited to those topics. Quantitative, interpretive, comparative, deductive, inductive, abductive, descriptive, and explanatory approaches are all appropriate methods for some problems of social research. So it is important for sociologists to "unlearn" some of the dogmas of positivist methodology that have often thought to be constitutive of the scientific warrant of sociology.

Against the dominant philosophies of social science of positivism, interpretivism, and constructivism, Gorski argues that there is only one credible alternative, the philosophical theory of critical realism. And this means, largely, the writings of Roy Bhaskar. So the bulk of this piece is an exposition of Bhaskar's central ideas. Gorski provides a precis of Bhaskar's thoughts in three stages of his work, A Realist Theory of Science, The Possibility of Naturalism: A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences, and Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. And he argues that the ontological framework embodied in these aspects of a specific philosophy of science -- realism about underlying structures, powers, and processes -- is the best available as a general starting point for the sciences.

Other philosophies of social science place epistemology or methodology at the center of what a philosophy of the sciences should resolve. Gorski, on the other hand, emphasizes the importance of the ontology of critical realism -- what CR conveys about the nature and stratification of the social world.

Crucial within that ontology is the notion of the reality of social structures and the idea that social properties are emergent. Here are a few comments about emergence:

[CR] does not deny that reduction can sometimes be illuminating, but it insists that the social is an emergent reality with its own specific powers and properties. (659) 

The genesis of the social sciences hinged on the discovery of emergence, and major advances in them have typically involved the discovery of emergent proper- ties (e.g., of economic markets, social classes, collective conscience, value spheres, social fields, and so on). (662) 

But they invariably fall short of their epistemic goals: to explain one strata of reality in terms of a lower-order one. Why? Because of ‘‘emergence.’’ The combination and inter- action of entities and properties at one level of reality generates ‘‘emergent’’ entities and properties at others. (664)

As I've observed elsewhere here (link, link, link), the concept of emergence is elusive, and it seems to shift back and forth between "fundamentally independent of lower level phenomena" and "dependent upon but autonomous from lower level phenomena". The latter is the version that I favor with the concept of "relative explanatory autonomy"; link). Like Tuukka Kaidesoja, I'm not yet satisfied with the treatment of emergence that is associated with critical realism (link).

A related and more novel idea about social ontology employed by Gorski is the concept of "lamination" first introduced in Bhaskar's Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom to describe the nature of the social world and the relations among levels of social action and structure:

Because there are multiple layers of agents and powers, moreover, observable events will have a "laminated" character; they are simultaneously governed by normic laws at various levels. This has important consequences for causal inference.... It is simultaneously and jointly determined by all of them. It is a "laminated" process. (665)

This is a vivid metaphor to use in conveying the idea of the "levels" of the social. But it has implications that may be unintended. For example, the idea of lamination suggests a sharp separation between layers; whereas many social domains seem to be better described as a continuous flow from lower to higher levels (and from higher to lower levels).

I find Gorski's exposition of critical realism to be useful and clear. However, there is a large omission in Gorski's account of the philosophical grounds of realism: Gorski assumes that there is no other serious tradition of post-positivist realism that serves as an alternative to critical realism. He dismisses what he calls the "conventional" realism of analytical sociology (659). He faults this version for its commitment to a form of individualism, structural individualism. Gorski insists on the "emergent" character of social structures and properties. And he presumes that there is no other viable form of realism available to the philosophy of science.

This binary and exclusive opposition between empiricism and critical realism as the only possibilities is misleading. There is a very substantial literature in the philosophy of science that rejects positivism; that maintains that theories are potentially good guides to the real "ontological" properties of the world; and that does not share the particular philosophical assumptions that Bhaskar brings into critical realism. I am thinking of Hilary Putnam, Dick Boyd, and Jarrett Leplin in particular. But there are dozens of other examples that could be considered.

A particularly clear exposition of this other tradition of post-positivist realism can be found in Richard Boyd's 1990 contribution in Wade Savage's Scientific Theories, "Realism, Approximate Truth, and Philosophical Method" (link). Here is how Boyd opens this piece:

Scientific realists hold that the characteristic product of successful scientific research is knowledge of largely theory-independent phenomena and that such knowledge is possible (indeed actual) even in those cases in which the relevant phenomena are not, in any non-question-begging sense, observable. The characteristic philosophical arguments for scientific realism embody the claim that certain central principles of scientific methodology require a realist explication. In its most completely developed form, this sort of abductive argument embodies the claim that a realist conception of scientific inquiry is required in order to justify, or to explain the reliability with respect to instrumental knowledge of, all of the basic methodological principles of mature scientific inquiry. (355)

This is a form of realism that reaches similar conclusions to those advocated by Bhaskar, but derives from an independent path of philosophical investigation following the collapse of positivist philosophy of science in the 1960s and 1970s. And this version of realism makes substantially fewer philosophical assumptions than Bhaskar's system puts forward.

(See also Jarrett Leplin, A Novel Defense of Scientific Realism.)

History of sociology

Sociology is a discipline with a short history and a very dense and complex tree of topics and methods. So writing its history — even limited to the past century and a half — is extremely challenging. And the idea that the discipline has worked itself out as the methodical development of ideas advanced by the "founders" -- e.g. Marx, Durkheim, Tarde, Weber, and Simmel -- is really a non-starter. Each of these thinkers brought important ideas into the mix; but sociology is more than simply an elaboration of their nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century ideas. Rather, sociologists have taken a meandering path as they have reacted to new social problems, innovations in theory and method, and shifting priorities in universities and funding sources.

An earlier post discussed one effort to write a coherent history of one strand of sociology —Frederic Vandenberghe’s critical history of modern European sociology (link). The strength of this kind of sole-author approach is also its weakness. A talented thinker like Vandenberghe can provide a degree of synthetic organization to the history to give the reader an integrated understanding of the main development of the discipline. But this very synthetic strength is also a drawback, in that it depends crucially on the sensibilities of the author. So, for example, Vandenberghe’s inclination towards the critical dimensions of the German tradition makes him less likely to highlight possible influences of Durkheim in Germany.

A more sociological approach is to consider the discipline in terms of the institutions and organizations through which it is exercised. This is the thrust of the controversial book by Stephen Turner and Jonathan Turner, The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology. T² argue that the discipline lacks focus because of the shifting resource base that has fueled its development over the past hundred years, with an associated shifting in the priorities that guided research and the institutions through which sociology existed (departments, journals, associations). And what T² regard as the over-emphasis on statistical methods in the 1950s and 1960s derives precisely from this point about resources: government funding for social science research increased after World War II, and funding agencies insisted on a more "scientific" approach to the study of social phenomena. So statistical studies and survey research received extensive funding. Stephen Turner must be counted as a critic of the intellectual content of contemporary sociology. Here is how he closes his short essay on the history of sociology, "Who's Afraid of the History of Sociology?" (link):

The best of sociology is in its past. The history of sociology is a continuous reproach to the sociology of the present. The past is an embarrassment precisely because it is better: its thinkers are more serious and profound, its concerns deeper, and it is far more worthwhile to study. The formal discipline that was created with such effort over the last century has been a fiasco. The people who have responsibility for its present form have good reason to be afraid of its historians. But they resent the conservators of the past when they should examine their own failings.

Another approach to attempting to sort out the history of sociology that emphasizes the content of the various domains of sociology is for an editor to curate contributions around a supposedly standard set of topics. This approach too depends upon the theoretical judgments of the editor about which topics are most important. Consider several recent handbooks designed to give students an overview of the discipline of sociology. Here are the main topic areas singled out in Appelrouth and Edles, Sociological Theory in the Contemporary Era: Text and Readings:

1. Introduction
2. Structural Functionalism (Parsons, Merton)
3. Critical Theory (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse)
4. Exchange Theory (Homans, Blau)
5. Symbolic Interactionism and Dramaturgy (Blumer, Goffman, Hochschild)
6. Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology (Schutz, Berger, Garfinkel)
7. Feminist Theory (Beauvoir, Friedan, Dorothy Smith)
8. Poststructural and Postmodern Theories (Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard)
9. Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses (Bourdieu, Randall Collins, Habermas, Giddens)
10. The Global Society (Wallerstein, Sklair, Said)

And here is a similar taxonomy from Judith Blau's The Blackwell Companion to Sociology:

1. Referencing Globalization
2. Relationships and Meaning
3. Economic Inequalities
4. Science, Knowledge, and Ideas
5. Politics and Political Movements
6. Structures: Stratification, Networks, and Firms
7. Individuals and Their Well-Being
8. Social Action

There is some overlap between the two lists, but they are not homologous. There are topics in each list that do not appear in the other. The new sociology of ideas appears in Blau's list but not Appelrouth and Edles'; and phenomenology and ethnomethodology does not appear on Blau's list. Globalization, inequalities, and relationships and ethnomethodology appear on both lists. The editorial choices by each set of editors are manifest.

A different approach is that taken by Craig Calhoun and more than twenty collaborators in Sociology in America: A History, with essays on twenty topics and periods within the intellectual geography of American sociology since the mid-nineteenth century. Here is an abbreviated table of contents of Calhoun's book:

Each author or set of authors brings his/her own sensibilities to the topic in question, and there is little opportunity for a synthetic overview of the field as a whole. But the overall impression gained by the careful reader of the whole volume is a powerful one — analogous to a serious visit to a rich and diverse art museum, where the visitor gets an exposure to multiple styles, subjects, and media, and comes away with his or her own impressions of the art field represented there.

Neil Gross's article on pragmatism and phenomenology is an excellent case in point. Gross is himself a leading practitioner of a pragmatist approach to sociology. His essay is a thoughtful and illuminating examination of the conceptual and substantive ways in which the philosophy of pragmatism aligned with the needs of an emerging sociology. He argues that there has been a major and often productive interaction between philosophy and sociology. He does a good job of explaining the aspects of the thinking of James, Dewey, Mead, and Peirce that proved insightful for the formulation of sociological concepts and research goals. The essay does more than establish the lines of influence that existed from the point of view of the history of ideas; it demonstrates the fecundity of the pragmatist approach for the study of human society. "Pragmatism postulates the existence of an inherently social self" (192). "The pragmatists held that how people respond to situations is closely bound up with the meanings they interpret them to have" (193). "Chicago sociology may have been shaped by pragmatism's vision of human action more generally ... as an adaptive response to problematic situations" (196). This is a very interesting and detailed history of the development of pragmatist sociology within the Chicago School. (He also offers a fine analysis of the development of analytic philosophy in the United States, and makes a fascinating connection to McCarthyism as an account of why philosophy turned away from political philosophy; 203ff.) And his treatment of the influence of phenomenology in sociology is equally interesting. "Like Schutz, Garfinkel recognized that cognition of the social world is fundamentally an interpretive endeavor and that this interpretation rests on a bed of pre-theoretical assumptions and understandings" (218).

It is possible to map most of the discussions in the Calhoun volume onto the taxonomies offered by Blau and Appelrouth and Edles. But the overall impression of Calhoun's collection is much stronger than the handbooks. The originality of the authors who composed the chapters comes through, and each essay stands by itself. Virtually every chapter is a valuable contribution itself to the discipline of sociology, rather than a survey of the developments in the discipline during a particular period of time. At the same time the chapters constitute an eloquent mosaic of many of the important imperatives, themes, and dimensions of American sociology since mid-nineteenth century.

The topic of how to approach the history of sociology is an important one. In an intriguing sense we don't yet know what sociology is. It will continue to shape-shift as researchers and theorists find new problems and old paradigms engaging. And thinking hard about the history of the many fields of sociology stimulates valuable new thinking about how we may innovate in the future.

Historical sociologists on critical realism

Critical realism took its origin within the philosophy discipline, arising at the time that there was profound debate over the adequacy of logical positivism as a basis for the philosophy of science. Carl Hempel represented the fruition of positivist philosophy of science, with his hypothetico-deductive model of confirmation, his deductive-nomological model of explanation, and his covering-law model of historical explanation. These all amount to the same idea, of course: that scientific knowledge takes the form of a set of general theoretical principles or laws, a set of empirical statements about existing conditions, and a set of deductions from the laws and statements of consequences for the observable phenomena. There was a strong reaction in the 1960s to the orthodoxies of logical positivism and Hempelian philosophy of science by philosophers such as Norwood Hanson, Paul Feyerabend, and Thomas Kuhn. Compelling criticisms were offered of the strict distinction between observation and theory, concerns were raised about the putative coincidence of explanation and derivation from general laws, and more nuanced theories of scientific rationality than the hypothetico-deductive method were offered.

A particular sticking point within the positivist theory of science was its common adherence to a Humean theory of the meaning of causation as constant conjunction. Hume derided the idea of “causal necessity” and sought to replace this notion with the idea of conformance to a strong regularity. Rom Harré and Edward Madden undertook a strong critique of this assumption in Causal Powers: Theory of Natural Necessity, also in the mid-1960s. And this anti-positivist strand of thinking about causation was more important to the emergence of critical realism than any other influence.

Several gifted sociologists joined this debate in the 1990s. Especially astute were contributions by George Steinmetz and Margaret Somers, both colleagues at the University of Michigan, and Philip Gorski at Yale. In a review article in Society for Comparative Study of Society and History in 1998 Steinmetz provides a careful review of the intellectual background and the central ideas that Roy Bhaskar introduces in his writings on naturalism and realism (link).  Steinmetz reviews the mainstream assumptions that defined positivist philosophy of social science through the 1960s and the echo of these assumptions in mainstream sociology; and he provides a fairly detailed description of Bhaskar’s alternative. He emphasizes several central ideas:

• the transcendental nature of Bhaskar’s reasoning: “discovering what must be true about the world for science to be possible” (176)
• the distinctions among the real, the actual, and the empirical
• the scientific importance of “open systems” — systems lacking causal closure and displaying contingency
• a specific idea about emergence — "Emergence is defined as the relationship between two levels such that one arises diachronically (or perhaps synchronically) out of the other but is capable of reacting back on the lower level and is causally irreducible to it (Bhaskar 1993:73) [178]

Following Peggy Somers in "We're No Angels" (1998; link), Steinmetz distinguishes between "theoretical realism" and critical realism; essentially the former concept refers to the standard version of scientific realism found within post-positivist philosophy of science (Hilary Putnam, Richard Boyd). The key attribute of scientific realism, according to Steinmetz, is its continuing adherence to the idea of scientific laws; "theoretical realism is strongly deductivist" (173). So Steinmetz believes that "theoretical realism" is more closely aligned with positivism than is critical realism, and that critical realism fits the practice of historically minded social scientists better.

I will argue that most historical researchers, whatever their self-description, are critical realists rather than theoretical realists, positivists, or neo-Kantian idealists, and that this stance is the most defensible one for the social sciences in general on ontological and epistemological grounds. (171)

Steinmetz believes that the philosophy of science articulated within critical realism accords very well with the practice of historically minded social scientists like himself. He closes his article with these words:

Critical realism is especially “liberating” for historical sociology. It provides a rebuttal to the positivist and theoretical realist insistence on the dogmas of empirical invariance, prediction, and parsimony (see Bhaskar 1989:184). Critical realism guards against any slide into empiricism by showing why theoretical mechanisms are central to all explanation. At the same time, critical realism suggests that contingent, conjunctural causality is the norm in open systems like society. Yet critical realism’s epistemological relativism allows it to accept the results of much of the recent history and sociology of science in a relaxed way without giving in to judgmental relativism. Historical social researchers are reassured of the acceptability of their scientific practice, even if it does not match what the mainstream misconstrues as science. Critical realism allows us to safely steer between the Scylla of constricting definitions of science and the Charybdis of solipsistic relativism. (184)

The methodology that Steinmetz commends is one that highlights social contingency and conjuncture, while at the same time discovering explanatory relations among circumstances based on the causal mechanisms we can identify that connect them. These are all important aspects of sociological research, and we should indeed seek out philosophies of social science that make room for them.

That said, I am not persuaded by the unfavorable distinction that Steinmetz and Somers draw between scientific realism and Bhaskar-style critical realism. I am inclined to think that the tradition of scientific realism has less baggage (from logical positivism) and critical realism has more (from Bhaskar's sometimes arcane philosophical arguments and distinctions deriving from transcendental philosophy). Here is Steinmetz on the deficiencies of theoretical realism:

Theoretical realism disparages explanations which invoke unique, nonrepeatable constellations of causal mechanisms in accounting for specific historical conjunctures. (174)

But this doesn't really seem to be an accurate portrayal of a wide range of scientific realists, including Richard Boyd. In fact, we can better look at the tradition of scientific realism as being closer to another tradition that Steinmetz admires, that of American pragmatism. (For a long time Harvard's department of philosophy was the home of scientific realism, and it was also the intellectual heir of James and Peirce.) Scientific realism, when considered as a meta-theory of the work of social sciences, simply extends to the social sciences the ontological elbow room that the natural sciences have long enjoyed: when we postulate unobservable entities, causes, and processes, we are sometimes justified in believing that these entities actually exist -- provided that our hypotheses are appropriately linked to observation and inference emanating from a dense field of scientific inquiry.

Take a sociological construct from Bourdieu that Steinmetz finds to be very useful, the idea of an intellectual field (link). This construct plainly invokes an extended and intangible social structure or entity -- an interconnected system of individuals, values, and institutions that steer the progress of persons and ideas through their careers. The concept has proven to be a plausible and contentful way of conceptualizing sociological phenomena across a broad range of contexts (intellectual and cultural history, imperialism, scientific research, political ideology), and Steinmetz and other sociologists are justified in attributing real existence to this construct. But this realist interpretation of the construct does not require esoteric philosophical reasoning; we can look at it as a very ordinary and pragmatist inference from the orderliness of a specific range of social phenomena to the best explanation -- that there is an underlying field of interrelations that generates this orderliness. And it seems to me that mainstream scientific realists like Boyd and Putnam would be very satisfied with this line of reasoning.

So I would look at these comments as a minor corrective to Steinmetz's argument here: social scientists are indeed well advised to be anti-positivist; they are well advised to be realist in their theorizing; but there is nothing in the case that suggests that Bhaskarian realism is the particular variant of realism they should assume. A more pragmatic and pluralistic version of scientific realism seems more suitable to research in sociology. (Here is a brief discussion of a more pluralistic and eclectic version of scientific realism for the social sciences; link.)

Youth studies

One of the smaller sub-fields within sociology is "youth studies." This strikes me as an intriguing area of research, and it seems as though the possible questions for inquiry here have only begun to be tapped. Youth issues have come up in earlier posts, including disaffected youth (link), engaged youth (link), and the problem of knowing how young people think (link).

To begin, why is the category of "youth" an interesting one? Youths are important because they eventually become adults and full participants in all aspects of social life. We would like to understand better what the forces are that influence the psychological and cultural development of young people. It also seems clear that young people of numerous countries embody a shifting set of styles, tastes, vocabularies, and values that are distinct from those of their elders. We would like to understand the pathways of influence through which these styles and values are proliferated. But the youth population is important in its own right. The social movements of Arab Spring were propelled by significant youth movements and activists. The civil rights movement and the anti-war movement on the United States each had major or even preponderant participation by mobilized youth. So the generation of people in their teens and twenties can have major political significance.

Who are the "youth" whom we want to better understand? Is youth a historically constructed category? "Youth" refers to people who are young adults, perhaps from the ages of 15 to 25. These people occupy an interesting position in the life cycle; they are not children, and they are not fully developed adults. Their personalities and characters are still malleable; they can further develop in one direction or another. One teenager latches on to his street pals and slides in the direction of petty crime; another gets very involved in her mosque and pursues higher education. Why are there such large differences within a given cohort? Some researchers use the concept of adolescence as a way of characterizing youth culture. "Youth" is the period of development of young people that falls between adolescence and adulthood. So the development experience is important to understand, and the characteristics of behavior that young people display are crucial.

What is "youth culture"? Marlis Buchmann is one of the contributors to current studies in this area, and his The Script of Life in Modern Society: Entry into Adulthood in a Changing World represents his thinking in an orderly way. He attempts to summarize the main theoretical ideas of the field in his survey article in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (link). Here is how Buchmann defines youth culture:

Youth culture refers to the cultural practice of members of this age group by which they express their identities and demonstrate their sense of belonging to a particular group of young people. The formation of youth culture thus implies boundary drawing. (16660)

Here Buchmann focuses on the forces that create one or more forms of youth culture and style, and he gives most weight to the approach taken by researchers at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, where youth culture is channelized by the class position of the young people who live it.

For the CCCS scholars, youth appeared to offer a special vantage point from which to consider the more general dislocation and fragmentation of the British working class as the structure of Britain’s system of production, labor force, income distribution, and lifestyles was transformed over the course of the post-World War II period. (16658)

This approach doesn't pay a lot of attention to what one might expect to be the most basic question: what are the pathways through which individual adolescents are formed and developed into one form of youth culture or another? What are the microfoundations of youth culture?

With regard to youth especially, cultural practices such as music, dancing, movies, visual arts (e.g., comics), particular sports (e.g., skateboarding), and fashion (e.g., clothing and hairstyles) are preferred means of expressing a distinct way of life that is recognized by others as a sign and signal of a particular identity and group membership. (16663)

According to the particular needs of social representation, young people may assemble and reassemble stylistic elements of various origins in ever new ways to form distinct styles of juvenile cultural practice. (16663)

Buchmann isn't very explicit when it comes to characterizing what a youth culture consists of. Is it a set of values -- anti-establishment, anarchist, anti-war, suspicious of adults? Is it an ensemble of tastes and styles -- punk rockers, skateboards, sideways caps? Is it a complex of motivations and behavioral traits?

One point that Buchmann emphasizes and that resonates with me is the idea that there is a proliferation of youth cultures, not a single or small number of class-defined cultures. There is a substantial element of path dependency in the evolution of a culture within a population, and youth cultures in a place and time evolve dynamically.

Buchmann also highlights the importance of generation or cohort in the formation of youth culture. The experiences of a particular generation of young people have a profound influence on the directions and characteristics of the cultures they create.

It is interesting to learn that James Coleman was one of the contributors to one strand of youth studies. His 1961 The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and its Impact on Education is an interesting treatment of the topics of development and culture. He takes age segregation created by compulsory schooling as a key determinant of the emergence of a separate youth culture in the modern world. 

I find this topic intriguing for two reasons. First, it sheds some light on the dynamic processes through which individuals and cohorts shape their identities. And second, it promises to shed light on important social topics, from disaffection to mobilization.

The street and the ring

Loïc Wacquant offers a fascinating piece of urban ethnography in Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. It is his account of his three-year experience while a sociology graduate student at the University of Chicago of participating in the Woodlawn Boys and Girls Club, a boxing club for young men who are serious about the sport of boxing on the South Side of Chicago. Wacquant takes the "participant-observer" method seriously -- he trains for a Chicago Golden Gloves match, while developing intense relationships with the young black men who do their training at the club and the older experts like DeeDee who coach them. (Here is Wacquant's website; link.)

One thing that is interesting about the book is that it brings together two fairly separate subjects of sociological interest -- the social lives of underclass black men, and the "sociology of the body" that focuses on the ways in which skill, dexterity, and persistence interweave with the sport of boxing.  There is an alliance  in both topics with the thinking of Bourdieu.

Here is something of the project of understanding marginalized black Chicago through participation:

Could I grasp and explain social relations in the black ghetto based on my embeddedness in that particular location? My long-term immersion in that little boxing gym and my intensive participation in the exchanges it supported day-to-day have allowed me -- in my eyes at least, but the reader can judge for herself on the evidence -- to reconstruct root and branch my understanding of what a ghetto is in general, and my analysis of the structure and functioning of Chicago's black ghetto in post-Fordist and post-Keynesian America at the end of the twentieth century in particular, as well as to better discern what distinguishes this terra non grata from the neighborhoods of relegation of other advanced societies. (x-xi)

Here is how Wacquant thinks about the task of making sociological sense of the sport:

[A sociology of boxing] must instead grasp boxing through its least known and least spectacular side: the drab and obsessive routine of the gym workout, of the endless and thankless preparation, inseparably physical and moral, that preludes the all-too-brief appearances in the limelight, the minute and mundane rites of daily life in the gym that produce and reproduce the belief feeding this very peculiar corporeal, material, and symbolic economy that is the pugilistic world. (6)

And here is a bit of the sociology of the body that Wacquant offers -- the phenomenology of being a boxer in training.

To work on the bag is to craft a product, as you would on a lathe, with the crude tools that are gloved as weapon, shield, and target. Finding your distance, breathing, feinting (with your eyes, your shoulders, your hands, your feet), sliding one step to the side to let the bag swing by, catching it again on the fly with a left hook right to the midsection. Not too high and not too wide, so the move can't be seen coming. Double it up, to the head, with a short, sharp movement. Follow up with a straight right, taking care to turn the wrist over like a screwdriver in order to align your knuckles horizontally at the precise moment of impact. (237-238)

Wacquant finds that immersion in the fight club allowed entry into the social world of marginalized Chicago that is otherwise highly racialized: white observers do not cross easily into the world of marginalized black men.

Being the only white member in the club ... could have constituted a serious obstacle to my integration and thus amputated my capacity to penetrate the social world of the boxer, if not for the conjugated action of three compensating factors. First of all, the egalitarian ethos and pronounced color-blindness of pugilistic culture are such that everyone is fully accepted into it so long as he submits to the common discipline and "pays his dues" in the ring. Next, my French nationality granted me a sort of statutory exteriority with respect to the structures of relations of exploitation, contempt, misunderstanding, and mutual mistrust that oppose blacks and whites in America.... Finally, my total "surrender" to the exigencies of the field, and especially the fact that I regularly put the gloves on with them, earned me the esteem of my club-mates, as attested by the term of address "brother Louis" and the collection of affectionate nicknames they bestowed upon me over the months: "Busy Louis," my ring moniker, but also "Bad Dude," "The French Bomber," "The French Hammer" ..., and "The Black Frenchman." (10-11)

The gym is a haven for the young black men who work out there -- a place where the dangers and disorder of the surrounding neighborhood are kept at bay.

In this cutthroat neighborhood, where handguns and other weapons are commonplace and "everyone" -- according to DeeDee, the club's head trainer -- is walking around with a can of Mace in their pocket for self-defense, purse-snatchings, muggings, battery, homicides, and lesser crimes of all kinds are part of the everyday routine and create a climate of pervasive fear, if not terror, that undermines interpersonal relationships and distorts all the activities of daily life. (22)

Here is a bit of ethnographic description that captures one incident on one day in September, 1990:

Today Tony called the gym from the hospital. Two members of a rival gang shot him on the street not far from here, on the other side of Cottage Grove. Luckily he saw them coming and took off running, but a bullet pierced his calf. He hobbled behind an abandoned building, pulled out his own gun from his gym bag, and opened fire on his two attackers, forcing them to retreat. He says he'd better get out of the hospital real quick because they're probably out looking for him now. I ask DeeDee if they shot him in the leg as a warning. "Shiit, Louie.! They don' shoot to injure no leg, they shoot to kill you. If Tony don' have his gun with him and pull it, they'dave track him down an' kill him, yeah: he be dead now." (25)

This could be a scene in The Wire -- for example, an ambush planned by two of Avon's gang members but foiled by Omar:

Two things seem particularly noteworthy in reading Body and Soul. First, the experiences of the three years that Wacquant spent in the Woodlawn Boys and Girls Club clearly helped to develop his own knowledge of the social reality of marginalized Chicago. There is a world of difference between reading theoretical and empirical studies of urban life, and finding ways of seriously immersing oneself in an urban environment. Wacquant is a better urban sociologist and theorist for the experiences he describes here.

Second, it seems clear that some specific insights into daily life in marginalized black neighborhoods in Chicago emerge from this experience. The prevalence of violence on the street, the strategies people arrive at to avoid being victims of violence, the social distance that exists between 63rd Street and Michigan Avenue -- these are all valuable insights that contribute to a better sociological understanding of the city.

Michael Mann on power

In 1986 Michael Mann began a strikingly ambitious project -- to give a theoretical and historical account of the history of power in human history.  This effort came to closure in the past few months with the publication of volume 3 (The Sources of Social Power: Volume 3, Global Empires and Revolution, 1890-1945) and volume 4 (The Sources of Social Power: Volume 4, Globalizations, 1945-2011). (Two other titles were published as offshoots of this project, Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing.)

This is an amazing corpus, and I think it throws important light on both the theory and the history. It is historical sociology on a macro-scale; and yet Mann also provides careful, almost ethnographic details at the level of individual actors -- fascists, ethnic paramilitaries, legislators, colonial administrators. So I think Mann also offers a great example of a sociologist who is not prisoner to a single methodology or a single avenue of approach to these supremely complex social processes.

Another admirable dimension of Mann's approach to this long sweep of history is his insistence on the contingency and conjunctural character of that history.

We shall see that these structural crises had multiple causes and stages cascading on top of each other in unexpected and unfortunate ways. They were contingent because different causal chains, eacho f which we can trace and explain quite well, came together in a way that we cannot explain in terms of either of them, yet which proved timely for the outcome. (V3, 3)

This attention to contingency and heterogeneity of social processes is to be found through all four volumes. Here is an extensive statement of these ideas at the beginning of Volume 1:

Societies are not unitary. They are not social systems (closed or open); they are not totalities. We can never find a single bounded society in geographical or social space. Because there is no system, no totality, there cannot be "sub-systems," "dimensions," or "levels" of such a totality. Because there is no whole, social relations cannot be reduced "ultimately," "in the last instance," to some systemic property of it -- like the "mode of material production," or the "cultural" or "normative system," or the "form of military organization." Because there is no bounded totality, it is not helpful to divide social change or conflict into "endogenous" and "exogenous" varieties. Because there is no social system, there is no "evolutionary" process within it. (The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760, 1)

Mann doesn't try to reduce any of the periods he considers to a simple organizing theme -- "modernization," "colonialism," "resistance." Instead, he recognizes the degree to which the historical process is heterogeneous across space and time. Fascism had different dynamics in Spain than in Germany; and both were distinct from the fascist ideologies of France between the wars.

But this recognition of the contingency of historical processes does not mean that explanation and generalization are impossible. Instead, Mann takes an approach that is familiar from the social mechanisms approach, though on a more macro scale: he looks to trace causal mechanisms and sequences to show how various social structures and circumstances led to specific kinds of changes in the social order.

One of the generalizing frameworks that he uses throughout all four volumes is what he refers to as the "IEMP model" of social power: ideological, economic, military, and political. He believes that these aspects of social reality are largely independent sets of institutions and processes, and they create different though complementary sources of power for individuals and groups within a given state of society. Here is the thumbnail he offers for each of these four high-level features of social power in Volume 3:

Ideological Power derives from the human need to find ultimate meaning in life, to share norms and values, and to participate in aesthetic and ritual practices with others. (V3, 6) 

Economic Power derives from the human need to extract, transform, distribute, and consume the products of nature. Economic relations are powerful because they combine the intensive mobilization of labor with very extensive circuites of capital, trade, and production chains, providing a combination of intensive and extensive power and normally also of authoritative and diffused power. (V3, 8) 

Military Power. Since writing my previous volumes, I have tightened up the definition of military power to "the social organization of concentrated and lethal violence." (V3, 10) 

Political Power is the centralized and territorial regulation of social life. The basic function of government is the provision of order over this realm. (V3, 12)

Empire and globalization are central topics in the final two volumes of the work. This reflects Mann's historical judgment that the past century or so has been structured by the internationalizing pressures of economic and military interest to create broader systems of control.

I'm looking forward to reading these final two volumes carefully. In the meantime, though, I'm struck by an interesting parallel between Mann's approach to this set of histories and that offered by Eric Hobsbawm a generation earlier.

The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848

The Age of Capital: 1848-1875

The Age of Empire: 1875-1914

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991

Hobsbawm was not a sociological theorist. But he was responsive to many of the same large issues as those raised by Mann: class, capitalism, state, colonialism, revolution, and war. And certainly Hobsbawm no less than Mann was very clear about the role that social power played throughout this global history.

One other observation that strikes me in looking through the four volumes as a group is that the books do not give much spotlight to Asia.  The Japanese empire is a central topic, and the Chinese Revolution comes in for some attention. But a key insight that historians of Eurasia like Bin Wong, Ken Pomeranz, and Prasannan Parthasarathi have arrived at, is that Asian history and politics need to be considered in their own terms. The institutions, politics, and ideologies of India, China, Burma, or Japan are not just pale versions of European equivalents; rather, they have their own logics and historical distinctiveness. So as large as this four-volume corpus is, it is still importantly incomplete. And it is a very interesting question to consider whether the IEMP framework that Mann develops works well as a basis for understanding the major turns of historical development in India or China over a comparable sweep of time.