Sociology as a Human Science: Essays on Interpretation and Causal Pluralism (Cultural Sociology) 3031183568, 9783031183560

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CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY

Sociology as a Human Science Essays on Interpretation and Causal Pluralism

Isaac Ariail Reed

Cultural Sociology Series Editors

Jeffrey C. Alexander Center for Cultural Sociology Yale University New Haven, CT, USA Ron Eyerman Center for Cultural Sociology Yale University New Haven, CT, USA David Inglis Department of Sociology University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland Philip Smith Center for Cultural Sociology Yale University New Haven, CT, USA

Cultural sociology is widely acknowledged as one of the most vibrant areas of inquiry in the social sciences across the world today. The Palgrave Macmillan Series in Cultural Sociology is dedicated to the proposition that deep meanings make a profound difference in social life. Culture is not simply the glue that holds society together, a crutch for the weak, or a mystifying ideology that conceals power. Nor is it just practical knowledge, dry schemas, or know how. The series demonstrates how shared and circulating patterns of meaning actively and inescapably penetrate the social. Through codes and myths, narratives and icons, rituals and representations, these culture structures drive human action, inspire social movements, direct and build institutions, and so come to shape history. The series takes its lead from the cultural turn in the humanities, but insists on rigorous social science methods and aims at empirical explanations. Contributions engage in thick interpretations but also account for behavioral outcomes. They develop cultural theory but also deploy middle-­ range tools to challenge reductionist understandings of how the world actually works. In so doing, the books in this series embody the spirit of cultural sociology as an intellectual enterprise.

Isaac Ariail Reed

Sociology as a Human Science Essays on Interpretation and Causal Pluralism

Isaac Ariail Reed Department of Sociology University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA, USA

Cultural Sociology ISBN 978-3-031-18356-0    ISBN 978-3-031-18357-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18357-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: imagedepotpro/E+/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Abigail Cary Moore and Vasfiye Toprak for research assistance, to two anonymous reviewers for constructive critique and helpful commentary and suggestions, and to Jeffrey C. Alexander for receiving with enthusiasm the idea for this volume. The essays in this book came to fruition over a long period of time and enjoyed the comments and help of editors and reviewers, workshops, conferences, and careful readers—more than I can possibly remember or recount. Here I can specifically identify interlocutors at the Social Science History Association and invitations to present work at the University of California at San Diego, the University of Michigan, and Harvard University as especially generative of collaborative thinking. Special thanks are due to Jennifer Bair and Hannah Bair for support through all of this. Finally, thanks to my co-authors Dan Hirschman, Natalie Aviles and Carly Knight for illuminating new pathways in working epistemics. A version of chapter two appeared as “Epistemology Contextualized: Social-Scientific Knowledge in a Postpositivist Era” in Sociological Theory 28 (1): 20–39, 2010. A version of chapter three appeared as “Justifying Sociological Knowledge: From Realism to Interpretation,” in Sociological Theory. 26 (2): 101–129, 2008. A version of chapter four appeared as Daniel Hirschman and Isaac Ariail Reed, “Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology” Sociological Theory 32(4): 259–282, 2014.

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A version of chapter five appeared as Natalie B. Aviles and Isaac Ariail Reed, “Ratio via Machina: Three Standards of Mechanistic Explanation in Sociology” in Sociological Methods and Research 46(4): 715–738, 2017. A version of chapter six appeared as Carly R. Knight and Isaac Ariail Reed, “Meaning and modularity: The Multivalence of ‘Mechanism’ in Sociological Explanation” in Sociological Theory 37 (3): 234–256, 2019. A version of chapter seven appeared as “What is Interpretive Explanation in Sociohistorical Analysis?” pp.  41–66  in Inheriting Gadamer: New Directions in Philosophical Hermeneutics, edited by Georgia Warnke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. A version of chapter eight appeared as “Power: Relational, Discursive, and Performative Dimensions” in Sociological Theory 31(3): 193–218, 2013.

Contents

1 Introduction: Sociology as a Human Science  1 Part I Metatheoretical Frames  17 2 Epistemology  Contextualized: Social Scientific Knowledge in a Post-Positivist Era 19 3 Justifying  Sociological Knowledge: From Realism to Interpretation 51 Part II Mechanisms in Dispute  95 4 Formation  Stories and Causality in Sociology 97 Daniel Hirschman and Isaac Ariail Reed 5 Ratio  via Machina: Three Standards of Mechanistic Explanation in Sociology133 Natalie B. Aviles and Isaac Ariail Reed

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6 Meaning  and Modularity: The Multivalence of “Mechanism” in Sociological Explanation157 Carly R. Knight and Isaac Ariail Reed Part III Interpretive Reconceptualization 193 7 What  Is Interpretive Explanation in Sociohistorical Analysis?195 8 Power:  Relational, Discursive, and Performative Dimensions223 Index261

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Positivist epistemology Ethnographic empiricism Postmodern epistemology/postcolonial theory Meaningful theory/meaningful action Directed acyclic graph representing a mechanism that explains the causal pathways from D to Y. Directly adapted from Morgan and Winship (2015: 332) Hedström and Ylikoski’s typology of social mechanisms based on Coleman’s boat (Coleman 1990). Adapted directly from Hedström and Ylikoski (2010: 59)

27 32 35 43 139 142

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Sociology as a Human Science

1   Debating Conceptual Method in the Humanities and Social Sciences The scholar of social theory; the philosopher of social science; the graduate student in sociology training in method but becoming increasingly aware of methodology and epistemology; the interpreter of literature articulating a new political sociology to better render the relation between text and context—I ask these persons and others like them, to whom this book is addressed, to consider the way in which the humanities and social sciences are often narrated (or have their narratives unwound) via references to struggles, debates, controversies, and (metaphorical) wars: the “science wars” (Ross 1996; Hernstein-Smith 2006); the emergence of a position “against theory” in literary criticism and the intense controversies over deconstruction (Mitchell 1985; Eco 1992); the question of whether the post in postmodern is the post in postcolonial (Appiah 1991); “perestroika!” in the discipline of (American) political science (Monroe 2005); and so on. These struggles over knowledge, its meaning and purpose, I would hazard, have an outsized importance, particularly in an age of uncertainty. When I was in graduate school, training in sociology, I was acutely aware of certain collections that staged struggles like these: The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby (and known colloquially as “Adorno versus Popper”) (1976); Rationality © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Ariail Reed, Sociology as a Human Science, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18357-7_1

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and Relativism, edited by Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (1982); Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E.  Marcus (1986); Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, by Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser (1995); and the intense debate, among historical sociologists, concerning historical method, theories of action, rationality, and social scientific explanation that occurred in the American Journal of Sociology in 1998 (Volume 104, issue 3). This is an idiosyncratic set, to be sure, particular to my own education. But I would ask my reader if they might have their own list, and thus to consider if the very idea of research, in their chosen area of study, is inflected in part by these sorts of struggles. The disputes also have long histories, and they cite each other explicitly or implicitly. Scholars writing about the meaning, purpose, and warrant for knowledge in the social sciences and the humanities reach back to the Methodenstreit over economics (“Austrian” versus “Historical”) of the 1880s in the German-speaking universities (see discussion in Loader 2012); they find inspiration in W.E.B. Du Bois’s fierce rejection of Herbert Spencer’s (mis)appropriation of Darwin1; and they query the connection between C.S. Peirce’s account of knowledge and the debate between Walter Lippman and John Dewey (Reed et al. 2022). My sense is that it is in such intellectual struggles and citations of previous struggles that we see the spirit of the human sciences, a phrase that encapsulates, in an admittedly indirect way, the particular angle I try to take on sociological knowledge in this book. The notion of the human sciences emerged in the nineteenth century as a counterpoint to and reflection upon certain growing tendencies toward specialization in European universities. The stunning achievements and technological applications of certain formats of natural science were understood to require a response—what, in the study of human beings, constituted reason, given that the triumph of techne was a rather reductive approach to the human? This skepticism about the rush to mechanize all arenas of life and knowledge, nourished in European romanticism, found expression in 1  In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois wrote, “Herbert Spencer finished his ten volumes of synthetic philosophy in 1896. The biological analogy, the vast generalizations, were striking, but actual scientific accomplishments lagged. For me an opportunity seemed to present itself … turning my gaze from fruitless word-twisting and facing the facts of my own situation and racial world, I determined to put science into sociology through a study of the conditions and problems of my own group” (Du Bois 2014: 26). This passage, alongside others, is discussed at length in Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver (1976).

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the uneasy synthesis of philosophy with what we now recognize as the inchoate social scientific disciplines. Philosophical work on the social sciences put sociology, economics, political science, and anthropology in relation to debates about interpreting texts and the import of historical consciousness. From this came les sciences humaines, the moral sciences, and die Geisteswissenschaften. The human sciences were then, and are now, a counterbalance to the desire to disavow philosophical reflection, or profane such reflection as mere speculation, in the pursuit of positive science and disciplinarity (see discussion in the opening pages of Habermas 1971). However, the phrase represents more than dissent from the anti-intellectualism of the overspecialized. For, the notion of the human sciences emphasizes the shared concerns of what became, in the twentieth century, the humanities and the social sciences: concern with the problem of understanding other human beings, in other times and places; concern with the limitations of scientific ambition created by human plurality and the historicity of social order, political action, and aesthetic and moral evaluation; and concern to retain the possibility that systematicity in research and rigor in thinking may be expanded in their definition beyond the fetishism of method or the imitation of the experimental physical sciences. Crucially, then, work on the human sciences rejects the partition of social research into scientific and critical camps. The result is a big tent, which takes into its space of consideration a variety of more dense ties and transfers between knowledge-­ projects of various scales. The questions asked underneath a big tent, and with broad understanding, need not be imprecise. Thinking about the human sciences often takes the form of broad questions specified via the study of quite particular intellectual problems. For example, one might ask whether there is such a thing as a normative case study in sociology (Thacher 2006), or what can be learned about the relationship between narrative and truth by studying psychoanalytic practice (Roth 1991), or about the implications of occupational status and mobility research for the philosophy of explanation (Khalifa 2004). Sociology as a Human Science is my own attempt to engage in these dialogues and disputes.

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2  The Human Sciences Between Minimal and Maximal Interpretation It is easy enough to insist on a sociology grounded in understanding, an interpretive sociology. There are many varieties of interpretive sociology, and many exemplary texts and works on interpretive method. They start with consciousness, with meaning, with signification, with interaction, and/or with intersubjectivity. It is perhaps less immediately obvious how to think about explanation in an interpretive way, and less clear how one might picture theory—or, barring the use of that term, the use of abstract concepts—given the basic set of interpretive commitments that, in sociology, is quickly called up by reference to “qualitative methods” (and especially ethnography and in-depth interviewing). There are, to be sure, excellent efforts in this direction. Most famously for sociology, Herbert Blumer (1954) proposed a distinction between definitive and sensitizing concepts, which has been repeatedly reinterpreted and subject to various twists and turns. There is also a longstanding, if more inchoate, sense in sociology that the Duhem-Quine thesis, and Thomas Kuhn’s notion that paradigm shifts are underdetermined by data, somehow apply especially strongly to sociology, and thus provide a certain philosophical warrant to the survival of multiple theoretical interpretations of a given phenomenon (Ritzer 1975). The use of these ideas in sociology (i.e., sensitizing concepts, paradigms, the underdetermination of theory by data) varies widely in the precision with which they are applied, and remains haunted and inflected by the more scientistic formulations that they supposedly reject. They often veer toward the blackmail of relativism: either one has a soft relativist epistemology, where theoretical interpretations run wild, or one resorts, at the end of the day, to the facts, which are taken, implicitly or explicitly, to lack “constructed-ness.” In contrast to this, we can use the distinction between minimal and maximal interpretation (Reed 2011: 22–31), the spectrum running between them, and the specific way in which maximal interpretations are pictured as “using” theory to address this dilemma. The spectrum from minimal to maximal recognizes that the facts, too, are interpreted, but that they are done so with less abstraction, and can— for certain communities of inquiries at certain times—achieve a certain solidity that admits of debate about how best to (maximally) interpret them. The phrase from the sociological lexicon that perhaps best captures

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minimal interpretation is Robert K.  Merton’s (1987) “establishing the phenomenon.” As a starting point, consider the following examples of knowledge claims in social research: • the calculation of change in poverty rates in a given setting over time; • variation in the popularity of different genres of music; • the sequence of “happenings” that make up an event of interest; • a set of outcomes (e.g., legal policies) that vary across polities; • a well-known massive social transformation (e.g., creation of the American welfare state via the New Deal); All of these phenomena, as they come to a community of inquiry through the text of various studies, are subject to interpretive dispute as phenomena. There can be a dispute about whether one can say there was a coherent phenomenon called “the French Revolution.” Such dispute is vital, and yet also minimal in the sense that a certain quasi-consensus can be achieved about such phenomena across scholars who differ deeply in their causal explanations of these phenomena, their placement of these phenomena in a larger context, and their drawing of associations between a given phenomenon and other phenomena. Why is this? At the minimal end of the minimal-maximal spectrum of interpretation, there is a tendency to seek the resolution of dispute via indexical signification. That is, the politics of knowledge is a politics of reference. Normativity, the broad sweep of history, philosophical reconceptualization, and high theory move to the background, and the foreground is a matter of what can be shown to signify what is in the world. This is both why, sometimes, minimal interpretations can feel secure, and why just such secure interpretations call forth something that is hors texte to the game of referential signifiers. Minimal interpretations, precisely as they become established facts, begin to demand depth, causality, theoretical structure, etc. That is, they demand further interpretation. Referential signification is never excised from even the most maximal interpretation. But as one begins to move up the spectrum toward maximal interpretation, the use of abstract terms becomes more frequent, and—crucially—the connotative meanings of such signifiers draw sustenance from their relations to other abstract signifiers. Just a bit up the spectrum from minimal, puzzles start to develop, puzzles that will bequeath why-questions. In the human sciences, the sources of these puzzles are never locked inside a paradigm or discipline. Rather, they can come from common sense and everyday surprise or pain (e.g., about the

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frequency of mass shootings and rates of gun ownership in the USA); from broader cultural concerns and questions (about changes in work culture and hours worked in standard middle-class occupations); or, crucially, from the people who are being studied. Puzzles can also, however, come from that fraught and problematic object of contemplation, “the literature” which, in its very constitution as a space of debate, a space of conflicting voices, thematizes the fraught nature of theory in the human sciences. Already in “the literature,” terms of art are introduced and debated, compared to other terms, given new connotations by new studies, and so on. The reference for such terms remains action in some sense of the term—maximal interpretations are never pure theory, they remain grounded in evidence, data, and thus reference. However, as terms of art are introduced, the world of theory is brought to bear on the interpretation being conducted. And the world of theory in the human sciences— social theory, political theory, literary theory, etc.—is a notoriously relational world of meaning, as is perhaps signified both by the very phrase that one can use theory and by the fraught way in which, despite tremendous efforts to quash it, theoretical development in these fields appears to still have a Talmudic element. Theorization functions, in part, via an interpretation of, and argument with, previous works—sometimes over minutiae of connotation, application, and enumeration of points—and thus constitutes itself via traditions, even if said traditions are not traditional in a political sense (e.g., “the Black radical tradition”). Thus, it is theory that moves an interpretation from minimal to maximal. Maximal interpretations are not, however, themselves “theory”— they use theoretical discourse, incorporating abstract concepts and fusing them with the materials of a minimal interpretation to generate knowledge claims that seek depth of insight. In so doing, two things happen at the same moment: Points of established fact are subject to recontextualization, explanation, and judgment; at the same time the castles in the sky of theory, the theoretical imagination, are infused with reality; there is a bringing of theory to earth, and thus, into a space of concrete dispute. If a certain set of happenings in and around the storming of the Bastille is colligated into an account of a stage of the French Revolution, this is a minimal interpretation; if those events are subject to a certain theoretical apparatus of abstract and relationally meaningful terms so that a Marxist explanation of the French Revolution begins to emerge, this is a maximal interpretation. Crucially, the Marxist explanation of the French Revolution, as a maximal interpretation, may fall out of favor, may  be rendered less

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likely and less convincing, may be found wanting in terms the evidence that it demands, or may come to be viewed in the community of inquiry as an overinterpretation. All of this can happen, without “disproving Marxist theory,” as if Marxist theory is like a hypothesis in experimental physics. The most telling explanation of the difference between minimal and maximal interpretation I have heard, part analogy and part literal accounting, was given by Johans Sandvin in a seminar in Bodo, Norway, dedicated to these issues in sociological epistemology. (Errors in the following rendering are my own.) Imagine a setting where children are playing; the identification of the actions one observes as “play” already is an interpretation; it raises issues; one can subject the notion that the children are playing to dispute. Perhaps they are playing at playing, pretending to play? Or is this even play at all? One may even ask what, exactly, makes the recognition that play is taking place possible. (This might be one way to understand what Peter Winch (2015) is up to in his classic text, The Idea of Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy.) And yet, one can also see that the establishment that “play is taking place” is in some sense a minimal, referential interpretation; it can be recorded, and it is likely to elicit agreement and understanding from other interpreters on the scene. One could stay near to the end of the minimal spectrum, and parse out a few different types of play, proposing some very close to the ground types by observing many such play sessions (competitive versus non-competitive, perhaps). But as one incorporates theories—of socialization into gender roles, of the constitution of the line between the status of “child” and that of “adult,” of the complex relationship between public and private construed by societies in which the family is understood in a certain way, etc.—one is on the road to maximal interpretation. One moves from “those children are playing,” to “those children are playing a competitive game,” to “those children are enacting masculinity and femininity, as understood in Norwegian culture, in a competitive game,” to “those children are enacting masculinity and femininity, as understood in Norwegian culture, in a competitive game, and thereby performatively constituting themselves as gendered subjects.” That these moves up the spectrum toward maximal interpretation are each taken with a certain amount of empirical warrant is clear enough (otherwise our research papers would be rather short). But in so moving, the interpreter activates differences of interpretation with other ways of interpreting the “play” that is referred to. The language of fact is infused with the language of theory. And what could be clearer than that

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such theoretical infusion is also an invitation to dispute, that, as a leap of interpretation, it invites criticism? This is the intensity and precarity of interpretation in social research.

3  Structuring the Move from Minimal to Maximal Interpretation The process whereby a knowledge claim emerges as a maximal interpretation is, then, the subject of intense reflection. Can it be ordered and rendered in such a way that one can be trained in the fusion of theory and minimal interpretation to make maximal interpretations? Can it be given foundations in certain intransitive truths about the human person, or about the nature of sociality itself? What are the criteria whereby we judge maximal interpretations? For many contributors to debates about social scientific knowledge, especially those who would like to worry less about the humanities, the answer to the second question about foundations has to be affirmative, if we want to hope for an affirmative answer to the first question about order and training, and a coherent answer to the third question about judgment. Outside of such a merger of the social and natural sciences, however, other avenues and disputes  become possible. The chapters in this book are a series of contributions to those disputes, for what Sociology as a Human Science seeks to do is to articulate with both generality and precision the ways in which sociologists have sought to, and can in the future, account for and prescribe the best routes from minimal to maximal interpretation. In other words, each of the chapters of this book attempts, in some way, to intervene in those debates in sociology where theory meets epistemology, and thereby to track the possibilities for, and limitations on, explanation and understanding in social research. The book is parsed into three sections, representing three such spaces of debate, and within each section each chapter takes up a more specific set of issues.  3.1   Metatheoretical Frames The first two substantive chapters of Sociology as a Human Science work toward a reframing of the operation of knowledge creation. What is theory and how does it work? How should we think about the human scientist as herself a subject? How should human scientists address the symmetry

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that appears in every act of knowledge that takes other human subjects, qua subjects, as its objects? Part I of the book, then, engages deeply with, but also departs sharply from, the sophisticated naturalist and realist arguments that have been used to frame the social sciences as sciences. For, it is my argument that drawing the social science-natural science connection cannot achieve the regularity of knowledge production and security of philosophical foundations to which arguments about the possibility of naturalism so often aspire. “Epistemology Contextualized: Social Scientific Knowledge in a Post-­ Positivist Era” takes as its leaping off point the distinction between scientific discovery and the justification of scientific knowledge, a distinction that was a central axis for thinking in twentieth-century philosophies of science. This way of imagining the process of scientific research articulates with sociology in both explicit and implicit ways, not least because a kind of pragmatic Popperism—of launching certain hypotheses and then trying to falsify them—still works in a soft-regulative way in the culture of social scientists. This basic division between discovery and justification, however, proves quite insufficient for understanding the explosion of metatheoretical proposals that accompanied post-positivism. Indeed, the distinction itself, in so far as it is even partially descriptive of sociological practice, is subsumed inside what I call the context of investigation, which is to say the discourse and social context of the investigator herself. This is counterposed to the context of explanation, which is to say the human context within which the phenomenon under study takes place. The construal of knowledge, then, takes place in the relationship, or communication, that takes place between the context of investigation and the context of explanation. This framing of the problem allows a new understanding of positivism, grounded theory, postmodern epistemology (in relationship to certain interventions in postcolonial theory), and finally, meaning-­centered (cultural) sociology. Following upon this contextualization of epistemology, “Justifying Sociological Knowledge: From Realism to Interpretation” takes aim at the realist framing of the process of connecting the context of investigation to the context of explanation and thereby, providing foundation and order to the use of theory in the transition from minimal to maximal interpretations. Here, the ascription of strong referential power to the abstract terms of social theory is at issue. Realism represents a highly sophisticated post-­ positivist rendering of social science and, in particular, a careful schematic for the use of theory in building depth-causal explanations. As an epistemological formation or epistemic mode, realism reaches far beyond the

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philosophy of social science in any narrow sense of that term; for this reason, it has to be traced not only through metatheoretical dialogue but also actual sociological knowledge claims made in the realist mode. Doing so results in a distinction between strict realism and reflexive realism. By comprehending this split, the limitations of realism can be revealed, opening onto a more interpretive understanding of sociological knowledge. 3.2   Mechanisms in Dispute The next three chapters of the book, each of them written with a different coauthor, bring the problems of science and scientism—and for that matter, the very idea that there is an easy relationship between “philosophy” and “social science”—into closer focus. The goal here is twofold. On the one hand, I recognize the core insights generated by interest in and discussions of social mechanisms. These discussions, which for many were kicked off by the publication of Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory edited by Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg (1998), have become a central forum for theory-work in sociology. On the other hand, I interpret the fraught and contentious nature of the mechanisms conversation in the social sciences to be the result of a certain dislocation between the promise of a mechanistic sociology and its actual intellectual torque. Each of the chapters in this section attempts to deal with this gap in a different way. Chapter 4, written with Daniel Hirschman as first author, draws out a distinction from Interpretation and Social Knowledge (Reed 2011) between forcing and forming causes, and inquires after “formation stories” as a format of explanation and interpretation in social research. Formation stories, about the making or formation of the social entities and social kinds that do the pushing and pulling in more standard sociological causal explanations, are often dismissed as non-causal. But a close examination reveals the contrary; the issue is not with the study of formation, but rather the ill fit between formation stories and certain careful, but narrow, ways of rendering causality in sociology. Thus, “Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology” inaugurates an argument for causal pluralism in social research that carries through the next two chapters. Chapter 4 also works carefully with Actor-Network Theory, a discourse notoriously missing from Interpretation and Social Knowledge. Chapter 5, written with Natalie B. Aviles as first author, inquires after “mechanism” as a grounding account of explanation in social science. We

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look closely at what the standard for achieving mechanistic explanation is, conducting an immanent critique of social scientific discourse. We find incommensurability between standards—a hidden pluralism masked by the term “mechanism.” Furthermore, at the heart of one of the most ambitious moves in the last twenty years of theoretical sociology—to ground sociological science in the discovery of “mechanisms”—we find something surprising: metaphor. Delving into Paul Ricoeur’s literary theory of metaphor, we uncover how—for a certain set of sociologists at least—the term “mechanism” is useful precisely for its connotations and literary flair, as it allows a certain kind of interpretive discernment. Here, too, causal pluralism looms. Drawing from Nancy Cartwright’s philosophy of science, we argue against mechanistic fundamentalism and for the dappled world as the guiding image for causal pluralism in social research. Chapter 6, written with Carly R.  Knight as first author, extends this argument for causal pluralism further, and takes on one of the most difficult semantic issues in the pursuit of mechanistic sociology—that of modularity in causal models as a primary feature of mechanistic explanation, on the one hand, and the apparent utility of mechanistic accounts to cultural sociologists concerned with the interpretation of meaning, on the other. Can these actually go together? Our answer is no. The chapter engages, in the same frame with the same questions, both pragmatist philosophy of science and semiotics and the notion of depth in explanation operative in sociological explanations that seek to carve the causal world at its joints and depend upon an interventionist philosophy of causality. The result is (another) discovered incommensurability—this time between the most basic premises of how meaning works relationally (premises shared across a wide variety of otherwise theoretically distinct cultural sociologies) and the modularity requirement for counterfactual causal inference in complex causal systems. As we play out the implications of this incommensurability—including various ways around the problem—the need for causal pluralism in sociological analysis becomes urgent and clear. Overall, as stated at the beginning of Chap. 6, the three chapters in Part II of this book were written amidst the stunning proliferation, not only of theories of social mechanisms but of “mechanism-talk” at research conferences and dissertation defenses in (American) sociology. In so far as this was not just talk that substituted the word “mechanism” for the word “cause” (and I believe it was very much not just this), the advent of serious mechanistic thinking in sociology deserves intense scrutiny, which these interventions into the mechanism debates in sociology seek to provide.

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3.3   Toward an Interpretive Reconceptualization The conclusion that may be drawn (by a sympathetic reader) from the first two parts of this book is that the commitment to retaining a strong connection between our working conceptions of sociology and our (changing) images of the natural sciences runs into trouble, both at the level of the framing philosophies of realism and positivism (Part I) and at the more fine-grained level of coming to a clear and workable understanding of social mechanisms (Part II). This raises the issue of how one might imagine sociology as a human science instead, and, in particular, how one would imagine a sociology that renders the interpretation of meaning non-­ supervenient upon those entities imagined (fantasized?) by sociologists to match the “hard” entities of the natural sciences. That is, if we grasp that both minimal interpretations and maximal interpretations involve an encounter between two meaningful contexts—that of the investigator and that of the investigated—and we accept that this encounter follows the broad outlines of moving “up the spectrum” from minimal to maximal interpretation, then how should we reconceptualize certain fundamental aspects of sociology? How should the interpretive epistemic mode (Reed 2011) work? “What Is Interpretive Explanation in Sociohistorical Analysis?” asks how to think about explanation in a distinctly interpretive way, en route to a hermeneutic sociology. It does this via two essential tools. First, Aristotle’s four-fold account of causality is translated and reinterpreted for the twenty-first-century human sciences. Thereby, a new starting point for thinking about “cause”—one connected to a philosophy that also articulates a hermeneutics—is established. This schema is arrived at via, and deployed upon, one of the most vexed questions in historical sociology over the last fifty years, namely how to interpret, account for, explain, and contextualize the French Revolution. Here the historiography is voluminous; it is also—significantly for political and historical sociology—one of the most vibrant sites in scholarship for thinking carefully and deeply about the role of culture, sense-making, and significance in the production of massive social transformation. In the study of the French Revolution one finds a site of scholarly struggle and controversy that encapsulates why the concept of the human sciences is of significance for the development of more specific disciplines (e.g. sociology, political science, history) and their methods. 

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The final chapter of Sociology as a Human Science, on power, takes a sociological concept, and reinterprets it in terms of the kind of causal pluralism that animates the rest of this book. For a hermeneutic sociology to flourish, it must have a theory and history of power. Furthermore, that an epistemology for sociology in which interpretation meets causal explanation would take up the question of power is not an accident, for the conceptual connection between power and causality is a longstanding, and much debated, concern. Here I take inspiration from, and attempt to provide the beginning of a counterpoint to, a comment written by Thomas Hobbes, that “the power of the agent, and the efficient cause are the same thing” (1839: 127). Myriad possible meanings appear to be condensed in this line, particularly since Hobbes goes on to differentiate the word “cause” as referring to the past and “power” as referring to the future.2 One way to read it is as suggesting that power, even domination, is best understood as a way to “move and shake the world,” thus that there is a significant overlap (if not a strict identity) between power and causality. This meaning was taken up and clarified in several now-classic theorizations of power from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It was perhaps most succinctly rephrased by Gianfranco Poggi (2001: 8), who wrote that social power “should be thought of as the ability to make a difference to the making of differences; were it not a poor pun, one might say that social power is power to the power of two.” At the same time, Hobbes’s reduction of power to efficient cause adumbrates a certain scientism in the spirit of sociology from the nineteenth century to the present; Aristotle’s four causes appear to be reduced to the (supposedly) most important, most effectual, most powerful. “Power: Relational, Discursive, and Performative Dimensions” seeks, in contrast to this, to 2  The full paragraph in which it appears runs as follows: “Correspondent to cause and effect, are POWER and ACT; nay, those and these are the same things; though, for divers considerations, they have divers names. For whensoever any agent has all those accidents which are necessarily requisite for the production of some effect in the patient, then we say that agent has power to produce that effect, if it be applied to a patient. But, as I have shewn in the precedent chapter, those accidents constitute the efficient cause; and therefore the same accidents, which constitute the efficient cause, constitute also the power of ther agent. Wherefore the power of the agent and the efficient cause are the same thing. But they are considered with this difference, that cause is so called in respect of the effect already produced, and power in respect of the same effect to the produced hereafter; so that cause respects the past, power the future time. Also, the power of the agent is thast which is commonly called active power” (Hobbes 1839: 127–128).

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open up the power-causality conversation via a serious consideration of theories of power in the light of epistemologies of social causality and vice versa.

4   Conclusion If underneath standards for mechanisms we find metaphor, if the most believable realisms are the least strict, if the possibility of explanation appears as a subspecies of understanding, then the sociologist qua human scientist is thrown back on the fundamental problems of interpretation as themselves the problems of social analysis. This still admits of a certain order and empirical rigor, articulated in different stages of the production of sociological knowledge. For, the criteria for evaluating minimal interpretations are, in essence, indexical or referential. To establish a phenomenon clearly and concretely is indeed an act of intellectual construction, but of a specific kind, such that it is colloquially referred to as a reconstruction (especially in historical sociology, where the prefix “re-” doubles as a signifier of pastness). In contrast, theory qua theory, whose very existence is always in some kind of crisis in the human sciences, is repeatedly evaluated for conceptual coherence, and subjected to criteria that are in some deep way very textual (“Talmudic”). Theory is taken up and criticized for its worldview and normative commitments, for the perceived future fecundity of its analytical concepts. The evaluation of theory, which frequently features both conceptual genealogy and prospective evaluation of research utility, is relational and reading-centered. We ask if someone has a good reading of Karl Marx on commodity fetishism, or if a conceptual model fits together, makes sense, and works on its own terms. Finally, in contrast to both our modes of evaluating minimal interpretations and theory, maximal interpretations are evaluated as either underinterpreted or over-­interpreted. They are under-interpreted when there is too much empirical material left over, when the possibilities for filtering and integrating interviews and historical evidence are left unattended to, when questions that are clearly present are not articulated, and when the efforts to link aspects of the minimal interpretation together fail. They are overinterpreted when the coherence they display owes too much to the theoretical terms used, when the fusion of theory and minimal interpretation appears not as fusion but as top-down imposition. All three of these formats of evaluation—of minimal interpretation, of theory, and of maximal interpretation, require judgment, rather than a decision-rule. But to reach such a position on the human sciences, which appears to us both as a flash of possibility and as a distant beacon, requires confronting, with all due care, the most robust and self-aware programs for

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organizing the transition from minimal to maximal interpretations that arrive to us today in reflections on social scientific practice. By engaging these closely, the argument for a hermeneutic sociology becomes less of a reaction formation and more of a sharp possibility.

References Adorno, Theodor, et  al. 1976. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. Translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby. London: Heinemann. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1991. Is the Post-in Postmodernism the Post-in Postcolonial? Critical Inquiry 17 (2): 336–357. Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser. 1995. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. With an Introduction by Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge. Blumer, Herbert. 1954. What Is Wrong with Social Theory? American Sociological Review 19 (1): 3–10. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Du Bois, W.E.B. 2014. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. Introduction by Kwame Anthony Appiah. New  York: Oxford University Press. Eco, Umberto. 1992. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Edited by Stefan Collini with Contributions by Jonathan Culler, Richard Rorty, and Christine Brooke-Rose. New York: Cambridge University Press. Green, Dan S., and Edwin D.  Driver. 1976. W.E.B.  Du Bois: A Case in the Sociology of Sociological Negation. Phylon 37 (4): 308–333. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press. Hedström, Peter, and Richard Swedberg. 1998. Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hernstein-Smith, Barbara. 2006. Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hobbes, Thomas. 1839. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Vol. 1. Edited by Sir William Molesworth. London: John Bohn. Hollis, Martin, and Steven Lukes, eds. 1982. Rationality and Relativism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Khalifa, Kareem. 2004. Erotetic Contextualism, Data-Generating Procedures, and Sociological Explanations of Social Mobility. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34 (1): 38–54. Loader, Colin. 2012. Alfred Weber and the Crisis of Culture, 1890–1933. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Merton, Robert K. 1987. Three Fragments from a Sociologist’s Notebooks: Establishing the Phenomenon, Specified Ignorance, and Strategic Research Materials. Annual Review of Sociology 13: 1–23. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1985. Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Monroe, Kristen Renwick, ed. 2005. Perestroika!: The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science. New Haven: Yale University Press. Poggi, Gianfranco. 2001. Forms of Power. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Reed, Isaac Ariail. 2011. Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reed, Isaac Ariail, Neil Gross, and Christopher Winship. 2022. Pragmatist Sociology: Histories and Possibilities. In The New Pragmatist Sociology: Inquiry, Agency, Democracy, ed. Neil Gross, Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship, 3–32. New York: Columbia University Press. Ritzer, George. 1975. Sociology: A Multiple Paradigm Science. The American Sociologist 10 (3): 156–167. Ross, Andrew, ed. 1996. Science Wars. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Roth, Paul A. 1991. Truth in Interpretation: The Case of Psychoanalysis. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 21 (2): 175–195. Thacher, David. 2006. The Normative Case Study. American Journal of Sociology 111 (6): 1631–1676. Winch, Peter. 2015. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. Routledge.

PART I

Metatheoretical Frames

CHAPTER 2

Epistemology Contextualized: Social Scientific Knowledge in a Post-Positivist Era

1   The Context of Investigation and the Context of Explanation In 1938, the empiricist philosopher Hans Reichenbach made a distinction, in his text Experience and Prediction, between the “context of discovery” and the “context of justification” (Reichenbach 1938). It was designed to differentiate between the variety of subjective and psychological processes that the working natural scientist went through to produce his discoveries and theories, and the strict logical arguments and observational techniques by which his theories could be verified. Around the same time, Karl Popper was working with the same distinction, which played a crucial role in framing his agenda-setting work, Logik der Forschung (Popper 2002). For Popper, the distinction neatly set the problems of the history and psychology of science apart from the problems of the philosophy of science proper: the initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me to neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it … [it] may be of great interest to empirical psychology; but it is irrelevant to the logical analysis of scientific knowledge … This latter is … concerned with … questions of the following kind. Can a statement be justified? And if so how? Is it testable? Is it logically dependent on certain other statements? Or does it perhaps contradict them? (Popper 2002: 7)

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Popper had a more expanded vision of the scientific process than the strict Vienna positivists; he thought that good scientific theories may indeed begin as metaphysical hunches, that scientific laws “cannot be logically reduced to elementary statements of experience,” and thus that processes of inductive generalization from observational experiences could not be used to demarcate science from other forms of inquiry (Popper 2002: 13). However, he did think that scientific theories could be tested, by reasoning deductively from theories to observation statements. He writes that while “scientific theories are never fully justifiable or verifiable, they are nevertheless testable. I shall therefore say that the objectivity of scientific statements lies in the fact that they can be inter-subjectively tested” (Popper 2002: 22, emphasis in original). For Popper, the essential work was to derive from scientific laws and theories the statements that could be subjected to observation, and possible falsification. This not only demarcated real science from the (for him) pseudo-sciences of psychoanalysis and Marxism, but it also set up the strictly demarcated area of the context of justification as that aspect of scientific practice that could be subjected to the universalist rigors of philosophical analysis. Like many other ideas, the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification was attacked, and in many intellectual circles discredited, in the 1960s and 1970s. This distinction was the substantive theoretical idea around which the debate concerning the relationship between the fields of psychology, history, and sociology of science and the philosophy of science raged (Kordig 1978; Siegel 1980; Kantorovich 1988). Of the attacks, the most notorious was that of Thomas Kuhn, whose work has been subject to interpretive controversy, but whose point concerning this distinction was quite clear. Kuhn argued that the process or context of justification in natural science also had social, psychological, and historical aspects. This is to say that the “foundations” of intersubjective, testable truth in science could not be reduced to eternal logic and irrefutable observation. These foundations, according to which truth was established, might change over time, might involve social pressure and social learning, and might even involve something akin to a “worldview” held by particular scientists (Kuhn 1996: 8–9, 111–135). Kuhn thus repositioned the whole problem of knowledge, in the sense that he disputed the autonomy of rationality and testability from the flawed social formations and psychological tendencies of scientists.

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Yet if the Kuhnian revolution collapsed the context of justification into the context of discovery, and thus created the space for the emergence of the strong program in the sociology of science, there was another unstated assumption to Popper’s philosophy that was equally problematic. In separating the pursuit of truth from pseudo-science, Popper took the (natural) reality that scientists were studying as unproblematic, and remained comfortable with the idea that scientific theories did their best to directly reference the eternal workings of the natural world. This makes things particularly difficult for thinking in a Popperian way about sociological knowledge (though Popper himself tried, especially in The Poverty of Historicism). For, whatever the “concept of nature” can or cannot do for philosophers of science or working natural scientists (Whitehead 2004), no agreement on the unitary nature of social reality can be claimed for social science. Whether, and in what way, societies, collectivities, groups, classes, culture, people, and so on exist is itself an issue which is always decided, simultaneously, via investigation of the world and presuppositions about it (Hall 1999; Alexander 1982). This is why the separation of the philosophy of social science from the substantive theoretical disputes of sociology is distorting: The disputations about the nature of social reality are written into even the most “empirical” knowledge claims (Alexander 1982; see also Selg 2013). How, then, can we even start to think about sociological knowledge in a clear way? This is the problem of post-positivism that has haunted sociology, and in particular social theory, since the 1960s. Sociologists are consistently required to consider the context of their and others’ knowledge production—the social location of the researcher, this or that theory which she applies, etc. And they are repeatedly made aware of what has been called the “multi-paradigmatic” nature of their discipline, which is to say that their disputes involve ideas about the very nature of the sociological object of study, which structure conceptually the kinds of research questions they ask in the first place, the methods they use to obtain data to answer these questions, and—if explanation is their goal—the kinds of entities they reference when constructing an explanation of a social phenomenon or set of social actions. To thematize these issues and their possible interrelation, and thus get a handle on the problems of the philosophy of social science in a post-­ positivist era, I would like to appropriate and transform the language of Reichenbach and Popper, and draw a distinction between the context of investigation and the context of explanation. The context of investigation

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refers to the social and intellectual context of the sociologist herself. The context of explanation refers to the reality that she wishes to investigate, and in particular, the social actions1 she wishes to explain and the pieces or aspects of those actions’ surrounding context that she uses to explain them. The context of investigation would include both of Reichenbach’s contexts (of discovery and justification); the context of explanation is invoked, in one way or another, by any empirically driven truth claim in sociological research. Clifford Geertz, with reference to the problems of anthropological writing and ethnography, called these two contexts “being here” (the context of investigation) and “being there” (the context of explanation) (Geertz 1988). I choose the less ontological language of context because of the frequent references to social and intellectual context in discussions of social theory, and because in many types of social and historical investigations, though the investigator wants to say something about “there,” she does not actually “go there” to do so. Any account of sociological knowledge will develop an account of the relationship between these contexts, usually in a simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive manner. And it is worth noting that sociological investigation possesses a symmetry foreign to natural science—both its context of investigation and its context of explanation are not only structured socially but also feature the (variably socialized) subjectivities of human beings within them.2 For those invested in the unity of the human 1  I am aware that depicting what is to be explained or interpreted as “social actions” already brings certain understandings of what sociology is into play, understandings that carry their own history and exist in tension-full arguments with other accounts of “the social” or “human action.” (This is a good example of why it is so alienating to try to conduct the philosophy of social science antiseptically from sociological theory, political theory, etc.) However, there is some warrant for the use of the term in the way in which it has operated rather capaciously, while retaining a certain sociological focus. While the term has its origins, for many working sociologists, in the opening pages of Max Weber’s Economy and Society, its use significantly exceeds these origins, particularly via the interpretation and reinterpretation of American pragmatism (Martin 2011; Gross et al. 2022). 2  There are a variety of ways in which one may argue plausibly that the “natural” in “natural science” is structured socially, the two most common being that the very line between culture and nature is itself a sociocultural creation specific to each sociohistorical formation, and that the construal of “nature” is itself an instantiation of a certain, socially operative, understanding of technology, materiality, etc.—technology as society made durable (Latour 1990). Nonetheless, I maintain that humans talk back to their researchers differently than scallops do, and furthermore there is a symmetry of investigator and investigated that obtains in the human sciences that is grounded in the equality of human beings, and thus quite important to consider.

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and natural sciences, and in the claims of both to objectivity, this symmetry poses a problem, because it upsets the comfortable relationship between researcher as subject and nature as object. For those inclined to skepticism, this same symmetry is the origin of what Clifford Geertz called “Mannheim’s Paradox,” namely, the realization (or perhaps it was only an admission) that sociopolitical thought does not grow out of disembodied reflection but ‘is always bound up with the existing life situation of the thinker’ seemed to taint such thought with the vulgar struggle for advantage that it had professed to rise above. (Geertz 2000b: 194)

This poses a “paradox” in social science3 because of the symmetry between the context of investigation and the context of explanation. The investigator wants to investigate the social object in the context of explanation. But because the investigator is herself a social being, the very forces that she claims to investigate might, in the context of the investigation, influence her own social action—including what she thinks and writes. Thus the relationship between researcher and object is “influenced by,” “intervened in,” or “structured by” the social context of the investigator. Hence, the social nature of sociological knowledge casts doubts upon its veracity, its verisimilitude to the context of explanation. The perfect relationship between researcher-subject and researched-object is upset by the fact that the researcher’s theories of society and social action could very well be applied to herself. Especially if the researcher is inclined to disbelieve her subjects or to explain their actions by forces beyond their 3  Mannheim excluded mathematics and the “exact sciences” from the purview of his sociology of knowledge, but David Bloor will not even grant this much. His “symmetry principle,” central to the strong program in the sociology of science, insists that true scientific statements must be subjected to the same regime of explanation by social factors as false statements (Bloor 1976). In other words, there can be no “relying on the object” to explain why scientists got it right. The emergence and triumph of the theory of oxygen have to be explained with the same social-structural mechanisms as the emergence, momentary triumph, and quick decline of the theory of phlogiston. This is fair enough, as far as it goes, which is to say, empirically. True scientific statements have to go through the processes attendant to science as a social organization, as do false ones—assuming we can tell the difference in the first place. Yet as James Bohman has noticed, the irony is the sociology of science has an objectivist understanding of the effects of social structure on action (1991). This produces the strange predisposition to be naturalist about social life, and constructionist about scientific knowledge of nature, a position explicitly embraced by Steve Fuller (1993).

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control, a certain epistemic hypocrisy looms—why should we believe her, when her actions (i.e., her sociological writings) might be better explained by forces beyond her control rather than her own ability to discover the truth? And so on. The infinite regress or sheer circularity implied here has troubled social theory for some time and has had some effect on social research. But it is perhaps best to take “Mannheim’s Paradox” as a set of questions to be addressed about social research, rather than as a condemnation of its very possibility. Namely, given that a simple divide between animate humans and inanimate nature cannot be maintained, what is the relationship between the context of investigation and the context of explanation implied by the possibility of successful social research and the construction of explanations in social science? What precise aspect(s) of the context of investigation influence the investigator, and in what ways? Do her political interests influence her choice of project, enhance or incapacitate her ability to construct correct explanations and her tendency to construct and narrate the facts in a certain way? Does her theoretical training in this or that school “laden” her observations, and is there any other choice? In other words, the metatheoretical positions and epistemic perspectives on social research implicitly or explicitly answer the question: What is the relationship between the context of investigation and the context of explanation in social research? And they all propose some solution, more or less well articulated, to Mannheim’s Paradox. Furthermore, if we think about argumentation about the production of social scientific knowledge in these terms, what is at stake in “post-positivism” becomes much clearer.

2  Epistemic Perspectives: Positivism and Its Discontents It is my contention that it is in the relation of the context of investigation to the context of explanation that the fundamental commitments of any epistemological position are to be found. Let us, then, consider positivism, attacks on positivism, and two “post-positivist” positions—grounded theory and postmodern anthropology—from this point of view. The accounts developed of these perspectives here will not be complete reconstructions; rather they are meant to be partial yet revealing about what is really going on in discussions of social science epistemology.

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2.1   Unity Through Reduction: Positivism Positivism suggests a specific way to connect the context of investigation and the context of explanation: the careful reduction of both to those operations of knowledge that can be intersubjectively agreed upon through strict logic and sensory observation. This is what, for positivism, can guarantee the reliability and validity of facts and explanations. Positivism begins with a reduction of the context of investigation to the rules of logic and to a precise language whose meanings are transparent to those in the scientific community who use it. It also proposes that the context of explanation be reduced to that which can be observed—and, to a great degree, that which can be measured. Then, through the process of inductive generalization, covering laws are imported from the context of explanation to the context of investigation. These covering laws can then be brought to bear on a new situation in the context of explanation. It is thus that social knowledge is not only arrived at and used in specific instances but also accumulated—as the process of induction from observed facts, followed by the positing of covering laws, followed by the deduction of explanations and predictions from covering laws and initial conditions, repeats itself. Fundamental here is the constant vigilance and rigor by which statements that fit neither the model of a covering law nor the model of a protocol sentence (which describes an immediate observation) are disqualified as hazy or metaphysical language, or as words lacking referents in the observable world (Hempel 1965; Ayer 1947; Salmon 1989; Turner 2006). Positivism is, at its core, rationality via the exclusion of ambiguity and “deeper meaning.” Positivism’s goal is to accumulate social knowledge by suppressing extra-logical factors that might influence the investigator and by suppressing the extra-observational aspects of the context of explanation that the investigator may be tempted to reference. Even in natural-scientific positivism, covering laws are ultimately taken to be linguistic or mathematical constructs and represent generalizations of observed facts, not underlying structures of nature.4 Likewise, in positivist social science, any underlying, unobservable aspects of social reality are rendered highly suspect as referents for building explanations—if variables cannot be operationalized, if a phenomenon cannot be measured, then how do we know it exists? Finally, the “values” of the investigator—those 4  Of course, in the debates in the philosophy of natural science that have followed the movement toward scientific realism, new, sophisticated, “anti-realist” empiricisms have emerged—see in particular Alston (2002), Monton (2007), and Van Fraassen (2002).

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irritating, supposedly subjective orientations—are also to be suppressed and kept separate from the clean interaction between logic, observation, and generalization from said observation. We can comprehend the positivist position pictorially by visualizing a “middle box” of essential knowledge operations which links together the observable part of the context of explanation with the universally communicable part of the context of investigation, and excludes everything else (Fig. 2.1). In this key “middle box” of knowledge, the conceptual work necessary for the production of truth is reduced to methodology in the strict sense, since the idea is that theoretical knowledge is just the accumulation of verified generalizations. As a result, the central problems for any given discipline are those of measurement. Hence, the conceptual arguments of positivist sociology are strictly delimited to arguments over proper operationalization, various solutions to sub-optimal experimental conditions, etc. That which is not method can be relegated to the philosophy of science as “under-laborer” to the task of science, who clears up the general conceptual issues pertaining to neutral language, human observational experience, and mathematical logic.5 The solution to these philosophical problems will in turn enable the full suppression of the extra-logical issues 5  Much has been made of the term “under-laborer” and the idea of the philosopher merely clearing up conceptual confusion here and there as science marches forward. The term derives from Locke: “in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some other of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-laborer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge” (quoted in Benton (1977)). Positivism has been accused of false modesty in this regard, but more often the critique is that positivism thus robs philosophy of its potential for reflection and criticism. Habermas has been careful to note that the faults of the opposing philosophical tradition—namely Hegel’s claim to absolute knowledge—helped create the conditions in which “positivism could forget that the methodology of the sciences was intertwined with the objective self-formative of the human species and erect the absolutism of pure methodology on the basis of the forgotten and repressed” (Habermas 1971a: 5). There are sociological reasons for the triumph of sociological positivism in the U.S. in the twentieth century (see Steinmetz (2005)). However, I also agree with Habermas (and Richard Bernstein (1978)) that there is a troubling intellectual reason as well: It is easy for the continental tradition, via “transcendental” argument, to fold the hand to positivism by indulging in impossibility arguments concerning knowledge of society, or by suggesting that such knowledge ultimately has very little to do with empirical study. The bringing of philosophy back to bear on social knowledge has to be done with great care, and perhaps in a way that betrays the meaning of the term “philosophy” itself.

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Fig. 2.1  Positivist epistemology

in the context of investigation, and will insist that only those aspects of the context of explanation that are verifiable by observation be brought into scientific knowledge. 2.2   The Attack on Positivism: Revenge of the Contexts The history of the demise of positivism as a feasible philosophy of either natural or social science could be written as the history of the revenge of the two suppressed contexts. In the name of the context of explanation, positivism’s account of natural science faltered on the issue of causality, since scientific theories continually refer to invisible causes, and working scientists seem to take very seriously their claims about how the world works on a deep, unobservable level. Good science, many philosophers and scientists argued, is done by modeling the causal structures of nature, invisible or not. This insight is the ultimate source of the powerful intellectual movement of scientific realism, addressed extensively in the next chapter (Harre 1975; Bhaskar 1997; Aronson et al. 1994; Leplin 1997, 1984; Maxwell 1962). In social science, objections to positivism were made even more strongly in the name of the context of explanation, because the positivist reduction

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to observables was understood as an even more flagrant exclusion of the essential aspects of social life. As part of the “restructuring of social and political theory” (Bernstein 1978), a series of terms were introduced as central to social scientific knowledge, terms taken to refer to parts of the context of explanation whose effects on social outcomes could not be ignored, yet which could not be integrated into strictly positivist modes of explanation: agency, subjectivity, political and economic interests (and their historicity), structural wholes, hegemony, meaning, and so on. Social theory today is, to a greater degree than is sometimes recognized, a debate over these terms, what they mean, what they refer to, and how they can be used in research. It is perhaps for this reason that the very term “social theory” (or, the opposition between social and political thought and sociological theory) evokes for so many social scientists an anti-positivist position.6 Another set of objections to positivism was made in the name of the context of investigation. The extensive meditation on and empirical study of the social, cultural, and psychological elements of the production of natural scientific knowledge (which smashed the boundary between the history/sociology/psychology of science and the philosophy of science) claimed that the context of investigation could not be excluded from any discussion of science’s claims to truth and rationality. Many different intellectual strands came together here, including the strong program in the sociology of science (Bloor 1976; MacKenzie 1981; Barnes et al. 1996), the new, post-Kuhnian philosophers of science (Lakatos 1965; Feyerabend 1975; Lakatos et al. 1968; Feyerabend 1987), and Quine’s radical interventions into the Anglo-American philosophical scene—the pragmatist deconstruction of the analytic/synthetic distinction and the “naturalization of epistemology” in which he argued that all questions of epistemology were questions of psychology (Quine 1951, 1969).7 This new, powerful academic zeitgeist gave birth to science studies and to the intuition, common to many in the humanities now, that the self-­understanding of science as context-free knowledge was at best a helpful illusion and at

6  Perhaps the best evidence for this—and a good reflection upon its implications—is Anthony Giddens’ and Jonathan Turner’s co-written introduction to Social Theory Today (1987). 7  It is, of course, Quine’s classic 1969 paper “Epistemology Naturalized” that this chapter references in the locution of its title.

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worst a pernicious reproduction of white, bourgeois, and patriarchal power (Harding 1991). Likewise, the extensive meditations on the purpose and reasons for social science, including work on its relationship to radical social movements and to political trends in the West more generally, attempted to rearticulate and reground social scientific knowledge in the appropriate, or appropriately understood, context of investigation. The social scientific context of investigation was opened up to include previously excluded aspects of the investigator’s knowledge: values, beliefs, interests, social forces, politics, etc. The sociology of knowledge embraced Mannheim’s paradox and turned to the task of comprehending that which lay behind the supposedly neutral, supposedly object-directed, claims of the context of investigation. As sociologists who were involved in social movements also wrote about them (for one example of a stream of this work, see Eyerman and Jamison 1991, 1998; Jamison and Eyerman 1994; Jamison et  al. 1990), and active members of the New Left wrote high tomes in social theory (Habermas 1971b), the possibility that the extra-logical aspects of the context of investigation should be embraced and elaborated was articulated in social theory and research. To what does this all amount, epistemologically speaking? Anti-­ positivisms of various stripes should be understood as parts of a whole, and that whole was a relentless attack on the way the relation between the context of investigation and the context of explanation is imagined in positivist philosophy and practiced in positivist research. Primarily this attack takes place by suggesting, in one way or another, that it is irrational, rather than rational, to exclude so much from the contexts in an attempt to build knowledge. These attacks also took on the presumed relation that the exclusions were taken to enable: strict induction from objective facts, and strict deduction and hypothesis testing from covering laws. Post-positivism, then, is a set of intellectual endeavors intended to breach the boundaries of knowledge set up by logical positivism in both the context of investigation and the context of explanation. The rest of the context of investigation and the context of explanation became, if not fair game, at least admitted to possible consideration—in a process often so volatile it resembled the return of the repressed. The work done by the moniker postpositivism—as indicated by the prefix “post”—may, on a specific level, have been negative work in the sense of upending certainty, and consensus. It was disruptive, also, because sans the arguments, and perhaps more importantly, the sensibility of positivism, the degree to which

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the social sciences are “like the natural sciences” becomes a difficult question to answer (Bhaskar 2014; Steinmetz 2005). But this negativity bequeathed a positivity: a massive opening up of other ways in which sociological knowledge might be configured, constructed, and justified. So let us examine two of these post-positivist epistemic perspectives: grounded theory and postmodern anthropology. 2.3   Grounded Theory and the Ethnographic Project Neither Popper nor Parsons was a positivist in the strict sense of the term. Both, however, argued for the unity of the social and natural sciences in a broad sense. For Popper, the criterion of falsifiable theories was what would demarcate pseudo-science from science, whether the subject of said science was nature, history, or society. For Parsons, “analytical realism” would allow sociology to be “voluntaristic” (not bound to an instrumental or mechanical theory of action) and scientific at the same time. In sociology, Parsons thought, generalized exchange would be the equivalent of the laws of thermodynamics, for example. What Parsons and Popper both represented, then, was a vision of social science which placed great emphasis and value on the work done, in the context of investigation, to elaborate theoretical schemes. They were the loyal opposition, dissident, and eloquent advocates of a specific aspect of positivist epistemology: the utility of a deductive relationship between clearly stated hypotheses in the context of investigation and the observations from the context of explanation that could test them.8 It was this tendency toward deductivism, and the resultant overvaluation of “theory” and, specifically, the theories developed in the context of investigation, that Glaser and Strauss disparaged so effectively in The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967). Read symptomatically, this text, alongside symbolic interactionism and the longstanding tradition of urban ethnography, represents the breakup of the orthodox consensus of sociological theory and research. One key intellectual aspect of this ­ breakup was a strong epistemic imperative to derive central sociological insight primarily from the context of explanation, rather than from the context of investigation which, in their view, was overgrown with

8  For a discussion of Parsons’s ambivalent relationship to positivism, and his attempt to preserve the “unity of the sciences,” see Alexander (1983).

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“theory.” To do this, moreover, Glaser and Strauss and others insisted that a key unobservable be reinserted into that context: local meanings. Glaser and Strauss were concerned with the fundamental research question of how to use qualitative sociological data. Their position, pace deductivism, is not “logical” but “phenomenological,” to use their provocative terms.9 They propose, that is, to derive theory from evidence, in a way that is commensurate with the “phenomenological,” qualitative sociological tradition—not in the sense of natural scientific inductivism. For what they derive from evidence are categories and properties, the latter being an “aspect or element” of the former. Thus, to take their favorite example, Two categories of nursing care are the nurses’ “professional composure” and their “perceptions of social loss” of a dying patient that is, their view of what degree of loss his death will be to his family and occupation. One property of social loss is “loss rationales”—that is, the rationales nurses use to justify to themselves their perceptions of social loss. All three are interrelated: loss rationales arise among nurses to explain the death of a patient whom they see as a high social loss, and this relationship helps the nurses to maintain their professional composure when facing his death. (Glaser and Strauss 1967: 36, emphasis in original)

Thus their primary theoretical categories used to analyze data are developed from or “discovered” in the data—they are derived from the distinctions that actors make and rationalizations that they give, and so on. These concepts, Glaser and Strauss insist, can then become autonomous from the data which give rise to them. They are “concepts indicated by the data,” and “once a category or property is conceived, a change in the evidence that indicated it will not necessarily alter, clarify, or destroy it. It takes much more evidence—usually from different substantive areas—as well as the creation of a better category to achieve such changes in the original category” (Glaser and Strauss 1967: 36, emphasis added). Nonetheless, they are quite clear that, in their program, “generating theory does put a premium on emergent conceptualizations” (Glaser and Strauss 1967: 37), and that this is thus the key to theoretical relevance and power. This can only be achieved, furthermore, by relative hostility to “existing theory”: 9  The full quotation is, “However colleagues may respond, our position is not logical; it is phenomenological” (Glaser and Strauss 1967: 6).

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In short, our focus on the emergence of categories solves the problems of fit, relevance, forcing, and richness. An effective strategy is, at first, literally to ignore the literature of theory and fact on the area under study, in order to assure that the emergence of categories will not be contaminated by concepts more suited to different areas. Similarities and convergences with the literature can be established after the analytic core of categories has emerged. (Glaser and Strauss 1967: 37, emphasis added)

Glaser and Strauss thus state explicitly, and in conceptual terms, the instincts of the pure ethnographer. In this case, the epistemic perspective is defined by the position that the relatively autonomous, meaning-full nature of the context of explanation dictates that the only method appropriate to the human sciences is to dive in, find one’s feet in a strange place with strange research subjects, and retain only as much of the context of investigation as is necessary to communicate to one’s colleagues and advance knowledge (Fig. 2.2). Of course, much has been written about sociological ethnography— and urban ethnography in particular—since Glaser and Strauss wrote their text.10 But the essential epistemic point remains the same: that the

Fig. 2.2  Ethnographic empiricism 10  Of particular interest are Burawoy (1998), Eliasoph and Lichterman (1999), Wacquant (2002), Anderson (2002), Duneier (2002), and Newman (2002).

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ultimate responsibility of the researcher is to the context of explanation, and that the contributions to “theory” or “knowledge” in the context of investigation can only be developed after the essential content of the context of explanation has revealed itself to the investigator. Even then, generalization is to be regarded with great suspicion. This epistemic perspective construes the relationship between the context of investigation and the context of explanation in a radically different manner than positivism did. It is a claim about how empirical responsibility in research should be attained, but it is specifically not a claim that there is a strict process of induction by which generalizations from the context of explanation can be imported into the context of investigation, and then exported from there as covering laws and used deductively. Rather, grounded theory demands that the social researcher collapse the context of investigation into the context of explanation. It is not the vigorous exclusion of certain aspects of each context that enables the comprehension of social reality, but rather the immersion of the investigator in the context of explanation that leads to social knowledge. This has perhaps never been more clearly expressed than in Herbert Blumer’s methodological invective in the opening pages of Symbolic Interactionism (1969). Therein, he insisted, again and again, on how sociological knowledge was to be achieved via a deep responsibility of the investigator to the actualities of the life of human groups, regardless of, and often in contradiction with, the protocols of supposedly scientific procedure. Furthermore, he insisted that the way in which this was to be done had to be premised upon the fact that human beings, through social interaction, gave meanings to the objects in their lives that did not inhere in the objects themselves, and did not exist apart from the ongoing interactions that humans traveled through. In managing a collapse between the context of investigation and the context of explanation, however, ethnographic empiricism can produce a result that in one aspect appears very positivistic11: the attempt to exclude the “values” or “politics” of the investigator from the production of social knowledge (Burawoy 1998). In “pure” ethnography, politics are disbarred from investigation unless they “already exist” in concepts extant in the context of explanation, otherwise they are an aspect of the context of investigation that must be suppressed. It was exactly this act of s­ uppression 11  For a different discussion of the “positivist” tendencies of sociological ethnography, see Goldthorpe (2007).

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produced by the relation of the contexts that fascinated and disturbed the critics of anthropological thought and method that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. 2.4   Postmodern Ethnographies and Postcolonial Theory Beginning with a series of elaborate and sophisticated statements of self-­ doubt concerning the validity of fieldwork (Crapanzano 1980; Rabinow 1977; Dwyer and Muhammad 1982), the critique of how anthropologists went about “writing culture” (Clifford et al. 1986; James et al. 1997)— that is, doing interpretation and explanation—became a full-blown epistemic crisis by the mid-1980s. This turn is often identified as “postmodern,” and, it should be noted, emerged at a time when American elite universities were caught up in the academic politics of curriculum debates that characterized the 1980s and came to a head at Stanford in 1988. But how do we understand it epistemologically? What is postmodern anthropology, considered not as a political movement but as an epistemic perspective?12 The postmodern turn in ethnography is a precise reversal of the relation of collapse imagined and managed by the epistemic perspective of grounded theory. At its core, the master doubt of the postmodern turn was a deep skepticism about whether the investigator could adequately, effectively, or honestly collapse the context of investigation into the context explanation and, as a result, write true social knowledge. Consider as a brief piece of evidence of this Vincent Crapanzano’s vituperation of Clifford Geertz’s ethnographic interpretation of the Balinese cockfight. He writes, “in the opening section of ‘Deep Play’ Geertz and his wife are cast, however, conventionally, as individuals. The Balinese are not … The ‘Balinese’—surely not the Balinese—becomes a foil for Geertz’s describing, interpreting, and theorizing—for his self-presenting … They remain cardboard figures” (Crapanzano 1986: 70–71). Here Crapanzano is referencing Geertz’s famous opening passage to the cockfight essay in which he describes how he and his wife got “in” with their informants, and thus became effectively immersed in their field site. For Crapanzano, Geertz’s supposed accomplishment of the collapse of the context of investigation into the context of explanation is in fact a rhetorical move loaded with the power differential of researcher and subject; the result is a 12  See the excellent discussion of Geertz and the postmodern anthropologists in Bohman’s (1991) The New Philosophy of Social Science: Problems of Indeterminacy.

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complete lack of comprehension on Geertz’s part of the context of explanation he is supposedly immersing himself in. It is exactly in so far as Geertz believes the collapse of his context into the context of his subjects led him to valid knowledge that Crapanzano is incredulous: Who told Geertz? How can a whole people share a single subjectivity? … Has Professor Geertz abandoned all of the analytic distinctions that have characterized the success (and the failure) of his civilization? … Geertz’s colorless, abstract metaphors subvert both his description and his interpretation. Indeed they subvert his authority. His message is simply not convincing … His constructions of constructions appear to be little more than projections, or at least blurrings, of his point of view, his subjectivity, with that of the native, or, more accurately, of the constructed native. (Crapanzano 1986: 74)

This is the key critique of postmodern anthropology, and its connection to postcolonial theory: What has passed for an understanding of the “native” has, in fact, been little more than the projection of more or less pernicious western narratives of the other onto the research subjects of the anthropological ethnographer (Clifford 1988; Said 1978). There is thus a deep political complicity between anthropological “knowledge” and Western domination (Fig. 2.3). This epistemological schema is the multiplicative result of postmodernism and postcolonial theory. It is the precise opposite of the relation between the contexts posited by ethnographic empiricism. Here, it is in

Fig. 2.3  Postmodern epistemology/postcolonial theory

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fact a deep knowledge of the context of investigation that is claimed, and, more importantly, the relation of the contexts is entirely reconfigured. The relation is, in this case, twofold: First, the contexts are viewed as indelibly different and removed from each other such that “true understanding” is impossible—the primary knowledge relationship between the context of investigation and the context of explanation is that the former is indelibly in error about the latter. Second, the erroneous imaginings of the native in the context of investigation are imported into the context of explanation as part of a regime of social domination—they become an aspect of the social reality of the context of explanation as ideology or as power/knowledge. George Marcus makes this clear in his own attack on Geertz’s cockfight essay, and on Geertz’s reflections on the ethical relationship between the investigator and the investigated: Here again, as in the cockfight anecdote, the broader context of implication—that of colonialism and neocolonialism—that has so exercised the subsequent critics of ethnography is submerged in Geertz’s account … The anthropology of the 1950s and 1960s was part of the great mission of development to the new states … [the] politics of fieldwork … emerged in terms of the always slightly absurd but very human predicaments of a well-­meaning outsider thrust among people with very different life chances. According to the presumptions of the development mission, themselves based on Western notions of liberal decency, the outsider was in some sense the model of a desired future. (Marcus 1999: 91)

Mannheim’s paradox returns! Postmodern anthropology is striking in its combination of certainty and doubt—certainty about the way the social forces acting upon the researcher throw into massive doubt anything that the researcher claims about her subjects. However, there is another side to this perspective. It involves two different strands, which are both comprehensible in the terms we have been developing here—for they propose a new set of relations between the contexts, and thus give postmodern anthropology positive content as an epistemic perspective. First, the context of explanation is used to unseat taken-for-granted assumptions about social life in the society of origin of the researcher—in the context of investigation broadly understood. Hence we have “anthropology as cultural critique” (Marcus and Fischer 1986). The idea here is that, if true understanding of the other is impossible—or

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if, in so far as it is possible, such understanding is always already complicit in domination—then the correct use of ethnographic and other forms of social scientific knowledge is as a challenge to that which the researcher does understand, namely, Western/modern societies themselves. In other words, the context of explanation (perhaps a misnomer for this epistemic perspective, since the possibility of explanation through interpretation is rendered suspect) is made to talk, normatively, to the context of explanation. Or, as Marcus and Fischer put it so eloquently: Cross-cultural perspectives still have an important role to play in carrying out projects of repatriated ethnography, in defining novel approaches to taken-for-granted domestic phenomena, in framing questions, and in suggesting alternatives or possibilities among domestic subjects that are only revealed by comparative contrast with other cultural material. (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 135–136)

Second, the context of investigation and the context of explanation are brought together by placing them both in the same even larger context, namely, the political economy of the global system. Though Marcus and Fischer discuss this possibility at length in their seminal text, perhaps its locus classicus is Appadurai’s notion of “global flows” and his proposal of a “general theory of global cultural processes” (Appadurai 1996: 46). Appadurai suggests that “anthropology must … come in from the cold and face the challenge of making a contribution to cultural studies without the benefit of its previous principal source of leverage—sightings of the savage” (Appadurai 1996: 65) Indeed, rather than assuming the difference of the other and the importance of the local, it is the role of the investigator to examine the production of senses of locality in a global world, and thus the relations between “the word and the world”: The link between the imagination and social life, I would suggest, is increasingly a global and deterritorialized one. Thus, those who represent real or ordinary lives must resist making claims to epistemic privilege in regard to the lived particularities of social life. Rather, ethnography must redefine itself as that practice of representation that illuminated the power of large-­ scale, imagined life possibilities over specific life trajectories. This is thickness with a difference, and the difference lies in a new alertness to the fact that ordinary lives today are more often powered not by the givenness of things but by the possibilities that the media (either directly or indirectly) suggest are available. (Appadurai 1996: 55)

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Could this be any more different from the approach to interpretation advocated by Herbert Blumer? Herein, the very capacity to distinguish between the context of investigation and the context of explanation is questioned, via the placement of both in a world of global media. The globalized world is the context of the representational practices of both investigator and investigated; it does not even make sense, from this perspective, to call for an “ethnographic collapse.” It is rather that we are all already “collapsed.” Postmodern anthropology is thus the apotheosis of the “revenge of the contexts,” as it takes this revenge to Wallersteinian proportions.

3  Meaning and Social Action: Toward a Post-Positivist Synthesis Is there a more balanced approach, a synthesis of these rather extreme reactions to positivism? Certainly, there are epistemic perspectives— including critical realism, Bourdieuan “reflexivity,” and standpoint theory—that probably fall somewhere in-between the radical disjunction between the contexts that is the starting point of postmodern anthropology, and the extreme collapse of the contexts suggested by grounded theory. Realism, in several of its variations, will be discussed in the next chapter.13 Here, however, I am interested in asking whether the insights of these “extreme” post-positivisms can be mobilized and synthesized into a feasible contextualized epistemology for social science. Reading The Discovery of Grounded Theory, one may conclude that, despite some protests to the contrary, the authors are intent on dismissing the utility of abstraction and theory per se. Such a dismissal is unfounded; the dangers and epistemic naiveté of imagining that the researcher enters the field with a “blank slate” for a mind need not be rehearsed here. In contrast, grounded theory’s suspicion of strong deductivism, and, related to this, grounded theory’s insistent assertion of the rather idiosyncratic ways in which meaning can be socially consequential are well-founded. Grounded theory—and ethnographic empiricism generally—is an argument, ultimately, about the plurality of contexts of explanation that the 13  For an explication and defense of Bourdieu as a realist, see Potter (2000). For a discussion of the relationship of feminist standpoint theory to realism, see the debate in Feminist Economics (Lawson 1999, 2003a, 2003b; Barker 2003; Harding 1999, 2003; Nelson 2003; Peter 2003).

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investigator may encounter. And what makes these contexts different are the social meanings active in each one; it is this recognition of the difference that difference makes (Geertz 2000a) that makes the ethnographic imperative ring true in a post-positivist era. Yet if local meanings are what matters, how are we to understand them? How can we conceptualize their scope? A serious look at hermeneutic philosophy would suggest that it is through the use of general concepts that the particularities of meaning can be understood (see, in particular, Dilthey 1996). In other words, some kind of theory or high conceptualization is needed to grasp local (or “grounded”) meaning in its social effectiveness. Postmodern anthropology, which for all its calls to politics and praxis remains immensely theoreticized, has always understood this. Rabinow, Appadurai, Clifford, Marcus, and Fischer, in their groundbreaking writings, used theory to dismantle the empiricist claims of the ethnographies that preceded their work; they may have objected to the universalisms of Parsons or Malinowski, but their use of abstraction to better understand the social situation of the person who is “writing culture” is undeniable. And, notoriously, postmodern anthropology takes three sets of theoretical propositions (or theoretical apparatuses of interpretation) very seriously: Bachelard’s and Foucault’s theories of power/ knowledge, the political economy of the world system, and postcolonial theory. With the possible exception of the second in this list, these are not theoretical systems that claim to have achieved a universal theory of society—rather the point is that theory, in this format, provides a language within which certain essential aspects of the postcolonial relationship between anthropologist and subject can be understood (and, after all, Wallerstein famously claimed that he was just theorizing a single, giant “case” (Wallerstein 2000)). But things are even weirder than they seem. If grounded theory dismissed the utility of theory, postmodern anthropology refused, despite its theoreticism, to theorize that utility. It is a strange artifact of the “writing culture” arguments that social researchers deeply influenced by “contemporary theory” tend to posit their position in the (global) social structure, rather than the meaningful theories they know, love, and are embedded in, as the extra-empirical source of their errors or insights. Instead of

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embracing this return to Mannheim’s paradox,14 let us ask, instead, the following question: What if, as opposed to political economy and power/ knowledge theory, the correct way to understand social research as social action was to understand it as grounded theory would—as the product of a set of local meanings? I believe that, if we took this angle on the problem, we would be compelled to conclude that the meanings which structure the action of the social researcher in the context of investigation are social theories themselves.15 We thus arrive at the following argument as a contextualization of epistemology: The context of investigation is structured culturally—by a set of meanings we know as social theory. The various contexts that the researcher encounters are also structured culturally—by meanings that are different in different times and place, but which tend to be much less 14  Ultimately, I think that it is to an unworkable form of Mannheim’s paradox which the excellent and epistemologically sophisticated arguments of Pierre Bourdieu for “reflexive science” and Sandra Harding for “strong objectivity” return. These arguments are clearly post-positivist in their efforts to consider the role of extra-logical factors in the context of investigation in the production of knowledge. Though stated in different terms and derived from different traditions, the core argument in each case is the same: Bourdieu and Harding accept that the context of investigation is structured socially and that these social structures influence the knowledge that the researcher produces. The argument then is, if the researcher can correctly comprehend the social forces at work in the context of investigation, then she can proceed to correctly comprehend and represent the context of explanation. Her reflexivity about the context of investigation allows her to reorient her position and unseat those of her presuppositions which disable objectivity, and thus better comprehend the context of explanation than someone who aims for “value-neutrality” by ignoring social influences in the context of investigation. This extraordinarily subjective argument, however, has one clear problem that brings us back to Mannheim: Does human reflexivity mediate the causal power of social position, or not? The implication of the strong objectivity argument is that the subjectivity of the researcher can overcome the social objectivity of the context of investigation. But this contradicts the premise of the argument—that social objectivity dominates any supposed subjective orientation to truth or “neutrality” in human actors. It seems that the only way out of this predicament would be to posit that social investigators have an extra-­ special quality to their subjectivity whereby when an individual gains knowledge of social forces, they stop acting upon him or her. But this is a rather unsociological ground on which to build a synthesis of the sociology of knowledge and epistemology! An extended consideration of standpoint theory as a more general perspective would require another paper, however. 15  The investigation of theory itself as meaning is just beginning—at least in its twenty-first-­ century form, since it could be argued that this was the whole point of Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia. Foundational in this regard is Jeffrey C. Alexander’s “Anti, Modern, Post and Neo” (1995), but see also Reed (2011), Krause (2016), and Krause (2021).

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abstract and much more pragmatically organized than social theory. The contexts are brought into contact with each other when the researcher uses concepts from the context of investigation to describe and interpret the context of explanation she is studying. Set out in steps, then, this argument for a post-positivist contextualized epistemology runs as follows: . meanings orient social action. 1 2. social actors are oriented by remarkably different or “local” meanings. 3. the meanings that orient social investigators are the relatively esoteric ones called “social theories,” which tend to be abstract and have been explicitly developed for the purpose of understanding the meanings that orient others’ actions. 4. these meanings (social theories) intersect with the meanings present in the context of explanation in the production of social knowledge. Specifically, they help the investigator “ferret out”16 the meanings that matter for action in a specific case. 5. thusly, the meanings that orient others’ actions are brought out and represented in the context of investigation. Stated this baldly, an immediate objection arises, namely that (1) has the ring of a metatheoretical or “ontological” presupposition, which is stated as an axiom as opposed to being empirically verified. In my defense, I would offer the following comment: Because meaning is, by its nature, plastic and malleable (in other words, because cultural differences are, in principle at least, endless), this is not a very restrictive presupposition. Indeed, the point is precisely to take on board grounded theory’s recognition of the variety of meanings which might guide social action and thus influence the structure of a social situation. In this sense, it proposes not to give a single theoretical account of the social world, but rather accept that there are myriad social worlds and a plurality of social theories for understanding them. That plurality of social theories is the cultural structure of the context of investigation.

16  The reference here is to Geertz’s (2000c: 26) “Thick description” essay which suggests that theory is used to “ferret out the unapparent import of things.” The interpretation of this statement and the practices of research that have been taken to follow from it are controversial (Reed 2008).

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The distinct advantage of this argument is that it does not require that the individual investigator be exceptionally brilliant, all-seeing, or reflexive—an implication of many arguments for “strong objectivity” and social scientific “reflexivity.” Nor does it require the individual investigator to be able to step back from all her theoretical tools and evaluate them continuously. Rather, it suggests that is only by immersion into the meanings of social science (an immersion that begins, I would suggest, in graduate training) that the individual investigator will be able to understand what orients other people’s actions. The sharpening of theoretical tools for interpreting other social actions happens at the collective level via criticism, review, and myriad other institutionalized mechanisms. And social science reflexivity happens at the collective level as well, in so far as the discourse of theory and epistemology develops over time. What this amounts to is that, to have sociological knowledge be “objective”—that is, to succeed, in some broad sense, in representing the context of explanation—what you need is a set of cultural frames that allow individual investigators to interpret social action. These cultural frames, furthermore, would be good at some things and bad at others—good at understanding shared meaning but bad at grasping individual psychological differences, for example. The culture of social investigation is theory (Fig. 2.4). This synthesis position also has the advantage (or, for some, the disadvantage) of offering a clear break between natural scientific and social scientific knowledge, while maintaining the possibility and rationality of the latter. Blumer, Glaser, and Strauss were, in a deep way, empiricists, but could never be called naturalists in the sense of believing in the unity of the human and natural sciences. Likewise the position I am presenting here, which proposes that, in social science, the role of meaning in structuring human action takes place both in the context of investigation and the context of explanation. In natural science, the only meanings are in the context of investigation. This is what spurs the Popperian project, for, if the only meanings are in the context of investigation, then it seems reasonable that one could specify philosophically how these meanings connect, referentially, to observable things in the world via experiment, falsification, etc. But the symmetry of the contexts in social science betrays this goal; all social scientists have the clear and basic problem that their concepts must reference other actors’ concepts, and these other actors’ concepts may reference all sorts of things, in all sorts of ways, that do or do not “exist” (e.g., God,

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Fig. 2.4  Meaningful theory/meaningful action

justice, the white race, America….). A theory of reference is not what social science epistemology needs, what it needs is a theory of how we use theory to interpret others’ references—a hermeneutics.

4   Conclusion This perspective implies that the epistemic questions that have been asked by positivism and, more recently, scientific realism, about social science theory are misguided. The question to ask is not “does this piece of theory correctly describe society’s workings?” but rather “does this piece of theory allow social researchers to interpret how social meaning works, in certain times and places?” Accuracy in representing the context of explanation is still the goal, but the means to that goal are radically different—because of the presence of meaning and subjectivity in social life. There will thus be, in social science, a radical difference between the referential capacities of bits of theory and the referential capacities of explanations. Abstract theory is not— and should not be—strictly testable as to whether it accurately represents “society.” For, society as such does

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not exist—there are rather a myriad of social contexts of explanation. Explanations of this or that set of social actions, however, can be held to high standards of reference and empirical responsibility. These explanations emerge from the intersection of two meaningful contexts, in which a researcher uses some meaningful pieces of the context of investigation to interpret a given context of explanation. It may be that we should call the standard to which we hold the interpretations that emerge from this process “objectivity.” But if we do, it is with this clear caveat: We need to separate “objectivity” from “naturalism.” Objectivity is a goal for social knowledge—to accurately represent the context of explanation or some piece of it. Naturalism is a means to this goal; it proposes to import into social science the relations between the context of investigation and the context of explanation that are perceived to be productive in natural science. Herein, I have examined the most clear and distinct of these attempts—positivism. Social scientific positivism’s great premise (and great hope) was that, if the context of investigation and the context of explanation are radically reduced, then the extant differences between investigating society and investigating nature will not have epistemological consequences. As I have tried to show herein, many social scientists are not so sure. For, if meaning orients social action, then the only way to explain action is to develop theories which enable the interpretation of this meaning. It is an old Weberian point, really, but one which perhaps could not become clear until positivism had its day and, like the return of the repressed, meaningful context had its revenge on both the subjects and objects of social science.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1982. Theoretical Logic in Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1983. Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 1995. Modern, Anti, Post and Neo. In Fin-de-Siècle Social Theory. New York: Verso. Alston, William P. 2002. Realism & Antirealism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Anderson, Elijah. 2002. The Ideologically Driven Critique. The American Journal of Sociology 107 (6): 1533–1550. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Aronson, Jerrold L., Rom Harré, et  al. 1994. Realism Rescued: How Scientific Progress Is Possible. Chicago: Open Court. Ayer, A.J. 1947. Language, Truth, and Logic. London: V. Gollancz Ltd. Barker, Drucilla. 2003. Emancipatory for Whom? A Comment on Critical Realism. Feminist Economics 9 (1): 103–108. Barnes, Barry, David Bloor, et  al. 1996. Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benton, Ted. 1977. Philosophical Foundations of the Three Sociologies. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bernstein, Richard J. 1978. The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Bhaskar, Roy. 1997. A Realist Theory of Science. London; New York: Verso. ———. 2014. The Possibility of Naturalism. New York: Taylor Francis. Bloor, David. 1976. Knowledge and Social Imagery. London; Boston: Routledge & K. Paul. Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism; Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Bohman, James. 1991. New Philosophy of Social Science: Problems of Indeterminacy. Oxford: Polity. Burawoy, Michael. 1998. The Extended Case Method. Sociological Theory 16 (1): 4–33. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James, George E. Marcus, et al. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography: A School of American Research Advanced Seminar. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1980. Tuhami, Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1986. ‘Hermes’ Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1996. Selected Works, Volume IV: Hermeneutics and the Study of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Duneier, Mitchell. 2002. What Kind of Combat Sport Is Sociology? The American Journal of Sociology 107 (6): 1551–1576. Dwyer, Kevin, and Faqir Muhammad. 1982. Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eliasoph, Nina, and Paul Lichterman. 1999. ‘We Begin with Our Favorite Theory...’: Reconstructing the Extended Case Method. Sociological Theory 17 (2): 228–234. Eyerman, Ron, and Andrew Jamison. 1991. Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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———. 1998. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press. Feyerabend, Paul. 1975. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. ———. 1987. Farewell to Reason. London; New York: Verso. Fuller, Steve. 1993. Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge: The Coming of Science and Technology Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000a. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2000b. Ideology as a Cultural System. In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. ———. 2000c. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Giddens, Anthony, and Jonathan H. Turner. 1987. Social Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press. Glaser, Barney G., and Anselm L. Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory; Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co. Goldthorpe, John H. 2007. Sociological Ethnography Today: Problems and Prospects. In On Sociology, Volume I: Critique and Program. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gross, Neil L., Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship, eds. 2022. The New Pragmatist Sociology: Inquiry, Agency, and Democracy. New  York: Columbia University Press. Habermas, Jurgen. 1971a. Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971b. Toward a Rational Society; Student Protest, Science, and Politics. Boston: Beacon Press. Hall, John R. 1999. Cultures of Inquiry: From Epistemology to Discourse in Sociohistorical Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harding, Sandra G. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Harding, Sandra. 1999. The Case for Strategic Realism: A Response to Lawson. Feminist Economics 5 (3): 127–133. ———. 2003. Representing Reality: The Critical Realism Project. Feminist Economics 9 (1): 151–159. Harre, Rom. 1975. Casual Powers: A Theory of Natural Necessity/R. Harre and E.H. Madden. Oxford [Eng.]: B. Blackwell. Hempel, Carl Gustav. 1965. Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science. New York: Free Press. James, Allison, Jennifer Lorna Hockey, et  al. 1997. After Writing Culture: Epistemology and Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology. New York: Routledge.

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Jamison, Andrew, and Ron Eyerman. 1994. Seeds of the Sixties. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jamison, Andrew, Ron Eyerman, et al. 1990. The Making of the New Environmental Consciousness: A Comparative Study of Environmental Movements in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kantorovich, Aharon. 1988. Philosophy of Science: From Justification to Explanation. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 39 (4): 469–494. Kordig, Carl R. 1978. Discovery and Justification. Philosophy of Science 45 (1): 110–117. Krause, Monika. 2016. The Meanings of Theorizing. British Journal of Sociology 67 (1): 23–29. ———. 2021. Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakatos, Imre, ed. 1965. Problems in the Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science. London: North-Holland Publishing Co. Lakatos, Imre, Alan Musgrave, et al. 1968. Problems in the Philosophy of Science. Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub. Co. Latour, Bruno. 1990. Technology Is Society Made Durable. The Sociological Review 38 (1_Suppl): 103–131. Lawson, Tony. 1999. Feminism, Realism, and Universalism. Feminist Economics 5 (2): 25–59. ———. 2003a. Ontology and Feminist Theorizing. Feminist Economics 9 (1): 119–150. ———. 2003b. Theorizing Ontology. Feminist Economics 9 (1): 161–169. Leplin, Jarrett. 1984. Scientific Realism. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1997. A Novel Defense of Scientific Realism. New  York: Oxford University Press. MacKenzie, Donald A. 1981. Statistics in Britain, 1865–1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marcus, George E. 1999. The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-en-Scene of Anthropological Fieldwork. In The Fate of ‘Culture’: Geertz and Beyond, ed. S.B. Ortner. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marcus, George E., and Michael M.J.  Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Martin, John Levi. 2011. The Explanation of Social Action. New  York: Oxford University Press. Maxwell, G. 1962. The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 3: 3–27.

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Monton, Bradley John. 2007. Images of Empiricism: Essays on Science and Stances, with a Reply from Bas C. van Fraassen. Oxford; New  York: Oxford University Press. Nelson, Julie. 2003. Once More, with Feeling: Feminist Economics and the Ontological Question. Feminist Economics 9 (1): 109–118. Newman, Katherine. 2002. No Shame: The View from the Left Bank. The American Journal of Sociology 107 (6): 1577–1599. Peter, Fabienne. 2003. Critical Realism, Feminist Epistemology, and the Emancipatory Potential of Science: A Comment on Lawson and Harding. Feminist Economics 9 (1): 93–101. Popper, Karl. 2002. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Routledge. Potter, G. 2000. For Bourdieu, against Alexander: Reality and Reduction. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 30(2): 229–+. Quine, W.V. 1951. Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism. The Philosophical Review 60 (1): 20–43. Quine, W.V.O. 1969. Epistemology Naturalized. In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reed, Isaac Ariail. 2008. Maximal Interpretation in Clifford Geertz and the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Towards a New Epistemology. Cultural Sociology 2 (2): 187–200. ———. 2011. Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reichenbach, Hans. 1938. Experience and Prediction; An Analysis of the Foundations and the Structure of Knowledge. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Salmon, Wesley C. 1989. Four Decades of Scientific Explanation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Selg, Peeter. 2013. The Politics of Theory and the Constitution of Meaning. Sociological Theory 31 (1): 1–23. Siegel, Harvey. 1980. Justification, Discovery and the Naturalizing of Epistemology. Philosophy of Science 47 (2): 297–321. Steinmetz, George. 2005. Scientific Authority and the Transition to Post-Fordism: The Plausibility of Positivism in U.S. Sociology since 1945. In The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological Others, ed. G. Steinmetz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Turner, Jonathan H. 2006. Explaining the Social World: Historicism versus Positivism. The Sociological Quarterly 47 (3): 451–463. Van Fraassen, Bas C. 2002. The Empirical Stance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Wacquant, Loic. 2002. Scrutinizing the Street: Poverty, Morality, and the Pitfalls of Urban Ethnography. The American Journal of Sociology 107 (6): 1468–1532. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2000. Hold the Tiller Firm: On Method and the Unit of Analysis. In The Essential Wallerstein. New York: The New Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 2004. The Concept of Nature. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

CHAPTER 3

Justifying Sociological Knowledge: From Realism to Interpretation

1   Introduction The problem with disputing reality is that one has to rediscover it. Within the metatheoretical discourses concerned with justifying sociological knowledge, this is the problem of post-positivism, namely, that outside of giving in to relativism, solipsism, or nihilism, we need some account of the nature and purpose of sociological theory and research. In the last forty years, a new set of epistemic discourses has emerged to fill the void left by the implosion of the positivist philosophy of science. These discourses offer new justifications for sociological knowledge and new approaches to the task of explaining social action. Herein I examine in depth one such conceptual formation—realism— and propose another as a feasible alternative—interpretivism. I present both as structures of thought according to which a post-positivist empirical sociology is possible, but whose understanding of the contours of sociological explanation and the nature of sociological theory are at odds with each other. My intent is both descriptive and prescriptive, and thus my language slightly colored; after reconstructing and criticizing sociological realism, I point to how interpretivism could remedy and move beyond realism’s problems and ambiguities. In contrasting these two epistemologies, I draw upon a long-standing dispute in social science (the Methodenstreit, see Frisby 1976; Hall 1999; Oakes 1988; Manicas 1987: 124–135; Habermas 1988) and re-articulate © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Ariail Reed, Sociology as a Human Science, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18357-7_3

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certain familiar oppositions—between the naturalist ambition for sociology and a more humanist concern with subjectivity, for example. But while the general landscape of the argument runs at least as far back as certain nineteenth-century attempts to define and delimit “sociology” (Is sociology a science? If so, in what way? If not, what is it?), the particular claims presented are contemporary. The epistemic discourse of realism for social science, as I examine it here, originated in the theoretical turmoil of the 1960s, matured via generation’s worth of social theory, and entered the core of the discipline via two decades of debates in the major empirical research journals of American sociology in the 1990s and 2000s  (Kiser and Hechter 1991; Quadagno and Knapp 1992; Skocpol 1994; Somers 1998; Kiser and Hechter 1998; Boudon 1998; Goldstone 1998; Calhoun 1998; Mahoney 1999, 2004; Sica 2004). Interpretivism has—as might be expected—a less programmatic recent history, but arguments for interpretation in social science reach back to the complex relationship between sociology, history, and German idealist philosophy (especially in the work of Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Wilhelm Dilthey), and something like an interpretive or hermeneutic position on sociological knowledge has played an important role in methodological disputes since the overthrow of the orthodox consensus. One may even posit an “interpretive turn” generally associated with the aftermath of another product of 1960s turmoil—the “cultural turn” (Alexander and Smith 2003; White 1985; Rabinow and Sullivan 1988). Particularly when it comes to social action and its interpretation, a series of metatheoretical interventions marked the 2000s and 2010s, and while not all of these claimed the mantle of “hermeneutics,” they all reconsidered carefully the interpretation, by the sociological investigator, of actors’ interpretations of their worlds and the social processes they find themselves operating within (Sewell 2005; Reed 2011; Martin 2011; Abbott 2016). For the philosophy of science, realism represents a response to the post-­ Kuhnian crisis of scientific rationality—a way to conceptualize the empirical responsibilities and causal claims of natural science outside of positivism (Bhaskar 1994: 14–40; Godfrey-Smith 2003; Bhaskar 1989a: 9–51; Manicas 2006: 1–41). In sociology, however, realism splits into two coherent and identifiable formations: strict and reflexive. The former proposes a clear and distinct sociological naturalism dedicated to theoretical unity, hypothesis testing, and explanation via universal social mechanisms. The

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latter offers, instead, a naturalism mediated by several long-standing concerns of social theory (e.g., agency, ideology, and the historical trajectories of modernity). Reflexive realism thus proposes a historicized conception of mechanism, considers the role of knowledge in constituting social structure, and makes an ontological distinction between society and nature. Nonetheless, I argue, both strict and reflexive realism are based upon flawed premises and arguments, in particular their conception of theory as social ontology and their insistence on a severe epistemic break between the investigator’s scientific knowledge of the social and the subjectivities and meanings that are extant in the research subjects’ social contexts. The split between strict and reflexive realism, and the latter’s frequent, insistent claims to have broken the shackles of unnecessary scientism, tend to obscure the way in which interpretive sociology can offer an autonomous, conceivable—indeed more realistic—way to study social life. Interpretivism is based on a set of philosophical arguments for the possibility of sociological knowledge that are quite different from those that frame realism. They derive from the tradition of hermeneutic argument in social theory and are augmented by the theoretical and empirical work of cultural history and cultural sociology. Research that takes subjectivity and/or culture as central to sociological investigation is now commonplace. Herein, I intend to show how certain interpretive arguments can offer counterpoints or alternatives to the major philosophical problems and ambiguities of realism. Thus I will suggest a move toward “layered interpretivism” which investigates the following as a route to sociological explanation: (1) intelligible subjects’ reasons for action, (2) structures of signification and meaning (culture), and (3) “objectivized” artifices of human labor as themselves possessing a meaningful logic. In this chapter, I give examples of sociological explanations that fit the molds of strict realism, reflexive realism, and interpretivism, and I reference a great deal of work in metatheory and sociological theory that bears upon epistemological questions. However, it is not my ambition to give a comprehensive review of the theoretical literature or to summarize the empirical research that has been conducted under this or that epistemological umbrella. Rather, my concern in this chapter is with the metatheoretical logic of the abstract arguments that outline the very possibility of studying society, and which thus have consequences for how we go about conducting ourselves as theorists and researchers.

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2  Realism According to the realist view, theory in social science grants conceptual access to the fundamental social relations that determine the course of history and the boundaries of social action. Social structures are seen as more fungible, historically variant, but not fundamentally different entities than natural objects and natural forces, at least in the following sense: Efficient causal mechanisms can be discovered in each to which observable events can be attributed, and the description of these mechanisms can be generalized to other cases. The theorization of these mechanisms also allows a fundamental break between the scientific investigator’s view of social reality and the view of everyday social actors (who may suffer from ideological distortion, false impressions, and common-sense opinions). The scientist, by using the specific language games and traditions of research of sociology, discovers and directly comprehends these structures and how they produce social outcomes. The realist approach in sociology appropriates and transforms the model of natural scientific realism, so it is necessary to take a brief detour through the recent intellectual history of that philosophical movement. Scientific realism is an extensive and burgeoning set of philosophical arguments that has its roots in Cartesian rationalism and takes its contemporary form in the foundational texts of Rom Harré, Roy Bhaskar, Hilary Putnam, and Grover Maxwell’s paper on “The ontological status of theoretical entities” (Harre 1963, 1975; Harre and Secord 1972; Bhaskar 1997 [1975]; 1989b; Putnam 1975, 1981, 1983, 1987; Maxwell 1962; also see Cartwright 1983; Salmon 1984). Realism has become a central (if controversial) focus of both the philosophy of natural science strictly understood (Cortois 1995; de Regt 1995; Leplin 1984),1 and of more generalized discussions of human knowledge (e.g., Collier 1981; Putnam 1978; Eagleton 1990). It has formed the basis of a recovery of rationality for natural science and thus its defense against postmodern skepticism and the political accusations of cultural and science studies. For this reason, in both natural and social scientific discourse, realism often positions itself against both positivism and postmodernism (Cruickshank 2003; Groff 2004: 135–142; Sayer 2000: 29–104; Lopez and Potter 2005; Morrow 1994). 1  It is important to note than in this context, “anti–realism” often signifies a new empiricism (e.g., van Frassen 1980).

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In scientific realism, it is the development of substantive ontologies of the world—mechanisms like gravity, light propagation, and electro-­ magnetism—that forms the core of scientific theory (Bhaskar 1997 [1975]; Harre 1975; Aronson et al. 1995; Manicas 2006: 1–41). Scientific realism expands the scope of what science can claim as real beyond that which can be or has been observed, by proposing a deep ontology of the world. It thus distinguishes between the real (the ontological level of structures and causal mechanisms), the actual (that which occurs in the world and is potentially open to observation), and the empirical (that which is observed and brought within scientific knowledge as fact). Thus gravity is real, but not actual or empirical, and furthermore, since other real mechanisms may counteract it, its workings may not be actualized in certain cases, making empirical evidence of its workings impossible to come by in the strict positivist sense of constant conjunctions or regularities. Thusly, scientific realism separates itself clearly from the “actualism” or “phenomenalism” of positivism and other forms of empiricism (Bhaskar 1997 [1975]: 24–30, 56–62). Though this affirmation of the “real” as a part of scientific explanation may seem intuitive, it constituted a radical philosophical break from positivism at the time of its instantiation (for a good narrative account, see Godfrey-Smith 2003). In allowing scientific explanations to include and discuss causality and unobservables, this move invites a myriad of difficulties for the kinds of analytic philosophy that characterized the philosophy of science in the Anglo-speaking world in the middle of the twentieth century (Ayer 1952; Hempel 1965 [1948]; Nagel 1979 [1961]). But ironically, by claiming a larger scope and higher stakes for scientific knowledge (i.e., by proposing that science can extend its conceptual reach to that which we cannot see, and rely fundamentally on a metaphysical term—causality—that has been philosophically problematic since Hume), it manages to overcome some of the problems that positivism faced, both internally (see Salmon 1989) and from post-Kuhnian critics. For, realism claims to account for the social construction of scientific knowledge at the same time as providing affirmation of its efficacy and rationality, by characterizing scientific knowledge as transitive and socially produced, but the real referents for scientific knowledge as intransitive structures which exist independent of observation and irregardless of their comprehension in this or that scientific paradigm. This separation is accomplished by relying upon the tripartite distinction introduced above. Real structures are the underlying generative

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mechanisms and processes that scientific theory references and which explain the behavior of things in the world. Actual events are that which comes to pass in the world (in which some mechanisms may counteract others, as in when a table disables the action of gravity on a glass and thus produces the phenomenon of its non-movement), and empirical facts are those events that are observed by humans and (potentially) brought under the scope of scientific knowledge. Thus “facts” are indeed transitive and socially produced in the sense that they require humans to experience and process them, but real structures are not, and hence science retains a real referent, and thus its intelligibility and rationality.2 How does science know that the structures it is referencing are, indeed, real? This is an obvious but important question, and in the case of natural science the answer depends upon two arguments, one about human agency and scientific experiment, and the other about the transcendental referents of scientific theory. Realism begins with this question: What must the world be like if scientific experiment is to make sense?3 In answering this question, scientific realism incorporates the insight, common to philosophical traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, that scientific knowledge involves human intervention in the world (Habermas 1971; Hacking 1983; Von Wright 1971; Apel 1984). The recognition of this is commensurate with the idea that, historically speaking, scientific knowledge involves a break with animism and other “magical” worldviews; science locates animation in human action, and mechanism in the world of nature (Habermas 1985: 43–75). It is a premise of the rationality of scientific experiment that, separate from the human agency that arranges an experiment, there must exist real entities that, when triggered, exert causal force in a mechanistic fashion (Bhaskar 1997 [1975]; Boyd 1990). The purpose of the creation of closed systems in experiments is to isolate and identify these entities.4 Thus

2  The difference between an intelligible practice and a rational practice may be a significant one. In sociological appropriations of realism, however, this difference is often glossed over, and Bhaskar is ambiguous on this point. For a clear–minded critique of the problems this elision creates, see Benton (1981). 3  Bhaskar writes, “The intelligibility of experimental activity presupposes not just the intransitivity but the structured character of the objects investigated under experimental conditions” (Bhaskar 1997 [1975]: 33). 4  Thus as Von Wright puts it, it makes sense to distinguish between “doing things and bringing about things” (1971: 66).

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experiment, as controlled human interaction with the world, serves as a guarantor for and constant check upon the propositions of theory. Secondly, if these entities—real structures—are to be the basis of scientific knowledge and enable both communication between paradigms and, ultimately, the determination of the superiority of certain theories and explanations, then they must exist over and above the world of human knowledge and subjectivity. This is to say that they must be transcendental, not in the idealist sense, but in the ontological, realist sense that they exist separate from their conception inside human subjectivity (and, in particular, the form of human perception, conception, and intervention called science). In other words, there would still be gravity in the universe even if there were no humans on earth to theorize it, and this means that there are transcendental, extra-linguistic guarantors for natural scientific knowledge. Then, we can say in a formal sense that, though our substantive and specific knowledge of mechanisms and their action may shift as scientific knowledge changes, as long as science is based upon interaction with the natural world, it will have an unchanging basis for what its theoretical terms attempt to reference, and a test for the correctness of its theories, namely the ability to predict and control the outcome of natural processes. 2.1   Sociological Realism Realism has become influential in sociology in a variety of ways. It is evident in the social ontologies of the action and structure debate (Giddens 1984; Cohen 1989; Sewell 1992; Archer 1982, 1990), attempts to make interaction theory and ontological individualism the basis for scientific sociology (Collins 1981), attempts to justify critical Marxism and Hegelian dialectics as simultaneously a science of society and a philosophy of human freedom (Bhaskar 1993), and attempts to suggest that rational choice and purposive action theory is the only feasible basis for sociological explanation (Coleman 1986; Kiser and Hechter 1991). The array of sociological realisms forms the basis for a sort of ethos or sensibility, one formed in the crucible of post-Kuhnian uncertainty and the specter of relativism, and that is dedicated to the rational potential of science and often includes the new hope that, this time, the philosophy of natural science will be able to include sociology. But in terms of the precise epistemological underpinnings of social investigation, realism in sociology can be divided into two positions: strict and reflexive.

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2.2   Strict Realism Strict realism makes reference to transcendental mechanisms in its explanations, is confident that careful adherence to scientific logic will overcome the lack of experiment in sociology, and relies exclusively on the ontological claims of general theory to set research programs. Strict realists, moreover, are comfortable talking about determinative and efficient causality, integrate “history” as a question of the scope conditions for the action of causal mechanisms, and view “agency” either as a philosophical non-issue concerning free will or as simply a question of whether individuals, as decision-makers, should be the central mechanism by which outcomes are explained in certain cases (Mahoney 2004: 468–473). As a result, this version of sociological realism has a quite clear understanding of what the epistemological logic of sociological theory and sociological explanation should be. Theory uncovers the basic properties of social life. A good explanation is parsimonious, transcendental, and testable. Objective explanations are thought to refer directly to a social reality whose existence is ahistorical, whose efficacy is determinative, and whose workings are mechanistic. Furthermore, theory becomes—or should become—increasingly unified. As Peter Hedstrom writes: A focus on mechanisms tends to reduce theoretical fragmentation. For example, we may have numerous different theories (of crime, organizations, social movements or whatnot) that are all based upon the same theory-­ within-­the-theory, that is, they all refer to the same set of mechanisms. (Hedstrom 2005: 28)

An excellent example of a strict realist sociological explanation is Randall Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998). In that massive work, he uses the single “general theory of interaction rituals” to explain the course of intellectual and philosophical developments throughout human history. Interaction ritual chains are defined in a strictly ontological fashion, separate from history and geographic location, as having certain “ingredients” (a group of at least two people, an overlapping focus of attention, a common mood or emotion) that in turn produce certain “social effects” (intensified mood, the development of moral obligations, and the increase in emotional energy). This theory is used, then, to explain and retroactively predict the substantive content of intellectual production, specifically which intellectuals will “be

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remembered,” (Collins 1998: 58) and the actual thinking of individual intellectuals themselves (“the predictability of thinking” (Collins 1998: 49) and “the inner lives of intellectuals” (Collins 1998: 51)). In his epilogue, Collins performs an intentionally Cartesian derivation of the “sociological cogito,” which forms the basis for his version of sociological realism (Collins 1998: 858–881). This follows upon Collins’ earlier idea of “translating all sociological concepts into aggregates of microphenomena” (Collins 1981: 987), with the addendum of “three pure macrovariables: the dispersion of individuals in physical space; the amount of time that social processes take…and the numbers of individuals involved” (Collins 1981: 989). Of course, there are strict realist explanations that place their ontological bets elsewhere. The generative and explanatory aspect of the social can be taken to be conscious and interested rational actors, system equilibrium, or class exploitation, to mention just a few candidates. But the epistemological principle of strict realism is the same: Ontological argument establishes the basic causal mechanism or causal structure, which is then linked through various bridging assumptions and scope conditions to its “testing” through evidence (Mahoney 2004: 465–468).5 What this epistemology gains in cleanliness, it loses in plausibility for many sociologists—there is no serious attempt inside strict realism to include contingency, agency, history, or culture in social explanation. Actors are at best important input-output mechanisms, and it becomes difficult to ask social-historical questions about the origins and social contexts of certain “mechanisms”—one can only ask if they are operative in certain cases, and with what initial conditions. All of the big Weberian questions for sociology—whence modern rationality? What is the internal logic of the historical shift between different types of legitimate domination? What is the role of worldviews in guiding action?—are answered in advance by the positing of universal mechanisms. Reflexive realism attempts to remedy these problems.

5  Perhaps the most sophisticated, careful, and philosophically rich version of strict realism—and one that answers directly and indirectly many criticisms advanced in this chapter and in Reed (2011)—is James Mahoney’s masterwork of philosophy of social science, The Logic of Social Science (2021), an extraordinary work of care and insight.

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2.3   Reflexive Realism In a series of theoretical essays, the historical sociologists George Steinmetz and Margaret Somers have distanced themselves from what I have here called strict realism and Somers calls theoretical realism (Steinmetz 1998, 2004; Somers 1998). They share with the intellectual movement of critical realism (which initially made inroads into British sociology before “crossing the Atlantic,” see especially Steinmetz 1998 and Gorski 2004) an expanded concern with history, agency, and culture. Thus Margaret Archer argues that society is “inseparable from its human components because the very existence of society depends in some way upon our activities” (Archer 1995: 1, see Vandenberghe 2005). Roy Bhaskar insists that society is “mediated through intentional human agency” (Bhaskar 1989b: 88), and argues consistently that social activities are “concept-­dependent,” and that “meanings cannot be measured, only understood” (Bhaskar 1989b: 50). This group of sociologists, other social scientists, and philosophers of social science6 has made in an explicit, metatheoretical fashion a set of arguments that characterize the emergent epistemological self-­ consciousness of many post-positivist researchers in sociology who remain committed to empirical research and theoretically aided sociological explanation. This sort of research rejects the scientistic ambitions of strict naturalism represented by thinkers like Hedstrom and Collins, preferring instead to mediate the new philosophy of science with the immanent knowledge claims in qualitative sociological methods and the substantive theoretical debates that derive from theoretically defined research traditions of social theory (Marxism, Weberianism, etc.). In this formation, the appropriation of realist philosophy of science is much more reflexive, in the sense that specifically sociological and historical problems are made to speak back to realist epistemology, and the possibility of naturalism is considered a problematic rather than an imperative. Some further textual evidence from the leading proponents of this emergent formation is instructive here. Steinmetz differentiates his own version of “critical realism”—derived from his reading of the philosopher Roy Bhaskar—from formal positivism, the “watered-down” positivism that is widespread within “U.S. sociology, 6  In particular Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson, and Justin Cruickshank; see Collier (2005: 344–355) for a brief discussion of the directions taken by critical realism from Bhaskar’s original interventions.

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psychology, and political science,” and from strict realism, which he calls theoretical realism. This last formation, Steinmetz notes, “deploys its causal entities within general covering laws and abhors conjunctural causation or contingency” (Steinmetz 1998: 173). Steinmetz does admit that Bhaskar’s critical realism shares certain similarities to strict scientific realists (something Hedstrom admits as well (2005: 24)), but then remarks that he finds in Bhaskar the capacity to consider more fully questions of epistemology for social science, as opposed to merely asserting a single strong ontology of the social and proceeding from there to mechanistic explanations. And indeed, there is a strong sense in Bhaskar’s writings and in the work of other critical realists that social reality is “emergent” or even “constructed” in some sense of these terms (Danermark et  al. 2002: 56–59; Cruickshank 2003: 103–113; Collier 1994: 138–151; Sayer 2000: 81–104). Furthermore, in Bhaskar’s work and in the theory and research of many other reflexive realists, a distinct ontological difference between the social and the natural is posited (Bhaskar 1989b: 44–65; Carter and New 2004: 1–20; Collier 1994: 137–261; Keat and Urry 1982: 228–250). Concepts are a part of social reality, and thus social structures “do not exist independently of the agents’ conceptions of what they are doing in their activity” (Steinmetz 1998: 181). So, Steinmetz writes with conviction that “the codetermination of social structure by social knowledge thus introduces an obligatory reflexivity into the social sciences” (Steinmetz 1998: 181). Furthermore, Steinmetz also argues for a “greater space-time specificity of social as opposed to natural mechanisms, such that even the underlying tendencies they ground may not be invariant across more than a limited period or territory” (Steinmetz 1998: 182) This is a key point in reflexive realism; it is not a coincidence that the split between strict and reflexive realism is most explicit—and extensively debated—in historical sociology (see Manicas 2006: 103–125, 171–185). In the philosophy of Bhaskar, this historicity of mechanisms is comprehended via the “irreversibility of ontologically irreducible processes, comparable to entropy in the natural sphere,” which “entails the necessity for concepts of qualitative rather than merely quantitative change” (Bhaskar 1989b: 46). All of this produces, in reflexive realism, an openness toward questions of historical contingency, a consideration of the role of knowledge and discourse in social life, and an engagement with theories of agency. Nonetheless, reflexive realism maintains a commitment to an ontologically stratified social reality which is divisible into real, actual, and empirical

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levels, and in which mechanisms can be found at the level of the real. It also thus maintains an approach to the social committed to the objectivity of social life—not in the sense of its universality or timelessness, but in the sense of its exteriority to both actors and investigators. For actors, mechanisms have an ontological reality which is unavoidable and constraining. For investigators, these same mechanisms provide the core referent for theory and explanation. This ontological position then demands as the sina qua non of investigation the fundamental “epistemological break” that Bourdieu described thus: Just as the physical sciences had to make a categorical break with animist representations of matter and action on matter, so the social sciences have to perform the epistemological break that can separate scientific interpretation from all artificialist or anthropomorphic interpretations of the functioning of society. The schemes used by sociological explanation have to be tested by being made completely explicit in order to avoid the contamination to which even the most purified schemes are exposed whenever they have a structural affinity with ordinary language schemes. (Bourdieu et al. 1991: 24; for a discussion of Bourdieu as a realist, see Potter 2000)

Though he has not participated in the recent epistemological debates concerning historical sociology, Michael Mann’s explanation of the French Revolution is a good example of reflexive realism in action, particularly since his work as a whole was the subject of such harsh criticism from the strict realists Kaiser and Hechter.7 Mann works from his well-known typology of power (ideological, economic, military, political) which does not dictate a singular, strict ontology in the sense favored by Collins and Hedstrom. Rather, it is a framework for studying, from the perspective of “power organizations” (Mann 1993: 6), the formations of different groups, at different historical moments: “Classes were not ‘pure’ but were also defined by ideological, military, and political forces” (Mann 1993: 167). Thus, Mann develops an account of five power actors who are

7  Kiser and Hecter originally wrote, “Mann’s explanation of variations in state autonomy, like Skocpol’s, is too incomplete and vague to yield precise empirical implications” (Kiser and Hechter 1991: 19).

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indigenous to that historical moment in French society: the specifically courtly old regime, the wealthy bourgeoisie, the petite-bourgeoisie centered on the sans-culottes of Paris, a highly religious peasantry obsessed with freedom from privilege, and an ideological elite that differed from the (later) Russian scientific Bolsheviks in a meaningful way: “they came out of the Enlightenment as a fusion of religion, science, philosophy, and the arts … There was an ideological causal chain from the church to Enlightenment academies to ‘Republic of Virtue’” (Mann 1993: 194). He then details the rising and declining relevance of these groups to the shape of the French state and society through the course of the revolution, and pays close attention to the contingencies, accidents, and “institutional particularities” therein. He thus synthesizes a great deal of evidence and theoretical debate about this single episode in history in terms of a schema that does not determine in an a priori manner the collective actors or the nature of their relationships. We are a long way, indeed, from transcendental mechanisms. On the other hand, Mann’s work pines for reduction and parsimony, a classic norm of scientific explanation; power organizations “determine the overall shape of society” (Mann 1993 6). In empirical work, the split between strict and reflexive realism may work itself out as a continuum, but we can now identify the opposing poles of the realist continuum, in terms of their position on fundamental issues in social science: mechanisms, ideology, the purpose of theory, and explanation.

Mechanisms Ideology/knowledge/ discourse Purpose of sociological theory Explanation

Strict realism

Reflexive realism

Transcendent (strong ontology) Beliefs and preferences of agents Social ontology

Historically and geographically specific Partially constitutive of social structure Social ontology

Primarily deductive, hypothesis testing

Intersection of theory and inductive historical work

2.4   The Structural Ambiguities of Reflexive Realism There is no disputing the pragmatic effectiveness of reflexive realism in freeing sociological theory and research from the chains of positivism or the imposed naturalism of strict realism, while retaining a commitment to empirical study and the development of sociological explanations. As

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Steinmetz writes in reference to critical realism, what I have termed reflexive realism “allows social scientists who are attracted to cultural theory and complex conjunctural forms of explanation to defend themselves against being lumped together into undifferentiated categories of ‘postmodernism’ or ‘eclecticism’” (Steinmetz 1998: 183). Furthermore, as Steinmetz notes in another article, the idea of concept-dependency as a unique feature of social relations forms a meeting point of critical realism, hermeneutics, and post-structuralism in the social sciences (Steinmetz 2005: 283). However, while the utility of reflexive realism for expanding the feasible plain of rigorous sociological research toward the problems of culture and historical contingency is undeniable, as a set of philosophical justifications for and descriptions of sociological argument, the reflexive realist position possesses certain deep ambiguities. I believe these ambiguities are “structural” in the sense that they are inherent to the intellectual project of providing a realist philosophy of social science, and thus supersede any given piece of reflexive realist theory or research. Ultimately, these ambiguities will not be only philosophically troubling. Rather, they put certain fetters upon both the capacity for sociology to produce empirical truth and sociology’s self-understanding. Here, I divide the core arguments of reflexive realism into three—ontological theory, the pragmatics of research, and the epistemic break—and take issue with each of them.8 2.5   Ontological Theory It is not clear that, if the mechanisms that reflexive realism looks for are space-time limited and concept-dependent, that the same transcendental-­ ontological arguments that justify the realist argument for natural science apply. What does it mean to do ontological theory if every formation that is examined and used in explanation is the product of historical contingency, dependent upon actors’ agency, and relative to its cultural context? How can one maintain the distinctions between the real, the actual, and the empirical as the foundation of social science if the nature of social reality is partially contingent upon cultural formulations? How does one maintain the transcendental-realist justification for scientific knowledge— the division of the world into intransitive referents of scientific theories and the transitive human-produced theories—when the objects of social inquiry are produced by social agents with subjectivity? 8

 Also see the criticisms in Magill (1994), Kemp (2005), and King (2004: 68–85).

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To avoid these awkward questions, reflexive realism makes a crucial elision. It equates the truism that a great deal of what the social scientist studies exists (or existed) separate from the individual social scientist’s own thought about it—or even from the more collective production of knowledge about it—with the division, made by scientific realism, between animate human action and inanimate nature. This latter is essential to the transcendental argument for the rationality of natural scientific experiment, but it is not an argument that holds for social science. This problem—equating the existence of the social outside of the investigator’s head with the ontological gap between thinking humans and a mechanistic natural world—runs through sociological realism like a red thread. To make this clear, it is useful to distinguish between the precise conception of ontological theory, according to which abstract theoretical terms directly reference social entities and their powers and properties, and the more general notion of ontological discourse or ontological claims-­making, according to which social scientific acts of writing attempt to describe or explain an aspect, piece, or part of social reality, to “say something about something.” Undoubtedly, the reflexive realists are correct to deny that post-positivism necessitates a solipsistic and relativistic sociology that can no longer make claims about the world. But this does not mean one should commit to the idea that sociological theory references ontological entities possessed of properties and causal powers. There might be other ways of saying something about the world, and of explaining social action!9 The realist justification of social science—even in its mediated, reflexive form—is based upon a philosophy that has outlined the conditions for knowledge from the perspective of the relation between the experimenting human subject and the ontologically secure natural object. This is in contradiction with the fundamental research interests of the reflexive realists—to make room in sociological explanations for culture, history, agency, and so on.

9  Reed (2011) and Martin (2011) agree on this anti–realist point, whatever the differences between those two texts. The latest iteration and consolidation of pragmatism in social theory may be thought of as further evidence in this regard; see Gross et al. (2022), especially the introduction and the article by Martin therein, which adroitly and subtly connects certain realist ambitions within sociology to certain ambitions to identify the rational and the real within contemporary social science.

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2.6   The Pragmatics of Research This recalls the fact that the realist philosophy of science is based not only upon the ideal of ontological theory but also upon a philosophical account of the pragmatic relationship between the researching subject and the researched object, which is to say, the pragmatics of scientific experimentation. Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the realist account of natural science is its ability to integrate interventionist arguments about the role of human agency in the production of scientific knowledge into an anti-conventionalist account of science as knowledge of and about the world. Scientific realism uses with particular acuity the distinction, made by Von Wright, between “doing things” and “bringing about things” (Von Wright 1971: 66), wherein the latter refers to the triggering of causal mechanisms and natural processes that proceed inanimately. Thus Bhaskar writes that “experimental activity in natural science not only facilitates (relatively) decisive test situations, it enables practical access, as it were, to the otherwise latent structures of nature” (Bhaskar 1979: 59, emphasis in original). The point here is that, though there may be all kinds of conventional, social, or “transitive” processes at work in terms of the formulation of theories of the world, and even in the decision that an experiment has ended (Galison 1987), the natural sciences have in their interaction with the natural world and their design of instruments, experiments, and material technologies a practical test as to the correctness of their theories— whether or not the experiment or technology works, which is to say, whether they allow the prediction and control of nature.10 The question, then, for reflexive realism, is how are we to philosophically justify social scientific knowledge without the help of the pragmatic guarantor of knowledge that is controlled experiment? Bhaskar recognizes explicitly that “the malleability achieved in the laboratory may provide an invaluable component in the process of scientific 10  Habermas describes this well in relating the “approach of the empirical–analytic sciences” to a “technical cognitive interest” (308, italics in original):

In controlled observation, which often takes the form of experiment, we generate initial conditions and measure the results of operations carried out under these conditions. Empiricism attempts to ground the objectivist illusion in observations expressed in basic statements … In reality basic statements are not simple representations of facts in themselves, but express the success or failure of operations. (308)

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discovery that the social sciences, in this respect, will be denied,” but goes on to write of critical realism that “our analysis of the relational and ontological limits will yield an analogue and a compensator respectively for the role of experimental practice in discovery” (Bhaskar 1979: 59). Before moving into Bhaskar’s proposed compensator, it is worth pausing to acknowledge that the search for the analogue and compensator for the pragmatics of experiment in natural science is a defining feature of the last 150 years of social theory. In almost all sophisticated, reflexive attempts to render social investigation scientific, some version of the “pragmatic out” whereby the correct interpretation or explanation of a given human phenomenon can be determined by action-in-the-world is developed. Among these, we could tally the Freudian principle that the correct interpretation of a dream is that which cures the patient, Popper’s call for “piecemeal social engineering” based on small experimental government programs (Popper 2002a: 58–64), and the long-standing Marxist tradition of praxis wherein the meeting point of revolutionary action, historical teleology, and theoretical analysis is the guarantor of truth.11 The reflexive realist argument represents a less grand, more strictly epistemological argument for a “pragmatic compensator” for social science. It is necessary, in this case, to go directly to the ur-text of reflexive realism, Bhaskar’s The Possibility of Naturalism, to comprehend the ambiguous logic of this argument, though it is referenced approvingly in many subsequent realist work (e.g., Sayer 2000: 18; Hartwig and Sharp 1999: 19; Engholm 1999: 25–26; Collier 1994; Steinmetz 1998). Bhaskar’s argument is that society already contains a flawed conception of its entities within itself—concepts exist in society, that describe social conditions to some extent before the scientific investigator arrives on the scene. These concepts provide compensation for the lack of experiment in social science. In Bhaskar’s original formulation, “just as a social science without a society is impossible, so a society without some kind of scientific, proto-­ scientific or ideological theory of itself is inconceivable … Now if one denotes the proto-scientific set of ideas P, then the transformational model 11  Though Bhaskar and other critical realists do have a close relationship to Marxism (Collier 1988; Creaven 2000; Joseph 2002; Brown et al. 2002) and have elaborated a sophisticated conception of ideology–critique (Bhaskar 1979: 83–101), and much has been written about Marx as a scientific realist avant la lettre (Keat and Urry 1982: 96–114; Benton 1977: 138–199), the “compensator” for the lack of experiment in social science claimed by reflexive realism can be considered in its specificity for a more precise notion of what is at stake for sociological explanation.

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of social activity applied to the activity of knowledge production suggests that social scientific theory, T, requiring cognitive resources, is produced, at least in part, by the transformation of P” (Bhaskar 1979: 61). How does this transformation P→T take place? For Bhaskar, it takes place through a theoretical act of “retroduction” which, he claims, is similar to the transcendental argument about the possibility of scientific knowledge.12 This requires some explanation. Just as realism argues philosophically from the existence of (intelligible, rational) scientific knowledge to the existence of a world about which scientific knowledge speaks, so sociological realism argues from the existence of conceptualizations of social relations to those social relations themselves. Collier cites this argument as “Roy Bhaskar’s central positive contribution … to the methodology of the social sciences: the idea that a great part of their theoretical work will consist in transcendental arguments from premises familiar from social practice” (Collier 1994: 166–167). Steinmetz also points to this argument about sociological argument—that it moves from proto-­ scientific concepts and phenomenological experiences to the generative structures that produce them—as providing the warrant for considering extant concepts within society as the compensator for the lack of controlled experiment (Steinmetz 1998: 181–183). Yet let us examine this argument a little more closely. Recall that the transcendental-realist argument for the existence of an ontologically deep (natural) world of causal processes depended on the intelligibility and rationality of scientific knowledge and experiment—otherwise we could argue from any sort of knowledge to what it implies exists (from belief in witchcraft and its practice [spell-casting] to the existence of demons, e.g.). But, as is clearly indicated by Bhaskar’s reference to the proto-scientific or even ideological nature of the extant concepts of social relations that exist inside society, these are by no means rational—indeed just the opposite. Bhaskar’s favorite example of this kind of argument in social science is Marx’s Capital, which he says, establishes “what must be the case for the experiences grasped by the phenomenal forms of capitalist life to be possible” (Bhaskar 1979: 65). In other words, it argues “retroductively” from social consciousness to social being. It is highly tendentious to suggest that this kind of argument in social science—a classic realm of theoretical 12  Specifically, Bhaskar argues that the transcendental argument from scientific knowledge to the conditions for its existence is a species in the larger genus of retroductive argument (Bhaskar 1979: 64).

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dispute—proceeds with the same formal, transcendental purity as the philosophical argument from scientific experiment to the conditions of its intelligibility/rationality, namely the existence of natural entities with causal powers. This analogy, upon which so much of sociological realism depends, between the transcendental argument for the possibility/ intelligibility/rationality of science and the sociological argument concerning the real mechanisms responsible for social concepts and phenomenal experience, is strained at best. 2.7   The Epistemic Break The problems become even more bewildering when we add the third key realist argument to the mix. Realism also insists—alongside the insistence that pseudotheories extant in society compensate for the lack of experimentation in social science—that its scientific theories represent a fundamental epistemic break from other forms of discourse that circulate in society, because it has a grasp of the ontology of the underlying structures of society which differentiates it from all other claims to knowledge. This is implicit in all of Bhaskar’s claims about the transformation of proto-­ scientific concepts into scientific ones.13 The problem, though, is that if the concepts of realism represent a fundamental epistemic break from other concepts circulating in society, how is it that these other concepts can serve as the pragmatic compensator for the lack of experiment in social science? What, exactly, is the process by which this transformation of proto-scientific concepts into true concepts of the real takes place?

13  Bourdieu is a classic realist in this sense, who “aims too make possible a science of the dialectical relations between the objective structures to which the objectivist mode of knowledge gives access and the structured dispositions within which those structures are actualized and which tend to reproduce them” (Bourdieu 1977: 3). His theory of practice is designed to accomplish the objective relegation of “native theories” to proto–scientific status, inside a schema of explanation guaranteed by real scientific theory: “the informant’s discourse owes its best–hidden properties to the fact that it is the product of a semi–theoretical disposition, inevitably induced by any learned questioning” (Bourdieu 1977: 18). For Bourdieu, then, “native theories are dangerous not so much because they lead research towards illusory explanations as because they bring quite superfluous reinforcement to the intellectualist tendency inherent in the objectivist approach to practices” (Bourdieu 1977: 19). Instead, Bourdieu expects his scientific theory of field and habitus to comprehend the objective, relational conditions that structure social action and to create the intellectual conditions under which knowledge of the reality of social life is possible.

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The answer, of course, is “theory.” But what Bhaksar’s example of Marx’s Capital shows so well is the contingency of sociological interpretation, rather than its necessity or ontological certainty. Can we seriously argue that formal argument will take us from actors’ conceptualizations of society to the scientific theory of the social reality that underlies these experiences and conceptualizations—especially when they might be false conceptualizations? It is rather the case that the “underlying reality” which we are all supposed to argue back to from the phenomenal forms it produces is constantly disputed and reinterpreted in the turmoil of social theory and social explanation. As John Hall remarks with regards to realism, “realists do not agree with each other about the reality (e.g., of ‘intelligence,’ ‘class conflict,’ ‘industrialization,’ ‘kinship’) that supposedly is knowable … realism is hard put to offer the social ontology that it would claim to warrant” (Hall 1999: 48).

3   From Realism to Interpretation I would propose a simple reason why ontological theory is inappropriate for sociology, the pragmatics of experiment cannot be replaced by a reliance on proto-concepts and retroductive argument, and the supposed epistemic break of scientific theory is belied by its own pluralist disputes about the nature of social reality. That is this: Both the social life under study and the construction of sociological theories and explanations of social action are shot through with problems of conceptualization and signification—that is, problems of meaning. What realism fails to acknowledge is that the “concept-dependency” of sociological explanations is not reducible to the role of proto-scientific or ideological theories that exist in society, which are then superseded by real scientific theory, or even to the role of “knowledge in society.” It is, rather, that the construction of sociological explanations is continually dependent on both meaning-in-society and upon sociological theory as itself a contested meaning-structure with a contingent relationship to the reality it studies—and neither of these can be reduced to some more real or elemental set of social forces. Sociological explanation emerges from the intersection of two active meaning systems, and thus cannot avoid the problem of interpretation—by ontology, pragmatics, or an illusory “scientific break.” Ultimately, the wager of reflexive realism is that all of the peculiar aspects of social life—culture and concept-dependency, historical open-­ endedness, agency, and the fact that social science is itself a social

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formation—can be integrated into the structure of sociological knowledge, but that, nonetheless, the fundamental ideal of scientific theory can be maintained. This ideal insists that while the “proto-scientific” concepts that exist in society are supposed to be of practical use in realist sociology, the ultimate goal is not only their supersession but also their denigration, as the true scientific theory of social life is developed. But at some point, this ontological point of view must be seen as itself an epistemic discourse, more of an artifact of scientific consciousness than an imperative of social reality. It may, in fact, be a highly unrealistic conception of what social science does, how it can hope to know its object of study, and how it can build explanations of social action. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to develop the outlines of an alternative set of justifications for sociological knowledge by working out from these criticisms of realism toward an alternative, interpretive approach to sociological explanation. It would of course be ideal to just point to a clear and distinct intellectual formation of “interpretivism” as a philosophy of social science, to contextualize and support the criticisms of realism I have developed above. But though many forms of discourse—philosophical and sociological—have contributed to an interpretive understanding of the nature of social science, “interpretivism” as a way to conceive the empirical responsibility and explanatory ambition of social science does not have the same clear status and recognition in philosophy and sociology as does “realism.”14 This issue is further complicated by the fact that critical realism has self-consciously articulated an appropriation of hermeneutics, beginning with Bhaskar’s critique of Winch and Wittgenstein (Bhaskar 1979: 169–203) and his naturalist appropriation of the idea of reasons as causes (Bhaskar 1979: 102–152), and carrying through to several recent attempts to articulate a realist approach to social symbols and discourse (e.g., Collier 1998; Nellhaus 1998; Fairclough et  al. 2002; Pearce and Woodiwiss 2005). Yet, at every turn, critical realists can be found attacking discourse-oriented or “constructivist” social theory as unable to comprehend and use for sociological explanation the ontological reality of social structure and social causation (e.g., Cruickshank 1998; Carter 1998; Patomaki and Wight 2000). 14  Both realism, as a philosophy of natural science, and critical realism, as a codified social theoretical perspective with consequences for sociological research, are relatively clearly delimited. See, for example, Critical Realism: Essential Readings (Archer et  al. 1998) or A Dictionary of Critical Realism (Hartwig 2007).

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It is not my intention or my desire to catalogue the (in some cases quite productive) tensions within realism as an intellectual movement, or to offer a final word on the strained, disputed, and thus highly reflexive way in which critical realism has maintained itself as “naturalist.”15 Rather, I want to explore how placing the interpretation of meaning at the center of the operations of the social sciences entails and enables a break from the most fundamental aspects of realism—strict or reflexive—and thus also promises an overcoming of the epistemic contradictions contained therein. As I indicate in footnotes along the way, each of the three pillars that make up what I call a “layered interpretive sociology” has been claimed, at one point or another, as the “hermeneutic aspect” of realism. My argument in the main text, however, is that these arguments entail an abandonment of the realist perspective for social science in favor of a thoroughgoing interpretive perspective that no longer claims that “the human sciences can be sciences in exactly the same sense, though not in exactly the same way, as the natural ones” (Bhaskar 1979: 203, emphasis in original, see also Steinmetz 1998: 181). The interpretive perspective rests on two basic premises. The first is an explicitly weak ontology of human nature and social life. Reflexive realism moved, to a certain degree, in this direction, by embedding its mechanisms historically. But interpretivism takes plasticity as the fundamental aspect of human nature and thus begins with a sense of the radical variance and historical arbitrariness of different social formations. The second premise is the idea, mentioned above, that social scientific research has as its most fundamental dynamic the intersection of two meaning-full social worlds—that of the investigator and the investigated. Thus the meaning-­ problems of social science always involve at least two systems of signification of variable coherence, whose construal of the world is arbitrary and conventional. To make knowledge claims, then, social science must work from the intersection of these two contexts to develop an increased comprehension of the world of the investigated (see also Chap. 1). How is this knowledge to be achieved? I would propose that social science consists of a layered set of interpretations, centered around the 15  It is a well–known anecdote that Bhaskar once commented that he could have titled his 1979 book “The Impossibility of Naturalism,” and indeed there are deep ambiguities in Bhaskar as to whether this reflexive naturalism is constituted by a fundamental ontological break between the natural and social worlds or by a recognition of the psychological and social worlds as emergent from, and thus irreducible to, their physical aspects.

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comprehension of social meaning. It takes as its starting point the subjective content of social action—the orientations of individual actors—which should be rendered intelligible and coherent in any attempt to construct sociological explanation. It then moves out from actors’ subjectivities to the supra-individual structures of meaning in which this action is embedded, and which actors use to frame their experiences and reasons for action—that is, culture. Because culture provides both the basis for individual subjects to render experience coherent and the frame through which more “objective” social structures come to influence action, and this step is the key pivot for any explanation. However, the structures of the social that appear to actors as external constraints would not be excluded from interpretive explanation. Rather, in addition to the consideration of how motivated actors perceive these structures, the externalities of social life would also be interpreted as referring to a set of meanings—as possessing their own historically specific logic of meaning. This is only a brief summary. I want to elaborate these points of view into the beginnings of a justificatory discourse for sociological knowledge by articulating how a sociology based around social meaning would avoid or amend the problematic aspects of the realist philosophy of social science. 3.1   From the Pragmatics of Experiment to the Intelligibility of Subjective Experience Let us begin with the idea of the pragmatics of experiment and the corresponding argument for the “pragmatic compensator” in social science. As I discussed above, the intelligibility/rationality of natural scientific experimentation is the starting point for the realist philosophy of natural science. In social science, “retroduction” from extant concepts and experiences in society to the social mechanisms that generate them is supposed to compensate for the fact that social science lacks experiment as a way to interact with its object of study. How would interpretive sociology remove social science from this deeply problematic analogy, and remedy its conception of itself? From an interpretive perspective, the “pragmatics of research” would be reconceived as the project, inherent in any attempt to explain social action, of rendering other subjectivities intelligible. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, and I would propose that several qualitative methodologies are designed explicitly for this task, including ethnography, participant observation, and in-depth interviewing. But the philosophical

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basis for this possibility is much more general. It is thus a key point for any interpretive sociology: The subjects of social science have the same essential capacities for coherent thought and intentional action as the investigator does. Thus, in so far as people act in a way that “makes sense” to themselves (or deviates in a discernable way from sensible action), it is possible for the investigator to come to an understanding of their action. This is the axiom of intelligibility, an argument for the weak rationality of subjectively oriented action. Thus Weber opened Economy and Society with an argument in which he posited rationality not as the basis for an ontology of human action, but rather as a heuristic starting point for interpretation (specifically, see Weber 1978: 6–7).16 The investigator makes an assumption of weak rationality as the basis of what Donald Davidson called “the principle of charity” for interpretation. What does this entail? It entails that the investigator orients herself to an understanding of the coherence and workability of her subjects’ motivations and assignments of meanings to the world.17 Thus rather than arguing “retroductively” from the experience of actors to the social conditions that, separate from this experience, created it, one develops a sense of the reasons actors had for actions. In arguing in this manner, furthermore, we work from the philosophical position that reasons are causes—but taken in an anti-naturalist direction.18 This idea—Davidson’s most radical claim, which separates him from most analytic philosophy and from realist social science—relies on the following two-step argument. The description of the reason for an action is logically independent from the description of the action. The 16  This is of course an extensively debated point, and the nature of Weber’s action typology—as well as the relationship between his conception of rationality and sociological methodology—is generally the subject of debate (e.g., Habermas 1985; Hollis and Lukes 1984; Kemp 2003). Here I mean only to focus on a very weak criterion of purposiveness and coherence as the methodological basis for the project of interpretation. 17  It is important to note, at this juncture, that Davidson has a primarily coherence–based theory of truth (Davidson 2006a). 18  Bhaskar, of course, devotes his chapter on human agency in The Possibility of Naturalism to the idea of reasons–as–causes. In a series of arguments, he insists that this disables verstehende sociology (Bhaskar 1979: 108–109) and furthermore, that “to grant causal status to reasons necessitates no exemption to (or break in) natural laws. Indeed intentional human actions may best be regarded as setting initial and boundary conditions for the operation for physical laws; and reasons, when they are efficacious, for the operation of neurophysiological ones” (Bhaskar 1979: 114). For another version of this, naturalist, “one world” thesis, see Searle (1997).

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redescription of one in terms of the other constitutes an explanation, which though it refers to a different class of causes—“mental events”— than do explanations in natural science, nonetheless has the same linguistic format. Thus when we redescribe the way a man was injured by saying “he was burned,” or when we redescribe a man turning left at a traffic light to get to Denver, we are, in both cases, providing causal explanations. However, because of the irreducibility of mental events to physical phenomena, and because of their reliance upon systems of meaning, such causal explanations cannot be grouped together or assimilated into scientific laws. Thus Davidson carefully separated causal explanation of actions from a predictive theory of action, fiercely denying the possibility of the latter.19 In entering into the intelligible reasons an actor has for acting, we can come to singular causal statements which explain his or her action, even if we cannot systematize these statements into an accurate predictive theory of his or her action, nor can we synthesize these reasons-as-causes into a singular metaphysical causal paradigm that integrates neuroscience, psychology, and sociology (e.g., Bhaskar 1979: 124–137). Davidson’s arguments, which are articulated in the abstract, individualist idiom of Anglophone analytic philosophy, fit in with the long-standing emphasis within hermeneutic and phenomenological social theory on the subjective experience of actors as a key to sociological explanation. One can find versions of this argument in Dilthey (1976), Schutz (1967), Berger and Luckman (1967), and Garfinkel’s conceptualization of the “routine grounds of everyday activities” (1964). But interpretive sociology has often shied away from the concept of cause for the very reason that it is associated with scientific generalization. Davidson’s point is exactly the opposite. The intelligibility of action is an essential ingredient to any attempt to comprehend and explain the human world, and efforts to systematize this intelligibility into sociological laws (e.g., Collins 1989) are artifacts of naturalistic ambition. The point of this—for the purposes of this chapter—is that the principle of charity in interpretation articulates a conception of social scientific “pragmatics” in direct contrast to the pragmatics of experiment and 19  Davidson writes, “Generalizations connecting reasons and actions are not—and cannot be sharpened into—the kind of law on the basis of which accurate predictions can reliably be made … what emerges, in the ex post facto atmosphere of explanation and justification, as the reason frequently was, to the agent at the time of action, one consideration among many, a reason … [a reason as a cause] provides a model neither for a predictive science of action nor for a normative account of evaluative reasoning” (Davidson 2006b: 33).

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interaction with the natural world that, for so many philosophers, retains the possibility of natural scientific rationality in a post-Kuhn era. Realist philosophy of science is, in this regard, based upon a philosophical articulation of the subject-object relation, while the interpretive perspective relies on the pragmatics of the subject-subject relation as its basis for social science. Yet far from the relativism this is sometimes taken to imply, this serves a basis for the possibility of a verstehende sociology, based upon the intelligibility of human subjectivity. 3.2   From Ontology to Locality Thus subjectivities, in their intelligibility, form one basis for the possibility for a hermeneutics of social action—we presuppose that, in a broad sense, what people do is “understandable” to them, and thus is potentially understandable to us. However, this proposition is dependent for its feasibility on the willingness of the investigator to recognize “context.” This is to say that the principle of hermeneutic charity whereby one gives the benefit of the doubt to the research subject—assuming that they, in some sense or another, are being coherent and intelligible—requires as a counterpoint the hermeneutic will of the interpreter, which is to say the willingness to do the work of immersion, excavation, or exegesis necessary to place the actions and utterances of other people in enough of a meaningful social context that their intelligibility can indeed be processed by interpretation.20 The idea of situating action in a meaningful social context is another point of departure from realism. It directly contradicts the realist idea that the purpose of theory is to produce social ontology—an ambition which repeats, in an epistemological register, the desire to contrast subjective,

20  Davidson notes, “the redescription of an action afforded by a reason may place the action in a wider social, economic, linguistic, or evaluative context” (Davidson 2006b: 28), but does not carry this insight forward. Concerning the relationship of reasons–as–causes to sociological analysis as a whole, Bhaskar makes exactly the inverse argument from that I am making here. He takes “reasons–as–causes” as implying the necessity of an ontological science of psychology, which then provides the “agentic” complement to his ontology of society and social structure (Bhaskar 1979: 102–152).

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contingent action with objective, determinant structure.21 The idea of a supra-individual set of meanings and symbolic structures which are neither contained in individuals intentions nor “objective” and external—in other words, the idea of culture—insists that the leap from action to external structure is theoretically misguided, and the realist argument for theory as social ontology is epistemologically naïve.22 For, from an interpretive perspective, the problem with social ontology as a theoretical goal is that it ignores how social ontology as social fact in the world is continually worked up through the frames of culture, which are arbitrary and conventional. Thus the very nature of the social in a given time and space—essential, surely, for sociological explanation—requires the work of meaning-interpretation. The relationship of action and structure cannot be established in advance, and mechanisms cannot be posited outside of the local comprehension of structures of social meaning. Thus as Clifford Geertz wrote, “the thing to ask about a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid is not what their ontological status is … but what their import is: what it is, ridicule or challenge, irony or anger, snobbery or pride, that, their occurrence and through their agency, is getting said” (Geertz 2000a: 10). Ontologies of the social do not make good sense—or at least, not good explanations of social action—because structures of the social are separated from the investigator not by the subject-object divide but by the chasm of meaningful difference that separates the investigator-subject, suspended in the meaningful world of sociological theory, from the investigated-­subject, suspended in culture. Both are subject to the arbitrary and conventional nature of meaning as a system of signification. Thus when we examine the collective frames through which subjects work to make the social world intelligible, in “reading” culture as an ensemble of texts, or in comprehending the historical trajectories and labored 21  In this regard, it is illuminating to examine the distance that the originator of scientific realism, Rom Harré, put between himself and the social scientific realism of Bhaskar and critical realism more generally. Harré strongly discourages the realist aim to treat social structures as entities with causal power—in other words, to theorize social structure ontologically. This has become evident in many of his recent articles, but see in particular the symposium in volume 5, issue 1 of the European Journal of Social Theory, “Rom Harre on Social Structure and Social Change” (May and Williams 2002; Harre 2002a, 2002b; Carter 2002; Strydom 2002). 22  Of course, Bhaskar and other realists argue extensively that they take fully into account the cultural or linguistic “context” of actions. In Bhaskar, however, this comes in an explicitly epistemological, not ontological register, wherein he admits the necessity of cultural context for the investigator to properly identify an action (Bhaskar 1979: 108).

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reproduction of social forms, we are required to address ourselves to locality, in the sense articulated by Geertz: “an attempt to come to terms with the diversity of the ways human beings construct their lives in the act of leading them” (Geertz 1983a: 16) Locality is not a geographic measure but an analytic imperative to consider the ideosyncracies of meaning and their consequences for social action. We cannot assume we know, in full and in advance, the form and content of social life, hypothesized in theory and tested in the field—we have to tentatively use our theories to begin to interpret a social space, shuttling back and forth between our abstractions and the evidence of meaningful social experience. Thus, both Geertz’s thick description of the Balinese Cockfight (Geertz 2000b) and Michel Foucault’s sweeping reconstruction of the “epistemes” of classical and modern thought (Foucault 1970)23 constitute exercises in  locality—they are attentive to historical and cultural difference in their effort to reconstruct patterns of meaning which explain certain behaviors. The point is to respect the autonomy of meaning-formations as possessing their own logic, and thus as requiring interpretation for actions to be placed by the investigator in their proper context. In doing so, we examine the contingent creation of social ontology through structures of signification and their institutionalization on the ground. If the ontological is locally determined by meaning, the goal of sociological explanation is to get inside the various layers of social meanings. This requires the tools of theory, mobilized not to achieve an epistemic break with the meanings of the social world, but rather to bridge the gap of meaning, and articulate how certain actions, done for certain reasons, are part of a larger whole, which actors may or may not see. Thus from the interpretive perspective, sociological theory is not ontological in the sense of establishing a unified, abstract account of the fundamental mechanisms according to which social life works—or even in the more modified sense of using the distinctions between real, actual, and empirical to articulate the underlying mechanisms for a given historical period. It is true that sociological explanations are ontological in the sense 23  Here, we must differentiate the early work of Foucault (the “archeological” Foucault) from his middle period (the “genealogical” Foucault). The early Foucault retained the concept of experience (Foucault 1988), deciphered and decoded meanings based on extensive empirical evidence, and attested to the possibility of a study of public discourse as an autonomous meaning–formation (Foucault 1994: xvii).

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of making truth claims about aspects of the social world. But theory does not gather together a set of social entities, expressed in the abstract, whose powers of causality are triggered when the conditions are right. Rather, sociological theory is the highly reflexive and open cultural frame for research activities, a set of conceptual tools that aids the process by which the investigator comes to comprehend the meaning-worlds of others. The actual reconstruction of how these meanings work themselves out in a given set of social structures and social actions under examination must, while using theory as a guide, always reference the meaningful particularities of the case itself—the epistemic orderings that all social objects always already have. This perspective on what sociological theories are and do resonates with certain existent aspects of sociological research and debate that cannot be accommodated by the scientific-realist model, no matter how sophisticated it becomes. First, it makes sense of the pluralistic and free-­ floating way in which research uses theories. The common question “what theory are you going to use?” grates upon the scientific-realist ambition to get sociology out of its “pre-paradigmatic” stage and into the stage of “normal science.” Sociological theories seem to have more lives than either a scientific norm of falsifiability (Popper 2002b) or the realist contention for “judgmental rationality” (Bhaskar 1979) would suggest, and seem to coexist in opposition to each other continuously in a way that is not entirely resolvable by reference to empirical evidence—or even to presuppositional logic. Social scientific research is always, it seems, in revolutionary upheaval. And yet, these theories do not need to resolve the revolution into a single bureaucratic structure to continue to “develop,” or to continue to be useful to researchers. Indeed, sociologists seem to have lost patience with theoretical Napoleons. This is not because sociological theories are at their root only normative commitments—a contention often made in the anti-science understanding of social theory (e.g., Seidman 2003), and frequently lampooned by strict realists (e.g., Hedstrom 2005: 12–14). Rather, it is because (good) sociological theory does not identify social entities in an ontological manner, but mediates the meaning-worlds of the investigator and the investigated. And so, the ultimately arbitrary and conventional nature of the meanings at work in the context of the investigated subjects means that for sociological theory to do its job, it must accept an unending plurality of “theories of” (theories of civil society, of scientific rationality, of colonialism…), and a great deal of reflection upon itself and its own norms and

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practices (metatheory and methodology), so as to prime the investigator with the tools to mediate the chasm of meaning between the investigator and investigated. That this is the ultimate task of theory suggests that it is not a break from the world of the investigated, but a connection and comprehension of it, which is the definitive epistemic posture of interpretive investigation and explanation. 3.3   From the Epistemic Break to the Depth Hermeneutics of Social Formations In realism, the relationship between investigator and investigated is that of the “epistemic break.” But if theory is used in the manner suggested above—not to retroduct from phenomenology to ontology, but to redescribe actions in terms of their reasons, and to situate reasons and motivations in the holistic terms of patterns of discourse—then the ideal of an epistemic break also must be discarded in favor of a sense of the tension between an outsider’s and an insider’s meaningful experience that produces new knowledge—between what Geertz called “experience-distant” and “experience-near” concepts (Geertz 1983b: 57). This means that sociological knowledge is not dependent upon an “epistemic break” but rather a depth—investigation of meaning, an exegesis of intention and context which renders subjects intelligible and cultures comprehensible. In realism, of course, the epistemic break relies upon scientific ontology for its stable certainty. The classic trope of sociological irony—“they know not what they do”—is achieved through reference to the separate structures of the social, scientifically conceived. Thus, for example, to gain the leverage of a “structural perspective,” Skocpol dismisses the content of ideology: “it cannot be argued … that the cognitive content of the [revolutionary] ideologies in any sense provides a predictive key to either the outcomes of the Revolutions or the activities of the revolutionaries … ideologically oriented leaderships in revolutionary crises have been greatly limited by existing structural conditions, and severely buffeted by the rapidly changing currents of revolutions” (Skocpol 1979: 170–171; for a clear explication of Skocpol as a realist, see Gorski 2004: 22–28, esp. 27). In interpretivism, on the contrary, the intentions and constructions of actors are placed into a coherent web of supra-individual meaning. This can include both the apprehension of codes and narratives—cultural frames—which are not immediately obvious to actors, and an

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understanding of objective structures or externalities. But constraining, external structures are not conceived of ontologically, or mechanistically. Rather, those structures that appear to actors as external are considered as objectivized structures, which thus have their own historical trajectory and must be interpreted as presupposing their own meaningful logic. No matter how objective—in the sense of external, unchangeable, and coercive— a set of social structures appear to the actors immersed in them, from a strict epistemological perspective they are artifices of human creation, built on the material-biological substrate of human existence, dependent in the last instance upon meaning for their shape. Reflexive realism, of course, recognizes “social constructionism” in this sense. Yet it fails to see that this requires even more interpretive work to comprehend the meaningful logics of externalized structures, and their interactions with the contested meanings of culture, which mediate the access of acting subjects to their external constraints. Thus the social sciences require a continual investigation of the meaning to which objectifications refer, that is, an analysis of the internal, meaningful relations between externalities and signification. The workings of externalities must also be considered in their radical difference, historical flux, and arbitrary and conventional construction. This was Wilhelm Dilthey’s fundamental argument, taken from Hegel, about the objective aspects of social life. Dilthey insisted that though “structural systems” (Dilthey 1976: 192) are “embedded in the context of nature” (Dilthey 1976: 191), they nonetheless demand interpretation, for “this objectification is always related, in understanding, to experience in which the person [the investigator] becomes aware of his own inner life and capable of interpreting that of others … every fact is man-made, and, therefore, historical” (Dilthey 1976: 192). Thus in considering these aspects of social structures (markets, political hierarchies, bureaucracies…), the task of the investigator is still an interpretive one, for two reasons. First, though actors may not explicitly assign meaning to a given set of “externalities,” in so far as these externalities are ultimately dependent upon human action and are artifices of human creation, they presuppose and enact a meaningful logic of some sort—and the investigator must reveal this. And second, when such objectivized structures intersect with subjectivity, this occurs through the grid of culture. Interpretivism thus insists on the historicity and cultural specificity of externalities.

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3.4   Sociological Interpretation: Some Examples To carry home these three points, in the remaining space I would like to consider some examples of work in interpretive sociology, which form a direct counterpoint to realist research. The overarching point of interpretivism is that the “objects” of social scientific research should be seen less as objects requiring ontological theorization than as fabrications of human action which have an “inner,” meaningful logic to them. The classic case of this is “culture,” the centerpoint of interpretive explanations, which defies ontological categorization, as many commentators have noted.24 But I have also made the point that the “objective” structures of the social should be studied, in all of their efficacy and constraining capacity, from an interpretive perspective as well. Thus let us take up the classical sociological objects of “market” and “class,” not to deconstruct them in to nothingness, but rather to show how an interpretive approach to them produces a quite distinct form of theorization and explanation than does the standard realist approach which the mere mention of these terms usually evokes. We can use an example from economic sociology to make clear the interpretive argument for the historical and cultural specificity of externalities. A classic example of a “non-cultural” structure is a market, defined simply as a situation “in which goods and services are sold to customers for a price that is paid in money (a generalized medium of exchange)” (Fligstein 1996: 658). Fred Block has made clear the way in which economic sociology, and in particular his historical approach to economic sociology, differentiates itself from the more naturalistic approach to markets of neoclassical economics. The latter rests upon two central theoretical assumptions. First, that “the economy is an analytically separate realm of society that can be understood in terms of its own internal dynamics” (Block 1990: 21). And second, “the assumption of that individuals act 24  I take this to be the central point of the discussion surrounding Ian Hacking’s Foucaultian studies, and his theoretical essays (Hacking 2002), wherein he introduces the specifically oxymoronic and ironic concept of historical ontology, intended to upend the idea that philosophy can serve as a source for ideas that stand outside history. Thus he writes that “Historical ontology is about the ways in which the possibilities for choice, and for being, arise in history. It is not to be practiced in terms of grand abstractions, but in terms of the explicit formations in which we can constitute ourselves … whose trajectories can be plotted … Historical ontology is not so much about the formation of character as about the space of possibilities for character formation that surround a person, and create the potentials for ‘individual experience’” (Hacking 2002: 23).

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rationally to maximize utilities” (Block 1990: 22).25 To build a theory this way, one must assume that “markets,” in so far as they do exist, are ontologically all of the same class, and can be theorized in this manner. Block takes precisely the opposite approach, not denying the existence or efficacy of markets, but rather reformulating the concept of the “embeddedness” of markets in social relations (Granovetter 1985) to theorize their constant dependence upon highly variable “background conditions.” These include legal rules and the manner in which they are enforced, non-­ market work produced by women or slaves, and “the beliefs held by economic actors” (Block 1990: 31). Thus, he writes that “while there is a temptation to imagine that these beliefs are simply a reflection of self-­ interest, the reality is that they can shape perceptions of self-interest themselves” (Block 1990: 31). The point is that the given logic of a given market depends upon such historically contingent “background factors” to the point that referring to markets in an ontological manner in abstract scientific theory is less than useful. He gives the example of the relation between accounting practices and markets: …the core distinction economists make between investments and current expenses is inherently problematic … many specific expenditures combine purposes—they are oriented both to long-term growth and to achieving immediate objectives, and there is no obvious way to measure the weight of these two components. Nonetheless … Accountants must have a rule for deciding on such cases … Since they cannot capture the actual combination of purposes in the specific expenditure, however, whatever rule they decide on will ultimately have an element of arbitrariness. (Block 1990: 32)

“Systems of accounting,” he continues, “are built up out of these somewhat arbitrary conventions, which serve to create the appearance of certitude out of ambiguity and complexity” (Block 1990: 32–33). The consequences of the logic of a given accounting convention for government accounts and the lives of millions can be quite significant. Yet, Block points out, “It is only very rarely that anyone questions these findings or examines the conventions that might have produced that particular ‘social fact’” (32–33).

25  There are significant debates in economics about whether these assumptions are ontological or instrumental, but it is indisputable that neo–classical economics uses a naturalistic theory of markets.

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Block’s anti-ontological theory of markets could hardly be accused of reducing economic action or market structure to a different “object”— social structure, culture, networks, or whatever. It is rather that his conceptual method—the regime of justification that sits behind his capacity to make explanatory claims, and his ability to clearly recognize the reality of markets and their consistent efficacy over large swaths of space and time— is markedly different than the realist mode which is dependent upon the positing of entities with properties. Thus when he endeavors to explain a set of social actions or even a large-scale social transformation (e.g., from industrialism to postindustrialism), he comprehends markets as constructed and construed by actors with variable subjectivity and possessed of cultural frames of reference. As a result, his account of markets unveils the historical specificity and contingent dimension to these externalities, whose efficacy comes not from their inherent “social being” but rather the strictness with which actors carry their construction and maintenance forward. If markets have been a favorite reference point for strict realists, then perhaps “class” has been a meeting point for the reflexive realism. The theorization of the ontology and ideology of class formation shows all of the expanded concerns with history and culture that mark the reflexive break from strict realism, if also the tendency to return to a core set of mechanisms, embedded in a single theoretical narrative, in explaining class formation (Somers  1992, 1998). Here, too, there is an interpretive response, which can exemplify all three of the interpretive points I made earlier—the comprehension of subjectivity, the turn to locality and culture, and the understanding of externalities as historically and culturally specific. In Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848, William Sewell, Jr. proposes a new explanation of the emergence of class consciousness and worker solidarity in nineteenth-­ century France. We also find in his work the full-blown project of interpretive explanation.26 Sewell takes the culture of the workers—the structures of meaning that code their understandings of labor and solidarity—as his core concern. But he also renders individual subjectivities intelligible and 26  This is in contrast to Sewell’s paper “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation” (Sewell 1992), which takes on a much more ontological, realist cast in attempting to establish the fundamental relationship between structure and action. But see, crucially, the extended concluding chapter of Sewell’s Logics of History (2005).

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carefully examines the historicity and meaningful aspects of the externalities (structural obstacles) navigated by the French workers. The explanation is thus centered upon the reconstruction of a historically situated meaning structure—the “corporate idiom”: “Derived from the usages of corporations of the old regime and worked out in opposition both to the claims of the masters and to the proprietary individualism imposed by the state, this corporate idiom expressed and informed the workers’ aspirations for a moral community of the trade” (Sewell 1980: 194). Sewell traces both the origins and internal evolution of this meaningful logic—codified and executed originally in the guilds of the old regime and eventually in the workers revolution of 1848. And thus it was “by developing a corporate vocabulary that workers found their own voice in the early years of the nineteenth century” (Sewell 1980: 194). Yet Sewell refuses a singular or monolithic account of the corporate idiom. At each step in his explanation, he considers how the subjects he is studying made sense of their world by combining, managing, and merging different idioms. Thus he shows in detail how the Parisian sans-culottes combined “revolutionary sentiment and support for corporations” (Sewell 1980: 93), such that even the most radical calls for the abolition in privilege (in the cahiers de doleances) maintained the necessity of corporations. Sewell also examines how the workers’ corporate idiom, and the workers consciousness, intersected with a key externality—the law.27 Yet, as he compellingly shows, this externality has its own meaningful referent—Enlightenment liberalism.28 The power of Sewell’s interpretation cannot be traced to his giving up nomothetic social science for the ideographic position of the historian. It is rather that by identifying the “corporate idiom” as a meaning-structure, he has moved beyond this opposition, as Weber did in his reconstruction of the spirit of capitalism as a “historical individual” (Weber 2002: 13–37). He eschews neither history nor theory: Again and again, Sewell explains events by drawing together meanings and motivations with theoretical 27  For example, he writes, “what was a regulation for the good of trade to workers was a violation of the liberty of industry in the eyes of the law” (Sewell 1980: 194). 28  Thus, for example, Le Chapelier’s law of 1791, which directly attacked the continuing existence of corporations (after this issue having been passed over in 1789), relied for its passage not on an anti–worker sentiment, but on the idea that “no intermediary body could stand between the individual—now armed with his natural rights—and the nation—now the repository and guarantor of natural rights and the sole arena for the exercise of public will” (Sewell 1980: 91).

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acuity. Thus he explains a set of social events, not by hypothesizing and testing a parsimoniously designed set of social mechanisms, but rather by inferring the structures of social meaning that construed workers’ identities, interests, and motivations (the corporate idiom) and those meanings that, objectified in various social institutions, structured their field of opportunities (Enlightenment liberalism, particularly its legal variant). These meaningful logics are examined in their difference and historical locality, resulting in the central counterintuitive finding of the book: contrary to the assumptions of many twentieth-century leftists, nineteenth-­ century French workers’ socialism was derived from a pre-Enlightenment form of discourse and practice: the guilds.

4  Conclusion As epistemological positions on the justification of sociological knowledge and the mode by which sociological explanations are constructed, realism and interpretivism have one key similarity. Both of them reject the empiricist argument that observable events and constant conjunctions are as far as we can go, philosophically speaking, in claiming rigorous knowledge of the world—social or natural. Instead, they both insist on the possibility of comprehending that which must be inferred from what is observed and recorded as fact—indeed it is what cannot be surmised by induction that, in both cases, renders sociological explanation possible. Both, furthermore, rely on social theory to accomplish this leap beyond the empirical to that which enables us to explain social action. Thus both realism and interpretivism are “depth” epistemologies, rejecting both the positivist and postmodern contentions that interpretation beyond the “surface” of social life is metaphysical nonsense. However, realism accomplishes this turn to depth via the transfer of an ontological philosophy of natural science to the social realm. The prescriptive reorientation of theory and explanation which results has certain essential ambiguities and problems, as I have tried to show. Ontological theory (perhaps attractive because of the way that it saved the rationality of natural science against its attackers) is inappropriate for the social realm because of the role of meaning in the construction and execution of social life—the arbitrary and conventional nature of signification renders ontological theory moot at worst, useful pragmatically via mediation at best, and explanations necessarily local. The endless search for a pragmatic compensator to scientific experiment also, I argue, distorts any theoretical

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account of sociological research. Instead, I suggest, the continual need to make sense of other subjects—the requirement of hermeneutic charity— should be the basis for any account of research pragmatics. Finally, realism’s naturalism, no matter how reflexive, invests it in an epistemic break as foundational of social scientific knowledge. Instead, I suggest that even the most external, “objective” structures should be comprehended from the “inside-out,” in terms of their historicity and cultural specificity. This radical interpretive project—to understand the meaningful logic of externalities—renders the basis for an epistemic break untenable, since even those structures which confront actors as coercive forces, or which work without actors’ conscious knowledge, are to be interrogated and interpreted in a hermeneutic process of comprehension. The ultimate goal of this interpretive shift is to reframe the possibility of sociological knowledge in a way that recognizes the cultural turn and its related intellectual movements as empirical accomplishments in the development of explanations of social actions in history. From an interpretive perspective, sociological inquiry requires that the investigator get inside the inner meanings by which his or her subjects live their lives. The production of knowledge about other social actors always takes place via a meaningful connection between the investigator’s subjectivity and those that he studies. This means that explanations are necessarily more local, and depend upon theory to enable the comprehension of cultural difference so that actions can be explained as part of a larger, meaningful whole. That these wholes can stretch far and wide, and be executed with striking and fearful precision, does not remove them from the realm of human creation, and thus of human mind and experience. Thus their investigation cannot, and should not, mirror the investigation of nature. For most of its history, the naturalist imperative has been a burden sociology could neither bear nor throw off. But this historical trajectory, like others, is produced by social actions, and so it is subject to contingency, and open to reinterpretation.

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Carter, Bob. 1998. ‘Dangerous Phrases’: Realism, ‘Race’ and Social Science. Alethia 1 (2): 5–8. ———. 2002. People Power: Harre and the Myth of Social Structure. European Journal of Social Theory 5 (1): 134–142. Carter, Bob, and Caroline New, eds. 2004. Making Realism Work: Realist Social Theory and Empirical Research. New York: Routledge. Cartwright, Nancy. 1983. How the Laws of Physics Lie. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cohen, Ira. 1989. Structuration Theory: Anthony Giddens and the Constitution of Social Life. Hampshire: Macmillan. Coleman, James. 1986. Social Theory, Social Research, and a Theory of Action. American Journal of Sociology 91 (6): 1309–1335. Collier, Andrew. 1981. Scientific Realism in the Human World: The Case of Psychoanalysis. Radical Philosophy 29: 8–18. ———. 1988. Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester. ———. 1994. Critical Realism. New York: Verso. ———. 1998. Language, Practice, and Realism. In Social Constructionism, Discourse, and Realism, ed. Ian Parker, 47–58. London: Sage. ———. 2005. Philosophy and Critical Realism. In The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences, ed. George Steintmetz, 327–345. Duke University Press. Collins, Randall. 1981. On the Microfoundations of Macrosociology. American Journal of Sociology 86 (5): 984–1014. ———. 1989. Sociology: Proscience or Antiscience? American Sociological Review 54 (1): 124–139. ———. 1998. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cortois, Paul, ed. 1995. The Many Problems of Realism. Tilburg University Press. Creaven, Sean. 2000. Marxism and Realism: A Materialistic Application of Realism in the Social Sciences. New York: Routledge. Cruickshank, Justin. 1998. Postmodern Politics: Rorty on the Self, Agency, and Liberalism. Alethia 1 (2): 2–4. ———. 2003. Realism and Sociology: Anti-foundationalism, Ontology and Social Research. New York: Routledge. Danermark, Berth, Mats Ekstrom, Liselotte Jakobsen, Ch. Jan, and Karlson. 2002. Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences. New York: Routledge. Davidson, Donald. 2006a. A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge. In The Essential Davidson, 225–238. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006b. Actions, Reasons and Causes. In The Essential Davidson, 23–36. New York: Oxford. de Regt, Herman C.D.G. 1995. Representing the World By Scientific Theories: The Case for Scientific Realism. Tilburg University Press.

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———. 2002b. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Routledge Classics. Potter, Gary. 2000. For Bourdieu, Against Alexander: Reality and Reduction. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 30 (2): 229–246. Putnam, Hilary. 1975. Mathematics, Matter, and Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1978. Meaning and the Moral Sciences. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1981. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1983. Realism and Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1987. The Many Faces of Realism. La Salle, IL: Open Court Press. Quadagno, Jill, and Stan J. Knapp. 1992. Have Historical Sociologists Forsaken Theory? Thoughts on the History/Theory Relationship. Sociological Methods of Research 20 (4): 481–507. Rabinow, Paul, and William M.  Sullivan. 1988. Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Reed, Isaac Ariail. 2011. Interpretation and Social Knowledge. University of Chicago Press. Salmon, Wesley. 1984. Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1989. Four Decades of Scientific Explanation. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Sayer, Andrew. 2000. Realism and Social Science. London: Sage. Schutz, Alfred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Searle, John. 1997. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press. Seidman, Steven. 2003. Contested Knowledge: Social Theory Today. 3rd ed. New York: Blackwell Limited Publishing. Sewell Jr., William. 1980. Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1992. A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. American Journal of Sociology 98: 1–29. ———. 2005. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. University of Chicago Press. Sica, Alan. 2004. Why ‘Unobservables’ Cannot Save General Theory: A Reply to Mahoney. Social Forces 83 (2): 491–501. Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions. New  York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1994. Reflections on Recent Scholarship about Social Revolutions and How to Study Them. In Social Revolutions in the Modern World, ed. Theda Skocpol, 301–343. New York: Cambridge University Press. Somers, Margaret. 1992. Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation. Social Science History 16(4): 591–630. 

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PART II

Mechanisms in Dispute

CHAPTER 4

Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology Daniel Hirschman and Isaac Ariail Reed

1   The Historical and Variable Ontology of the Social It is a basic principle of sociological theory that social things (from organizations to identities to racial groups to states) are real because they are constructed. In other words, the reality of social things is a function of the work done to produce and sustain them. An important corollary to this principle is the historicity of social kinds. The ontology of the social is

D. Hirschman (*) Department of Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] I. Ariail Reed Department of Sociology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Ariail Reed, Sociology as a Human Science, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18357-7_4

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historically variable; the kinds of social things that exist now did not always exist and may not always exist in the future.1 Stated as such, this argument may seem clear enough, if controversial. Yet when we examine examples of the invention and diffusion of individual agency, the emergence of modern states, or of the construction of scientific facts and the techniques associated with them, we quickly see that, although sociologists in various subfields have long studied the coming into existence of particular social kinds, entities, or objects, social theorists have paid relatively little attention to the structure and logic of such studies.2 We propose the label “formation stories” to characterize these studies, as they follow the formation of new social kinds as a historical process. Drawing on insights from historical sociology and science studies, we argue that formation stories offer explanatory, causal claims. Although formation stories should be understood as causal, they fit poorly into the dominant modes of causal argument in sociology, which can be collectively characterized by the metaphor of “forcing.” Forcing cause claims trace the movements of pre-defined objects into pre-defined outcomes and argue that certain objects or interactions cause other objects to realize a certain outcome. In contrast, formation stories explain how social things come to be stable enough to force or be forced.3 Thus, formation stories establish historical boundaries beyond which forcing cause claims will likely not travel. By characterizing formation stories as causal, but not as mechanisms, treatments, or robust associations, we can begin to produce new criteria and methods for making formation claims more rigorous. Our aim here is thus similar to Mahoney (2000), who attempts to clarify the logic of path 1  Much of what is sometimes called metatheory and sometimes called ontology creates an account of the basic entities that exist in the social world, with the implicit or explicit claim that these entities are transhistorical (e.g., calculating human actors, microinteractions, etc.). This is often opposed by an approach to theory and metatheory that insists on its “downward shift” into history, culture, etc. (Alexander and Seidman 2008). Our goal here is to turn this opposition between theory as basic ontology and theory as history into a more rigorous understanding of how historical changes in social kinds bound abstract theoretical work in sociology, and thus should themselves be subject to empirical study and theoretical analysis. 2  This inattention has been accompanied by a lot of writing at cross-purposes and conceptual controversy, for example, the extended definitional debate about the “agency” or “causal power” of nonhumans in Actor Network Theory (see Sayes 2014 for a review). 3  Recent work in scientific realism has emphasized the way entities have “causal powers” (Groff and Greco 2013). In this language, the formation of stable objects could be referred to as the invention or reshaping of an object or kind’s causal powers.

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dependence arguments. We argue that formation stories are an important class of sociological argument with their own peculiar characteristics and which thus necessitate further theoretical and methodological reflection. By treating formation stories as causal accounts, we argue that such stories have been simultaneously common in sociology and commonly misunderstood. On the one hand, they have been written off (or occasionally, in bouts of epistemic counterculturalism, valorized)4 as merely descriptive, rather than explanatory claims. On the other, this dismissal has left them underscrutinized, because formation stories have not been subjected to the rigorous evaluations, careful skepticism, and extended debates that other causal claims have faced. We synthesize theoretical insights from varied sources, including historical sociology and science studies, to argue that although formation is a messy historical process, we can discern some important lines of commonality across formation stories. We highlight the importance of both sociotechnical assemblages and actors’ own understandings of the social world in the process of formation. This synthesis helps to clarify the distinction between formation stories, which trace historical shifts in the sets of objects actually existing in the social world, and the more typical social scientific analysis of concepts (cf. Sartori 1970; Goertz 2006). Social science has long had a tradition of examining “concept formation” and the construction of the object of analysis by the investigator, with a particular interest in both the intellectual origins of and scope conditions for the application of well-defined concepts (cf. Somers 1995).5 Furthermore, it is also well known that the work of social scientists may itself help to constitute or reconstitute social kinds. However, our overall argument here is that in formation stories, the mode of inquiry is historical rather than definitional. Thus, the conceptual work we propose to do in this chapter would point less toward debates about the definition of democracy as an analytical object in contemporary political sociology, and more towards debates about the emergence of democracy as an actually existing 4  The clearest and loudest of these voices is Andrew Abbott, who argues that “we who like to imagine ourselves responsible for the public’s knowledge of society despise description” (Abbott 2001: 121). See also Abbott 2007. 5  Though the idea that some sort of analytical/theoretical work is done to construct an object of empirical analysis can be found across the social sciences, sociology in particular traces this dynamic and the impact of historical work on sociological theory to Max Weber’s (1949) “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy.” See Outhwaite (2010); Oakes (1990); Ringer (1997); and Bourdieu et al. (1991).

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social kind. Put another way, this article itself is a work of conceptual analysis of the concept of “formation stories.” The exemplars we analyze, however, are empirical works that trace historically the formation of new social kinds, not works of conceptual definition and operationalization. Clarifying our understanding of formation stories as causal accounts offers three interrelated benefits. First, we hope our analysis will lead to better formation stories, and particularly, better criticism and evaluation of the causal logic of such arguments. Second, by foregrounding the role of formation stories, we shed light on the limitations of traditional forcing cause arguments. Taking formation stories seriously entails not only the typical philosophical modesty about causality but also the setting of empirical, historical boundaries to our forcing cause claims. Third, understanding formation as a causal process helps to disentangle arguments about the causal influence of culture. Culture (in its various manifestations) may act as a forcing cause, but it may also act through the formation or transformation of social kinds. The argument proceeds as follows. We begin by reviewing the three dominant approaches to causality in sociology and arguing that they are usefully characterized as forcing causes. We then synthesize existing theoretical treatments of events, boundaries, assemblages, and looping kinds to make sense of the causal logic of formation stories. To begin the project of identifying regularities in formation stories, we then provide a typology of formation stories. We conclude with a return to the analytical payoffs of separating formation stories from forcing cause accounts for our understandings of the role of history and culture in sociological analysis.

2  Forcing Causes in Sociology We begin our analysis by summarizing the three most active, well-­ established approaches to causality in sociology, and arguing that all three fall under the rubric of “forcing causes.” These are, briefly, “variable causality,” “manipulation and treatment,” and “mechanisms.” In identifying these approaches, we rely on a rich literature on causal modeling, and especially on similar distinctions drawn by Goldthorpe (2001). While these literatures disagree on many points, and the second and third arguably emerged in reaction to the perceived flaws of the first, we emphasize certain important commonalities which limit the scope of forcing cause claims in a way that points to the need to theorize formation stories as causal.

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2.1   Variable Causality In the classic account of causality developed in the post-war era of sociology, causal claims functioned by eliminating suspected sources of spurious correlation, thus establishing a “robust dependence” of an effect, Y, on a cause, X (Goldthorpe 2001). An exemplar is Blau and Duncan (1967): Father’s education causes the son’s current occupational prestige directly and indirectly through the son’s education and first job. This approach to causation is familiar from the essential statistical-sociological operation of “controlling for” variables in standard linear regressions and related techniques. Variable causality has been mobilized in many different social scientific disciplines and, philosophically speaking, participates in the long tradition of linking causation to prediction (Hempel 1965). This format of causal analysis has weathered a great deal of criticism. Here, we highlight some of the key assumptions that underwrite variable causality. This sort of social causality is about variables pushing on other variables. Abbott (2001) identified this approach as “sociological causalism” and cataloged six stated and implicit, but potentially problematic, assumptions of the “general linear reality” approach that characterizes most studies in this tradition. We focus here on the first two assumptions: (1) that the social world consists of fixed entities with varying attributes and (2) that causality flows from large to small, from general trends to specific outcomes. Abbott’s (1988: 172–173) original formulation emphasized the frailty of this first assumption in contexts where entities “change through birth, death, amalgamation, and division.” Later work went further to charge that sociological causalism assumed fixed and unchanging meanings and in so doing ignored the potential for meanings, and thus the social kinds that they help to form, to change: Most important, the “meaning of parameters” can itself change for strategic reasons, that is through deliberate action of actors in a system… we all believe that one of the central, basic human actions is to redefine something, so that the very shape of the present, perhaps even the identities of the actors in the present, can be made new. (Abbott 1995)

The second assumption identified by Abbott (1988: 173) is that of “monotonic causal flow,” the idea that causality flows from “big to small (from the contextual to the specific) or between attributes of equivalent

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size.”6 Researchers are asked to investigate how general social trends shape particular outcomes that are assumed to be smaller than the trends that combine to produce them. Causality never flows from “the arbitrary to the general, from the minor event to the major development” (Abbott 1988: 173). Here, Abbott prefigures Sewell Jr. (2005) in criticizing ­sociological causalism for its inattention to eventfulness, and thus for the possibility that seemingly “small” perturbations can have seemingly “large” consequences. A related criticism of monotonic causal flow comes from the science studies tradition. In contrast to the assumption that there are levels in the social world, and that causality flows in one direction between them, actor-network theory suggests that researchers start with a flat ontology wherein no actor is inherently “bigger” or “at a higher level” than any other, and then trace the process by which some actors become big (Callon and Latour 1981). Both Abbott’s and Callon and Latour’s criticisms share the suspicion that standard sociological accounts misperceive social causality as constituted by “grand immanent forces” (Abbott 2001: 112). While later work—including Abbott’s own—partially addressed these concerns with variable causality, Abbott’s first objection remains, in our view, the most important. Variable causality assumes fixed entities with varying attributes. An attribute, in this view, has an effect on another attribute: one’s education affects one’s income; one’s race affects one’s wages. Two more recent approaches to causality abandon this focus on variables as causes while maintaining the assumption of fixed entities. The first such tradition shifts our attention from variables to treatments. 2.2   Manipulation and Treatment In a series of influential works (Holland 1986; Heckman 2005; Morgan and Winship 2007), statisticians and social scientists have advocated for a reconceptualization of causality in a more strictly experimental vein. To understand causality, they argue, one must understand the effect of an intervention on a set of subjects, with that “intervention”—however it is generated—understood as the cause. In this approach, the first best option 6  It is important to note that Abbott’s understanding of “context” here is related to his understanding of “grand immanent forces,” rather than what many sociologists and anthropologists would identify as the “local context” for the working out of a more generalizable cause or mechanism.

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to establish the effect of a cause is an actual randomized controlled trial. The second best is some sort of quasi-experimental technique like regression discontinuity, propensity score matching, or instrumental variables. All of these recognize the “fundamental problem of causal inference” (Holland 1986): An entity cannot be in both the control group and the treatment group. Much of the intellectual innovation in this tradition is built up around attempts to deal with this problem well enough to make causal claims. Notably, a strict reading of this approach says that causality can only be discussed, in principle, for something that can be experimentally manipulated. This manipulation-based understanding of causality fits cleanly with program evaluation-type research where individuals can be assigned to a treatment or control group (receiving a certain intervention or benefit). However, in so doing it tends to narrow the set of questions that can be legitimately answered in terms of a causal effect in the quest to avoid the dreaded problems of endogeneity and selection bias. More importantly for our purposes, note again a basic assumption—that the entities being treated are fixed, as are the treatments themselves. Here again, we encounter the pushing and pulling of extant social realities, in this case with the pushing and the pulling done by the experimenter or intervening agency. In the treatment-based approach, causality here flows from the manipulation itself: If we push people into group A instead of group B, what happens? This framing leads naturally to criticism that, in its imitation of practical-scientific interventions, this understanding of social causality grants a great deal of intentionality and agency to the experimenting scientist, but none to the entities that are experimented upon (Goldthorpe 2001: 7–8). This problem and the attendant need to render social causality commensurate with a concept of the social actor as a knowledgeable agent has been one important inspiration for the third approach to forcing causality. 2.3  Mechanisms The last major approach to forcing causality, usually referred to as a mechanistic or social mechanisms approach, is often presented as a radical departure from variable and experimental causality. We identify two broad variants of this mode of understanding causality, focusing on the ways in which mechanism is “an irreducibly causal notion” that “refers to the

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entities of a causal process that produces the effect of interest” (Hedstrom and Ylikoski 2010: 50).7 In the mechanistic view, causality is a generative process. Instead of conceptualizing variable X or treatment T as a cause of Y, this approach posits a causal process, M, which moves a piece of the social world from X to Y, and argues that social research should proceed by identifying and characterizing these causal processes.8 Something happens to “trigger” a mechanism or make it “work” (the input) and the process then produces the effect of interest (the output or outcome). 2.3.1 Mechanisms as Microfoundations Certain important strands of the mechanisms literature have attempted to use the concept of mechanism to (1) secure a clear set of “microfoundations” for causality in the social world, usually focused on individuals, their motivations, and the consequences of their interactions, and (2) link these foundations to the variable-based analyses that are recast as correlational descriptions which are then explained by mechanisms. That is, variable causality is reconceptualized as precise description (Savage 2009: 159–160), which is paired with a mechanisms approach to causality to produce a rigorous social science based on quantitative description and mechanistic explanation (Goldthrope 2007: 123–124). Some of this work is directly allied to the view of rational action as the necessary microfoundations of sociology (e.g., Coleman 1994), while other strands call for a broader understanding of actors and action. A well-­ known variant of this latter type is Peter Hedstrom’s (2005) model of Desires, Beliefs, and Opportunities. However, despite opening up a broader conception of the actor than rational choice varieties of 7  Epistemologically, interest in “generative process” and “social mechanisms” is a part of several high-profile approaches to social science, such as rational-choice theory, analytical sociology, various small-n approaches in comparative-historical sociology and comparative politics, and critical realism. Not surprisingly, then, the definition of and use of the concept of mechanism is extremely contested in the literature. 8  Thus, as James Mahoney explains, “[i]n this literature, causal mechanisms are often understood as intervening steps between an initial cause and a final outcome” (2012: 10). Given this, one way to understand mechanisms, then, is just as intervening variables; this can also connect to the treatment understanding of causality and its use of Directed Analytic Graphs (Knight and Winship 2013). Mahoney (2001) discusses these issues at length while providing an account of the broad origins of mechanistic thinking in sociology in “Beyond Correlational Analysis.”

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mechanistic explanation, these approaches still rely on the fixed entities assumption. Hedstrom explains: Mechanisms consist of entities (with their properties) and the activities that these entities engage in, either by themselves or in concert with other entities. These activities bring about change, and the type of change brought about depends upon the properties of the entities and how the entities are organized spatially and temporally. (Hedstrom 2005: 25)

This microfoundational approach to causality clearly articulates an understanding of the social world as a series of regularized processes in which well-defined, real entities with specific properties push and pull on each other and aggregate to produce “outcomes.” One goal of this approach to causal mechanisms, then, is parsimony—the project is to discover a relatively small set of underlying mechanisms with which one can explain a wide variety of phenomena that “on the surface” appear to be different. 2.3.2 Mechanisms as Components of Conjunctures Perhaps reacting to these aspirations for parsimony, historical sociologists have criticized the microfoundations approach to mechanisms and advanced their own alternative. This alternative is developed via a theoretical language that departs explicitly from the variable approach to causality, and which views the merging of variable and mechanistic causality as mistaken. Instead, this approach focuses causal analysis on the conjuncture of different mechanistic processes. Steinmetz (1998: 176, 180) characterizes society or social life as an “open system” (cf. Bhaskar 2008: 107–131), and thus reconceptualizes historical contingency as the idea that “complex events are codetermined by constellations of causal mechanisms” (Steinmetz 1998: 177; for a nice visual representation, see 178). This is particularly useful for producing an account of massive, rare, historical events (such as the French Revolution) which can be parsed into a conjuncture of mechanistic processes, with the understanding that, even if the conjuncture of such processes is relatively rare, the processes themselves can be found throughout history (Tilly 1995b). In this way, revolutions become more like floods than ocean tides (to use Tilly’s evocative metaphor): They are rare events, but ultimately analytically separable into the mechanisms that combine to bring them about (Tilly 1995a: 1601).

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Key to this way of thinking is the idea that a mechanism can be triggered without bringing about its normal effects. This is because, in a complex causal conjuncture, other mechanisms can intervene, override, or combine with a mechanism to produce unexpected outcomes. Thus, instead of associating causality with the establishment of a robust association between observables, this work locates cause in the “real causal powers” of social mechanisms (Groff and Greco 2013). So, mechanisms are defined as emergent causal powers of related entities within a system, which indicates (1) their existence at several different “levels” of reality (i.e., not just “micro”), (2) the complex way they exist as relations between various entities, and (3) that their causal powers are context dependent vis-`a-vis the broader social system of which they are apart. Thus, for example, “a patent of nobility may have very considerable causal powers in one socio-historical context (a feudal society) but relatively little in another (a capitalist society), and a very opposite one in yet another (a communist society)” (Gorski 2009: 162). Mechanisms are thus, in this view, “space-time specific,” “mutable,” dependent upon human agency, and also “concept dependent,” though they are not reducible to the “cultural concepts” that help make them up (Gorski 2009: 150, 164–165; for an example see Steinmetz’s [2007: 26–27] critique of Edward Said). There is thus, in this approach, relative consensus that accurate explanation with mechanisms requires investigators to pay attention to the context in which a given mechanism works. This stance accords with a more general discontent about the highly acontextual approach to causality that, in the post-war era, became “hegemonic in American sociology” (Abbott 2001: 113). Although the idea that a social mechanism or any other forcing causal relationship has to be adequately contextualized so as to produce accurate, predictive, or “rich” explanation has been extensively developed, less attention has been paid to whether the notion of mechanisms adequately expands the sociological repertoire and exhausts the space of causal reasoning necessary for sociological inquiry. 2.3.3 Mechanisms as Forcing Causes While diverse and contested, the developing mechanisms literature still conforms to a basic understanding of “causes as forces” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). The “causal powers” attributed to mechanisms, or conjunctures of mechanisms, derive from entities, their properties, and the interactions and relations between these entities (Groff and Greco 2013).

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Furthermore, whether a given theory of mechanisms attempts to “reduce” causality to a fundamental level or, alternately, embraces “explanatory a-reducibility” (Gorski 2009: 149), both approaches assume a stratified, layered ontology of human social life which occurs in “levels” (usually running from “micro” to “macro”). Hence Stinchcombe’s more epistemological definition of mechanisms holds across many, ontologically divergent, accounts of mechanistic causality: “A mechanism is a piece of scientific reasoning… which gives knowledge about a component process” of another, ordinarily higher-level theory (1991: 367). The extended debates in the mechanisms literature—debates about variable ontologies, meso-to-meso explanation, and differences between social and natural mechanisms introduced by the way social mechanisms are “concept-dependent”—are underwritten by a key commonality. All of this literature thinks of mechanisms as configurations of entities with causal powers that can be identified as present or absent, and thus are in some sense “modular” (for a strict definition, see Woodward 2003: 48).9 However, at the cutting edge of thinking about mechanisms, and particularly in the strand of the mechanisms literature that has reacted against the “microfoundations” approach to mechanisms, we can see a shift toward the causal importance of formation. Both Philip Gorski and George Steinmetz, for example, have argued for developing historically variable ontologies of the social as part of what they still sometimes identify as a mechanisms-based approach. And Neil Gross, in a recent paper, redefines mechanisms as “composed of chains or aggregations of actors confronting problem situations and mobilizing more or less habitual responses” (Gross 2009: 368), and points specifically to the semiotic codes that give social practices form and meaning (Gross 2009: 359). Gross’s quite different account of mechanisms, opposed as it is to almost all other positions in the mechanisms literature (2009: 364–366), touches on a key point: How do all the objects and entities that cause things to happen in the social world come to be what they are, with certain meanings, “causal powers,” etc.? That is, how do the forces in the social world come to possess a certain 9  This essential assumption may explain the foci of certain intense debates in the literature. For example, it accounts for why those who write in the critical realist idiom assign mechanisms to the sphere of the “real” (which produces the “actual” and the “empirical”), and thus engage in extensive debates on the “emergence” of real entities at higher levels of complexity. And it may account for why so much ink is spilled over the different “levels of analysis” in sociology, for the stakes of the “level of analysis” debate are very high if it turns out that “causal powers” can only be assigned to a subset of the total number of “levels.”

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form or shape that makes them what they are? It is this issue that we hope to address with our concept of “formation.” 2.4   Forcing Cause Claims Offer an Incomplete Map Though the debate about causal inference and causal explanation has focused primarily on the differences between these three approaches, the similarities should by now be clear. First, these versions of causality all maintain the “fixed entities assumption” identified by Abbott. Even the “generative processes” approach associated with social mechanisms is not about the history of social kinds themselves, or about how entities subtly change their nature, meaning, or essential properties through some historical path. Rather, research that identifies mechanisms, and uses mechanisms to explain outcomes, is interested in how social objects that are real within the scope of the given analysis come together to force certain outcomes rather than others. Second, work on forcing causes is inclined toward—and indeed in some versions epistemologically requires—regularity as part of its theoretical coherence and explanatory power (see, e.g., Goldthorpe 2001: 10–11; Hedstrom and Bearman 2009: 5). This regularity requirement perhaps accounts for the appeal of mechanism as a metaphor for social process, since machines are renowned for, and useful because of, their regularity. More substantively, this emphasis on regularity recalls the rigor of scientific experiments—and especially their repeatability—as the method for discovering the workings of the natural world. Given the existence of social kinds of various shapes and sizes, and the tendency for such entities to act on the world in a regularized way, we agree that the pursuit of forcing causes is an intellectually rich and worthwhile endeavor. Furthermore, for a variety of normative reasons, investigating those entities and mechanisms that can be intervened upon or manipulated to produce a different (known) outcome or result can be especially rewarding. And, we have no doubt that forcing cause accounts can be, and often are, true explanations of certain social phenomena or outcomes. Yet, simultaneously, it is also the case that forcing cause accounts tend to underestimate the importance of their boundaries, which should be determined empirically, and to overestimate the stability of their results, leaving the shaping and reshaping of the entities in the social world to the side in their research. When it comes to forcing causes, that is, there is an ever-present danger of sliding “from the model of reality to the reality of the model” (Bourdieu 1990: 39).

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As a result, those aspects of social life that do not fit into these causal regimes are, if not ignored, reclassified under a variety of different categories that imply non-causal or non-explanatory research as historical description, interpretive sociology, second-order interpretations, etc. This reclassification of claims about the formation of forces, kinds, and objects as non-causal is confusing and prevents rigorous methodological discussion about actual research practices. A good example of how this happens can be found in comparative-historical sociology. That subfield has often been anxious to define as causal those things that fit one of the definitions of causality discussed above, and thus characterize other aspects of the work of historical sociology as consisting of interpretation and description (e.g., Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003: 22–23; Kiser and Hechter 1991; Quadagno and Knapp 1992; Calhoun 1998: 860–867; Ragin 1989: 31). And yet, a review of the subfield argues that “to explain the origins of social order requires tracing the emergences of structures, institutions, or other collective properties that transform the causal relationships that dominated prior to the episode of ordering” (Clemens 2007: 534), and then notes how Michael Mann’s explanation of fascism in terms of “social caging” involves a kind of epistemological shift: “Note the contrast between Mann’s definition of the problem of fascism as a process of group emergence and other correlational analyses that address the question of who voted for the Nazis…” We propose that this example is quite indicative of a broader trend, whereby a quite narrow methodological definition of causality is consistently being brought into contact with research that cannot make its (implicitly causal) claims “fit” into the definitions of causality that are articulated in standard methodology texts. In addition to creating a disjuncture between what sociologists say they are doing and what they are actually doing, this mismatch severely limits the capacity for critique and improvement within the community of inquiry that is concerned with formation stories.

3   Theorizing Formation Stories Given the wide variety of sociological research that does in fact attend to formation, a broader conceptualization of causality is called for. We thus theorize the formation of objects, kinds, and forces to account for the way that new social kinds can come into being, and extant social kinds can be reshaped such that their properties or “causal powers” are fundamentally

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altered. Formation stories instantiate, we propose, four essential departures in the way causality is usually understood in sociology. The first departure, drawing from Abbott (2001), is to relax the assumption of “fixed entities.” As noted above, most sociological research makes strong assumptions about the fixity of social kinds. For example, a great deal of work charts the movement of individuals (or organizations, or nations, etc.) between fixed states: Health researchers might focus on what kinds of people experience certain illnesses, while stratification research asks whose children manage to move up in the social hierarchy. The possible outcomes (sick or healthy, rich or poor) are known in advance and assumed to be relatively unchanging in significance. Classic works of historical sociology make similar assumptions about inputs (or “conditions”), outcomes, and the forces that move a case from one to the other, for example, from a single location of sovereignty to different types of “revolutionary situations” (Tilly 1995b: 10–14).10 Formation stories, in contrast, embrace the variable ontology of the social and reject the assumption of fixed entities, proposing instead to trace how entities, outcomes, categories, and kinds came into being or were reshaped. The second departure, drawing from Sewell Jr. (2005), is to treat history as eventful. One aspect of the messiness of social life is that some actions, accidents, decisions, and details are causally much more important than others, in terms of how they shape the future of social life from a certain point in time and space. Some occurrences change the fabric of social reality such that the possibilities for causal regularities of the forcing cause variety are different before and after what we then mark as the “event.” Exactly how the event unfolded can dramatically alter the kinds of entities that emerge from the event.11 Events may be very short and dramatic, as in the classic case of the storming of the Bastille. But the idea of an eventful temporality goes a bit beyond this emphasis on key moments, to include a broader focus on disjuncture and rupture in history (cf. Foucault 1972). Of course, social theory has long been interested in 10  One exception, noted by Abbott (2001: 60), is demographic or ecological models that attempt to explain births and deaths. This exception reinforces the general problem though: We can start thinking about how to model the birth or death of an existing kind (individuals, organizations, etc.) but it is much harder to model the emergence of new kinds or the disappearance of an entire kind. 11  Abbott also has a version of events, and he connects it to his critique of scientific causalism in American sociology, in so far as a focus on events, relationality, and action is his proposed remedy for the “full-blown ANOVA concept of causality” (2001: 113); see especially Abbott 2001: 120–125; 209–239.

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history and eventfulness. Our point is more narrow but also more precise: How did certain occurrences, possibly minute, alter the sorts of entities that came into being, and the forcing cause relationships that those entities engage in? The third departure, drawing from actor-network theory, is an emphasis on assemblages. Social kinds emerge through processes of assemblage, which mix together a heterogeneous collection of individuals, organizations, technologies, ideas, significations, and more (Latour 2007). Formation stories apply this way of thinking to the emergence of new things-in-the-social-world, like “public opinion,” and to the reshaping of extant social categories, like “whiteness” (Baker 1990; Osborne and Rose 1999; Omi and Winant 1994). So, for example, instead of thinking of “the economy” as the material substratum of social life, consider how “the economy” came into being as a technical object measured by the fluctuations in Gross Domestic Product (Mitchell 1998). Our point here is not just that “objects” are “constructed.” Rather, our point is that existing social kinds are real entities with real consequences, but also with real histories, and that these histories are twisted and varied; to make an entity with the power to “force,” we propose, requires a process of assemblage which does not fit neatly into the languages of {macro-, meso-, micro-}, {culture, politics, economy}, or {ideal, material}. For this reason, tracing the formation of kinds, categories, and entities involves linking together actions, communications, various kinds of material stuff, and a wide variety of linkages and mediations, in a way that challenges traditional understandings of levels of analysis. This tracing can be termed the tracing of “assemblage” because it is relatively agnostic about the kinds of “stuff” that can come together in a formation story. Fourth, and finally, we draw from Ian Hacking (2000, 2002), who emphasizes the unique characteristics of assemblages involving knowledge about people. Hacking names this approach “dynamic nominalism,” and thus brings into the causal conversation the question of how representation has an impact on social life. Hacking emphasizes the ability of names (and, more broadly, knowledge and theories) to reshape the thing named if and only if the thing in question is somehow aware of the name it is being given. This requirement of awareness differentiates arguments about the social construction of atoms from arguments about the social construction of

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autism (Hacking 2000).12 Autistic individuals, and their parents, friends, partners, teachers, and therapists all (potentially) know about autism (theories of autism) and change their behavior accordingly, choosing some treatments over others, joining some support groups over others, and so on (Eyal 2010). These individual changes in behavior have the potential to reshape the causal significance of the category—that is, what it means for a diagnosed individual, family member, or psychiatrist to be autistic can change depending on how an important subset of people understand autism. On the other hand, atoms do not, in principle, care whether we think they look like plum pudding or mini-solar systems, and do not, in principle, change their behavior depending on our theories. Hacking’s insights point to the potential for culture, in various forms, to play a critical role in formation stories. To summarize, then, when we speak of formation stories, we refer to explanatory accounts of how social kinds are shaped, reshaped, or brought into being; in contrast to forcing causes, these stories take as their points of reference the non-fixedness of social entities, the eventfulness of social life, the emergence of social entities from processes of assemblage, and the dependence of such assemblage and non-fixedness on representation. These four departures provide guideposts for our analysis of existing research on formation: We will be interested in work that explains the emergence of new social kinds, breaks history into pieces based on events, traces messy, heterogeneous processes whereby new social kinds emerge, and which involves a concept of representation. As the reader will quickly see, the four departures are partially descriptive and partially prescriptive. The following section offers a simple classification of formation stories based on the kind of object being formed, and in so doing illustrates some 12  John Searle (1995: 1–58; 127–148) famously distinguished between the “intrinsic” and “observer-relative” properties or facts about objects, igniting much philosophical debate. One way to characterize our argument here is to say that most sociologists accept that many of their objects of study include and indeed highlight observer-relative properties of objects, persons, etc., and that most sociologists also accept that what Searle characterizes as “collective intentionality” is a baseline from which sociologists work. However, it is perhaps too restrictive to insist debate continue at this level. As Neil Gross explains, Searle’s basic formula, according to which social facts take the form “X counts as Y in context C,” tends to reduce the complexity of culture and history to the level of cognitive rules. Gross (2006: 54) writes “it is not clear that the metaphors, genres, and tropes that also play a significant role in our understanding of institutions, and hence in constituting those institutions as real, can be reduced down to rules of this sort… there is reason to doubt whether Searle’s understanding of the nature of constitutive rules will seem adequate to many sociologists.”

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of the theoretical payoffs of bringing together previously disconnected research traditions under the heading of formation.

4   What Gets Formed? To this point our discussion of formation in sociology has been largely abstract, to match the existing discourse on causality. Here, however, we make our argument a bit more concrete by analyzing four types of formation stories, each of which is concerned with the formation of a different sort of object for sociological analysis: actors, meso-level social orders, sociotechnical objects, and macro-level cultural “atmospheres.”13 To illustrate the first three types, we explore well-established areas of research, albeit ones that have not previously been recognized as subtypes of a larger class of arguments. The fourth type, cultural atmospheres, we consider as a possible extension of formation arguments, which could help address the complex problem of culture and causality in sociology. In what follows, we note how each type of formation story already draws on, or could benefit from explicit attention to, the theoretical departures identified above: the rejection of fixed entities, eventfulness, assemblage, and representation. The first two sections emphasize the breadth of formation stories already prominent within sociology. The third and fourth consider specific examples to highlight the relationship between formation stories and forcing causes. 4.1   The Formation of Actors In many different areas of sociology, and certainly in sociological theory, the social world is understood to contain “actors” (individual or collective) that push and pull this way and that, and thus produce various outcomes (Alexander 1981: 114–122; Sewell 1992; Giddens 1979: 49–96; Hedstrom 2005: 34–66). Sociological theories built on the ability of actors to act as forcing causes are constrained by our knowledge of the properties or tendencies of those actors. One response to this constraint has been to construct theoretical models rooted in clear assumptions about these properties and tendencies, as in the tradition of rational choice 13  Of course, in any given account, there may be intertwining between the types: the formation of a meso-level social order may involve the formation of a new sociotechnical object or a new social actor, for example.

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theory. An alternative line of research, however, treats actors’ capabilities as an empirical and historical question, and aims to produce explanatory accounts of how actors came to be the actors that they are. This alternative, empirical account of actors’ properties is most familiar in the case of collective actors—for example, the groups of people that assert their interests as a whole, engage in contentious politics with states and other entities in their political environment, and attempt to force certain kinds of outcomes. Where do they come from? Why do they want what they want? Most generally, how do collectivities with well-defined boundaries and clear demands form? This question is evident in classical sociology, for example, Max Weber’s skeptical response to socialist theorists in Germany, in which he suggested a series of barriers between an objective, shared “market situation” of individuals and communal action based on that collective interest (Weber 1958: 183, cf. Fourcade and Healy 2013). More recent work examines how the collectivities that engage in contentious politics come into being as unified entities, for example, through constitutive boundary change (Tilly 2004) or the formation of collective identities that did not exist before (Polletta and Jasper 2001). Since Marx’s own (admittedly teleological) account of the rise of the proletariat as a class for itself, the sociology of collective action has been in some way “eventful” in its recognition that the formation of a certain collective actor with certain collective properties can create a new set of social tensions and forceful relations in the world. However, the importance of assemblage has been much less clear in this literature. Understanding the emergence of collective actors as a case of formation can clarify a tension within studies of collective identity. In hindsight, we can see that in turning to collective identity, social movements scholars were really interested in two distinct sets of problems: first, how the “collectivities” that were engaged in politics came into being historically (something that had merely been taken for granted when the field of social movements studies turned from the analysis of mass politics to the analysis of the civil rights movement, see Polletta and Jasper 2001); and second, how “collective identity” allowed researchers to understand the non-instrumental basis of recruitment and strategy choice by already formed movements. The first problem leads to formation stories; the second considers how culture can act as a forcing cause via “framing.” Thus, we can see why the interest in formation does not really fit with the theoretical advances in the framing approach to social movements, for collective actors are assembled out of

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all kinds of “stuff”–stories, shared emotional experiences, economic resources, the built environment, and so on. The point of investigating such formation is, then, not to discern the specific causal power of framing, but rather to discern how a group came to be the group that it is (a group which, once formed, may indeed engage in “framing.”) If the idea that collectivities have to be formed recalls the classic opposition between Marx and Weber, a more recent argument insists on the need for empirical formation stories about the individual actor itself. As Meyer and Jepperson explain, “the modern ‘actor’ is a historical and ongoing cultural construction, and …the particulars of this construction should help to account for a number of specific features of actorhood, including anomalous and unnoticed ones” (Meyer and Jepperson 2000: 101). In their argument, the very existence of certain kinds of individuals, responsible in a certain way for their actions, is itself an empirical, historical story that has to be considered, precisely because it reveals essential aspects about individuals as agents that are important for building a theory of agents as what we would call forcing causes (for a similar argument about the historical production of individual actors, motivated very differently, see Foucault 1977). For Meyer and Jepperson, the long arc of this story is a cultural tale about the devolution of agency from gods, spiritual powers, and an animated environment to individuals, organizations, and states, a kind of extended immanentization of cultural understandings of responsibility and activity: “Over time these exogenous forces (e.g. godly powers) have been relocated as authority immanent within society itself, enlarging social agency, relocating authority from god to church, from church to state, from church and state to individual souls and later citizens” (Meyer and Jepperson 2000: 101). Our point is not to affirm this specific formation story as the final or correct one, but rather to point out how this argument takes “agents” explicitly out of the realm of metatheory and conceptual definition, and instead makes them the subject of empirical explanation. This theme is perhaps the defining feature of formation stories: the existence of particular social things is not a matter of metatheoretical dispute, but rather empirical, and especially historical, explanation. 4.2   Meso-Level Social Orders Meyer and Jepperson locate their argument across the micro-macro spectrum, arguing that their formation story applies to individuals,

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organizations, and states as “actors.” While there is much to be gained from collapsing the distinctions between different levels of analysis to highlight unifying features (including the mere fact that none is more natural, or less constructed, than another), it is not the only option. A particularly vibrant tradition of sociological research narrates the formation of meso-level social orders, which are not seen as actors, but rather serve as the environments in which actors (be they individuals, organizations, social movements, or states) act. Fields are perhaps the most iconic variety of meso-level social order. Studies of field formation examine empirically the coming-into-being of a space for action, with attention to the field’s shape, scope, and relationship to other fields. For example, Barman (2013) documents how the field of “non-profits” emerged as foundations fought to be classified alongside the charitable organizations they funded, and thus to shield themselves from political scrutiny. This struggle took place through an influential classification system of tax-exempt organizations, which in turn produced a field of non-profit research and helped to legitimize this broader conceptualization that lumped the Ford Foundation and local soup kitchens into the same field. In a similarly framed argument, Tom Medvetz (2012) documents the “crystallization of the space of think tanks.” Medvetz’s explanation for the formation of the space of think tanks highlights a quite particular—but obviously, in an eventful sense, massively important— “structural convergence” between technocratic organizations which needed to make their knowledge more open to the public and activists who needed to become “experts” and thus have their own knowledge claims become more “closed.” Given the influence of synthetic theoretical frameworks which emphasize the dynamics of fields such as Bourdieu (1984), DiMaggio and Powell (1983), and Fligstein and McAdam (2011), it is not surprising that research on the formation of fields has been an empirically successful enterprise. Beyond fields per se, Padgett and Powell’s (2012) recent treatise on The Emergence of Organizations and Markets offers another elaborated research program on the formation of meso-level social orders. Inspired by a research tradition in economic sociology going back to White’s (2008) influential work on “how social formations emerge,” Padgett and Powell argue that new markets emerge out of the interactions of multiple networks, as logics and resources flow from one network into another and are repurposed. Through a series of case studies, Padgett, Powell, and co-­ authors offer examples of novel organizational forms emerging out of

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existing, overlapping networks, such as the birth of the partnership system in renaissance Florence. Thinking about meso-level social orders through the lens of formation stories may help us respond to recent calls for some kind of alliance or peace between the sociologies of Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour (cf. Eyal and Buchholz 2010). Without delving all the way into constructing an opposition between these theorists and its possible solution, we can nonetheless see one way forward for such an alliance: research on field formation that emphasizes eventfulness and assemblage. A field emerges not only via crisscrossing strategies of individual and collective actors, but also through the appropriation of the built environment, the transfer of funds, the emergence of new communications technologies, and so on. Modern financial markets, for example, depend deeply on the speed of information transfer available, which in turn depends on the speed of light (MacKenzie et al. 2012), and the field of think tanks required not only the invention of a new symbolic space for the interpretation of experts and expert knowledge but also the literal space of massive buildings positioned within less than a day’s driving distance from Congress. 4.3   Sociotechnical Objects In terms of existing research, the emphasis on assemblage is best exemplified by formation stories about sociotechnical objects, which themselves often become part of formation stories about meso-level social orders and actors. The idea of object-formation of some sort or another is the focus of a diverse body of research in science and technology studies (classics include Latour 1999, Daston 2000, Hacking 2002). This variety reflects in part the breadth of the category sociotechnical object itself, which spans everything from traditionally understood technologies like bicycles and bakelite (Bijker 1997), to diseases and diagnoses (Latour 1999; Hacking 2007), and to technical versions of broad social phenomena such as public opinion manifested in polls and surveys (Igo 2007). What these stories have in common is an attempt to trace historically the emergence, or reshaping, of “thingness” in the sense of something that human actors designate denotatively, and attempt to manipulate, attack, leverage, etc. Thus sociotechnical objects is a category that refers to sociological research

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on the formation of those social realities whose treatment by people is somewhat analogous to people’s treatment of everyday material objects.14 To illustrate our broader arguments, here we examine a single case of the reforming of a sociotechnical object in this sense: autism. We focus especially on the work of Gil Eyal (2013, see also Eyal 2010), and argue that his analysis usefully models the four departures critical for telling successful formation stories. In addition, Eyal (2013) illustrates the usefulness of formation stories for informing and bounding forcing cause accounts (both sociological and, in this case, biological). Eyal (2013: 864) begins with a puzzle: How did autism grow from a relatively rare disease (affecting 1 in 2500 in 1989) to an epidemic (affecting 1 in 88) in just two decades? Previous research on the question falls into one of two genres of explanatory account. First, naturalistic accounts search for biological causes of autism such as new environmental toxins, or the infamous and widely discredited vaccine-autism link (Kirkland 2012). The second genre of account, broadly social constructionist in orientation, critiques the naturalistic accounts for ignoring the obvious changes in the ontology of autism that occurred in the late twentieth century. These accounts emphasize changes in the diagnostic criteria beginning in the 1980s that opened up autism diagnoses to new kinds of individuals. Thus, the autism epidemic should be thought of as a process of diagnostic substitution and accretion: Children who were previously diagnosed as mentally retarded or schizophrenic (or simply undiagnosed) are now instead labeled autistic. While Eyal agrees with much of this second perspective, and especially the importance of diagnostic substitution, he argues that such accounts punt on the real origins of the epidemic: “Social constructionist explanations, by comparison, are more plausible but, ultimately, just as unsatisfying. They do not solve the puzzle of the autism ‘epidemic’ but merely push back the burden of explanation. If changed diagnostic criteria are the proximate cause, for example, the question obviously becomes why were they changed?” In other words, social construction accounts are unsatisfactory without a good formation story to explain the shifts in diagnostic criteria. Did diagnostic substitution occur because we realized that autism was actually bigger than we previously thought (which restores the 14  These objects may be “actors” in the ANT sense (Sayes 2014), but not in the sociological sense; they may be constituted within fields of expertise or other meso-level social orders, but they are not co-extensive with those fields.

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naturalist account) or because psychiatrists claimed increasing turf (medicalization) or something else entirely (Eyal 2013: 867)? We need an account, a causal explanation, of the shifts in the ontology of autism. Eyal’s account of the autism epidemic begins not with changes in the diagnostic criteria of autism, but rather a change in the institutional matrix through which we evaluate and treat mentally ill children. Specifically, Eyal argues that [The] deinstitutionalization of mental retardation, a lengthy process that began in the early 1970s and lasted at least two decades, was a key cause leading to the autism epidemic…Deinstitutionalization erased the old categories that reflected the needs of custodial institutions (feeble minded, mentally deficient, moron, idiot, imbecile) while creating instead a new institutional matrix—community treatment, special education, and early intervention programs—wherein autism could be identified, differentiated, and multiplied. (Eyal 2013: 867–868)

Deinstitutionalization is explicitly a key feature of the causal explanation of the autism epidemic. But what kind of a cause is it? For Eyal (2013: 868), deinstitutionalization was an event in a causal formation story (an “episode” in a sequence of reiterated problem solving), not a mechanism, variable, or treatment. From this episode of deinstitutionalization, Eyal traces a messy assemblage of actors and tools that make visible and transform autism from a tightly defined, and very limited in reach, network in the 1940s to a widespread and diffuse grouping of experts, parents, self-­ identified autistic individuals, checklists, treatment protocols, and funding streams. For example, by creating and distributing a simple checklist for autistic symptoms, psychologist Bernard Rimland managed to solicit information from thousands of parents, and in turn connected these parents to newly proposed behavioral therapies, growing the “autism matrix.” Although Eyal’s central concern is a better understanding of the role of experts and expertise and not a challenge to sociology’s understanding of causality, we can use his account of the autism epidemic to understand formation stories more generally. In addition to highlighting the role of events, culture, and messy assemblages in the formation and transformation of autism and the autism epidemic, the contrast between Eyal’s formation story and forcing causal research on autism highlights how formation stories can usefully inform forcing cause accounts. Note that broadly social constructionist research may still fit inside traditional forcing cause approaches. For example, Liu et al. (2010) offer a mechanisms

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account of the diffusion of autism diagnoses through social networks. Following Eyal’s critique, however, we agree that such an account, while useful, on its own fails as an explanatory account of the autism epidemic because it cannot explain why autism suddenly became amenable to social diffusion in the 1980s. Eyal’s formation story explains precisely that. 4.4   Macrocultural “Atmospheres” Could the formation story be extended beyond these three types? We do not regard our classification as exhaustive, and in that spirit we offer a more exploratory suggestion: that what are often understood as broad, macrocultural interpretations be reconsidered as a type of formation story explanation. To propose this, we use an iconic example in an intentionally provocative way. It is widely agreed that a fiscal crisis precipitated the French Revolution. And yet, France had experienced fiscal crises many times before. What was different about the 1780s? Historians point to change in the cultural setting of the late eighteenth century, documenting the decreased legitimacy of the King vis-`a-vis his famous grandfather (Darnton 1996). This new “cultural atmosphere” into which the fiscal crisis of the French state intruded can be rendered more precise via an examination of the formation of public opinion. In “Public Opinion as Political Invention,” Keith Baker (1990) traces the formation of public opinion as a politically relevant reality in pre-­ revolutionary France. In the reigning ideology of absolutism, the King was the only “public person,” but over the second half of the eighteenth century a new source of authority crept into politics. Across the political spectrum, the French elite hated the seemingly chaotic, fear-based, irrational party politics of England after 1688. And yet, they also articulated a desire for “liberty” of some sort, in opposition to the perceived despotism of the King’s ministers, who spent the second half of the eighteenth century attempting to beat the regional parlements into submission. Simultaneously, another transfer occurred: from the early eighteenth-­ century discourse concerning how an international “public” of Europe would judge the maneuvers of various absolutist regimes to the possibility that a domestic “public” could discuss, and perhaps even judge, its own monarch and especially the actions of his ministers. The result of this interwoven process was a thorough transformation of “public opinion,”

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which came to stand for both “the people” and for rationality and enlightenment.15 Baker’s work was an iconic moment in the cultural turn in the historiography of the French Revolution, but recent work has extended his analysis to the material substrate of this new political object—in particular the explosion of mass printing techniques—which combined with these meanings of “public” to make the new object possible. As Colin Jones (1996) argues, the Affiches (newspapers primarily driven by advertisements but prone to some news reporting as well, especially in the 1780s) “could claim to embody as well as represent that ‘public opinion’ whose importance recent historians have not been slow to emphasize” (Jones 1996: 39). Public opinion, an essential part of the cultural context of the 1780s, thus came into being haltingly and through a highly varied assemblage of different sorts of stuff: signs, circulars, spoken gossip and debate among nobles, etc. The invention of public opinion is a formation story, but it does not fit easily into the types we have outlined and that we understand as well-­ established by sociological research. Later, public opinion would become, in part, a sociotechnical object.16 But in this case, the invention and manifestation of public opinion was a driver of a “major shift in French culture” and becomes part of the “cultural origins of the French Revolution.” Note, however, that the importance of change in broad cultural formations is not usually understood in this way. Often, their explication is thought of as non-explanatory, an interpretation of “epistemes” (Foucault 1971) or of symbolic landscapes in a way that is detached from causal social science (Geertz 2000). Alternately, via concepts designed to capture the direct effects of culture on action, such as values, culture can be thought of in forcing cause terms, though the scope and utility of such a formulation is hotly debated. If, as Orlando Patterson (2014: 2) has recently noted, cultural sociology suffers from, at one extreme, “the 15  This is clear in studies of twentieth-century politics (Igo 2007; Osborne and Rose 1999; Perrin and McFarland 2011); Igo (2011) outlines the early development of survey research in a way that would clearly be considered a formation story, suggesting strongly that “public opinion” was reshaped into something that could be studied via certain instruments, and raising the issue of the relationship of such objects of modern social science techniques, a key point of the larger volume (Camic et al. 2011). However, in Baker’s study, the formation of public opinion is not really a study of technique so much as it is a way to understand the fundamental cultural shift of the late eighteenth century in terms that can be traced empirically.

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dogmatic rejection of causal explanations, and, at the other, explanatory evasiveness more generally,” then perhaps this is because explanations that evoke cultural representations are especially likely to exceed the existing concepts of causality present in sociology. Without proposing a single resolution to debates about culture and causality here, we submit that some research questions that invoke the question of culture might be well addressed by looking closely at formation as we have outlined it.16 Certainly this is what the historiography of the French Revolution would suggest.

5  Discussion If we see formation stories as causal, we can then start to understand them as a specific genre of sociological argument, replete with an accepted set of questions, attendant methodological debates, exemplar cases, and an evolving theoretical toolkit. This leads to insights about what debates about formation stories might look like, if they were recognized as such. We can begin by noting how the different formation stories presented above share a common insight, namely, that the “object,” “actor,” or “organization” that sociologists have worked to understand as a part of forcing cause relations has particular qualities and properties due to the formation story that is set out. Note here that, in addition to being causal claims in their own right, formation stories establish empirically the boundaries of forcing cause claims. In essence, they offer an empirical, historically traceable reason why the scope conditions of a given analysis are what they are. One implication of our account is that sociology should be much more concerned with the history of its own objects of study, accounting for them historically rather than defining them according to its own conventions. Thought of in this way, formation stories provide a useful complement to the idea of “path-dependence,” now widely understood as part of historical sociology. In path dependence, a contingent choice of institutional formation, object, or type of relationship A from the set {A, B, C…} at time t1 causes A to lock in for time t2, t3, t4, … , thus generating a sequence that can be analyzed in terms of the mechanisms of reproduction that create the “inertia” that we recognize as path-dependence (Mahoney 2000). Formation stories, on the other hand, help explain how A, B, and

16  For a similar argument, framed in terms of “landscapes of meaning,” see Reed 2011: 161–162.

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C came into existence in the first place, and tell us about the properties that those objects have as a result of the historical process of assemblage. If formation stories are to serve as another kind of causal historical account complementary to path-dependence, much more debate is needed about what makes a particular formation story persuasive. We see a need for methodological discussion of what constitutes a compelling counterfactual claim in formation stories. For a formation story to be taken as a causal story, the author of the claim must show plausible other ways the formation could have gone, and then account well for the difference between the plausible and the actual within the case under study.17 This difference is the primary difference that needs to be explained in a formation story-qua-sociological claim. Note, however, that to even establish such a difference, the investigator must use evidence from the case under study to distinguish the merely possible from the plausible (on the idea of plausible alternatives, see Lewis 1973, Hawthorn 1993). This process, and debate about it, is quite familiar to historians, but it is not as commonly foregrounded in in-depth case studies in sociology. Explicit attention to counterfactuals would be an important step forward because as of now— perhaps because they are not usually taken as causal claims at all—formation stories tend not to make their counterfactuals available. These three consequences of understanding formation stories as causal are epistemological. There is, however, also an ontological implication to adding formation stories to our causal repertoire: formation stories enable us to understand that the causal powers of the social world are never “fully and finally formed.” The objects, kinds, and forces of the social world are not raised in a historical garden of Eden and then set free into the world of causality once they have matured, to forever participate in the 17  It is worth noting that, despite a great deal of rhetoric surrounding Actor-Network Theory that valorizes description and attacks standard forms of sociological and “social” explanation, Latour himself affirms these sorts of contrasts as essential to the operation whereby causes are assessed. In his provocative discussion on construction, he notes that “the ‘making of’ any enterprise—films, skyscrapers, facts, political meetings, initiation rituals, haute couture, cooking… provides a rare glimpse of what it is for a thing to emerge out of inexistence by adding to any existing entity its time dimension. Even more important, when you are guided to any construction site you are experiencing the troubling and exhilarating feeling that things could be different, or at least that they could still fail” (Latour 2005: 89, emphasis in original). This is a somewhat melodramatic version of the argument presented here—that to get formation stories as causal stories, one must distinguish the plausible from the possible, and then explain the difference between the actual and the plausible by effectively tracing the history of the formation of an object.

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regularized causality of a well-ordered universe. Rather they are constantly available for, and sometimes subject to, intense revision, reassociation, and so on. Having been formed, they can be transformed. As such, their “objectness” is really a relative stability of associations, not a timeless property (Latour 1999).18 Although we agree with actor-network theory on many counts, we part ways on an important point of emphasis. Latour (2005: 107) emphasizes the distinction between translation and transportation, using explicitly causal language: “all the actors we are going to deploy might be associated in such a way that they make others do things. This is done not by transporting a force that would remain the same throughout as some sort of faithful intermediary, but by generating transformations manifested by the many unexpected events triggered in the other mediators that follow them along the line.” In our terms, Latour is expressing a rather strong preference for those causes in the world that display a certain amount of eventfulness and downplaying the role of forcing causes. We see no reason to automatically assume “mediation” predominates over “intermediation” in any given context. For, the preference for one over the other, if executed a priori, limits empirical research. We would instead urge sociologists to explore the ways in which formation stories bound forcing causes, without committing to one being “more important” than another. The importance of different genres of causal explanation should depend pragmatically on the research question, and empirically on the extent to which actors, objects, fields, and cultural atmospheres are stable enough to be usefully modeled with forcing cause approaches. Together, these epistemological and ontological implications of understanding formation stories as part of the causal repertoire of sociological research imply that generalizing from formation stories will proceed differently from forcing cause accounts. Instead, we suggest that formation stories will be usefully generalized via analogy. Analogy has already been noted by Diane Vaughan as an important theoretical operation (2004; 2014). Analogy is a particularly appropriate mode of generalization for formation stories; rather than the “modularity” that is expected of treatment-­ style causal reasoning and some mechanistic approaches (Woodward 2003: 336–339), in which the very possibility of making a 18  This point about the potential reformation of objects is also expressed in Actor-Network Theory via a preference for “performative” rather than “ostensive” definitions of objects (Latour 2005: 34).

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causal claim is premised on being able to add, remove, or tweak a discrete element of a causal system while leaving the rest of the system intact, formation stories function precisely because they are claims about a messy assemblage of links, entities, etc. An assemblage that produces an object or kind cannot be parsed into an aggregation of “lower level” mechanisms, which then can be abstracted and transposed directly to other places and times. However, a well-established formation story can be carried beyond the context of its initial utility by analogical thinking as a form of generalization. For example, the “performativity of economics” (Callon 1998; MacKenzie and Millo 2003) and Hacking’s (1995) “looping effects” offer two examples of generalizable formation stories. While the details of how economic theories intersect with political and technological developments to shape markets will vary dramatically from case to case, the observation that particular modes of thought are especially generative focuses our attention on that potential cause and at least suggests its potential causal weight in new contexts. Similarly, having shown in a handful of contexts the dynamic processes by which new diagnoses of mental illness shape the behaviors of those diagnosed, and their social networks and political communities, which in turn reshapes the meaning of the diagnosis, we come to expect that similar processes will occur in other similar cases, even as we recognize the particularity of the conjunctions of ideas, people, organizations, and tools that constitute specific assemblages like “autism” or “multiple personality disorder” (Hacking 2007; Eyal 2010).

6  Conclusion The history of sociological theory is full of arguments for and against “reducing” sociological explanation to various core entities or actors and thus also with attempts to transcend the sacred oppositions of individual and social structure, consciousness and culture, etc. Twenty-first-century versions of this argument have focused carefully on the particulars of how causal images of the world can be mobilized in research. This renewed interest in getting causality right had led to important links between the philosophy of the social sciences, sociological theory, and sociological research, including an extensive investigation into the foundations of three well-known approaches to causality based on the rigorous conceptualization of variables, treatments, and mechanisms.

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One might hope, for parsimony’s sake, that these versions of “forcing causality” could eventually be extended to cover formation stories—that, in other words, formation stories are just accounts of important strands of causal history that have not been adequately parsed into forcing causes yet, either from lack of knowledge, lack of trying, or lack of adequate theory. A similar, though less broad objection was recently registered in the pages of Sociological Theory, when Kuorikoski and Pöyhönen (2012) argued that Hacking’s looping kinds are in fact captured by a mechanistic framework. This argument was then used, somewhat predictably, to hammer “social constructionism,” a position framed in opposition to one that studies “an empirical causal phenomenon within society” (Kuorikoski and Pöyhönen 2012: 195) We contend that formation stories are real, consequential, and empirically traceable, but not comprehensible in the terms of mechanistic, treatment, or variable approaches to causality. Thus this sort of opposition—between constructionism and empirical causal phenomenon—does not make sense for understanding, improving, and enhancing sociological research on formation. Instead, we should develop better, more elaborated, and more varied approaches to causality for sociology. One way to do this is to pursue a deeper understanding of formation stories. By accepting that arguments that trace the messy history of formation are, in fact, causal arguments, sociologists would be positioned to develop methods for telling better formation stories, and better, more general, theories for understanding how formation happens. We see such an expansion as preferable to two alternatives: first, that sociologists continue to try to pack formation stories into one of the three well-established versions of forcing causality, or, second, that sociologists simply treat accounts of formation as “interpretive,” “descriptive,” or “merely historical,” in other words, as non-causal. The essence of our argument can perhaps be captured via an oversimplified metaphor. Piecing together social causality out of variables, treatments, and mechanisms has been, to this point, something like understanding the causal interactions within a massively difficult and highly complex Rube Goldberg machine. But how did the pieces of that machine—the marbles, ramps, springs, and so on—come to be what they are? Some versions of the philosophy of social science argue that the intellectual operation by which one “reduces” the properties of a marble to its molecular components can be imitated in sociology. In contrast, our argument is that in sociology, the equivalent to the marbles come to have their

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existence, shape, and properties not through the aggregation of well-­ defined and fixed lower-level entities, but rather through eventful histories, assemblages of heterogeneous stuff, and meaningful representations. How did there come to be capitalists? How did options become so important in modern financial markets? Why did something called public opinion emerge, take shape, and become essential for certain forms of legitimate domination? By conceptualizing these stories as causal processes of formation, we can come closer to explaining why social reality is the way it is.

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CHAPTER 5

Ratio via Machina: Three Standards of Mechanistic Explanation in Sociology Natalie B. Aviles and Isaac Ariail Reed

1   Introduction Mechanistic explanation has become ubiquitous in sociology, but its meaning remains obscure. On the one hand, a great deal of definitional work has emerged to formalize the concept of social mechanism. On the other, mechanism-talk has proliferated so quickly, and with such success, that references to mechanisms retain a certain ambiguity. In this chapter, we attempt to clarify the debate about mechanisms by proposing a three-­ fold typology of mechanistic explanation, backed by clear and consistent reasoning from the philosophy of science and social theory. We develop this typology alongside analysis of exemplary texts, bringing forward the evaluative standards implicit in each example. In articulating three distinct standards of what constitutes a mechanistic explanation we draw out a common intellectual impulse in the move toward mechanism-talk, while

N. B. Aviles (*) • I. Ariail Reed Department of Sociology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Ariail Reed, Sociology as a Human Science, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18357-7_5

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simultaneously articulating deep differences in what mechanisms are taken to reference and how sociologists are expected to use them in their explanations. This better reveals what is at stake in the many debates over mechanisms. Finally, in our own engagement with these debates, we argue not for or against realism, nor for or against mechanisms, but rather against a mechanistic fundamentalism that would flatten the social world into a limited number of efficient causal processes. In contrast to mechanistic fundamentalism, we articulate the beginnings of a pluralistic understanding of causation. This, we argue, both fits better much of what sociologists already find excellent about a variety of explanatory genres and, prescriptively, articulates a more productive way forward for the development of social theory.

2  Three Standards for Mechanistic Explanation It is widely understood among sociologists engaged in the mechanism debates that a single definition of “mechanism” does not exist in sociology (cf. Abbott 2007; Gross 2009; Gorski 2009; Hedström 2005; Hedström and Swedberg 1998). Nonetheless, with the exception of Abbott, these scholars attempt to address the lack of consensus by proposing their own single definition or theory of mechanisms. Breaking with these debates, we instead presume sociologists create accurate and actionable knowledge about the world through diverse practices that converge upon a concept that orients them to explanation in (minimally) similar ways. This approach leaves the door open to multiple productive interpretations of “mechanism” that cohere in different approaches to analysis and explanation. More precisely, we believe that there are in fact three separate standards for mechanistic explanation that have emerged over the years: substantial, formal, and metaphorical. Each of these directs a different kind of causal explanation based on different assumptions about the goals of explanatory practice. According to the substantial standard, a mechanism is an explanation that anchors descriptions of causal processes in the operation of real entities whose essential properties and tendencies can be established via empirical research. For the formalist standard, a mechanism explains the relationship between two variables by stipulating an intervening causal pathway of sufficient depth relative to a common analytical focus in the discipline. Finally, in the metaphoric standard, a mechanism identifies, in the interpretation of a case or cases, the stability and regularity of certain social phenomena in relation to the contingency, malleability, or

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irreducible complexity of other social phenomena that are part of the interpretation being made. In this first part of the chapter, our purpose is to make clear what the implicit standards of mechanistic explanation are in each of the three types by analyzing explanations that adequately enunciate each standard, prioritizing work that has been recognized as exemplary within sociology. Juxtaposing these standard-bearers allows for discussion of what is at stake in accepting one standard over the others. 2.1   The Substantial Standard In the substantial1 standard, mechanisms are causal processes made up of real entities with stable tendencies, and mechanistic explanation accounts for empirical outcomes as the product of interactions between these entities and other attributes of the social world. The substantial standard of mechanistic explanation thus reserves the use of the term “mechanism” for those instances in which an explanation (1) traces the process that leads from input to output via a set of interlocked, precisely determinable entities and (2) uses concepts that refer directly to the basic causal capacities (or “natures”) of those entities. This standard is developed in careful philosophical detail by Nancy Cartwright.2 In Cartwright’s view, mechanistic explanation captures components of an underlying “nomological machine,” a causal structure comprising real entities with stable causal capacities. The language of a mechanistic explanation thus must match precisely the underlying structure of the world, and this matching relies for its veracity on the way in which the concepts that move the explanation forward in language refer directly to the essential natures or capacities of the entities in the world. These capacities are, furthermore, not incidental to, but rather constitutive of, those entities. In Cartwright’s articulation, a “mechanism” is simply a separable component of a nomological machine, which explains empirical phenomena by tracing the workings of structures comprising stable and determinable causal capacities. The goal of mechanistic explanation should thus be to 1  We use the term “substantial” because this standard includes mechanisms that posit causal capacities inherent to particular substances or entities. 2  We have selected Cartwright’s theory of mechanisms because it is the most comprehensive, synthesizing prominent structuralist, process, and interventionist positions on mechanistic causation, represented separately by philosophers like Bechtel and Richardson (1993), Machamer et al. (2000), and Menzies (2012), into a coherent ontological position with clear epistemological implications for causal explanation.

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capture how underlying causal structures create different parts of the world we experience. Instead of debating the invariance of laws, or their existence as linguistic constructs, Cartwright returns to the idea that what is captured by a well-designed experiment or an efficacious model is an inner tendency inherent in the nature of certain entities (capacities). The observed outcomes that result from the action of capacities are not always assured, as they can be redirected by other intervening events, but the stability of capacities means they can be relied upon to tend toward certain limited expressions. Though Cartwright developed her model from examples of physics experiments, she argues that something similar drives certain causal arguments in social science. Using economics as her inspiration, Cartwright finds parallels to the nomological machines of physics in the “socio-­ economic machines” of social science models and experiments. Reasoning by analogy, Cartwright concludes that “social capacities” of some kind must exist if regular social causes exist in this way. Thus, according to the substantial standard, a good mechanistic model that actually explains regularity in the social world must schematize real social capacities and their structural arrangements in a socio-economic machine (Cartwright 1999: 53, 58–59). The key to modeling mechanisms in the social sciences is to set up exactly the right circumstances so that the capacities we suspect of particular entities in the social world can express themselves clearly enough that we glean some sense of the underlying causal structure of social processes. Without a doubt, this is a daunting task.3 In sociology, critical realism has taken up this challenge. Though there is variation and inconsistency in how different critical realists understand the models of sociology to map onto those of the physical or natural sciences, critical realists share an assumption that sociological explanation ultimately must elaborate the intransitive ontological components (real structures, human natures) that furnish the social world. In the vernacular of critical realism, the “real” refers to intransitive entities with causal capacities that exist irrespective of human understanding of them; the 3  Cartwright herself tests the uncertain construct of social capacities by analyzing economic models, such as game-theoretic simulations. She finds that, to the extent these models meet the substantial standard, they do so by sacrificing external validity (1999: 149). Ultimately, Cartwright finds that social capacities are extremely difficult to pin down, in part because they are constituted and reconstituted by human agents reacting to historical circumstances, individual impulses, and any number of other irregular or impermanent factors (cf. Crespo 2013).

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“actual” refers to the operation (whether observable or not) of these entities in the world; and the “empirical” refers to observations or experiences of the world (cf. Smith 2010: 93). Causation inheres in the capacities of real entities that combine in causal mechanisms. Empirical observation is the imperfect vehicle of sociological inquiry that attempts to access real causes and mechanisms by hypothesizing actual processes based on observed outcomes. Critical realism thus stipulates that the mission of sociological inquiry should be to develop adequate causal explanations of social phenomena in terms of actual conjunctions of mechanisms comprising real entities with stable causal capacities and tendencies, a position consistent with the approach Cartwright describes. Christian Smith exemplifies the critical realist approach to social mechanisms in What Is a Person? (2010), wherein he grounds explanations of social causes in “a theoretical model of the ontology of the nature of human being” (10). For Smith, the social world is populated by real entities, such as human beings, with certain causal capacities that interact to create higher-level entities, such as social structures, that exhibit emergent causal capacities and tendencies of their own. Smith uses a critical realist formulation of personhood to argue for the ontology of human dignity. For Smith, “human dignity is an independent objective reality” (2010: 470); it is an emergent product of the causal capacities of personhood. Dignity exists as a real entity with specific causal capacities whether or not actors in a given historical context recognize it as such. Dignity is differently actualized in different contexts according to other triggering causal processes, but it is always present to some degree, and human actors everywhere experience empirical manifestations of dignity that enable sociologists to study its effects. Human dignity comprises one social capacity ingredient in mechanisms of solidarity that in turn actualize into specific (e.g., national) moral orders when triggered by certain cultural and structural forces. Importantly, Smith’s work also captures what is characteristically critical about critical realism, that is, its attempt to preserve the possibility of normativity in scientific sociology. For Smith, critical realist sociology on topics like human dignity support moral action directed toward preserving the integrity of all persons. It is worth pointing out that Smith’s explanation is consistent with a substantial understanding of causal mechanisms as composed of real capacities with determinable tendencies regardless of whether the reader finds his specific interpretation of human nature compelling. Nevertheless, while critical realist explanations such as Smith’s conform to Cartwright’s

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injunction that mechanistic explanations anchor causal processes in stable capacities with determinable tendencies, the assumption that adequate mechanistic explanations of empirically complex social phenomena must emanate from a small number of intransitive social capacities (that, for instance, inhere in human nature) may ultimately lack sufficient warrant. The tension is revealed in frequent attempts among critical realists to reconcile ontological models of human nature and structural capacities with the tenets of social constructionism and historicism indicated by the axiom that entities in the social world are “concept-dependent” (cf. Gorski 2009). These and other difficulties have troubled attempts to develop a deep, social realist “foundation” to sociological science (cf. Alexander 1982–1983; Seidman 1991) and have led many sociologists to be somewhat skeptical of the utility of (various versions of) the substantial standard. In particular, the notion that what a strong causal explanation in sociology does is reveal the “real nature” of an entity is rather distant from many causal claims in sociology, which tend to bound significantly the application of their hypotheses and adopt a much more nominalist approach at a philosophical level. Given our reliance on her arguments above, it is worth noting that Cartwright expresses similar skepticism at certain points in her texts.4 What, then, is to be done? 2.2   The Formal Standard The formal standard dispenses with the ontological goals of explanation that characterize the substantial standard. Instead, it develops a more pragmatic, analytical approach to modeling mechanistic causes. Rather than attempting to grasp the nature of entities and their interaction, it uses mechanistic language to discuss a recurrent problem in sociological research and theory: the way that some explanations may be judged to be insufficiently “deep” because they fail to specify underlying causal pathways connecting inputs to outcomes. The second standard of mechanistic explanation thus engages and reconstitutes a long-standing sociological 4  While Cartwright by no means dismisses sociologists’ ability to construct causal explanations, she is generically skeptical about social scientists’ ability to convincingly construct mechanisms that reveal real social capacities. This is due in part to a lack of plausible general principles from which social scientists can work to isolate the tendencies of social capacities by eliminating extraneous forces and bracketing structural assumptions built into their models (Cartwright 2009: 50).

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interest in explanation via intervening variables. In so doing, it constructs models of causal processes or pathways in varying degrees of formality. Critiquing approaches that attempt to explain outcomes by measuring the strength of association between variables, advocates of the formal standard like Morgan and Winship (2015) maintain that adequate explanation requires the additional depth provided by modeling a mechanism that hypothesizes how and why a given variable (D) affects another variable (Y). Thus, the question “what is the mechanism?” should be understood as an inquiry about intervening variables. If indeed investigators want to evaluate a theoretical account of a variable relationship, then “a more narrowly focused analysis of the putative causal pathways that relate D to Y must be undertaken” (2015: 330). Using Judea Pearl’s approach to causality, in which intervening variables are represented as constituting pathways from one variable to another in directed acyclic graphs, Morgan and Winship characterize the above example in the following way (Fig. 5.1). If we think of mechanisms this way, they become particularly useful for addressing a frequent problem in social science, namely that the relationship between variable D and variable Y is affected by unobserved variables that cause both. If U is a cause of both D and Y, then the causal effect of D on Y can be, nonetheless, effectively estimated via the intervening variable M, if two things are true: M is isolated—that is, no observed or unobserved variables cause both D and M, and exhaustive—M intercepts all causal pathways from D to Y.  It is, of course, possible to have a set of mechanisms (say, M, N, and another mechanism O) that satisfy these criteria, if the relationship between those mechanisms can itself be adequately rendered.

U

D

M

Y

N Fig. 5.1  Directed acyclic graph representing a mechanism that explains the causal pathways from D to Y.  Directly adapted from Morgan and Winship (2015: 332)

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This standard of mechanistic explanation breaks sharply from the substantial standard. Because it has developed in contrast to some of the literature on “generative” and “substantive” mechanisms, and because it explicitly and assiduously avoids the issue of the “inner nature” of social entities, we label this approach the formal standard. In this view, mechanisms are intervening causal pathways hypothesized relative to a well-­ defined research question about how to get from independent to dependent variables. In the formal approach, explanation via mechanisms frequently involves a process of “bottoming out” which causal pathways matter relative to the community of inquiry’s interests. Machamer et al. explain: Nested hierarchical descriptions of mechanisms typically bottom out in lowest level mechanisms. These are the components that are accepted as relatively fundamental or taken to be unproblematic for the purposes of a given scientist, research group, or field. Bottoming out is relative: different types of entities and activities are where a given field stops when constructing mechanisms. The explanation comes to an end, and description of lowerlevel mechanisms would be irrelevant to their interests. (2000: 13; cited in Morgan and Winship 2015: 345)

Bottoming out allows sociologists to isolate and schematize analytically important causal processes in a way that does not require philosophical finality about the underlying natures or essential causal tendencies of entities. The relativity of bottoming out also reveals the way in which the formal standard is more pragmatist, rather than realist, in its philosophical orientation. The point is to connect explanations to the concerns of a given community of inquiry and the well-defined research questions it has produced. In those areas of sociology that have tended to think of mechanisms as intervening variables, one could argue that this kind of bottoming out relative to the concerns of the research community has become part of the formal standard for mechanistic explanation.5 However, because the search for intervening variables and the search for a lower level are not identical pursuits, departures from this version of the formal standard are possible. These can go in one of two directions. First, one might abandon 5  The philosophical reference point here is C.S. Peirce’s concept of the community of inquiry. For discussions of the concept see Peirce 1992/1877; Talisse 2004; Lichterman and Reed 2015.

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the search for a lower level, and simply pursue intervening variables at any level of analysis. If there are good practical reasons to do this (in terms of policy interventions in the world, for example), this may indeed accord well with the spirit of the formal standard, and especially with its pragmatist orientation. However, second, one might demand that bottoming out get to a given level, based on a specific rendering of the social world writ large. That is, one might propose that explanations always bottom out at the level of individual human beings understood as having natures that dispose them to act in a certain way. This second departure is, in our view, a departure that returns to the substantive standard, and we discuss the implications of this approach at several points in later parts of this chapter. For Morgan and Winship, whose approach is pragmatic, the formal understanding of mechanisms is tied into a broader program wherein social causality is accessed via the potential outcomes framework. However, the formal standard appears in many other approaches, even if those approaches are less strict in their avoidance of “ontological” debates about social reality, and less clear about the pragmatist basis for their philosophy of science. For example, it is also exemplified in Peter Hedström’s early programmatic work advocating for an analytical approach to social mechanisms.6 According to Hedström, mechanisms are abstract models, analytical constructs to be tested against empirical phenomena or simulations, and emphatically not to be evaluated based on realist interpretations of the necessarily simplified and incomplete assumptions they make about the social world (Hedström and Swedberg 1998: 14–15). For Hedström, the mechanisms analytical sociologists identify should resemble the kind of simplified model represented by “Coleman’s boat,” wherein macro-level social phenomena are explained in terms of intervening individual actions oriented toward situational conditions in ways that generate transformations in aggregate patterns, as in Fig. 5.2 (Hedström and Swedberg 1998; Hedström and Ylikoski 2010). Hedström (1998) illustrates this approach by constructing a model of rational imitation, a theory that actors imitate the actions of other actors 6  Though initially a strong proponent of a purely analytical approach to social mechanisms, Hedström’s subsequent research around the desires-beliefs-opportunities (DBO) model can be interpreted as presuming a substantialist basis for the DBOs it postulates. Hedström’s ontological drift highlights how the potential for slippage between substantial and formal approaches bedevils many efforts to define a single standard for mechanistic explanation, a problem that further justifies the need to self-consciously parse the different explanatory standards of each approach.

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Macro-level assoclation 4 Situational mechanisms

3

1

Transformational mechanisms

2 Action-formation mechanisms

Fig. 5.2  Hedström and Ylikoski’s typology of social mechanisms based on Coleman’s boat (Coleman 1990). Adapted directly from Hedström and Ylikoski (2010: 59)

based on their belief that others’ actions indicate the most effective strategies for achieving a desired outcome. Hedström proposes rational imitation as an individual-level phenomenon that produces quasi-general aggregate mechanisms, such as cognitive dissonance reduction or self-­ fulfilling prophecies, by intervening between macro-level variables. Hedström, drawing upon Merton’s example of the self-fulfilling prophecy as a mechanistic explanation of bank runs, creates a simulation to model the aggregate dynamics of individual acts of rational imitation. Far from assuming rational imitation derives from an innate capacity of real human actors, Hedström’s model tests different heuristics for action that ranges from completely imitative to completely atomistic, and function to test the parameters of the hypothesized mechanism rather than mirror real phenomena. Hedström’s model of the self-fulfilling prophecy explains how certain macro-level associations (bank runs) occur when certain situational conditions (rumors of insolvency and occurrences where people have withdrawn their funds from the bank) trigger intervening action-­formation mechanisms (actors’ beliefs that the actions of others indicate the truth of insolvency rumors and that they should therefore act similarly) which then manifest transformational mechanisms (cascading numbers of imitators withdrawing their funds, rendering the bank insolvent after all).

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Though proposed as a candidate explanation for empirical phenomena, Hedström’s simulation does not purport to directly represent “real-life situations” (1998: 325). It is a simplified abstraction of a more generic process whose empirical manifestation is subject to all manner of complex contingencies unspecifiable in the model. According to the formal standard, a “theoretical model is in principle constructed in such a way that it includes only those elements believed to be essential for the problem at hand. The target of the theoretical analysis, then, is this model and not the reality that the model is intended to explain” (Hedström and Swedberg 1998: 14). An adequate formal explanation of mechanistic causation ultimately explains social phenomena as the outcome of unobservable intervening mechanisms abstracted from empirical examples through careful causal modeling. 2.3   The Metaphorical Standard It is worth remarking that, despite prolific attempts to define what mechanisms are in social science inquiry, many sociologists who couch their explanations in mechanisms advance neither strong ontological stances on the nature of social reality nor construct formal analytical causal models to support their claims (cf. Vaidyanathan et al. 2015). Nevertheless, the idea of mechanism appears to do some systematic conceptual work for the sociologists who deploy mechanistic explanations outside of the substantial or formal standards. In some areas of sociology, the rhetoric of mechanism matters, not because it denotes an ontological entity or an analytical model, but because it connotes a particular imagery that is useful for organizing observations. For many sociological explanations, we propose, the core imagery evoked by the term “mechanism” is a key element of an explanation—namely, that something in the social world works regularly and efficiently, as if it were a machine. What this entails, then, is usually a claim about some parts of the world working more like a machine than other parts. This is the metaphorical standard. In the metaphorical view, “mechanism” is simultaneously a sensitizing and explanatory concept, though it is explanatory in a different way than discussed in the sections on substantial and formal approaches to mechanisms (indeed it is possible that strong proponents of the substantial and formal standards would not recognize what follows here as explanation). The concept is sensitizing in that it primes the researcher to pick out attributes of a broader, intertwined, and messy social world that are more

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machine-like than other processes that surround them. To explain how the mechanism metaphor enforces a coherent standard for explanation in sociology, we must take a brief detour into the theory of metaphor. The linguistic turn in philosophy, pivoting on Wittgenstein, opened up a purportedly denotative scientific discourse to literary scrutiny, including work on metaphor.7 As we understand it, metaphorical analysis inspired by the linguistic turn is not just about the format of scientific argument, but, in the standard for sociological explanation we propose here, speaks to a heuristic process of generating sociological explanations (cf. Gerhart and Russell 1984). In other words, we imagine metaphor as basic to the process whereby the sociologist sorts, colligates, and construes evidence in a case. Literary theorist and philosopher Paul Ricoeur gives an account of this kind of sorting. Metaphor, Ricoeur (2003/1975) argues, generates truth statements that exist somewhere between poetic innovation and empirical observation. This is because metaphors are by their nature a “split reference” to invention and reality, with one foot in the realm of creative fiction and the other in the terra firma of the world. To fully grasp their meaning, readers must interpret metaphors as having a split copula; that is, they must read the verb “to be” that holds together a metaphoric statement as “it is and it is not.” Such a reading highlights the “semantic impertinence” at the heart of all metaphorical statements, that is, the fact that they are absurd if taken literally (178). Semantic impertinence justifies Ricoeur’s use of the tension theory of metaphor, the idea that metaphors cohere not only because they are similar to their referents, but because they are at the same time implicitly different from them. The tension is reconciled when a metaphor transcends the initial shock of its literal absurdity to indicate something else that is similar, a process that enables users of the metaphor to elaborate their account of reality in new ways. In sociology, we propose, metaphorical tension is useful in explaining the ways in which social life, when thickly described, is both like and not like a machine. This insight guides much historical sociological research into how and when social life becomes more regular and regulated, the 7  An early forerunner was Stephen Pepper (1961), who considered mechanism to be a prime example of a “root metaphor,” the basic framework that generates comprehensive “world hypotheses”—grand and all-encompassing schemes that guide cognition in science and philosophy. For Pepper, metaphor pre-sorts the kinds of processes that can be imagined as ontological furniture of the world in the first place.

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way in which such machine-like regularity works, and the effect of this regularity on the human subjects who engage, support, participate in, and resist it. Thus, thinking metaphorically about mechanisms enables the development of more innovative and intellectually powerful interpretations and case-based explanations. For example, the metaphorical use of mechanism is central to the causal explanation proposed by historical sociologist Richard Biernacki in The Fabrication of Labor (1995). Biernacki’s explanation offers an extensive and detailed account of how labor was conceptualized and enacted in two different settings for early industrialization: Britain and Germany. He argues that different cultural categories germane to each country gave labor and its remuneration different manifestations in each case—in Britain, as the amount of labor crystallized in the end product, and in Germany, as the disposition over the laborer’s labor power over a given period of time. Note, however, that this classically “humanist” or “interpretive” explanation gained torque precisely because these interpretations of the effect of cultural categories were made with explicit reference to a mechanistic part of the social world that contrasted with them: the piece-­ rate mechanism. Biernacki posits that “the economic environment limited the mode of payment” (45) so piece-rate remuneration for weavers was the norm in both Britain and Germany. The piece-rate mechanism was a stable, regular, and general phenomenon undergirding wool textile manufacture in both Britain and Germany that emerged from the practical and utilitarian economic actions of mill owners using technologies of comparable structure and efficiency. In other words, metaphorically speaking, it operated like a machine to produce consistent actions across disparate contexts. Note that Biernacki’s explanation does not posit the piece-rate mechanism as an entity with capacities, nor does it rest upon a formal causal model that stipulates piece-rate payment as an intervening causal pathway. Rather, Biernacki uses more metaphorical language to defend his argument: the piece-rate mechanism was a “Rorschach test for industrial culture” (1995: 44) in that it enabled different cultural categories to constitute unique pay scales around it. This to us indicates that the role of mechanism in Biernacki’s explanation is neither substantial nor formal but rather functions within the conceptual apparatus of the explanation as a point of focus, such that the piece-rate mechanism is counterposed to its precipitation into how labor is measured on the shop floor in each case, via the cultural categories used to interpret and thus fabricate labor.

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In this instance of metaphorical usage, the mechanism is what is held constant across the two cases and then interpreted on the ground; this would indeed appear to be one way in which this sort of explanation tends to work—it can also be found, for example, in Salzinger’s (2003) interpretation of factory work, in which the more mechanistic process of feminine labor as a vector of globalization manifests according to different interpretations on each factory floor. But the use of the mechanism metaphor does not have to point to a constant in this way. For example, a paired comparison might detail how a certain case congealed a mechanistic process while another, contrasting case did not. Wilson (2011) makes this argument when he compares reflection and refraction models of tax administration in relation to domestic and colonial systems of governance. Alternatively, the advent of mechanistic social life might be a matter of degree. Gorski (2003) makes this sort of argument by comparing the relative strength or intensity of social discipline in the Netherlands and Prussia. What distinguishes metaphorical mechanisms from the other two types is that the criteria used to evaluate the presence and/or strength of a mechanism emerge in relation to the attributes of specific contexts or cases and not in relation to conjunctions of intransitive capacities or models of intervening causal pathways. The metaphorical standard, then, trades parsimony and transposable theory for nuance and explanation-via-case-­ description. This difference prompts the next part of this chapter, which looks more generally at differences between the standards and their implications for debates about sociological explanation.

3  The Mechanisms Debates, Reconsidered We now propose to use these three standards to clarify what is at stake in (some of) the mechanisms debates in sociology. Consider two propositions. Proposition 1 Debates about realism are really debates between the substantial and formal standards. One extended strand of debate in sociology concerns the degree to which a realist program that adheres to the substantial standard of mechanistic explanation is applicable to sociology, even as a regulatory ideal that is never fully reached in practice. Can we say that, in sociology, what we must access are the social capacities whose causal tendencies structure the world? There are a variety of arguments for such a position. For example:

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–– John Goldthorpe (2007) argues that Rational Action Theory may not describe individual actors in their full, elaborated reality, but does capture a core tendency of decision-making action that is causally significant, and thus can be the basis of explanation. –– Hedström (2005), departing from his earlier formalism, argues that sociologists should construct analytical models to capture the “desires, beliefs, and opportunities” (DBOs) that motivate social actors as real entities prone to certain activities, and that the tendencies created by DBOs, in interaction, explain aggregate social outcomes. –– Daniel Little (2012) argues that social realities at the meso- and macro-level emerge from interactions between purposeful entities (persons) at the micro-level, and these emergent entities have natures or capacities of their own. All of these arguments share a commitment to a substantial standard, and criticism tends, for all the discussion of realism and anti-realism, to focus in on the issue of whether “ontology” or “entities with properties” should really drive the theorization of sociological mechanisms. Morgan and Winship (2015) argue that the attempt by Goldthorpe and other proponents of rational choice theory to ground statistical research in an ontology of the actor and, as a result, a certain basic set of generative mechanisms can lead to perverse consequences for the field. In particular, they point out that if scholars become advocates for a certain key mechanism based on a favored but arbitrary ontology of social life, and if they support the existence of such a mechanism through various highly indirect entailments, then the result may be “mechanism warlordism” wherein “the mechanisms of the most industrious scholars—those who can dream up the largest number of hypotheses to affirm, who can recruit the largest number of students to do the same, and who can attract the largest amount of funding to collect the data on their hypotheses…could receive the most affirmation” (Morgan and Winship 2015: 343). The threat of mechanism warlordism supports their articulation of the formal standard. It is revealing, and we think, positive evidence for the utility of the typology proposed here, that Isaac Ariail Reed (2011), arguing from a very different tradition of thought from Morgan and Winship, arrives at a similar criticism of what Reed calls realism and we call the substantial standard. His argument against realism amounts to an argument that, by starting with a certain ontology, investigators “short circuit” the project of

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understanding social life as it is subjectively perceived and meaningfully interpreted, instead beginning with an ontology arbitrarily set by the theoretical school within which the investigator works. This argument is mobilized for a very different agenda—Reed is interested in historically bounded, thickly described case studies, not intervening variables—but the issue with the substantial standard is the same. Both arguments, in other words, dispute the pursuit of entities with inherent natures as appropriate for sociological explanation. Another way of saying the same thing is this: there may be ontological consistencies to the entities that make up social life as we study it in sociology (e.g., the nature of persons, certain properties of social facts like money, and so on), but it is extremely unlikely that, by attaining precision about this ontology, we will be able to sufficiently explain the observed variations that primarily occupy sociologists. To summarize, from the perspective of the formal standard, attempts to elaborate sociological epistemology around generative mechanisms, the micro-foundations of sociology, or critical realism are insufficiently pragmatist in their understanding of social science. In aspiring to the substantial standard, such approaches attempt to replace the contingent process whereby a community decides whether an explanation is “insufficiently deep” and thus requires more work on mechanisms with an ontological guarantor that requires all explanations to function in a single language. In response, those in pursuit of the substantial standard may argue that the pragmatist approach is undertheorized, which is to say that it has not made clear the presuppositions about actors and actions upon which it rests. This sort of back-and-forth between substantial and formal standards is, we think, what is going on in much of the mechanism-talk that has become part and parcel of working sociology (and is near ubiquitous in conference talk where research is evaluated and criticized). Much of the confusion about the term “mechanism,” we hazard, results from the fact that these two standards of explanation can sometimes gel together nicely, but oftentimes do not. If, for example, by positing an isolated and exhaustive intervening variable we are also articulating in a clear way a testable picture of certain entities that exist and drive process, then these two meanings come together nicely. But in much sociological research, this keen match is unavailable. Proposal 2  An essential divide in the use of the term “mechanism” in sociological explanation is the value placed upon parsimony. 

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The metaphorical standard reveals, however, how much is held in common in the debates between the substantial and formal standards. Broadly, the substantial and the formal standards value a relatively straightforward understanding of parsimony as the key to explanatory strength, and as such, they reject the more local and thick-descriptive approach prominent in many explanations that follow the metaphorical standard. Put bluntly, those following the metaphorical standard elevate nuance as a guiding epistemic norm in place of parsimony. Thus, although the metaphorical standard and the formal standard share skepticism about ontological claims about entities and natures, they break over their understanding of the goals of explanation and the purpose of theory in social science. As an explanatory practice, the metaphorical standard suggests a focus on the phenomenology of the interpretation of evidence. Returning to Ricoeur, metaphors are a “seeing-as” in the Wittgensteinian sense, the intuition of a coherent experience from ambiguous context (2003/1975: 252). This leads to a productive view with regards to explanation that echoes the “thick description” advocated by Clifford Geertz: it “unleashes the power that certain fictions have to redescribe reality” in creative ways (Ricoeur 2003/1975: 5). The implication is that neither an underlying ontological structure nor an isolated and exhaustive intervening process needs to be fully stipulated to obtain a good mechanistic explanation. Rather, the analyst evokes the imagery of mechanism to draw a key contrast within the case. The metaphoric standard thus encourages a hermeneutic attitude, where explanations are evaluated based on how their application of the term “mechanism” and its connotations illuminates regularities without reifying them or reducing all phenomena of interest to the mechanism. In the metaphorical standard, the interpretation of empirical observations through the metaphor of mechanism works to produce good knowledge claims because that which is identified as a mechanism is grasped in its regularity and consistency in comparison and relationship to aspects of social life that are not like machines with regular interlocking parts—local cultures, historical contingencies, and human idiosyncrasies. It is here that the semantic impertinence of metaphor becomes indispensable to good metaphorical explanation: “interpretation of metaphor is not possible unless one first perceives the incompatibility of the non-figurative meaning of the lexeme with the rest of the context” (Ricoeur 2003/1975: 215). The tension between the regularity and stability implied by the metaphor of mechanism and the experience of a messy and irregular social

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world must be evident in metaphorical explanations, both to enable sound evaluation and to defend against hypostatization. In a paper delivered at New York University on “Analytical Sociology and Pragmatism,” Neil Gross identified this issue of parsimony as central to the debates swirling around the Analytical Sociology (AS) movement. In particular, he argued for certain details and historically bounded accounts as indeed identifying “substantive” mechanisms, in opposition to the extreme levels of abstraction he found in AS. Gross saw clearly a debate about parsimony that in fact extends well beyond Analytical Sociology. With reference to certain historical details central to Robert Scott’s account of pilgrimage cures in the Middle Ages—for example, that in a Christian world where illness was taken to be the result of sin, going on a pilgrimage took a person out of an emotionally suffocating environment— Gross argued that Analytical Sociologists had mistaken historical details essential to a causal story for “minute detail” that had to be discarded; in contrast, he argued for a more historically grounded and nuanced comprehension of mechanisms. “This is the essence of the epistemic problem for mechanisms in sociology—how abstract is too abstract? How much should be sacrificed at the altar of parsimony?”8

4  Against Mechanistic Fundamentalism, or the Dappled World of Sociology Let us suppose that the reader has accepted a minimal version of our argument thus far: that there are three ways to think of mechanistic explanation that describe the world of sociological practice that includes the term “mechanism.” (We say this is a minimal version of our argument because, for example, one reader could believe it and also believe that no substantial ontologies of social mechanisms live up to the substantial standard, while another could believe it and hold that Hedström’s and Goldthorpe’s sociologies do meet this standard.) Stated as such, it remains an argument for more clarity in what standards sociologists are applying to themselves when they conduct mechanistic explanations. It remains, as it were, an attempt at clear talk about good practice. What follows is, by contrast, more normative talk about sociological practice, which is to say, an account of how sociologists should think about mechanisms. In this regard, we think that the problem with mechanisms in sociology is not realism or 8

 This talk was delivered at New York University, December 9, 2013.

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anti-realism, but rather a tendency toward mechanistic fundamentalism. In this section, we clarify what we mean by this term, and propose an alternative—the dappled world approach to social causality—we think better captures the variation in the social world sociologists observe and explain. In doing so, we adapt some of the arguments of Cartwright, but apply them specifically to sociology and sociology’s engagement with the implications, for explanation, of history and culture.9 Mechanistic fundamentalism is the argument that (1) the social world is made up of a finite set of mechanisms comprising elements of a stable “social ontology” presumed to underwrite social phenomena, and (2) the pursuit of causal explanation in sociology amounts to the delineation of a 9  In the same text wherein she developed her understanding of nomological machines, Cartwright developed her criticism of standard philosophy of science in a new direction. “It is not realism,” she wrote, “but fundamentalism that we need to combat” (Cartwright 1999: 23, emphasis in original). Fundamentalism holds that the things described in laws or models are not only true, but true everywhere. In application, the fundamentalist position posits that every observable instance of any given phenomenon can ultimately be reduced to one of a few basic laws. For Cartwright, the problematic fundamentalism which drives to reduce the world to the laws of physics has as its preferable counterpoint her notion of the “dappled world.” The dappled world is one where those purportedly universal, fundamental laws of physics describe only a limited range of phenomena and only under certain conditions; the rest of the world as we know it is populated by various “natures” which we know to tend toward certain activities but cannot hope to predict in the same way we can those few nomological machines that are described in natural law. Those situations not governed by universal laws can be subsumed under these laws “only by distortion, whereas they can often be described fairly correctly by concepts from more phenomenological laws” (1999: 31). Where natures can be described more accurately in phenomenological terms, they should “be admitted into the body of knowledge on their own merit” (1999: 24). It is important for understanding our argument that Cartwright’s notion of “natures” or “capacities” that make up nomological machines is part of her dappled world hypothesis—in other words, the world of causality has to be understood as dappled because different things in the world have different natures. This is why Cartwright calls her position one of “metaphysical nomological pluralism”—it does not abandon general causes and assumes that our descriptions of causes can get very close to describing the real world. However, it assumes that there are many species of cause, and that the task of the (physical, natural, and social) sciences is to catalog the great variety of causes in ways that help us explain our world. Our argument is that a metaphorical understanding of mechanisms aids in doubling down on this “dappled world” hypothesis. In the human sciences, the construal of the world is such that even within the set of causes that concern “sociology,” the world is extraordinarily dappled, because objects, kinds, and processes are formed and then unformed in a world of cultural and historical variation of ontology (see Chap. 3). In this context, there is a parallel to the fundamentalism in the philosophy of science that attempts to reduce all causal natures to the laws of physics.

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very small set of such mechanisms that can account for an extremely wide variety of behaviors, outcomes, etc. (in other words, given agreement over this ontology, the epistemic value of parsimony then becomes paramount). Mechanistic fundamentalism is founded on the following two moves that are analogous to classic arguments in the philosophy of science: Downward reduction is the expectation that the workings of the social world will “bottom out” at the level of the individual person, who is taken as the fundamental building block of social explanation. As Abbott points out, extant discussions of mechanisms lead quickly to attempts to delineate the primitives of mechanisms—whether they are Goldthorpe’s (2007) rational actors, Hedström’s (2005) DBOs, or Neil Gross’s (2009) pragmatist A-P-H-Rs. It is worth mentioning that this is a direct analogy to the stacked world of biology-chemistry-physics, with the foundational particle physics at the bottom of the stack. Crosswise reduction assumes that models constructed under highly controlled or abstracted conditions hold true across all empirical phenomena, including those occurring outside of the conditions stipulated in an explanation. In sociology, crosswise reduction is revealed in the assumption that a small number of general processes must undergird all empirical phenomena, and that it is the task of explanation to reconstruct empirical phenomena to fit the abstract models upon which these observed phenomena are presumptively based. The arguments for and against these two sorts of reductionism dot the literature, and we do not go into them here. Rather, we wish to point out that, understood in this way, the opposite of mechanistic fundamentalism is not some sort of “constructivism,” “relativism,” or “anti-realism,” but, following Cartwright, a pluralism about the sorts of causal models needed to explain social phenomena. That is to say, the problem with mechanistic fundamentalism is not that it wishes to build a science of social reality that has as its goal explanation, nor is it that it expects scientific discoveries to be responsible to evidence. Rather, the problem is that it tends toward irresponsibility toward evidence in so far as it combines the substantial standard with a pursuit of parsimony as the primary epistemic value. To see how this is the case, consider the following thought experiment.

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Imagine that the social world exists, and there is in it a certain number of causal configurations, inner workings, etc. Social scientist F goes out into this world, and, insisting on parsimony above all else, stops developing models (verbal or mathematical) of what he sees after he has, based on his observations, built twenty such models. After that, each empirical phenomenon he observes, with the phenomena separated by relatively intuitive categories (barfights, marriages, arrests, etc.), is fitted into one of his twenty models. In contrast, social scientist E goes out into the world and uses the same intuitive, informal criteria to decide when he has stopped observing one phenomenon and started to observe another, but for each and every new phenomenon builds a new theoretical model. We expect that most sociologists—whether “realist” or “constructivist,” “naturalist” or “humanist”—would agree that somewhere between these two extremes is a more desirable research program for knowledge production in social science. Social mechanisms are neither the fundamental particles of the social universe nor are they perfect empirical descriptions. And this means not only that we should avoid reducing the world to certain specific mechanisms (i.e., avoid the victory of a given mechanism warlord), but that alongside the development of “mechanism” as a causal imagery, we should develop other explanatory genres based on different causal imagery. (Prominent examples inside sociology include “field” and “network.”) Doing so will require an engagement with the denotations and connotations of these terms as sensitizing as well as explanatory concepts. In other words, it will require engagement with and elaboration of the metaphorical standard, not only for “mechanism,” but for other key causal terms as well. (For work in this spirit applied to the concept of “field,” cf. Martin 2003.) To do this requires us to see the social world as “dappled”—as consisting of sundry causes that are best captured by different terms, one of which is “mechanism.” In this, we again follow Cartwright (2004), who advocates “thick” causal imagery that communicates information about specific kinds of causes in terms that are of greater explanatory use than the fugitive general causal laws we often attempt to abstract from them. We argue that including a metaphoric standard allows us to establish clearer criteria for thick causal accounts that draw from the content-rich causal imagery sociologists use to convey these accounts in the first place. These criteria, derived as they are from specific uses of concepts, remain

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appropriate to the specific causes they describe, and, as Cartwright insists, should not be reduced to more fundamental standards.10 There is some argument for labeling this sort of pluralism a brand of realism, in the sense that the metaphorical approach to mechanisms shares with a variety of different realisms the idea that, through its theoretical development, it can enable a better grasp on, and explanations of, social reality. However, the argument for elaborating a metaphorical approach to sociological explanation as a fruitful way forward could also be taken as anti-realist, in the sense that it tends toward an interest in the complex connotations and tensions produced by metaphorical concepts, and thus away from a sheerly denotative interpretation of how sociological understanding works. But perhaps the point is that realism/anti-realism is not the right dichotomy. Instead, at issue is the tension between parsimony and nuance, between fundamentalism and pluralism.

5  Conclusion To the extent that mechanisms have become ubiquitous resources in causal explanation, we should be more precise about what we mean when we talk about mechanisms. Efforts to construct a single definition of social mechanism have faltered because there are three different ways of using the concept of mechanism to construct explanations, and these uses converge far too infrequently to justify any of the universal, monosemic definitions sociologists have so far proposed. The expositions offered in Sect. 2 of this chapter elaborate three separate standards to capture the nuance across different kinds of mechanism-talk and save their contributions to the discipline where they inevitably fail to overlap with the demands of other standards. More to the point, it suggests that each of the three standards presupposes a different approach to the construction and evaluation of explanation, and conflating these standards in an effort to enforce a single universal definition of “mechanism” will lead to misunderstandings of explanatory practice in sociology. This chapter attempts to reduce those

 This argument is based on our own affinity for the metaphorical standard. However, a more pluralistic approach to mechanisms is possible for sociologists who are not inclined toward the metaphorical standard and do not wish to extend the group of causal metaphors beyond mechanism. Particularly from within the formal standard, one could posit “sundry mechanisms of different kinds.” We thank anonymous reviewer 1 of the chapter for pointing this out. 10

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misunderstandings and offer a way forward in ongoing discussions of the scope and utility of mechanistic explanation in sociology.

References Abbott, Andrew. 2007. Mechanisms and Relations. Sociologica 1 (2): 1–22. Alexander, Jeffrey. 1982–1983. Theoretical Logic in Sociology. Vol. 1–4. London: Routledge. Bechtel, William, and Robert C.  Richardson. 1993. Discovering Complexity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Biernacki, Richard. 1995. The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cartwright, Nancy. 1999. The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. Causation: One Word, Many Things. Philosophy of Science 71 (5): 805–820. ———. 2009. If No Capacities Then No Credible Worlds. But Can Models Reveal Capacities? Erkenntnis 70 (1): 45–58. Coleman, James S. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Crespo, Ricardo F. 2013. Theoretical and Practical Reason in Economics: Capacities and Capabilities. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. Gerhart, Mary, and Allan M.  Russell. 1984. Metaphoric Process: The Creation of Scientific and Religious Understanding. Fort Worth, TX: TCU Press. Goldthorpe, John H. 2007. On Sociology. 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gorski, Philip. 2003. The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2009. Social ‘Mechanisms’ and Comparative-historical Sociology: A Critical Realist Proposal. In Frontiers of Sociology, ed. P.  Hedström and B. Wittrock, 147–194. Leiden: Brill. Gross, Neil. 2009. A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms. American Sociological Review 74 (3): 358–379. Hedström, Peter. 1998. Rational Imitation. In Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, ed. Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hedström, Peter, and Richard Swedberg, eds. 1998. Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hedström, Peter, and Petri Ylikoski. 2010. Causal Mechanisms in the Social Sciences. Annual Review of Sociology 36 (1): 49–67.

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Hirschman, Daniel, and Isaac Ariail Reed. 2014. Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology. Sociological Theory 32 (4): 259–282. Lichterman, Paul, and Isaac Ariail Reed. 2015. Theory and Contrastive Explanation in Ethnography. Sociological Methods and Research 44 (4): 585–635. Little, Daniel. 2012. Explanatory Autonomy and Coleman’s Boat. Theoria 27 (2): 137–151. Machamer, Peter, Lindley Darden, and Carl F.  Craver. 2000. Thinking About Mechanisms. Philosophy of Science 67 (1): 1–25. Martin, John Levi. 2003. What Is Field Theory? American Journal of Sociology 109 (1): 1–49. Menzies, Peter. 2012. The Causal Structure of Mechanisms. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (4): 796–805. Morgan, Stephen L., and Christopher Winship. 2015. Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peirce, Charles S. 1992/1877. The Fixation of Belief. In The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, 109–123. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pepper, Stephen C. 1961. World Hypotheses. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reed, Isaac Ariail. 2011. Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 2003/1975. The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language. London: Routledge. Salzinger, Leslie. 2003. Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories. Berkeley: University of California Press. Seidman, Steven. 1991. The End of Sociological Theory: The Postmodern Hope. Sociological Theory 9 (2): 131–146. Smith, Christian. 2010. What is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Talisse, Robert. 2004. Towards a Peircean Politics of Inquiry. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society XL (1): 21–38. Vaidyanathan, Brandon, Michael Strand, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Thomas Buschman, Meghan Davis, and Amanda Varela. 2015. Causality in Contemporary American Sociology: An Empirical Assessment and Critique. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Published Online February 11, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12081, 1–24. Wilson, Nicholas Hoover. 2011. From Reflection to Refraction: State Administration in British India, Circa 1770–1855. American Journal of Sociology 116 (5): 1437–1477.

CHAPTER 6

Meaning and Modularity: The Multivalence of “Mechanism” in Sociological Explanation Carly R. Knight and Isaac Ariail Reed

1   Introduction The philosopher Susanne Langer noted that when new ideas are first introduced, a tendency arises among “all sensitive and active minds” to attempt to extend the idea “for every purpose” (1941: 23). Eventually, however, such extensions must be refined and specified. Following Langer, Clifford Geertz (1973) noted that once thinkers accept that the original concept does not explain everything—and yet “still explains something”— attention must then shift to “isolating just what that something is, to disentangling ourselves from a lot of the pseudoscience which, in the first flush of [the idea’s] celebrity, it has also given rise” (4). While Geertz was referring to the concept of “culture,” we believe a similar operation of disentanglement is now in order with regards to the concept of C. R. Knight (*) Department of Sociology, New York University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] I. Ariail Reed Department of Sociology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Ariail Reed, Sociology as a Human Science, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18357-7_6

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“mechanism” in sociology. In particular, this chapter is an attempt to analyze the extension of social mechanisms to problems in cultural explanation. Thinking about culture and explanation has been central to sociological theory for more than one hundred years, but the tools with which social scientists address the issue have changed considerably over time (e.g., Weber 1958; Parsons 1964; Bourdieu 1977; Swidler 1986). In the wake of an explosion of literature on social mechanisms, an increasingly common strategy—and one much in line with contemporary social scientific epistemological commitments (Abend, Petre and Sauder 2013)—has been to argue that culture can explain when “meanings” form a central part of a causal mechanistic chain (Gross 2009; Tavory and Timmermans 2013; Norton 2014; Lichterman and Reed 2014). These “meaningful mechanisms” demonstrate the causal power of culture by showing “signification and interpretation as part of the causal pushing and pulling on the world” (Lichterman and Reed 2014: 30), aiding cultural sociologists in meeting “skeptical demands for causal clarity” (Alexander and Smith 2006: 138). Better still, the extension of mechanisms to meaningful and semiotic analyses holds the potential to unify cultural and non-cultural explanation under a single explanatory framework. Thus mechanisms offer the potential to bridge the so-called interpretative and causal divide—such “that the explanation of social life [as] the stated goal of the social sciences can…be squared with the idea that the human sciences require the interpretation of subjectivity to accomplish their explanatory task” (Reed 2011: 32–33). In this chapter, we argue that mechanisms fail in this unifying endeavor. In particular, we identify a crucial disjuncture in how distinct approaches to mechanistic explanation conceive of their models, and relatedly, in the kinds of causal relationships depicted within them. Specifically, we argue that one prominent approach to mechanistic analysis, which we refer to as modular mechanism models, explains by deconstructing a phenomenon into sequences of independent causal chains. Depicting casual relations of counterfactual dependence, these models demonstrate how a social phenomenon changes under a series of hypothetical interventions on its antecedent causes. By contrast, we argue that meaningful mechanism models are based upon a different, and incompatible, causal logic. Depicting semiotic relationality, these models instead decompose phenomena into interdependent signs, symbols, and codes that make action possible. This disjuncture, we argue, results in models that not only rest on incompatible causal foundations but which, consequently, demand different evidentiary standards in order to assess their validity.

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This conflict is highly problematic for the possibility of mechanistic analysis as unifying. In particular, it creates a catch-22. Either mechanistic explanation cannot accommodate both an emphasis on modular causality and relational meaning—in which case, one account or the other must be excluded from the mechanistic framework—or, an account of mechanisms that is sufficiently general to accommodate both approaches will inevitably produce within it camps whose explanatory commitments are deeply at odds. In this case, mechanistic explanation would act as a placebo, rather than a panacea, re-instantiating, in fractal fashion, the very oppositions that obtain between different understandings of explanation in the social sciences more generally. Our argument proceeds as follows. First, we argue that mechanistic explanation, meaningful or otherwise, is committed to fulfilling three core criteria: providing (1) causal information (2) of a general character that (3) carves complex processes into component parts. We go on to detail how these commitments are realized in one prominent—though not wholly uncontroversial—account of modular mechanisms. Turning then to meaningful mechanisms, we discuss how the semiotic relations depicted by these models violate a core assumption of the modular approach. We consider possible objections to our claim and conclude by exploring the implications of this causal diversity for the place of mechanisms within an interpretive social science. Ultimately, while we argue that the causal indeterminacy of “social mechanisms” will necessarily reinstate classic explanatory divisions, our point is not merely deconstructive. Rather, by freeing ourselves from the tortuous theoretical task of stretching a single paradigm to accommodate incongruous epistemological goals, we argue we are better positioned to reconsider the broader range of conceptual tools at our disposal as sociologists.

2   What Is Mechanistic Explanation? To explore how mechanisms function in cultural explanations, it is helpful to first set out some terminology. In this chapter, we use a “causal system” to refer to all of the causal processes at play in a given phenomenon under study; we refer to “mechanisms” as causal structures that obtain within those systems. “Mechanism models” are representations of mechanisms, meaning they are models of causal structures and are almost never models of the entire causal systems themselves. Finally, we consider “mechanistic explanation” to be achieved when an analyst provides an accurate mechanism model of an actual mechanism (or set of mechanisms).

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Yet what are the “mechanisms” that social researchers attempt to model? Given the term’s ubiquity, it is little surprise that the concept is saddled with a diversity of not-always-consistent definitions. As an exhaustive analysis of these various approaches is outside the bounds of this chapter, we first distinguish between two general theoretical claims associated with mechanisms and limit our discussion to one of these. There are, broadly, two main claims often made by social mechanists (Levy 2013). The first is ontological and states that causal relationships exist in virtue of mechanisms. In contrast to a Humean account of causation as constant conjunction (or, more broadly, a pattern of association among events), proponents of this “realist” view hold that events are only linked insofar as underlying mechanisms give rise to them: “Mechanisms rather than regularities or necessary/sufficient conditions provide the fundamental grounding of causal relations” (Little 2012: 5).1 The second claim is epistemological and is about social explanation. Social mechanists making the epistemological claim argue that good explanations must reference mechanisms—not because the inner nature of causation itself is grounded in mechanisms—but rather because mechanistic explanations are superior to other approaches at depicting causal structures (mechanisms are classically juxtaposed to statistical black-box analyses).2 For instance, the epistemological warrant for mechanistic explanation is a core principle of Analytic Sociology: “one should… aim for models which show how a proposed mechanism generates the outcome to be explained” (Hedström and Bearman 2009: 6). While these two claims are related, and those advocating the ontological approach typically also argue for mechanism models’ explanatory importance, they are conceptually distinct. Realist proponents of mechanisms as the ontological basis of social causation may not always advocate for a given mechanism’s explanatory relevance (as in the case of “unmanifest” mechanisms, Steinmetz 1998: 178). Similarly, those advocating the explanatory claim do not commit themselves to arguing for mechanisms as the essence

1   This “causal realist” project encompasses philosophical accounts of generative or Aristotelian views of mechanistic causation (e.g., Glennan 1996; Machamer 2004) as well as theoretical discussions of social mechanisms’ ontological characteristics (e.g., Gorski 2009). 2  For example, Elster (1989), advocates the epistemological claim in stating: “To explain an event is to give an account of why it happened. Usually… this takes the form of citing an earlier event as the cause of the event we want to explain… [But] to cite the cause is not enough: the causal mechanism must also be provided, or at least suggested” (3–4).

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of causal relations.3 One can coherently advocate for mechanistic explanation while seeking a “deeper” metaphysical account of causation elsewhere (Hedström and Ylikoski 2010; Franklin-Hall 2016). In this chapter, we focus on the epistemological approach to mechanistic explanation for two main reasons. First, as recent invocations for “meaningful mechanisms” have typically focused on cultural explanation, rather than theories of causation, we wish to deal with these endeavors on their own terms. For instance, Tavory and Timmermans (2013) advocate for mechanism models of pragmatist semiotics while conceding that mechanisms themselves do not “solve the metaphysical problem of causality” (688).4 Second, focusing on the epistemological approach allows us to analyze mechanistic explanation while setting aside many of the thorny philosophical problems that arise in realist accounts and which are less directly relevant for those engaged in proposing and analyzing sociological models.5 2.1   The Goals of Mechanism Models But if the explanatory approach is not committed to stipulating mechanisms as the ontological basis of causation, then to what is this claim committed? While there is no single, conclusive account, the literature on mechanisms tends to converge on three basic properties as central to just how mechanism models explain. These are: (1) mechanism models must provide causal information; (2) mechanism models should explain a 3  For example, philosopher of biology Charles Craver (2006), whose approach to mechanisms is commonly cited by sociologists (e.g., Hedström and Bearman 2009), argues that the best account of biological explanation is mechanistic but rejects mechanisms as constitutive of causation. Instead, Craver advocates an approach based upon Woodward’s account of intervention: “I propose that activities in mechanisms should be understood partly in terms of the ability to manipulate the value of one variable in the description of a mechanism by manipulating another” (372). 4  More specifically, Tavory and Timmermans argue mechanisms need “recourse to other forms of causal inference (see, e.g., Woodward 2002)” (Tavory and Timmermans 2013: 688). 5  In the 1970s and 1980s, many philosophers (e.g., Railton 1978; Salmon 1984) attempted to use mechanisms as a key to understanding causal relations. After problems were identified with these accounts (Hitchcock 1995), newer attempts have provided alternative accounts of how mechanisms can ground causal relations (e.g., Glennan 1996, 2002). Nevertheless, there is debate about the success of these accounts regarding whether mechanisms presuppose, rather than provide, a notion of causation. For a review of these debates see Franklin-­ Hall (2016).

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general, rather than a particular, process; and (3) mechanism models should decompose a process into constitutive parts. In other words, “mechanism” is not just a synonym for thinking causally. The term itself contains more connotations than that, and these connotations are not so much “baggage” (Gorski 2009: 151), but rather useful clues in rendering more precisely what it means for mechanisms to show “how things work” (Craver 2007: 110). We briefly discuss each property in turn. First, mechanism models must describe a causal process. Mechanism is “irreducibly a causal notion” (Hedström and Ylikoski 2010: 50), describing a sequence in which “some cause X tends to bring about some effect Y” (Gross 2009: 364). While mechanistic explanation is not committed to a particular view of causality (Franklin-Hall 2016), it does set some important constraints for “an acceptable theory of causation” (Hedström and Ylikoski 2010: 5), principally with regards to which theories it rejects. Mechanisms are not universal causal laws or “covering laws” (Elster 2007) in that they do not explain by identifying a deterministic universal pattern. Neither, however, are mechanisms merely sequences of events that occur prior to some outcome, however regularly this sequence might unfold (Morgan and Winship 2007: 338–346). Thus, while mechanism models do not necessitate a particular account of causation, they do require some account and are not completely agnostic as to what it should consist in. Second, good mechanistic explanations are general. Mechanisms are “frequently occurring” or “widely instantiated” (Elster 1998: 45) processes that have “some minimum level of generality” (Gross 2009: 363) and are expected to “apply widely” (Reed 2011: 42). Mechanism models therefore explain not by simply providing the causal structure for a particular outcome but by providing a causal structure that is “sufficiently general to be transposable between different cases” (Norton 2014: 169). While mechanism models may be used to explain uncommon or highly individual events, their explanatory value derives from their potential to be invoked in other places and times, and studied in their different instantiations. Third, mechanism models decompose causal processes into more fine-­ grained component parts.6 Mechanisms are distinguished from holistic 6  There are differences in how mechanism proponents cast the arrangement of subcomponent processes. Mechanisms are oftentimes cast as a set of preceding causes and, commonly, these preceding causes are thought to occur at a lower level with respect to their effects (Stinchcombe 1991; Gross 2009). Some accounts refer to more complicated arrangements, describing multilevel mechanisms or emergent processes (Sawyer 2004). Yet, however complex the arrangement among mechanistic subcomponents, accounts converge on stipulating that mechanisms show how things work by decomposing complex processes.

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“black box” explanations by their attention to internal “structure” (Hedström and Swedberg’s 208: 9), decomposing processes into their “working entities” (Darden 2008) or “component” parts (Craver 2006: 369). Mechanisms “break up questions” (Hedström and Ylikoski 2010: 51) by identifying “within episode” processes (Tilly 2001: 24) and constructing “detailed accounts of how causal forces move through social systems” (Norton 2014: 164). Philosopher Franklin-Hall (2016) terms this feature the “carving criterion”—mechanistic explanation shows how things work by carving phenomena “at their joints, describing them in terms of the appropriate set of parts” (8). However, as we shall see, this apparent consensus begins to unravel once we consider what, exactly, social analysts consider to be the appropriate set of parts, and, crucially, what must be true about the relationship among these parts. Indeed, the process of abstracting a messy social reality into tractable and generalizable models will turn on which social processes are featured as central to social causation, and thus on the explanatory endeavor the model attempts to achieve.

3   Modular Mechanisms Models and Carving Up Causes We argue here that differences in how social analysts fulfill the causal, generality, and carving criteria result in incompatible approaches to mechanism models. To establish this claim, we first consider the modular approach, exemplified by Hedström and Ylikoski’s (2010) well-cited explication of social mechanisms: A mechanism-based explanation describes the causal process selectively. It does not aim at an exhaustive account of all details but seeks to capture the crucial elements of the process by abstracting away the irrelevant details. The relevance of entities, their properties, and their interactions is determined by their ability to make a relevant difference to the outcome of interest. If the presence of an entity or of changes in its properties or activities truly does not make any difference to the effect to be explained it can be ignored. This counterfactual criterion of relevance implies that mechanismbased explanation involves counterfactual reasoning about possible changes and their consequences. (52, emphasis added)

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Hedström and Ylikoski thus ground their account in a central question that faces all social analysts engaged in mechanistic explanation: Which elements of noisy social phenomena should be carved out as truly causal in modeling those phenomena?7 Hedström and Ylikoski’s answer defines the modular approach: Relevant and irrelevant elements of a model are distinguished according to whether an element’s alteration would change the outcome—that is, according to the interventionist counterfactual criterion of relevance.8 On this view, to provide a causal explanation for a phenomenon is to identify the preceding events on which the phenomenon depends, in the specific manipulationist sense of “depends.” That is, it is to identify those events that could be “intervened” upon in order to change that phenomenon, enabling researchers to answer questions regarding how things could have been otherwise.9 7  That this question must be addressed in order to mechanistically model a causal system makes clear that theoretical questions about the nature of social mechanisms (i.e., what is a social mechanism?) cannot be separated from questions about the causal relations among mechanisms’ component parts (i.e., when have we identified causal component processes and excluded non-causal processes?) This is because a mechanism model that erroneously includes non-causal processes has failed in its explanatory endeavor; namely, it has not successfully picked out a set of causes of the social phenomena it is supposedly a mechanism for. 8  Hedstrom and Ylikoski specifically draw on an interventionist approach to counterfactual as specified by Woodward (2002): “In Woodward’s account, causal claims track relations of counterfactual dependency. They tell us what would have happened to the effect if the cause had been subject to a surgical intervention that would not have affected any other part of the causal structure” (Hedström and Ylikoski 2010: 54). 9  We follow Hedström and Ylikoski (2010), among others (e.g., Morgan and Winship 2007; Hedström and Ylikoski 2010; Demeulenaere 2011), in drawing on the interventionist approach to counterfactuals. However, this is not the only approach to counterfactual causation one could appeal to. In particular, interventionist counterfactuals should be distinguished from similarity-based counterfactuals developed by Lewis (1974). While the interventionist approach interprets counterfactual conditions through causal models, the similarity-based approach interprets counterfactual conditions through the analysis of possible worlds (see Briggs 2012). We focus on interventionist counterfactuals for several reasons. First, the interventionist approach is the account of counterfactual causation most directly connected to actual social science practice: drawing on social scientific methods of causal identification, the counterfactual approach is intended to specify what causation in such models is (Holland 1986; Morgan and Winship 2007: 4–5; Pearl 2000). Second, the similarity-­ based account will function similarly to the interventionist account in many respects (see Woodward 2003: 133–147). Of particular interest here, the similarity account likewise requires evaluating counterfactuals with regards to alternative causal systems in which the system’s other causal relationships are held as close to constant as possible. In sum, the interventionist account provides a well-specified causal account in line with social scientific practices that captures a key feature of common sociological approaches to mechanisms: Causal mechanisms depict how an outcome changes given a change in the potential cause, holding the remaining causal relationships in the system constant.

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This interventionist counterfactual account conforms with many intuitive notions of causal identification and has been explicitly adopted by mechanists in both philosophy (e.g., Craver 2006) and sociology (e.g., Morgan and Winship 2007; Hedström and Ylikoski 2010; Demeulenaere 2011).10 While in sociology this account is often cited by scholars in the tradition of (particularly European) Analytic Sociology (e.g., Demeulenaere 2011; Kuorikoski and Pöyhönen 2012), it is implicitly assumed by a much broader array of sociological scholarship. Interventionist counterfactuals are built into many statistical methods used in causal analysis (Gelman 2011; Gangl 2010) and are especially relevant when mechanisms are modeled as mediating processes. For instance, Imai et  al. (2011) explicitly draw upon the potential outcomes approach to causal inference in developing a mediation framework that decomposes causal effects into independent mechanistic pathways (for applications see Pager and Pedulla 2015; Pedulla 2016). Yet even where mechanisms are not explicitly framed in the counterfactual approach, they are regularly understood as analytically independent pathways linking cause to effect. Such models are ubiquitous in sociological research and appear, for instance, in analyses of the independent processes generating wage inequality (e.g., Cheng 2014), educational outcomes (Alon 2009; Tam and Jiang 2014), and friendship networks (Wimmer and Lewis 2010; Schaefer et al. 2011). Across these studies, the causal efficacy of various mechanistic pathways is assessed by analyzing how variation in the outcome depends upon variation in observed measures of the mechanisms. Though the interventionist approach is most apparent in studies using statistical methods, the general logic also appears in ethnographic, historical, and policy-related analyses. Rather than “mediation” or “decomposition,” ethnographers often rely upon comparative strategies that borrow from the rationale of experimental design (Abend et al. 2013). For instance, Small (2009) encourages researchers to devise hypotheses from their cases of the form “when X occurs, whether Y will follow depends on W” (23). Through selecting positive and negative cases, 10  For the remainder of this chapter, when we refer to the counterfactual approach, we are referring specifically to the interventionist counterfactual approach, and when we refer to counterfactuals, we are referring specifically to interventionist counterfactuals.

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process-tracing depends on identifying “whether the condition or mechanism makes a difference to the outcome” (Rohlfing 2014: 617). Policy analysts, too, adopt an interventionist framework when they conceive of mechanisms as potential social levers for policy intervention (e.g., Reskin 2003). At this point in our argument, it is important to recognize that the interventionist account is not without its detractors (e.g., Groff 2011; Porpora 2015). But for our purposes, what matters is not whether this approach is, in fact, the correct account in the sense of a final, philosophical definition of causation. Rather, our goal is to examine whether a prominent account of causality that features in, and is indeed required by, many methodological approaches to social mechanistic explanation can be reconciled with interpretative and semiotic mechanism models. We argue that the difficulty arises when one considers that the counterfactual approach to causality entails a more technical requirement. Namely, when the interventionist approach is applied to causal systems, it requires that the elements of a representation of that causal system are modular. In brief, the elements of a causal model are considered modular when changes to one part of the model do not affect the relations among the other parts of the model. When applied to mechanisms, the idea is that if two mechanisms are components of a causal structure, then they should be independent such that it is possible, at least in theory, to alter one component without altering the relationship among other components.11 That is, “if two mechanisms are genuinely distinct, it ought to be possible to interfere with one without changing the other” (Hausman and Woodward 2004: 158).12 To see how this works in practice, consider an example. In his study on how nonstandard employment histories lead to discrimination in the labor market, Pedulla (2016) posits two potential mechanisms that could account for why employers negatively evaluate job candidates with nonstandard employment histories:  (1)  assessments of competence and 11  Modularity is not required for all possible changes to a variable; it rather requires that it must be some range of interventions that fulfill this criterion. 12  In the language of equations, the idea behind modularity is that in a correctly identified causal model, altering one variable should not alter other equations that do not contain that variable.

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(2) assessments of commitment to work. Modularity entails that if both processes are included in a correctly specified model, it should be possible, at least in theory, to conceive of altering an employee’s commitment to work (or the employer’s assessment of that commitment) without necessarily altering, that is, while holding constant, the employee’s competence (or the employer’s assessment of competence).13 Importantly, modularity does not require that there cannot be interactions or causal complexity. Modularity only implies that such interactions or complexity must be specified features of the causal model. If, for instance, changing assessments of commitment necessarily altered assessments of competence, this would imply that we were missing a causal link between these mechanisms. The key takeaway is that if a given mechanistic process is not causally connected to another process, then altering that first process should not alter the functioning of the second. It is important to differentiate modularity, a feature of a representation of a causal system, from the distinct concept of statistical independence. Statistically independent events are ones where the joint probability of a set of events is equal to the product of their individual probabilities; in other words, statistically independent events are like coin-flips where getting heads on the first flip provides no information on the chance of getting heads on the second.14 Relations of statistical dependence say nothing about causal relationships; causally related events will necessarily be statistically dependent yet statistical dependence is obviously not sufficient for causation.15 The notion of modularity specifies how the modular approach to mechanistic explanation fulfills the causal and carving criteria in order to show “how a system works.” Like the “cogs and wheels” to which they metaphorically refer, modular mechanism models “carve” a complex causal 13  Modeling competing mechanisms this way allows Pedulla (2016) to differentiate which mechanisms matter for which individuals. He finds that perceived commitment explains the negative effects of nonstandard employment histories for men while perceived competence explains the negative effects of such histories for women. 14  By contrast, statistically dependent events are ones where the probability distribution of one event varies with the distribution of another. Modularity refers to the relationship among independent events under hypothetical interventions. In a causal system, an effect is considered modular with respect to its cause (i.e., you could alter Y without altering X). If X and Y are in fact causally related, they are necessarily statistically dependent. 15  In the classic example, low barometer readings and thunderstorms are statistically dependent events yet not causally related.

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system into independent, component processes and identify the causal dependence relationships among these components. Crucially, however, there are plenty of instances where modularity is thought to fail (Cartwright 2007). Indeed, there are entire regions of sociological argument in which modularity does not, and in fact cannot, hold. We now turn to one of those regions.

4   Mechanisms and the Modelling of Meaning Recently, social theorists have pointed to the notable absence of meanings, symbols, and signs from standard approaches to social mechanisms. Gross (2009) argues that while meaning is central to social action and therefore social causation, classic approaches to mechanisms have drawn on culturally impoverished accounts of strategic action predicated on individualized beliefs. Merton’s archetypal social mechanism of a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” for example, emphasizes how actors’ beliefs about the solvency of a bank cascade into collective panic, leading to a bank run that no individual actor intended nor desired to bring about (Merton 1968). Yet, as Gross rightly points out, “Merton’s postulated mechanism of the self-fulfilling prophecy functions in this case only because actors are positioned in cultural systems from which they derive their assumptions and orientations, and hence have the beliefs they do” (369). In other words, by emphasizing individual beliefs, Merton’s mechanism ignores the very feature that makes possible the synchronous, uncoordinated, and yet collective nature of a bank run: cultural systems that organize diverse actors’ understandings about the health of their country’s financial institutions, their trust in government, their own financial security, and therefore their best course of action. Following on Gross’ argument, the question for the researcher then becomes how to represent the causal efficacy of meaning in a mechanism model. In specifying the integration of meaning in mechanistic explanations, sociologists often focus on relations among signs made present in action and interaction. For example, Norton (2014) portrays meaningful action as emerging from “networks of signs and signifiers understood in meaningful relation to one another” (167). Here, cultural causality is realized as actors constantly interpret and perform their understandings of the social situations in which they find themselves. Crucially, these sequences of interpretations and performances iterate, such that what Norton refers to as “assemblage[s] of cultural codes and systems” continuously realize

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their causal effect within and across situations. Tavory and Timmermans (2013) similarly ground meaningful mechanisms in sequences of semiotic chains composed of objects (things in the world), signs (signifiers of objects), and interpretants (the reaction of the interpreter of a sign). Successions of meaning-making amass as “each understanding or action” produces “another round of meaning making” where “one iteration of meaning making may become the sign for another” (688). These accounts therefore coalesce on the view that culture realizes its causal effects through accumulating sequences of interpretation and action. Returning to the criteria we laid out earlier in the chapter, these models therefore appear to fulfill each of the three requirements of mechanistic explanation: They (1) depict a causal process, (2) refer to general sequences that explain varieties of behaviors across contexts, and (3) carve the social world into constitutive parts—semiotic chains actualized by actors’ interpretations and performances. The problem for mechanistic explanation arises from the fact that though meaningful mechanism models depict causal processes, decomposing them into their constituent parts, they do so in a manner that is fundamentally at odds with the core premises of modular mechanistic explanation. Recall that a modular model decomposes complex phenomena into discrete causal pathways, providing counterfactual information that answers the question of how things could have been otherwise given an intervention on a particular pathway, holding constant the workings of the causal system elsewhere. This characteristic requires that the model’s constituent parts are independent such that it is possible, at least in theory, to intervene on one part of the model independent from the remainder of the system. Yet consider this feature of mechanistic explanation when a model instead refers to the stringing together of signs in action to create and habitually maintain meaning. As we will show below, our extent theories of culture in sociology all suggest that modularity is violated by such models. In the sociological literature on culture, there are extensive debates about how precisely to characterize the process whereby meanings emerge and become more or less consistent or fixed. For example, there is debate over the impact of the cognitive capacities of humans on how meanings emerge, and, connected with this, a set of methodological debates about whether to think of culture, metaphorically speaking, as a “public document” (Geertz 1973: 10) or as a series of subjective states molded by

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intersubjective interaction, but ultimately grounded in individual belief, reasoning, or practice. However, despite this diversity of approaches, almost all of this research either states explicitly or implies that the assignment of meaning to a given term, person, thing, or situation is dependent upon the assignment of meaning to other, related terms, persons, things, or situations. This can be true of very small meaning “systems” that occur for only a few people or among small groups,16 or of ones that are drawn upon by large populations.17 This relationality implies that if one meaning in a schema of categorization changed fundamentally, then the other meanings would also change. Given a set of meaningful words, or a set of emotionally charged symbols, or a set of gestures that come one after another, a change in the meaning of “sign A” would require a change in the meaning of “sign B,” and this change can occur at the level of denotation, connotation, or both. If cats are not associated with femaleness, then dogs cannot be “male” in the symbol system cited by Sahlins (2013: 219). This relationality is present in both classic philosophical and linguistic accounts of meaning, and in and across theoretical debates in the sociology of culture. Perhaps most famously,  the relationality of meaning forms a part of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, which heavily influenced structuralist approaches to culture in American sociology (Alexander and Seidman 1990). Saussure’s semiotics introduces a grid-like failure of modularity due to the dependence of one side of a meaningful binary on the other, and the emergence of a set of complexly interlocked binaries in the “deep meanings” that organize culture at the mythological level (Barthes 2012; Reed 2015). Hence Levi-Strauss states: “if there is a meaning to be found in mythology, it cannot reside in the isolated elements which enter into the composition of a myth, but only in the way those elements are combined.” (Levi-Strauss 2008: 210). Sociologists have argued that there are limitations to Saussurean structuralism and its Durkheimian manifestation in the sociology of culture (Lamont 1998; Gross 2005). But, importantly, the relationality of the meanings in which action is embedded is not exclusive to the theories of meaning found in cultural structuralism. A variant also appears in the  See Desmond (2007) where wildland firefighters’ identity and sense of masculinity is structured in relation to and in opposition to “structure firefighters” who work in towns and cities. 17  See Kim (1999) for an example of how minority group identities are constructed in relation to ethnic hierarchies. Here, she argues that Asian American identity is defined in relation to whiteness and Blackness. 16

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pragmatist tradition, including those parts of that tradition that focus on scientific knowledge in particular (as opposed to, say, religious experience). For example, a relational account of meaning and action appears in W.V.O. Quine’s analysis of science.18 Quine’s argument for a pragmatist account of scientific activity arrived at the key conclusion that “it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement.” Rather, science should best be conceived as a “field” or “man-made fabric whose boundary conditions are experience.” When experience contradicts scientific knowledge, then, a complex process of re-evaluation of the statements of the field takes place, dependent upon an interpretation of the “germaneness” of various statements to the matter, as scientists work to change the overall system in its combined rendering of experience. This rendering is relational: “re-evaluation of some statements involves re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections,” and thus “no particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole” (Quine 1951: 40). Undoubtedly, Quine’s theoretical picture of the relationship between meaning and action—not to mention his philosophical concerns and orientations—are quite different than those of Saussure, Levi-Strauss, or Émile Durkheim. But a relationality of meaning is presupposed by both genres of argument, and so in both cultural structuralism (and its post-structuralist heterodoxy) and mid-century pragmatist philosophy of science, modularity is disabled for the processes being described. We see a similar intellectual pattern  in several key theoretical statements of the sociology of culture. Michele Lamont understands “patterns of boundary work not as essentialized individual or national characteristics but as cultural structures, that is, institutionalized cultural repertoires or publically available categorization systems” (Lamont 2001: 176). These systems rely simultaneously on several crisscrossing meanings in which, for example, white French working men define themselves in contrast to various others, such that a change in either the salience or connotation of one 18  Quine’s essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” is well-known for its rendering of scientific knowledge as the refinement of statements’ truth values based on their utility for navigating “recalcitrant experience” (Quine 1951: 40). Taking aim at the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements and the verificationist theory of meaning, Quine reconnected meaning to “prior use” by actual persons in the world and imagined verification as a question of science in action.

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“other” (e.g., an increase of the population of Blacks in France, or a shift in the connotation of the category “Arab”) could change the overall space or set of meanings used to construe identities. Similarly, Swidler’s toolkit model of culture (2001), though developing a significantly different set of metaphors for understanding culture in action, relies on relationality when theorizing a working “repertoire” of cultural meanings. For Swider, relationality inheres not in a unified systems of meanings but rather in the relationship between meanings and the strategies of action—themselves cultural products—on which such meanings depend: “Indeed, the meanings of particular cultural elements depend, in part, on the strategy of action in which they are embedded” (Swidler 1986: 281). In Talk of Love, Swidler (2001: 184) emphasizes the interdependence of meanings and institutions such that “culture conveys meanings through adherence to or deviation from locally established expectations or conventions.” Thus, for Swidler, both the relationship between aspects of a given actor’s repertoire and the relationship of repertoires to the institutional settings that repertoires are used to navigate are constituted by the interdependence of meanings on each other.19 Crucially, this feature of relational interdependence is not incidental to meaningful mechanisms. Rather, it is at the core of their explanatory power. In describing how meanings causally shape sequences of situations, Norton discusses how an actor’s performance “fatefully reshape[s] the environment of action” such that subsequent new environments “include the [previous] action and is thus different from what came before” (32, emphasis added). That is to say the relationships between signs that enable meaning-making are not only causally antecedent to, but also partially constitutive of the interpretations, interactions, and performances that they produce. Similarly, while drawing upon a Peircian rather than Saussurean picture of meaning-making, Tavory and Timmermans depict mechanism models as a “spiral of meaning making, where the interpretant of one iteration of meaning making may become the sign for another” (688). In a longer exploration of the logic of qualitative research, Tavory and Timmermans develop Peirce’s arguments about dynamic interpretants— thus moving away from Saussurean semiotics—so as to characterize the nature of inference and sociological interpretation. Yet here too, such models demonstrate relationality: “the shape the interpretant ends up 19  In Quine, this is the relationship between statements and the languages they are a part of, see Quine 1951: 31–34.

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taking is thus defined partially by the sign-object, but is also replete with the entire history of action, interpretation, and inference that interpreters bring to the observation…Signification is not an isolated act but part of an ongoing flow of action in which signs build on each other” (Tavory and Timmermans 2014: 28).20 The lively debates in the sociology of culture, then, mobilize powerful and evocative models and provide a wide spectrum of accounts of how meanings are mobilized in social life. But these models are not modular. A 20  Interestingly, Quine cites Peirce as the source of the “verification theory of meaning,” which Quine then takes aim at as the second dogma of empiricism. The debate on Peirce’s position on these matters is an important point of contention. The issue would appear to be the following: On the one hand, Peirce can be adamant in (some of) his writings that “all pragmatists” ground “their method of ascertaining the meanings of words and concepts” in “no other than that experimental method by which all the successful sciences (in which number nobody in his sense would include metaphysics),” and thus Peirce prefigures logical empiricists like Carnap and Ayer and what Quine calls their “radical reductionism” (Peirce 1907: 400–401). Furthermore, Peirce at points insisted that his position differed from that of William James in that Peirce was much more interested in restricting the term “concept” to those “sign-burdens” that “carry some implication concerning the general behavior either of some conscious being or some inanimate object” (Peirce 1907: 401). This, then, allowed mid-century logical empiricists to bend Peirce’s pragmatist maxim to their own philosophical purposes (“Consider what effects…” see discussion in Peirce 1905: 346–347). In contrast, to this, however, we find in Peirce’s semiotics and work on abduction a holistic understanding of both how meaning works in social life generally and in the pursuit of scientific inquiry in particular, which has been influential on precisely that area of social theory and epistemology that departs from logical empiricism in its conceptualization of the social or human sciences (cf. Habermas 1971; Rappaport 1999: 58–68; Longino 2002: 5–7; Reed, 2011; Swedberg 2015). In particular, Peirce defines symbols as signs that take on meaning through conventional usage, and further argues that “it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow” (1894: 10). This, combined with his insistence that signs as used in the world mix together indices, icons, and symbols, suggests a relational account of meaning similar to that of Quine. Indeed, Dewey summarizes Peirce’s semiotics as: “Peirce uniformly holds (1) that there is no such thing as a sign in isolation, every sign being a constituent of a sequential set of signs, so that apart from membership in this set, a thing has no meaning, (2) that in the sequential movement of signs thus ordered, the meaning of the earlier ones in the series is provided by or constituted by the later ones as their interpretants…” (Dewey1946: 88). To be sure, this is still an account of meaning that differs in its argumentation, tone, and emphasis from the narrow focus on binary opposition and synchronic structure as the source of meaning that one finds in the semiotics of Saussure. But the core emphasis on the irreducibility of meaning to the implications of a single statement for a set of concrete actions does, in fact, demonstrate relationality in its model of meaning. (Peirce wants the actions that give a statement or concept meaning to include all possible actions that would respond occur “under all conceivable circumstances” (Peirce 1907: 402).)

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mechanism model of linked situations, cascading such that each new situation contains within it elements of the previous upon which its interpretation depends—or spirals of meaning-making such that each new round contains as its referent the semiotic content of the previous—is fundamentally relationally interdependent. The crux of the issue is that we cannot, even theoretically, imagine altering one component in such a model and hold fixed that which follows. This is because to intervene on one component part of meaningful system is not just to causally alter what follows. It is also to necessarily and definitionally alter it. Because meanings come into being via one version or another of semiosis—whether that is a semiotic net or grid (a “culture structure”), or the more granular and pragmatic process of cascading, evolving interpretations made in a series of problem-­ situations over time—the counterfactuals cultural theorists would be inclined to are those where a shift in a meaning entails a repertoire or structure whose meanings are reconfigured at the holistic level.21 The relationship among meanings, frames, and symbols themselves are not modular, and tracing precisely that relationality is what makes cultural analysis able to explain its subject matter. Our contention, then, is that the position of cultural theory—implicit or explicit—is that meaningful relationality disables modularity. At its core, the relational theory of meaning is one in which the sense and reference that are indicated via signs exist in distinctly non-modular relationships. The relationship between signs that produce meaning cannot be considered as independent causal processes. Note that in the example of a modular mechanism we briefly discussed in the previous section, if non-­ modularity arose, it was the result of missing some important element of our causal structure: If commitment and competence were necessarily linked such that all interventions on commitment changed competence, then this was an indication that we were missing a causal relationship between the two mechanisms. If we turn to the case of meanings, however, the dependence we are imagining is not based on a causal relationship that is missing from the model, but rather is based on a semantic interdependence characterized by denotation and/or connotation. We cannot add in another causal arrow to “fix” the problem of non-­modularity 21  Alexander (2001) provides a clear example of this kind of holistic counterfactual thinking when he argues that the introduction of a new “multicultural” mode of incorporation would require a whole new set of concepts moving “from concepts like ‘society,’ ‘common values,’ and ‘community’ to a notion of the ‘civil sphere’” (239).

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when we are modeling meanings. Non-modularity is, for cultural theorists, a feature, not a bug. To illustrate the non-modularity characteristic of these systems, we can consider an example of a meaningful mechanism model elaborated by Tavory and Timmermans (2013: 697–703). Tavory and Timmermans draw upon ethnographic evidence to investigate how the parents of newborns react to information that their infant has tested positive in an initial screening for a metabolic disorder. As the authors note, only a small fraction of infants who initially test positive will be diagnosed as a true positive, and therefore clinicians often find themselves informing parents whose children initially screened positive that their child is likely healthy (yet, importantly, clinicians lack a definitive test that can confirm this healthy diagnosis). The puzzle arises in how parents react to this new information; even after being told that their child is likely not diseased, many parents hold onto the “disease frame” in which their child is still sick, a response that causes the clinician-parent interaction to go awry. In proposing a mechanism to explain these reactions, Tavory and Timmermans look for the causal “culprit” at “the semiotic lower level of aggregation” (700). Their discussion of the mechanism is worth quoting at some length: The proposed ethnographic explanation…in the study highlights parents and clinicians’ reaction to the absence of an interpretative frame. When all parties agreed that the child was sick or healthy, clinicians and parents knew how to handle the situations and disagreements were rare…The interesting divergences and semiotic changes over time and over place occurred when parents and clinicians faced a situation in which a child is potentially ill, but shows no symptoms and may never have any symptoms. This situation is uncharted territory. When there is no actionable frame for diseased-butnow-basically-healthy status, parents tended to fall back on the frame of the child as diseased while professionals gravitated either to a likely false positive understanding or to a “carrier” understanding…. (702, emphasis in original)

In other words, interactions between the parents and clinicians (i.e., whether the interaction goes well or goes awry) depend on the relationship between the parents’ and clinicians’ frames (i.e., whether the separate parties adopt the same or conflicting frames). When interactions do go awry, the semiotic “causal culprit” is the structure of the semiotic system available to parents and clinicians. That is, parents and clinicians have at their disposable a “diseased” or “healthy” frame, and yet there is no frame that maps onto the status of a child that is “diseased-but-now-basically-healthy.”

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Tavory’s and Timmermans’s puzzle is solved when we see that the semiotic structure accessible to parents and clinicians does not map onto the child’s status, and that, as a consequence, parents retain their original interpretation. Early frames determine subsequent frames, and the structure of available frames carves out the space of possible interpretations and actions. Now consider the modularity requirement. One cannot imagine altering the “absence of a frame” while simultaneously holding constant the healthy and diseased frames. To introduce a new frame into what was once a dichotomy is to effectively change the relationship among meanings of health and disease.22 More centrally for Tavory and Timmermans’s model of dynamic interpretants, the temporal component of the meaningful mechanism model does not display modularity. We cannot imagine “holding constant” parents’ continual adherence to the disease frame while varying their initial uptake of this frame. That is, the content of the later disease frame—that their child is still sick—necessarily refers to and is constituted by that which went before. Tavory’s and Timmermans’s model therefore points to a process that we indeed wish to recognize as casual: the relationships among frames which are interpreted and acted upon determine the space of possible subsequent interpretations and actions. Yet, as the authors themselves grant, this is not a casual model that depicts constituent parts that stand in relations of counterfactual dependence. Dispensing with “a discrete-event view of causality” that operates “like a dominoes game,” they instead suggest that a pragmatist model of causality “is much more like mixing spices in a recipe where different ingredients partly define the taste” (687). Crucially, the causal discrepancy between modular and meaningful mechanism models has methodological consequences for the analysts who employ them. In the world of modular mechanisms, the analyst acquires evidence that a particular causal pathway obtains in her data by testing whether the observed relationship between cause and effect could be explained by any among of a set of alternative pathways. By contrast, accruing evidence for meaningful mechanism models requires precisely the reverse tactic. To demonstrate the plausibility of a meaningful mechanism models, the analyst assesses variance not in the mechanistic pathways 22  Given the introduction of a third frame, the extent to which the content of the frames “health” and “disease” will change is an empirical question. Nevertheless, the relationship among the frames will change. Moreover, that one cannot hold these frames fixed contrasts with a modular mechanistic model. (We thank an anonymous reviewer for this distinction.)

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but in the outcome to be explained. When the analyst is able to demonstrate that a given meaning structure can account for a variety of different behaviors, confidence in the causal power of that semiotic structure increases. Thus, Norton contends that “codes are a mechanism for theorizing common orientations across multiple situations and thus for explaining how actions across multiple, potentially quite different situations, can be similarly oriented” (p. 173). Similarly, Tavory and Timmermans (2013: 692) explain that in the case of semiotic chains, “the researcher keeps one aspect of the meaning-making process constant to examine how different situations are refracted through—or transformed by—these semiotic aspects.” The robustness of modular mechanism models is assessed in relation to alternative pathways while meaningful models are assessed in relation to alternative outcomes.

5  Objections: Modularizing Meaning? Might there, however, be a way to reconcile the modeling of meaning with modular depictions of causal processes? Here, we consider two possible objections to our claim about the incompatibility of modularity and meaning. First, one might argue that meanings can, in fact, be modular. For instance, it could be that while meaning-systems defy modularity as we have shown, there are certain “meaning-action bundles”—meanings connected to certain tendencies of action—that can, for certain questions, support a modular representation. I may not be able to intervene on “cats signify feminine” without changing the entire set of relationships that relate animals and gender, but I could, perhaps, intervene on the specific relationship composed of the meaning of cats as feminine and the propensity of female children to purchase cats as pets. If I believe that abortion should be legal, that raises the probability that I will vote Democratic; if I am against gun control, that raises the probability that I will vote Republican. In such a modular system, it is possible to ask about the casual effect on voting if beliefs about gun control change from “against” to “for.” That is, meaning and action could be treated as if they were modular for the purposes of analysis. This approach does have traction in certain sectors of cultural sociology, particularly in work where belief, values, or motivations are thought to cause a particular behavior (Vaisey 2009). This approach to culture also appears in systems where the outcome is not necessarily action but in

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which certain beliefs play a part in the causal web. For instance, Kirk and Papachristos (2011) in their article “Cultural Mechanisms and the Persistence of Neighborhood Violence” investigate the causal efficacy of “legal cynicism” on neighborhood-level homicide rates. The implication of the study is not that, if one were to intervene on legal cynicism, the web of meanings around law, the police, and trust in legal institutions would retain its relationships, connotations, and denotations. Rather, the point is that if one were to intervene on legal cynicism, the relationships among other elements in the causal system in which those beliefs are embedded could remain. As Kirk and Papachristos put it: “cynicism exerts an influence on neighborhood rates of violence independent of the structural circumstances that originally produced such cynicism” (1192). However, this solution brings us to the kind of cultural explanation that meaningful mechanisms were explicitly theorized in order to overcome: a mechanistic explanation of action based on culture as individually held beliefs. Indeed, this belief-action approach to culture has been roundly and repeatedly criticized in the sociology of culture when it is presented as a general theory of culture and action—for, it radically disables the understanding of how action is embedded in time, space, and multiple overlapping systems of meaning. The vast oeuvre of Pierre Bourdieu is, among many other things, an attempt to show the many limitations of thinking about culture as individual belief (see Swartz 1997 and Strauss and Quinn 1997 for sociological and anthropological consensus on this point), and his central concepts of field, capital, and habitus are notorious in their rejection of the kind of independence-under-intervention that we have discussed here under the heading of modularity. Beginning with his early attack on subjectivism of various kinds in Outline of a Theory of Practice and then carried through in critique after critique of “substantialist” approaches to various practices (sport, educational attainment, art appreciation, etc.), a central contribution of Bourdieu’s work was to articulate how the relationality of meanings upended more mechanistic, means-ends explanations of action. Thus, although not stated in these terms, Bourdieu’s mantra, the “real is relational” can be understood as a critique of the utility of modular causal pathways for understanding the influence of culture on social action. For Bourdieu, approaches to culture that are “inclined to treat the activities and preferences specific to certain individuals as if they were substantial properties” are insufficient precisely because they remove from view the meaningful relationships between different practices. Lizardo (2011) credits Bourdieu’s cultural model as asserting that cultural

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objects “do not have any ‘essential’ meaning in themselves, but only in relation to other works” (36). Thus, wherever one stands on Bourdieu’s repeated contention that there is a homology between social positions and symbolic positions in various fields, it is important to keep in mind that for both Bourdieu and his Saussurean opponents,23 the relationality of meaning cannot be removed from the working theoretical model without removing the ability to analyze the power of culture and symbolic distinctions (Alexander and Smith 2006). Any model that therefore seeks to represent culture relationally will necessarily, and by design, fail modularity. At this point, a reader might agree that our best models of culture are sociological situations where modularity fails, but nonetheless argue that acts of meaning-making could themselves be objects of modular models. While semiotic nets’ denotative and connotative relations indeed defy modular representation, perhaps the act of meaning-making, taken as an object of study, can be abstracted away from such context. In other words, we could hold on to a relational theory of meaning but not necessarily have this theory feature explicitly in our models, fulfilling the modularity requirement and taking on board the relational model.24 In the abstract, this poses a difficult question. Namely, does the fact that a theory of meaningful action implies the existence of symbolic systems therefore mean that it cannot escape relationality (Sewell 2005)? But when we look in empirical sociology at the kinds of explanations proposed by the advocates of “meaningful mechanisms,” we quickly realize that such an objection is less relevant for research. For, it evacuates from the idea of “meaningful mechanisms” precisely what these explanations hope to achieve. From Gross’s critique of how belief functions in Merton’s self-­ fulfilling prophecy to Norton’s, and Tavory and Timmermans’s, appeal to semiotic chains, the explanatory purpose of these models is to illustrate how dependencies among signs and codes are shifted and re-instantiated as individuals interpret and act upon the world around them. The purpose is to model process and relationality (Olick 2013), and thus the failure of modularity cannot be cordoned off without losing precisely what the models are meant to capture. 23  For Bourdieu’s critiques of Saussure, see Bourdieu (1973); Bourdieu (1977), particularly “The objective limits of objectivism”; Bourdieu (1991), particularly “The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language.” For a critique of Bourdieu from a Saussurean perspective, see Alexander (1995). 24  We thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.

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6  The Uncomfortable Implications for the Sociology of Culture At this point in the chapter, we have made two claims, which we hope to have established with a certain degree of specificity and conceptual rigor: (1) a great deal of sociological work takes “mechanism” to imply that modularity, while not uncontroversial as an approach to causality, is a reasonably good specification of how many analysts assess independent casual pathways, and (2) modularity is incompatible with what is implicitly or explicitly taken to be an irreducible property of cultural meaning-systems by a wide variety of theories of culture in action in sociology. We now consider the implications of possible routes to reconciling this disjuncture.25 A first possibility is to give up on modeling “culture” in the supra-­ individual sense of the term, and thereby let go of the relational theory of signs, symbols, and codes needed to model a web of meaning. Instead, we could insist that our models only refer to individual action as a result of beliefs, preferences, and desires held with more or less strength. In these redefinitions, because culture is no longer modeled relationally but rather in terms of beliefs or values that can be held, not held, or held with variable strength, the possibility that “culture,” radically redefined, participates in modular causal systems remains open. The reader knows well the debates that follow such a move. Such an approach to culture has been criticized from many different angles: as “atomistic,” as too dependent on a means-ends model of action, and as insufficiently “thick” or “deep” (Geertz 1973; Alexander and Smith 2006; Desmond 2014). One way to interpret this long lineage of critique is as an extensive argument to the effect that the possibility of modularity as a clean way to model culture may only be obtained at the cost of external validity. For the differences that many sociologists want to explain—for example, between different church groups fighting welfare retrenchment (Lichterman 2005) or the subtle ways in which religion, understood as a universal human phenomenon, is nonetheless practiced and lived vastly 25  We should clarify here that our argument is not that all mechanistic accounts can be classified as either modular or meaningful. Indeed, one might imagine alternative accounts of mechanisms that deal neither with counterfactual causation nor semiotic relationality. Rather, our argument is that the different assumptions that undergird these two prominent accounts are problematic for the unity of mechanistic explanation, even if it were possible to specify alternative or different mechanistic approaches.

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differently in different historical moments (Riesebrodt 2009)—modular models of culture are unable to account for context or historicity, and this is presumably why work on “meaningful mechanisms” that accommodates a semiotic theory of culture had to arise in the first place. We thus reject this solution, though we have no doubt that some of our colleagues will not only accept it but defend it with agility and aplomb. A second possibility is to reject the troubling modularity requirement by rejecting its progenitor, the interventionist approach to causality. One might point to the successful explanations arrived at by the meaningful mechanism approach and argue that if an interventionist approach to causality excludes such models, we should discard it as flawed or inappropriate to social science, finding instead an alternative causal account to ground our models, perhaps one arrived at by sociologists “on their own” (e.g., without engagement with philosophers of biology).26 This solution has its appeal, particularly in its unwillingness to simply model social science on natural science, but we reject it as well. For, as the volume of empirical work on mechanisms that we discussed earlier illustrates, the specification of causality as relations of counterfactual dependence has already demonstrated its conceptual and empirical effectiveness to sociological research. Moreover, as Hirschman and Reed point out in a different chapter of this book, including “formation stories” (which are surely non-modular in the terms of this chapter) as part of causal sociology does not require rejecting outright that in certain times and places, social kinds are stable enough that a modular-mechanist account of causation can work empirically, so long as scope conditions are rigorously specified. In particular, if such situations can be clearly delimited, then sociology should “make intelligent interventions possible” (Sewell 2005: 355). After all, even Sewell admits that the world is not reducible to semiotics. A third possibility—and the one we pursue here—is to articulate a reflexive recognition that the primary uses of the term “mechanism” in the sociology of culture are metaphorical. The denotations and connotations of the term “mechanism” in the context of the community of inquiry of cultural analysis in sociology are such that it provides a highly useful way to describe certain social processes. Understood in this sense, 26  It is not, however, clear that this move would even solve the problem raised here. While Cartwright (2007) argues explicitly that few causal systems met the modularity requirement, Woodward (2008) argues that modularity is crucial to the task of defining distinct causal mechanisms and therefore is not a unique feature of the interventionist approach.

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“mechanism” is a sensitizing concept that points to causal processes that unfold in a regular manner that admits of some degree of generalization (see Chap. 4). Yet precisely because its utility is metaphorical, rather than definitional, the term “mechanism” then opens on to a very different approach to the epistemology of social causation. In this view, and accepting mechanism as metaphorical, we would consider modular mechanisms a sufficient, but not necessary, route to sociological explanation. Meaningful mechanisms would, too, be sufficient and not necessary, while at the same time being built upon fundamentally different explanatory principles. Both explanation types, modular and meaningful, would provide information about regularly unfolding causal structure: the former carving the social world at its causal joints, the later demonstrating the productive capacity of its symbolic, interdependent junctures. This approach is consistent with its own theory of meaning. That is, it views the meaning of causation that inheres in the concept “mechanism” to be specified by its relationship to surrounding signs in scientific discourse. However, what might first be taken as a laissez-faire epistemological pluralism (or anarchism, see Feyerabend 1988)—each to her or his own intellectual context—is not implied by this third possibility. Rather, it implies something much more unsettling for sociological theory and research. By abandoning the epistemological unity of the mechanism label—by allowing different explanatory approaches to make use of the same term— we abandon any epistemic capital that meaningful mechanisms may gain from their nominal proximity to a modeling strategy with a well-­developed statistical apparatus.  In other words, having identified a mechanism will not be sufficient, in and of itself, for answering those skeptical demands for causal clarity of how things could have been otherwise. Because production and procession, rather than dependence and intervention, characterize meaningful mechanisms, they will indeed illustrate the constellation of semiotic understandings that make possible action but they will not—and they cannot—answer the causal questions of interventionist dependence that modular mechanism models make explicit. And so, this recognition—that social mechanism is a useful causal metaphor deeply riven in its approach to causality—means that sociologists of culture—and perhaps sociologists more generally—must delineate strict limitations on the use of mechanistic language as a speech genre for their science. Scholars must recognize that social mechanism cannot serve as the

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default stand-in for explanation. For, if mechanism is primarily an explanatory metaphor characterized by a contested notion of causation, then the question arises: Which other causal metaphors should sociologists of culture draw upon to build their explanations? We do not believe that this question has received adequate attention in the field. Accepting the metaphorical approach requires likewise accepting that there is no coherent intellectual reason to consider mechanistic explanations as inherently more scientific or “rigorous” than explanations in the sociology of culture that adopt other epistemic strategies, or that make use of other metaphors, particularly those that are similarly productive, processual, and interpretive. Consider, for instance, narrative. Griffin (1993) describes narrative explanation as “analytic constructions (or ‘colligations’) that unify a number of past or contemporaneous actions and happenings, which might otherwise have been viewed as discrete or disparate, into a coherent relational whole that gives meaning to and explains each of its elements, and is, at the same time, constituted by them” (1097). Like meaningful mechanisms, the casual relations that narratives illustrate are based in temporal sequencing, in demonstrating the actual ideas, happenings, networks, and actions whose assemblage forms a historical event (see Chap. 3). Also, like meaningful mechanism models, narratives are simultaneously interpretative models, as the meaning of their component parts arises in relation to their holistic arrangement. Narrative explanation, however, does not model relations of counterfactual dependence. As Griffin asserts, narratives—those “artful blend[s] of explanation and interpretation”—fail to meet the requirement of a “casual” explanation precisely because “true” causal explanation “conceptually isolates and abstracts facts from their historical concatenations and asks whether their absence or modification would have altered the course of the event as it was recorded” (1101). Our point here is not to mount a defense of narrative explanation so much as it is to argue that should we accept meaningful mechanisms as sufficient for explanation, we must likewise accept a causal pluralist position (Cartwright 1999; also see Godfrey-Smith 2009). Epistemic value, and indeed casual explanation, might be achieved by models which do not demonstrate whether their abstracted component parts’ “absence or modification” alters the outcome of interest. Indeed, beyond narrative, we can identify a vast and varied field of non-modular explanations in sociology, of explanations that focus not on interventions but on historical specificity, flow, sequence, and production. The theoretical terms and bounded

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explanations developed in these accounts will not carve the world into (generalizable) independent processes linked by counterfactual dependence. Is it possible, that in the “first flush” of mechanisms’ celebrity, we have failed to evaluate in careful terms the epistemic value of various other routes to sociological explanation? In this chapter, we have focused on how cultural explanations that model meaning are often nonmodular. However, in concluding we want to point toward the possibility that much of the social world, and the kinds of models we wish to use to comprehend it, may also fail to exhibit modular relations. The relationships among institutional rules and the practices that they enable is a good candidate for the kind of relationality that disables modularity (see  Abend 2018). Consider political questions, for instance, that disentangle how the existence of legislative practices like the Senate filibuster, as well as how particular uses of the filibuster in a given administration, determine gridlock.27 It is sensible to try to disentangle the causal contribution of an institutional rule from the causal contribution of a given use of that rule. However, because rules and the actions they make possible are not only causally dependent but also logically and constitutively dependent, models depicting these systems will not be modular. Future work could further examine what sorts of causal systems exhibit this kind of non-modularity and therefore what kinds of epistemic commitments we make when referring to causal relationships among such processes.

7  Conclusion We see two implications of the argument pursued here for further thinking about sociological concepts. The first is the synthesis of the sociology of sociological knowledge with epistemology. What we have in mind here is a combination of studies of the use of sociological concepts in various settings (conferences, experimental interactions with subjects, the writing of ethnographic field notes, etc.) with theoretical reflection on how to better imagine the basis of the use of these concepts, including thinking about 27  You could not, for instance, depict both “the existence of the filibuster” and how a particular administration uses the filibuster within a modular causal model. Because rules and the practices they make possible are logically and constitutively dependent, as well as causally dependent, they likewise exhibit non-modularity.

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how sociologists should use concepts. The model for the latter aspect of this—a philosophy of social science that is compatible with a sociology of knowledge—can be found in the extension of the Stanford school of the philosophy of science to the social science of economics, conducted by Nancy Cartwright. It may be that greater engagement with these questions will open the door to further developing sociological accounts of mechanistic explanation neither modular nor meaningful. For instance, explanations of causal accounts based in production, rather than intervention, have provided the basis for a causal approach outside of the experimental logic of dependence (Hall 2004). The second implication is that, beyond the question of meaning, the careful parsing of what we mean by the term “mechanism” may have salutary effects for sociological theory more generally. Completely outside of questions of culture, “social mechanisms” have been repeatedly offered as a solution to the problem of how to theorize social causality. But here, too, we find a multiplicity of meanings of the term. Despite its ubiquity, the concept of mechanism takes on different meanings when it is set to explain different targets; it reproduces in fractal fashion the same divides (Abbott 2001, 2007). These differences in meaning reproduce disagreements about causation and, indeed, even reproduce the familiar opposition between intervening variables, on the one hand, and more holistic and relational analysis, on the other. Our overall message, however, is straightforward, though perhaps ironic. The concept of mechanism was designed to open the black box of causality for sociology (Hedström and Swedberg 1998). But we have, perhaps, black boxed for ourselves just how mechanisms explain—how they are part of a verifiable explanatory account delivered from one (group of) sociologist(s) to another. This chapter, then, has been an effort to articulate with greater clarity what we talk about when we talk about mechanisms. By doing so, we hope to avoid falling into that particularly detrimental trap for any epistemic community: sacrificing the construction of useful models of reality so as to reify the encompassing reality of a single model. For, looking closely at “mechanism,” we can see that it is neither panacea nor placebo, but rather a sociological tool—one among many, whose value must be approached with care, in the company of other metaphors, pursuing other explanations.

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Riesebrodt, Martin. 2009. The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  Rohlfing, Ingo. 2014. “Comparative Hypothesis Testing via Process Tracing.” Sociological Methods & Research 43 (4): 606–642. Sahlins, Marshall. 2013. Culture and Practical Reason. University of Chicago Press. Salmon, Wesley C. 1984. Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World. Princeton University Press. Sawyer, R. Keith. 2004. The Mechanisms of Emergence. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34 (2): 260–282. Schaefer, David R., Olga Kornienko, and Andrew M. Fox. 2011. Misery Does Not Love Company. American Sociological Review 76 (5): 764–785. Sewell, William H., Jr. 2005. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. University of Chicago Press. Small, Mario Luis. 2009. ‘How Many Cases Do I Need?’: On Science and the Logic of Case Selection in Field-Based Research. Ethnography 10 (1): 5–38. Steinmetz, George. 1998. Critical Realism and Historical Sociology. A Review Article. In Comparative Studies in Society and History. Cambridge University Press. Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 1991. The Conditions of Fruitfulness of Theorizing About Mechanisms in Social Science. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 21 (3): 367–388. Strauss, Claudia, and Naomi Quinn. 1997. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge University Press. Swartz, David. 1997. Culture and Power. University of Chicago Press. Swedberg, Richard. 2015. The Art of Social Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Swidler, Ann. 1986. Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies. American Sociological Review 51: 273–286. ———. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. University of Chicago Press. Tam, Tony, and Jin Jiang. 2014. “The Making of Higher Education Inequality.” American Sociological Review 79 (4): 807–816.  Tavory, Iddo, and Stefan Timmermans. 2013. A Pragmatist Approach to Causality in Ethnography. American Journal of Sociology 119 (3): 682–714. ———. 2014. Abductive Analysis: Theorizing Qualitative Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tilly, Charles. 2001. Mechanisms in Political Processes. Annual Review of Political Science 4: 21–41. Vaisey, Stephen. 2009. Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action. American Journal of Sociology 114 (6): 1675–1715. Voyer, Andrea M. 2013. Strangers and Neighbors: Multiculturalism, Conflict, and Community in America. Cambridge University Press.

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Weber, Max. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner. Wimmer, Andreas, and Kevin Lewis. 2010. Beyond and Below Racial Homophily: ERG Models of a Friendship Network Documented on Facebook. American Journal of Sociology 116 (2): 583–642. Woodward, Jim. 2002. What Is a Mechanism? A Counterfactual Account. Philosophy of Science 69: S366–S377. Woodward, James. 2003. Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008. “Invariance, Modularity, and All That: Cartwright on Causation.” In Nancy Cartwright’s Philosophy of Science, eds. Luc Bovens, Carl Hoefer, and Stephan Hartmann, 198–237. New York: Routledge. 

PART III

Interpretive Reconceptualization

CHAPTER 7

What Is Interpretive Explanation in Sociohistorical Analysis?

1   Introduction The distinction between understanding and explanation, frequently used to make sense of the human sciences and their relationship to the natural or physical sciences, reliably destabilizes philosophical categorizations, because it is ontological, epistemological, and pragmatic all at once. “Understanding” can describe what historians and sociologists study, that is to say, a “sociology of understandings” (Glaeser 2011) (ontology: people, with their understandings of the world and their wild and wonderfully weird subjectivities); how they study them (epistemology: methods of interpretation leading to understanding, routes to secure the validity of interpretation); and the inherently communicative nature of scholarly investigation and publishing as an accomplishable task (pragmatics: science is similar in some ways to all communicative action—for example, it has both a constative and performative dimension). It is tempting, then, to deconstruct the distinction between explanation and understanding itself. But this would be a mistake; instead, an ill-fated but nonetheless useful attempt at sublation should be attempted. In what follows, I do so from a point of view defined by the line between sociology and history, a zone full of hermeneutic problems but surprisingly under-influenced by hermeneutic philosophy. I will refer to the research that occurs at this line as “sociohistorical analysis,” and be concerned to show, in a concrete register defined by an arena of empirical study, how “interpretive explanation” works (Ricoeur 1981; Roth 1991; Mahajan 1992). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Ariail Reed, Sociology as a Human Science, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18357-7_7

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For sociohistorical analysis, the debate about explanation and understanding matters because what it means to successfully explain (account for? retrodict? predict?) why people do what they do (or why they did, what they did) is both in dispute and massively consequential for—to give just a few examples—policy proposals, the collective self-understanding of groups of people confronting their own violent histories, and the constitution of social movements as organizations both identity-bound and strategic. And, since the birth of the modern historical profession, the question of explanation and understanding has been part of thinking about the very possibility of doing history itself. What is an explanation? How does it work? When is it causal? And how do you make causal statements about particular historical transformations, full of willful agents engaged in contingent contests for power (Dray 1997)? Hermeneutics suggests that explanation is subsumed under a broader category of human understanding, which can take many forms. Less obviously, hermeneutics suggests that causal explanation itself can be usefully reformed via a reconceptualization driven by hermeneutic approaches to meaning. The idea is that not only is explanation a subcategory of understanding, but also explanation itself is simultaneously causal and interpretive in an interesting and underexplored way. This idea of interpretive explanation—captured famously in Max Weber’s definition of sociology in the opening pages of Economy and Society (Weber 1978)—can be better comprehended by expanding our purview on causality beyond the imitation of certain narrow formats of efficient causality in social theory. This devotion to efficient causality is usually based upon one or another idealization of the causal theories of the natural sciences, but it lives in many forms and is perhaps the ultimate sense in which Thomas Hobbes can be interpreted as the founder of modern social thought. To move outside of thinking efficient causality, I present a necessarily degraded reading of Aristotle’s four causes—degraded in the sense that it is bent toward the problems of twentieth-century and twenty-first-century social theory, and thus glides and glosses over major problems in the philosophical interpretation of Aristotle. With regrets, then, I propose a reformulation of Aristotle’s schema of four causes so as to draw a distinction between forming and forcing causality which, in my view, would greatly enhance our comprehension of what is at stake in debates about causality in sociohistorical analysis. I show how this is the case by examining debates about the causes and/or origins of the French Revolution.

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2   Aristotle’s Four Causes in Sociological Theory: A Hermeneutic Possibility? As is well known, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle gives the example of the casting of a bronze statue and divides the causal aspects of this situation into four (Aristotle 1941). The material cause is the bronze (e.g., the temperature at which it melts, its properties as a liquid and as a solid). The final cause is the endpoint of the process, “that for the sake of which other things are”—in this case, the finished statue. The efficient cause is that from which change comes, that is to say, the actual pouring of the bronze into the cast. And finally, the formal cause is, somewhat elusively “the whole, the synthesis, the form,” the reference for which is the way a designed plaster cast gives shape to the bronze poured into it. I propose that by interpreting this schema with the problems of contemporary sociohistorical analysis in mind, this enigmatically given example can be useful for sorting through the causal confusion of social theory and rendering somehow comprehensible the idea of interpretive explanation. Though there are accounts in social theory of the relationship between Marx’s concept of labor and Aristotle’s metaphysics (Engelskirchen 2007), of the importance of the distinction between zoe and bios for understanding politics and state-society relations (Agamben 1998), and even an attempt to base sociological research itself on the specifically Aristotelean concept of phronesis (Flyvberg 2001), I here depart from the overwhelming emphasis in social theory’s appropriation of Aristotle, which focuses on the constitution of human beings as practical reasoners in pursuit of good action or as political actors engaged in collective decision-making. This is because, in my view, for the problem of understanding/explanation in contemporary sociohistorical analysis, the dominant account of Aristotle’s metaphysics and epistemology comes from Donald Levine, who developed an understanding of Aristotle’s four causes as a means to comprehend a vast array of arguments in the history of modern social theory and to argue against the reductionism inherent in many different approaches to explaining human life (Levine 1995: 109). Levine’s reading runs as follows. Levine begins by noting Aristotle’s differentiation of the universal “theoretical” sciences from the “practical sciences,” thus lining Aristotle up with Max Weber, Wilhelm Dilthey, and the elements of Karl Marx’s work that emphasize historical conjunctures and specificities. This is because, unlike the “internal” dynamic of natural substances, human actions are subject to will, opinion, and how people construe the good. Thus the

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human sciences must strive for knowledge of “particulars” (Levine 1995: 108). Then, Levine argues that Aristotle distinguishes between that which is still “natural” about human action and that which is “artificial.” The passions (motivating emotions like grief, hate, desire, etc.) are “organismically grounded” (Levine 1995: 112). “These provide the motivational energies for action” (Levine 1995: 112). Also, the faculties are also organismically grounded—sense perception, calculation, ability for thought, etc. All of this, then, is grounded in the “material cause” (or, we could say, the biophysical substrate of being human). There are some social elements to the “material cause” of human nature in Levine’s interpretation—humans naturally form associations, and the polis, in particular, “exists by nature.” This is because “(1) human beings by nature are endowed with the faculty of speech, by which they are disposed to discourse about good and bad, a disposition they can express only in the political community; (2) the component units of the polis, households and village, exist by nature; (3) the polis is the form of association towards which these unites aspire, the culmination of their existence—and that makes it their end” (Levine 1995: 113). Thus, in Levine’s reading, the human sciences are constituted or founded on an Aristotelean distinction between nature and artifice, with an understanding of material and final causes as “natural,” and of efficient and formal causes as “artificial.” Of these artificial causes, Levine suggests that we think of a political regime (e.g., as defined by Charles Tilly (2006: 19) as “repeated, strong interactions among major political actors including a government”), as a formal cause, and the socialization and education that reinforce a regime as an efficient cause. In other words, formal causes refer to large social and state structures, whereas efficient causes are what we see “at work” in reproducing them, when we turn on the sociological microscope. Levine uses all of this as a way to develop an anti-Hobbesian agenda for social and political theory. The idea here is that for Thomas Hobbes, the human world is constituted as a great field of interacting impulses, just as the mechanical world is constituted as a great field of interacting atoms, and their force is so strong that they perturb the workings of the only other natural phenomenon humans evince, reason. Analysis of these interacting motions, based on the natural propensities of atomic individualism, constitutes the alpha and omega of Hobbesian social science. Hobbes thus “eliminates two other phenomena that Aristotle also assumed to be natural: the propensity of substances to actualize their

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potential in a certain direction, and the tendency of humans to organize themselves in enduring associations” (Levine 1995: 124). Hobbes is, for Levine, the origins of the “modern” reductionism that he wants to avoid, and he does so by resisting both Hobbes’s tendency to make causes in human life “natural,” and his rather exclusive interest in “material and efficient causes.” It is not hard to see that Levine’s reading here is in fact part of the argument, in sociology, against rational choice theory, methodological individualism, etc. However, beyond this particular set of arguments, Levine’s reading of Aristotle is useful because it locates quite clearly the links between Aristotle and the hermeneutic understanding of the human sciences in Wilhelm Dilthey, and because it shows how pre-modern schemas can be used to unsettle thinking about social causality in the contemporary philosophy of social science, and in sociological research itself. I view Levine’s argument as correct in so far as it finds and criticizes in contemporary social science a tendency to read material interests, on the one hand, and efficient social mechanisms, on the other, onto every social situation that is being analyzed, in a way that creates parsimony at the cost of external validity. If this is what we mean by reduction, then clearly Aristotle, and the hermeneutic tradition more generally, is its antidote. But to affirm and advance this antidote, I want to propose a different reading of the classic Aristotelean schema.

3  Rereading Aristotle: Forcing and Forming Causes My reading is less informed by the debates about classical and modern social theory which occupied Levine, and more informed by cultural sociology and, to some degree, science and technology studies. It also draws on Alastair MacIntyre for its reconceptualization of formal causes. It is as follows. Consider again the casting of the bronze statue as Aristotle’s point of theorization for causality. The material cause, the properties of bronze, should be reconceptualized as the materiality of social life that participates in an assemblage. That is to say, there are material objects and technologies that are implicated in the heterogenous networks and alliances that make up social life. Frequent examples of material causes in the sociohistorical analysis include the built environment (including, famously for Bruno

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Latour, mechanical door closers); the “natural” environment; human bodies; and transportation, communication, and production technologies (Latour 2007; Johnson [Latour] 1988). The final cause is conceptualized elsewhere by Aristotle as telos or purpose, but here in terms of the image of the final statue in the artist’s mind, which is very close to saying the artist’s intention. Final causes, then, should be read as referring to that set of causes we could call the motivation of human actors. Within the space of these sorts of causes, we find a set of debates about reasons, intentions, unconscious motives, and habituation, as well as the ubiquitous question of “interest” in social science explanations (Davidson 2005; Reed 2011: 135–153). Efficient causes are of course the most trouble, for a reason that is four hundred years old. Since the attack on the scholastics in the scientific revolution, the pull to have one’s own causal rendering of the world understood by the scientific community as an efficient cause is like intellectual gravity—you can fight it and build buildings that help you avoid crashing to the earth, but it does not go away. In social theory, this is central to the appeal of rational action theory and analytical sociology. But, from a hermeneutic perspective, we can see efficient causes as social mechanisms that are one part of the larger causal imagination. This, in particular, aids historical sociology, which has always been centered around questions about the conditions for, and pathways whereby, social life comes to be more “efficient” or “mechanistic.” In other words, in historical sociology, we are in the business not only of identifying social mechanisms but of trying to figure out the answers to questions such as: When and how did state power become more mechanistic and efficient in its application? How did the rationalization of scholarship occur in relation to the advent of bureaucracy and the market society? Thus, Aristotle’s efficient causes should be reconceptualized as repeatable, reliable, codified social mechanisms that can be triggered. These can be examined via process tracing  (Mahoney 2012). Further examples are the triggering of the legal process by the filing of charges, self-fulfilling prophecies such as bank runs, and a variety of cause-effect mechanisms that we associate with market competition. Finally, formal causes should be thought of as indicating the dependence of human action on meaning, with an understanding that meaning includes referential, moral, and aesthetic elements. In other words, the references for actions, when they emanate from motives and participate in social actions, also include previous actions, not in themselves, but as those previous actions are understood. Those previous actions that are in the

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network of reference for an action thus make up its meaningful context. In his classic essay on the intelligibility of action Alastair MacIntyre explains that if you consider different sequences of actions, of differing temporal expanse, one quickly finds that such sequences are also “of different types: conversations, feuds, enquiries such as those of the sciences, projects in the arts or politics, playing through a particular game and indefinitely many more long- or short-term individual or joint types of project and transaction” (MacIntyre 1986: 64). What MacIntyre calls intelligibility, we might identify as the formal cause in action-reaction sequences (Glaeser 2014), whose shaping of motive and mechanism makes both more concrete, and more comprehensible as motives and mechanisms with force in the world. Thus, for MacIntyre, “intelligibility is an objective property of actions or of sets of actions; it is not in the eye of the beholder” and thus includes in its purview both “the private world of the mental as well as the public world of the social”(MacIntyre 1986: 64–65). MacIntryre then renders intelligibility as a property of everyday routines and of more consciously cultivated and rationally criticized practices (under which we can include sculpture) (MacIntyre 1986: 66). The colligation of different action sequences into types may vary significantly in the degree of generality that is possible while keeping a grip on the meanings that inflect action. So, if we take the intelligibility of action seriously, we will have to let the generality of an appropriate explanation vary by the research question as a well-defined why question about certain specific actions. For some research questions, the practice of sculpture in the classical tradition may be enough of a reference point to get at the formal cause; for other questions, important distinctions between different artistic schools will be significant. What all such explanations share, however, is this embedding of the push and pull of the world into a meaningful context. At this point we have, then, a recharacterization of Aristotle’s four causes that can be tracked in the following way: • material: built environment, technology, materiality • final: motives, interests, and intentions as the springs of action • efficient: social processes that achieve regularity • formal: the meaningful or intelligible background or context for action

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One of the clear indications of several decades worth of work in science and technology studies is that the material causes are complexly intertwined with the formal in “giving form to” or “shaping meaningfully” how humans are motivated and navigate the social world. In other words, the way in which the world grants agencement to certain actions and not others requires a comprehension of meaningful context, understood in a hermeneutic way, but also material semiotics (Law 2007; DeLanda 2006). I would, indeed, suggest that in a hermeneutic social science, the role of the material is paired well with formal causes in so far as both together constitute the historically variable context for action. The question then becomes how, if we understand these as types of causes, our understanding of and conduct of sociohistorical inquiry will change. To begin with, a significantly different reading of the human sciences’ relationship to the natural sciences than that proposed by Levine emerges. It now appears that, in so far as accounting for human action in its full efflorescence remains the goal of the human sciences in general and sociohistorical inquiry in particular, it is the material and formal causes that make up a complex of historical difficulties for the investigator that are relatively alienated from the image of natural science in Western modernity. Both the meaningful context for action and the uptake of the material into social life are the location of extensive work on the radical variation in the history of human social groupings, and, as I will shortly press on further, extensive work on the formation of social kinds. That is to say, it is with material and formal causes that we find the core insights of hermeneutic philosophy to be directly at work in sociohistorical analysis: the relationship of part to whole as essential to understanding the environment for action, the emergence of new kinds, forms, and entities in the social world, including identities, systems of categorization, and sociotechnical objects such as options in options markets and derivatives. It is still the case that motives and mechanisms, as those things to which the investigator is sometimes prone to attribute certain actions and outcomes, require interpretation—what is more interpretive than the problem of other minds? However, it would appear that final and efficient causes, understood in this way, are the sorts of things that investigators are prone to put into context. They are analogized, more frequently and more often with Humean bias, to causal forces. They are also, in well-known ways, the most frequent reference points for “reductionist” explanations, whether those reductions are done in terms of “interest,” “status attainment,” or some other moniker that, while of course being a useful part of

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the theoretical lexicon in the human sciences, is far too often leaned upon in the social sciences as the foundation of every explanation (“parsimony”). For this reason, I want to make a distinction between forcing causes (final cause/motives, efficient cause/mechanisms) and forming causes (material cause/technological, formal cause/meaning) in sociohistorical analysis. It is, of course, an excessively crude distinction. But it is useful precisely because it captures and criticizes the central tendency of social science to focus on forcing causality, and, by implication, not to see forming causes as causes at all. Indeed, the overwhelming tendency in modern social science has been to see that which cannot be wedged into the efficient processes of mechanisms or the revealed or unrevealed preferences of interest to be outside the very possibility of explanation. This is a tendency shared, unfortunately, by some of the central thinkers in the hermeneutic tradition, who depart from the very possibility of explanation, and recede instead into the language of recontextualization and the addition of further accounts to the ones we already have (Rorty 1991; Geertz 2000). What differentiates forcing and forming causes from each other, as causes? If it is anything, it is that forcing causes take place as a kind of analog of motion, where something, metaphorically speaking, “pushes” or “pulls” on something else. In contrast, forming causes work via a kind of arrangement—of signs, borders, boundaries, and other aspects of the “ground” for action. As such, these arrangements constitute a hermeneutic causality. The basic insights of the hermeneutic tradition apply to the grounds for action, the intelligibility of action, the “moral background” of action, and so on: These causes are collectively emergent, arbitrary, conventional, and historically variable; no actor can do without them; to exert some control over these arrangements is, in part, to grasp at power. However, it should be noted that, precisely because of  the emergent, social, and interpretation-dependent nature of these forming causes, attempts to influence them by this or that actor seeking an adjustment in power are subject to significant uncertainty and thus both unanticipated and unintended consequences. Action molded by the arrangements that are forming causes is inevitable qua action; changing this or that arrangement intentionally is quite difficult indeed. Finally, in the hermeneutic view, explanation rarely emerges at a high level of abstraction. For that reason, I now try to show what I mean by forming causes with reference to a specific problem in sociohistorical analysis.

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4   Public Opinion, Books, and the Causes of the French Revolution Explaining the French Revolution is a central occupation of Western historiography and comparative-historical sociology; it looms in the background of classical social theory itself; Monika  Krause and Michael Guggenheim even claim that the French Revolution is the “model system” for historical sociologists studying social change (Krause and Guggenheim 2012). Here I examine work from history and sociology on the lead up to revolution in the second half of the eighteenth century and on the very early stages of the “revolutionary situation,” namely 1787–1789. I do not claim to offer an exhaustive review of the literature, or definitive evidence in favor of any particular interpretation of the French Revolution. Rather, I wish to use this well-researched topic as a testing ground for the distinction between forming and forcing causes. In particular, I will use the forming-forcing distinction to understand the relationship between the cultural historiography of the revolution and the widespread consensus, in comparative-historical sociology, that the fiscal crisis of the French state helped precipitate the revolution. The very first thing to note is that the shift toward a cultural interpretation of the revolution’s origins in the histories written in the 1980s and 1990s involved a tremendous amount of causal talk. Exemplary in this regard is the way in which two of the most important books in the cultural historiography of the revolution contain sections titled “Do Books Make Revolutions?” and “Do Books Cause Revolutions?” (These authors were surely, also, two of the most self-aware concerning the conceptual problems they were opening up for social theory, hence the bluntness of the titles, which have a certain measure of irony to them) (Chartier 1991: 67–91; Darnton 1995a: 169–246). This causal talk in Revolutionary historiography focused on changes in French (and especially Parisian) social life, and in particular the communicative aspects of that life, in the century before the revolution began in 1789, and especially after 1750. The messiness and difficulty of claiming causality here is intensely felt by historians—on the one hand, it feels absurd to say the revolution was Rousseau’s fault; on the other, it is equally clear that in the years leading up to the revolution, something shifted in the meanings that somehow informed revolutionary action, and these meanings appear to bear some interesting resemblances to the core philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment. In sociology, the difficulty of making these

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sorts of causal claims is well known via the debate between Theda Skocpol and William Sewell, Jr. in the Journal of Modern History about the role of “ideology” in revolutions, and, in the French case, the role of Enlightenment ideologies in particular (Skocpol 1985; Sewell 1985). In what follows, I first elucidate how the explanation of the French Revolution via “culture” refers to forming causes. I then recapitulate the forcing cause explanation, well known in comparative-historical sociology, which traces the precipitation of revolution to the fiscal crisis of the French state. Finally, I discuss the potentially productive relationship between these two different causal analyses, and discuss a third option, a cultural forcing cause argument, which has been superseded in the literature. 4.1   Forming Causes in the Lead-Up to the French Revolution The forming cause story for the French Revolution has (as I will present it here) two parts: the formation of a new social kind, “opinion publique”, and a shift in the arrangement of emotions, meanings, and status-­ ascriptions to royal authority. By describing these, together, we can describe the cultural atmosphere for action in the 1780s. And it was this atmosphere or context that gave shape and meaning to the fiscal crisis of the late 1780s. Public opinion In “Public Opinion as Political Invention,” Keith Baker traces the invention of public opinion as a politically relevant object in pre-­ revolutionary France. He begins with a simple indicator of a change in meaning. In the Encyclopedie (1765), “opinion” is derided as the uncertain, subjective opposite of rational knowledge. And earlier in the century, beliefs about fluctuations in uncertain opinion were mobilized as part of arguments for absolutist monarchy. However, in the parts of the Encyclopedie methodique that concerned finances and the police (published in subscription format in the 1780s), “opinion” is no longer defined, and instead there is an entry for “opinion publique.” Strangely, this “public opinion” possesses the precise qualities that “opinion” lacked. Public opinion is, in this definition, universal, rational, and objective; and it is a kind of court that judges people and governments. What happened? In the ideologies of absolutism, the King was the only public person, and thus communication of advice to him could and should be secret, precisely to protect the King as the protector of the “public” or general good (Baker 1990: 170). But over the second half of the eighteenth century, public opinion crept into politics and became a source of authority.

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First, French “notables” had to acknowledge developments in English politics, but in so doing they had to distance themselves from them, while also desiring reform of the French government. Across the political spectrum, the French elite hated what was perceived as the chaotic, fear-based, irrational party politics of England after 1688. And yet, they articulated a desire for “liberty” of some sort, in opposition to the perceived despotism of the King’s ministers, who spent the second half of the eighteenth century attempting to beat the regional parlements into submission. Simultaneously, another transfer occurred: from the early eighteenth-­ century discourse concerning how an international “public” of Europe would judge the maneuvers of various absolutist regimes to the possibility that a domestic “public” could discuss, and perhaps even judge, its own monarch—and especially the actions of his ministers. The result of this interwoven process was a thorough transformation of “public opinion.” In 1750, Rousseau had used it to refer to collective values and customs and the source of the social standing of individuals. In contrast, “From 1770,” explains Baker, “the term begins also to take on connotations of the Enlightenment and to acquire a more explicitly political resonance” (Baker 1990: 187). What is particularly interesting for our purposes is that this new meaning of “public opinion” was a category of speech, and a frequently invoked justification for decisions, before any consensus was obtained on what it really referred to or on how to mention it. Hence, as Baker explains, “public opinion” emerged as an “abstract category” that political actors used to make their claims legitimate (Baker 1990: 172). Furthermore, because of the desire to avoid English party politics, this category, though lacking a clear referent, acquired an association not only with “rationality,” “enlightenment,” and “the people” but also with stability. “Public opinion” became both “the enlightened expression of active and open discussion of all political matters” and “incompatible with divisions and factions” (Baker 1990: 188, 194). And so, this complex set of associations and criss-­ crossing meanings were embedded in a category that was used in everyday political discourse and disputation, and, eventually, used by the King’s ministers to legitimize state actions. For, the advocates and representatives of Versailles also began referencing public opinion in their attacks on the parlements. Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, defending monarchy, argued that the pamphlets decrying despotism and corruption in government failed because, when it comes to the pamphleteers, “neither their opinions nor mine will ever form what one means by ‘public opinion’—unless one

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agrees that there can be an immense difference, in every sense, between public opinion and the unanimous wish of the nation” (in Baker 1990: 190; we will have reason to return to these pamphlets in a moment). Public opinion, though controversial and non-referential, is nonetheless real as a category in the middle of a constellation of meanings essential to the legitimation of domination. A new social kind has appeared on the political scene. It can be struggled over, reinterpreted, and even despised, but it cannot be erased. It is, as sociologists are fond of saying, “real in its consequences” (Thomas and Thomas 1928: 572). At this point, a few comments are in order. First, note that the meaning of “opinion publique” emerges in the French/Parisian context in relation to other meanings that work in and around “public” and “opinion” and “politics,” and especially in relation to those ascribed, by the French elite, to English politics. Second, the reality of the term precedes its reification. Indeed, the calling of the Estates General led, in Baker’s view, to a set of actions which served to specify the referent for the term: “clarification was forced by the political process set in train by the calling of the Estates General” (Baker 1990: 172). Finally, third, this tracing of the formation of a social kind has an important material and technological shift as part of its arrangement: printing. Indeed, the lack of a clear “sociological referent” for the measurement of public opinion does not mean that the social kind “public opinion” was stranded—a category without support. Rather, public opinion came into being via an assemblage of different sorts of “stuff.” Printing, as a material aspect of forming cause, was also essential to another shift in the “cultural atmosphere” in France. 4.2   Reading and Delegitimation What printed materials were people reading in eighteenth-century Paris? And did what they read “make” or “cause” the revolution in some sense of the term?1 We can begin with a set of basic empirical theses, about the 1  The initial model of “intellectual origins” of the revolution was, as both Chartier and Darnton agree, “diffusionist” and top down. In his classic The Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution, Daniel Mornet traced the spread of philosophical ideas, and ultimately what he liked to call “intelligence,” through various institutions, examining, for example, what was taught in schools, increases in readership, and the growth of the Freemasons. Lacking a concept of “field” or “discourse,” however, Mornet dichotomized “ideas and principles” and “pragmatic action” in an unfortunate way; the inheritors of his project in the 1990s set themselves the task of reconsidering these “origins” from an updated theoretical perspective.

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spread of print and reading in the second half of the eighteenth century.2 Readership increased massively, and the product people were reading in Paris was qualitatively transformed. This applied to both the Affiches traced by Jones (1996) and to the prohibited works that were not given the King’s seal. The latter, the so-called livres philosophiques, sold “under the cloak,” exploded in popularity in the second half of the eighteenth century, and they included an overlapping typology of books: libelles attacking the depravity, lack of morality, and general self-indulgence of the King and those close to him (these could be of a scandal-mongering pamphlet variety, or of a longer, biographical nature); sheer pornography; works of political philosophy (e.g., treatises from Voltaire and Rousseau); and “utopian fantasy” (Darnton 1995a: 115–136). These genres bled into each other in complex ways. Furthermore, how people read changed, as well. A “new relationship between reader and text was forged; it was disrespectful of authorities, in turn seduced and disillusioned by novelty, and, above all, little inclined to belief and adherence” (Chartier 1991: 91). Subtle shifts of meaning occurred in these illegal texts. For example, later eighteenth-century libels paint very different pictures of the King and his mistresses than did those that were popular during the reign of Louis XIV. One classic of the earlier era, La France galante, though scandalous, painted a picture of a powerful Louis XIV, “cutting a wide swath through the ladies of his court … he is an imposing figure, the virile master of a powerful kingdom, usually referred to as ‘le Grand Alcandre.” In contrast, the libelles of Louis XV, especially those published after 1770, are quite different: The King is presented as having screwed up two foreign wars, perhaps because he “cares only for women,” though he “is barely capable of an erection, so he falls under the spell of a common whore” (Darnton 1995a: 213). Simultaneously, Darnton points to an important philosophical difference between the earlier texts and the later ones: the early libelles often protested against tyranny, a notion that goes back to antiquity and that underwent a revival during the Renaissance. But the late libelles accused the monarchy of degenerating into despotism, a concept that 2  For printing and the theory of ideological infrastructures and its applicability in pre-­ revolutionary France, see Mann (1993: 175–76, 36–37). For printing and distribution structures in the provinces for “under the cloak” literature, see Darnton (1995a: 22–82). For the growing importance of a literary market and its consequences, see Turnovsky (2010). For quantitative figures on the orders of clandestine literature in the run-up to the revolution, see Darnton (1995b).

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began to acquire a powerful new range of meaning at the end of the seventeenth century. Both terms conveyed the idea of the abuse of power, but tyranny connected it with the arbitrary rule of an individual, someone whose removal would eliminate the problem, whereas despotism indicated that it pervaded an entire system of government. (Darnton 1995a: 213)

Though this view of despotism began at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, by the end of the eighteenth century, despotism was central to the whole enterprise of libel: “From 1771 to 1789, despotism would be the main theme of libelle literature, one perfectly suited to the standard, scabrous details about royal orgies and lettres de cachet” (Darnton 1995a: 214). 4.3   Initial Causal Interpretations The authors who reconstructed the meanings that made up the cultural atmosphere of Paris were clear in their conclusions that these meanings shaped the early moments of the revolution. Darnton explains that what the Marxist historians called the “aristocratic revolt” of 1787–1788 was not, in fact, perceived as such in Paris. Rather, “contemporary Frenchmen... did not perceive the ‘aristocratic revolt’… Most of them despised Calonne and applauded the Notables’ resistance to him … the public took the parlements’ side. And when [Brienne] tried to destroy the parlements, it took to the streets” (Darnton 1995a: 243). These events, in other words, fell into the interpretive framework developed by readers of the forbidden bestsellers of the eighteenth century. That framework centered on ministerial despotism, the incompetence of the King, and the overarching corruption of the system. It thus “helped contemporaries make sense of things” when the conflict with the parlements came to a head. And so, the final flourish: “That the Bastille was nearly empty and that Louis XVI desired nothing more than the welfare of his subjects did not matter in 1787 and 1788. The regime stood condemned. It has lost the final round in the long struggle to control public opinion. It had lost its legitimacy” (Darnton 1995a: 246). Thus what happened in France in 1787–1789 is, according to the cultural historiography of the revolution, in part due to the invention of public opinion, and the reshaping and redefinition of the meaning and scope of royal authority. The question, however, is how to relate this kind of causal talk with the kind that prefers the more Humean, billiard-ball locutions of “triggers” and “forces.”

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4.4   The Force Given Form: The Financial Crisis of the State Reconsidered Though debates over “culture” and the French Revolution continue, sociologists and historians are in fact relatively clear about one aspect of the causal explanation of the early moments of the revolutionary situation (1787–1789). That is the causal link between war, state debt, and the conflicts that ensued from the attempt by the King and his ministers to raise money to meet said debt. Here we find a chorus of voices: The debt accumulated by the French monarchy during the Seven Years’ War and the War of American Independence precipitated the struggles of the French Revolution. (Tilly 1992: 186) [R]oyal treasurers finally exhausted their capacity to raise loans from financiers, and were forced (again) to propose reforms of the tax system. The usual resistance from the parlements ensued, and an expedient adopted in an attempt to circumvent it—the summoning of an Assembly of Notables in 1787—only provided privileged interests yet another platform for voicing resistance. A last ditch effort to override the parlements (by Brienne in 1787–1788) crumbled in the face of concerted upper-class defiance, popular demonstrations, and the unwillingness of army officers to direct forcible suppression of the popular resistance. (Skocpol 1976: 188) Army and church did not cause the struggles of 1788 and 1789. All they did was contribute to the regime’s feeble response. The cause lay squarely in the crown’s inability to solve its fiscal problems. (Mann 1993: 179) The Old Regime state was thrown into crisis by impending bankruptcy, not by its split ideology. (Sewell 1985: 66–67)3

This is a clear example of a forcing cause, one that takes certain fixed entities to be real within the scope of the given analysis, and then watches as these entities push and pull on each other. As Tilly writes about his own work, “the arguments proceed as if each category were real, unitary, and unproblematic” (Tilly 1992: 35). French society in 1787 has “particular structural characteristics,” and these characteristics help explain what 3  Anticipating the kinds of arguments we make here based on the cultural historiography of the revolution, Sewell continues on to write that “once the crisis had begun, ideological contradictions contributed mightily to the deepening of the crisis into revolution.” Forming causes are a useful category, in part, because they help specify how something could “contribute mightily” to a revolution without forcing it to happen.

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happens when tremendous “foreign pressures” brought to bear (Skocpol 1976: 182). The King can no longer borrow, so he and his ministers are “forced” to raise money by modernizing the finance system, and in particular by raiding areas of privilege that had been exempt. This leads to resistance (“push back”) by the nobles.4 The consensus on this forcing cause is clear, but it is also incomplete. The obvious question is: What differentiates earlier financial crises from the one that precipitated the French Revolution? Tilly admits that the alliance that formed in reaction to the financial crisis was “odd”: Why, this time, did the opposition to the King take such a broad-based, popular form, knitting together “sinkholes of aristocratic privilege and purchased royal office…with peasants and bourgeois who railed against the expense, arbitrariness and corruption of government” (Tilly 1996: 163)? The counterfactual that would be predicted by a strictly forcing cause account of French state finances and war-making is nicely implied by the historiographical expert on eighteenth-century French finance: The financial problems of the French monarchy on the eve of the Revolution might be seen, therefore, as a predictable consequence of long-standing institutional difficulties. What was not predictable was the path that the monarchy took. In 1788, instead of defaulting on part of its obligations, the monarchy convoked the Estates-General, the kingdom’s representative body, which had not met for 175 years. It was this act, the calling of the Estates-General to solve a financial crisis, and not impending bankruptcy per se, that was novel in French history. This fateful decision opened the way to a whole new era of politics, in fact, to revolution. (Bossenga 2011: 38)

I submit that this eventful pathway occurred because of the way the events of 1787–1789 were shaped and formed by the existence of “public opinion” as a politically relevant object—which had not been part of the landscape in 1750 or 1770—and the atmosphere into which this latest attempt by the King’s ministers to shore up the state’s finances was 4  This forcing cause is itself the product, in these accounts, of the conjuncture of two earlier forcing causes (and thus the utility of conjunctural causality to historical sociology becomes quite concrete): (1) the imperial war-making of the French state in competition with other European states (a cause which became more powerful as England developed economically (see Skocpol 1976: 179–180)), and (2) a series of money-raising procedures, such as venality, that worked in the short term but which, over the longer term, were disastrous: “each time the state raised money in one of these ways, furthermore, it created another walled-off pool of privilege that would be harder to drain for new money in the future” (Tilly 1996: 162).

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thrust—an atmosphere of delegitimized and pornographically ridiculed royal authority. This “made the difference” between, for example, the outcome of the financial crisis of 1770 and that of 1787. More generally, it provided the arranged and significant background for action as the events of the revolution began to be strung together as a series of cause-and-­ effect, pushes-and-pulls. The background for action is causal in the sense that it refers to a difference that made a difference, to a shift or change in meaning consequential for an outcome as we have identified it. Indeed, the essence of the cultural historiography of the revolution is that several shifts in the meaning of French politics had emerged, along with a rapid change in the network of producers of pamphlets and books, and that the books themselves contained a shift in meanings and attitudes toward the monarchy. The pamphlets and books were, moreover, read with an increasing intensity as they were produced at great rates in the later eighteenth century. This intense reading shifted the cognitive and emotional relationship of many of the people in Paris to the King; simultaneously, “public opinion” became a potential source of political legitimacy for French notables, even if no one yet knew how to measure it. But as I describe the shift, note that none of these parts  make sense without the whole, and they certainly could not have forced anything to happen inside the finances of the state by themselves. Rather, they are parts of the whole atmosphere of meaning that could give shape to “social forces”: first during the resistance of Nobles to the King and his ministers that was supported by the lower parts of the social hierarchy in Paris, and again when the Bastille was stormed, thus “inventing” revolution by combining popular violence with reasoned legitimacy in the name of “the people” (Sewell 2005: 225–270). Note, finally, how this cause that “gave form to” the events of the French Revolution came to be: through an assemblage of heterogeneous things, not a regularized process or even a conjunction of regularized processes. Rather, some mechanistic things happened, some manifestly singular things happened, some “material” things happened, some “ideal” things happened, and it was all networked together via a series of “alliances”—between printing, pornography, and philosophy, for example. Out of the whole mess came an assemblage, an arrangement of meaning and material, that guided the actions that became the French Revolution.

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4.5   Culture as a Forcing Cause? At this point, it should be relatively clear that under the rubric of “culture,” many historians of the French Revolution arrived at a conclusion concerning what I am here calling “forming causes.” And an unsympathetic reader might be inclined to read this entire debate/debacle as really one between economics and culture, or perhaps between Marx and Durkheim. But in fact, there is one final note to make about the cultural turn in the historiography of the French Revolution, and it is one that speaks directly to the distinction between forcing and forming causes, and the possibility of a hermeneutic approach to sociohistorical analysis. The authors of the cultural turn in histories of the French Revolution (Baker, Darnton, Chartier, Sewell, and Hunt) have many theoretical differences between them.5 What they share, however, is an overwhelming tendency to reach for a form of causal talk that is explicitly non-­ mechanistic  and which thus avoids a fetishization of efficient causality. Chartier, for example, attacks any notion of a “direct” causal connection between the content of the works of forbidden literature and a shift in beliefs that undermined the legitimacy of the ancien regime. He writes: “the images in the libels and in the topical pamphlets were not graven into the soft wax of their readers’ minds, and reading did not necessarily lead to belief. If a connection existed between the massive distribution of an aggressively disrespectful pamphlet literature and the destruction of the image of the monarchy, it was doubtless neither direct nor ineluctable” (Chartier 1991: 83). Darnton, for his part, claims that Baker is insufficiently subtle because he imposes a model of discourse that is overly determinate and perhaps anti-humanistic (Darnton 1995a: 176). To what is all this critique directed? It is relatively clear, in fact, that it is directed at an earlier cultural historiography that posited culture as a forcing rather than forming cause. For this earlier work, the causal importance of culture was to be identified by the push-and-pull of “values” on “action.” And in this particular understanding, the cultural hypothesis failed. For, while intellectual historians have long been fond of noting certain “writer-philosophes” or men of letters who also participated in the  Specifically, Darnton takes a more Geertzian position vis-à-vis “culture,” Baker prefers arguing for the tautonomy of “discourse” (thus implicitly engaging Althusser and Marxism), Chartier uses a theory of “representation” and is influenced by Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, Sewell identifies a dialectic between action and structure taken from the social theory of Anthony Giddens, and Hunt focuses on the Durkheimian notion of “collective representations.” 5

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Constituent Assembly, a careful analysis of the writings of the members of the Assembly led to the conclusion that “in the end, the Constituents who had participated in the ‘Republic of Letters’ prior to 1789 represented only a small minority, about one-twelfth of the Assembly’s membership.” Timothy Tackett thus casts significant doubt upon the degree to which, say, the “values” of the Enlightenment were direct, forcing motivators of what assemblymen did. The skepticism is directed at an efficient causal link such that “reading Rousseau” could force someone to “become revolutionary.” Note, however, that even Tackett, the master of this skepticism, admits that references to “reason” and “natural rights” began to appear later on in 1789 in certain Assemblymen’s writings, and thus concludes that there may have been some influence on the Assembly by “their more intellectual colleagues” (Tackett 1996: 65). This indicates a movement away from attempts to render meaning a forcing cause, and an embrace of an understanding of its work as inhering in forming causality.

5  Discussion: How to Think About Forming Causes6 In pointing to these arrangements of materiality and meaning the analysts of the French Revolution articulated precisely that which, in one way or another, has been the occupation of both hermeneutic philosophy, interpretive sociology, and symbolic anthropology for many academic generations. The invention of public opinion is the “condition of intelligibility” for calling the Estates General; the delegitimation of the King via printed pornography provides part of the moral and aesthetic background against which the storming of the Bastille can occur and be lauded as an expression of popular sovereignty. In this sense, these historians operate in the universe of Clifford Geertz and Susan Bordo, examining the public documents of discourse to infer the anatomy of a shifting worldview. However, they do so in a way that engages the enduring questions of causality and plausible worlds of sociohistorical analysis. As such, their work is particularly useful for understanding the possibility of interpretive explanation. What do these analyses reveal about the difference between forming and 6  The following fourfold distinction was  developed by myself and  Daniel Hirschman, and thus this section is in dialogue with Chap. 4 of this book, as well as with Reed (2011). This chapter emphasizes the hermeneutic dimensions of the concept and their relationship to  cultural history, whereas Chap. 4 is more concerned with  the  formation of  objects and kinds, engaging field theory and Actor Network Theory directly.

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forcing causes, as I have termed them here? I see four essential ways in which these causes depart from the standard understanding of cause in social science. 5.1   Lack of Fixed Entities Forming causes address not how kinds, objects, and forces push and pull on each other, but rather how kinds, objects, and forces came to be in the first place, or have their meaning and significance fundamentally changed. Public opinion becomes a social kind—first as a category of politically inflected language and then as the disputed reference for that category. Meanwhile, what it means to have a fiscal crisis in the state is fundamentally different in 1789 than it was in 1750, because the “atmosphere” created by the pamphlets and forbidden bestsellers inflects crisis with a new set of meanings, including the meaning of system-wide corruption and despotism of the King’s men. 5.2   An Eventful Approach to History In examining the formation and modulation of kinds, one is presented with a world subject to an “eventful” revision of its causal laws, precisely because the entities and the atmospheres in which they act are fundamentally variable. Thus the calling of the Estates-General to solve the fiscal crisis, and the “invention” of revolution at the Bastille, opens up a new political ontology, with very different meanings, definitions, and possibilities (Furet 1981: 77–79; Sewell 2005: 267). 5.3  Assemblage The forming cause piece of the causal story of the French Revolution is not reliably tractable as “micro” or “macro,” or as following rules of aggregation and emergence familiar from social theories that take the individual as the fundamental unit of analysis. Rather, the atmosphere of the revolution was created by a network of objects (printing presses, pamphlets in circulation); meanings (the content of such pamphlets, the emergent legitimacy of “public opinion”); political devices and tools available within the current system (the calling of the Estates General); and beliefs in certain sectors of the French nobility (the entitlement to “liberty” felt deeply by “notables”). In forming causes, in other words, the emergence of

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new kinds is not something that happens via emergence from a lower level to a higher level so much as it occurs across “levels.” Forming causes, when it comes to levels and entities, are ontologically promiscuous. 5.4   Dynamic Nominalism Ian Hacking refers to his species of investigation as one in which he traces the interaction between the name and the named, and the study of public opinion in 18th-century France  certainly fits with this (Hacking 1996; Hacking 1995).7 This interaction is evident at key moments in the revolution: The calling of the Estates General was interpretable in terms of, but also gives new meaning to, “public opinion,” while the Affiches could “could claim to embody as well as represent that ‘public opinion’ whose importance recent historians have not been slow to emphasize” (Jones 1996: 39). That “public opinion” could be so contested in its referents and meanings is precisely the point of Hacking’s dynamic nominalism. 5.5   Breaking the Break: Hermeneutics and Sociohistorical Analysis In the Anglophone tradition of thinking about history, causality, and society, the legacy of J.S. Mill dominated that of William Whewell in the twentieth century, favoring a reductionist program of explanation over an against holistic/hermeneutic understanding. The  inversion, or mirror image, of this within hermeneutic philosophy  is the break Hans George-­Gadamer made with the project of Wilhelm Dilthey in Truth and Method, thereby eschewing the project of explanation, and with it, most of social science. This reading was reinforced because it was shared, in its broad outlines, by Gadamer’s debating opponent Jürgen Habermas. The aspect of Gadamer’s reading of Dilthey that I am highlighting here was that, first, Dilthey’s hermeneutics was a psychologism that rested on an unsustainable concept of empathetic feeling; second, Dilthey’s hermeneutics alternated wildly between an implausible capturing of the subjective soul or intention of the author and an “objectivist” or even “Cartesian” attempt to develop a sovereign perspective on all of history; finally,  third, that, trapped inside these nineteenth-century prisms, Dilthey expressed a devotion to “method” that was scientism by another name (Dilthey 1976, 1996; Gadamer 1989; Habermas 1971). For Gadamer, Dilthey gives too much to forcing causes.  7  In the twentieth century, public opinion became a classic instance of a “looping kind.” See Igo (2007).

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Through the work of Austin Harrington, this understanding of Dilthey has been revealed as flawed in the sense that it grasps neither the relational meaning of Dilthey’s work vis-à-vis his contemporaries nor the core ideas of his vision for the human sciences. In particular, Dilthey, first, countered psychologism with an understanding of Geist which was a prologue to the twentieth-century view of cultural or discursive formations as text-­analogs; second, he did engage in the idea of using general theory, but did so to articulate a project of historical explanation that we would recognize now as concrete and historically bounded—connected to questions such as “what were the origins of the French Revolution?”; third, Dilthey did not really mean method in the sense that was fetishized in American social science in the twentieth century.8 This suggests an opening in hermeneutics to ask questions about meaning, cause, and effect. Interestingly, a parallel opening may be emerging in sociology. Certainly, the field of comparative-historical sociology has expressed deep discontent with Millsian conceptualizations of social science. In sociology more broadly, there has been a partial unsettlement of the notion of causality. In a variety of recent texts, sociology is understood to have reconsidered its overwhelming dependence on specific statistical techniques, and in particular, logistic regression, to make causal or quasi-­ causal claims. Thus, in the field today, there is a reconsideration of a wide variety of philosophical issues concerning how to think about explanation, including events and eventfulness, the meaning and utility of counterfactuals, necessity and sufficiency in causal analysis, and different understandings of what constitutes explanation (Abbott 2001; Biernacki 2012; Goertz and Mahoney 2012; Luker 2008; Steinmetz 2005). This unsettlement means that the line between history and sociology can no longer be easily assimilated into a simple version of the ideographic/nomothetic distinction. And it is precisely in such a moment that the core ideas of hermeneutics can be helpful. For example, hermeneutics provides a language with which to think about how in human science the goal is often to “illustrate the general significance that resides within each chosen case” (Harrington 2000b: 446). Furthermore, the concept of a virtuous hermeneutic circle offers an alternative to hypothesis testing in

8  Austin Harrington (2001: 323) explains that, by Geist, Dilthey meant, “not some reified mental substance but a complex of relationships between practices, experience, and signifying activities.” See also Harrington (2000a, 2000b).

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social science that does not dispense with the responsibility to evidence or the idea that one interpretation can be judged to be superior to another. Given these shifts in intellectual context, the issue of explanation and understanding looks different. Since Max Weber, much of the debate about interpretation and explanation in the human sciences has focused on the action inside the actor’s head—on what I have here termed final causes as motives. A vast literature exists here, which concerns the possibility of interpreting individuals in a way that gets at the core of their subjectivity. Hence the essential questions: Are reasons causes? Should we start with the presumption of rationality, and infer the degree to which actors’ understandings depart from it? If we say that someone is driven by an unconscious motive, are we in effect telling them they have false consciousness? In contrast to this, the questions I have asked here are: How can we characterize discursive formations as causal? What sort of power do we want to ascribe to them? And how does materiality play a role? In my view, this is part of the way forward for hermeneutics in the twenty-first century. It is toward this end that I have drawn a single, and crude, distinction between forcing and forming causality in this chapter. In doing so, I hope to have rendered explicit something that is implicit in the best sociohistorical research practice. To grasp the vagaries of causality in human life, we need an understanding of causality far more expansive than has heretofore been dominant. For human action is too weighted with significance to be understood only as subject to efficient causes. For hermeneutics, arrangements of meaning may be efficacious without being efficient.

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Roth, Paul. 1991. Interpretation as Explanation. In The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture, ed. David R. Hiley, James Bohman, and Richard Schusterman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sewell, William, Jr. 2005. Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille. In Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, 225–270. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1985. Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case. Journal of Modern History 57 (1): 57–85. Skocpol, Theda. “France, Russia, China: A Structural Analysis of Social Revolutions,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18(2): 175-210 (1976), 188. ———. 1985. Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell. Journal of Modern History 57 (1): 86–96. Steinmetz, George, ed. 2005. The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tackett, Timothy. 1996. Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thomas, W.I., and D.S. Thomas. 1928. The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs. New York: Knopf. Tilly, Charles. 1992. Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 990–1992, 186. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. ———. 1996. European Revolutions: 1492–1992.. Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2006. Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turnovsky, Geoffrey. 2010. The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 8

Power: Relational, Discursive, and Performative Dimensions

1   Introduction Imagine a series of actions and interactions leading up to a sociological outcome of interest. Let this outcome be “political” in a broad sense—let it be a binding decision on how a set of human beings will order their lives together and make other decisions in the future. So, for example, a sociologist might be interested in the town hall meetings and day-to-day informal talk leading up to a vote on a new proposed law or an election for mayor in a small town; or in how different interviewing practices and rules for faculty voting in different academic departments affect racial and ethnic diversity in hiring; or in the lead-up, in three different unions, to the decision about whether or not to strike; or in how a board meeting about a merger, conditioned by a set of threats and counter-threats that precede that meeting, results in a specific kind of corporate restructuring. I hazard that explaining such outcomes is important to sociology and that, even beyond the contentious issue of the relationship of these outcomes to democracy or the good society, sociologists find a great deal to argue about when they try to explain them. How should we explain what happened in a specific case, or over a large range of cases, or comparatively, in a small or medium number of cases? Who triumphed? Who lost? What issue was not even on the table? Whose grievances were ignored or unarticulated? And who did not even know they were being manipulated, and thus, dominated? © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Ariail Reed, Sociology as a Human Science, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18357-7_8

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These are questions about power. Especially in sociology, these questions reach far beyond binding decisions. Nonetheless, it is useful to begin with such situations when writing about power, because the relevance of the concept to the ability to provide a good explanation of the outcome is clear. Now imagine the following three, typified, one-sided sociological accounts of how an outcome or outcomes were brought about. One account emphasizes social capital, mechanisms of patronage and exchange, and the “positionality” of key actors. Perhaps everyone in town already owes a certain candidate for mayor a favor; perhaps long-standing business relationships, founded on both profit and trust, give one corporate leader an insurmountable advantage in a given series of negotiations. Or perhaps, in a contest that was otherwise evenly matched, a semi-­ outsider—an old union member who had worked for another, bigger union and returned with enhanced prestige—could throw his weight around, and thus push the outcome in one direction or the other. Network analysis might help here, if edges can be correctly coded, as would an understanding of the different ways unequal exchange works. Overall, one could point to a certain structure of social relations—more or less dynamic over the time studied—as accounting for the outcome. And in this structure, there are advantaged and disadvantaged positions, which people occupy. These positions are, not coincidentally, related to the winners, the losers, and the radically excluded that characterize the outcome. This is the relational concept of power. The second account is interested in talk, symbolization, narrative, and coding, and more generally, in the intersection of perception and advantage. Perhaps in the town hall meetings, one group becomes very good at “framing” the issue. Indeed, they are so good at it that by the end of the process, the outcome has been naturalized as inevitable, as the only thing to do, or, alternately, as the moral thing to do. Or, in the lead-up to the strike vote in the union, the repeated conversations and interactions of several members spread an account of striking that successfully associates it with essential values of masculinity—courage, responsibility, and pride. Or perhaps, in the long trip to the top, corporate raiders come to construe themselves and their relation to the world in certain terms, terms that make their actions feel like the most natural thing in the world, good for capitalism, growth, and the bottom line, which is, “obviously” what life is all about. Maybe this sort of sociological account would even go so far as to say that the very kind of people that end up doing X or Y at the end of the process—voting this way or that, deciding to strike, etc.—have been

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produced by the repeated talk and writing that they engage in. Qua decision-­making subjects, they have been constructed and construed by the significations in which they are immersed. This construal itself makes for advantage, discipline, and even domination. This is the discursive concept of power. Finally, one account emphasizes the situated creativity and temporal ordering of the actions that produce the outcome. The people who act may indeed occupy a position in a relational structure and may be interpolated by certain discourses. But in this account, it is the acts themselves that produce new realities, and thus account for why the whole process went one way or another. Timing, surprising-yet-compelling public action, and transformative moments or events are what explain the outcome. The order in which issues are introduced in a meeting affects how they are comprehended;1 a key speech at a particularly tense moment in the very last union meeting leads to a strike; the crafty manipulation of the interactional conditions of the board meeting (withholding a trip to lunch, exhaustion of the opposition, amassing a large, intimidating group of lawyers) has discernable effects on corporate negotiations. In this sociological account, it is worth noting, some of these actions are consequential precisely because they are not “naturalized,” hidden, or insidious: they are the bold and sudden giving of orders when doing so would seem to be out of place; they are wild ideas and insane lies that resonate with an audience because they capture the absurdity of a situation; they are acts that transform the emotions of previously steady subjects; they are speeches that, even though someone is not well-positioned to give them, end up carrying the day. And so the vote is swayed, authority is shored up, and a company is broken up and sold off. This is the performative concept of power. 1.1   From Concepts to Dimensions These are abstract, highly typified accounts-of-sociological-accounts of power. As such—informally given, using a brief reference to made-up examples—they lack rigorous theoretical justification; in what follows I 1  Adam Slez and John Levi Martin argue that examining the “temporal dynamics of political action” allows one to better explain what happened at the Constitutional Convention. In particular, they “find that the meaning of any one issue—what it implied for alignments and oppositions between actors—was conditional on how previous questions had been decided” (2007: 43).

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attempt to elaborate and ground these concepts of power by conceptualizing them as dimensions of power as it works in the world, subject to empirical variation. I specify and situate these dimensions of power in relation to prevalent theoretical languages for analyzing power and domination, and link them to different ontologies of social causality, thus giving them some epistemological justification. I argue that the dimensions of power—relational, discursive, and performative—should form part of the general theoretical framework with which we do research on power in sociology. In particular, these three dimensions of power should be understood as orthogonal to, or cross-cutting, the well-known theorization of power in terms of its sources, associated with Michael Mann and others (see discussion below, and Table 8.1). Finally, I suggest that the performative dimension of power is, of the three presented here, the least well understood in sociology, and suggest some avenues of research that might remedy this situation.

2   Power: Conceptual Issues and Theoretical Debates Power is a central, subfield- and discipline-organizing concept in sociology, and as a result, the way in which theorists parse, typologize, conceptually delimit, or otherwise comprehend power has consequences for empirical research and the truth claims that result from it. Yet, when it comes to theorizing power, matters are far from clear. It is an essential, but also essentially contested, concept (Lukes 2005:14; Gallie 1956). The normative reasons for studying power are myriad, but so are the conceptual disputations surrounding it, even if normative considerations are bracketed. As Gianfranco Poggi explains in a review of the subject, the concept of power “stands out as one whose definition is particularly contentious and unstable” (2006: 464). Various solutions to this problem have been proposed, including developing clear limits on what can be considered power (Lukes 2005: 108–124), or arguing that power should be used multiply, as a “family resemblance” concept (Haugaard 2010). All of this multiplicity is the contemporary inheritance of a century’s worth of debate beginning with Max Weber’s definition of power explicitly as the “chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a social action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action” (Weber 1978: 926). By the mid-twentieth century, Robert

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Dahl had extracted from Weber’s definition the idea that “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do” (Dahl 1957: 202–203), and used the concept to study decision-making power in New Haven, Connecticut (Dahl 2005). In sociology, Talcott Parsons had proposed a radical redefinition of the term. Arguing that his critics—especially C.  Wright Mills (1959: 35–49) and Ralf Dahrendorf (1958: 126–127)—had defined power as a “zero-sum” game between those who possessed power and those who did not, Parsons instead suggested an analogy between power and money. For Parsons, power could be augmented by social reorganization, and, like money, served as a generalized medium through which societies function. So, while some could have more power or money than others, ultimately power, like money, was a product of the social system as a whole (Parsons 1963). In a direct attack on Parsons, Anthony Giddens argued that “largely though a trick of definition,” Parsons had removed from consideration “two obvious facts,” namely: “that authoritative decisions very often do serve sectional interests and that the most radical conflicts in society stem from struggles for power” (Giddens 1968: 265). For Parsons, Giddens wrote, “power now becomes simply an extension of consensus, the means which a society uses to attain its goals” (Giddens 1968: 268). Steven Lukes had a similar critique of Talcott Parsons as did Giddens, Mills, and Dahrendorf (Lukes 2005: 31–36). But Lukes’ “radical view” of power, while distancing itself from Parsons, was primarily developed in opposition to the “pluralist” views of power common in American political science at the time (e.g., Dahl 2005 [1961]; Bachrach and Baratz 1962, 1970). Lukes argued that Robert Dahl had only comprehended one of power’s three dimensions, and that his critics had only comprehended two of them. Dahl had focused on which leaders were able to influence decision-­ making processes and ignored the ways in which certain issues and decisions never came up in the first place (second dimension), and ignored how the preferences of whole populations were manipulated (third dimension). One intellectual source of this problem, Lukes argued, was the methodologically individualist use of Weber’s definition of power that had been mobilized by Dahl. In contrast, Lukes’ theory of power developed a Gramscian-Marxist account of how the consent of the dominated is obtained. With some modification, this is the position maintained by Lukes in his extensively updated edition of Power: A Radical View (2005: 124–151).

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The post-Parsonian theories of power, then, developed in what could broadly be called Marxist-cultural and structural-Weberian directions. The former developed a focus on ideology, hegemony, consumption, and other sources of quiescence in capitalist societies (e.g., Laclau and Mouffe 1985), while the latter, especially in historical sociology, developed a focus on the state as an arena of power (Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985). It was in this context that Michael Mann’s understanding of power became central to comparative-historical sociology. Mann theorized power as existing in organizational networks that respond to basic human needs and thus separated ideological, economic, military, and political power (Mann 1992, 1993; Hall and Schroeder 2006). This emphasis on the different organizational and/or institutional bases for power—what I will call the “sources” approach—was by no means limited to Mann’s historical sociology, however. John Scott developed Weber’s “Class, Status, Party” into an account of three different kinds of power: class, status, and “command,” and analyzed how in modern capitalist societies economic power bases were also inflected by command structures and hierarchies (Scott 1996, especially 158–225). Meanwhile, Gianfranco Poggi (2001) developed his work on the state into a general account of power sources that looked quite similar to Scott’s: Political power is control of the resource of rulership, ideological/normative power is control of status (especially in relationship to divine or holy entities), and economic power is the control of material resources. Poggi argued, in particular, that Mann makes a theoretical misstep in separating political and military power (Poggi 2006). Hence among sociologists who take a broadly Weberian view, the theorization of power moved from Lukes to Mann, from an account of power’s “dimensions” to an account of—and debate about the interactions between—power’s “sources.” Other theoretical accounts of power can be understood as a variation on this sources approach. If we understand power as originating in different institutional spheres, organizational complexes, or fields of social action, then we could suggest that these fields are more varied than just polity, economy, and culture. One might understand Bourdieu’s framework for field analysis in this way, in so far as his work developed the metaphor of capital as a way to analyze how different sorts of power can be converted into each other, and how power struggles relate to the social construction of value in specific arenas of action, such as the colonial state (Steinmetz 2008) or literature (Bourdieu 1995). In this format of analysis, the number of potential fields of struggle is not limited, but becomes itself

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a historical question. Or, one might point to the resurgence of a macroinstitutionalist, evolutionary approach to institutional differentiation as, again, a “sources” approach to power, in which power is grounded in institutions, and in particular the six core institutions that appear to be common to all societies: kinship, religion, polity, economy, law, and education, with perhaps science and art added as “autonomous” spheres in the modern era (Turner 1997, 2003; Abrutyn 2009). Finally, one might note the overlap between these approaches and those developed by systems theorists concerned with differentiation (Luhmann 1995). The ongoing sociological arguments about power’s sources and their relationships is, in parts of the discipline, complicated by the influence of Michel Foucault. In some of his writings and interviews, Foucault argued that researchers should not examine power as something that a person could “have” (Foucault 1980: 142, 159, 198–200). He thus arrived at a notion of power as diffuse and anonymous, and as productive of those entities that other theorists had often identified as the sources or resources for the development of power (bodies, populations, laws, etc.), and even as productive of the agents who exercise power (see Digesser 1992: 979–982 for a discussion of the production, by power, of “subjects”). In his written empirical work, Foucault directed his attack on the Hobbesian philosophy of power as too limiting for the analyst. He proposed, instead, productive power as a counterpoint to repressive power (see especially Foucault 1990: 92–102), and thus reopened a series of debates about the complex relationship between “power to” and “power over,” while simultaneously injecting into these debates his broader perspective on the importance of discursive formations in constituting social relations (Honneth 1993; Allen 2010; Saar 2010; Honneth et al. 2010). 2.1   Making Sense of Sociological Theories of Power: Three Axes of Debate Such a brief—indeed telegraphic—account can barely scratch the surface of the many debates about power (for a recent book-length examination, see Hearn 2012). Nonetheless, one can discern from the wide-ranging literature on the subject three axes of argumentation. First axis: the long-standing distinction between power to (capacity) and power over (domination), iconically embodied by the difference between “Parsons” and “Dahrendorf” (or between “Arendt” and “Hobbes”) (Wrong 1968; Pitkin 1972; Gohler 2009). Along this axis, the

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primary question is how “empowerment” is related to domination, and how a better understanding of these issues might inflect research on, and perhaps the practice of, social movements that seek liberation and justice (Allen 2000). One key point of debate here is, for example, whether certain kinds of capacity (or “empowerment”) are paradoxically dependent on domination. For example, a child receives recognition and love from her parents, which allows her to become a functioning, capable adult— someone with capacity to act on the world. But, these very forms of recognition and love encode gendered schemas of self which are patriarchal, and render her vulnerable to domination (Allen 2010). Second axis: a series of arguments about different sources of social power and how they interact—deriving originally from Weber but developing into extended discussions on political, economic, and cultural power. These arguments clearly lend themselves to a series of historical questions about how and when different sources of power are more or less important and how they interact. Classically, for example, one might be interested in how economic power both disembedded itself from other formats of power and how it came to dominate other social arenas (Polanyi 2001). This second axis of argument is widely understood to cut across the first axis orthogonally, which is to say that all of the sources of power can be relevant for “power to” as well as “power over.” Third axis: the “dimensions” of power. Here Lukes’ work is foundational. Taken in its original intellectual context, Lukes’ Power: A Radical View was written as a challenge to the understanding of political decision-­ making and government-centered power common to American political science—that is, this work can be read as suggesting there were three dimensions to a single source of power (political). But Lukes’ third dimension of power, while strictly defined as the manipulation of subjectively perceived interests, drew theoretically and empirically for its elaboration on how other sources of power impacted political power—economic, cultural, etc. Furthermore, it was tied to a notion of actors and real interests that, as Lukes showed in his expansion of Power: A Radical View, formed the central normative difference between Lukes’ perspective and that of the Foucauldians he debated (Bordo 2003; Flyvberg 1998; Lukes 2005: 99–107). In the massive flurry of debate about reason and power that has accompanied the interpretations of Foucault’s work, the emphasis, in Lukes’ original text, on the link between methodology and the theorization of power has been lost; in particular, the fundamental connection between

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the concept of “power” and the concept of “cause” has been obscured. Amid discussions of modern and postmodern conceptualizations of power, the basic insight of Lukes—that research on power was informed not only by one’s normative stance but also by one’s concept(s) of social causality—has faded.2 Indeed, at the origins of social theories of power, we find that Thomas Hobbes (1839–1845: 127) argued explicitly in his work that “power and cause are the same thing.” This suggests that we could theorize power with reference to the causal workings of the social world, as expressed in our theoretical “root metaphors” for understanding how that world works (Pepper 1961). Furthermore, in so far as social causality is multiple, this multiplicity could be mobilized as the basis for understanding power’s different dimensions, and thus as the basis for research on social power. This is the path I pursue in this chapter.

3  Sociological Explanations, Causality, and Power Consider what is, for social theory at least, an important moment in the intellectual history of arguments about power: Marx’s and Engels’ argument in The Communist Manifesto that the massive increase in social capacity represented by the capitalist reorganization of production was dependent upon the social domination of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. This is an argument that combines the “sources” of power problematic with a theorization of an intersection between capacity (power to) and domination (power over). Marx’s historical narrative accounts for the triumph of economic power over other sources of power. It splices this economic power into the intertwined strands of productive capacity (whereby for the first time, in capitalist modernity, humankind begins by social organization to master nature and free itself from the continual threat of starvation) and productive domination (wherein this accomplishment is premised on the debasement, humiliation, impoverishment, and de-­ humanization of the proletariat). 2  Some commentators have attempted to separate out “modern” concepts of power focused on the state, the economy, and ideology from “postmodern” concepts of power focused on micro-processes and discursive effects, often with the implication that the first is “causal” and the second “interpretive” (Clegg 1989; Torfing 2009). But this division of the field is rendered somewhat suspect by commentators who have connected Foucault’s theory of power to that of Parsons (Brenner 1994; Kroker 1984; Giddens 1984), noting that both emphasized power as an ever-present, system-wide property of modern societies.

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However, there is, as many commentators have made clear, a link between this argument and the epistemological framework that Marx used to build explanations of the social world (see, especially, Benton 1977: 138–169). In Marx, the social relationship between dominator and dominated is conditioned by the particular way in which a given society relates to nature via labor, and, more specifically, by the social-organizational aspects of the production and distribution of the resources created by that labor. This understanding is further inflected by the specifically Marxist concepts of totality (Arato and Breines 1979; Jay 1986) and dialectics (Jay 1996). Hence there is a connection between Marx’s social theory of power and domination and his methodology/epistemology of historical materialism. It is a short step to a generalization of the point. For Marx, his historical materialist epistemology inflects his concept(s) of power; for the behavioralists, their methodological individualism inflects their concept(s) of power. As philosophers of social science have made clear, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim thought about the epistemology and methodology of sociological explanation, and in particular social causality, in very different ways (Hollis 1994; Benton 1977; see also Ragin 1987: 30–33). One could certainly catalog the history of theories of power this way. But there is also another possibility: One could develop the power-causality link into a typology of the dimensions of power.3 Such a typology would be provisional and non-exhaustive. The point would not be to settle, once and for all, epistemological/ontological disputes about causality, but rather to mobilize certain epistemological-­ ontological constructs—constructs that have already proved useful for grasping how the social world works—so as to develop a typology useful for research on power and domination. Such an argument takes as a starting point the premise that sociological languages of cause do manage, some of the time, to comprehend the social world “out there” and thus connect the knower and the world (Dewey and Bentley 1949). Because to exercise power in the world is to make something happen, and because we have, in social theory, a complex and pluralistic account of how things are made to happen in the world, we can use our notions of causality to illuminate the concept of power. Three different contemporary 3  Interestingly, in Dahl’s 1957 paper, “The Concept of Power,” he explicitly stated that he would “steer clear of the possible identity of ‘power’ with ‘cause,’ and the host of problems this identity might give rise to” (1957: 203).

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epistemologies of social causality, in particular, recommend themselves as the basis for a typology of power’s dimensions. Though these epistemologies have classical sources, I take them in their more contemporary theoretical manifestations for the purpose of this chapter. 3.1  Relational-Realist In “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,” Mustafa Emirbayer argued for a shift to “relational” thinking as the organizing philosophical framework for sociology. This shift, he wrote, would have implications for fundamental sociological concepts, including power (1997: 291), which should be rethought along “transactional” or “relational” lines. Emirbayer’s point was that power should be seen as existing, primarily, in the relations that obtain between actors, or between positions in a social structure. This relational context is primary, for it is what gives specific individuals what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “quantum of social force” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 230). Emirbayer’s paper is but one instance of a slew of recent calls for relational sociology (Vandenberghe 1999; White 2008; Donati 2010), a move that is encompassed by the more general turn to sociological realism (Hedstrom 2005; Bhaskar 1998; Smith 2010; Porpora 1989), and which brings a new epistemological understanding to the long-standing sociological emphasis on social relations as real and consequential (Simmel 1971; Blau 1964; Emerson 1962; see also Molm et al. 1999). The research questions implied by this account of social causality are quite present in debates about power. They tend to concern which social mechanisms are present in different cases or historical moments, and how and when individuals or groups can trigger them. Consider research on states and state power. Is the modern U.S. state an arena for class struggle, whose administrative capacities are coercive mechanisms that can be activated by some class fractions and not others (Domhoff 1967; Mills 2000)? Or is it rather the case that the military capacities of states themselves constitute and reconstitute classes at certain junctures in history (Tilly 1990; Mann 1993)? How do differences in the organization of social relations outside the state affect state capacities to build infrastructure or distribute food? How do these capacities of states overlap with or enable domination and coercion via war-making or tax collection? And so on. The relational concept of power is sometimes presented in opposition to understandings of power that explain social power as originating in non-­ social aspects of the world. Thus one might explain social power via genetic

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dispositions or psychological traits that result from natural selection, individual rationality and skill at decision-making, and so on.4 In contrast, the many iterations of the idea of social structure in sociology and anthropology, including such classic foci of study as kinship systems (Levi-Strauss 1971; White 1963), organizations (Zald 1970), and states (Evans et al. 1985), suggest that such approaches miss an essential aspect of what makes the world work, and thus an essential aspect of power. The various non-­ social traits of individuals have to find expression within a relational structure; to understand how individuals, or groups of individuals, come to have power and thus to control each other requires that we understand the reality of their relations with each other. 3.2  Discursive-Hermeneutic Empirical explanations, or parts of explanations, that reference “discourse” or “discursive formations” or “cultural structures” tend to have a different epistemic structure than do those that reference “relations.” Relying more on hermeneutics than the theorization of mechanisms, such explanations tend to mobilize the idea that meaning should be understood as a system of signification that is (1) relatively anonymous, (2) arbitrary and conventional in its makeup, and (3) diffuse in its presence and effects. These studies tend to make causal claims by collecting many different specific actions into one whole, and show how these actions all in some way presuppose or are molded by the discursive formation whose discovery and reconstruction is the main occupation of the analyst. Furthermore, in this approach, explanations often rely upon an insight of social theories of discourse, namely that meaning can be most effective when it is imprecise, ambiguous, or referentially vague. The emotional power of certain highly effective tropes whose precision and coherence are wanting, or whose referential, or even semantic, meaning is unclear (e.g., “there is nothing to fear but fear itself,” “to dare is to do,” “operation Iraqi freedom”), suggests that the power of meaning to move the social world is not only holistic in nature but also results, in some cases at least, from its inherent ambiguities and the unpredictable ways in which it can 4  Famously, the status attainment research program attempted to parse how factors such as parent’s education and income, as compared to innate cognitive ability, predicted mobility or status achievement; this literature has been given new “non-social” factors to consider by work on gene and environment interactions (Adkins and Guo 2008; Adkins and Vaisey 2009).

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be elaborated. This is important, because it means that discourse or meaning cannot be broken down into a series of mechanisms at a lower level of analysis—that it resists, in other words, being fully encapsulated as merely a subspecies of relational-realist causality (Reed 2011). And so, in this dimension of power, capacity and domination are encoded into discourse, with the result that they are as diffuse, anonymous, and idiosyncratic as discourse is. Discursive capacity would be evident in, for example, the way in which a shifting set of meanings around observation and gentlemanly honor enables the development of a scientific mindset, which in turn aids the development of technology, and the rejection of alchemy, in early modern England (Shapin 1994). Or, when patients are immersed in therapeutic discourses, perhaps discourses in which dreams are discussed and interpreted, the patients are reconstituted as subjects more capable of acting rationally in the world, thus enabling their capacity. However, as this last example suggests, the discursive-­ hermeneutic approach also offers an account of domination. If we follow the logic of the power-causality link, then, we can see Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979) as a classic analysis of the discursive dimension of power. Said argued that it was only by investigating and interpreting how the British and French administrators and intellectuals imagined and signified the East that researchers could comprehend fully the domination involved in the colonial ventures of those (and other modern Western) empires. In so doing, he revealed a complex discursive formation that guided the design of colonial programs of domination, and that supported and justified this domination to both Western and Eastern populations. His investigation was of a meaningful whole, whose effects were wide-ranging, diffuse, and constitutive of “the East” as an object of interest to “the West.” Thus the discursive formation is what explains (or helps explain) the social actions of the British and French colonizers of the Middle East, and less directly, some of the actions of the colonized as well.5

5  Said’s explanations have been criticized by sociologists as too discursive in orientation, not only from the perspective of those more interested in the political economy of colonialism, but also by those who want to specify how the discursive formation of Orientalist representations of the non-Western was institutionalized in specific ways. According to George Steinmetz, Said’s discursivisim “is reductionist in its causal imagery and its lack of attention to social and psychic levels of causality” (2007: 26). Steinmetz’s critique highlights the need to analytically separate the dimensions of power so that their various intersections and interactions can be examined empirically.

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3.3  Performative-Pragmatist The re-engagement with pragmatism entered sociology as a way to reconceptualize social action, and in particular, as a way to avoid the Parsonian model of norm- and value-guided action, which was tied to the Weberian model of means-and-ends rationality (Swidler 1986; Joas 1996). But more recently, ideas from pragmatist philosophy and sociology have been developed as a response to both mechanistic and discursive models of causality, particularly by refocusing analysis on concrete action sequences. So, the development of “cultural pragmatics” in cultural sociology has emphasized how culture must be made to “walk and talk,” via a “mise-en-scène” (Alexander et  al. 2006; Alexander 2004). Furthermore, a pragmatic account of human actors as oscillating between creativity and habit has been explicitly proposed by Neil Gross as a different approach to mechanistic causality. “Pragmatists,” he writes, “would view social mechanisms as composed of chains or aggregations of actors confronting problem situations and mobilizing more or less habitual responses” (Gross 2009: 368). In both of these streams of theoretical thinking, the situated creativity of action (Joas 1996) is essential to understanding how social life works. This connects to a long-standing sociological tradition of micro-analysis that has used dramatic metaphors and analyzed how interactions proceed via such concepts as “felicity’s condition” and “interaction ritual chains” (Goffman 1983; Collins 2005). Performance, furthermore, does not have to be limited to the micro level. Performative action can have effects on the level of interpersonal dyad, but also in a more “macro” way, as in media events or social dramas (Dayan and Katz 1992; Turner 1975). If we pursue the power-causality link, pressing on this notion of the “performative” and the focus on creative action, we come across a causal grounding that departs from relational positionings in a social structure and from discursive formations. The performative-pragmatic epistemology, in other words, contains a different image social causality. I will attempt to show this, first, via an analogy from speech act theory and, second, via the approach to action and intersubjectivity pioneered by George Herbert Mead and reconstructed by Hans Joas. Speech act theory concerns itself with analytically differentiating the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary aspects of utterances. Briefly, the first refers to what is said, the second to what one does in saying something, and the third to what one does by saying something. If I say “this class will end in ten minutes,” I am making a prediction about a fact in the

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world (locutionary), constructing a quasi-promise to my students, given how they are likely to interpret me (illocutionary), and, finally, creating an effect on my students’ actions: They will start packing their bags in approximately ten minutes, even if I am still lecturing (perlocutionary). These dimensions of utterances can be used to distinguish different sorts of speech acts, and originally, J.L.  Austin made a distinction between “constative” and “performative” utterances. The implication was that “performatives” like promises, wedding declarations, and threats lean heavily on their illocutionary and perlocutionary aspects. Constatives can, primarily, be judged referentially for their truth or falsity, while performatives are judged felicitous or infelicitous, depending on whether they work. Judith Butler, drawing on (and creatively interpreting) this work—and the debate between Jacques Derrida and John Searle—pointed out that such utterances can also be thought of as acts of power. The question for speech act philosophy thus becomes how the “illocutionary” and “perlocutionary” forces that inhere in speech acts are also forces that can enact domination, if also enable resistance (Austin 1975; Searle 1974: 54–71; Butler 1997a: 9–12; see also Bach 2006). Much of this philosophical work functions within an intellectual space circumscribed by ordinary language philosophy and the emphasis, in post-­ structuralism, on the ambiguities of the spoken and/or written word. But we can extrapolate from this work an analogy for the analysis of the power-­ causality link in the social world. The analogy is this: Power is performative in so far as its carrying through in social action is like a speech act that threatens, pronounces, or promises; it is relational or discursive in so far as its carrying through is like a speech act that states a proposition or reports upon the world. So, just as some speech acts can be “verified” by checking to see if they say something referentially true, some exercises of power can be referred back to the relational positionality or discursive codings from which they emanate. In contrast, other exercises of power cannot be referred back to the “map of social power in a fairly fixed way” (Butler 1999: 122). Instead, they have to be analyzed as themselves possessing social force, force which derives from their concrete temporal positioning and intersubjective situationality vis-a-vis other actions. Thus “performance” or “performativity” can create social power rather than just expressing those power relations that already exist, in analogy with how some speech acts can create a marriage or name a ship, rather than just reporting on its existence.

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This analogy underwrites a lot of social scientific appropriation of the concept of performativity (particularly given the influence of Butler’s work, and the development, in that work, of a certain interpretation of Austin, Searle, and Derrida). However, the ultimate causal imagery underlying this idea is to be found not in poststructuralism per se, but in the pragmatist philosophy of G.H. Mead. Mead’s pragmatics transforms the performative metaphor into an ontology. In Mead’s social theory, acts themselves matter for future actions, and thus exerting power over them, power that is not “delegated” to the act from previously existing power relations (for discussion of this “delegation” see Bourdieu 1993a; Butler 1999). In his later writings and lectures, Mead elaborated a philosophy of temporality, and of the interaction of human actors with each other and the physical world, which departed from both mechanistic determinism and teleological philosophies of history. For Mead, the past is contained in the present via the previously made adjustments to habits of action that the actor carries with him; the future is contained in the present via the “control which the changing field of experience during the act maintains over its execution” (Mead 1934: 351, cited in Joas 1985). When one adds to this ontology of time the way in which Mead embedded human action in intersubjective praxis, the ontology that results is one where the socially constituted, physically situated “event” has a causal power of its own. In this view, eventful action exceeds its past determinants, and thus exercises its own sort of control on the future. This is the performative-pragmatic image of social causality in its pure form. When several actors come together to act, the intersubjectively constituted present of the “undertaking” or task, that is, “what we are doing,” connects to the past and the future via conditioning and control, respectively, but the “event” is, sui generis, its own form of causal power. This is because the emergent sociality of the event places it precisely “betwixt and between” two well-formed systems of relations: “the novel event is in both the old order and the new which its advent heralds. Sociality is the capacity of being several things at once” (Mead 1932: 49; Joas 1985: 183). In this space of the “event,” acts themselves have the capacity to transform the habits and social relations from which they emerge; this temporal philosophy, then, points to the same aspect of social life as do theories of “performative” speech acts: the autonomy of the act itself, situated in time and space vis-à-vis other actors, to affect what happens in the future.

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One response to a careful reading of Mead’s later philosophy has been to propose it as the rendering of reality appropriate for the social sciences, a kind of underlying temporal philosophy for constructing the relationship between history and sociology (Abbott 2001: 224–230). My proposal is less bold: It is simply that, in discussing action in this way, Mead has pointed us to one mode of causality in the social world. I thus propose to bring this mode of causality into conversation with the others, for the specific purpose of better understanding the dimensions of power. 3.4   From Epistemology and Ontology to the Dimensions of Power Epistemological and ontological arguments are often pitched at a metatheoretical level. Even if they do not claim to be “foundational” in some logical-positivist sense, they nonetheless tend to work at the level of “presuppositions” (Alexander 1981) or preliminaries, and as such are often thought to be mutually exclusive. My argument here is for a shift in the level of abstraction, motivated by an intuition that doing so will allow for the development of better conceptual tools to aid research on power and domination. Instead of seeing the three causal images presented above as incommensurable “paradigms,” I propose that we use them to construct a multidimensional account of power in the world. This account is intended to function as a working typology, amendable in various ways, and useful precisely to the degree that it allows an examination of how the different dimensions of power interact, condition each other, and develop historically. It is also intended to cross-cut the theoretical distinctions that define the sources approach to power. To signal this shift, I drop the latter, epistemological part of each of the hyphenated titles of the above sections, rendering a threefold typology of power: relational, discursive, and performative.

4  The Three Dimensions of Power: Definitions and an Example Relational power refers to the degree to which the structure of relations or ties between actors (where relations or ties can be variously constituted, and actors can be individual or collective) determines the ability of some actors to control or limit the actions of others, achieve their intentions

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over and against the will of others, and generally possess the ability to direct social life, often to their advantage. Power, in so far as it is relational, derives from positionality in a structure of social relations. This positionality can be dynamic, and some forms of relational power involve social mechanisms. Discursive power refers to the degree to which the categories of thought, symbolizations and linguistic conventions, and meaningful models of and for the world determine the ability of some actors to control the actions of others, or to obtain new capacities. Power is discursive to the degree that it is “written into” signification and perception, and this signification and perception creates or shapes certain kinds of subjects, reinforces certain hegemonic assumptions, and/or naturalizes a particular set of social objects or modality of social relations. Discursive power tends to be diffuse and can often work best when it hides its workings and appears not to be an exercise of power. Performative power refers to how situated action and interaction exerts control over actors and their future actions. In performative power, well-­ timed acts, “in tune” with the situation, provide actors with another route to a “quantum of social force,” and to “making B do something he would not otherwise do.” Power is performative to the degree that it rests in the particular “eventness” of a specific set of concrete actions. It often works by transforming actors’ expectations and emotions, and thereby (contributing to) the control or coordination of their future actions. Performative power, in contrast to discursive power, can often (if not always) magnify itself by becoming a public spectacle or drawing attention to itself. It is successful when a performance “comes off” or is felicitous. In the performative dimension of power, the temporal and spatial dimensions of action are brought to the fore, in contrast to action’s embeddedness in relational structures or discursive formations. 4.1   An Example of Power’s Dimensions: Storming the Bastille and the French Revolution I take an example here from my own field of study, comparative-historical sociology, in an attempt to make clear how the same process could be analyzed in terms of the three dimensions of power. I rely on classic accounts of the French Revolution and its signal event—the storming of the Bastille—to illuminate the concepts of relational and discursive power; I then add to these readings of the French Revolution the dimension of

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performative power—relying upon, but rereading, William Sewell, Jr.’s work on the Bastille as an event. 4.1.1 Relational Power and the French Revolution Theda Skocpol’s argument about revolutions is a classic example of relational power analysis. The relational position of states vis-à-vis other states in international competitions combined with the structural likelihood of peasant revolt, and, of course, the relative autonomy of state and class power are the essential features of her causal analysis of the power grabs that are revolutions. More specifically, however, she explains the events of the summer of 1789, including the fall of the Bastille, in this way: Thus, by the early summer of 1789, the quarrels within the dominant class over forms of representation culminated in a victory for the Parisian National Assembly and its various liberal, urban supporters throughout France. And a concomitant of this victory was the sudden devolution of control over the means of administration and coercion from the normally centralized royal administration into the decentralized possession of the various cities and towns, mostly controlled by the supporters of the National Assembly. (Skocpol 1979: 67)

One can quibble with Skocpol’s emphases on certain relationalities in explaining this key point in the French Revolution, but it is difficult to imagine a more clear indication of the power-causality link as it is understood relationally—at each point, Skocpol relates control and domination to the dynamic, underlying relationalities between different collective actors. More generally, one might posit the relational dimension of power as that which frames most debates in the second wave of comparative-­ historical sociology (Adams et al. 2005). 4.1.2 Discursive Power and the French Revolution Interest in the discursive dimension of power animates the explosion of research on the “cultural” or “ideological” aspect of the revolution. Keith Michael Baker, in his account of the ideological origins of the revolution, explains that “the emergence, elaboration, and interpretation of these three discourses [of justice, will and reason]…defined the political culture that emerged in France in the later part of the eighteenth century and provided the ideological framework that gave explosive meaning to the events that destroyed the Old Regime. The origins of the political

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language of 1789, the language that came to constitute the grounding of the new order…seems to have been created from the competition among them” (Baker 1990: 27). In her own study of the “poetics of power” in the revolution, Lynn Hunt frames her argument about the language of revolution in the following way: Revolutionary language did not simply reflect the realities of revolutionary changes and conflicts … political language was not merely an expression of an ideological position that was determined by underlying social or political interests. The language itself helped shape the perception of interests and hence the development of ideologies…revolutionary political discourse was rhetorical; it was a means of persuasion, a way of reconstituting the social and political world. (Hunt 1984: 24)

Perhaps the key phrase here is “helped shape the perception of interests.” Variations on this phrase often accompany an analysis of the discursive dimension of power, and they reach back to Lukes’ argument about power’s third face or dimension. The analysis of the discursive dimension of power is a generalization of this argument, one that detaches the analysis of how discourse inflects social relations from any specific concept of actors’ objective interests. The point is to hermeneutically reconstruct discourse, so as to understand how the symbolic landscape itself encodes advantage or disadvantage, power to and power over, and so on. 4.1.3 The Event of “the Bastille” and Performative Power It was in the context of the turn toward discursive power in the study of the French Revolution that William Sewell, Jr. developed his argument about the Bastille—namely that this event “invented revolution.” What the Bastille did, Sewell argues, was to articulate via a dialectic of action and interpretation the fusion of popular violence and democratic sovereignty that would come to be known as the French Revolution. This connects directly to arguments in the cultural history of the revolution concerning the emergence onto the political scene of late ancien regime France of “the people” or “the public” as a relevant source of political legitimacy. Although Sewell’s work emerged from a shift in thinking about the revolution that emphasized discursive power, his analysis of the fall of the Bastille pushes beyond this toward a concept of performative power. The Bastille was, after all, an “event,” and it is this “eventness” that should

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alert us to its performative dimension.6 Sewell’s specific historical focus is in fact on the timing and ordering of action in the summer of 1789. Sewell points to the variety of historical contingencies and specific performative maneuvers—actions and rhetoric, made in medias res of the event—that brought the revolution into being, and in particular enabled some actors to control others, some violence to be legitimated and other violent acts condemned, and so on. In my view, this is an iconic argument about performative power. However, Sewell does not frame his understanding of action and interpretation during events as a study of a different dimension of power, one perhaps particularly likely to emerge during “unsettled times” (Swidler 2001). Rather, Sewell refers to relational power at the very end of his argument about the Bastille-as-event, in his discussion of the “authoritative sanction” given to a certain interpretation of events by “the central governing authorities” (Sewell 1996: 875). In other words, he argues that the interpretation of the Bastille as the beginning of a popular democratic revolution carried weight because as an interpretation, it happened from a certain position within a relational structure—a powerful institution constituted as an authority before the event. Not just anyone could interpret the Bastille as the expression of the sovereignty of the French people. Rather, it was the institutional location of the National Assembly that made the rhetoric elaborated there so consequential. Sewell expands this argument to suggest that authoritative interpretations will emerge from the institutional location proper to the actions under study: we should expect the location of rearticulating action to vary with the setting and scope of the event. A religious event might well achieve its authoritative resolution in a religious institutional setting…A rupture in kinship relations might be sanctioned by the elders of the clan or by a tacit agreement on the part of the appropriate kinsmen. Where authoritative rearticulations will be achieved depends on what modes of power are activated or challenged by the event in question and on the particular institutional nodes in which the affected power is concentrated. (Sewell 1996: 875)

This is a useful general hypothesis that implicitly draws on the “sources” approach to power: Relational power is the key dimension, and different “sources” generate power, especially for actions that are within their arena. 6

 For the social theory of events, see Wagner-Pacifici (2010).

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However, even if one were to find this hypothesis to be true for a wide variety of cases, one might still want to know why some performances in the National Assembly were more persuasive than others, why the actions of storming the Bastille demanded a certain sort of in situ response, and what interpretations of that event were specifically and radically excluded through interaction in the Assembly. To do this, one would have to posit that power derives not only from structural position and from extant discursive codings but also from the anatomy of performances themselves, which is to say, from action for an audience that occurs in concrete space and time, and draws upon both habit and creativity. Interestingly, in the empirical part of Sewell’s essay on the Bastille, he is not concerned with the relational positioning of the National Assembly (a la Skocpol), nor is he concerned with the rise of Enlightenment ideology (a la Baker and much of his own work). Rather, he is attuned to the way in which the actions of the crowd and the reporting of the crowd’s actions in popular newspapers such as Les Revolutions de Paris combined in an artful dance with the interpretation of popular violence in the National Assembly to produce the “event” of the Bastille and its revolutionary significance (Sewell 1996: 852–860). In Sewell’s account, the storming of the Bastille is not something that can be explained with concepts of relational and discursive power; as an “event” it needs the concept of performative power as well. So, his essay can be read as implicitly posing the question: What is the relationship between relational, discursive, and performative power? It is to this question that I turn next.

5  Relations Between the Three Dimensions of Power: Hypotheses and Discussion 5.1   How Autonomous Is the Performative? Discursive power and relational power have to be “acted out.” As countless theorists have shown, social structures and symbolic schemas have to be “instantiated” or “made real” or “find expression in” actions by human individuals; for this reason “structure” and “action” are intertwined, co-­ dependent, or co-constitutive. Does this mean that performative power, as I am developing it here, is just the “other side of the coin” (or coins) of discursive and relational power? I believe it is not, and I will try to explain why.

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Rather than just viewing “performance” as a new word for “action,” performative power should index the degree to which capacity and domination are traceable to the situated effectiveness of acts themselves as movers of the world. It should be a way to pursue the empirical variability in the degree to which this format of power exceeds the typical structure-and-­ action dialectic. The analogy to speech acts is important here: What performative power traces is when situated action is like a promise or a wedding vow, rather than a statement with a clear reference and truth-­ value. If, when someone acts, their effectiveness derives from the way they have been delegated to act by certain discursive codings or relational positionings, that is, in the analogy, like a constative speech act. If, when someone acts, their effectiveness derives from their performative power, that is, in the analogy, like a performative speech act. Thus what we want to know, with performative power, is when and how situated action itself has outsized impact on social convention, structural arrangements, discursive formations, and so on (for more on this issue, and other theorizations of this analogy, see Bourdieu 1993a; Butler 1997a, 1999; Derrida 1988). The move to thinking about performative power in this way—and, specifically, not as a retread of structure versus action—has certain positive consequences for research. The much-theorized way in which performativity “cites” discursive codings and social relations that are not immediately present in the act itself becomes a point for empirical research on the interactions between the three dimensions of power. From the dimensional perspective developed here, the degree to which performative power matters is an empirical question, rather than a metaphysical constant or metatheoretical assumption. The question becomes: To what degree do the timing, emotional resonance, and rhetorical effectiveness of actions— in contrast to the social position of the actors doing the actions, or the codes and narratives cited by actors who “frame” an issue—give some actors control over others, or give some actors increased capacity to move in the world? The degree to which this is the case, in a given case or situation under study, is the degree to which performative power is autonomous from relational or discursive power. We have a lot of theories of performance but, in my view, very little empirical research explicitly directed at this issue. To move this question of the autonomy of performative power in the direction of research, I offer two ideas for further research.

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1. In one common process, the aggregation of “micro” acts of performative power over time creates a shift in discursive or relational power. What are the institutional conditions that make this process likely to occur? A relationship of aggregation between microperformative power and discursive power is the underlying sociological dynamic in many of the cases that Judith Butler relies upon in her theoretical discussions of power. Butler theorizes the reappropriation of pejorative names and slurs as a kind of performativity that can result in a shift in the discursive constructs from which name-calling originally derived. The politics surrounding the term “queer” are perhaps the classic example in this regard, though she extends the analysis to hate speech more generally, and to the subtle ways in which hateful speech acts can also create the opportunity for their resistance (Butler 1997a). In this dynamic, “microperformatives” cycle back into the discursive formations that they themselves cite when they enact reappropriation and resistance. The point is that the citing of discursive codings can, depending on the situation and context, surprisingly twist the taken-­ for-­granted meanings embedded in those codings. Over time, these performative reappropriations can alter the taken-for-granted discursive structure. The question of how this happens is rendered more complex by the question of whether such performatives are uttered by actors in civil society, or by actors acting in the name of the state—thus implying a relationship between microperformatives and relational power as well. If this is proposed as a process whereby performative power relates to discursive and relational power, then a key research question emerges: What conditions enable these sorts of aggregations to be effective? Not all attempts to reappropriate a hateful term over time are successful. In the case of “queer,” we might point to the existence of a “civil sphere” that discursively constructs all citizens as entitled to equal access to rights and fair treatment, and the application of this schema toward homosexually identified individuals, or to the discursive construction of the civil rights movement as a heroic accomplishment whose memory informs later struggles (Alexander 2006). 2. In many situations, macroperformances are parasitic upon, or merely “express” relational and discursive power. That is, a “performance” takes place, but very little, if any, performative power is exercised. In contrast, there are certain situations where macroperformative power

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is vital. Identifying and explaining the difference between these two sorts of situations could become a central focus on empirical research. It is undoubtedly the case that the President’s State of the Union address is a grand, dramatic, and widely viewed happening in the United States. Many methodological innovations have been developed to gauge its rhetorical effects on various audiences. But its power-effects are, at most, extremely limited vis-à-vis the relational and discursive power formations of American politics. Thus, though it is perhaps usefully interpreted as a sort of “drama,” the actual performative power of the State of the Union is close to nil. With certain interesting exceptions, the State of the Union almost never allows Presidents to better leverage Congress— that is, to make Congressmen do something they would not otherwise do—though it can help promote already popular proposals a bit (Edwards 2006; Jones 2010; Canes-Wrone 2001). Thus we can say that the State of the Union address is a case in which performative power has almost no autonomy whatsoever from the relational and discursive dimensions of political power; a “performance” exists in some existential sense, but it does not develop autonomous power. Generalizing from this, we might propose that there are a class of events (pseudoevents?) that are not really contexts for performative power per se, so much as they are a parasitical dramatization of relational and discursive power. In contrast, it is also clear that there are other events in which performative power takes on a life of its own, and becomes very important. One can “invent” revolution by storming the Bastille; one can “proclaim the republic” as Von Hindenberg did; one can found a new legal and political order as the central political act of a revolution (Arendt 1993: 138–141). In such moments, certain acts take on outsized importance and exert tremendous control over future actions, placing such situations at the opposite end of the spectrum of performative power from the State of the Union address. Two research questions emerge from this. First, what accounts for the variation in the importance of performative power for outcomes? One suspects that what is required here is an operationalization of Swidler’s (2001) concept of “unsettled times”—that is, social situations in which the standard (if varied) institutional guides for action disappear or are muted. Second, in the historical contexts in which performative power becomes extremely important, how does the performative dimension of power relate to the classic concerns of social theories of power, namely, the

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relationship between capacity and domination, and the different sources of social power? Are there certain sources of power for which the performative dimension is more important? Is there historical variation in the way in which performative power from one sphere relates to performative power in another? These questions bring me to the final substantive argument of this chapter.

6  Differentiating the Sources and Dimensions of Power in Framing Sociological Research Consider again the argument—common to Mann, Poggi, and Scott, and perhaps implied in field theory and in systems theory—that power is differentiated in terms of its sources. In this view, the capacity to make a difference in how other human beings make a difference (Poggi 2001: 10) is mapped in terms of the institutionally or organizationally defined social means to power—wealth, status, piety, loyalty, command, violence, etc. As I argued above, this theorization of power’s sources suggests certain programmatic research questions: How do the sources of power interact, and how do their relations change historically? Is there a tendency for certain sources of power to become more autonomous from each other over long periods of historical time? Are some societies—or certain practices within those societies—dominated by a given source of power? What is the relationship between different kinds of elites, when elites are defined by their advantages vis-à-vis a given source of power? I view these questions as essential. The argument of this chapter is that theorizing power only in terms of its sources may underestimate the complexities of power and thus block other essential research questions from view. In particular, the risk is that the different dimensions of power (relational, discursive, and performative) may be obfuscated by, or conflated with, power’s sources (economic, political, military, and ideological/religious). In this section, I try to provide a framework for clarifying the distinction. 6.1   Cross-Tabulating the Dimensions and the Sources of Power I propose that the analysis of power could be represented by a three-by-­ four table, crossing the dimensions with the sources of power, if we follow

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Mann’s “sources” typology of power (and substituting “cultural” for “ideological”). In Table 8.1, I have given a typified example for each cell. Such a table is necessarily schematic and does not address what surely would be some of the most vital information in any empirical study, namely, the relationships that obtain between different cells in the table. But what it does suggest is a way to ask more nuanced questions about power, by using both the “sources” and “dimensions” axes. So, for example, let us say that a researcher is pursuing a hypothesis about the existence of a “power elite.” In particular, she has evidence to show how, at a certain time in a certain society, the political elite, economic elite, and military elite are, comparatively speaking, more unified than in other societies. Using the dimensions question, she might ask how this commonality among the power elite came to be, and how it holds together. Is it, for example, primarily an issue of exchange relationships and patronage, or does a shared worldview that encodes certain people as inherently, naturally superior, really matter? Or, was there a massive crisis in which members of the previously differentiated military, economic, and political elite publically acted in a way that bound them together, performatively? These are the kinds of questions that could be asked, if the dimensions of power are not conflated with its sources. 6.2   An Example: Differentiating Discursive from Cultural Power The utility of separating power’s dimensions from its sources is perhaps most evident in the way it can resolve a fundamental ambiguity about “cultural” or “ideological” power that runs through the sociological literature. There is a tendency to fail to differentiate between culture as a separate source of power (and thus the “sphere” or location of the resource of prestige, honor, lifestyle, or holiness) and culture as a dimension of power. Following Foucault and several of the historians of political culture, I suggest we call the cultural dimension of power “discursive power” or the power of “discursive formations,” so as to differentiate it from the idea that one of the sources of power is “culture-producing” institutions, organizations, and fields such as art and religion. It is of course difficult to corral any use of the term “culture” in the social sciences, but I will try to justify this suggestion briefly. Generally speaking, when we refer to networks of cultural elites (like Boston Brahmins who design the organizational basis for symphonic

Dimensions of power

Sources of power

The construction of consumer expectations of the future through the media (Block 1990: 31); the reframing of worker’s demands and strikes as “communist” and “the very devil” (Isaac 2002) The impact of public disclosure of sweatshop practices on stock prices (Rock 2003)

Discursive

Performative

Tendency of the general rate of profit to fall due to the falling ratio of surplus value to invested total capital (Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, Chapter 13)

Relational

Economic

The “founding act” of a constitution that establishes a legal order (Arendt 1993: 138–141); the negotiation of a scandal by a president and his staff (Mast 2012)

The construction of “the public” or “the people” as an important political actor (Baker 1990: 172)

The network structure of different absolutist regimes in early modern Europe (Mann 1993: 177)

Political

Table 8.1  Examples of power, tabulated by source and dimension

The miracles enacted by a charismatic religious leader (Weber 1978: 1111–1157); the constructive innovation of form in a literary work, particularly during a time of crisis in the literary field (White 1975: 108–110)

The institutionalization of a distinction between “high” and “popular” culture (Dimaggio 1991: 376); the development of a “spiritual marketplace” (Roof 2001) The structuring of the religious field (in part) by the distinction between “sacred” and “profane” (Bourdieu 1991; Durkheim 1995)

Cultural

The effect of nuclear weapons tests on the balance of power between nations (Paul 2003: 26)

Reconstruction of the soldier from a subject to be found or discovered a subject that can be made or molded (Foucault 1995: 135–136).

The development of semi-autonomous military networks as a part of state-building (Hyslop 2009)

Military

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music, Dimaggio 1991) and ask empirical questions about the overlap of those elites with political and economic elites, we are asking about cultural power in sense of the sources of social power. But if we ask about the “cultural” dimension of economics and fiscal policy, or the framing techniques of social movements, we are asking about discursive power in the dimensional sense. The sources notion of cultural power is the basis for the sociology of culture, which has, since the sociological classics, taken art and religion as the “model systems” of culture (Guggenheim and Krause 2012). The dimensional analysis of discourse, on the other hand, refers not to an institutional sphere of human activity, but rather to a causal feature of the social world. Discursive power is potentially present, in empirically variable ways, in any sphere of activity. Both ideas—cultural sources of power and the discursive dimension of power—are present in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The literature on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of culture and power is voluminous and could be the subject of an article unto itself (and see especially Swartz 1997), but even a brief examination of some different Bourdieusian arguments will reveal what I mean. On the one hand, Bourdieu was at repeated pains to analytically distinguish—and then show the relations that obtain between—discursive and relational power in a given field, and highly critical of any tendency in the sociology of religion, art, education, the state, politics, and so on, to underestimate one or the other (e.g., Bourdieu 1991, 1995). Fields, in other words, have symbolic (i.e., discursive) and social (i.e., relational) aspects that structure the complex strategies of the actors therein. So, they can be analyzed internally for the interactions between symbolic oppositions and social groupings. This sort of analysis can be performed on fields that are, and are not, tagged as “cultural.” Thus Bourdieu’s account of field-specific capitals, or of the “laws” of field formation (Bourdieu 1993b: 72–74), constructs a research program on the relationship between discursive and relational power in different arenas of struggle, and the expression of this relationship in the habitus of actors involved in a given field. On the other hand, Bourdieu’s analysis of the relations between different fields, and in particular his critical engagement with both orthodox and Althusserian Marxism on the relationship of economy, state, and culture, constitutes an argument about the different sources of power. In particular, Bourdieu marshaled a great deal of evidence, and theoretical concepts such as habitus and structural homology, to explain how cultural power (produced in such fields as religion, art, and science, e.g.) impacted

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modern, differentiated societies (Bourdieu 1984). He thus developed a theory about the relationship of cultural to political and especially economic power.7

7  Conclusion: Theorizing the Dimensions of Power with, and Beyond, Lukes In his text Power: A Radical View, originally published in 1974, Steven Lukes proposed to analyze power’s “dimensions.” Since that time, debate on power has proliferated in many different intellectual directions, some of them deeply influenced by the work of Michel Foucault on power, others taking place in the arena of neo-Weberian considerations of the different sources of social power. Lukes, in his updated edition of Power: A Radical View (2005), directly engaged Foucault-inspired studies of power as the “ultra-radical” view of power, an engagement prompted, perhaps, by claims that Foucault had discovered or theorized a “fourth dimension” of power in his studies on discourse and the constitution of subjects. For Lukes, the analysis of the dimensions of power maintains the concept of power as simultaneously analytical and moral. The dimensions of power are articulated in relation to the concept of interest, a concept which is understood to be normatively loaded. Lukes’ three dimensions of power are three different ways in which the workings of the social world intersect with the capacity of reason-possessing human actors to recognize, articulate, represent, and accomplish their interests. In the first dimension, interests are clear, important issues are up for debate, and power is exercised by those who see through their interests over and against those who fail to do so. In the second dimension, certain interests are kept out of the public eye, off the bargaining table, or relatively unarticulated, though they nonetheless exist for some actors who are affected by decisions and non-decisions. In the third dimension, wants and desires are manipulated to the point that actors’ real or objective interests become shrouded from the actors themselves, replaced by the subjective interests produced by the various structures that surround them. This I take to be the uncontroversial understanding of Lukes’ schema. It has resulted in the well-known resultant controversy over when and how an observer can

7  For extended debate on how fields relate to each other, and the strengths and weaknesses of Bourdieu’s social theory in this regard, see Calhoun (1993); Eyal (2013).

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claim that a certain set of actors have “real interests” that differ from what those actors say or see their interests to be. Lukes deliberately connects his work on power to normative concerns in social science. And it is this connection—between his articulation of the dimensions of power and the concept of interests—that enables him to argue in considerable detail that, while Foucault’s work has vastly expanded our understanding of the mechanisms by which willing compliance is achieved, it has not succeeded in overthrowing or replacing the fundamental conceptual connection between evaluating a situation to be one of “domination” and the normative commitment to certain ideas of freedom, reason, and individual interest. In this chapter, I have picked up on a different theme in Lukes’ work, namely the connection between our ontologies of the social world and theorizing power. Rather than relating power to interests, and parsing that relation into three (or four) dimensions, I have returned to the fundamental analytic break that Lukes made with the pluralists, and sought an analytics of power grounded in different causal images of the social world. From this point of view, Lukes’ argument was an argument to broaden the analytical toolkit we possess for studying power in sociology.8 In the terms of this chapter, Lukes’ development of the Gramscian-Marxist view emphasized a central way in which discursive and relational power intersect in modern, capitalist societies. This was a format of power that, Lukes argued, could not be adequately analyzed within the behavioralist framework then dominant in American political science. By using the language of dimensions to highlight the link between power and causality, I am arguing, in this chapter, that we need to further expand the conceptual repertoire of sociology for understanding power. My efforts in this regard have been motivated pragmatically: I have taken three epistemological constructs of social causality that I take to be useful in understanding how the social world works, and turned them into a typology of power’s dimensions. Other inquiries into the dimensions of power are possible.9 But in this chapter, I have attempted in particular to show that we need, in sociology, to analytically separate performative 8  Hence his willingness to pursue counterfactuals as part of arguments about the third dimension of power (Lukes 2005: 44). 9  Thus, in contrast to the focus here, one might develop the causal schemas associated with psychoanalytic theory—in particular, perhaps, those that refer to the unconscious motivations of behavior and sexual symbolization—into a dimension of power. See Butler (1997b) and Steinmetz (2007: 55–65).

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power from discursive and relational power, and that doing so will allow us to expand the sorts of questions we can ask when we research power. In the end, to start making judgments about domination, all three of the dimensions of power here would have to be related to a concept of actors’ interests, or perhaps a more general normative account of the good society. My argument here has not been for a better critique of power, but rather for a better analysis of it. If sociologists were to mobilize the conceptual link between power and causality in empirical research, and thus study not only power’s sources but also its dimensions, I believe our analytic understanding of, and store of knowledge about, power would improve. This, in turn, would better inform normative debates about domination and how to alleviate it.

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Index1

A Actor-network theory, 10, 98n2, 102, 111, 123n17, 124, 124n18, 214n6 Agency, 28, 53, 56, 58–61, 64–66, 70, 74n18, 77, 98, 98n2, 103, 106, 115 Anthropology, 3, 24, 30, 34–39, 214, 234 Aristotle, 12, 13, 196–203 B Bhaskar, Roy, 27, 30, 52, 54–57, 56n2, 56n3, 60, 60n6, 61, 66–69, 67n11, 68n12, 71, 72, 72n15, 74n18, 75, 76n20, 77n21, 77n22, 79, 105, 233 Bourdieu, Pierre, 38n13, 62, 69n13, 108, 116, 117, 158, 178, 179, 179n23, 228, 233, 238, 245, 251, 252, 252n7

Butler, Judith, 2, 237, 238, 245, 246 C Causality, 5, 10–14, 27, 55, 58, 79, 97–127, 139, 141, 151, 151n9, 159, 161, 162, 166, 176, 180–182, 185, 196, 199, 203, 204, 211n4, 214, 216–218, 226, 231–239, 235n5, 253, 254 Counterfactual reasoning, 163 Covering laws, 25, 29, 33, 61, 162 Cultural sociology, 9, 11, 53, 121, 177, 199, 236 Culture, 6, 7, 9, 12, 21, 22n2, 42, 53, 59, 60, 64, 65, 70, 73, 77, 80–82, 84, 98n1, 100, 111–114, 112n12, 119, 121, 122, 125, 145, 149, 151, 157, 158, 169–173, 177–185, 205, 210, 213–214, 228, 236, 241, 249, 251

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Ariail Reed, Sociology as a Human Science, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18357-7

261

262 

INDEX

D Dilthey, Wilhelm, 39, 52, 75, 81, 197, 199, 216, 217, 217n8 E Ethnography, 4, 22, 30, 32–39, 33n11, 73 Evidence, 6, 7, 14, 28n6, 31, 34, 55, 59, 60, 63, 65n9, 78, 78n23, 79, 123, 144, 147, 149, 152, 175, 176, 204, 218, 249, 251 Experience, 20, 26, 56, 68–70, 73–76, 78, 78n23, 80, 81, 87, 110, 115, 136, 137, 149, 171, 217n8, 238 Experiment, 42, 56–58, 65–70, 66n10, 67n11, 73–76, 86, 108, 136, 152 F Field theory, 214n6, 248 Foucault, Michel, 39, 78, 78n23, 110, 115, 121, 229, 230, 231n2, 249, 252, 253 French Revolution, 5, 6, 12, 62, 105, 120–122, 196, 204–215, 217, 240–244 G Geertz, Clifford, 22, 23, 34–36, 34n12, 39, 41n16, 77, 78, 80, 121, 149, 157, 169, 180, 203, 214

H Hermeneutics, 12, 13, 15, 39, 43, 52, 53, 64, 71, 75, 76, 80–81, 87, 149, 195–200, 202, 203, 213, 214, 214n6, 216–218, 234 Historical sociology, 12, 14, 61, 62, 98, 99, 105, 109, 110, 122, 200, 211n4, 228 Human sciences, 1–15, 22n2, 32, 72, 151n9, 158, 173n20, 195, 198, 199, 202, 203, 217, 218 I Ideology, 36, 53, 63, 80, 84, 120, 205, 210, 228, 231n2, 242, 244 L Latour, Bruno, 22n2, 102, 111, 117, 123n17, 124, 124n18, 199, 200 M Marx, Karl, 14, 67n11, 68, 70, 114, 115, 197, 213, 231, 232 Mechanisms, 10–12, 14, 23n3, 42, 52–59, 61–64, 66, 69, 72, 73, 77, 78, 84, 86, 98, 100, 102n6, 103–108, 119, 122, 125, 126, 133–137, 135n1, 135n2, 138n4, 139–154, 141n6, 144n7, 151n9, 154n10, 157–185, 199–203, 224, 233–236, 240, 253 Merton, Robert K., 5, 142, 168, 179

 INDEX 

Metaphor, 11, 14, 35, 98, 105, 108, 112n12, 126, 144, 144n7, 146, 149, 154n10, 172, 182, 183, 185, 228, 236, 238 N Naturalism, 44, 52, 53, 60, 63, 72n15, 87 O Observation, 20, 24–27, 30, 55, 66n10, 73, 125, 137, 143, 144, 149, 153, 173, 235 Ontology, 53, 55, 57, 61, 62, 69, 70, 72, 74, 76–80, 82n24, 84, 97–100, 102, 107, 110, 118, 119, 137, 147, 148, 150, 151n9, 152, 195, 215, 226, 238, 239, 253 P Peirce, Charles Saunders, 2, 140n5, 172, 173n20 Performance, 168, 169, 172, 236, 237, 240, 244–247 Postmodern, 1, 9, 24, 30, 34–39, 54, 86, 231, 231n2 Power, 9, 13, 13n2, 14, 29, 31, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 40n14, 62, 63, 65, 69, 77n21, 79, 85, 98n3, 106–108, 111, 115, 123, 145, 149, 158, 172, 177, 179, 196, 200, 203, 209, 218, 223–254

263

R Rationality, 2, 20, 25, 28, 42, 52, 54–56, 59, 65, 68, 69, 73, 74, 74n16, 76, 79, 86, 121, 206, 218, 234, 236 Realism, 9, 10, 12, 14, 25n4, 27, 38, 38n13, 43, 51–87, 98n3, 104n7, 134, 136, 137, 146–148, 150, 154, 233 Reasons as causes, 71, 74n18, 75, 76n20 Representation, 37, 62, 66n10, 105, 111–113, 122, 126, 159, 166, 167, 177, 179, 213n5, 235n5, 241 Ritual, 58, 123n17 S Science, natural, 2, 8, 9, 12, 20, 22, 22n2, 23, 25n4, 27, 30, 42, 44, 52, 54, 56, 57, 64, 66, 67, 71n14, 73, 75, 86, 136, 181, 196, 202 Semiotics, 11, 107, 158, 159, 161, 166, 169, 170, 172, 173n20, 174–177, 179, 180n25, 181, 182, 202 Sewell, Jr., William, 52, 57, 84, 84n26, 85, 85n27, 85n28, 102, 110, 113, 179, 181, 205, 210, 210n3, 212, 213, 213n5, 215, 241–244 Skocpol, Theda, 52, 62n7, 80, 205, 210, 211, 211n4, 228, 241, 244 Subjectivity, 22, 28, 35, 40n14, 43, 52, 53, 57, 64, 73, 76, 81, 84, 87, 158, 195, 218

264 

INDEX

T Theory, 1, 2, 4–9, 11, 13, 14, 19–24, 22n1, 23n3, 27–44, 38n13, 40n14, 41n16, 51–58, 60–71, 65n9, 69n13, 74n17, 75–80, 83–87, 83n25, 97, 98n1, 99n5, 102, 104n7, 107, 110–115, 125, 126, 133, 134, 135n2, 138, 141, 144, 146, 147, 149, 158, 161, 162, 166, 167, 169, 170, 173n20, 174, 178–182, 185, 196–200, 204, 208n2, 213n5, 214n6, 215, 217, 227–232,

231n2, 234, 236, 238, 243n6, 245, 247, 248, 252, 252n7, 253n9 U Unconscious, 200, 218, 253n9 W Weber, Max, 22n1, 52, 74, 74n16, 85, 99n5, 114, 115, 158, 196, 197, 218, 226–228, 230, 232