Causal narratives, mechanisms, and powers

A million termites move around industriously without supervisors or external coordination.  Some months later, a great structure has arisen — a termite cathedral mound. It is a structure that has apparent functionality (figure 2), it is oriented to the sun in a way that optimizes its ability to handle heat and cold, and the design plainly exceeds the cognitive or practical capacity of any single termite. How do they do it? (The BBC video below describes these mounds and their construction.)

This is a hard question because we know quite a bit about what the termites do not do. They do not have architects and project managers; they do not have blueprints guiding their work; they do not have a master plan. Instead, millions of independent organisms somehow coordinate their actions in ways that collectively result in the large structure.

 figure 1. The mound

figure 2. The structure of the mound

We would like to have an explanation for how this works; how the individual insects within this population behave in the ways that are necessary to create this vast complex structure.

One way of putting our explanatory needs here is to say that we are asking for a mechanism: what is the mechanism or ensemble of mechanisms that produce the collective behavior leading to the construction of the mound? What is it about the behavioral code of the insect that permits this collective behavior? This way of putting the problem is to highlight the mechanisms approach.

But we might better say, we are asking for an explanatory narrative, including elements like these:

• The insects have such-and-so behavioral routines (algorithms) embedded in their nervous systems.
• Behaviors are triggered by environmental circumstances and the activities of other insects around them.
• The triggered behavior in each insect contributes to a pattern of activity that leads to progressive “building” of the mound.

The force of the explanation hinges on the details we can learn about these powers and capacities of the termites as a species -- these behavioral algorithms. We want to know something crucial about the powers and capacities of the individual insects; we want to know how their routines are responsive to environment and other insects; and we want to know how the emerging structure of the mound leads to the modified activities of the insects over the process of construction.

This narrative highlights a topic we have considered several times before -- the idea of the causal powers of an entity. Most basically, we might look at the individual worker termite as robot controlled by a complex algorithm -- "when external circumstances X,Y,Z arise, carry out the Z routine." The causal powers of the individual worker termite are determined by its algorithm and its physical capacities -- salivation, moving around, carrying bits of mud, and so forth. And the task of explanation is to discover the nature of the algorithms and the ways in which the resulting behaviors aggregate to the observed physical structure of the mound.

We might observe, for example, that a certain kind of insect navigates a maze by following a simple rule: always keep the wall on your left. This rule will sometimes work well; sometimes it will not. But this observation suggests that the insect's central nervous system encodes the decision-making rule in this way. And we might also infer that "maze navigation" is important for the survival of the insect in its normal environment, and so its navigational algorithms will have been refined through natural selection.

We would also like to know something else about the insects and their powers: how did they come to have these particular capacities and algorithms? Here we have a well established explanation, in the form of the theory of the gene, natural selection, and the evolution of species characteristics through differential reproductive success. Here the explanatory challenge is to piece together the nature of the algorithms that would suffice to account for the observed collective outcomes.

It is also of interest in this example that there is a large field of research and discovery within complexity research that hinges on discovering the complex collective patterns that can emerge from simple routines at the level of the individual agent. For example, the "Game of Life" illustrates the power of cellular automata in generating complexity out of simple agent-level routines.

This example is a useful one, not primarily for entymologists, but for us as philosophers of social science. What would an explanation of this phenomenon look like? And a little bit of reflection seems to take us in the direction of some familiar ideas: the idea of things having causal powers that govern what they can do, the idea of the aggregation of complex outcomes from independent activities of large numbers of agents (agent-based models), and the idea that a good explanation gives us an empirically supportable understanding of how something works.

"How does it work" questions

Source: Karl Ove Moene in Alternatives to Capitalism, p. 85

One of the strengths of the causal-mechanisms approach to social explanation is how it responds to a very fundamental aspect of what we want explanations to do: we want to understand how something works. And a mechanisms account answers that question.

Let’s consider an example in detail. Suppose we observe that worker-owned cooperatives (WOC) tend to respond differently to price changes for their products than capitalist-owned firms (COF) when it comes to production decisions. The WOC firm will conform to this rule: “The higher the output price, the lower will be the supply” (85), whereas the COF firm will increase employment and supply. This is referred to as the Ward problem.

We would like to know how that comes about; what are the organization's processes and interactions that lead to the outcome. This means that we need to dig deeply into the specific processes that lead to production and employment decisions in both kinds of enterprises and see how these processes lead to different results.

The key part of the explanation will need to involve an analysis of the locus of decision-making that exists within the enterprise, and a demonstration of how the decision-making process in a WOC leads to a different outcome from that involved in a COF.

Here is how Karl Ove Moene analyzes this problem in “Strong Unions or Worker Control?” (Alternatives to Capitalism).

A production cooperative with worker control is defined somewhat restrictively as follows:

1. Productive activities are jointly carried out by the members (who in this case are the workers).
2. Important managerial decisions reflect the desires of the members, who participate in some manner in decision making.
3. The net income (income after expenses) is divide among the members according to some formula.
4. The members have equal rights, and important decisions are made democratically by one person, one vote. (84)

A capitalist firm acts differently:

1. Productive activities are carried out by wage laborers and directed by management controlled by the owners.
2. Important managerial decisions reflect the desires of the owners of the enterprise. 
3. Producers are paid a wage set by the labor market. The net income is assigned as profits to the owners.
4. Producers have no right of decision-making in production decisions.

The assumption is that decision-makers in both settings will make decisions that maximize their income — in other words, narrow egoistic economic rationality. In the assumptions used here for the cooperative, this implies that decision-making will aim at adjusting employment and production to the point where "marginal productivity (VMP) equals the net income per member (NIM)” (85). These quantities are represented in the graph above. Here is the reasoning:

What happens if the output price increases? In real terms, net income per member increases, because the fixed costs deflated by the output price decreases. Hence the NIM curve in Figure 5.1 shifts upwards, while the marginal productivity curve remains in place. As a consequence, the optimal number of members in the coop decreases and the firm's supply decreases the higher the output price. [Hence the coop lays off excess workers.] (85-86)

(Actually, this is what should happen in the long term. Moene goes on to show that the coop would not behave this way in the short run; but he acknowledges that the economic reasoning is correct. So for the sake of my example, let's assume that the coop behaves as Ward argues.)

The mechanism that distinguishes the behavior of the two kinds of firm is easy to specify in this case. The mechanism of individual decision-making based on rational self-interest is in common in the two types of firms. So the explanation doesn't turn on the mechanism of economic rationality per se. What differs across the cases is the collective decision-making process and the interests of the actors who make the decisions in the two cases. The decision-making mechanisms in the two cases are reflected in principles 2-4. The coop embodies a democratic social-choice rule, whereas the capitalist firm embodies a dictatorship choice rule (in Kenneth Arrow's sense -- one actor's preferences decide the outcome). A democratic decision about production levels leads to the reduction-of-output result, whereas a dictatorship decision about production levels leads to the increase-of-output result in these circumstances. And in turn, we are able to say that the phenomenon is explained by reference to the mechanism of decision-making that is embodied in the two types of firms -- democratic decision making in the coop and autocratic decision making in the capitalist firm.

This is a satisfying explanation because it demonstrates how the surprising outcomes are the foreseeable results of the differing decision processes. It identifies the mechanisms that lead to the different outcomes in the different circumstances.

This example also illustrates another interesting point -- that a given mechanism can be further analyzed into one or more underlying mechanisms and processes. In this case the underlying mechanism is the postulated model of action at the individual level -- maximizing of self-interest. If we postulated a different action model -- a conditional altruism model, for example -- then the behavior of the system might be different.

(I think this is a valid example of a mechanisms-based social explanation. Others might disagree, however, and argue that it is actually a deductivist explanation, reasoning from general characteristics of the "atoms" of the system (individual actors) to aggregate properties (labor-expelling collective decisions).)

Skocpol on the 1979 revolution in Iran

An earlier post reviewed Theda Skocpol's effort in States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China to provide a comparative, structural account of the occurrence of social revolutions. There I suggested that the account is too deterministic and too abstract. It gives the impression, perhaps undeserved, that there are only a small number of pathways through which social revolutions can take place, and only a small number of causal factors that serve to bring them about. The impression emerges that Skocpol has offered a set of templates into which we should expect other social revolutions to fit.

One of the benefits of re-reading a book that is now 35 years old, however, is that history presents new cases that are appropriately considered by the theory. One such case is the Iranian Revolution, which unfolded in 1979. And, as Skocpol indicates forthrightly, the Iranian Revolution does not fit the model that she puts forward in States and Social Revolutions very closely. Skocpol considered the complexities and challenges which the Iranian Revolution posed to her theory in an article which appeared in 1981, before the dust had fully settled in Tehran. The article is included in her collection, Social Revolutions in the Modern World. Here is the challenge that the Iranian Revolution created for Skocpol's causal theory of social revolutions:

A few of us have also been inspired to probe the Iranian sociopolitical realities behind these events. For me, such probing was irresistible – above all because the Iranian revolution struck me in some ways is quite anomalous. This revolution surely qualifies as a sort of "social revolution." Yet its unfolding – especially in the events leading to the Shah's overthrow – challenged expectations about revolutionary causation that I developed through comparative-historical research on the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions. (240)

Skocpol finds that the large features of the Iranian Revolution did indeed fit the terms of her definition of a social revolution, but that the causal background and components of this historical event did not fit her expectations.

The initial stages of the Iranian revolution obviously challenged my previously worked-out notions about the causes of social revolutions. Three apparent difficulties come immediately to mind. First, the Iranian Revolution does seem as if it might have been simply a product of excessively rapid modernization.... Second, in a striking departure from the regularities of revolutionary history, the Shah's army and police – modern coercive organizations over 300,000 men strong – were rendered ineffective in the revolutionary process between 1977 and early 1979 without the occurrence of a military defeat in foreign war and without pressures from abroad.... Third, if ever there has been a revolution deliberately "made" by a mass–based social movement aiming to overthrow the old order, the Iranian revolution against the Shah surely is it. (241-242)

So the Iranian Revolution does not fit the mold. Does this imply that the interpretation of social revolution offered in States and Social Revolutions is refuted? Or does it imply instead that there are more narrow limits on the strength of the generalizations offered in that book than appear on first reading? In fact, it seems that the latter is the case:

Fortunately, in States and Social Revolutions I explicitly denied the possibility of fruitfulness of a general causal theory of revolutions that would apply across all times and places.... The Iranian Revolution can be interpreted in terms analytically consistent with the explanatory principles I used in States and Social Revolutions – this is what I shall briefly try to show. However, this remarkable revolution also forces me to deepen my understanding of the possible role of idea systems and cultural understandings in the shaping of political action – in ways that I show indicate recurrently at appropriate points in this article. (243)

One important difference between the revolutions studied by Skocpol's earlier work and the Iranian revolution is the urban base of the latter revolution. "Opposition to the Shah was centered in urban communal enclaves where autonomous and solitary collective resistance was possible" (245). "In the mass movements against the Shah during 1977 and 1978, the traditional urban communities of Iran were to play an indispensable role in mobilizing in sustaining the core of popular resistance" (246). This is a difference in the social composition of the social revolution; peasant unrest and uprisings were crucial in the cases of France, Russia, and China; but not in the case of Iran.

Another key difference in the circumstances of the Iranian Revolution was the role played by Shi'a Islam. This is what Skocpol was referring to when she indicated the important role of idea systems and cultural understandings.  "In sum, Shi'a Islam was both organizationally and culturally crucial to the making of the Iranian revolution against the Shah" (249). So ideas and values played a role in mobilizing and sustaining revolutionary actions by the population that does not have a valid counterpart in China, France, or Russia. This is a more serious divergence from the reasoning of SSR, because it introduces an entirely new causal factor -- "idea systems". In SSR the motivations that are ascribed to activists and followers are interest-based; whereas her treatment of Shi'a Islam and the Iranian Revolution forces a broadening of the theory of the actor to incorporate the workings of non-material values and commitments.

How does Skocpol think that ideas and culture function in the context of social unrest? "In and of themselves, the culture and networks of communication do not dictate mass revolutionary action. But if a historical conjuncture arises in which a vulnerable state faces oppositionally inclined social groups possessing solidarity, autonomy, and independent economic resources, then the sorts of moral symbols and forms of social communication offered by Shi'a Islam in Iran can sustain the self-conscious making of a revolution" (250). So the value system of Shi'a Islam, and the passions and commitments that it engendered, played a key causal role in the success of the revolutionary actors in Tehran, in the view that Skocpol offers in the current article.

So the social actors can be different and the causal factors involved can be different. What about the outcomes of the processes of social revolution? Can we at least keep the idea that a social revolution, once underway, has a certain logic of development that leads to certain kinds of outcomes? Here again, Skocpol is clear in saying that we cannot.

On the contrary, Skocpol brings the fact of contingency into her account here in a way that is not apparent in the earlier book. In her treatment of the Iranian Revolution she is brought to acknowledge and recognize the deep contingency that exists within a social revolution.

Of course, events in Iran may outrun that Shi'a revolutionary leadership. The clerics may lose their political unity and the army or a secular political party may step in. Or regional revolts and foreign subversion may lead to the dismemberment of the country. (254)

Or in other words: there is no necessary sequence of events in this social revolution, or any other.

So what remains? How does comparative study of social revolutions contribute to explanation? Rather than hoping for a causal diagram that identifies factors, forces, and outcomes, it seems unavoidable that we need to look for more limited findings. And this pushes us in the direction of the disaggregated approach that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly take in their own subsequent treatments of social contention in Dynamics of Contention.

According to that approach, there are some common causal processes -- we would now call them "mechanisms of contention" -- that give some insight into the critical events that transpire within a given historical sequence. But these common mechanisms do not have primacy over the myriad other factors in play -- the behavior of the military, the emergence of a secular political party, the sudden appearance of a charismatic movie actor turned political leader, the eruption of international conflict (like the war that Iran was forced to wage with Iraq), and countless other possible causal branches. And this means something very deep for the project of comparative theorizing about social revolution, or any other large-scale social change: we should regard these processes as importantly sui generis rather than general, and we should look for the sub-processes and mechanisms rather than high-level macro-causal relationships.

Skocpol on the Chinese Revolution

(Sources: States and Social Revolutions, pp. 155, 282)

In States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (1979) Theda Skocpol set out to discover a causal analysis of the occurrence of social revolution, and she offered case-study narratives of the major revolutions in France, Russia, and China. She provides a 54-page narrative of the Chinese Revolution which can serve as a thumbnail account of the major events and causal factors that made it up. Her narrative is deliberately framed in comparative terms; she wants to locate features of the Chinese situation in relation to relevantly similar characteristics of the French and Russian cases.

Here is Skocpol's definition of a social revolution:

Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society's state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below. Social revolutions are set apart from other sorts of conflicts and transformative processes above all by the combination of two coincidences: the coincidence of societal structural change with class upheaval; and the coincidence of political with social transformation. (Introduction)

The summary tables above both mirror the definition Skocpol has crafted and reveal the essence of her comparative causal analysis of the three primary cases. Tables 1A and 1B provide a coding of the states of affairs in France, Russia, and China in what she identifies as the relevant initial structural conditions -- conditions relevant to political crisis and peasant uprisings. Table 1C represents her view of the proximate outcomes of these conjunctions in the three cases -- breakdown of effective state power and emergence of widespread rural unrest. And Table 2 reflects her effort to code the more distant outcomes in the three cases, when the dust had settled -- the nature of the political configurations and state systems that emerged from the revolutions that took place. 

This is historical sociology, not social-science history. The goal is not to be a full historical account of these revolutions in detail, but instead to identify relatively limited number of structural and agentic causes that may be relevant to the occurrence of revolution in the individual cases.

It is worth noting what this account does not provide. It does not attempt to disaggregate revolutionary processes into underlying causal social mechanisms. Rather, it presupposes a fairly macro-level conception of causal conditions and factors. This is what allows Skocpol to make use of a Millian method for discovering what she takes to be necessary and sufficient causes for social revolution. And second, it gives no attention to the possibilities of contingency and path dependency. Rather, she is looking for causal conditions that co-occur in some historical circumstances and then lead to social revolution as an outcome. This is the conjunctural part of her story.

This is a very specific conception of comparativist social explanation. It is anti-positivist, in an important sense, in that it expressly rejects the idea that there might be fundamental laws from which the occurrence of revolution might be derived. But it is also anti-reductionist, in that it is not interested in explaining the large outcomes, or similarities of oarge outcomes, based on underlying mechanisms or processes. I find it hard to think of an example of causal explanation in biology, geology, or physics that has a similar structure. Explanations of the transition of a group of tree species within a forest might look similar -- the ecologist looks for macro-level circumstances that favor one species over another. But there is always the underlying mechanism of natural selection and differential rates of reproduction that provides a microfoundation for the explanation.

In Skocpol’s analysis of China several events and structures were most fundamental in the unfolding of China’s social revolution.

1. The devolution of power to the regional level that had occurred in the final years of the old regime (pre-1911). This reflects the great weakening of the central imperial state and military and the emergence of warlords and local elites with their own militias.
2. The poverty and oppression of the peasantry. The deprivation of farmers at the hands of landlords and local elites left peasants in a state of misery and deprivation that left them ready for radicalization and mobilization. 
3. The fact of European imperialist military and economic pressure from mid-nineteenth century forward, which both weakened the imperial state and delegitimized it. 

The account of the Chinese Revolution provided by Bianco and described in the previous post gives attention to another key factor: the organizational capacity and revolutionary strategies of the CCP. To some extent this runs contrary to Skocpol's vigorous opposition to the idea of revolution as an intentional process. But Bianco is clearly right, that the strategies and coordination of the CCP provided a vital component of the eventual success of the Chinese Revolution.

Moreover, the more disaggregated studies of the Chinese Revolution that have emerged since Skocpol's book make it clear to me that there were deep contingencies in the process as it unfolded, and that multiple outcomes were possible. So the antecedent structural conditions that she identifies did not suffice to bring about the eventual revolution.

Skocpol's comparativist methodology was an exciting innovation when it appeared in 1979. With the hindsight of thirty-five years, however, I am inclined to think that it is a failed experiment. It remains too close to the methodology that asks the researcher to find a set of conditions that vary appropriately with the outcome, and in the end it is methodologically committed to the idea that we can discover an answer to the question, what conditions do all social revolutions share? The critique that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly offer of theories of contentious politics that simply look for large generalizations across groups of large scale contentious events seems to apply here as well. The focus in Skocpol's analysis remains too macro, with social revolutions constituting the units of analysis. But as MTT argue, it is more useful to drop down a level or two and look to the mechanisms and processes that make up social revolutions, rather than trying to identify high-level generalizations across groups of cases, whether large-N or small-N.

Understanding the Chinese Revolution

source: Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, frontispiece

The Chinese Revolution is one of the world-historical events that has set the stage for the modern world. And, unlike the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, it is sufficiently contemporary that there are very substantial sources of data and informants about its occurrence. Several generations of China historians have sought to provide explanations and elaborations on the occurrence of the Chinese Revolution (link, link). The Revolution set the course for a population of over 1.1 billion people, it affected the economic and international development of the rest of the world, and it established a government that continues to rule the second largest economy in the world. Moreover, vast amounts of scholarship have been written in attempting to describe and explain the course of the Revolution.

So we might imagine that the story has been written, and that we know everything we need to know about the causes, events, and main directions of the Revolution. However, this would be a mistake. As earlier posts have shown, there continue to be new questions, renewed debates over old questions, and deep uncertainties about the best ways of understanding the occurrence and development of this momentous series of events.

It is interesting, therefore, to return to one of the earlier efforts at historical explanation of the Chinese Revolution, the widely read book by Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949. The book first appeared French in 1967, and therefore much of what we now understand to be the development of modern China was yet to occur. The Great Leap Forward and attendant famine had occurred in 1958-1959, the Cultural Revolution was just getting underway, and of course the major reorientation of the Chinese state in the direction market reform was decades in the future. In a meaningful sense, Bianco was writing the history of a revolution that was still underway.

The title of the book captures Bianco's central goal in his treatment of the Revolution: to identify the large factors that explained the occurrence and characteristics of the success of the CCP's struggle for mobilization and power. Ideology and doctrine play an important role; Bianco spends a lot of attention on the question of whether Chinese communism was heterodox or orthodox in relation to classical Marxist theory. Another key question in Bianco's treatment is the role of the peasantry in Mao's strategy for creating revolution. The ideological frameworks brought forward by Nationalist and Communist leaders play a large role in Bianco's account.

Bianco organizes his analysis around the role of Marxist ideology and theory, the role of the Comintern in attempting to "manage" Communist activism in China, the role of the Japanese war of aggression against China, and the economic and social circumstances governing the agrarian world that brought Chinese peasants into a state of latent revolutionary activism, just needing the mobilization efforts of the CCP to ignite a social conflagration. And he takes up the nationalism thesis offered by Chalmers Johnson in Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945 just a few years earlier (1962; link), treating Johnson's work respectfully but critically. In other words, he raises the central explanatory ideas that observers of the time thought potentially important: ideology, exploitation, war, nationalism, and military competition between the Guomindang dictatorship and the Communist Party.

Three large factors emerge as being the most important sources of revolution in Bianco's account: the tactical effectiveness of the CCP in mobilizing the peasantry, the crushing exploitation and poverty of the countryside, and the military realities created by the three-sided conflict between the GMD, the CCP, and the Japanese army. Of these, the poverty of agrarian China was the most pervasive:

The source of the revolution, the real strength of the CCP, must be sought in the living conditions that prevailed from one end of rural China to the other, where poverty, abuse, and early death were the only prospect for nearly half a billion people. (87)

Bianco's greatest contributions to Chinese history are focused on pre-revolution peasant politics. These writings are exemplified in Peasants Without the Party: Grass-Root Movements in Twentieth-Century China, "Peasants and Revolution: The Case of China" (link), and "Peasant Movements" in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 13: Republican China 1912-1949, Part 2. Here is a summary offered in Origins:

To the extent that the non-Communist peasant movements I have studied can be characterized in general terms, they seem to me diffuse, sporadic, and lacking in coordination and firm leadership. Above all they seem defensive: peasants may arouse themselves to protest an assault on the status quo, but they almost never attack the deeper causes of their exploitation and misery. (107)

Bianco incorporates his own study of earlier peasant rebellions into his account of the politics of mobilization, and he highlights the non-revolutionary character of those earlier movements (107). As he had argued in his research on China's peasantry, it was the organizing and mobilizing role of the CCP that turned peasant discontent from local unrest to sustained revolutionary action.

One thing I find interesting in rereading the book today is the fairly general level at which it is written. Bianco essentially summarizes his perceptions of the main elements of the complicated economic, political, and military events that transpired in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s in China. He was a highly expert observer, and was intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the Comintern, the Guomindang, and the CCP. But the work is offered at a very high level of discourse, not really intending to provide new historical understanding of the politics of nationalism and the social program of the party.

This contrasts with the level of historical detail and richness of Bianco's own primary research on peasant movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in China. Here his work is archival and detailed, and offers genuine new insights into the particulars of the phenomena. And it contrasts as well with the level of detail and precision of the treatments of various parts of the revolution in China that were written in the following thirty years.

Origins was influential and widely read. That said, it should be understood as a work of historical synthesis rather than a contribution of original discovery. It remained for the next generation of historians -- people like Mark Selden, Yung Fa Chen, and Odoric Wou -- to push the historical inquiry more deeply into the mechanisms and variations of these processes of revolution. In his forward to English edition in 1976, Mark Selden attempts to summarize the key issues for future research posed by the book: the need to give a more fine grained taxonomy of the peasantry (rich, middle, poor), the effects of the rapid commercialization that were underway in the twenties and thirties, and the relative importance of domestic and foreign factors in the occurrence of the Revolution. Selden himself takes up some of these issues in The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (1971). And historians like Chen and Wou have given substantially greater detail about the specifics of mobilization, strategy, and military tactices in the base areas than was possible in 1967 when Bianco wrote his book.

The historian and the archives

Generally speaking everyone understands that one important kind of research conducted by historians takes place in archives -- repositories of records and documents that have been preserved by governments or organizations for some purpose, in which documents are preserved that shed light on the past. But it is common to imagine that the trip to the archive is instrumental and wholly focused on the gathering of information that sheds light on the activities of individuals and organizations in the past. The purpose and value of the visit, on this account, is the gathering of information.

Arlette Farge is one of France's leading contemporary historians and is the author of Fragile Lives: Violence, Power, and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Her recently translated book The Allure of the Archives casts archival research in a very different light. Her use of archival materials is of course aimed at learning some of the details of the activities and practices of the past. But she very eloquently expresses the idea that archival work goes well beyond the mundane gathering and noting of facts. In fact, much of this short book reads as an almost poetic expression of the experience of engaging with old documents and scraps of paper in archives across France.

The taste for the archive is rooted in these encounters with the silhouettes of the past, be they faltering or sublime. There is an obscure beauty in so many existences barely illuminated by words, in confrontation with each other, imprisoned by their own devices as much as they were undone by their era. (kl 605-607)

The archive's allure, nonetheless, lives on. The taste for the archives is not a fashion that will go out of style as quickly as it came in. It comes from the conviction that the preservation of the judicial records has created a space of captured speech. The goal is not for the cleverest, most driven researcher to unearth some buried treasure, but for the historian to use the archives as a vantage point from which she can bring to light new forms of knowledge that would otherwise have remained shrouded in obscurity. (kl 668-672)

The book can be read as a counterargument against the idea that historical research can be done almost entirely in a digitized world of scanned documents available on the Internet. For Farge, the tactile and practical experience of spending hours, days, and weeks in direct contact with the documents of the past is an irreplaceable part of the historian's art. (Robert Darnton takes up this aspect of the book in his fine review of The Allure of the Archives here in the New York Review of Books.)

Farge provides a nuanced explanation of the unavoidable need for interpretation when the historian confronts a set of documents. This involves selection: "Purposefully focusing on a particular theme (drunkenness, theft, adultery) creates a specific viewpoint that requires explanation, because the space is necessarily reorganized by the research objective" (kl 778-780). And it involves reconstruction: It is necessary to be able to mentally reconstruct some of the context in which the documents were collected. But more, it is necessary to find ways of "hearing" the voices of the men and women whose moments of experience are captured on these scraps of paper. (As she points out in her description of the writings of the mad Thorin, it was literally necessary for her to vocalize the words and letters he had written to be able to guess the intended sentences. "Thorin might have been illiterate, but his writings, in their clumsy calligraphy, transmit what no ordinary text can: the way in which they were pronounced and articulated" (kl 750).)

Farge has written a personal book, almost an ethnographic book about the experience of using and learning from the miscellaneous documents of an archive (a judicial archive, in her case). But some of her own sensibilities as an interpreter and writer of history come through as well: an emphasis on the centrality of conflict in historical settings, a concern for the material and meaningful lives of ordinary women, an interest in the particulars of home and work for ordinary people, attention to the strategic intelligence of ordinary people in their interactions with police and the judicial apparatus.  Like Robert Darnton in The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History, she is interested in finding small clues in the evidence of the archive that shed light on aspects of ordinary social interactions and meanings in eighteenth-century Paris.

In particular, Farge is insistent that historians should not treat the archive as simply a source of interesting or surprising singular stories (the surprising discovery of a letter from one man to another about the charms of his wife, the marvelous discovery of report of a traffic incident involving the Marquis de Sade, a sword, and a horse). Her goal, and the goal of historians more generally, is to find ways of extracting a narrative from the material that somehow honors both the singularity and the thematic:

Our task is to find a language that can integrate singular moments into a narrative capable of reproducing their roughness, while underlining both their irreducibility and their affinity with other representations. We need a language that is capable of reconstructing and deconstructing, playing with the similar as with the different.... If we aim to “defend stories” and bring them into history, we must commit ourselves to demonstrating in a compelling manner the ways in which each individual constructed her own agency out of what history and society put at her disposal. When examined in this way, interrogations and testimonies shed light on the spaces where an individual entered into both peaceful and tumultuous relationships with different social groups, while at the same time struggling to preserve her freedoms and defend her autonomy. (kl 1073-1075)

And she steers a careful course between objectivity and subjectivity in telling history -- between "one truth about the past" and "all perspectives are equally valid":

The archive is a vantage point from which the symbolic and intellectual constructions of the past can be rearranged. It is a matrix that does not articulate “the” truth, but rather produces, through recognition as much as through disorientation, the elements necessary to ground a discourse of truth telling that refuses lies. Neither more nor less real than other sources, the archival documents display the fates of men and women whose surprising and somber actions crossed paths with an authority that had many faces. (kl1121-1125)

She finds that there are "foundational events" in history -- the Holocaust, the French Revolution -- whose features can and must be known. And the archive plays one important role in helping us know those facts:

It is important to understand that outside of certain rare exceptions, archival documents cannot be definitive proof. But they are reference points we cannot ignore, whose meaning must be constructed through rigorous and precise questioning. As historians we must recognize that “the validity of the knowledge depends on the validity of the purpose,” and that we must carefully navigate between recognizing the influence of our choices and the impossible theory of history as an objective compilation of facts. (kl 1164-1168)

These many documents and the voices they imperfectly capture give the historian a way of discerning some of the realities that underlay the grand events:

Through the archive we can glimpse what became of these people who were constantly in movement, and whose agency was composed of a continual combination and recombination of action and reaction, change and conflict. We must seize on to what happened, recognizing that in the facts we find in the archive something was always going on inside social relationships. As we abandon abstract categorizations, we can bring to light something that moved, arose, and fulfilled itself through continual change. (kl 1309-1312)

It is interesting to compare the central thrust of this book with some of the comments Farge made about archival research in Fragile Lives (first published in French in 1986, three years before the publication in French of Le gout de l'archive):

This book [Fragile Lives] was born out of the archives -- not from a set of documents, nor from chronicles, memoirs, novels or treatises of a judicial, administrative or literary nature. No, none of the above.

It came quite simply from the judicial archives -- the odd scrap, snatch of a phrase, fragments of lives from that vast repository of once-pronounced words that constitute the archives -- words emerging from the darkness and depths of three successive night-times: of time and oblivion; of the wretched and unfortunate; and last (and most impenetrable for our ow stubborn minds), the night of guild and its grip... 

Historians who find themselves caught up with original sources become so fascinated by the archives that involvement with them makes it almost impossible to avoid self-justification through them or to resist the temptation to suppress any doubts these might cast on their own perceptions and systems of rationality or those of others. The impact the archives have on the historian (scarcely ever recognized explicitly) sometimes has the effect of actually denying their value. Fine though they might be, they are nonetheless full of pitfalls, and the corollary of their beauty is their deceptiveness. Any historian taking them on board cannot but be wary of the improbable outlines of the images they conceal. (1)

Here, it seems, Farge takes a somewhat more cautious view of archival research.

(Chuck Tilly refers to his first visit to a French archive in his preliminary phase of research on The Vendee: A Sociological Analysis of the Counter-Revolution of 1793 in the interview he did with me a few years ago (around minute 3 in the clip below). His excitement about that first visit persisted for almost fifty years.)

Mechanisms and methodology

In its origin the causal mechanisms approach (link) is chiefly an answer to the question, “what is a good social explanation?”. So it turns out that much of the mechanisms discussion has taken place within the philosophy of science, especially the philosophy of social science and the philosophy of biology. The question I’d like to formulate here is whether mechanisms theory has any relevance to methodology as well? Can sociologists make better progress on concrete research problems by organizing some of their thinking around the construct of a social mechanism?

This kind of question comes up with respect to a number of the topics and innovations that have occurred in the philosophy of social science in recent years — critical realism, causal powers, and strategic fields, for example. It is certainly worthwhile developing theories and refinements of each of these concepts within the philosophy of social science. But it is an additional question to ask whether these concepts have a valuable role to play in discussions of research methodology and design as well.

So what is the problem of methodology, from the point of view of the working sociologist? The researcher has a number of preliminary tasks: What is the domain of social phenomena that are of interest? How can those phenomena be studied using available empirical tools? How can we theorize what is going on in this domain? How can we think about the nature of the entities, processes, causes, and meanings that make up this domain? And how can we probe the properties and dynamics of those sociological entities and processes?

Take a phenomenon like corruption. China is said to face a social and political problem deriving from widespread corrupt practices. How would we investigate the phenomenon of corruption in China (or India, the United States, or Finland)? Corruption is an umbrella concept that describes patterns of behavior across a wide range of domains: interactions between police and the public, practices through which business contracts are secured, enforcement of environmental and safety regulations, enforcement of trade regulations, practices through which individuals secure services from hospitals and licensing authorities, and there are indefinitely many other examples. Moreover, we can identify similar patterns of behavior in many countries, so there is an element of international comparison in play as well.

And yet not all instances of rule breaking are instances of corruption. So there is a preliminary task for the researcher, to engage in conceptual work and to define, for the purpose of the research enterprise, what kinds of behavior by agents and citizens will be counted as “corrupt”. Here we would like the researcher to work like a philosopher of language in some ways: “What do we mean by ‘X’ in ordinary or technical parlance?” In the current example, we would like the researcher to arrive at a working specification of corruption that is both reasonably practicable in application but also reasonably conformant to our prior assumptions about the category. (A definition of “corruption” that identifies corruption as “income-enhancing strategies by an economic actor” may be easy to apply but entirely inadequate as a specification of what we mean by corruption.) Robert Klitgaard does this kind of conceptual work in his 1988 and 1989 books, Controlling Corruption and Corrupt Cities: A Practical Guide to Cure and Prevention.

So let’s say we’ve offered a specification of corruption along these lines:

“[One species of] corruption involves situations in which individuals with decision-making power with respect to rules, fines, approvals, or contracts expects and receives covert payments from the consumer in exchange for the desired decision.”

This definition would capture many of the examples provided above: police officers giving speeding tickets, customs inspectors closing their eyes to valuable undeclared items, hospital staff making decisions about admissions and treatment of patients, safety inspectors approving a given location or activity — in exchange for a gift from the affected individual. Essentially the corrupt agent is “selling” a service or benefit which he or she controls to an individual who needs that service, contrary to the rules of the organization.

Now the researcher needs to specify a research question. It might be descriptive:

• "How frequent are instances of corrupt behavior by this description in setting X?"

It might be comparative:

• “How does institution X compare with institution Y with respect to the frequency of corrupt behavior by its agents?”

It might be explanatory:

• "Why do some institutions have higher rates of corrupt behavior than others?”

Or it might be policy-oriented:

• “What features of institutions can be introduced to reduce rates of corrupt behavior by the agents of the institution?”

The mechanisms theory is particularly relevant to methodology for at least the final three tasks. The background assumptions the researcher brings to his or her work about what a good explanation, a good policy design, or a good comparison ought to look like will strongly affect the ways in which he or she proceeds from this point further.

If the researcher adopts the simple empiricist model of explanation — find characteristics that appropriately co-vary with the dependent variable — then the research path is fairly clear:

• Identify a set of cases (don’t select on the dependent variable) and see whether there are correlations among institutional features and rates of corruption. (Ultimately this seems to be the prescription of King, Keohane, and Verba in Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research.)

Or he or she might pursue the necessary-and-sufficient-condition version of the approach:

• Identify a set of cases (again with provisos about selection of cases) and see whether we can identify necessary and/or sufficient conditions using Mill’s methods or other analytical tools. (Gary Goertz describes strategies like these in Necessary Conditions: Theory, Methodology, and Applications.)

On the other hand, if the researcher adopts the causal-mechanisms approach — identify causal mechanisms and processes that affect the occurrence or frequency of the outcome of interest — then he or she will proceed differently. The researcher will examine the individual cases carefully, looking to identify the factors and mechanisms that appear to be involved in the outcomes of interest; he or she will then look to see whether there are common processes involved in multiple cases; and he or she will consider whether available theories of social processes are relevant to the explanation of the outcomes observed. (This is essentially the method pursued by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly in Dynamics of Contention.)

For example, the extensive theorizing and discussions of principal-agent problems in political science may shed light on concrete mechanisms through which corrupt behaviors are controlled in a variety of existing circumstances. The Principal wants the Agent to act according to the rules of the organization; the Agent is to some extent outside his observation and control. So what mechanisms of self-enforcement are available to lead the Agent to comply with the expectations of the Principal?

One mechanism of compliance that the Principal may consider is a Corrupt Practices Tipline, whereby consumers can anonymously report corruption by specific officers. This extends the Principal’s ability to gather information about the Agent’s behavior. The Agent, knowing that the Tipline exists, constrains his otherwise corrupt inclinations, and the incidence of corrupt practices declines.

Another possible approach for the Principal is to link the Agent's longterm rewards to his/her longterm success in assigned tasks. Jean Ensminger describes the practice of gifts of "bridewealth" in these terms, as a way in which cattle owners maintain the loyalty of their herders during the long periods of time that they are out of sight in the foraging areas (Making a Market: The Institutional Transformation of an African Society) Deferred compensation and stock options may play a similar role in the modern business organization.

Another mechanism that might be considered is selective investigation and enforcement. The Principal may know that many customs agents are accepting small gifts of money when evaluating customs declarations, and that a small number of these transactions involve high-value items and correspondingly high-value gifts. It might be sensible to focus investigation and enforcement on this smaller incidence of high-value transactions. Choosing this strategy may have the effect of significantly reducing “big corrupt transactions” while leaving “small corrupt transactions” essential unchanged.

A final mechanism that might be considered here (out of many possible avenues of investigation) is a cultural factor -- training, education, and inculturation. We might consider whether one cultural setting does a better job of preparing individuals to play honest roles in organizations than another based on the educational and formative experiences that are offered to them. This can provide the basis for a hypothesis about a causal mechanism leading to a high (or low) rate of corrupt behavior; and it might provide a basis for a possible policy intervention (workplace training to shift basic values).

This is one example of the way a concrete research strategy might evolve. The important point of the example is that the philosophical orientations described here — “simple empiricism”, “mechanisms theory” — lead researchers to structure their investigations in very different ways. The researcher who is attuned to causal mechanisms will focus his or her efforts on uncovering the concrete social pathways or processes through which a given pattern of behavior is either encouraged or discouraged; and the researcher will be led to consider comparative cases to see whether similar arrangements lead to similar patterns of behavior in the other cases. This suggests that the discussion of the ins and outs of causal mechanisms theory in philosophy of social science may in fact be an important contribution to social science methodology as well.

SSHA 2014 Call for Papers

SSHA CALL FOR PAPERS

Macrohistorical Dynamics Network

39th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association
Toronto, Ontario 6-9 November 2014
Submission Deadline: 14 February 2014

"Inequalities: Politics, Policy, and the Past"

 

www.ssha.org

 

We invite you to take part in Macrohistorical Dynamics (MHD) panels of the 39th annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, November 6-9, 2014 in Toronto.  For more information on the meeting as well as the call for proposals, please refer to the SSHA website at www.ssha.org.

 

The deadline for paper and/or panel submissions is February 14, 2014.

 

The members of the Social Science History Association share a common interest in interdisciplinary and systematic approaches to historical research, and many of us find the SSHA one of the most stimulating conferences that we attend.

 

The theme of the 2014 annual meeting is “Inequalities: Politics, Policy, and the Past”.

 

Macrohistorical Dynamics (MHD) is an interdisciplinary social science research field that focuses on problems of large-scale, comparative historical inquiry.  Contributors to the field have brought perspective on a wide variety of problem areas, including macro-historical sociology; comparative histories; Eurasian history; world history; world-system analysis; philosophy of history; and studies of long-term socio-ecological, technological, demographic, cultural, and political transformations.  The Macrohistorical Dynamics network brings a rigorous perspective to bear on questions having to do with “large” history.

 

Possible topics that illustrate some of the general themes of Macrohistorical Dynamics include …

 
•    Comparative Methods in Macrohistory
•    Large-scale historical causes: climate, population, geography
•    Cultural and National Identities in Large-scale Historical Change
•    Theory in Macro-history: Are There Successful Macrosociological Theories?
•    Macro-, Meso-, Micro- in Historical Explanations
•    Empires and Peoples
•    Globalization and World Cities
•    Social Evolution and Systemic Transformations in World History

 

The list of MHD panel themes for 2014 is open, and we encourage you to submit proposals for paper topics or panel themes.

 

The MHD network expects to be able to host at least six panels in 2014 and will also be able to place additional papers through co-sponsorship with other networks (for example, with History/Methods, Politics, Culture, State-Society, Historical Geography, etc.).

SSHA requests that submissions be made by means of its web conference management system. Paper title, brief abstract, and contact information should be submitted on the site, where the general SSHA 2014 call for papers is also available.  (If you haven’t used the system previously you will need to create an account, which is a very simple process.)  Here is the direct link for submissions: 

 

http://conference.ssha.org/

 

The online system is now accepting submissions. If you have any questions, please contact either of the MHD co-chairs (Peter Perdue, James Lee, Dan Little). 

 

NOTE: There is an SSHA rule concerning book sessions.  For a book session to proceed, the author (or at least one of multiple authors) MUST be present.  Proposals for book sessions should only be submitted if there is high confidence that the author will be able to travel to Toronto November 6-9, 2014.

 

SSHA has set up a mechanism for networks to share papers, so even if you have a solo paper, send the idea along.  Co-sponsored panels and papers are encouraged by the SSHA Program Committee as a means of broadening the visibility of the various networks.

 

Please feel free to contact the MHD network organizers for further information.

 

Prof. Daniel Little
University of Michigan-Dearborn
delittle@umich.edu

Prof. Peter Perdue
Department of History
Yale University
New Haven CT
peter.c.perdue@yale.edu

Prof. James Lee
School of Humanities and Social Science
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Hong Kong
jqljzl@gmail.com

 

Visit the SSHA Facebook site.

Mechanisms and intellectual movements

I am particularly interested in the idea that we can explain social outcomes by identifying the social mechanisms that (often, typically, occasionally) bring them about. I also find the evolution of science and systems of ideas to be particularly fascinating within contemporary sociology, in that this aspect of human life embraces both rationally directed thought and sociological influences. So it is very interesting to consider what we can discover about the structures, networks, and professional organizations that influence the course that a given discipline or field of research takes.

It is therefore interesting to consider the role that reference to social mechanisms has played in recent works of the sociology of science and the sociology of knowledge. A particularly good example is found in the work of sociologists like Camic, Lamont, Gross, and Frickel, and Frickel and Gross's "General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements" (2005) is a good place to start (link). Frickel and Gross put their goal in this article in this way:

The theory seeks to answer the question, under what social conditions is any particular scientific/intellectual movement, or SIM (whose nature we clarify shortly), most likely to emerge, gain adherents, win intellectual prestige, and ultimately acquire some level of institutional stability? (205)

This description evokes an explanatory goal with a causal perspective -- "conditions" that make "emergence" likely. But on its face this is not a mechanisms-based approach -- rather, it is more akin to a "facilitating or necessary conditions" kind of analysis of social causation. This impression is reinforced by the assertion that the theory is inductive, based on an examination of a number of case studies of SIMs aimed at identifying such conditions. (The authors also make a point of giving emphasis to failed SIMs because of the traction offered by such cases for counterfactual analysis.) They emphasize the importance of identifying common features of SIMs, in order to "mark them as objects for sociological study" (208), which implies that a precondition of sociological study is that we need to identify a social kind of entities with reasonably similar properties. This too suggests an underlying causal perspective that looks to regularities and common properties rather than causal mechanisms or causal powers.

As much of the recent discussion of critical realism makes clear, it is very important to be as explicit as possible about the assumptions we make about causation in the social sciences. So a quick review of the article may be useful in order to shed light on the kinds of causal thinking that Frickel and Gross engage in here.

To begin, what is a SIM?

The most abbreviated definition is this: SIMs are collective efforts to pursue research programs or projects for thought in the face of resistance from others in the scientific or intellectual community. (206)

So one criterion for an ensemble of thinkers and institutions to constitute a SIM in the F/G definition is that their shared intellectual program needs to challenge the status quo, the dominant way of thinking about the subject matter of concern. F/G explicitly model their analysis on the study of social movements; notice the parallel with McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly's formulation in Dynamics of Contention of their central question.

Under what conditions will normally apathetic, frightened, or disorganized people explode into the streets, put down their tools, or mount the barricades? How do different actors and identities appear and transform in episodes of contention? Finally, what kinds of trajectories do these processes follow? (chapter 2)

It is interesting that F/G are quite explicit in looking for a "general theory". What they mean by this, apparently, is an account of a limited set of social conditions whose presence or absence "explains" the success or failure of a candidate SIM at a point in time. And this in turn sounds quite a bit like the comparative method pursued by Theda Skocpol in States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China: through comparative study of cases, discover a background set of social and political conditions that serve as jointly sufficient and/or necessary conditions for the occurrence of social revolution (link). (Like Skocpol, F/G make use of the probabilistic versions of sufficiency and necessity: "makes more likely" and "makes more unlikely".) Mechanisms come into the story fairly quickly: "Our general theory insists that the precise mechanisms whereby a field's external environment shapes a SIM must be specified" (209); but in fact, there is very little discussion of concrete mechanisms in the article.

The four premises of the general theory are these:

• Proposition 1: A SIM is more likely to emerge when high-status intellectual actors harbor complaints against what they understand to be the central intellectual tendencies of the day. (209; italics mine)
• Proposition 2: SIMs are more likely to be successful when structural conditions provide access to key resources. (213)
• Proposition 3: The greater a SIM's access to various micro mobilization contexts, the more likely it is to be successful. (219)
• Proposition 4: The success of a SIM is contingent upon the work done by movement participants to frame movement ideas in ways that resonate with the concerns of those who inhabit an intellectual field or fields. (221)

For each of these theoretical propositions they offer the sketch of an idea about what the mechanisms are that might support this factor. For example, concerning proposition 1, they maintain that "grievance" is a necessary condition for the emergence of an SIM because it puts potential adherents in a state of psychological readiness for mobilization. Another mechanism they cite for the emergence and mobilization of an SIM is the sudden entry into a field of non-traditional practitioners -- for example, women or African-American scholars entering the field of urban studies in the 1960s who found that prevailing wisdom failed to do justice to their own experiences. And on the resources point, F/G refer to the job market, academic organizations, and funding sources, and sketch out how favorable conditions with regard to these structural features can facilitate the success of a SIM. This is, at least in sketch, a mechanisms analysis.

The mechanisms associated with Proposition 3 are encapsulated in the notion of "micromobilization". Like Tilly in his analysis of the counter-revolution in The Vendee, F/G hold that the success of a SIM is influenced by the strength or weakness of the various organizations and networks through which it is able to spread its message and its mobilization efforts at the grassroots level. They mention laboratories, conferences, research retreats, and academic departments (219). Once one or more advocates of the given SIM has a position of influence in one of these centers, he or she is enabled to influence and mobilize other scholars to the SIM.

The mechanisms associated with Proposition 4 pick up on the rhetorical side of intellectual work.  We might unsympathetically refer to this aspect of the development of a SIM as the marketing campaign it pursues. In order to influence prospective adherents to an intellectual movement it is necessary to provide "messages" that resonate with them. (Fritz Ringer's analysis of the German mandarins between the wars in The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 seems to illustrate this mechanism; a few highly effective reactionary authors caught the wave of pessimism that was present in German culture between the wars, and this seems to have had an important effect on the development of social science thinking in the period.) This factor has to do with effective framing of issues and research questions:

Fundamental to framing, and underlying and connecting to the three other dimensions we describe shortly, is the notion of intellectual identity. We see intellectual identity as one of the crucial links between micro, mess, and macro levels of analysis in the sociology of ideas. (222)

It is possible to take issue with the notion that there is a general theory on offer here. I would rather call the analysis provided here an account of some generalizations about the causal conditions that facilitate or impede intellectual movements. The phrase "general theory" makes the effort seem more comprehensive than it actually aims to be. What this treatment lacks (by design) is a micro- or meso-level account of how specific institutions, identity features, resource sources, and networks have played out in specific instances of intellectual change. (The contributions to Camic, Gross, and Lamont's Social Knowledge in the Making do this in a variety of ways.)

But consider Chuck Tilly's frequent critique of a similar effort in contentious politics studies: it is the underlying mechanisms and processes, not the general similarities and common conditions, that provide real insight into the explanation of episodes of contentious action. Tilly argues that there is a great deal of variation across episodes; but we can nonetheless discover some common underlying mechanisms and processes. And this would suggest that a more meso-level might be helpful in the study of SIMs as well. Or putting it in other terms, more attention to mechanisms and less emphasis on general conditions might provide more insight into the phenomena of intellectual movements.

There is one final observation that appears relevant here. The "social mechanisms" approach itself might be classified as a SIM in the making. This intellectual movement involves a relatively small group of practitioners embedded within specific centers of institutional influence; it emerged from dissatisfaction with the received view of causation in the social sciences; and it is involved in a struggle for resources and prestige in the field of the philosophy of social science, both in Europe and North America. (For that matter, much the same could be said for critical realism.)

Finally, I am keeping my eyes open for meso-level social mechanisms in the sociology literature, and so I was curious in reading through this piece again whether any of the mechanisms postulated here were meso-meso. It seems that they are not. Rather, the social mechanisms mentioned generally proceed from a structure or institution to individual behavior (meso-micro) or from individual behavior to a meso- or macro-level outcome (progress of the SIM). But if this is correct, then the explanatory work offered here conforms to the downward and upward struts of Coleman's boat, not the type 4 causation from meso to meso that Coleman precludes (link). This makes the analysis perhaps more compatible with the strictures of analytical sociology that the authors might have guessed (link).