Theories of the actor

I'm attracted to an approach to sociological thinking that can be described as "actor-centered."  The basic idea is that social phenomena are constituted by the actions of individuals, oriented by their own subjectivities and mental frameworks.  It is recognized, of course, that the subjectivity of the actor doesn't come full-blown into his or her mind at adulthood; rather, we recognize that individuals are "socialized"; their thought processes and mental frameworks are developed through myriad social relationships and institutions. So the actor is a socially constituted individual.

If we take the approach to social explanation that demands that we understand how complex social processes and assemblages supervene on the actions and thoughts of individuals, then it is logical that we would want to develop a theory of the actor.  We would like to have a justifiable set of ideas about how individuals perceive the social world, how they think about their own lives and commitments, and how they move from thought to action.  But we have many alternatives available as we attempt to grapple with this task.

We might begin by asking, what work should a theory of the actor do?  Here are a set of questions that a theory of the actor ought to consider:

1. How does the actor represent the world of action -- the physical and social environment?  Here we need a vocabulary of mental frameworks, representational schemes, stereotypes, and paradigms.
2. How do these schemes become actualized within the actor's mental system? This is the developmental and socialization question.
3. What motivates the actor?  What sorts of things does the actor seek to accomplish through action?
4. Here too there is a developmental question: how are these motives instilled in the actor through a social process of learning?
5. What mental forces lead to action? Here we are considering things like deliberative processes, heuristic reasoning, emotional attachments, habits, and internally realized practices.
6. How do the results of action get incorporated into the actor's mental system?  Here we are thinking about memory, representation of the meanings of outcomes, regret, satisfaction, or happiness.
7. How do the results of past experiences inform the mental processes leading to subsequent actions? Here we are considering the ways that memory and emotional representations of the past may motivate different patterns of action in the future.

Aristotle guides much philosophical thinking on these questions by offering an orderly theory of the practical agent (The Nicomachean Ethics).  His theory is centered on the idea of deliberative rationality, but he leaves a place for the emotions in action as well (to be controlled by the faculty of reason).  Deliberation, in Aristotle's view, amounts to reflecting on one's goals and arranging them into a hierarchy; then choosing actions that permit the achievement of one's highest goals.

Formal rational choice theory provides a set of answers to several of these questions.  Actors have preferences and beliefs; their preferences are well ordered; they assign probabilities and utilities to outcomes (the results of actions); and they choose a given action to maximize the satisfaction of their preferences.

Ethnographic thinkers such as Clifford Geertz or Erving Goffman take a different tack altogether; they give a lot of attention to questions 1 and 2; they provide "thick" descriptions of the motives and meanings of the actors (3); and they indicate a diverse set of answers to question 5.  (Geertz and Goffman are discussed in other posts.)

Other anthropologists have favored a "performative" understanding of agency.  The actor is understood as carrying out a culturally prescribed script in response to stereotyped social settings.  Victor Turner's anthropology is a leading example of this approach to action (Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society).

Mayer Zald recommends the work of Karl Weick on the first question (Sensemaking in Organizations (Foundations for Organizational Science)).  Here is how Weick explains sensemaking:

The concept of sensemaking is well named because, literally, it means the making of sense. Active agents construct sensible, sensable events. They "structure the unknown". How they construct what they construct, why, and with what effects are the central questions for people interested in sensemaking.  Investigators who sensemaking define it in quite different ways. Many investigators imply what Starbuck and Milliken make explicit, namely, that sensemaking involves placing stimuli into some kind of framework. The well-known phrase "frame of reference" has traditionally meant a generalized point of view that directs interpretations. (4) (references omitted)

It's worthwhile addressing this topic, because it would appear that we don't yet have a particularly good vocabulary for formulating questions about agency.  As indicated above, Aristotle's theory of the mind has been dominant in western philosophy; and yet it feels as though his approach is just one among many starting points that could have been chosen.  Here is an earlier treatment of this question (link).

I'm reminded by my friends that not all sociologists accept the actor-centered approach.  Some (like Andrew Abbott and Peggy Somers) prefer what they refer to as a "relational" understanding of the basis of social activity.  It is not so much the actor as the action; it is not the internal state of the individual agent so much as the swirl of interactions with others that determine the course of a social activity.  This is part of Abbott's objection to the idea that sociology should aim to uncover social mechanisms (link).

Ethics as culture

Gabriel Abend has recently published The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics, a remarkable book on what seems initially to be a small subject -- a history of the academic field of business ethics. I say "seems", because in Abend's hands this topic turns out to be a superb subject for the emerging field of the sociology of culture. (I should explain that the subject might seem small to a philosopher, because the discipline of business ethics is low-prestige within philosophy and is generally regarded as too applied to count as "serious" philosophical ethics. For Abend, however, it is an important subject precisely because it is "applied" and because the activity to which it pertains is highly consequential in the contemporary world and the world of nineteenth century capitalism as well.)

Michele Lamont is often cited as the person who gave new impetus to the sociology of culture in the past decade (e.g. in Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class; link, link). (Lamont is one of the editors of the Princeton series in which this book appears). Lamont has given new energy to the study of how cultural values structure ordinary life in a variety of settings, and also has provided some powerful examples of how to approach this problem empirically. And Abend brings such great detail of focus to his investigation that his study sets a new standard for what is required in a study of public culture. One of the intellectual antecedents of Abend's approach is the micro-sociology of Erving Goffman. Like Goffman, Abend is interested in tracing the public manifestations of a cultural epoch -- not the subjective experience that may underly it.

What Abend wants to understand is the actual history of the field of business ethics. He isn't trying to discover the patterns of behavior that are found among businessmen, or the ethical ideas they embrace. Rather, he wants to tease out the material and ideological content expressed by professional "business ethicists", largely found in schools of business. What has been the public expert discourse on business ethics over the past century, and what framing assumptions about the ethical field does this discourse presuppose?

The book scrutinizes the content of business ethicists' understandings and prescriptions -- taking into account their context, the audiences they were addressed to, and the cultural repertoires they drew upon. ... Much like sociologists and anthropologists of science, I am interested in the tools, devices, technologies, methods, and tactics business ethicists came up with and avail themselves of. Manuals of proper behavior, success manuals, pamphlets, biographies, obituaries, typologies, illustrations, and codes of ethics are not neutral, interchangeable containers of information. They are social things, with particular causal histories and social functions, and whose particular modes of operation, modes of existence, and materiality must be analyzed as well. (11)

He correctly observes that there are three levels of ethics that can be considered from a sociological point of view:

First, there is the level of behavior or practices. ... Second, there is the level of people's moral judgments in the least, and societies' and social groups' moral norms and institutions. ... In this book I introduce a third level, which up to now has not been recognized as a distant object inquiry: the moral background. (17)

His interest throughout the book is with the third level, the moral background. This refers, essentially, to the frameworks, concepts, and principles of reasoning that people have in mind when they think ethically or normatively.

Moral background elements do not belong to the level or realm of first-order morality. Rather, they facilitate, support, or enable first-order moral claims, norms, actions, practices, and institutions. (53)

Moral background includes six kinds of topics, according to Abend:

1. Kinds of reasons or grounds that support first order morality
2. Conceptual repertoires
3. what can be morally evaluated
4. what counts is proper moral methods in arguments
5. whether first order morality is assumed to be objective
6. metaphysical conceptions about what there is and what these things are like. (18)

He compares the moral background with the meta-scientific beliefs that scientists bring to the study of nature or society.

What is it that members of a scientific community share, exactly? For one, they likely share many social and demographic characteristics. That helps account sociologically for their having become members of that community in the first place. More important, they have common epistemological and ontological intuitions, dispositions, or assumptions. They agree on how you go about answering a scientific question, and what kind of evidence and how much of it you need to corroborate a hypothesis. (28)

This focus is particularly interesting to me because it provides additional leverage on the problem of offering a vocabulary for the background conceptual resources that are a necessary part of all social cognition. As has been noted several times in earlier posts, there is an important body of conceptual and factual presuppositions that human beings unavoidably use when they try to make sense of the world around them. And the framework itself is only rarely available for inspection. So it is a valuable contribution when sociologists like Abend, Gross, or Lamont are able to pinpoint the content and structure of such systems of tacit cognitive framework in action.

The discussion of conceptual repertoires is particularly detailed and helpful. Abend defines conceptual repertoires as "the set of concepts that are available to any given group or society, in a given time and place" (37). He makes the valid and important point that conceptual schemes are culturally specific and historically variable; "this repertoire enables and constrains their thought and speech, their laws and institutions, and, importantly, the actions they may undertake" (37). He offers as examples of moral concepts ideas like these: "dignity, decency, integrity, piety, responsibility, tolerance, moderation, fanaticism, extremism, despotism, chauvinism, rudeness, ..." (38), and makes the correct point that ideas like these show up in some cultural and historical settings and not in others. So the realities that can be "seen" and experienced by historically situated people depend on the schemes or repertoires they have available to them in those settings. (The topic of conceptual schemes has come up frequently here. Here are a few earlier discussions; link, link, link.)

Abend finds two thematic sets of beliefs and concepts that largely serve to characterize most approaches to business ethics, which he refers to as "standards of practice" and "the Christian merchant." The first approach works on the assumption that ethical standards like honesty are good for business, all things considered, and that the function of business ethics writings and teaching is to help business people come to see that their interests dictate that they should conform, even when there are strong incentives to do otherwise. The second principle argues that there are higher moral standards that govern behavior, and that prudent adherence to rules of honesty does not get to the heart of business ethics. Broadly speaking the first approach is scientific and consesquentialist (JS Mill), while the second is theological and deontological (Kant). (In Kant's memorable phrase, "tell the truth though the world should perish.")

Abend demonstrates that the field of business ethics is substantially older than it is usually thought to be, extending back at least a century. To demonstrate this point he makes interesting use of Google's Ngram tool, a research tool based on Google's massive collection of scanned books, and finds that the phrase "business ethics" begins to take off around 1900, passing "commercial morality" in 1912 and "business morality" in 1917. All the other phrases go into a sustained decline in books from 1920 forward, while "business ethics" takes off.

The Moral Background is a major contribution to the emerging field of cultural sociology. Especially important among the virtues of Abend's research is his ability to work through a huge body of historical material from the subject -- the founding of various business schools, speeches by public officials about business scandals, the utterances of pro-business organizations like chambers of commerce, newspaper cartoons about business scandals, philosophical writings about ethical theory -- and to find meaning in these disparate sources that point back to the "moral backgrounds" from which they emanate. This is a truly gigantic task of intellectual integration, and Abend's book sets a high bar for future studies of the cultural meaning of intellectual, practical, and normative social realities.

Thinking poverty in the inner city

I find the question of how other people think to be one of the most interesting angles we can raise about the social world. By "thinking" I mean breaking down the world of experience into useful categories, reasoning about cause and effect among these items, and organizing one's activities around how he/she understands the world.  What are the mental frameworks through which people conceptualize and organize their daily social experiences? This is pertinent to the notion of an actor-centered sociology, and it is resonant as well with the social-ethnographic research done by people like Erving Goffman. (Here is an earlier post on the topic of social cognition, and here is a thread of posts on Goffman.)

This set of questions is particularly important across the lines of division that separate us in modern US society. The question of how poor Appalachian women think about America, or young black inner city men do, or how white suburban teenagers think about their futures, are all deeply interesting questions. And I fully expect that there are interesting and profound differences across and within the mental frameworks of these various groups.

A sociologist who breaks new ground on this kind of question is Alford Young, a sociologist at the University of Michigan.  His work falls within the field of "cultural sociology", and he works on issues of race and poverty in urban America. His recent book The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances is a brilliant effort to get inside the mental frameworks of poor young black men in Chicago.  As he points out, most of American society has a pretty simple theory of the consciousness of inner city young men, and it fears what it sees.  Violence, drugs, and disaffection are the main correlates.  And Young demonstrates that these ideas are wrong in a number of important ways.

Rather, this work aims to show that research that focuses on these men’s anger and hostility hinders a more complex exploration of how they take stock of themselves and the world in which they live. (8)

Young's book builds a case on the basis of twenty-six interviews he conducted in 1993 and 1994 in the West side of Chicago. Young emphasizes the value of conversation:

What stayed with me over the years, especially as I went to the University of Chicago for graduate studies, was that a great deal could be learned about other people from extended conversations about mundane, everyday matters. (preface)

This is, obviously, a work of qualitative research. It is based on interviews with a relatively small number of individuals. Young's research hypothesis is that these individuals, while not statistically representative, can shed a great deal of light on the lived experience of young black men in their circumstances and the ways in which these individuals come to think about those circumstances.

Young wants to probe the worldviews of these young men; and he also wants to develop some theories about how they acquired these worldviews.  What were the factors -- structural, cultural, familial -- that led to these fairly different bundles of assumptions, frameworks, and beliefs about how society works?  And he is particularly interested in probing how these young men conceptualize stratification, inequality, racism, and discrimination.  If there is one major surprise in the book, it is the fact that for many of Young's respondents, these topics are not important and not much thought about.

Young argues at length that the mentalities he discovers through these conversations defy stereotypes. He rejects the idea of a "lower-class sub-culture" with a distinctive set of ideas about consumption and favors instead the idea that there are significant and interesting variations within the population of young black urban men.

Thus, it is important to pay attention to what people articulate as their own understanding of how social processes work and how they as individuals might negotiate the complex social terrain, rather than simply looking at their actions.... In order to advance this type of understanding, this study seeks to elucidate these men’s worldviews about a particular range of issues and concerns related to socioeconomic mobility. (10)

One thing that is particularly interesting that emerges from Young's analysis is the fact that these men turn out to have fairly different ideas about their own possibilities for mobility and a better life. And Young finds that these differences correspond to the extent of experience the individual has had outside the neighborhood.

The degree of exposure that the men have had to the world beyond the Near West Side emerges as key to understanding the differences in the breadth and depth of their worldviews. Such exposure might have come about for some through a few months of work in a downtown fast food restaurant, for others, through incarceration in a penal institution. Whatever the circumstances, such exposure provided opportunities for these men to interact across racial and class lines. Overall, interaction with other worlds led to the acquisition of a more profound understanding of the inequities in social power and influence, and how these forces can affect individual lives. Quite often it led to intimate encounters with racism. (14)

In addition to the inherent ethnographic importance of better understanding of this segment of our society, Young believes that this kind of inquiry can shed light on important social mechanisms that influence mentality.  He singles out social isolation and poverty concentration.

Social isolation refers to the lack of contact or sustained interaction with individuals or institutions that represent mainstream society.... Poverty concentration refers to the social outcomes resulting from large numbers of impoverished people living in great proximity to each other.... The introduction of the concepts of social isolation and poverty concentration created an analytical space for including and assessing the effects of an enduring lack of social and geographic connection between the urban poor and other, more affluent people. (31-32)

This connects to Young's other recurring theme, the idea of the importance of social capital and social networks for the formation of one's cognitive frameworks and for the horizon of opportunity that presents itself.

Cultural capital is the knowledge of how to function or operate in specific social settings in order to mobilize, generate responses from, or affect others such as social elites. Finally, social capital has a twofold definition. On one hand, social capital depends on the degree to which an individual is embedded in social networks that can bring about the rewards and benefits that enhance his or her life. In this way, social capital is seen as a precursor to the acquisition of other forms of capital (money, information, social standing, etc.). On the other hand, social capital has been identified as the package of norms and sanctions maintained by groups so that positive or desired outcomes occur for all members, especially those that no single member could achieve on his or her own. (59)

The extracts from interviews that Young provides -- on home life, school, work, life in the streets, and other topics -- are superb, and you feel like you've had a rare opportunity yourself to talk with these young men.

There are many surprises in Young's findings; for example, the less contact residents of the Henry Horner Homes had with the rest of Chicago, the less concerned they seemed to be about racial discrimination and injustice. Here is an exchange with Barry:

When I asked him “Do you think you are treated fairly in society?” he paused for a moment and then said, “I guess so. I guess I’m treated fairly, I guess.” I waited to see what else he might say, but nothing was forthcoming. After some gentle prodding Barry told me that he “just didn’t know no white people,” and that was why it was so hard for him to say more in this part of our discussion. (113)

Here is how Young understands Barry's responses about race:

Barry’s life history involved extreme social isolation not only from labor markets and other institutions relevant to upward mobility, but also from some of the most mobile and connected people in his own neighborhood, such as gang members, college-bound athletes and other students, and other individuals who maintained social ties beyond neighborhood boundaries. Barry’s lack of social ties denied him much-needed experience with people in different positions along the social hierarchy of American life. Barry’s social world included few people other than the low-income residents of the Near West Side. These are the same people he went to school with, sold drugs to, and lived amongst. The scantiness of Barry’s social networks paralleled the narrowness of his views on mobility and opportunity. (115)

Barry was highly isolated, but Devin was not. And here is how Devin answers similar questions:

Devin amplified his earlier remarks by making the following point about black-white relations in America:

I think they [white people] look at me as the, not my people, but to the racists, they look at me like the enemy. They feel that we all blacks is out to get them. Which I believe like this here, I’m is out to get them. . . . Yes. . . . Because they getting too much money. We fight for, we fought for the United States, not them. We went to war. We got to stand up for our rights. We not getting treated right. We’re not even getting equal rights.

Having lived lives that involved either the most interpersonal conflict or the most intimacy with people of high social status and wealth, it is not surprising that Ted, Casey, Peter, and Devin had the most conflict-oriented worldviews about stratification and inequality in American life. (131)

How does this research help with the practical challenges of moving forward in a more just way?  Young addresses this question too:

If a better day is to come for poor black men, then researchers and other parties who are sensitive to their plight must commit themselves to a new perspective on these men. In order for their lives to truly improve, increased employment and job-training opportunities need to be brought into their lives. These men certainly would benefit from an expanded and more secure labor market, but, as we have seen, there is much more that must occur for them to improve their lives. As the men’s testimonies about work make clear, however, increased employment opportunities alone will not deliver them from socioeconomic disadvantage. Information about municipal labor market opportunities, including the options and possibilities in the modern urban world of work and the means and mechanisms for accessing better employment, are as important as the jobs themselves.

Of course, this is the utopian vision of change. The current public view of these men is perhaps best conveyed by the “three-strikes and you’re out” rationale of recent governmental initiatives on crime and delinquency, increased incarceration rates for nonviolent offenders, and other law enforcement initiatives that have resulted in the removal of many low-income black men from the public landscape. This approach goes hand in hand with the public reaction to notions of the underclass, which centers on control and containment of an apparently troubling constituency. (202)

Economic development is of course needed in our cities.  But Young makes a crucial point that I would paraphrase in different terms. The extreme residential segregation that most American cities contain is itself a major obstacle to social mobility -- not only in terms of economic opportunities, but in the very fabric of how different groups understand the social world around them. Segregation is epistemic as well as economic.

Getting inside people's frames

It seems clear that human beings bring specific frameworks of thought, ideas, emotions, and valuations to their social lives, and these frameworks affect both how they interpret the social realities they confront and the ways that they respond to what they experience. Human beings have "frames" of cognition and valuation that guide their experiences and actions. The idea of a practical-mental frame is therefore a compelling one, and it should be a possible subject for empirical sociological investigation.

The notion of a frame seems to originate (in sociology anyway) in the writings of Erving Goffman. Here is how he formulates the idea in Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience:

When the individual in our Western society recognizes a particular event, he tends, whatever else he does, to imply in this response (and in effect employ) one or more frameworks or schemata of interpretation of a kind that can be called primary. I say primary because application of such a framework or perspective is seen by those who apply it as not depending on or harking back to some prior or 'original' interpretation; indeed a primary framework is one that is seen as rendering what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of the scene into something that is meaningful.... Whatever the degree of organization, however, each primary framework allows its user to locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences defined in its terms. He is likely to be unaware of such organized features as the framework has and unable to describe the framework with any completeness if asked, yet these handicaps are no bar to his easily and fully applying it.... Social frameworks ... provide background understanding for events that incorporate the will, aim, and controlling effort of an intelligence, a live agency, the chief one being the human being.... Taken all together, the primary frameworks of a particular social group constitute a central element of its culture, especially insofar as understandings emerge concerning principal classes of schemata, the relations of these classes to one another, and the sum total of forces and agents that these interpretive designs acknowledge to be loose in the world. (21-22, 27)

The term "cultural sociology" is sometimes used to try to capture those research efforts that try to probe the meanings and mental frameworks that people bring to their social interactions. We can postulate that human beings are processors of meanings and interpretations, and that their frameworks take shape as a result of the range of experiences and interactions they have had to date. This means that their frameworks are deeply social, created and constructed by the social settings and experiences the individuals have had. And we can further postulate that social action is deeply inflected by the specifics of the mental and emotional frameworks through which actors structure and interpret the worlds they confront. At least a part of the disciplinary matrix of cultural sociology might be understood as the field of inquiry that tries to probe those frameworks as they are embodied in specific collectivities -- working class people, women, African Americans, American Muslims, or college professors, for example. (Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel might be viewed as progenitors of this aspect of the sociology discipline; link, link.)

Wendy Griswold addresses part of this viewpoint on sociological research in her very good overview of the field in Cultures and Societies in a Changing World.

Most sociologists now view people as meaning makers as well as rational actors, symbol users as well as class representatives, and storytellers as well as points in a demographic trend. Moreover, sociology largely has escaped its former either/or way of thinking. The discipline now seeks to understand how people's meaning making shapes their rational action, how their class position molds their stories—in short, how social structure and culture mutually influence one another. (kl 195)

So how have sociologists attempted to investigate these kinds of subjective realities? Here is how Al Young describes his research goals in The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances:

I wanted to get a sense of whether poor black men looked beyond their immediate surroundings and circumstances when thinking about the future. Hence, the story told here is about how these men think about themselves as members of a larger social world -- not just their communities and neighborhoods, but American society. (lc 134)

Part 2, "Lifeworlds," explores the men's own accounts of their past and contemporary circumstances. It is here that the experiences and situations that have positioned them as poor, urban-based black men are explored. Chapter 2 provides a vision of the social contexts that circumscribe these men's lives and shape the comments and opinions that they shared with me. (lc 195)

In order to answer these questions Young conducted several dozen interviews with young black men on the south side of Chicago, and his interpretation and analysis of the results is highly illuminating.

Or take as another example the highly interesting work of sociologist Michele Lamont in Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. Here Lamont studies the mentalities of high-status white men in the United States and France. Her question is a fairly simple one: how do these men formulate their judgments of success and failure in themselves and others? What features do they admire in others and which do they dislike? She conducts interviews with 160 men in four cities in France and the United States, and makes a sustained effort to discern the profiles of culture and value that she finds among these individuals.

I compare competing definitions of what it means to be a 'worthy person' by analyzing symbolic boundaries, i.e., by looking at implicit definitions of purity present in the labels interviewees use to describe, abstractly and concretely, people with whom they don't want to associate, people to whom they consider themselves to be superior and inferior, and people who arouse hostility, indifference, and sympathy. Hence, the study analyzes the relative importance attached to religion, honesty, low moral standards, cosmopolitanism, high culture, money, power, and the likes, by Hoosiers, New Yorkers, Parisians, and Clermontois. (kl 179)

This kind of research is inherently interesting because of the light it sheds for readers about the lives and experiences of others. Reading Al Young or Michele Lamont offers the reader a window into the experience and meaning frameworks of people whose lives and experiences have been substantially different from our own; it helps us understand the ways in which these various individuals and members of groups understand themselves and their social worlds. All by itself this is a valuable kind of research. (Why did so many African Americans respond differently to the acquittal of OJ Simpson than their white counterparts and peers?)

But this kind of research becomes especially interesting if we find that the mental frameworks and systems of meanings that actors bring with them actually make substantial differences to their social actions and the choices that they make. In this case we can actually begin to create explanations and interpretations of social outcomes that interest us a great deal. (Why are some extremist militants so ready to put on suicide vests in actions that are almost certain to bring about their own deaths?)

A key issue with this kind of inquiry is methodological. How should we investigate and observe the subjective characteristics of thought and feeling that this work entails? What are appropriate standards of validity on the basis of which to assess assertions in this area? Sociologists like Alford Young and Michele Lamont have often chosen a methodology that centers on open-ended unstructured interviews -- very much the kind of thing that Studs Terkel was so good at. What these sociologists add to the approach of a Studs Terkel or an Ira Glass is an effort to analyze and generalize from the interviews they collect in order to arrive at mid-level statements about the mentality and symbolic frameworks of this group or that. And both Young and Lamont succeed in providing portraits of their subjects that are highly insightful and sociologically plausible -- we can understand the mechanisms through which these frameworks take hold and we can see some of the meso-level consequences that follow from them in specific social settings.

In a number of prior posts I've argued for an actor-centered sociology (link). And I've argued that we need to have better and more fully articulated theories of the actor if an actor-centered sociology is to be valuable.  What I am calling cultural sociology here is one way for the discipline of sociology to get down to business in providing more nuanced theories of the actor.

(I should note that the description provided here of cultural sociology makes the field seem highly actor-centered; but this isn't entirely accurate. There are macro and meso zones of research in cultural sociology that are distinctly uninterested in the mental frameworks of the individual actors. Wendy Griswold captures this multi-level division of the field by referring to a "cultural diamond", and the actor-centered aspect that I've described here is probably the smallest in terms of the volume of research conducted in the field. Here is Griswold's description of the diamond:

I use the device of the "cultural diamond" to investigate the connections among four elements: cultural objects -- symbols, beliefs, values, and practices; cultural creators, including the organizations and systems that produce and distribute cultural objects; cultural receivers, the people who experience culture and specific cultural objects; and the social world, the context in which culture is created and experienced. (kl 218)

In fact, the actor-centered dimension of the field gets relatively little spotlight in Griswold's Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. If anything, one might argue that there should be more attention to the interface between frame and actor, so that individuals are not viewed as simply the passive bearers of this cultural icon or that.)

Garfinkel on social competence

Harold Garfinkel made highly original contributions to the field of micro-sociology in the form of his program of ethnomethodology, and the fruits of these contributions have not been fully developed. His death a few weeks ago (link) has led quite a few people to look back and re-assess the importance of his contributions. This renewed attention is very much warranted. Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) is the primary place where his ideas reached a broad public, so let's take a look at some of the ideas advanced there.

The interest that I take in his work flows from the idea of agent-centered sociology that I've found so appealing -- the idea of the situated actor, the idea that we need to have a substantially richer set of concepts in terms of which to characterize the actor's thought processes, and the idea that current conceptions of the rational actor or the cultural actor are inadequate (link). In order to provide a basis for explanations of social outcomes deriving from the interactions of purposive agents, we need a developed and nuanced set of ideas about how agents tick. And theorists like Garfinkel and Goffman provide substantial resources in this area. (Here are discussions of Goffman; link, link.)

Here is a key statement of Garfinkel's research goals in Studies in Ethnomethodology:

The following studies seek to treat practical activities, practical circumstances, and practical sociological reasoning as topics of empirical study, and by paying to the most commonplace activities of daily life the attention usually accorded extraordinary events, seek to learn about them as phenomena in their own right. (1)

A central empirical interest of Garfinkel's is the nuance of the ordinary knowledge -- commonsense knowledge -- that people use to navigate their daily lives and tasks.  What presuppositions about actions and motives do jurors rely on as they reach judgments about truth and falsity of testimony?  What ellipses occur in ordinary conversations that are nonetheless intelligible to the participants because of unspoken background knowledge?  What implicit beliefs and standards do coders for the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center use to classify unexpected deaths (11 ff.)?

Here is Garfinkel's explication of a conversation between husband and wife about their son's putting a penny in the parking meter:

An examination of the colloquy reveals the following. (a) There were many matters that the partners understood they were talking about that they did not mention. (b) Many matters that the partners understood were understood on the basis not only of what was actually said but what was left unspoken. (c) Many matters were understood through a process of attending to the temporal series of utterances as documentary evidences of a developing conversation rather than as a string of terms. (d) Matters that the two understood in common were understood only in and through a course of understanding work that consisted of treating an actual linguistic event as "the document of," as "pointing to," as standing on behalf of an underlying pattern of matters that each already supposed to be the matters that the person, by his speaking, could be telling the other about. (39-40)

Garfinkel devised an experimental method for probing presuppositions that he referred to as "breaching" experiments: interactions with subjects that deliberately challenged their conversational or practical expectations. For example, a subject was invited to play the game of tic-tac-toe; and the researcher erased the subject's first move and placed the subject's mark in another location. The subject was incensed.  Another example:

My friend said to me, "Hurry or we will be late." I asked him what did he mean by late and from what point of view did it have reference. There was a look of perplexity and cynicism on his face. "Why are you asking me such silly questions? Surely I don't have to explain such a statement.  What is wrong with you today? Why should I have to stop to analyze such a statement? Everyone understands my statements and you should be no exception!"

Garfinkel takes the discomfort and irritation expressed by the subjects in these experiments to be an indicator of their expectations about normal social interaction. Here is one of his reflections about this dynamic:

Despite the interest in social affects that prevails in the social sciences, and despite the extensive concern that clinical psychiatry pays them, surprisingly little has been written on the socially structured conditions for their production. The role that a background of common understandings plays in their production, control, and recognition is, however, almost terra incognita. (49)

Here is a summary statement of Garfinkel's goals:

I have been arguing that a concern for the nature, production, and recognition of reasonable, realistic, and analyzable actions is not the monopoly of philosophers and professional sociologists. Members of a society are concerned as a matter of course and necessarily with these matters both as features and for the socially managed production of their everyday affairs.  The study of common sense knowledge and common sense activities consists of treating as problematic phenomena the actual methods whereby members of a society, doing sociology, lay or professional, make the social structures of everyday activities observable. (75)

The way that I would like to paraphrase Garfinkel's work is that he is offering an empirical research program designed to fill in a rich theory of the human actor's "competence" in engaging in ordinary social interactions. What does the actor need to know about immediate social relationships and practices in order to get along in ordinary social life? And how can we study this question in empirically rigorous ways? The program of ethnomethodology is intended to focus attention on the knowledge of rules and practices that ordinary people employ to make sense of their social surroundings.

One objection that some purists might offer of this formulation is that it puts the object of investigation "inside the head," rather than in the behavioral performances -- primarily conversations and classificatory tasks -- that Garfinkel primarily studies. It is thought that Garfinkel's method is formal rather than mentalistic.  It is true that he says repeatedly that he is not interested in getting inside the head of the individuals he studies. But the logic of his findings still has important implications for the cognitive systems of the individuals, and this is in fact the only reason we would be interested in the research. So I want to understand his research along the lines of a Chomskian linguist: making inferences about psychologically real "competences and capacities" on the basis of analysis of non-mental performances (utterances).

On this approach, Garfinkel did not pretend to offer a full theory of agency or actor consciousness; instead, his work functioned as a sort of specialized investigation of one aspect of social cognition -- the competences, rules, and practices we can attribute to specific actors on the basis of careful analysis of their observable performances.

(John Heritage's Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology is generally recommended as a highly insightful survey and discussion of Garfinkel's work.)

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.

Alternatives to analytical sociology

I've now spent a fair amount of time in the past month on the micro-macro link and the foundations of analytical sociology (AS). It is worth taking stock to consider how this approach relates to other important methodologies in sociology and the social sciences more generally.

To start: I've generally found the strictures of "microfoundations" and "agent-based explanations" as representing ontological constraints on sociological explanations rather than guides for empirical research. The constraints require, essentially, that all our explanations of social processes and causal connections need to be compatible with providing plausible micro-level accounts of how they work. This is somewhat analogous to the philosophy of atomism in pre-Socratic natural philosophy; atomism postulated that there was a most fundamental level of physical phenomena; that these "atoms" were discrete and indivisible; and that all natural phenomena are composed of atoms and their aggregations. But this philosophy doesn't prescribe how to pursue the science of chemistry.

So these constraints don't necessarily provide guidance about what social phenomena to study or how to study it. In particular, they don't imply that sociological research needs to flow from bottom up, and they don't imply that the content of sociology should derive from features of individual agency and psychology.

But it seems that advocates of AS believe that the framework goes beyond this; that it leads to research strategies and areas of empirical inquiry that are distinctive from those adopted by other approaches to sociology. Research needs to fit into one of the struts of Coleman's boat. It needs to provide an empirical understanding of some of the micro-micro linkages or the micro-macro linkages; and it needs to offer rigorous techniques for establishing causal connections from micro to macro. Hedstrom puts the point this way early in Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology:

To be explanatory a theory must specify the set of causal mechanisms that are likely to have brought about the change, and this requires one to demonstrate how macro states at one point in time influence individuals' actions, and how these actions bring about new macro states at a later point in time. (kindle location 139)

This brief summary of the central dogmas of AS provides one reason why AS theorists are so concerned to have adequate and tractable models of the actor -- often rational actor models. Thomas Schelling's work provides a particularly key example for the AS research community (Micromotives and Macrobehavior, Choice and Consequence, Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays); in field after field he demonstrates how micro motives aggregate onto macro outcomes. And Elster's work is also key, in that he provides some theoretical machinery for analyzing the actor at a "thicker" level -- imperfect rationality, self-deception, emotion, commitment, and impulse (Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions).

This summary also shows why agent-based modeling and simulations are so attractive to AS researchers: these techniques offer tractable methods for aggregating the effects of lower-level features of social life onto higher-level outcomes. If we represent actors as possessing characteristics of action X, Y, Z, and we represent their relations as U, V, W -- how do these actors in social settings aggregate to mid- and higher-level social patterns? This is the key methodological challenge that drives the Santa Fe Institute, and it produces very interesting results (link). (Here is an interesting recent paper on agent-based simulations for the social sciences by Dirk Helbing and Stefano Balietti called "How to Do Agent-Based Simulations in the Future: From Modeling Social Mechanisms to  Emergent Phenomena and Interactive Systems Design" (link).)

There certainly is intellectual power in this approach -- actors in social relations and the aggregation of their actions; but it isn't the whole of sociology. So let's quickly consider a few examples of sociological research that seem fairly distant from AS and consider how they might relate.

We might consider such fertile social scientists as Jack Goldstone, Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly, Andrew Abbott, Emmanuel Wallerstein, Pierre Bourdieu, Stanley Lieberson, George Steinmetz, Douglas Massey, and Erving Goffman, with respect to these questions:

• To what extent do their theories rely on "mechanisms" as a foundation for social explanations? 
• Are their theories compatible with the requirement of microfoundations at a local actor level? 
• Do they have a theory of the actor?  
• And do they make use of social ontologies that presuppose large social causes and macro causal relationships?  

In many instances some but not all answers to these questions will be affirmative.  Goffman and Bourdieu have a theory of the actor; Tilly and Lieberson appeal to social mechanisms; and in different ways I would say that each of them offer theories that are compatible with the requirement of microfoundations.  At the same time, the explanatory logic that these authors provide is rarely "aggregative"; they are not interested in showing how a macro phenomenon is the aggregate result of local actors' choices.  Moreover, several of them make specific and deliberate use of macro factors as central explanatory constructs: Goldstone, Skocpol, Wallerstein, and Massey. And Tilly explicitly criticizes the individualism that is characteristic of rational-actor theories, preferring a relational understanding of social phenomena.  So there isn't an easy translational relationship between AS and a number of other important and productive research traditions in sociology today.

One interesting data point on this question of the relationship between AS and other approaches to social explanation can be examined in Kathleen Thelen's contribution to Renate Mayntz, Akteure – Mechanismen – Zur Theoriefähigkeit makro-sozialer Analysen. (The book is very interesting and is available as a PDF download; link.)

Thelen is a brilliant scholar within the new historical institutionalism perspective (How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan), and her contribution to the Mayntz volume ("The Explanatory Power of Historical Institutionalism") implicitly aims at tracing out some of the points of contrast between AS and historical institutionalism. She highlights several key methodological and theoretical assumptions underlying current research in historical institutionalism: attention to the formation of collective interests (92), attention to context (93), attention to meso- and macro-causal analysis (95), and sensitivity to the temporal dimension of social processes (96).  Here are some representative passages:

Thus, historical institutionalists have consistently drawn attention to the way in which institutional configurations »foster the emergence of particular definitions of mutual interest« (Immergut 1998: 339), and how they also often shape political outcomes by facilitating the organization of certain groups while actively disarticulating others (e.g., Skocpol 1992). (92)

A good deal of historical-institutional scholarship shows that the impact of institutions is often heavily mediated by features of the overarching political or historical context, a point that Charles Ragin’s work has repeatedly emphasized and underscored (Ragin 1987; also Katznelson 1997). (93)

However, beyond that, the emphasis on timing and sequencing in historical institutional research is also motivated by the insight, borne out in a number of studies, that when things happen, or the order in which different processes unfold, can itself be an extremely important part of the causal story (Pierson 2000c). (97)

Thus, for example, a number of authors have suggested that rational choice institutionalism applies best to understanding the strategic interaction of in- dividuals in the context of specific, well established and well known rules and parameters (e.g., Bates 1997; Geddes 1995). By contrast to this, the strength of historical-institutional approaches is precisely in the leverage it provides on understanding configurations of institutions (Katznelson 1997) and over much longer stretches of time (Pierson 2001). Historical institutionalism is concerned not just with how a particular set of rules affects the strategic orientation of individual actors and their interactions, but also with the broader issue of the ways in which institutional configurations define what Theda Skocpol has termed »fields of action« that have a very broad influence not just on the strategies of individual players but on the identities of actors and the networks that define their relations to each other. (103-4)

My takeaway from Thelen's thinking here and elsewhere is that there is a pretty significant methodological divide between her way of thinking about social processes and that of AS.  She highlights a handful of characteristics of HI research.  Historical institutionalists are inclined to focus on the meso level -- the settings of rules, norms, and processes through which social life is mediated; and they are sensitive to the crucial variations across time and place that these arrangements illustrate.  Nothing in this construction is antithetical to the requirement of microfoundations and the recognition that socially situated actors constitute the social world; but the emphasis of the research is not on the discovery of the aggregation dynamics from the level of the individual actor.

So I'm inclined to judge two things: first, that the methodological requirement of microfoundations is indeed a universal requirement on valid sociological research; but second, that the program of aggregation from micro to macro is only one way of conducting sociological research and explanation. So we shouldn't expect other areas of sociological thinking and research to simply fold into the framework of analytical sociology -- any more than a common commitment to natural selection as the causal mechanism underlying species change dictates the content and methods of the various areas of biology.

This is a place where the ontological framework of social structures that Dave Elder-Vass provides in The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency seems methodologically useful.  It provides a rigorous basis for conceding the point that context, institutions, moral ideas, and value systems have a causal role to play in social explanation.  In E-V's view, these social structures supervene upon facts about individual actors; but their causal properties do not need to be reduced to features of the actors.

Elias on figurational sociology

A premise shared by all actor-centered versions of sociology is that individuals and their actions are the rock-bottom level of the social world. Every other social fact derives from facts at this level. Norbert Elias raises a strong and credible challenge to this ontological assumption in his work, offering a view of social action that makes "figurations" of actors just as real as individual actors themselves. By figuration he means something like an interlocking set of individuals whose actions are a fluid series of reactions to and expectations about others. Figurations include both conflict and cooperation. And he is insistent that figurations cannot be reduced to the sum of a collection of independent actors and their choices. "Imagine the interlocking of the plans and actions, not of two, but of two thousand or two million interdependent players. The ongoing process which one encounters in this case does not take place independently of individual people whose plans and actions keep it going. Yet it has a structure and demands an explanation sui generis. It cannot be explained in terms of the ‘ideas’ or the ‘actions’ of individual people" (52). So good sociology needs to pay attention to figurations, not just individuals and their mental states.

Elias's most vivid illustration of what he means by a figuration comes from his reflections on the game of soccer and the flow of action across two teams and twenty-two individual players over extended episodes of play. These arguments constitute the primary topic of volume 7 of his collected writings, Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process. (This is particularly relevant at a time when millions of people are viewing the Euro Cup.)

The observation of an ongoing game of football can be of considerable help as an introduction to the understanding of such terms as interlocking plans and actions. Each team may have planned its strategy in accordance with the knowledge of their own and their opponents’ skills and foibles. However, as the game proceeds, it often produces constellations which were not intended or foreseen by either side. In fact, the flowing pattern formed by players and ball in a football game can serve as a graphic illustration not only of the concept of ‘figurations’ but also of that of ‘social process’. The game-process is precisely that, a flowing figuration of human beings whose actions and experiences continuously interlock, a social process in miniature. One of the most instructive aspects of the fast-changing pattern of a football game is the fact that this pattern is formed by the moving players of both sides. If one concentrated one’s attention only on the activities of the players of one team and turned a blind eye to the activities of the other, one could not follow the game. The actions and experiences of the members of the team which one tried to observe in isolation and independently of the actions and perceptions of the other would remain incomprehensible. In an ongoing game, the two teams form with each other a single figuration. It requires a capacity for distancing oneself from the game to recognize that the actions of each side constantly interlock with those of their opponents and thus that the two opposing sides form a single figuration. So do antagonistic states. Social processes are often uncontrollable because they are fuelled by enmity. Partisanship for one side or another can easily blur that fact. (51-52; italics mine)

Here is a more theoretical formulation from Elias, from "Dynamics of sports groups" in the same volume.

Let us start with the concept of ‘figuration’. It has already been said that a game is the changing figuration of the players on the field. This means that the figuration is not only an aspect of the players. It is not as one sometimes seems to believe if one uses related expressions such as ‘social pattern’, ‘social group’, or ‘society’, something abstracted from individual people. Figurations are formed by individuals, as it were ‘body and soul’. If one watches the players standing and moving on the field in constant inter-dependence, one can actually see them forcing a continuously changing figuration. If groups or societies are large, one usually cannot see the figurations their individual members form with one another. Nevertheless, in these cases too people form figurations with each other — a city, a church, a political party, a state — which are no less real than the one formed by players on a football field, even though one cannot take them in at a glance.

To envisage groupings of people as figurations in this sense, with their dynamics, their problems of tension and of tension control and many others, even though one cannot see them here and now, requires a specific training. This is one of the tasks of figurational sociology, of which the present essay is an example. At present, a good deal of uncertainty still exists with regard to the nature of that phenomenon to which one refers as ‘society’. Sociological theories often appear to start from the assumption that ‘groups’ or ‘societies’, and ‘social phenomean’ in general, are something abstracted from individual people, or at least that they are not quite as ‘real’ as individuals, whatever that may mean. The game of football — as a small-scale model — can help to correct this view. It shows that figurations of individuals are neither more nor less real than the individuals who form them. Figurational sociology is based on observations such as this. In contrast to sociological theories which treat societies as if they were mere names, an ‘ideal type’, a sociologist’s construction, and which are in that sense representative of sociological nominalism, it represents a sociological realism. Individuals always come in figurations and figurations are always formed by individuals. (199)

This ontological position converges closely with the "relational" view of social action advocated by the new pragmatists as well as Chuck Tilly. The pragmatists' idea that individual actions derive from the flow of opportunities and reactions instigated by the movements of others is particularly relevant. But Elias's view also seems to have some resonance with the idea of methodological localism as well: "individuals in local social interactions are the molecule of the social world."

What seems correct here is an insight into the "descriptive ontology" of the social world. Elias credibly establishes the fact of entangled, flowing patterns of action by individuals during an episode, and makes it credible that these collective patterns don't derive fully in any direct way from the individual intentions of the participants. "Figurations are just as real as individuals." So the sociologist's ontology needs to include figurations. Moreover the insight seems to cast doubt as well on the analytical sociologists' strategy of "dissection". These points suggest that Elias provides a basis for a critique of ontological individualism. And Elias can be understood as calling for more realism in sociological description. 

What this analysis does not provide is any hint about how to use this idea in constructing explanations of larger-scale social outcomes or patterns. Are we forced to stop with the discovery of a set of figurations in play in a given social occurrence? Are we unable to provide any underlying explanation of the emergence of the figuration itself? Answers to these questions are not clear in Elias's text. And yet this is after all the purpose of explanatory sociology.

It is also not completely convincing to me that the figurations described by Elias could not be derived through something like an agent-based simulation. The derivation of flocking and swarming behavior in fish and birds seems to be exactly this -- a generative account of the emergence of a collective phenomenon (figuration) from assumptions about the decision-making of the individuals. So it seems possible that we might look at Elias's position as seeing a challenge to actor-based sociology that now can be addressed rather than a refutation. 

In this sense it appears that figurational sociology is in the same position as various versions of microsociology considered elsewhere (e.g. Goffman): it identifies a theoretical lacuna in rational choice theory and thin theories of the actor, but it does not provide recommendations for how to proceed with a more adequate explanatory theory.

(Recall the earlier discussion on non-generative social facts and ontological individualism; link. That post makes a related argument for the existence of social facts that cannot be derived from facts about the individual actors involved. In each case the problem derives from the highly path-dependent nature of social outcomes.)

Readers' list of innovative social science writing

Image: graph of relationships among the social sciences, Eigenfactor.org

To the readers of UnderstandingSociety,

I am writing directly to you to ask your thoughts about innovative work in the social sciences today. What books or new areas of inquiry in the social sciences are you particularly excited about right now?

The context --

One of the goals I have in this blog is to take note of interesting new developments in the social sciences and philosophy.  It seems to me very consistently that the social sciences still have a lot of important work to do in establishing goals, methods, and theories for understanding the social world, and creative and innovative contributions to new issues as well as old are very exciting.

In recent months I've written about books that I probably wouldn't have run across without the advantage of many conversations with some very good sociologists and political scientists on a regular basis, and this is a real source of intellectual growth.  I think of Pickett and Wilkinson's theorizing about economic inequalities and social harms, Neil Gross's sociological biography of Richard Rorty, Andreas Glaeser's account of the cultural conditions of the collapse of the Stasi in East Germany, McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal's analysis of political polarization, and John Levi Martin's new thinking about social explanations as good examples, and there are many others.

    

I've also enjoyed going back to classic texts from the social sciences of the 1960s for a second look. People like Erving Goffman, Chalmers Johnson, G. William Skinner, Steven Lukes, and Karl Popper have come in for a second look over the past several years on UnderstandingSociety. In each case I feel that I've come to see some features of their work that seem particularly pertinent today, fifty years after their primary research, that somehow didn't emerge in my first reading years ago.  (I was definitely not a fan of Popper's in the 1970s.)

   

The invitation --

What books or new pieces of research in the social sciences and philosophy are you particularly excited about? What are some areas of research that you think are shedding significant new light on how we understand the social world?

If enough readers are willing to make a suggestion or two, it would be very interesting to compile a list of topics and books that are making a difference in the social sciences -- a kind of "crowd-sourcing" approach to mapping out the areas of innovation that are making a difference in how we think about the social world.

If you are willing, please post a few suggestions of books in the social sciences that have you excited in the comments section. You can also make your recommendations on the UnderstandingSociety Facebook page or tweet me at @dlittle30.

I have created a page in the sidebar, Readers' Recommendations, as a way of organizing these recommendations.