Social Theory Now
 022647514X, 9780226475141

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: Social Theory Now
On the Very Idea of Cultural Sociology
Varieties of Microsociology
Globalizing Gender
World Capitalism, World Hegemony, World Empires
Postcolonial Thought as Social Theory
On the Frontiers of Rational Choice
Systems in Social Theory
The Patterns in Between: “Field” as a Conceptual Variable
Poststructuralism Today
Networks and Network Theory: Possible Directions for Unification
ActorNetwork Theory
The Sociology of Conventions and Testing
Norms and Mental Imagery
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Social Theory Now

Social Theory Now edited by Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, and Isaac Ariail Reed

the university of chicago press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47514-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47528-8 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47531-8 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226475318.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Benzecry, Claudio E., editor. | Krause, Monika, 1978– editor. | Reed, Isaac (Isaac Ariail), editor. Title: Social theory now / edited by Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, and Isaac Ariail Reed. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016051236 | ISBN 9780226475141 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226475288 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226475318 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Social sciences—Philosophy. Classification: LCC H61 .S77524 2017 | DDC 300.1—dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2016051236 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction: Social Theory Now 1 Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, and Isaac Ariail Reed 1

On the Very Idea of Cultural Sociology Isaac Ariail Reed

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Varieties of Microsociology 42 Claudio E. Benzecry and Daniel Winchester

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Globalizing Gender Dorit Geva

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World Capitalism, World Hegemony, World Empires Ho-Fung Hung

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Postcolonial Thought as Social Theory Julian Go

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On the Frontiers of Rational Choice Ivan Ermakoff

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Systems in Social Theory Dirk Baecker

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The Patterns in Between: “Field” as a Conceptual Variable Monika Krause

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Poststructuralism Today Claire Laurier Decoteau

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10 Networks and Network Theory: Possible Directions for Unification 278 Emily Erikson 11

Actor-Network Theory Javier Lezaun

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The Sociology of Conventions and Testing 337 Jörg Potthast

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Norms and Mental Imagery 361 Neil Gross and Zachary Hyde List of Contributors  393 Index

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Introduction: Social Theory Now

In 1987, Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner published Social Theory Today, an edited collection of original essays by scholars from different theoretical traditions. The book assembled a group of authors who were prominent then and whose reputation has only grown since—Immanuel Wallerstein, Axel Honneth, Ralph Miliband, Jeffrey Alexander, and Hans Joas among them. However, we would argue that it was not just the caliber of its contributors that have made the book stand out among “theory books.” Social Theory Today set itself a quite distinctive and ambitious task and was very different from a number of well-established publishing formats in this area. Because it assembled original essays by scholars engaged in research in different theoretical traditions, Social Theory Today was not a textbook, and it was not a handbook. Theory textbooks provide a coherent and often creative and original overview of theorizing in a range of traditions, but almost by definition, the author of a textbook can’t be actively engaged in her or his own research within all of these traditions. A handbook, on the other hand, assembles authors who are very well versed in a specific approach but often encourages accessible summaries rather than original papers and rarely provides much of a sense of an overarching narrative. Social Theory Today also distinguished itself from another kind of influential volumes at the time. Jeffrey Alexander et al. (1987) and Karin Knorr-Cetina and Aaron Cicourel (1981), for example, assembled an equally impressive range of authors at around the same time, but they approached their volumes differently. They set authors to work on a specific problem, the problem of the micro-macro link, which was then the frontier of theory development.

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Giddens and Turner were in a way less focused but more ambitious. Rather than address a particular issue, they took on theory itself, and this is arguably one of the reasons why their book is perhaps of more interest today than these other volumes, as debates and problems have shifted. Social Theory Today was published thirty years ago, and no text has come to the fore to replace it. We believe we need a text like Social Theory Today because while the intellectual and institutional landscape of social theory has changed, theory is still being taught, and textbooks and handbooks are still being produced. Social theory and sociological theory remain a nexus of teaching, research, and debate—an intellectual reference point important to many working academics. In this context, Social Theory Now seeks to translate the ambition of the kind of dialogue staged in Social Theory Today for the present moment. We can’t compare ourselves in stature to Giddens and Turner, of course, but like those editors, we, too, asked authors from different theoretical traditions to write a chapter that would introduce the conceptual landscape that provides the backdrop for their own research and make an argument for where work in their tradition should go next conceptually. Social Theory Now presents a new list of theoretical traditions, which we think are relevant to the conversations in social theory in the current era. Social Theory Now hopes to provide an examination of what is going on in the classical theoretical traditions, with the understanding that the post–World War II era is now, itself, “classic.” It also includes a chapter on feminism, which was odd to be missing already in 1987, as well as new areas of exploration for social theory, such as postcolonial theory, actor-network theory, and the sociology of conventions. The fragmented nature of social theory raises questions as to what, if anything, holds social theory together today, which means we felt we had to go beyond the mere updating of chapter titles. In this context, we argue that social theory is not held together by any agreement on content or a shared institutional context but that it shows some coherence around some secondorder assumptions on what it might be worth disagreeing about. Giddens and Turner were in their introduction heavily focused on epistemology and on whether sociology can or should be a science. We have identified a broader set of themes. We try out the proposition that social theory is a dialogue about four central questions and two concerns: social theorists ask how social order is possible, and they debate the role of materiality in social life, the role of meaning, and the role of practice. Cutting across these questions are two sets of concerns: theorists tend to take a position on epistemics (how knowledge of the social world is possible) and history (how major his-

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torical shifts in the structure of social life occur and develop, and affect our knowledge of the world). These questions and themes guided our selection of traditions of thought for inclusion in this volume; we were looking for traditions of thought that we felt offered very distinctive answers to these questions. While in our view it is indeed the case that social theory is a dialogue about these questions and themes across different institutional and geographical locations, we are also aware and indeed hope that there is something performative to our claim; we hope that Social Theory Now to some limited extent contributes to bringing into being such a dialogue, although we also realize it will not be a dialogue of full mutual understanding and transparency, resembling more the “trading zone” for heterogeneous objects observed by Peter Galison (1997) for the case of physics. We were not very prescriptive when we approached authors, but we did offer an account of our themes as a point of orientation for our authors when arranging for their chapters to be written, and we now offer a discussion of these themes as a specific frame for reading the contributions that follow. We are aware that there might be disagreement with the themes we have selected as central to social theory today. There is certainly disagreement, also among the editors of the volume, about the relative weight and importance of these themes, and we will return to some of these debates later on. But for all the discussions we have had among ourselves and with others and that we might have in the future about the list of themes and about the list of chapters, we would remind readers also of some of the dangers that lie in the other direction, the direction of not trying to identify shared questions, and the direction of not producing a conversation among distinctive traditions, however selected and justified. We would argue that without shared questions and dialogue in an area called social theory, we would see more theory-less research, more fragmentation into topical areas of expertise, and more of the kind of theory that celebrates niche expertise in famous authors. We would also see (even) more papers that attach data to “a theory” without an awareness of the existence of other theories and perspectives and (even) more claims to novelty that appear as novelty only within traditions, and only because traditions are cultivated in a parochial way. In what follows, we will first briefly discuss some the institutional and epistemic context of social theory today, and we will discuss the relationship between “social theory,” on the one hand, and “sociological theory,” on the other hand. We will then discuss the questions and themes we have identified. We discuss the volume’s relationship to teaching and provide a brief

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summary of the individual chapters. Each of the chapters both introduces and presents a tradition and develops an argument for an agenda for further theoretical development within this tradition.

changing contexts and premises It is beyond the scope of this introduction to attempt to provide a full map of the field of social theory. However, it is helpful to note two specific changes in the field that make the activity of theorizing today different than it was when Giddens and Turner published their volume. First, new institutional locations from which to “theorize sociologically” have emerged, leading to increased intellectual complexity—and fragmentation as well. Second, social theory has been transformed because of what we would like to call the recognition of the existence of a decentered standpoint, which has changed what counts as knowledge about the social world. Regarding the first point, impulses from the humanities (postcolonial and feminist theories are of key importance here) and science and technology studies inflect theory development in sociology while at the same time, sociologists occupy jobs in business, communications, and medical schools. Compared to a world in which the social sciences were more easily divided into their nineteenth-century-derived disciplines of economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology (a world that in many ways lived on into the 1980s), it should be clear that the space from which to theorize today is to a large extent more conflicted, ambiguous, and thus productive of massive ambivalence about what the project of social theory itself is. With this fragmentation, there is no lack of creativity; new connections and possibilities are clearly on the horizon for theoretical work in sociology. On the other hand, each of these contexts and settings adds their own inflections, constraints, and incentives. Simultaneously, a generational shift (as the baby boomers retire and are replaced by younger cohorts) also seems to have spurred changes in both theoretical work and the more informal sentiments and sensibilities that accompany it. Regarding the second point, the epistemic contours of debate that characterized the Giddens/Turner era—an opposition between scientism, on the one hand, and ideas-focused approaches, on the other hand—have given way to an understanding of sociology as a nuanced production of knowledge both by and about humans, and thus subject to a variety of social, material, and intellectual forces, rhetorics, and ways of combining evidence and argu-

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ment. Broadly speaking, a combined effect of the postpositivist program (Alexander 1987), a range of approaches in the sociology of scientific knowledge and in science and technology studies (Bloor 1991 [1976]; Haraway 1988; Latour 1988) and the reflexive (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Calhoun 1995; Smith 1987) moment of sociology has been to make a consideration of the conventions of theorizing in various overlapping communities of inquiry central to the task of producing sociology. There is always the temptation to avoid confronting the issues raised by these analyses. One answer has been to view the challenge of understanding as a purely technical one, simply retreating into naïve empiricism, aiming to reconstruct knowledge as a generalization-generating enterprise, although in some cases moving away from variable-centered approaches into mechanisms and processes. This strategy works to reclaim a “tarnished” standpoint from which to reconstruct valid sociological knowledge, dismissing some of the criticisms as not belonging to sociology. A second answer has denounced the struggle for understanding as a struggle for power and by announcing the impossibility of knowledge, making it hard for sociologists to build bridges across subdisciplinary and transdisciplinary claims. However, the way forward appears, instead, to be one that dispenses with the nostalgia for a lost central standpoint (often simply reproduced, in reverse, by loudly announcing its absolute impossibility). The gains in knowledge we present here (and they are gains—an enhancement or increase over what came before) are not offered as a transcendent philosophical horizon but rather, the reconstruction of the theories presented in the chapters as constitutively limited by both the social context of their intellectual production and the empirical scope of their application. Second, and in consequence, each school of thought or tradition included herein came to the table with the recognition of being one among many other possibilities for thinking about the social character of our reality. It is that reflexivity that lends itself to a key part of this book: an invitation extended by the editors to the authors to explore what are the issues each theory aims to tackle, how they do it, what are the taken-for-granted ideas about social reality behind each and every one of them; to summarize, how is it that issues of methods, questions, and ontologies are “packaged” together. Thus, we would propose herein less a normative manifesto for where social theory should now be, making tabula rasa of the past, or prioritizing one definitive answer about the nature of the social over others, and more a way of reclaiming, reconfiguring, recomposing the legacy of what scholars who state they do social theory do. That is why we have chosen to frame this book

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not as a series of “great names” chapters—though this is of course a collection of outstanding scholars—but rather as a conversation among creative users and researchers.

social theory and sociological theory As we know, thanks to Wolf Lepenies (1988), sociology is positioned within a disciplinary space between the so-called “two cultures” of the arts and the sciences. To establish its relative autonomy and to justify its scholarly status, sociology has been subjected to a double ordeal: it must pass the test of epistemological validity dictated by the empirical sciences while also undergoing the trial of aesthetic appeal typical of the arts and humanities. It has wavered between trying to be a natural science following the positivist model and trying to be a hermeneutic practice following the literary model. It is this interstitial character of sociology, gabled between the humanities and the sciences, that has caused “friction” to exist, and that accounts for some of the innovative defamiliarizing and totalizing work we tend to call theoretical. The editors of the book and most of its authors are sociologists by training, and this of course does shape the conception of the volume. However, we ourselves do not wish to draw a boundary between sociological theory and social theory. A brief empirical look at how this boundary is drawn would quickly reveal that it is primarily drawn, and used, by sociologists, and in particular by sociologists who want to separate what is relevant to their research concerns from other scholarly work that they should not feel obliged to read. It is also a division that is emphasized more in some countries than in others, and particularly strongly in the United States where sociology is very strongly professionalized. This professionalization has had many salutary effects, especially in the form of a dense engagement among scholars in the same field; it has also meant, perhaps unfortunately, that with very few exceptions recruitment to positions within sociology departments is largely from among graduates in a set number of other sociology departments. American sociology might also be set apart by its stronger leanings toward and defensiveness against scientism, which impacts and distorts the pursuit of theory in the US academy in particular ways. As Mayer Zald (1995) signaled some twenty years ago, US sociologists in the post–World War II era and beyond collectively embarked on the project of “becoming a science.” Zald identified many of the problems and tensions this opened up, especially

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with respect to sociology’s relationship to the humanities. For years, theory was also tied to a badge of honor and prestige, which excluded particular traditions (and sometimes particular social groups; Social Theory Today, for instance, did not have any female author in it). Nonetheless, even in the United States, sociological theory is the place where impulses from the most ambitious work in other disciplines and work from the broader intellectual space of the human sciences can enter the disciplined, empirically oriented, methods-conscious social sciences. Bourdieu is now well-known and well-received in US sociology, yet his own work was conducted in direct dialogue, albeit critical, with Kant and Sartre. Postcolonial theory is clearly of profound relevance to sociology, but it has its origins in history and in literary criticism and has been brought into sociology by tremendous bridgework of a primarily conceptual or theoretical nature. The analysis of gender in sociology owes much to analyses by historians and scholars in literature and cultural studies. Thus, rather than draw a boundary by a label or by an assumed disciplinary consensus, we start with a set of questions and concerns. We both posit and perform social theory as the discussion of these concerns. We hope that in redescribing the work of social theory in this way, we are also able to generate an agenda for where we see social theory going. With reference to the important work done analyzing the different meanings of theory (cf. Abend 2008), our aim is not to settle on one definition but rather to create some clarity as to what version of theory is being presented, advanced, and discussed by different schools. What we have in mind is that these questions and themes establish the contours of a sociological “trading zone.” According to Peter Galison’s (1997, 783) memorable analysis, in an intellectual trading zone, two groups can agree on rules of exchange even if they ascribe utterly different significance to the objects being exchanged; they may even disagree on the meaning of the exchange process itself. Nonetheless, the trading partners can hammer out a local coordination, despite vast global differences. In an even more sophisticated way, cultures in interaction frequently establish contact languages, systems of discourse that can vary from the most function-specific jargons, through semi specific pidgins, to full-fledged creoles rich enough to support activities as complex as poetry and metalinguistic reflection.

Our hope is that these questions help establish a creole that can support the activity of theorizing.

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the questions and concerns of social theory Questions “how is social order possible?” This question brings several different concerns together. Harold Garfinkel posed the problem in the theoretically most rigorous way: how does order arise beyond the “here and now”? Including and going beyond the microsociological agenda, the question of order asks about patterns and regularities in social life. And while this question has often been asked with a concern for social order as a necessary good, it can also be asked critically: How and in what ways is the world stratified into an order that is an established hierarchy? If domination plays a role in maintaining order, what forms of it tend to matter most? How does transformation (or its opposite, reproduction), happen? Disorder, can of course, have orders of its own. Asking about order is also asking about patterns in apparent disorder—and patterns underlying apparent radical change. We can also ask: What is the “structure of the conjuncture”? Is there a pattern to how revolutions proceed when overturning the social order?

“what is the role of materiality in the world?” The relationship of social theory to the question of materiality or materialism is long-standing and finds one of its origin points in the classic texts of Karl Marx. This influence is represented today by research on the new international division of labor, globalization, and debates about space, ownership, and dispossession in social theory. Simultaneously, however, debates about the body (in feminism and elsewhere) and about materiality and technology (activated by actor-network theory) radically reconceptualize the role of the material in human life. Throughout all of these debates and lines of research, we find a deep friction between four locations for thought—the fundamental needs of human beings, defined biologically and biosocially; the subjection of many arenas of social life to economic pressures, in particular given the way in which the distribution of goods that meet needs are bound up with systems of capital; the rapid escalation of technological extensions of human processes; and finally, the way in which human bodies, in particular, continue to exceed any given schematic understanding in how they become part of action and are experienced by those who use and abuse them.

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“what is the role of meaning in the world?” The question of meaning has echoed throughout the history of social theory, with attention to both meaning-making in situated interactions and broader patterns of cultural representations. Again, a key origin point is found in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European thought—in Marx’s responses to Hegel, on the one hand, and Max Weber’s responses to Marx and Marxism, on the other hand. However, in the contemporary era, consideration of meaning in social life includes the rich arena of cultural sociology (whose contemporary, American version dates almost exactly to the publication of Social Theory Today), Latour’s semiotic materialism, and Luhmann’s systems theory, focused as it is on communication. The study of meaning is in a particularly fraught place at the moment. On the one hand, the contemporary academy has been, over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, deeply infused by the study of signs. Rare is the arena in the human sciences that has not been touched by semiotics in some form or another, and within sociology, many key subfields simply have—as a de facto feature—the study of the “cultural” or “meaningful” dimension of their particular object (be it sex and gender, the corporation, or voting, for example). At the same time, a deep tension exists between the broad success of the “cultural turn” and its humanist presuppositions, as debates about word counts, big data, and network analysis also inform the study of culture. It will be for social theory to find a language in which to have, and perhaps successfully mediate, these wildly intellectually dispersed arguments.

“what is the role of practice in the world?” Few theorists have been more influential in sociology, over the last twentyfive years, than Pierre Bourdieu. While reflecting this, this collection also broadens the question of “practice,” to take up earlier concerns with “agency” and newer concerns about the material aspects of practice. We include questions such as: How is it that people find patterns of innovation while reproducing old practices? How is it that creativity can flourish when confronted with new situations? What role does the body play in cementing our sense of self and our place in the world we experience? How is it that people learn about the world by “doing” in it? How is practice distributed across people and technology? We also note that an important aspect of the “practice turn” in social theory, developed in particular by the science studies tradition, is the insistence that social researchers examine knowledge in its various spaces of produc-

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tion and use. From Clifford Geertz’s Islam Observed to Bruno Latour and Karin Knorr-Cetina’s laboratory studies, the arguments in this arena insist on a shift to the concrete when considering even the most abstract or philosophical issues. It is an open question where this leaves epistemology, one that is addressed in several chapters herein, and makes up part of our first “thematic” concern for social theory.

Underlying Concerns “how do we know what we know?” In 1987, Giddens and Turner posed the question “what is the nature of social science?” and delineated the volume’s contributions in terms of their relationship to the logical empiricist philosophy associated with the natural sciences, on the one hand, and the interpretivist counterposition, on the other. Epistemological questions have developed a great deal since then, with new understandings of interpretivism, realism analytical sociology, and standpoint theory now central to debates about knowledge. Moreover, qualitative and historical-comparative scholarships have both recently entered into a period of debate about conceptualization, its relationship to evidence, the link between level of analysis, and the justification of claims. Theoretical programs have, too, become more self-reflexive about the limits of their claims and as such, open to competing perspectives. The abandonment of our a priori ontological underpinning of what the world is made out of (networks, interactions, structures, actions, etc.) has led us into something like epistemological agnosticism and in consequence, into the theoretical pluralism we espouse in this volume—which is perhaps also reflected in the rejuvenation of interest in pragmatist philosophy in American sociology. As a consequence, the sociology of knowledge also looks entirely different. These shifts are reflected in most of the essays herein.

“what historical changes are theoretically significant for understanding the contemporary world?” Too often, the more “ambitiously abstract”—that is, the more formal, sociological theorizing becomes—the more it tends to forget its historical presuppositions. Thus a constant countertendency in Social Theory Now is a historically driven questioning not only of the intellectual origins of certain key concepts or sets of terms but also of the basic shifts in social life that are important to grasp, describe, and explain, and how to characterize them (e.g., “multiple modernities,” “globalization,” “the postcolonial era”). We have picked as chapters genres of theoretical work that propose answers to these

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questions in a way that includes internal differences and dialogue (and research programs if appropriate).

teaching theory Teaching is not the only concern we have in putting this volume together, but it is one important concern. The volume has certainly been shaped by the editors’ experience in teaching sociological theory.1 As part of preparing this book, we solicited contemporary theory syllabi from colleagues in our cohort. The resulting collection was dizzying and confusing. Some scholars still tried to construct a chronological order of theoretical research problems; some taught theory as a list of greatest hits, centering on charismatic authors or stars; others tended toward an eclectic selection of different current concerns. We asked ourselves: Why exactly do we read previous theoretical work that is not on our research topic? Why do we ask students to read it? In a recent contribution, Richard Swedberg (2015) has suggested we pick a master and learn from how he or she does theory or theoretical research. We think this is an important aspect of the answer but we think it is very important to complement “picking one master” by learning through observing differences among traditions. The stakes of social theory are brought into being by the dialogue between competing approaches, and certain techniques of argument become crystal clear when careful reading of a single master or tradition is placed into a space of dialogue and, indeed, fierce critique. A certain investment into these stakes—rather than any specific kind of knowledge—marks the initiation of students into social scientific inquiry, usually well before students are able to conduct original research. We all have learnt from experience that even very smart and knowledgeable students do not naturally care about the difference between a Marxian and a Durkheimian approach to homelessness, for example, but once they do, they can begin to think about how different kinds of evidence would relate to different propositions, how they relate to change, how these and other theoretical approaches can generate new perspectives on other kinds of phenomena. If the stakes of social theory are central to the initiation of outsiders, they are also important to the frontier of innovation in social theory: new contributions and innovations are contributions in relationship to these stakes, and we were encouraged, upon receiving initial drafts of the chapters to be found herein, at the way in which they turned towards the future as well as the past. Each of the chapters in this volume stands on the shoulder of

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giants; precisely because this is not a handbook or a textbook we do not think that these texts can in any way replace older texts, which are foundational to certain traditions of theorizing. Who reads Lezaun must also read Latour, who reads Go, should also read Bhabha, who reads Geva should also read Dorothy Smith, and so on and so forth. We have held our authors’ feet to the fire in terms of providing citations for gestures within their writing to ‘obvious’ aspects of sociological thought. This has resulted in bibliographies and footnotes that we feel will be especially useful for students. Learning about theory is reading original texts; but the contributions in this volume are also original texts. All our contributors are engaged in research which is in dialogue with the theoretical work they write about; all authors present a view on where work in the tradition is currently at and some proposals for what they think will and should happen next. We do not think these texts can replace the reading of the classics. We do imagine, however, that a pairing of a classic text and a chapter from this book might work well as a teaching tool: We hope in such a pairing, the chapters of this book can deepen the understanding of the original, open up interpretative debates, provide an orientation towards current research, and suggest creative pathways forward for theory in the future. We recognize that this is in some ways a more conservative approach to teaching theory than a radical focus on practicing theory through research (Swedberg 2015), or focusing on a specific problem, such as historicity, on structure/agency, or materiality. However, it is one that is true to the heritage of social scientific inquiry and has value in preserving what is good about disciplinary inquiry. We also think that learning theory as a multiplicity-in-dialogue has interesting consequences for learning to see theory as intimately involved in the research course. It allows students to refine, punctuate, and clarify through a process of slow reconstruction what kind of phenomena they encounter in their research process. Students should go armed to the field with multiple possibilities for adjudicating what they have encountered, rather than get married early on to one theoretical approach or other. We see this as a dialectical activity in which certain occurrences in the field point us to their potential conceptualization or classification as a particular kind of phenomena, even if not in the realm of our “favorite theory,” still within alternative options other traditions have mobilized.

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the chapters Building on our claim that theory is a conversation between approaches that in some way or another provide answers to the central questions and themes above, we sought to identify traditions that provided a very distinctive answer to the questions and themes we discussed above. “Distinctiveness” offers a criterion that is not based entirely on a judgment of formal quality or substantive truth value. In discussing different candidates, we found ourselves invoking the distinction between “theory” and “topic”; while “topics” play a central role in organizing scholarly conversations and research, theories can be applied to any topic. Theorizing in that sense is the performance of reading research in a way that cuts across topics with a view to implications for questions of order, practice, meaning, and materiality. Of course, the resulting list of chapters is only one among many possible ones, and any other set of editors would have produced a different list even using the criteria we tried to use consistently. Even this set of editors could have gone different ways on different chapters. Some of us, for example, felt strongly that ethnomethodology should have been its own chapter based on the criterion of distinctiveness. We recognize that different variants of Marxism are important today, that field theory is only one part of the Bourdieusian heritage, and that critical race theory brings questions and concerns that are not subsumed entirely by postcolonial theory. We would look forward to a debate on what we should or could have chosen and what could be included ten years from now. We expect a consistency of dissent with our list but would predict a dissent inconsistent with regard to what should have been left out and what should have been included. This is the fate of any text that tries, and inevitably fails, to comprehend some sort of unity in the fragmented world of social theory now. The goal is, however, to fail in an interesting and useful way. Rather than approach “founding figures” who, if they had agreed to contribute at all, would have had to summarize themselves or try very hard not to, we chose authors who are all in some way or another “second generation,” if not third, fourth, or even fifth. Given the long history of social theory, second-generation authors are of course always also at the same time seventh, eighth generation, and so on. Some of our authors are very well known; others are comparatively more junior. All of our authors are actively engaged in empirical research that has a close relationship to the theoretical approaches under discussion. We approached authors with the task to discuss a certain approach—thus

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the responsibility for the selection and list of topics lies entirely with the editors. Imagining these texts as the one text we would assign next to a classical reading in an intellectually serious and ambitious theory course, we asked authors to both introduce a certain approach and make an argument as to where they see the next steps for theory development in their traditions. Even though chapters vary in the relative weight, which they give to breadth and subtlety of exposition on the one hand and theoretical agenda setting on the other hand, each chapter does a bit of both, as we highlight in the following summaries. Isaac Ariail Reed begins from the cacophony of voices in contemporary sociology that argue over the definition of, methods to study, and theoretical models of “culture.” What, amid all of this, can we say it means to study culture or have a cultural sociology? Reed considers what, in theoretical discourse in sociology, is contrasted with culture. Culture, he proposes, is taken as opposed to economy, on the one hand, and to persons or actors, on the other hand. This leads to a series of considerations of why sociologists consider these contrasts meaningful, and what they are willing to attribute to culture in their explanations. Claudio E. Benzecry and Dan Winchester uncover the variegated landscape of microsociology. Central to all microtheoretical programs is a claim that the social order is morally sustained, organized, and accomplished at the microsocial level. Yet there are also important differences in how this work of ordering is conceptualized. This chapter explores how each perspective (symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and dramaturgy) reveals, in and through the close analysis of everyday scenes, the constitution of micro-ontologies. The chapter then shows how those programs have been recombined in a number of more contemporary approaches (e.g., institutional ethnography, interaction ritual chains, laboratory studies) that increasingly include the theorization of its integration with meso- or macroorders as a key part of their agenda. Dorit Geva asks, first, about the relationship between gender, sexuality, and modernity in sociology and, second, about how a more global sociology would itself change how we think about this relationship. This leads to several careful reconstructions and critiques of important interventions in feminist theory. Geva argues that a historicization of “Northern feminist sociological theory” is required to understand the genealogy of its conceptualization of body, sexuality, and the social order. A more global account of modernity, she argues, will lead to a rebuilding of sociological theories of “doing gender” and sociological accounts of gender and the self. Ho-Fung Hung extends, de- and recenters world-systems theory in order

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to explain the current crisis in the world hegemonic order. The chapter makes the case for how in order to explain the new hegemonic order the tools developed to understand the first two hegemonic transitions are not enough. Focusing instead on the consequences of decolonization, the transformation of the world money system, and the dynamic of economies that are labor instead of capital intensive, Hung shows how the economic and military power of the United States is being paradoxically both upheld and challenged by new contenders. Julian Go advances postcolonial social theory as a program. Taking as its starting point the criticism of forms of knowledge affiliated with colonial domination, this chapter shows first the intimate relationship between our received sociological knowledge, modernity, and patterns of empire and then proceeds to present postcolonial social theory as a particular kind of worldview to interpret the world. Moving beyond the critique of social science as embedded in hierarchical global relationships, Go proposes to reconstruct theory about the social world by focusing on two strategies he calls postcolonial relationalism and the subaltern standpoint. Ivan Ermakoff ’s essay is a consideration of rational choice theory that is simultaneously orthodox and heterodox in its ambitions. Beginning with a discussion of both the original rational choice program and the various, modified versions of the program that emerged in the wake of initial criticisms, Ermakoff then moves toward a view of rational choice theory as grounded in an understanding of action as optimizing. He then turns to three areas of interest for social theory that rational choice would seem to be ill-equipped to model and explain: (1) instances wherein agents endorse or adopt self-limiting norms, (2) disruption and crisis, and (3) the process of belief formation (including self-deception). By forcing rational choice to confront these classic problems of social theory, he maps the frontier of research in the field from a distinctively theoretical perspective. Dirk Baecker discusses sociological systems theory as an attempt to take seriously the complexity of social systems, such as interactions, organizations, or functional subsystems like art or science. Social systems are complex because their elements are heterogeneous, multiple, and only selectively interconnected; their relationship to the observer is itself social. He discusses criticism as a specific version of the observation of social systems, which can itself be observed. Monika Krause examines field theoretical research in the context of classic work on the differentiation of spheres, such as art, science, or religion. She reports that scholars are now examining how fields relate to other fields and suggests that research can also ask how field patterns relate to patterns,

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which have historically been emphasized by other theoretical traditions, such as interactions, organizations, or broader cultural dynamics. Claire Decoteau interrogates what from poststructuralism has and can be imported into sociology. She posits that the immanence of poststructuralism helps those attempting to break free from some core disciplinary antinomies, that between objectivity and subjectivity, between idealism and materialism, but more importantly, a new way to think relations of power and agency. Both power and agency are presented as immanent, produced yet productive and decentered. As a consequence, she suggests how some of its central tenets can be a resource for sociologists theorizing about the production of subjects and knowledge. Emily Erikson critiques the tendency in the field of sociology to see work in social networks as unmotivated by grand theoretical visions, insisting that despite professed preferences for Mertonian middle-range theory, overarching theoretical perspectives have been essential to the development of the most exciting empirical research in networks. The lack of theoretical selfconsciousness, she explains, is due to the fact that there are conflicting theoretical visions, sometimes unrecognized in their conflict: formalism and relationalism. Erikson makes clear that both relationalism and formalism take many different forms. Nonetheless, it is the relationship between the two that is important to examine in order to move research on social networks forward. Javier Lezaun observes the travels of actor-network theory from its origins in the social studies of science through its forays into studies of markets and the law. He notes that over the course of the last decades, scholars in this tradition have become increasingly engaged in explicitly normative debates about different kinds of political questions and about the very nature of the political, and he suggests that the way future work handles this normative dimension will shape the direction of the theory and the associated research program. Jörg Potthast explores the insights afforded by an explicit focus on the role of normative accounts and justifications in everyday life, championed most prominently by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot in their book On Justification. He suggests that we miss what is original about this work when we equate “justification” with “legitimation” and subsume research in this tradition within the sociology of culture. He argues that the originality of the approach can only be realized by asking about justifications at the same time as asking about sociomaterial practices of testing. Neil Gross and Zachary Hyde turn back to pragmatism to explore the fundamental aesthetic component of norms and the role of imagines in pro-

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ducing adherence to approved conduct. Moving away from the idea of norm following as propositionally stated, socially sanctioned rules, the chapter sketches an alternative understanding. Building of recent appropriations of corporeal and aesthetic processes in contemporary sociology, Gross and Hyde see in images a key place for self-imagination; it is through images that salient features of the world stand out to us as actionable.

notes 1. Indeed, one of the editors, Monika Krause, would like to acknowledge her debt to Nirmal Puwar, Margarita Aragon, Ivo Furman, Marcus Morgan, and Jenny Munday, with whom she taught a course called “Central Issues in Social Analysis” at Goldsmiths College.

references Abend, Gabriel. 2008. “The Meaning of Theory.” Sociological Theory 26 (3): 173–99. Alexander, Jeffrey.1987. “On the Centrality of the Classics.” In Social Theory Today, edited by Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner, 11–57. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Alexander Jeffrey, Bernhard Giesen, Richard Münch, and Neil Smelser, eds. The MicroMacro Link. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bloor, P. D. 1991 [1976]. Knowledge and Social Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Calhoun, Craig. 1995. Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference. New York and London: Blackwell. Galison, Peter. 1997. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99. Knorr-Cetina, Karin, and Aaron Cicourel. 1981. Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies. London: Routledge. Latour, Bruno. 1988. Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lepenies, Wolf. 1988. Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Swedberg, Richard. 2015. “Before Theory Comes Theorizing.” BJS Annual Lecture. British Journal of Sociology 67 (1): 5–22. Zald, Mayer N. 1995. “Progress and Cumulation in the Human Sciences after the Fall.” Sociological Forum 10: 455–79.

chapter one

On the Very Idea of Cultural Sociology isaac ariail reed

When it comes to the study of culture in sociology, we have a series of overlapping definitions of the object of study; another set of methodological debates about how to collect and interpret evidence about it; and, finally, a set of theoretical arguments about what it does or does not do to, for, or with actors, people, organizations, nation-states, laboratories, scallops, and so on.1 It can be extremely frustrating for initiates to the subdiscipline of cultural sociology, initiates to the zones of the human sciences concerned with culture in some vaguely similar sense, and old hands at both that we still do not have agreement on definition, method, or theory. Some kind of sad story about a preparadigmatic science appears to threaten the whole enterprise, and academic barbs about studying “culture” are a dime a dozen if you want them, mostly concerning the sheer multitude of subjects studied under the moniker of cultural sociology or cultural studies (some of them, inevitably, inane) and the repetitive instabilities of theoretical debates (some of them, inevitably, unnecessary). And indeed, research in cultural sociology approximates neither the fantastical progress of physics since Newton (imagined or real) nor the esteemed refinement or sophisticated radicalism of literary theory. Instead, cultural sociology exists at the center of a large set of crisscrossing arguments both logical and analogical, based simultaneously on the experience of ethnography and the formalisms of computational text analysis, and ultimately focused on the relationship between meaning and society. This can feel like a mess, and it feels that way because, in many regards, it is a mess. What, then, can be done? I propose to ask, what is not culture? and from this question derive some insight about the premises of our own queries and definitional difficulties.

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I do not mean, “what is not culture?” in a set-theoretic sense (a frequently tried and frequently failed strategy for answering “what is culture?”). That is, I do not ask for the set of objects, processes, beings-in-the-world, or areas of study that fall outside of the set of things we label culture. Instead, I mean to ask the question in the Saussurean sense of to what terms and their meanings is the meaning of culture opposed?2 The oppositions that help give the term culture its meaning in academic discourse exist for actual people, some of whom are addressed by this essay—a community of somewhat likeminded researchers working in and around sociology on culture. This community, such as it is, uses a language game derived from both the concerns of American academic sociology and the broader, more global discourse of social theory. For these folks, then, what is culture not? The question is itself a bootstrapping move; to some, it will appear problematic precisely because it presumes a (relational) theory of meaning derived from semiotics (and from Clifford Geertz).3 But the theory of meaning required here is not very particular at all (“long” has some of its meaning in contrast to “short”; “dog” in contrast to “cat”), and the argument that follows does not depend upon the truth of a specific theory of the causal influence of culture on action or of this or that theory of human language. Furthermore, such bootstrapping may be necessary in response to the interminability of definitional debates. So, let us ask the following questions: to what terms is culture opposed (and by implication, associated with) in our given community of inquiry? And then, what are the differences and similarities between how we understand culture and how we understand its opposites or counterpoints? And thus, finally, what questions do we expect to answer by mentioning culture, by making a cultural argument, or by pursuing a cultural sociology in lieu of other sociologies? This will reveal, I believe, not so much a new definition of culture or an approach that solves the problems of years of debate, but rather what is at stake in the very idea of cultural sociology.

culture and economy Culture is not economy. This would appear to be the sine qua non of the whole beautiful debacle that is social theory, beginning with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology.4 Something about ideas, beliefs, signified-signifier-referent, theme, genre, symbol, philosophy, religion— something to do with culture—is different, in a yet-to-be-defined way, from the agglomeration of many different instances of two practical actions in the world: making something and exchanging something for something else.

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The difference between culture and economy, once set out, can be elided, conflated, exaggerated, explained historically, accounted for functionally, referenced obliquely, attacked endlessly, or secretly relied upon to make explanations look good to materialists, but a difference it is. Why is this difference important to us? What does it reflect about the world that we wish to grasp conceptually and highlight in our sociological explanations? And why does it reappear in every generation’s debate about social action? The conceptual opposition between culture and economy is important, first, because it encodes centuries of thought about the tension between rhetoric and motive, especially when the latter is pecuniary.5 The capacity to convince someone to do something via speech and ideation, without physical coercion—fight in a war, buy a specific brand of beer, and so forth—does not always track directly with who benefits in the doing (however we define or ill-define benefits). The inclination to come up with creative ways to theorize this fact has led to many innovations in sociological theory. Meanwhile, empirical discoveries of complex transitions in how groups of people value goods and actions and act accordingly are some of the most important foci in the field of cultural sociology. Thus, one of the central contributions of cultural sociology has been to render theories of domination and explanations of durable inequalities more intellectually powerful via reference to ideology, hegemony, and symbolic violence. And this requires a difference between professed allegiance (variably believed) and accrued benefit (intended or unintended). Beyond sociologists’ ongoing interests in the utility of culture to the powers and the interests, the distinction between culture and economy is important for a second reason. To say that culture is not economy suggests that although talking may be part of work, working may underwrite one’s power to be heard, and making art is surely work, there is, nonetheless, a distinction to be made between mental and manual labor in human societies. To meet the biological needs of human animals, certain material things have to be made and produced; societies have arranged themselves differently to meet or not meet these needs for their members. The study of these arrangements is central to the human sciences. However, recognizing the existence of material imperatives and incentives and cataloguing their manifest forms has turned out to be insufficient for explaining the variation in the sinews of production, distribution, and consumption that it is important to examine and explain in social life.6 To get to better explanations of the vast variation in how human social groups arrange to arrange material resources, one has to go out to the movie theater, study how music is composed, read about how gods are worshipped, and much more besides. Then, after immersing

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oneself in King Lear, the Super Bowl halftime show, and so forth, when one returns to economy, one inevitably views it differently. For if we are forced to come to terms with the intersection between signifiers, subjectivities, and the inherently mental work of giving the world and our actions within it meaning, we will also be forced to contextualize the act of exchange.7 This leap to the mental world of signification and the vast uncharted territories of subjective fantasy is what lends cultural sociology its distinctiveness over and against the occasional invocations of culture that dot economics, political science, and those areas of sociology unconcerned with signification and unmotivated by understanding. It is also the primary reason cultural sociology draws so many concepts and so much energy from the humanities. Finally, the engagement with subjectivity is perhaps the reason why certain egregious misunderstandings of the enterprise emanate from other arenas of social science, whose members routinely accuse cultural sociology of idealism, relativism, and so on. Cultural sociology does not decide a priori that cultural values will explain some economic outcome. Nor does it insist on viewing economy as the cause of social life in last instance (mediated, between now and infinity, by culture). But cultural sociology does insist on the necessity of examining the relationship between signification and trade, between ideology and interest. Indeed, examining this nexus anew appears, in retrospect, as a tremendous source of creativity for the sociological mind, and each sociological generation revisits the problem. This revisiting is possible because of the meaningful theoretical difference between culture and economy.

culture and per sons Culture is not a person. Rather people—individual humans—exist in cultural context. What this means is that a person or any aggregate of persons acts or act in a world that is not a Cartesian function of his, her, or their own brains. Rather, the language they speak, the food they eat, or the masculinity they aspire to or detest comes from a meaningful world around them, constituted by other people—both alive and dead—and their communications— present and past. Human action takes place within a semiotic sea, and to explain what I do, you should say something about the water I swim in. This rather metaphorically stated point is another theoretical locus of debate because it is at the root of the notion that culture mediates. What is mediation? If we locate something in an individual person, within many individual persons, or within persons generally—a drive for power, a need for

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recognition, a desire to sleep with his or her mother or father—we can then say that this rather inchoate something which is not culture and is part of an individual is, in turn, mediated by culture. It comes to expression via culture, we might say. Thus to understand what occurs in the human world, we must understand that which is within individuals (intentions, unconscious drives, etc.) to take form via culture, in the old Aristotelean sense of a sculptor giving “form” to a statue.8 The mediation of projects, desires, and intentions by cultural context is a very common trope in cultural sociology. Underneath this way of talking is an endemic question of how—and how much—people are made by cultural context. Those researchers who are spellbound by Michel Foucault sense that the individual “essences” that manifest and express themselves through culture are, in fact, also made by it, constituted by it, or come from it. From this perspective, to say culture “mediates” is too weak.9 For the true Foucauldian, the essential characteristics of the subject do not precede (logically, ontologically, or otherwise) that which mediates him, her, or them. So, for example, one might argue that at a given historical conjuncture, not only do sexual desires manifest through a strict and punitive heteronormative culture but also that those desires themselves come about in persons in the first place because of the mesh of (heteronormative) culture.10 However, it is worth pointing out that the claim that culture forms persons into certain kinds of subjects and that tracing that process is key to understanding the historical transformation of the West still relies on a distinction between discourse and persons, for it is persons who are formed by discourse into subjects.

From Persons to Actors The next leap is both controversial and common: the cultural sociologist replaces actual, concrete individual persons with a more generalized definition of actors and opposes these actors to culture as well. The actors can be nongovernmental organizations, corporations, nation-states, churches, and so on. These, too, are then shown to be subject to their cultural context, discursive formation, illusio, and so forth. The degree to which a shift from persons to a more general notion of actors means a fundamental change in the dynamics that obtain between cultural context and actors is the essence of the debate on the generalizability of certain models of culture and institutions (e.g., field theory).11 It is also possible to consider, as actors, subaspects of individual persons—bodies and psychic drives being the classic examples. Finally, if you really want to put everything in context, and you are really in-

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tent on being agnostic about what causes matter to you as a human scientist, you can place material objects in context as well and treat them as actants. But what is retained in all of this is a distinction between culture and that which acts within it and through it—on the one hand, an actant, a person, or an organization and on the other hand, the sociocultural space in which it does its acting.12 Note that many of the oppositions and arguments that obtain between culture and actor also obtain when we relate actor to economy. For we also argue, in sociology, that economic context mediates certain individual intentions, projects, or drives. Thus, an unquenchable lust for power may express itself as the push to be a top producer at a Hollywood studio in the context of postmodern American capitalism rather than a top samurai, as it would have in the context of Japanese feudalism. Furthermore, we know quite well how different individual traits are rewarded differently in different economic systems; this parallels how in different cultural contexts different actions or traits are esteemed or despised. (For example, being neurotic and obsessive about textual meaning can either be prized or scorned, a source of honor and authority or a cause for exclusion.) These similarities suggest that underneath it all, the root logic of thinking about culture in sociology is really a triangle that obtains between economy, persons, and culture. One can see this triptych repeat itself across the many variations of social theory: structure/action/culture;13 political economy, interest, ideology;14 social, subjective, symbolic;15 external environment, action, internal environment.16

what do we attribute to economy, and what do we attribute to culture? The proposal is thus that the meaningful differences between culture and economy, and culture and persons or actors are theoretically foundational for the very idea of cultural sociology. The next step, then, is to ask: given that culture is not economy and not individual persons (or with modification, not actors), how does it compare to those entities? What are we willing to attribute to culture, and what are we hesitant to attribute to it? We are far more willing to talk about economy as a system than we are willing to talk about culture as a system. Even more, we are more comfortable saying two people “share” an economy (even if it is not a “sharing economy”) than we are that they share a culture. So, if we begin with a very basic set of theoretical meanings so as to eventually construct more complex

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explanations and more powerful explanations—an ontology of economy, person, and culture—and we examine habits of thought, we will quickly come to the conclusion that these days, sociologists like to think of economies as things that are a bit machine- or systems-like in their properties and furthermore as wholes that people “share” (or that somehow affect them in their wholeness). On the other hand, while we would admit quite readily that a certain number of concrete people share a language (e.g., French), and we are happy to use language as a model for culture, we nonetheless struggle mightily with the notion that they “share French culture.” For “what is French culture?” is a question sociologists of culture are inclined to study the battle over rather than answer directly themselves. Should we resist this difference and just insist that there are cultural systems embedded in and overlapping with each other, just as there are economic systems embedded in and overlapping with each other? If we adopted this view, we could simply say, there are rules of art and rules of the market. Cultural sociologists (and anthropologists) study the former, and economic sociologists (and economists) study the latter. Furthermore, this view would have the advantage of being an excellent way to study inequality—just as economies exclude, overburden, or exploit, so too, we could say, is a given population unequal in its access to the cultural system, with all its meanings, identities, status symbols, and ease of use. This analogy between economic and cultural inequality (and between economic and cultural power) is central to the field and inspires much of its best work. And yet the very fact that we treat it as an analogy suggests that talking about cultural systems bothers us in some way. Why? Culture is not quite treatable as a system for reasons that are, in my view, epistemological rather than political (see endnote for the political argument).17 There is something external about an economic transaction. In the modern world in which economic systems are (to some degree) disembedded or consistently imagined to be disembedded, the essence of the market transaction, at least in its idealized form, is that neither actor need know what it means to the other to make the transaction.18 Because of this, it is easier for the analyst to gather together thousands upon thousands of such interactions into a system and say something relevant and useful about the system, without doing too much violence to the concrete reality of the interactions themselves—or at least, the reality of the parts of the interactions that we set out to care about in the first place. Aggregation of market transactions into a description of an “economy” can proceed because interpretation is limited to one axis of meaning that is so simple and consistent— price—that it can be specified quantitatively. And, more importantly, this

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quantitative price-meaning is revealed rather than hidden. Of course, at a later stage, the transaction can then be re-embedded in culture and society so as to explain it. On the other hand, because we associate culture with “deep” or “inner” things like “beliefs,” “stories people tell themselves about themselves,” “myths,” “religion,” “artistic temperament,” and so on, we are drawn again and again to there being something internal and subjective about “culture.”19 As a result, we access the concrete reality of cultures with greater difficulty, and we are far more loathe to abstract away from them when we finally get a hold of the symbols and emotions that organize the inner lives of humans. Consider what this intellectual grasping of the inner life looks like in our studies. To carefully articulate the concrete reality of what happens when Manet exhibited a painting,20 Balinese men went to cockfights,21 or Turkish women wore the hijab to university,22 we are drawn repeatedly to the relation of indicator to indicated, signifier to signified, written mark, gesture, or sartorial choice to “meaning.” And in being so drawn, we come to realize that in cultural sociology, we are really asking: whose interpretation of which signifying gesture is carrying the day here? This struggle to interpret meaning seems to consistently cause investigation to resist the levels of abstraction common to mathematically driven social sciences like economics. This resistance to abstraction, however, is a relative phenomenon. For there is a sliding scale concerning the precise scope in time and space that we will refer to as “cultural context” (nineteenthcentury France? Middletown? One Balinese town? Or does that town stand, in the analysis, for all of Bali? Etc.). This has the paradoxical result that even for sociologists who privilege culture in their explanations, in said explanations, the economic systems tend to outsize the cultural contexts (for a classic example, see Pierre Bourdieu’s work on May 1968 in France).23 We thus have a situation wherein culture cannot simply be an equal counterpoint to economy because the systematicity that we ascribe to the latter is denied by the interpretation that we have to conduct on the former. It is possible to start treating economy more like culture, something that has been tried with very interesting results by, among others, Karl Polanyi, Clifford Geertz, Richard Biernacki, and Viviana Zelizer. To do so, one attempts to unravel the inner meanings of exchange and thus take seriously the idea that the meaningless exchange is a stark utopia rather than the basis for social science.24 Thus, we can conclude that these metaphorical adventures—which can be summarized too crudely as “treating economy like culture and treating culture like economy”—are productive precisely in so far as metaphors

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find meaning in difference. That difference cannot be ignored: economic exchange and its relatively predictable motives, on the one hand, and cultural signaling and its more-difficult-to-interpret meanings, on the other. Whether it is traceable to the origins of modernity itself, this difference remains with our community of inquiry, and we have to deal with it in any cultural sociology. So, what does it mean to say that the “sharing of ” culture is unequal? If the metaphorical comparison to economics is understood as a metaphor, then we can plumb the hermeneutic depths of cultural inequality. Deep meanings themselves can be the means of power and thus the producers of durable inequality. That is the ultimate implication of the term hegemony. But having moved to the inner life of humans, the task of considering the differences between, for example, hegemonic, alternative, residual, and reactive “readings” of a common set of symbols, also engages the fundamental contingency and variety of meaning-in-interpretation. In deciphering hegemony, ideology, or worldview, then, we are all following the hermeneutic imperative rather than submitting culture to economic analysis.

what do we attribute to per sons, and what do we attribute to culture? Just as we hesitate to assign to culture certain attributes that we aggressively assign to economies, we also resist attributing to culture certain predicates that we are very intent on attributing to individual minds. Legal defenses of violent actions that insist the defendant was just following his or her cultural or religious tradition are mocked by journalists as “my culture made me do it.”25 The locution would not be humorous (or perhaps, sad) if there were not something amiss, and this something follows us into sociology. The point is that we think of individual persons as having intentions and projects for action that they carry through, and we tend not to think of culture this way. But perhaps we should. Would it be unreasonable to ascribe to Nazi culture, even more than to individual Nazis, the intention of creating a world without Jews?26 The problem is that intentions are things we intuitively reserve for people, and so anytime we ascribe intention to a culture, we sound like we are ascribing the intention to all the people “in the culture.” And this makes us uneasy because we know that the vagaries of human intention make these claims false at a concrete level. It may be reasonable to describe

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American political culture as imperial, but to ascribe to all Americans, or perhaps even the great majority of them, the individual intention (ambition?) to master the Middle East militarily, is empirically tenuous and moreover effaces from view the most interesting questions concerning political culture in an imperial democracy. Thus, while the difference from economy pulls cultural interpretation toward local communication and perhaps all the way toward the inner lives of a small set of subjects, the difference from individual persons pushes equally hard in the other direction. We do not want to ascribe to culture, as something we study in sociology, that which we regard as essential to mind (intentionality) or that which we regard as definitive of persons-withbiographies (projects, goals, etc.). Moreover, even when we expand from individual persons to a more general definition of actors, we still tend to want to reserve person-like qualities for the actors and not the cultural context they operate in. This is, in fact, essential to field theory.27 Fields do not strategize; actors within them do, consciously or unconsciously. Ultimately, this tension between culture and persons is what sits behind the debates about how culture supposedly “constrains and enables” and the related debates about “structure and agency.”28 As analysts, we reserve a certain set of attributions for individual humans and perhaps via extension, a few collective actors (organizations, say, or, if you are Georg Lukacs, the proletariat29). Compared to someone who has a project (growing a small business, returning the nation to glory, leading a football team down the field) and acts both in its name and to make it happen, culture emerges as the background upon which this action takes place, the landscape of meaning that such agential beings—whatever or whoever they are—navigate.

beyond emergence: instead of ontologically locating culture, explain with culture It is at this point that philosophers of science and critical realists tend to start talking about “emergence” and “levels of analysis,” thus reengaging for culture (as a quasi-system) what for so long was the issue for social structure.30 Emergent and dependent upon the actions of individuals, can social structure or culture be said to have an existence of its own and as a result, push people around, or at least wall them up? Indeed, if you read enough of a certain sort of social theory, this sort of ontological analysis starts to feel required for any discussion that uses the prefixes macro, meso, and micro,

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and it is perhaps the writing degree zero of social theory in the United Kingdom.31 But I think this way of pursuing ontological analysis (building the world up layer by layer and thus concluding what properties it must have) is a bit too close to the endless question of defining culture. The strategy I pursue here is more pragmatist. What do we do when we reference culture as opposed to human individuals, actors, or the economy in a sociological explanation? By attempting to answer this question, with reference to what has already been written here, we can, I think, begin to delineate some important vectors for research in cultural sociology, while also noting what it is that we presume when pursuing them.32 It would appear from the preceding discussion that when we reference culture, we reference a piece of the world that is 1. the context for intention and desire rather than intention and desire themselves; 2. not well captured by only its “revealed” or external elements (the price of an exchange, a twitch of the eye), but requires, rather, an inference to its “hidden” elements, which is to say, those thoughts, ideations, themes, and materials in the world that are referred to by signifiers; and 3. thus made up of signs that have to be interpreted because culture is somehow both a part of the “inner life” of people and greater than the sum of individual psyches that take place with and through them. The last point is what drives certain philosophers of social science to distraction. They are inclined to ask: how can something be simultaneously inside and outside? Do we not have to locate culture in one place or another? And if we do, is it the words people say, or the thoughts they think, or the music they play, or the transcription of that music, or the imagined essence of the symphony by the man who composed it, and so forth? And so it goes with the impossible project of methodological fetishism. But what is going on here—that is, in seeing culture as both inside and outside the heads of persons—is really just the positing of a cultural formation as an amalgamation of contested and modulating interpretations. Consider “justice.” The meaning of justice in a given society is made up of signals about justice and actions in the name of justice and thoughts about said actions and signals, gathered together. For the investigator, their location is not as important as their meaningful interrelation, and thus it is the interpretation of this interrelation that allows the analyst to grasp what justice means. Here, the work of Bruno Latour is directly useful, though not at all in the way he intended.33 The discursive formations, cultural configurations,

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and landscapes of meaning studied in cultural sociology are made up of all sorts of different kinds of stuff—tools and buildings, minds and their virtual representation on the Internet, various visual representations, structures of feeling, internalized fears, and so forth. They are, as it were, assembled. One can have a debate on the ontological basis for some of this assemblage (e.g., are there basic human capacities for emotions like fear and anger that transcend cultural context and era?) or one can trace the formation of kinds and objects in time as part of one’s explanation (e.g., whence the corporation?), but either way, one is in the business of interpreting interpretations, the making of which depends on a vast array of different sorts of stuff pulled together in the game of signification. Thus, for cultural sociology going forward, the problem will be to come to some comprehension of how culture, rather than referring to a unitary theory of the human being, society, or some other such ontological screed, instead enters our sociological explanations as a tremendous source of variation in both human behavior and in the experience humans have of other humans’ behavior and the world more generally. To be sure, the study of this variation will also attend to how this variation relates to, is circumscribed by, and sometimes itself creates power. But the core question is: given some change in or maintenance of human behavior that forms the basis of a welldefined explanatory question, is variation in culture a prominent part of the answer to the question? Thus far, then, I have suggested that when we point to culture, we do two things: 1. We differentiate culture from economy and from actors/persons. 2. We mobilize culture in our explanations by attributing to it slightly different tendencies than we do to economies or persons and by pointing to differences in meaning as consequential for social life. Let me give a very brief historical example of this and then attempt to address what its implications are for sociological analysis.

interpreting interpretations of halley’s comet and explaining puritan action: toward an epistemology for cultural sociology In 1682, Halley’s Comet was visible in the night sky over the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Many persons witnessed it, including the Puritan elites Thomas

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Brattle and Increase Mather. Brattle, interpolated into the Anglican-tolerant “liberal Puritanism” of (some) elites in Boston, themselves interpolated into the very beginnings of the Atlantic Enlightenment, went to the observatory at Cambridge, made a series of observations, and sent them to Isaac Newton. (They ended up being referenced in a key section of Principia Mathematica.) Mather, a master patriarch of the “hard-line” Puritans, haunted by his perception of the decline of the religious project of his father’s generation, returned to his desk to compose Kometographia, a long treatise interpreting the history of comets and other “portents” as (mostly bad) signs from God of things to come. The difference between Mather’s interpretation and Brattle’s interpretation is explained by culture. But it is, for many of our questions about the origins of American modernity, nothing more than a toy example. It is too easy, one might say, to point to the objective thing in the world (Halley’s Comet) and then to its interpretation by two persons inclined to (what appear to us as) different worldviews. But perhaps a historical sociologist, for a variety of reasons, does not care so much about who wrote what about a comet but does care—very much—about who pushed the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 forward versus who railed against them. In that case, culture still helps the sociologist, but now the explanandum has shifted. (Who supported the witch trials? Who tried to use his elite position to stop them?) In this case, then, the texts of Kometographia and the footnote in Principia Mathematica become part of the archive of evidence from which the investigator infers the cultural difference that does the explaining of different stances on the event of the Salem Witch Trials. When we explain by pointing to a difference in culture like this, what intellectual operation are we conducting, and what kind of knowledge claim are we making? We contrast two social imaginaries or worlds of meaning (“culture”). We also contrast this difference in social imaginaries with other potential differences that could explain what we are interested in explaining. These other potential explanations could be alternate cultural differences; or they could point to Brattle’s and Mather’s intentions, interests, projects, or desires; or to their position or their “resources.” Thus, in other words, although there are always differences in landscapes of meaning, the difference that these differences make varies. Sometimes, when we really specify the explanatory question, the difference that cultural difference makes will be zero; at other moments, cultural difference will be the most important of all causes; and of course, everything in between is also possible. This brief thumbnail of cultural explanation allows, despite its manifest

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inadequacy, a few more comments on the issues as hand. These are offered not as a final argument or as a survey of arguments, but rather as an articulation of where hermeneutic approaches to culture and sociological explanation stand currently. Cultural sociologists sometimes like to say, when referencing cultural difference, that two persons or groups of persons (e.g., Mather and Brattle) “lived in different worlds.” This is perhaps unnecessarily provocative. Useful for Thomas Kuhn to break the ice in 1962,34 it now tends to be a way to spook readers who are not on board with cultural sociology, which may be fun but is probably not the most rational way forward for the community of inquiry. Thus, I would like to propose that instead we say, when pointing to the cultures that made the difference for a set of action, that what we are doing is pointing to how culture affected the concretely held imaginaries of the actors—in the example given, of Brattle and Mather. This has the nice effect of allowing us to say with confidence (in retrospect) that Brattle’s imaginary was a much more accurate rendering of the actual natural world than was Mather’s. Simultaneously, however, we note that the greater ultimate “truthiness” of Brattle’s imaginary may not be what made it compelling to him or others. The example—of Brattle, Mather, a comet, and a hunt for witches—is a very bounded instance of “local” explanation. For some philosophers of science, it would not qualify as an explanation at all. And certainly, it has the horrifying disadvantage of being too theoretical for historians and too historically particular for sociologists. The problem of the level of generality at which explanations occur and the level of abstraction at which theoretical statements are made is a problem that manifests the tension, mentioned earlier, between cultural interpretation being both pulled toward and pushed away from the “local,” otherwise known as “a relatively small set of people in a relatively short period of time.” But this emphasis on bounded explanations that explore, among many factors, the relevance of differences in meaningful landscapes, is central to the very idea of cultural sociology. For it is what renders cultural sociology distant from positivism on the one hand, and links together culture, historical sociology, and ethnography on the other. It is also why cultural sociologists, when they are feeling good about themselves, will argue that their project embodies Max Weber’s ambition for sociology to be a science of concrete reality, as opposed to a science in the sense of the ultrageneralizing ambitions of the natural sciences.

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the crux of the matter The fundamental issue here is the way in which human persons are immersed in, interpolated by, and formed by a certain culture, world of meaning, or social imaginary, and as a result inclined to interpret and act in the world in a certain way rather than some other ways. This claim can be made via a variety of sorts of evidence, organized qualitatively or quantitatively (or both) and schematized and processed in different ways. Ultimately, however, in a cultural explanation, said evidence will be marshaled to help say two things: that actors were immersed in cultural spaces x and y, and that the differences in meaning between these spaces made a difference for outcomes a and b. What can be said about the intellectual process whereby this marshaling is done? 1. It involves inference to invisible meanings, the existence of which cannot be “materially proved” in some atheoretical sense of the phrase. This presumably is not, by itself, a problem for any sort of scientist, natural or human, who understands what it means to posit a magnetic field, although it is the secret fetish of thousands of invectives against the supposed idealism of cultural sociology. 2. It does not take the form of a test of hypotheses derived deductively from hypergeneral theory. This constitutes the distance between cultural sociology and positivist sociology, although it does not exclude the use of statistics, regression, and significance testing from cultural sociology. Furthermore, it does not even exclude from cultural sociology the idea that some social theory consists of hypergeneral, extremely abstract renderings of working hypotheses about human behavior. What it does do is suggest that the operation of interpreting landscapes of meaning disrupts permanently a single easy trip from hypothesis to test to explanation, and the supposed safeguards against confirmation bias offered by such a trip. 3. It often relies on and engages with long-standing scholarly debates, sets of arguments, or traditions of interpretation of those cultural spaces. These debates follow the genre of conversational point-and-counterpoint in answer to shared questions (e.g., “Were there a distinct set of liberal Puritans?”; “How should we understand the ‘long argument’ in seventeenthcentury New England about religious decline?”). This means in cultural sociology, theoretical argument is part and parcel of the ongoing empirical interpretation of culture and action in answer to various research questions, and thus the pursuit of truth in the community of inquiry often

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follows a model of competition between arguments, rather than a series of experiments. 4. It can shift the use of evidence vis-à-vis the explanandum and explananda, depending upon the explanatory question at hand. So, Kometographia is explained as an action in one instance of explanation, but for another explanation, it is part of the evidence for the existence of a mystical dimension of hard-line Puritan culture. Cultural sociology, that is, has a broadly pragmatist understanding of explanation in science, which is to say that the assembling of the interpretation occurs with reference to an agreed-upon set of questions driving inquiry.35 The generality or scope of these questions in cultural sociology varies immensely. That is, sometimes we really want to know why a small set of people in a very confined swath of time and space made a certain set of decisions (e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis), and sometimes we want to know why, in a variety of different situations, a certain highly typified cultural form (e.g., heroic narrative) works in a certain predictable way (e.g., to amp up nationalism). 5. It relies on, for positing the very existence of such cultural spaces, a process of reading evidence that in many ways, mimics the reading of a text. When interpreting evidence, short passages are related to the meaning of the evidence as a whole, and the meaning of the evidence as a whole is used to create better knowledge of the parts. This last epistemological point is the one that drives just about everyone—inside and outside of cultural sociology—crazy. What is this bizarre thing called hermeneutics, and what does it have to do with sociological explanation?36 There are many different reasons for this difficult relationship between empirical sociology and hermeneutic philosophy, not the least of which is the way that classic statements on the hermeneutic circle by the philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger can seem utterly unconcerned with the issue of empirical explanations in actual human science. But the primary reason for hostility toward hermeneutics in sociology is, I suspect, that this process of part-whole interpretation either appears to be or seems to encourage precisely the confirmation bias that is the bane of all clear thinking in science and perhaps all clear thinking in general. In other words, the threat represented by the hermeneutic circle is, for many sociologists, not relativism per se (e.g., “Any interpretation of a text is as good as any other”), but rather the idea that an interpretation the investigator favors for nonempirical reasons begins as a seed for approaching the archive, and then grows from a seed to a massive interpretation of the whole, via the hermeneutic circle, thus misleading everyone. To many

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sociologists, this is what makes the very idea of cultural sociology as I have described it here a mistaken road. But this view is based on a deeply wrongheaded rendering of what the hermeneutic circle actually does. In fact, the point of the hermeneutic circle is simply to form a meaningcentered version of the sociological imagination—that is, to provide the link between history and biography by elucidating social context.37 Indeed, the point of the repeated, iterative whole-part process of interpretation is to continually check the reasonableness of both overarching understandings of a mass of textual materials, make adjustments to such overarching interpretations, and furthermore develop valid understandings of particular parts that take into account the context in which they emerged. This latter point is crucial because it is what links contextualization to the avoidance of confirmation bias in cultural sociology. By forcing the investigator to continually contextualize her or his textual evidence as part of a larger whole—both in terms of other pieces of primary evidence and in terms of the “conversation of arguments” between other people in the community of inquiry who have examined the evidence, this process acts as a safeguard against the misreading of evidence that occurs when it is ripped out the meaningful relations that gave birth to it in the first place.38 To take an example from my own work, suppose one’s initial inclination or bias is toward an explanation in which a worldview of scientific materialism, in its very early, seventeenth-century forms, helped bring the Salem Witch Trials to a close. There are some textual aspects of Thomas Brattle’s letter against the Salem Witch Trials that would support this view—and these, combined with the fact that he was an avid astronomer, might then be used to support this argument. Then, one could tell an explanatory story about “scientific skepticism” helping to stop the witch trials, and align Brattle with Robert Calef ’s skepticism and anti-Puritanism. However, if Brattle’s letter is repeatedly contextualized in the manner dictated by the hermeneutic circle—both with his biography, the other documents surrounding the trials, and so forth—and as a result interpreted properly, this reading becomes impossible. Instead, one is forced to conclude that Brattle’s letter against the trials was effective precisely because it navigated the trials from within New World Congregationalism and presented a moderated version of it and its implications for society. It succeeded not because of any inclinations its author had toward scientific materialism, but rather because it avoided voicing anything of the kind. This makes for a significantly more complex story of the Witch Trials, but also one that is more accurate qua sociological explanation.39

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conclusion: the premises of cultural sociology At this point, I have used two very simple negative statements—that culture is not economy and that culture is not individual person—to sketch in a series of intuitions, problems, and tensions that attend the community of inquiry in sociology around culture. These intuitions, problems, and tensions are not research findings but rather the sorts of intellectual problems that one must resolve in one way or another if one is going to produce research findings. One could go significantly further with this gambit: by opposing culture to sovereignty, or to institutions, or even to nature. Social theory itself seems to develop in this fractal way.40 However, at this point, it is perhaps worth pausing to note that we can now see the basic premises of cultural sociology. In sociology, we care a lot about differences whose definition, scope, and level of generality vary immensely from one research question to the next: the difference between French and American reactions to sex scandals, the difference between winning and losing an election, the different rates at which different class fractions get different jobs, and so on. The first premise of cultural sociology is that when we go to unravel, unwind, and select from the multiple causal chains that help us account for these differences, we want to typify a subset of causes as having to do with the symbolic environment of individual humans, autonomous from the revealed preferences that are their interests, and intertwined with the world of labor and exchange. This subset of causes can be termed culture.41 The second premise is that understanding these cultural causes requires the interpretation of meaning. This is a methodological issue in the broad sense of the term method. How abstract our interpretations of meaning should be is an unresolved controversy in cultural sociology; this is evident in the way that the variable utility of different techniques for getting at meanings (forced choice surveys, interviews scheduled and unscheduled, etc.) is always up for debate. But whatever one chooses as one’s preferred level of abstraction, interpretation has to be done. By placing actors (including organizational actors), social mechanisms, interests, and so much more on the landscape of meaning formed by culture, the cultural sociologist arrives at a rather notorious intellectual bridge, the crossing of which renders social science part of the human sciences. The epistemic ruptures that result are complex, as the previous section of this chapter indicates. The third premise is, then, that the time-space scope in which an interlocking set of meanings is relevant depends on both the explanatory question at hand (does a cultural difference make a difference for the differences

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we want to explain?) and the extension, in social reality, of those meanings. This means that what is fundamental to cultural sociology is that it is neither micro, nor macro, nor meso. There are no a priori levels to which culture can be assigned. Rather, there are different scopes of semiotic currents, differently sized fields with symbolic principles of vision and division, and different narratives that are felt more or less intensely to be essential to the lives of more or less people. To summarize these three premises, we can say that to be a part of a sociological explanation, “cultural configurations”42 have to be interpreted. Interpretation invokes, to this day, a certain kind of skepticism among those oriented to the ideals of science, a skepticism that is bolstered by relativist readings of Thomas Kuhn and the more-than-occasional opacity of the continental philosophical tradition. But the continuing relevance of this skepticism is itself questionable. For cultural sociology, the idiosyncrasies of meaning and its interpretation do not form a relativist roadblock, but rather the premise of empirical sociology.43 Cultural sociology is, then, the study of differences in meaning, with particular attention to how those differences affect social dynamics and human outcomes.

notes 1. The literature is voluminous. Four good entry points are William H. Sewell Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 35–61; Michael Schudson, “How Culture Works: Perspectives from Media Studies on the Efficacy of Symbols,” Theory and Society 18: 153–80, 1989; Mark D. Jacobs and Lyn Spillman, “Cultural Sociology at the Crossroads of the Discipline,” Poetics 33, no. 1 (2005): 1–14; Roger Friedland and John Mohr, “The Cultural Turn in American Sociology,” in Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice, ed. Roger Friedland and John Mohr (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 2. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). To Saussure’s rather abstract notion of the linguistic community existing at any one point in time, we have to add C. S. Peirce’s more concrete notion of a community of inquiry, designed to grasp science as a collective process. For Peirce, a community of inquiry, as opposed to a community of doctrine is a community oriented toward the production of true statements based on argument and evidence, which conducts its debates publicly, and depends upon criticism and disagreement for the advancement of knowledge. It is a slightly more optimistic notion than the concept of scientific field and, importantly for the argument here, extends indefinitely into the future. See C. S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in The Essential Peirce, volume 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 108–23.

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3. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978). 5. The question of when and how the power to convince is used instrumentally is a central occupation of the Western philosophical tradition; the opposition between rhetoric and motive was deeply important to ancient Greek philosophy. One of the earliest places where the opposition between rhetoric and motive is given theoretical centrality is in the work of Isocrates, a rival of Plato. Despite being classified himself as a sophist, he railed against other sophists who, he argued, emphasized the utility of speaking well as a route to power and advantage. Instead, his approach to teaching rhetoric emphasized justice, the common good, and character. See Isocrates, “Antidosis,” in Isocrates I, trans. David Mirhady and Yun Lee Too (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000) and Isocrates, “Against the Sophists,” in Isocrates 2, trans. Terry L. Papillon (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). I am grateful to Peter Simonson for personal communication about this matter. For a more general genealogical linking of concerns with “culture” to the philosophy of rhetoric, see Christian Meyer, “Precursors of Rhetoric Culture Theory,” in Culture and Rhetoric, ed. Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 31–48. 6. Marshal Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). This is a key part of the origins of what we now call cultural sociology, but it is often overlooked, perhaps because of the way it emerged from a cross-disciplinary, hypertheoretical argument with Marxism in the American academy of the 1970s, whose contours perhaps appear to today’s graduate students as an alien world. 7. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 412–53. See also Jeffrey Alexander, “Market as Narrative and Character,” Journal of Cultural Economy 4, no. 4 (2011): 477–88. 8. Isaac Ariail Reed, Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 140–46. 9. The language of weak and strong can be misleading. For to say culture “mediates and focuses desire” can be an extraordinarily strong claim, particularly if we view desire or other unconscious or conscious aspects of human subjectivity as relatively inchoate. Indeed, between the explanation of cultural meanings via underlying desires that “need” them (a “weak” approach that “reduces” culture to the desires it serves), and the explanation of the emergence of certain desires as a result of the cultural systems that “produce them” (a “strong” approach that locates culture as explananda) lies a vast territory ripe for empirical investigation. 10. The classic texts are Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge Classics, 2006). An important dimension of these accounts is their description of how human subjects become very convinced that culture is merely a mediating influence and, in being so convinced, participate in the process whereby culture becomes a constitutive power rather than a mediating one. Thus, these texts have an essential and important element of what Paul Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion in their approach to how discourse forms subjects. When and how we can and should make this sort of (suspicious) claim about constitutive culture

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passing itself off as mediating culture is a point of recurrent debate in social theory, as indicated by, first, the fact that the language here is both causal, and controversial in its causal implications (“constitute,” “make,” “form,” “give shape”) and second, by the highly uneven reception of both Judith Butler and Michel Foucault in sociological research on culture. See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977). 11. See, for example, Julian Go, “Global Fields and Imperial Forms: Field Theory and the British and American Empires,” Sociological Theory 26, no. 3 (2008): 201–29; or Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam, A Theory of Fields (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 12. Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Action and Its Environments,” in Action and Its Environments: Toward a New Synthesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 301–34. 13. Margaret Archer, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, rev. ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 14. Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). 15. Pierre Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” Comparative Social Research 13 (1991): 1–44. 16. Alexander, “Action and Its Environments.” 17. One possibility is that this issue is normative or “political.” In this argument, if sociologists think capitalism (or patriarchy, or racial hierarchy) is a system of domination— that is, a system of power wherein the distribution of power to different actors in the system they find objectionable—then this is the root of their comfort at naming it a system. We label as a shared system that which we do not like; but when it comes to how people believe, practice, use repertoires, and so forth, we are much more careful. This argument is, it is important to note, usually made by people who do not like that sociologists are engaged in the critique of domination; it is a common point of attack for those who urge that sociological theory should be neutral and “scientific.” As an argument, I do not think it accurately describes the field or the motivations of researchers, but it does touch on something in the history of American sociology that still matters on a surface level at least. That is this: our working models of capitalism in sociology contain, within them, several recognized points of conflict and struggle. In so far as we propose a model of “shared culture” based on consensus that does not appear to posit such “structurally determined” points of struggle, such a model grates against our intuitive sense that the social world is riven with various different forms of conflict, and that these conflicts are not random but patterned. But the degree to which we can treat culture as a system does not really depend on a strong notion of consensus; rather, the question is whether a semiotic system can be understood in the same way as an economic system is. 18. One could imagine the exchange of signs as an external process, a kind of linguistic exchange, similar to the thought experiments in philosophy of mind that picture a person in a room who, when passed a piece of paper in a language he does not understand, looks up the appropriate response in a large book, thus mimicking some sort of artificial intelligence without access to meaning. When cultural sociology began to come to prominence in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, there were several effort to constrain the study of culture in this way and thus to circumvent the problems that attend the interpre-

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tation of what signs mean to different subjects. See Robert Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and Ann Swidler, “Codes, Contexts, and Institutions,” in Talk of Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 160–80. There is occasionally in this work a tendency to conflate the way in which culture is external to a given individual person in the sense discussed here, with the great hope that the study of culture can be rendered external to all subjectivity and thus all interpretations of what others are thinking and how they are thinking it. This seems unsustainable. 19. In a recent article, Orlando Patterson makes this point, admitting that the distinction between external and internal cultural knowledge or schemas is “largely one of analytic convenience. All external knowledge must, in the final analysis, be mentally interpreted” (Orlando Patterson, “Making Sense of Culture,” Annual Review of Sociology 40 [2014]: 1–30). In this sense, he takes up the original project of Wilhelm Dilthey, who made precisely the same point in “The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Studies” (Wilhelm Dilthey, Dilthey: Selected Writings, ed. H. P. Rickman [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976], 170–245). 20. Pierre Bourdieu, “Manet and the Institutionalization of Anomie,” in The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 238–53. 21. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play.” 22. Nilufer Gole, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 23. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. 1988). 24. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944); Clifford Geertz, “The Bazaar Economy: Information and Search in Peasant Marketing,” American Economic Review, 68, no. 2 (1978): 28–32; Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). For a discussion of these developments and their relationship to cultural sociology, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Market as Narrative and Character.” 25. The political theorist Seyla Benhabib starts her book on multiculturalism with an account of criminal cases where part of the defense (often for violent actions) was that the actions taken were in line with a cultural tradition. The example, in Benhabib, brings up a complex set of questions about responsibility, the law, and morality (and ultimately the appropriate provenance of an Enlightenment concept of reason); here, I just use it to make a simpler point—that there is tension in social science around attributing intention to anything that is not an individual human. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 26. Alon Confino, A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 27. John Levi Martin, “What Is Field Theory?” American Journal of Sociology 109, no. 1 (2003): 1–49. 28. The classic location for this locution is Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Soci-

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ety: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); for a recent expression of frustration, bordering on exasperation, with how this language has inflected social theory and cultural sociology, see John Levi Martin, Thinking Through Theory (New York: Norton, 2015): 45–76. 29. Georg Lukacs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 83–222. 30. David Elder-Vass, “The Emergence of Culture,” Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (2010): 351–63. 31. It is an extensive part of the massive oeuvres of Roy Bhaskar, Anthony Giddens, and Margaret Archer. For two essential critiques of this tradition, see Anthony King, The Structure of Social Theory (New York: Routledge, 2004); Justin Cruickshank, “A Tale of Two Ontologies: An Immanent Critique of Critical Realism,” The Sociological Review 52, no. 4 (2004): 567–85. See Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977). 32. We can then call our presumptions about the minimal furniture of the human world “ontology” if we want to, but with the rather irksome caveats that (1) ontology means different things to different theorists and (2) in the position taken here, these presumptions do not do much of the work of explaining themselves, which comes much more from (as I will try to show) the rather more concrete issue of which meanings, intentions, projects, and economic systems, with their own specific dynamics, matter when and where. In other words, you might have to have an ontology of a very minimal kind to move forward with research, but if the ontology, rather than the more historicized, contingent theoretical terms that you develop, is providing the answers to a very specific set of explanatory questions, then one has a problem, because presumably the variation one is trying to explain has significantly less scope than the furniture of the universe. 33. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 34. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), chapter X. 35. Paul Lichterman and Isaac Ariail Reed, “Theory and Contrastive Explanation in Ethnography,” Sociological Methods & Research 44, no. 4 (2014): 585–635. 36. The most recent set of arguments about the contentious relationship between hermeneutics and sociology has focused on the use of word counts and other computational algorithms to interpret large amounts of text. Monica Lee and John Levi Martin, “Coding, Counting and Cultural Cartography,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 3, no. 1 (2015): 1–33; Richard Biernacki, “How to Do Things with Historical Texts,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 3, no. 3 (2015): 311–52; Isaac Ariail Reed, “Counting, Interpreting and Their Potential Interrelation in the Human Sciences,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 3, no. 3 (2015): 353–64; Lyn Spillman, “Ghosts of Straw Men: A Reply to Lee and Martin,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 3, no. 3 (2015): 365–79; Monica Lee and John Levi Martin, “Response to Biernacki, Reed, and Spillman,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 3, no. 3 (2015): 380–415. 37. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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38. Richard Biernacki makes a similar argument that the empirically based adjustment of ideal types, via vigorous self-questioning about one’s working interpretation, is the scientific ethos of historical sociology. See Richard Biernacki, “After Quantitative Cultural Sociology: Interpretive Science as a Calling,” in Meaning and Method: The Cultural Approach to Sociology, ed. Isaac Reed and Jeffrey C. Alexander (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2009), 119–208. 39. Isaac Reed, “Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of Witchcraft,” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 2 (2007): 209–34; Isaac Ariail Reed, “Deep Culture in Action: Resignification, Synecdoche, and Metanarrative in the Moral Panic of the Salem Witch Trials,” Theory and Society 44, no. 1 (2015): 65–94. 40. Andrew Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 41. This premise does carry some ontological baggage. You have to believe there are signs, that signs have meanings that are relatively arbitrary and relatively conventional, and that these meanings are a source of variation in what people end up doing. But these are not heavy bags to carry. 42. Patterson, “Making Sense of Culture.” 43. Andreas Glaeser, “Hermeneutic Institutionalism: Towards a New Synthesis,” Qualitative Sociology 37 (2014): 207–41.

chapter two

Varieties of Microsociology claudio e. benzecry and daniel winchester

so a patron walks into a bar. . . . After a long day at work, a woman walks into a tavern to have a drink. She walks up to the long line of stools sitting in front of the mahogany bar, takes a seat, and is promptly greeted by a smiling bartender. “Hi, there. What can I get for you?” the barkeep asks. The woman peruses the drinks menu a bit to check out the establishment’s more exotic cocktails but then decides on a classic Manhattan. The bartender skillfully mixes the drink, employs a few aesthetic flourishes to the preparation for effect, and serves the cocktail to our patron. The patron then turns her attention to a television above the bar to check out basketball scores and highlights while enjoying her cocktail. A few moments later, the patron is unexpectedly interrupted by the bartender, who has already prepared another Manhattan. “Courtesy of the guy over there,” the bartender says, pointing to a second patron who smiles and approaches the woman’s barstool. As he comes near, the woman slides the drink back toward him. “No, thanks,” she says. “I can afford to buy my own drinks.” * * * A patron walks into a bar. . . . This is an occurrence so seemingly mundane and unproblematic as to not require any sociological analysis at all. Yet the variegated traditions of microsociology teach us that it is precisely in analyzing the taken-for-granted activities that make up the commonsense

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reality of everyday life that we can understand the layered mechanisms, knowledges, techniques, and meanings that constitute the social. In what follows, we take readers through a microsociological tour of this everyday bar scene—through symbolic interaction, ethnomethodology, phenomenology, and dramaturgical approaches—attempting to show how the varieties of microsociology frame and explain how this taken-for-granted scene is actively accomplished. These streams have some common enemies and many shared interests. They all try to go beyond epistemology as a philosophical endeavor toward an empirical approach and all ask not how the world is but how it is constructed (and how it has come to be, partly as a consequence of these constructions). They have all been lumped together, partially because of the space allotted within contemporary theory training, which tends to elide the variations and instead focus on what they have in common, especially in opposition to grand or general theories. This has two consequences for the argument we advance. First, that we dedicate the first part of the chapter to mapping out the different schools that make up this field called microsociology. Second, that vagueness about what actually constitutes “micro” and “theory” has contributed to unexpected intellectual encounters and innovative arguments that further illuminate social life. Sometimes the lack of clarity about what constitutes sociological theory is actually productive (on this, see Perrin 2014). It is through the random encounter of competing ideas of how the micro-order structures reality, and how to study it, that rival versions have actually engaged in productive exchanges. The second part of the chapter will be dedicated to documenting the lines of communication and tension in how contemporary authors have refined, extended, or challenged and reconfigured foundational work. We begin where the Giddens-Turner book stopped (see Gross 2007; Heritage 1987; Joas 1987), taking stock of the foundational varieties of microsociology—symbolic interaction, ethnomethodology, phenomenology, and dramaturgy—but then move on to more contemporary developments. Central to all microtheoretical programs is a claim that the social order is morally sustained, organized, and accomplished at the microsocial level. Yet there are also important differences in how this work of ordering is conceptualized. In this chapter, we explore the core concepts (e.g., situations, projects, interaction orders) associated with each school, exploring the similarities, differences, and potential tensions in the ways each of the foundational approaches understands what constitutes the microworld and how each perspective reveals, in and through the close analysis of everyday scenes, the constitution of what we might call micro-ontologies. We then show how

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those programs have been recombined in a number of more contemporary approaches (e.g., institutional ethnography, interaction ritual chains, social worlds, group sociology, laboratory studies) that, among other advances, increasingly include the integration of the micro- with meso- or macro-orders as a key part of their theoretical agendas. We conclude by asking what these varieties of microsociology have to say about one of Social Theory Now’s core thematics: knowledge production. Now, then, back to the bar. . . .

sociology in micro Symbolic Interactionism (The Meanings of a Manhattan) Arguably the most commonly referenced variety of microsociology in introductory-level sociology classes, symbolic interactionism (SI) begins our tour of the variety of microsociologies. Coined by Chicago sociologist Herbert Blumer more than a half century ago, the perspective of SI was heavily derived from the insights of early American pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey, and most significantly, George Herbert Mead as well as influenced by Blumer’s Chicago school forebearers, W. I. Thomas and Robert Park (Fine 1995). From these influences, Blumer (1969, 2) derived the three fundamental premises of the approach: (1) humans act toward things according to the meanings those things have for them; (2) these meanings derive not from the things themselves but emerge out of social interaction with other people; and (3) these meanings are negotiated and modified through a process of interpretation in which the actor reflexively communicates with herself. To unpack these premises and analyze what they suggest about the makings of the micro, let’s analyze a strip of interaction from our hypothetical bar scene, starting with the moment our first patron is informed by the bartender that another patron has bought her a drink. As noted, the female patron turns down this drink offer, sliding the drink back toward the male patron and telling him that she can buy her own drinks. For an interactionist, even this short interaction is rife with symbolic potential, and the courses of action taken by our patrons depend entirely on how its meaning was interpreted and defined by those involved. Let’s take a closer look. Within the context of this interaction, the emergent meaning of the “drink” transforms from simply a Manhattan into an invitation for flirtation with a stranger—an attempt to initiate, in other words, a new “definition of

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the situation” (Thomas 1923) and so a new line of joint action between our two patrons. However, how the interaction proceeded depended not only on this initial transformation of meaning intended by the drink-buying patron but on how it was subsequently interpreted and redefined by our first patron (Blumer’s third premise). Borrowing from Mead (1934), Blumer (1969, 5) takes interpretation to be an internalized form of interaction in which the actor communicates with herself. Let’s say that upon receiving the drink, our first patron interprets this action as an imposition on her previous plans (to simply have a few drinks to relax by herself after work) and potentially reinforcing what she considers problematic gender roles regarding both sex and economic power. Not wanting to have the situation defined in this way, she returns the drink to the male patron explaining that she can afford to buy her own drinks, thereby redefining the situation in terms not conducive to the flirtatious interaction hoped for by our drink-buying patron. But let’s imagine that things don’t end there. The male patron, perceiving that his initial behavior was not interpreted in the way he had hoped, attempts to redefine the situation yet again by apologizing and, noticing the woman has turned her attention to a game on one of the televisions, asking if she is a basketball fan. Our other patron, who does in fact really like basketball, interprets this as a more appropriate invitation to a conversation based on shared interest and decides to engage in talk about the chances of the local professional team to make it to the playoffs next year. The situation is now redefined as a conversation between equals about a mutual interest in basketball. And how the interaction proceeds from here—whether, for example, a context for potential romantic or sexual involvement is reestablished (and by whom)—will be entirely dependent on if and how new symbolic meanings are interactionally produced and interpretively processed.1 For the symbolic interactionist, the bar scene is, like the microworld in general, an emergent and evolving sphere of meaning established and negotiated through reciprocally informing cycles of interaction, symbol generation, and interpretation and definition.

Phenomenology (How Do We All Know We’re Even in a Bar?) A second foundational variety of microsociology is the phenomenological approach initiated by Alfred Schutz (1967; Schutz and Luckmann 1973, 1989). For phenomenological sociologists such as Schutz, the fundamental question about the micro-order is this: How is the taken-for-granted structure

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of everyday life—or the lifeworld, as Schutz called it—constituted in and through acts of consciousness?2 How, in other words, does the meaningful structure of any microscene manifest or “show up” in the lived experience of the individuals inhabiting it? And how is it that these profoundly subjective experiences of social reality become intersubjective—that is, shared in common with others? Like other microsociological approaches, phenomenological sociology focuses analytic attention on the taken-for-granted aspects of everyday life and asks how the social world comes to be experienced as an objective, durable reality shared in common with others. And also like other microsociological approaches, it assumes that these shared understandings and the taken-for-granted character of the social world are accomplishments of human meaning-making. Yet, instead of emphasizing the dynamics of situated interaction (as in SI, above) or the performances by which social actors establish and manage an impression of self (as in dramaturgy, below), phenomenological sociology attends first to the dynamics of human (inter)subjectivity. Indeed, perhaps more than any other microsociological approach, phenomenology emphasizes the importance of the first-person perspective (and the coordination of multiple first-person perspectives) for understanding the micro-order. For phenomenologists following the inspiration of Schutz, the first question to ask of a micro-order is what is most taken for granted. What aspects of this slice of microreality, in other words, must be unquestionably assumed for action and interaction to occur? For phenomenological sociologists, typification (Schutz and Luckmann 1973) is perhaps the most central of the mental operations by which consciousness constitutes a common world of experience and (inter)action. Typification is the process by which consciousness carves up and classifies social reality into different classes or types. In typification, social actors deploy a storehouse of practical knowledge in the form of maxims and recipes in order to make sense of and navigate the world with others. To go back to the scene at the bar, a phenomenological sociologist would note that when ordering a drink, our patron does not perceive the person behind the bar as only a unique individual but immediately experiences and interacts with him in a typified way—that is, as one individual example of the larger type known as “bartender” who will prepare and serve patrons alcoholic beverages in exchange for money. Notice that the patron does not only experience and interact with the individual behind the bar as a typical person—that is, a barkeep—but also imputes certain typical motives to him (that he wants to do his job well and does so in large part for financial

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gain) and assumes that he will perform typical actions in accordance with those motives (that he will prepare the drink and serve it to the patron in a timely manner). The bartender, for his part, also consciously confronts the individual ordering a drink in a typified manner—as one instance of the “patron” type who will order, consume, and pay for drinks in a manner consistent with that type and impute some typical motives to her for doing so (e.g., to drown sorrows, to relax, to enjoy an inebriated state, etc.). In addition, both the bartender and the patron typify the setting in which their typified social roles and actions take place—that is, a bar. However, a phenomenological analysis of the bar does not (or at least doesn’t have to) end there. From a Schutzian perspective, at the same time the bar scene is a world that people experience in common, it is also the case there are a plurality of subject-dependent meanings inherent within this one microscene. The meaning of a microsocial world is not only constituted through a taken-for-granted stock of knowledge shared by everyone involved but is also layered with the historically situated biographies and projects of individual social actors (Schutz 1967, 53–63). Projects, according to Schutz, are personally motivated, temporally extended, and futureoriented plans of action (see also Mische 2008; Tavory and Eliasoph 2013). It is only by also situating actors’ conduct within these more personal extended projects that we can fully understand the meaning of their actions as well as the way the context of action (the microworld) is experienced by the individual. To go back to our bar scene, a phenomenological sociologist would ask, “What is the larger project involved for the patron walking into the bar and ordering a drink? What about the bartender who prepares and serves the drink? The man who flirts with the female patron?,” and so on. For the female patron, the act of ordering the drink may be part of a more extended project of relaxing—perhaps even getting drunk—after a particularly grueling day at work. For the bartender, the act of preparing and serving the drink may be part of a more extended project of making money, getting a promotion, and/or honing his skills as a worker. For the male patron, the act of flirting may be part of a more extended project to find companionship, engage in a casual sexual encounter, and/or to boost his own sense of sexual desirability. In short, the meaning of our actors’ actions within the bar are guided and made meaningful by what Schutz (1967, 86) termed the “in-order-to motives” inherent in their projects (e.g., I go to the bar in order to get drunk, to make money, to “hook up,” etc.). Different projects imbue social scenes with what Schutz termed different systems of relevance—that is, what meaningfully “stands out” as significant about a scene and the objects within it.

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From the phenomenological perspective, the micro-order exists at the dynamic intersection of subjective projects and intersubjectively typified understandings. Through sharing a common stock of practical knowledge regarding social action in the form of typifications, social actors are able to intersubjectively coordinate their projects of action and create congruence between their otherwise different systems of relevance (Schutz and Luckmann 1973). The bar is experienced as a world for oneself as well as a world for others—a unique “province of meaning” where certain kinds of typical projects can coexist and coalesce (relaxing after a bad day at the office, engaging in service work, trying to find a date or sexual partner, etc.). Subjective projects, moreover, may shift and change based on intersubjective dynamics (e.g., what was initially a project to get drunk after work turns into a project to go home with someone) and vice versa. The microworld is a dynamic and multistable coordination of subjective and intersubjective experience, one largely accomplished through the shared stock of general knowledge actors use to understand others’ projects of action as well as organize their own conduct.

Ethnomethodology (Should I Ask “What Can I Get for You?”) Inspired by phenomenological sociology, the perspective of ethnomethodology pioneered by Harold Garfinkel (1967, 2002) and elaborated by, among others, scholars such as Harvey Sacks, Aaron Cicoreul, and Candace West also focuses attention on the taken-for-granted aspects of social life and asks how social orders come to be experienced as objective, commonsense realities. Taking seriously Émile Durkheim’s statement that sociology is the study of the objective reality of social facts, ethnomethodologists set out to document—often in excruciating detail—how this sense of objectivity or “matter-of-factness” is actively accomplished. Like phenomenologists, ethnomethodologists stress the importance of social actors’ knowledgeability or competence in coordinating their activities with one another. But for Garfinkel and subsequent ethnomethodologists, typification was not sufficient for explaining how social order was accomplished. For ethnomethodologists, the designation of what is “typical,” “normal,” or “to be expected” of a person, activity, place, and so forth, must itself be collectively accomplished and depends on a more foundational set of interactional competencies or forms of know-how. More specifically, ethnomethodologists argue that the social order is constantly being brought into existence by a shared corpus of social practices (or ethnomethods) through which social actors constitute even the most taken-for-granted aspects of the situation

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under which they are operating. More radically, the situation or social context itself simply is this ongoing work of actors making their actions intelligible or “accountable” to one another as instances of a typical kind of ordered reality. Ethnomethodology is precisely the study of (“ology”) everyday members’ (“ethno”) practices (“methods”) for rendering a taken-for-granted social reality. This is admittedly difficult to understand in the abstract, as we tend to experience our actions as taking place in already-existing situations, not as constantly creating them. Garfinkel (1967) was aware of the counterintuitive nature of this stance, and is perhaps most famous—at least among those who have taken an introduction to sociology class—for having his students conduct “breaching experiments” in order to demonstrate how the takenfor-granted features of social order are utterly dependent on the methods members use to make that context accountable (i.e., intelligible) to one another. So let’s imagine for a moment that the first patron in our bar scene is, in actuality, a graduate student being trained in ethnomethodology. To help make visible some of the work that goes into furnishing the unquestioned background for action, the student’s Garfinkel-inspired adviser has asked her to disrupt certain expectations associated with the bar. Upon entering the establishment, the patron/student/reluctant ethnomethodologist walks up to the bar and sits down. The bartender shortly walks up to her and asks, “Hi, there. What can I get for you?” In a serious tone, the patron responds, “A large trash bag full of unmarked hundred-dollar bills.” The bartender laughs. “Afraid that’s not on the menu today. Something else perhaps?” “OK . . . disappointing. A Vespa, then. I’ll take a Vespa.” “I’m not sure I know how to make one of those. Vodka-based?” “No, no, they’re out of Italy. The motorized scooter company. I’d love to ride around this place on one.” “Look, I’m sure this is funny for you and all, but I’ve got other customers here.” “Are you bringing them scooters, too?” “What the hell is wrong with you? Just order a drink or get out of here.” “Oh, a drink! Well, why didn’t you say so? I’ll take an espresso.” “This is a bar. We don’t have an espresso machine. I don’t make coffee. I make cocktails.” “Don’t be so hard on yourself. I’m sure you could make coffee if you just put your mind to it.”

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“OK, that’s it. I’m done with you. Get out of here, smartass.” After thanking the bartender for complimenting her posterior, the patron/student quickly leaves to take field notes and avoid being forcibly removed from the establishment. What can we possibly learn about the construction of social order from this? First, it demonstrates that in everyday life, social actors depend on a great deal of tacit, background knowledge in order to make sense and continue on with life together. When the bartender asks, “What can I get for you?,” the prevailing background assumption that any reasonable person would share is that the class of meaningful responses to such a question include only drinks, not bags full of money or Italian scooters. But interestingly, the bartender did not specify the meaning of his question as such. The question itself—“What can I get you?”—could hypothetically refer to any number of objects and services. It is in and of itself a woefully underspecified question. But this, for Garfinkel, is precisely the point. To construct and maintain the orderliness of action, social actors call upon one another and themselves to understand more than what is explicitly said by continually referencing (and thus continually reconstituting) a taken-for-granted background of understanding. The practical background of the interaction—the sequential ordering of the action in the here and now—more than the explicit words themselves, specifies the operative meanings. Thus, while symbolic interactionists tend to focus on what is up for interpretation within a particular context, ethnomethodologists focus on all of those things that are not up for interpretation and that, in fact, constitute the context upon which things can come up for definition in the first place (see Denzin 1969). The bartender’s sequential responses to the patron’s breach are also instructive. The bartender initially laughs and treats the patron’s request of a trash bag full of cash as a joke. For Garfinkel, this demonstrates how social actors are “geared into” making order out of potential disorder and how, in the face of instances where behaviors fall out of line with taken-for-granted expectations, actors will “fill in” new context—for example, this is an instance not of a legitimate drink order but of a joke. By laughing before responding that sacks full of hundred-dollar bills are not on the menu today, the bartender not only fills in proper context for the patron’s utterance but also makes observable to the patron his own competent understanding of that context (which the patron goes on to ignore, of course). In fact, this fitting together of particulars and generalities, instances and types, is precisely what goes into the making of social order, as social actors are constantly utilizing one pole (the particular) to invoke the other (the general) and vice

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versa. This “looping” quality in which context is at once a presupposed resource for and ongoing outcome of members’ practices is what ethnomethodologists refer to as the inherent, endemic “reflexivity” of action. In doing this work, the bartender attempts to keep the orderly structuring of the bar scene on track. But our patron simply won’t agree to go along. This leads to confusion, bewilderment, and anger, responses common to most, if not all, of Garfinkel’s infamous breaching experiments. Sometimes superficial reading of these reactions suggests they say something about the power of social norms. But for ethnomethodologists, it is not so much the violation of a norm that is the problem but what the violation of background expectancies does to the micro-order. In effect, the patron’s refusal to conform results in a breakdown of the ordering activities that furnish the taken-forgranted setting of the bar, the identities of its inhabitants, and the meaningful behaviors that are supposed to take place. Interrupting the ability of the bartender to simply “go on” with the interaction is a refusal of his status as a competent producer and thus member of the social order. The micro-order is also a delicate moral order built on very foundational assumptions regarding trust, reciprocity, and mutual intelligibility. The image of the microworld here is of an ongoing collective accomplishment, one constructed via tacit knowledge, a taken-for-granted trust in others’ social competency, and the orderly sequencing of mutually accountable practice.

Dramaturgy (Of Course I Know How to Make a Manhattan!) A final key foundational microapproach in need of discussion is Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective. Goffman’s dramaturgy is probably the most impressionistic of the foundational approaches, relying less on the construction and application of certain theoretical premises and more on illustrating—through an amazing multitude of cases—the insights gained from viewing social interaction through the metaphor of theatrical drama. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the microworld for Goffman is best conceptualized as a stage and human beings its performers, each playing many roles. Central to social interaction in the dramaturgical perspective is what Goffman (1959) termed impression management, which refers to the many ways social actors manage how they present themselves to others in order to sustain a desirable impression of self. Like symbolic interactionists, Goffman viewed the self as essentially a social product. Yet, rather than analyzing the self as a locus of internalized social interaction as Blumer (following Mead) did, Goffman radically externalized the self, analyzing it as the fragile outcome of a multifaceted performance that was never completely under the

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control of the individual. Indeed, individuals both rely on supraindividual contextual factors to assemble their performances of self and fundamentally depend on the actions and reactions of others for their performances to reach “dramatic realization”—that is, the successful realization of our performance of self. While, in most cases, social actors seem to successfully perform a socially acceptable impression of self, this still always requires a significant amount of interactional work. To better understand what goes into the microdrama of the self, let’s once again go to the bar, this time focusing on our bartender. From the dramaturgical perspective, the bartender must marshal, in the best way he can, the expressive equipment available to him in the bar in order to pull off his desired impression as a competent service worker. The most fundamental contextual element at his disposal is the bar itself, which furnishes “the stage” for his performance. Goffman himself made a fundamental distinction between “backstage” and “front stage,” conceptually designating those social spaces in which actors are actively managing impressions in front of social others (the front stage) and those in which they are out of the limelight, so to speak, but often actively preparing for being in front of the audience (backstage). Let’s imagine, for example, that our bartender is hanging out in the kitchen area of the tavern, a common backstage area for service workers in the food and beverage industries. Here, while our bartender engages in small talk and exchanges jokes with his coworkers before starting his shift after a three-day weekend, he learns that the bar’s management has decided to completely rearrange the area behind the bar to fit a more modern aesthetic. Starting his shift in just minutes, the bartender is furious and anxietyridden about not being informed sooner, as he realizes that the “props” of his trade—bottles of liquor, wine, and beer; garnishes; glasses; mugs; mixers; taps; and so forth—are not going to be in their accustomed locations, and he has no time to figure out the new arrangements. Hurrying to the front-stage region behind the bar to start his shift, the bartender tries to not let his audience—including our patron who has just arrived for drinks after a long day at the office—see his frustration. The consummate professional, the bartender puts on a smile and chats up his customers, taking drink orders and displaying a sharp appearance and carefree demeanor—elements of what in dramaturgical terms is called a social front. In not showing his frustration in the front-stage arena of interactions with customers (his audience) and by presenting a professionalized service worker front, the bartender is also engaging in what Goffman (1959, 35) termed idealization, a performance that “incorporate[s] and exemplif[ies] the officially accredited values of the society.” No one likes an angry bar-

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tender, after all, and from experience, our barkeep knows that performing in this way also tends to lead to better tips. But when the bartender sets out to make a Manhattan for our first patron, some cracks in the social front start to appear. Due to his manager’s rearranging of his workstation, our bartender doesn’t know where the bottles of rye whiskey, cocktail glasses, or vermouth and bitters are now located. As he wanders around the bar trying to find these items, his smile turns to a grimace, and he looks visibly confused and frustrated. He notices that his customer is watching him, observing his confusion and change in demeanor. He makes an effort to put the smile back on his face, shrugs his shoulders, and says, “The bosses moved everything around on me over the weekend. Management can be a real pain in the ass, am I right?” “Oh yeah, totally,” our patron responds, also attempting to help the bartender maintain his performance. This collective attempt to repair embarrassing or otherwise self-damaging situations is what dramaturgists term face work. After several minutes of searching, our bartender manages to finally find all of the elements he needs to mix the cocktail but soon realizes that his other customers are growing impatient because they haven’t received their drinks. Growing increasingly frustrated and flummoxed, the bartender attempts to make the drink too quickly and accidentally knocks the cocktail glass to the floor. His social front seems all but breached now, and our bartender is unfortunately in for a long night of face work. For Goffman-inspired dramaturgical sociologists, the bar scene is nothing less than a complex, high-stakes drama. Placed upon the stage of the social, social actors utilize the microsetting in their attempts to arrive at dramatic realization—to “pull off ” and “play out” a particular performance of self. In the dramaturgical microworld, while the stage itself may seem a rather stable background of self-presentation, selves continually show up as dynamic, fragile, collective performances.

beyond foundational approaches The second part of this chapter details more contemporary theorists of the micro. Of course there has been a lot of good work and theorizing about the micro in the decades since the apex of the foundational approaches in the 1960s and 1970s, but we can’t possibly cover all of this ground. Because it’s very hard not to be encyclopedic, we instead organize the contributions to focus on a handful of interesting exemplars. As with the previous sec-

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tion, we explore the landscape of diverging theories by looking at the key concepts organizing said variation and the work these concepts perform in advancing our understanding and knowledge of the microsocial world, especially regarding how the social order is achieved. In all the contemporary programs, what we encounter is an extension and recombination of insights that were originally part of separate programs. In some cases, those encounters have crystallized into new programs of their own (institutional ethnography, interaction ritual chains, social worlds, group sociology, and laboratory studies). In other cases, a new “normal science” of the micro has emerged in which insights from dramaturgical and interactional sociology produce convincing descriptions of the social world.

Extending Symbolic Interactionism How do you become a regular or a patron? What kinds of activities coordinate our experience of the bar so as to make it seamless? What are the many small collective tasks behind the bartender being able to be the star performer? And how much is your range of action constrained by committing to being a regular at a bar? Drawing on the pioneering ethnographic work of Everett Hughes (1984), Howard Becker (1982; Becker et al. 1961) has emphasized how diverse social worlds—arts, medical schools, drug subcultures—are comparable in a few respects: the processes of socialization and initiation, the ceremonies that produce membership, and the mechanisms that set the boundaries between disciplines that share similar codes. One of Becker’s key departures from the more traditional versions of symbolic interactionism is his emphasis on how the life cycle increasingly constrains the creativity of social action. While learning to order and enjoy a Manhattan is an affair that can’t be predicted by social background, it happens as one becomes a member of a social group, and concepts like “commitment” or “latent culture” show how much an adult socialized in a particular world acquires resources and conventions that condition his or her motivation and possibilities to act. The concept of world intertwines with the idea of conventions. In his work on art worlds, for instance, Becker describes complex cooperation networks (though they are not always horizontal). The concept of the art world allowed Becker to show how cultural objects are collectively produced, in order to illuminate the division of labor that this entails, and how conventions are central for making cultural products less costly and more effective. In a paradoxical turn, the emphasis on conventions, which shows up in the metaphor of jazz as a concerted and collaborative activity (which appears as early as the 1950s in Outsiders to later be revisited in 2009 and 2013),

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Becker sees the possibility of finding creative lines of action in the cooperative interaction in which behavior is constrained both by traditions and resources. Moreover, his latest work with Rob Faulkner (Faulkner and Becker 2009) incorporates lessons from the world of laboratory studies (see below) in showing how the standard jazz repertory is assembled. Here, he reveals that it is not by the laborious introjection of x amount of pieces but rather, by improvising together based on the harmonic progression of the music at hand that knowledge gets both transmitted and produced in the process of making music. If Becker emphasizes worlds and conventions, a few scholars following the work of Anselm Strauss3 (1978) contend that situations are not enough and that we instead need to focus on groups and how they cement both the individual and society. The most important proponent of this view (which permeates a lot of empirical work less interested in providing the reader with an extended theoretical toolbox) is Gary Fine (1983, 1987, 1996, 1998, 2010), who has abstracted and formalized a theory of how groups operate and how they also constitute society, through the intersection of multiple localized interaction orders, which he terms tiny publics (Fine 2010 and 2012; see also Fine and Harrington 2004). For him, situations are not enough, as they ignore the sedimented history and the collective understanding of action beyond the immediate context. Fine centers his explanation on idiocultures, as he thinks local culture sediments past interactions and provides the basis for future interactions. The key is the analysis of how interaction is a continuous occurrence from which meaning can be derived. In what he terms sociological miniaturism, he analyzes the mechanisms through which groups are constituted, bounded, and segmented. In his empirical work, he analyzes the idiocultures, the boundary work, the ceremonies of inclusion and exclusion, the resulting established divisions, and the local talk that serves as the mesolevel context for self-referential horizons of action. The local is the place where culture is both learned and deployed and what makes shared recognition among participants possible. Even in unscripted groups, participants depend on idiocultures as a road map for how to act in a local context, aiming to understand stable expectations and reconstruct and restore the shared experience that makes—for him—action possible.4

Doing Gender and Institutional Ethnography Beginning in the 1980s, prominent feminist sociologists developed theoretical and methodological approaches that profoundly shaped the way soci-

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ologists thought not only about gender but about the micro-order as well.5 Arguably, the two most influential perspectives here are that of Candace West and Dorothy Smith. West along with coauthor Zimmerman (1987) criticized more mainstream approaches that conceptualized and operationalized gender as a static variable, social role, or individual attribute. Extending ethnomethodological insights, West and Zimmerman instead argued that gender is the outcome of what people do in everyday interactions together—in other words, social actors “do gender” as an ongoing, socially organized accomplishment. To put it in the simplest terms, gender is not something one is as an individual but rather something one does with others. “Doing gender” is about the ongoing, microinteractional work that goes into constantly (re-)creating differences between the categories of men and women, boys and girls. We could look, for example, at a number of features of the rather stereotypical interaction of “buying a drink” and how these features at once recruit and help re-create distinctions between men and women. In buying the drink, the ostensibly male patron is enacting a gendered, heteronormative script in which economically more powerful men buy consumer goods for appreciative women in exchange for social pleasantries and the possibility of a romantic and/or sexual encounter. In the doing of the drink buying, the patron is also doing distinctions between genders. Gender, in West’s microsociology, refers precisely to people’s engagement in these types of ongoing, situated activities in light of normative expectations about what is “appropriate” or “inappropriate” in terms of being male or a female.6 At around the same time West was developing her ethnomethodologically inspired approach to microlevel gender analysis, Dorothy Smith (1987) was developing her critique of the gendered practices of sociological knowledge production, arguing that the experiences of men were taken as the unacknowledged starting point of social scientific theory and research. Out of this critique arose a full-blown theoretical and methodological approach Smith came to call institutional ethnography (Smith 1987, 2005; see also DeVault 1999). In institutional ethnography (IE), Smith combined phenomenology’s concern with lived experience and ethnomethodology’s perspective on the social as the ongoing coordination of people’s activities with a Marxist focus on power dynamics and extralocal social relations. As a method, IE begins with the lived experiences of located individuals and then seeks to discover how these experiences are shaped by the local and extralocal coordination of these individuals’ activities. To go back to the bar, Smith and other institutional ethnographers might first look to how the lived experience of the bar changes depending on

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whether we begin our scene with “a guy” or “a woman” walks into a bar. If our patron is a woman, for example, aspects of the bar experience will unfortunately include safety considerations that would not be present for a male patron. In our contemporary society, women are taught—and not without reason—to be constantly vigilant around their drinks and drinking behavior, lest a predator attempt to sexually assault them while they are inebriated (or even slip incapacitating drugs into their drinks while they are unaware). The bar scene, like many social spaces, is embedded with potential dangers for women that do not exist for men. An institutional ethnographer would then go on to examine the local and extralocal interactions and activities that structure the experience of the bar in such gendered ways.7 Locally, an IE practitioner might examine how the activities and policies of the bar establishment itself contributes to or lessens the possibility of sexual violence and predation. Are bar employers encouraged and trained to identify and intervene in cases of unwanted sexual advances?8 Or to be on the lookout for potential “date rape” drugs such as rohypnol? An institutional ethnographer would then also attempt to map the ways these activities are connected to and affected by institutional arrangements occurring outside of the bar itself. How, for example, did it come to be that the problem of sexual assault while drinking alcohol become defined as primarily a women’s problem that has, to a major extent, been internalized by women as such? Why, for example, has the problem not been focused on male perpetrators? Or on the alcohol sales and advertising industry? Answering these questions requires extending the microinteractional analysis into what we generally consider “macro-” or “meso-” level territory, as the institutional ethnographer tracks how the work of media, business, and political institutions has effectively structured the gendered space of the bar. Institutional ethnography, then, not only provides a compelling gender critique of sociological perspectives on the micro-order but also creates a perspective that attempts to create methodological and theoretical linkages between the micro-, meso-, and even macrodomains.

Interaction Ritual Chains Randall Collins has followed a different path, sourcing from one of Goffman’s key assertions: what matters to explain social action is not “men and their moments. Rather, moments and their men” (Goffman 1967, 3). Extending the idea of Interaction Ritual from the 1967 homonymous book by Goffman, Collins makes interaction ritual chains the center of his intellectual

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project. Collins started with his 1981 article in which he asserted the constitutive character of microsituations in organizing macro orders; elaborated on it in his work on the sociology of philosophy (Collins, 1998) in which he emphasized the collaborative character of intellectual production, focusing on two particular organizational pressures—on the one hand, the affective relationship between mentor and disciple, and on the other, the small attention space available for “big” intellectual ideas and the jockeying that it produces for positions, status, and resources; and culminated by producing a systematic account of the concept in his book of the same title (Collins, 2004), focusing on how moments of solidarity and successful “groupness” are the result of events through which participants become attuned to each other, being able to abstract themselves from any outside distraction. Integrating interaction within the theoretical coordinates of Durkheimian sociology, which emphasizes the centrality of rituals that produce effervescence, Collins makes of emotional energy, and its scarce or restricted character, the motivating factor in the lines of actions pursued by agents, who flock from situation to situation. Rituals summon the participation of individuals who search for emotional resonance with others, while failed rituals drain emotional energy from them. An interactional ritual includes bodily copresence, a mutual focus of attention among participants, the exclusion of outside events, and a resulting shared emotional quality. The model of an interactional situation is constructed around two dimensions: (1) whether the mutual focus of attention indeed happens and (2) how much emotional entrainment it builds among those participating. When the interaction ritual is successful, the emotional energy becomes intensified, and the individuals who participate become absorbed into the object (or symbol) in common. Moreover, the experience happens both at the external and internal level, so it generates something akin to what Durkheim (1965 [1912]) named collective effervescence. Collins asserts that individuals aim to imbue routinized ties with emotional energy. And that even at the level of the individual, conversations become internalized (Collins 2007) in such a way that even activities conducted in solitary (e.g., smoking a cigarette, listening to an opera record alone [Benzecry and Collins 2014]) are still internalizations of the flow of the situation, as the individual self is constructed from the outside in. After his exploration of the ritual and antirituals of smoking (Collins 2004, chapter 8), one could imagine that drinking at a bar would be “cased” looking at three particular features: (1) how the rituals that allow for people to have their bodies intertwined with a social experience build a feedback of mutual entrainment between the two experiences; (2) the rhythms achieved

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in the intertwining of the bodies in the experience; and (3) whether the ingestion is publicly allowed for or forbidden, exploring the boundaries built around the ritual itself. Among those who have followed this strand of Goffmanian theory, there are two books worthy of mention for how they have refined and expanded two of its key tenets: (1) the rhythms of social life and (2) the emotional/collaborative character of knowledge production. On the first account, Erika Summers Effler (2010) has explored how the key to explaining the endurance of social movements (and of groups at large) is to observe how emotions fuel movements even in situations in which the group struggles to achieve what they first wanted. Groups appear not as stable entities but rather as multistable “flows” dependent on speed, tempo, and ongoing emotional investment. Her focus on collapse, recovery, and adjustment resembles Farrell’s (2001) interest in the sequential character of intellectual collaboration and how it happens away from powerful mentors. Focused on how collaborative circles also build themselves through emotional dynamics—although here, instead of competing for the space of the mentor’s dedicated attention like in Collins (1998), the motivating factor rests on the self-other mirroring images built by the intimacy fostered by dyads—the author provides us with a powerful model for how emotions and tempo sustain grouping over time.

Laboratory Studies: How Do We Interact with Nonhumans? There are two traditions in laboratory studies, and they both involve the study of work. Nevertheless, the starting definition of work differs quite considerably between them. For authors like Lynch (1985, 1993) or Pollner (1987) who follow ethnomethodological postulates about knowledge (on this, see Garfinkel 1967, chapter 8), work is about the study of ordinary methods through which people conduct their practical affairs, and how in doing so, they constitute scenes and interaction. The research of Lynch extended this by showing the ordinary, day-to-day production of scientific methods. Two methodological principles are worth mentioning here: one, what Garfinkel called ethnomethodological indifference, or the idea that there is nothing a priori beneath the native practice; and two, what Garfinkel and Lynch call the “missing what” in the studies of professions in which they criticize scholars for the excessive focus on the institutional factors and context around practice, failing to present how actors manage to do science together, how they pragmatically establish what counts as adequacy, appropriateness, and accuracy. Unlike science studies, with its focus on discourses and the inscription of activities into signs (Latour 1987; Latour and Woolgar

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1979), Lynch (1993) wanted to make explicit the gap between formal bureaucratic and institutional accounts and the natural accountability of the lifeworld. Instead of step-by-step programs, he focused on the temporal coordination of tasks and projects and on how scientific facts are extracted from the lifeworld of the lab. His approach, in which the researcher has to master the discipline (scientific or otherwise) to operate within the competence system of what she wants to study, has two paradoxical consequences. One, to rescue the specificity of what is being produced, to show how categories are constituted during encounters—in the case of the lab, the production of scientific facts as outcomes; and two, to submerge what is being done into a “vulgar” competency like talk. Scholars following the work of Everett Hughes and under the guidance of Anselm Strauss also emphasize how theories and facts are a form of collective behavior, but they do so by focusing on the contextual factors that shape scientific work. Implicit in this approach is the equation between working and knowing, so scholars like Susan Leigh Star (1985) have shown how the evolution of theories is best explained by detailing the conditions under which scientific work is produced—for example, scientific careers, the struggles for resources, the impact of technology in disseminating the findings, as well as the division of labor within the scientific process itself. Following Strauss (1978), her work focuses on scientists as a group with shared commitments that need to manage the constant complexity and uncertainty of the workplace. On top of highlighting the work of collaboration and the ecologies of action through which people with different definitions of the situation meet to produce work in common (Star 1995), scholars in this tradition (Henderson 1991; Star and Griesemer 1989) have also invoked the role of materiality, more precisely what they have called boundary objects, in explaining communication between multiple constituencies. These kinds of objects serve as points of reference, allowing the translation of the common object into multiple logics. These objects are central in producing what scholars have termed distributed cognition, because materials remain flexible for group use and capture various forms of nonverbal knowledge; boundary objects are thus both elastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. Combining these traditions with constructivist arguments on science and how facts are produced, Karin Knorr-Cetina built an exploration of the machinery around how knowledge is assembled. In her earlier work (Knorr-

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Cetina 1981), she did so by focusing on the laboratory as a particular locale in which instruments and devices are central to the workshop-like production of knowledge. In her second book (Knorr-Cetina 1999), she expanded the scale of her inquiry to what she called epistemic culture, showing how tools, devices, and experimentations build into a local contexture that produces relatedness and clustering between the various parts of the laboratory (subjects, tools, signals, experiments, etc.). She also extended the lifeworld of the laboratory, following the traffic of objects across multiple actually existing labs, which act then as locales. In showing the richly textured intertwining between environment and culture, between spatial organization and the rhetorical production of facts, she explains the variation of how knowledge is produced across different scientific disciplines, asserting the work of labs in “enculturing” natural objects and in producing people as particular epistemic subjects. What matters even more for the argument we are aiming to advance here is her more recent work on financial markets (Knorr-Cetina 2009; KnorrCetina and Bruegger 2002; Knorr-Cetina and Preda 2007) in which she emphasizes the virtually mediated character of embodiment and interaction in modern life. There, she first elaborated on the concept of “global microstructure,” calling attention to how a mediated interaction order has become constitutive of processes of global scope, how actors in distant locales still orient their actions toward one another, paying special attention to the work of temporal coordination needed to make financial markets operate seamlessly. She borrowed from Schutz and Luckmann (1973) the concept of appresentation to emphasize how screens participate in bringing what is geographically distant closer to participants. Later on, she formalized her work beyond financial markets and extended it to other kinds of interaction, calling those encounters in which an environment is augmented by scopic components a “synthetic situation.” If we were to play some more with our bar example, we can imagine how people interact with screens, watching sports in real time as they talk with their friends next to them, or as they check their smartphones, looking at Tinder for dates, to Facebook and Instagram for real-time updates on what their friends are doing, or engaging in face-to-face conversations via Skype or Facetime. Moreover, we can envision research involving the reorganization of dating markets because of technological disruption, as individuals cross information from the multiple databases of people they have in front of them.9

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a new “normal science” of the micro? On top of these innovative and programmatic approaches, something akin to a new “normal science” of the micro has emerged. It combines the techniques of impression management from Goffman, the attention to situational context of symbolic interactionism, and the taken-for-grantedness of categories of experience from phenomenology and ethnomethodology. Authors care about face work, worlds, negotiations, and situations. This approach, even though it is not explicitly theoretical, has nonetheless reorganized the meaning of microsociology and has been used in ethnographic research to observe competing urban codes of morality (Anderson 1990; Duneier 1992, 1999; Horowitz 1983); the relationship between humans and animals (Jerolmack 2013; Sanders 1999); the confidence games of blues players and exotic dancers (Grazian 2003, 2004; Pasko 2002); the careers of semiprofessional hip-hop artists, tour guides, and opera fans (Benzecry 2009; Lee 2009; Wynn 2011); and sexuality and gender as collective achievements (Grazian 2007), among many other topics. If the previous intersections we presented as programs coalesced in a distinctive way, there are also other original intersections that have not yet produced schools but are nevertheless worth mentioning because they provide new directions to understand what it means to conceptualize the world as constituted by phenomena at the microscale. The first one is the intersection between phenomenology and symbolic interactionism that can be found in the work of Jack Katz; the second is the marriage of cognitive sociology, Simmelian theory, and Goffmanian frame analysis found in the work of Eviatar Zerubavel and his students; and the third, the renewed interest in phenomenology and pragmatism and their marriage in the “sociology of the future.” These last two are not stricto sensu “theories of the micro” as much as they are theories of (inter)action and agency that take the micro seriously. Interestingly enough and despite his debt mostly to phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, the work of Jack Katz (1988, 1999, 2002) can be thought as also aiming to investigate one of Goffman’s (1969) key interests: where the action is. In his book Seductions of Crime, for instance, Katz (1988) advocates a movement from background conditions to foreground factors in order to understand why people commit crimes. He encourages other sociologists to follow his research strategy and think not about the background conditions that would make someone a criminal but rather what about the foreground characteristics of the practice or object is seductive in itself (in the case of crime, its association with risk, danger, prohibition, etc.). The result of this strategy is to understand what is morally and sensually attractive

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about a practice as much as how the practice is constitutive of the person who partakes in it. In his latter explorations on how individuals structure the narrative of their emotions, Katz ties together three traditions: the symbolic interactionism of Mead, the attention to phenomenological structures of Schutz, and the care for the body of Merleau-Ponty. In his complex account of emotion as a reflexive action, he establishes a three-pronged structure in which we have first to look at how action is constituted in interaction, either in direct collaboration with others, or anticipating the meaning others might infer from it; second, how that action might be part of a project or a practical course of action, independent of real-time copresence; and third, how corporeal processes produce awareness and action. In observing the aesthetic and transformative elements of feelings, Katz gives preponderance to the researcher, as someone who can observe the corporeal processes beyond the direct awareness of the actor herself, making visible the invisible (something we’ll elaborate more on later in the chapter). There is one strand of Goffmanian sociology that has been less central in microsociology, despite its fruitfulness elsewhere:10 the idea of frame.11 The work of Eviatar Zerubavel (1997, 2007, and 2015, among many others) and his students (mainly Wayne Brekhus, Asia Friedman, and Tom DeGloma) has aimed to explore how we make sensory experience perceptible by making it into significant symbols and categories (e.g., calendars, maps, trees, census). The key assertion of this theoretical strand is that while the world is continuous, we perceive it discretely, and the resulting main focus has been the study of the “filtering” mechanisms through which reality is lumped or split, marked or unmarked, made into background or foreground, or circumscribed so as to be taken for granted (Brekhus 1998). To the focus on cognition and the basic features of social perception (Zerubavelians would probably ask at the bar: why do people think wine is closer to beer, and orange juice closer to grape juice?), this group adds a Simmelian call to generalize conclusions about social patterns more generally; so while Brekhus (2003) studies gay identity, his conclusions about how density and duration organize the self as a grammar in which sometimes someone’s selfidentification is a noun, others a verb, and other times an adjective should be something that could be transcontextually transposed to other occasions. The same goes for Friedman’s (2012, 2013) description of sex and race attribution as a draining process in which the real focus is on how for the blind the lack of sight makes for a different temporality in attribution of difference, complicating models of automatic cognition that work through the categories we take for granted (black/white, female/male). A third group of scholars have extended the Schutzian focus on tempo-

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rality to understand how social actors’ deliberations about the future shape events at both the micro- and macroscale, an emerging perspective we might term the sociology of the future. In his study of the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, David Gibson (2012) has argued for the role of microcontingency and future-oriented decision-making even for events of geopolitical scale and importance. Marrying Schutz and conversation analysis, the book explores how deliberating about the future at the microlevel plays a role in the lines of action actors take as they engage in decisions about political events at the macrolevel, and the relationship between environmental factors, temporality, turn taking, and conversational rules and procedures in producing such decisions. In her study of Brazilian youth activists, Ann Mische (2001; see also 2008) explores how youth leaders link personal projects to those of larger collectivities, adding a temporal dimension to the micro- and mesodynamics of political action. More recently, Mische (2009) outlines a number of dimensions—such as depth, breadth, clarity, and so forth—along which actors’ projected futures can be sociologically examined. Tavory and Eliasoph (2013) theorize how the future structures not just individual action but collective interaction, developing a conceptual schema that focuses on how actors must coordinate relationships among different levels of anticipation—from the fleeting protentions that structure moment-tomoment interaction to the large-scale temporal landscapes (such as calendar grids and clock time)—in order to make sense of action together. Tavory and Winchester (2012) theorize the “experiential careers” of social actors’ practical involvements, examining how the personally significant experiences (e.g., religious, aesthetic, romantic, intellectual, etc.) associated with those practices become routinized and deroutinized in socially patterned ways, melding an interactional “career” perspective with the phenomenology of the body.

how do we know what we know? How do the varieties of microsociology help sociologists answer questions about knowledge? Given that in this set of traditions theoretical issues are deeply intertwined with methodological considerations, we will also consider the conceptualization issues that have been at the core of the debates about the ethnographic method. Grounded theorists and analytic inductors and abductors (Becker 1998; Blumer 1969; Glaser and Strauss 1967; Katz 2001; Tavory and Timmermans 2009) have brought an open-ended approach to the relationship between theory and data, developing sensitizing

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concepts, and pushing us to ask what is the best question the data can actually answer (Becker 1998). The “grounded theory” approach developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967; see also Charmaz 2006) outlines a quintessentially inductive method in which the sociologist discards preexisting theoretical frames and begins only with the data. Theory is not the starting point but the end result of a process of constructing theoretical concepts and frameworks through aggregating and abstracting from the data. While grounded theory remains the most widely cited framework for theory building among microsociologists, some of its epistemological claims are also controversial. In particular, sociologists have criticized the notions that theoretical assumptions can so simply be left behind by the investigator and that empirical observations can occur in “raw” form, completely untouched by any preexisting beliefs about the nature of said reality. Based on the work of pragmatist philosopher Charles Peirce, Timmermans and Tavory (2012; Tavory and Timmermans 2009) have recently developed a proposed alternative that privileges an “abductive” as opposed to “inductive” approach to the relationship between data and theory. Rather than approach data as theoretical atheists, Timmermans and Tavory argue that sociologists should be well-informed theoretical agnostics, equipped with knowledge of a variety of explanatory frameworks that could potentially fit the data at hand. The abductive analyst then reasons analogically from data to frameworks, looking for unexpected or surprising results that contrast with or contradict existing theories. Importantly, searching for interesting contradictions between theories and data necessitates in-depth familiarity—not defamiliarization—with a number of theoretical frameworks. While analytical induction is not a logic that belongs exclusively to the qualitative method, it has been since its inception closely associated with symbolic interactionism. Unlike causality built from random samples, there is no methodological value in piling up confirming cases; causal inference is built through retrodiction, and the objective is to specify the individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions to understand the emergence of social life; explanation is actually an attempt to understand difference (Katz 2001). Ethnographers look for multivaried data, as to be able to search for internal variation within the kind of phenomena. In each case, the researcher searches for the kind of data she would need to support her hypothesis, then maps out what would be the necessary data at hand to gather support for (or discard) an alternative explanation. The key is to patiently take the false starts, the struggles in establishing the study object during the context of discovery, as part of the knowledge enterprise, almost as a

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mandatory step against theoretical omniscience and in the service of better knowing. This continues until the researcher can no longer practically pursue negative cases. Part of the appeal of the method is in how things are narratively presented (Katz 2002), working through the processes that make social life up in order to provide explanations for it. Convincing descriptions get tied up with explanation; it’s through the how that we make the why of a particular observed event possible. Moreover, the data are built on the social psychological assumption that each subjectively distinctive stretch of personal experience comes “with a tail of biographical length” (Katz 2001, 15). Being able to make that visible happens precisely in the explanation of how people acquire the practicalities of action, how they express matters of selfawareness and self-regard, and what are the sensual bases of motivation (which dovetails with his interest in embodiment). This last one allows the researcher to observe the emotional and physical foundations of motivation in how subjects actually experience particular forces (which might actually be invisible to himself or herself ). If Katz combined symbolic interactionism with phenomenology, his student Maggie Kusenbach (2003) interrogates how good interviews and participant observation are for capturing the structures of the lifeworld. She calls her method the “go-along ethnography.” She sees it as being in between formal interviewing and being a participant or an observer. In it, she aims to elicit the mundane level of experience via a systematic revisit of some of the participants’ observed routines. She does so by listening to the participants’ narratives as they move together through space, in order to establish how individuals think of social realms, perceive their surroundings, and organize the world and their own biographies in it spatially, establishing, in consequence, the horizons the subject carries privately.

conclusion: the world on a bar stool This whirlwind tour of the varieties of microsociology has led us down a somewhat winding path of perspectives and concepts—impression management, typifications, symbolic interactions, coordinated temporalities, and so on. Each microsociological school of thought, however, whether foundational or more contemporary, has marshaled these concepts for a similar purpose. Microsociology shares an argument that we can best understand what is most essential about the microworld as a whole through detailed examination of particular scenes. In other words, we best understand how

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the social whole works through detailed examinations of the parts. So this same little scene—“a woman walks into a bar”—has served to reveal evermore detailed information not just about the way people order a drink but also the constituent elements that make up social life at the microlevel (e.g., coordinated temporalities, interaction rituals, bodily intentionality, etc.). Such concepts are attempts to understand how those things we most take for granted—the minutiae of everyday life together—are actually the outcomes of ongoing collective accomplishments. Out of the potential chaos of face-toface interaction emerges orderly events, interpretive engagements, intelligible sequences of action, selves, and so on. Microsociology is perhaps based on a sociologization of what is usually posed as a theological question: how does something come from nothing? From the viewpoint of microsociology, in all of its varieties, social actors are the demigods of the mundane, calling forth meaningful social substance out of the void. The variety of microconceptual apparatuses also serve as pragmatic tools by which practicing sociologists can orient their research. The problem of rendering order from contingency, in other words, extends from the microworld itself into research about the microworld. Indeed, the implied fourth person in our bar scene is always a sociologist, asking himself or herself “what the hell is going on here that is interesting, sociologically speaking?” Dramaturgical conceptual tools orient the researcher to the performances of self; symbolic interactionist tools to the interpretation of the situation; ethnomethodological tools to the ad hoc accounting practices that make the ongoing sequences of action intelligible; and so on. In positive terms, each conceptual apparatus means that there is always some sociological question to be derived from the chaos of data collection. In perhaps less positive terms, it means that that which is rendered from the data always leaves hidden some other aspect of what could be known. The focus on the interpretation of the situation, for example, tends to black box all those tacit, mutually agreed-upon understandings that make interpretive difference possible in the first place. At the same time, a focus on shared ethnomethods or stocks of knowledge tends to focus less on the creative twists and turns of symbolic behavior and interpretation. A focus on selves as public performances renders opaque identity’s more social-psychological dynamics. In conceptually ordering the messy data derived from the microworld, researchers perhaps face a sociological version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—that is, the more we attempt to examine something about one aspect of the microscene, the less we seem to be able to know about some other aspect. But how to solve the problem of what is unanticipated and unaccounted for in research is only part of the role of agency within these traditions. De-

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spite their many differences when it comes to conceptualizing selfhood and action, and the multitude of names under which constraints, patterns, and regularity appear in this literature (as sedimentations, careers, double side bets, inertia, routinized forms of action, boundaries, social worlds, expectations, etc.), one of the common tenets across this scholarship is the role of irony and contingency; that despite the multiple determinations of social action, the variability and context dependency of human behavior, things could always be otherwise (to paraphrase Everett Hughes); they are not inevitable. We want to finish this chapter by evocating this through the far more poetic words of Borges (1964, 208); we imagine most microsociologists would agree with them: “We have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.”

notes Equal authors. Authorship by alphabetical order. The authors would like to thank Iddo Tavory, Andrew Deener, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. 1. Of course, this interpretive process is something that can only be inferred with observational methods. Interview methods would be necessary for a more exact understanding of the internalized communication the subject had with herself. However, for some research purposes, it may simply be enough to know that the initial definition of the situation was “overturned” by the refusal of the drink. 2. Throughout his intellectual career, Schutz’s major project was to apply the foundational phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl to the social sciences. Husserl focused most intensely on the invariant structures of human consciousness and how those structures dictate how aspects of reality appear to or “show up” in human experience. For Schutz, the sociological extension of this focus was a lifelong reflection on how social reality is structured by the operations of human consciousness. 3. Anselm Strauss studied in Chicago under Blumer and Hughes (where he also worked as an assistant professor, and with Goffman and Becker constituted what is called the “second Chicago school”). He contributed to symbolic interactionism by coining concepts like routine action, negotiated order, and social world. He was also innovative in research methods, being one of the proponents of grounded theory and in his field, medical sociology. He later became a professor at University of California, San Francisco where he trained scholars such as Susan Leigh Star, Kathy Charmaz, and Adele Clark. 4. More recently, Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman (2003) have elaborated on the notion of group style to explain how cultural structures are filtered, differently enacted, and put to work by different groups.

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5. To underscore even more the elective affinities between microtraditions and studies of gender production, it’s worthy of mention that many gender and sexuality scholars who have branched out into other subfields within sociology, sometimes even establishing separate schools like institutional ethnography, have started their sociological explorations as ethnographers trained by practitioners of the microtraditions. So, for example, Patricia Clough studied with Norman Denzin; Marjorie DeVault with Howard Becker; and Sherryl Kleinman with Gary Fine. More recently, we could include here the work of Victoria Pitts Taylor, who worked under Stefan Timmermans (who himself worked under Susan Leigh Star). 6. In later work with Fenstermaker (West and Fenstermaker 1995), West and her coauthor extended this perspective to encompass racial, sexual, and class-based distinctions as well—a perspective they referred to as “doing difference.” 7. For instance, if it is a corporate bar with franchises, is there a manual or textbook of operations? Does it say anything about how patrons should be served? How waiters and waitresses should dress? How to greet patrons? 8. See, for example, the Safe Bars project (http://www.collectiveactiondc.org/programs /safe-bars/). 9. More recently, Campos-Castillo and Hitlin (2013) have reconceptualized copresence as a degree of entrainment in which technologically mediated, imaginary, and parasocial activities (e.g., watching TV) are taken into account. 10. After the work of Snow and Benford (1988), frame analysis has become one of the central theories in social movements scholarship. 11. In the latter part of his career, Goffman (1974) distinguished even more between the precarious character of the structuration of social life and the subjective sense of reality of it as frail and contingent. Moreover, he posited the world as objectively structured, with the rules of the frames structured almost as a language, amalgamating the different components of an activity.

references Anderson, Elijah. 1990. Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Becker, Howard, Blanche Geer, Everett C. Hughes, and Anselm Strauss. 1961. Boys in White. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. ———. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1998. Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You’re Doing It. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Becker, Howard S., and Robert R. Faulkner. 2013. Thinking Together: An E-Mail Exchange and All That Jazz. Los Angeles: USC Annenberg Press.

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Benzecry, Claudio, and Randall Collins. 2014. “The High of Cultural Experience toward a Microsociology of Cultural Consumption.” Sociological Theory 32 (4): 307–26. doi: 10.1177/0735275114558944. Benzecry, Claudio E. 2009. “Becoming a Fan: On the Seductions of Opera.” Qualitative Sociology 32 (2): 131–51. doi: 10.1007/s11133–009–9123–7. Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. “Avatars of the Tortoise.” In Labyrinths, 202–8. New York: New Directions. Brekhus, Wayne. 1998. “A Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting Our Focus.” Sociological Theory 16 (1): 34–51. ———. 2003. Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Campos-Castillo, Celeste, and Steven Hitlin. 2013. “Copresence Revisiting a Building Block for Social Interaction Theories.” Sociological Theory 31 (2): 168–92. doi: 10.1177 /0735275113489811. Charmaz, Kathy. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis. London: Sage. Collins, Randall. 1981. “On the Microfoundations of Macrosociology.” American Journal of Sociology 86 (5): 984–1014. ———. 1998. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2007. “Turning Points, Bottlenecks, and the Fallacies of Counterfactual History.” Sociological Forum 22 (3): 247–69. doi: 10.1111/j.1573–7861.2007.00030.x. Denzin, Norman K. 1969. “Symbolic Interactionism and Ethnomethodology: A Proposed Synthesis.” American Sociological Review 34 (6): 922–34. doi: 10.2307/2095982. DeVault, Marjorie. 1999. Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Duneier. Mitchell. 1992. Slim’s Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Durkheim, Emile. 1965 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Effler, Erika Summers. 2010. Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes: Emotional Rhythms in Social Movement Groups. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eliasoph, Nina, and Paul Lichterman. 2003. “Culture in Interaction.” American Journal of Sociology 108 (4): 735–94. Farrell, Michael P. 2001. Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Faulkner, Robert R., and Howard S. Becker. 2009. “Do You Know . . . ?”: The Jazz Repertoire in Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fine, Gary Alan. 1983. Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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———. 1987. With the Boys: Little League Baseball and Preadolescent Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1995. A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1998. Morel Tales: The Culture of Mushrooming. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2010. “The Sociology of the Local: Action and Its Publics.” Sociological Theory 28 (4): 355–76. doi: 10.1111/j.1467–9558.2010.01380.x. ———. 2012. Tiny Publics: A Theory of Group Action and Culture. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Fine, Gary Alan, and Brooke Harrington. 2004. “Tiny Publics: Small Groups and Civil Society.” Sociological Theory 22 (3): 341–56. doi: 10.1111/j.0735–2751.2004.00223.x. Friedman, Asia M. 2012. “Believing Not Seeing: A Blind Phenomenology of Sexed Bodies.” Symbolic Interaction 35 (3): 284–300. doi: 10.1002/symb.25. ———. 2013. Blind to Sameness: Sexpectations and the Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. ———. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gibson, David R. 2012. Talk at the Brink: Deliberation and Decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Glaser, Barney, and Anselm Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine Transaction. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor. ———. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face to Face Behavior. Chicago: Aldine Transaction. ———. 1969. Where the Action Is. Three Essays. London: Allen Lane. ———. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. London: Harper and Row. Grazian, David. 2003. Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2004. “The Production of Popular Music as a Confidence Game: The Case of the Chicago Blues.” Qualitative Sociology 27 (2): 137–58. doi: 10.1023/B:QUAS.00000 20690.48033.00. ———. 2007. “The Girl Hunt: Urban Nightlife and the Performance of Masculinity as Collective Activity.” Symbolic Interaction 30 (2): 221–43. doi: 10.1525/si.2007.30.2.221. Gross, Neil. 2007. “Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Twentieth-Century American Sociology.” In Sociology in America: A History, edited by Craig Calhoun, 183–224. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henderson, Kathryn. 1991. “Flexible Sketches and Inflexible Data Bases: Visual Communication, Conscription Devices, and Boundary Objects in Design Engineering.” Science, Technology & Human Values 16 (4): 448–73. doi: 10.1177/016224399101600402.

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Heritage, John C. 1987. “Ethnomethodology.” In Social Theory Today, edited by Anthony Giddens and Turner Jonathan, 224–73. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Horowitz, Ruth. 1983. Honor and the American Dream: Culture and Identity in a Chicano Community. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hughes, Everett C. 1984. The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Jerolmack, Colin. 2013. The Global Pigeon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joas, Hans. 1987. “Sumbolic Interactionism.” In Social Theory Today, edited by Anthony Giddens and Turner Jonathan, 82–115. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Katz, Jack. 1988. Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil, reprint ed. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1999. How Emotions Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2001. “Analytic Induction.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul Baltes, 480–84. Oxford, UK: Elsevier. ———. 2002. “From How to Why on Luminous Description and Causal Inference in Ethnography (Part 2).” Ethnography 3 (1): 63–90. doi: 10.1177/1466138102003001003. Katz, Jack, and Thomas J. Csordas. 2003. “Phenomenological Ethnography in Sociology and Anthropology.” Ethnography 4 (3): 275–88. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1981. The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford, UK: Pergamon. ———. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2009. “The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World.” Symbolic Interaction 32 (1): 61–87. doi: 10.1525/si.2009.32.1.61. Knorr-Cetina, Karin, and Urs Bruegger. 2002. “Traders’ Engagement with Markets: A Postsocial Relationship.” Theory, Culture & Society 19 (5–6): 161–85. doi: 10.1177/0263 27602761899200. Knorr-Cetina, Karin, and Alex Preda. 2007. “The Temporalization of Financial Markets: From Network to Flow.” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (7–8): 116–38. doi: 10.1177/0263 276407084700. Kusenbach, Margarethe. 2003. “Street Phenomenology: The Go-Along as Ethnographic Research Tool.” Ethnography 4 (3): 455–85. doi: 10.1177/146613810343007. Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, reprint ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lee, Jooyoung. 2009. “Open Mic Professionalizing the Rap Career.” Ethnography 10 (4): 475–95. doi: 10.1177/1466138109347001. Lynch, Michael. 1985. Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory. London: Routledge Kegan & Paul. ———. 1993. Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mische, Ann. 2001. “Juggling Multiple Futures: Personal and Collective Project-Formation among Brazilian Youth Leaders.” In Leadership and Social Movements, edited by Colin Barker, Michael Lavalette, and Alan Johnson, 137–59. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ———. 2008. Partisan Publics: Communication and Contention across Brazilian Youth Activist Networks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2009. “Projects and Possibilities: Researching Futures in Action.” Sociological Forum 24 (3): 694–704. doi: 10.1111/j.1573–7861.2009.01127.x. Pasko, Lisa. 2002. “Naked Power: The Practice of Stripping as a Confidence Game.” Sexualities 5 (1): 49–66. doi: 10.1177/1363460702005001003. Perrin, Andrew. 2014. “Theory of, Theory and, Theory from.” Perspectives: Newsletter of the ASA Theory Section 36 (2). Pollner, Melvin. 1987. Mundane Reason: Reality in Everyday and Sociological Discourse. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Sanders, Clinton. 1999. Understanding Dogs. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Schutz, Alfred. 1967. Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schutz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann. 1973. The Structures of the Life-World, vol. 1. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press. Schutz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann. 1989. The Structures of the Life-World, vol. 2. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press. Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. ———. 2005. Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Snow, David A., and Robert D. Benford. 1988. “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization.” In From Structure to Action: Comparing Social Movement Research across Cultures, edited by Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Sidney Tarrow, 197–217. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Star, Susan Leigh. 1985. “Scientific Work and Uncertainty.” Social Studies of Science 15 (3): 391–427. doi: 10.1177/030631285015003001. ———. 1989. Regions of the Mind. Brain Research and the Quest for Scientific Certainty. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Star, Susan Leigh, ed. 1995. Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology. Albany: State University of New York Press. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. 1989. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39.” Social Studies of Science 19 (3): 387–420. doi: 10.1177/0306312890 19003001. Strauss, Anselm L. 1978. Negotiations: Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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Sudnow, David. 1978. Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tavory, Iddo, and Nina Eliasoph. 2013. “Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation.” American Journal of Sociology 118 (4): 908–42. doi: 10.1086/668646. Tavory, Iddo, and Stefan Timmermans. 2009. “Two Cases of Ethnography Grounded Theory and the Extended Case Method.” Ethnography 10 (3): 243–63. doi: 10.1177 /1466138109339042. Tavory, Iddo, and Daniel Winchester. 2012. “Experiential Careers: The Routinization and De-Routinization of Religious Life.” Theory and Society 41 (4): 351–73. doi: 10.1007 /s11186–012–9170-z. Thomas, William Isaac. 1923. The Unadjusted Girl: With Cases and Standpoint for Behavior Analysis. New York: Little, Brown. Timmermans, Stefan, and Iddo Tavory. 2012. “Theory Construction in Qualitative Research From Grounded Theory to Abductive Analysis.” Sociological Theory 30 (3): 167– 86. doi: 10.1177/0735275112457914. West, Candace, and Sarah Fenstermaker. 1995. “Doing Difference.” Gender & Society 9 (1): 8–37. doi: 10.1177/089124395009001002. West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1 (2): 125–51. doi: 10.1177/0891243287001002002. Wynn, Jonathan R. 2011. The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1997. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2007. The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2015. Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance. New York: Oxford University Press.

chapter three

Globalizing Gender dorit geva

Although the discipline of sociology is still at its core the study of modernity, and although the sociology of gender and sexuality is one of the most dynamic and productive subfields within sociology, there remains much work to be done in elaborating upon the relationship between gender, sexuality, and modernity. This chapter argues that without identifying the core modernist questions at the heart of sociological theories of gender and sexuality and without comprehensively identifying how gender and sexuality are constitutive of modernity, we are perhaps destined to ask every few years what Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne asked in 1985—namely, why has there not been a feminist revolution in sociology?1 Joan Alway restated the question a decade later but with a more specific focus on the missing feminist revolution within sociological theory.2 Alway (1995) suggested that feminist sociological theory destabilizes the basic questions sociological theory asks by focusing on the category of gender, rather than on modernity itself. I argue, however, that sidelining questions about modernity is not a virtue but a problem for feminist sociological theory. I am not arguing that feminist sociological theory ought to become the institutional mainstream of sociology—indeed, there are compelling arguments put forth by Joan Alway and many others that feminist sociology is at its best when occupying a critical distance from the disciplinary center. Rather, I argue that treating modernity as a black box within feminist theories of gender and sexuality has had three problematic effects. First, it has contributed to the splintering of feminist sociology into an array of subfields that do not recognize a shared agenda. Second, it has played a role in the sidelining of feminist sociological theory as a minor specialization within

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sociological theory, one that more “mainstream” approaches need not seriously acknowledge. And finally, it has sustained a Northern-centric vein of feminist theorizing, therefore closing off opportunities for increased NorthSouth dialogues, and for truly global feminist theorizing. Of course there was no place for women theorists, or what we might today label as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) theorists, at the time when sweeping social theories of modernity were first formulated following the great temporal and cultural “ruptures” in Europe in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 The sociology of gender and sexuality has no Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, or Georg Simmel to turn to in offering far-reaching and systematic accounts of gender, sexuality, and modernity. We live with the undertheorized, and often cringeinducing, views of women and the heterosexual nuclear family offered by the old masters as we study, or teach, “classical” sociological theory.4 Instead, for many feminist scholars in the Global North, the originary cradle of feminist sociological theory is to be found within 1970s Marxist feminism, when feminist consciousness among social theorists intensified within the fertile, and yet ultimately restrictive, confines of the new Western Marxism. This chapter first identifies some of the unique contributions of sociological approaches to gender and sexuality since the 1970s. At the same time, in surveying feminist sociological theorizing over the past forty-five years, I also distinguish some relative strengths and weaknesses in this scholarship in terms of its recognition of modernity as central to theorizing about gender and sexuality. I first present the ethnomethodological analysis of gender and sexuality as a distinctly sociological approach to the subject. Especially following Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s 1987 symbolic interactionist theory of “doing gender,” this work has endeavored to show how gender is a situated interactional accomplishment and how naturalized gender binaries are constantly reproduced in various interactional settings. However, while ethnomethodological accounts of doing gender and sexuality have contributed a uniquely sociological approach to gender and sexuality, they have little sense of history or modernity. This is also revealed in this work’s ethnocentricism, that is, in its tendency to generalize about “doing gender” without self-reflexivity regarding the time, place, and epistemological categories employed by observers and observed. I also present sociological scholarship on sexuality influenced by Michel Foucault’s work on modern knowledge production, expertise, and sexuality. This scholarship shows greater reflectivity regarding the mutual constitution of modernity and sexuality. Some of this work, however, tends to mention modernity in passing, as a contextual frame for analysis, rather

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than placing modernity front and center in theorizations of sexuality. By contrast, other sociological approaches to sexuality have a more robust account of modernity, especially those that further develop Foucauldian accounts of modern sexuality and epistemology. Like the ethnomethodological approach, however, this work largely presumes Northern modernity in its analyses of sexuality and regimes of knowledge production. Another body of feminist sociological scholarship, however, has placed history and modernity at the core of its analysis. Feminist sociological theory in the 1970s incubated within a Marxist milieu that primarily concerned itself with labor as the essence of human nature and capitalism as an epochal reorganization of labor. Feminists within this framework were dissatisfied with Marxism’s poor account of women’s inequality and therefore worked to integrate a dual analysis of patriarchy and capitalism. This Marxist feminist work ultimately gave birth to one of the most significant feminist research programs within sociology, which has since traced how the modern state and the sexual division of labor have developed in tandem. A particular focus has been development of social policies around the female caregiver/ male breadwinner model and the rise (and decline) of the modern welfare state. However, while maintaining a strong sense of modernity in the form of the state and the sexual division of labor, this work has bracketed questions about how to conceive of gender beyond the sexual division of labor and how to conceive of modernity beyond the state. After reviewing these subfields’ respective approaches to gender, sexuality, and modernity, and after highlighting their unique contributions, part II of this chapter aims to push feminist sociological theory to further consider the problematic of modernity. I do so in two ways. I first start by turning to some recent calls for a postcolonial critique of Northern sociological theory, a process that several sister disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences have already undertaken (e.g., McClintock 1995; Mohanty 2003; see Go in this volume). As opposed to much feminist theory originating in the Global North, feminist sociologists studying the Global South are profoundly aware of the mutual constitution of gender, sexuality, and modernity. They cannot conceive of regimes of gender and sexuality without accounting for histories of colonialism, conquest, and past and present national modernization projects. Scholarship on gender and sexuality in the Global South points to how femininity, masculinity, and heterosexuality are ideologically mobilized as radiographic images of national modernization projects. Not only do they point to the centrality of gender and sexuality in constituting “the modern,” but they also point to how modernity is an ideologically loaded construct.

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This chapter argues that responding to postcolonial critiques and the call for attention to “Southern theory” can produce a more ambitious research program for sociological approaches to gender and sexuality. Feminist theorizing of and about the Global South can push feminist theorizing of and about the Global North to more explicitly consider the relationship between modernity, gender, and sexuality. Giving a global gloss to bell hooks’s (1984) call to make space for marginalized women’s voices to enter the center, Raewyn Connell (2014a) has recently argued that by engaging in a critique of Northern theory, Southern theory ought to move more into the center. In the same spirit, I argue that regimes of gender and sexuality in the Global South ought to be reflected back upon gender and sexuality in the Global North. This can bring to light the taken-for-granted modernization theses and epistemological categories that still delimit Northern feminist sociological theory. I also argue, however, that another difficult task beckons: Northern feminist social theory should examine its own modernist metaphysics, that is, the “first principles” that organize sociological theories of gender and sexuality. Despite a rich feminist postmodern critique from the humanities during the 1990s, which probed the conceptual categories and assumptions that continue to operate within Western feminism, no similar sustained self-analysis emerged within feminist sociological theory from the Global North. Although regularly making appearances as “feminist theory” on course syllabi, the postmodern critique has been largely rejected by sociological theorists of gender and sexuality. Postmodern feminist theory has been particularly strong within textually based disciplines such as literature, philosophy, and media studies and has been less convincing to empirically oriented social scientists. Sociologists have not been persuaded by several central claims made by postmodern feminist theory, especially the claim that the category of “women” needed to be questioned (e.g., Flax 1987; Nicholson 1994) and the claim that gender is an open-ended performance susceptible to constant subversion (e.g., Butler 1990). As sociological scholars of sexuality have argued, postmodern theory is thin in its conception of “the social,” or stated otherwise, in giving accounts of the hard realities of social ordering and its constant reproduction. Instead, feminist sociologists have been more convinced by the framework of intersectionality as one that, on the one hand, does not presume a white, Western middle-class universalization of women’s experiences of inequality and what it means to be a feminist; and that, on the other hand, enables extensive empirical examination while also being a productive tool for coali-

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tional feminist politics (see McCall [2005] and Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall [2013] for reviews). While I accept that postmodern feminist theory has been thin in its conception of the “social” and that it has not produced a robust research program within sociology, I wish to point out that unlike theorizations of intersectionality, postmodern theory importantly called for an interrogation of the modernist categories we employ. The challenge was not only epistemological but metaphysical. I argue that we need not destroy those categories once identified. Instead, we can recognize how those metaphysical categories form the backbone of the otherwise loose conglomeration of sociological theories of gender and sexuality. Indeed, that backbone is the unique contribution Northern sociological theories of gender and sexuality offer to the discipline of sociology and beyond. I pinpoint the central categories underpinning sociological theories of gender and sexuality by returning to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, an immensely influential mid-twentieth-century Northern theorization of gender and sexuality, and show how the central problem of the mammoth volume was to uncover the dialectic between “plastic embodiment” and hardened social order. This dialectic remains at the center of contemporary feminist social theory and offers a metaphysics of embodiment that has become the sine qua non of North-modern social theories of gender and sexuality. This chapter urges Northern feminist social theorists to therefore grapple with their own modernism by engaging in further discussion across subfields whose relative strengths can be brought together into a greater whole; by considering (and reconsidering) the postcolonial and postmodern critiques of Northern feminist theory; and by recognizing, through critical assessment, the metaphysical legacies bequeathed by North-modernist foundational thinkers.

sociological theories of gender and sexuality: modernity as contextual framework The ethnomethodological approach to gender and sexuality is arguably sociology’s most distinct contribution to theories of gender and sexuality. Building upon Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s landmark 1987 article, “Doing Gender,” this work shows gender to be a situated accomplishment, one that is remarkably ordered and reproduced within diverse interactional settings. West and Zimmerman drew from Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) classic

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ethnomethodological account of Agnes, a male-to-female transgender psychiatric patient whom Garfinkel described as having successfully managed her appearance so as to “pass” as a woman. West and Zimmerman use the case of Agnes to go beyond Garfinkel’s account of transgender passing and rather, argue that we all “do” gender. This is done in an interplay between sex, or “socially agreed upon biological criteria for classifying persons as female or males” (West and Zimmerman 1987, 127); “sex category,” which connotes the everyday enactments signaling to others our biological sex; and finally, “gender,” the myriad added layers of activities and managed conduct that are presumed to match—and thus signal—our sex category. As other scholars have since shown, gender binaries are naturalized in myriad situations, such as at work (e.g., Denissen and Saguy 2014; Schilt 2010), in prison (Jenness 2014), and in religious institutions (Sumerau 2012). Scholars such as Laurel Westbrook and Kristen Schilt have sidestepped the postmodern moment, quietly and confidently eschewing the view of gender as playful performance.5 Their ingeniously crafted and compassionately rendered studies show how heteronormative ideologies continue to structure and police everyday interactions. Influenced by queer theory’s contention that heterosexual desire is an ideologically naturalized construct wherein “opposites” attract and that heterosexuality therefore also naturalizes the male/ female binary, these scholars do not treat sexuality as a distinct, nor natural, category upon which gender dresses itself. Instead, their work shows how sexuality, especially heterosexuality in the United States, is itself a construct that naturalizes gender differences. Recent scholarship on heteronormativity and gender also points to the spaces and places for “undoing gender through interactions that reduce gender differences rather than reproduce them” (e.g., Connell 2010; Deutsch 2007; Pfeffer 2014; Whitley 2013). Yet, this work maintains what historical sociologists Julia Adams, Elisabeth Clemens, and Ann Orloff (2005) have identified as the “presentist” orientation typical of much American sociology. Taking for granted that the interactional settings are nested within modernity—indeed, taking for granted that this research is almost entirely about the contemporary United States—there are several black boxes it leaves unexamined. Some of the scholars working within this tradition have moved to integrate a symbolic interactionist approach with analyses of more diachronically layered institutions. Laurel Westbrook and Kristen Schilt (2014) incorporate interactionist approaches into a broader analysis of how gender is determined for trans-men and trans-women across a wide variety of spaces and institutions, including work, sports, and family law. This approach enables them to offer a typology of how distinct criteria for “determining gender” are applied

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within nonsexual gender-integrated spaces, nonsexual gender-segregated contexts, and heterosexual contexts. The authors build upon symbolic interactionist frameworks, at the same time as they show some dissatisfaction with a focus on face-to-face interactions in accounting for the construction of gender. They therefore offer an inventory of everyday interactions, alongside how within law, policy, and “the imaginary,” actors articulate what they understand to be the “true” criteria for defining what constitutes a man or a woman. This work stands out as a rich sociological field of theorizing about gender, ingeniously combining empirical evidence with more abstract theoretical accounts of how gender is a social achievement. However, its presentism, and its focus almost exclusively on the United States, limits this work’s ability to act as a central backbone for a further-ranging contribution to sociological theory. There is little attempt, for example, to nest the interactional reproduction of gender binaries through a more sweeping account of how modernity is bound to the sails of science and the phenomenological experience of embodiment with science as a key site for the everyday naturalization and lived experience of sexual difference (e.g., Fausto-Sterling 2000; Lorber 1994). If we reexamine the case of Agnes, the starting point for feminist ethnomethodological approaches to gender and sexuality, we can see that these themes are apparent right at the surface. It is significant that Harold Garfinkel’s access to Agnes was made possible through his collaboration with a psychiatrist who was Agnes’s doctor at University of California, Los Angeles. Her presentation as a psychiatric “case study” has been oddly erased since West and Zimmerman’s work and beyond. Garfinkel explains in his chapter on Agnes that her doctors determined that she had a rare disorder that had caused her testicles to produce more estrogen than testosterone, although her case confused doctors and was not consistent with other known cases. Agnes had to undergo a medical psychiatric evaluation before she was permitted to undergo sex reassignment surgery, so that her body would fully “align” with being a woman. Furthermore, at the end of Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology sits the blandly titled, “Appendix to Chapter Five,” in which Garfinkel discloses a spectacular revelation that came as a shock to him and Agnes’s doctors: just at the time of the book’s publication, Garfinkel learned that her medical history was rather different than what he and her doctors had determined before her sex reassignment surgery. Five years after the surgery, she revealed to her doctors that she had been secretly stealing estrogen pills from her mother since the age of twelve and was not born with a genetic disorder.

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The medical report provided to Garfinkel (1967, 287) and cited in his book’s appendix explains: “She did not know what the effects would be, only that this was a female substance.” Agnes apparently continued self-medicating herself with estrogen pills throughout her adolescence, thereby preventing development of male secondary sex characteristics. Garfinkel and later ethnomethodological accounts of gender and sexuality have emphasized how Agnes managed her “passing.” However, importantly, Agnes sought medical expertise to legitimate her authenticity as an adult woman. She furthermore took medical science into her own hands, even if only vaguely understanding to what effect. Her story is therefore centrally about modern science, pharmacology, and expertise; it concerns the construction of the dimorphic male/ female binary as a central pillar in accomplishing and legitimating gender. At the same time, there are scholars of sexuality who exhibit a significantly deeper awareness of modernity in their work. These are sociologists who have been influenced by queer theory, which places the politics of sexuality front and center. Queer theory has sought to illustrate how sexuality and sexual power underpins much of social life, especially endeavoring to uncover the constant workings of heteronormativity in modern life (Stein and Plummer 1996). Within this work, queer theory, like postmodern and poststructuralist theory, has also been criticized for lacking a strong account of “the social” given its anchoring in what Adam Isaiah Green (2002, 522) has lucidly described as its “discursively burdened” textual idealism. Green and others I note below have worked to provide a genuinely sociological account of the social structuring of sexuality. They give substance to queer theory’s claim that modern sexuality structures gender. As Mimi Schippers (2007, 90) elegantly explicates: In contemporary Western societies, heterosexual desire is defined as an erotic attachment to difference, and as such, it does the hegemonic work of fusing masculinity and femininity together as complementary opposites. . . . The construction of hetero-desire as the ontological essence of gender difference establishes the meaning of the relationship between masculinity and femininity. Regardless of one’s sex category, the possession of erotic desire for the feminine object is constructed as masculine and being the object of masculine desire is feminine.

However, returning to the problem of order that has preoccupied social theory from its inception, these scholars have taken some distance from queer theory by pointing to its promise of ever-present subversion. Green has especially questioned queer theorists’ claims that being gay means one

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necessarily identifies with an oppositional subjectivity. Influenced by Connell’s (1992) analysis of the interrelationship between hegemonic masculinity and “gayness,” Green notes that empirical evidence by sociologists shows how queerness is neither “spectacularly disruptive” nor a wholesale reproduction of hegemonic structures of sexuality and gender. Rather, [T]he process of developing and acting on sexual and gender identity is muddy, conflicted, and provisional, and in this sense—even if for only a fleeting moment—unavoidably self-conscious. Thence the recuperation of the queer project, i.e. the categorical instability promised by queer theory. Indeed, here is the heart of a post-queer sexuality studies that recognizes the subversive potential of sexual marginality within the strong parametres of an empirical sociology.

Green’s (2008, 2014) more recent concept of sexual fields shows not only the social structuring of sexual life but furthermore, how sexual fields are social structures within which “erotic players” must navigate partners, neighborhoods, and valuations of worth. Such scholarship fulfills the promise of a sociological account of sexuality as a principle of collective social organization. This work, however, treats modernity as the temporal framework within which sexuality operates. It does not interrogate the very meaning of modernity in terms of its epistemological and, I would argue, metaphysical categories. Other scholars of sexuality, by contrast, do place modernity front and center, especially in relation to science and expert knowledge. Such work has sought to flesh out Michel Foucault’s sweeping but sociologically thin claims about how sexuality is organized during modernity, and how modernity is organized by the professional knowledge(s) that shape our most intimate lives (see Foucault 1990; see also Sedgwick 1990). Steven Epstein (1994, 196) noted, however, that although Foucault’s work on sexuality and modernity had far-reaching influence in the humanities, it was largely overlooked within the social sciences. Foucault’s work has unquestionably taken an important place in the discipline of sociology but primarily in the study of politics, criminology, and the state, while his epistemological claims have not received the same attention. Nonetheless, some scholars of sexuality are also giving more sociological substance to studies of sexuality and modern epistemology, with an eye toward how modern regimes of knowledge relate to the politics of sexuality. Epstein’s (e.g., 1996, 2007) own work is centrally concerned with how expert knowledge interweaves with contemporary sexual politics.

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Tey Meadow’s (2011) account of how parents make sense of their transgender children’s gender identity places “this historical moment” front and center in analyzing the biomedical, psychiatric, and spiritual tropes parents use to understand their children. Rather than viewing expert knowledge as sources of stigmatization and repression, Meadow argues that the strategies employed by parents of transgender children, and these parents’ use of popular scientific and spiritual themes, are in fact typical of how we account for the modern self. Even though her work could use some more specificity regarding the American late-modern moment, Meadow’s work illustrates how examination of contemporary gender and sexuality—or to be more specific, how the experience of a particular kind of embodiment—is an examination of late modernity, and how an examination of late modernity is an examination of a particular experience of embodiment. Therefore, some sociological accounts of sexuality point to two important features of Northern modernity, even if these theorists themselves do not fully spell out these features. The first is how biological sex, or the “sexed body,” is treated as an ontological truth by experts, and in everyday interactions, which then naturalizes gender differences. This ordering is a central ordering of Northern modernity, and it is seen by social theorists of sexuality as a historically contingent ordering. The second is how science and expert knowledge is a distinctly modern authority, one that continues to permeate late-modern transformations in making sense of gender, including transgender. However, even though this work is more attuned to linking accounts of sexuality to the epochal ruptures of modernity, it remains unaware of its distinctly Northern nature. It points to the historically specific, North-modern artifice that genitalia shape desire and gender. They counter this artifice with a truth claim, and that sociological truth claim is our malleable, plastic embodiment. As I will further explain in part II, this move is not adequately recognized by existing social theorists of gender and sexuality as a Northmodernist metaphysical view of embodiment and social order.

History and Pseudohistory, Epistemology and Metaphysics Unlike feminist ethnomethodology, feminist historical and political sociology has a much stronger sense of history and modernity. However, it is weaker in its explicit theorizations of gender and sexuality. This scholarship is centrally concerned with identifying the place of gender and the sexual division of labor in the constitution of modernity. Having emerged from Marxist feminist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s, this work sought to identify

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the relationship between capitalism, modernity, and the state. For the new generation of Western Marxists in the 1970s, the postwar European welfare state became a central object of analysis (e.g., Poulantzas 1973). Marxist feminist thought incubated in this milieu. Dissatisfied with Marxism’s poor account of women’s inequality, it sought to identify how patriarchy operates, in Heidi Hartmann’s (1979, 11) terms, as a “set of social relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women.” Furthermore, scholars such as Hartmann argued that patriarchy’s material basis rested in men’s control over women’s unpaid, or poorly paid, reproductive and productive labor. Marxist feminists identified the modern state as perpetuating this arrangement. The capitalist state was seen as preserving both gender and class inequality by maintaining women’s exploitation within the sexual division of labor at home and in labor markets (e.g., Abramovitz 1988; Boris and Bardaglio 1983; Hartmann 1976). Feminists grew increasingly dissatisfied with Marxism’s inability to explain modern states’ weaker support of women as workers and mothers, especially by the late 1980s. Shaking off its Marxist origins and eventually rejecting the category of patriarchy as too simplistic, concern with the state and the sexual division of labor has continued as the central pivot of feminist historical and political sociology (e.g., Lister 1990; Orloff 1993, 1996). Within comparative and historical sociology, feminists have since amassed an impressive body of work on social policy and welfare state development. Although feminists have lamented that much historical sociology still marginalizes analyses of gender and sexuality (see Adams 1998; Morawska 1998), a marginalization that undoubtedly persists, it is now impossible to conceive of welfare state development and contemporary reforms without taking into account how states and the sexual division of labor are interrelated.6 It is notable, however, that labor continues to be of central concern to this scholarship (see also Geva 2011a, 2014). Although feminist historical and comparative sociology is to be lauded for its sense of history and modernity, it has inadvertently maintained a kernel of Marxist metaphysics by maintaining that labor is a central lens through which gender relations are examined.7 In this scholarship (my own included), “gender” has usually referred to the sexual division of labor. Feminist historical sociology in the 1990s developed in leaps and bounds just as postmodern and poststructuralist theories of gender emanating from the humanities were taking flight. Theda Skocpol’s agenda-setting Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United

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States was published in 1992, two years after publication of Judith Butler’s (1990) dazzling Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Butler analyzed texts by scholars such as Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan to argue that gender can be a subversive performance. By contrast, political sociologist Skocpol showed how post–Civil War pension schemes in the United States were built upon powerful ideologies regarding women’s citizenship roles as mothers and widows, as opposed to men’s citizenship roles as soldiers and breadwinning heads of families. Whereas Butler interrogated the epistemological origins of “gender,” Skocpol’s work analyzed the institutional trajectory of policies and politics. Feminist historical and political sociologists influenced by Skocpol’s work on gender and the state were keenly aware of these other developments in feminist theory. However, it was, to put it mildly, challenging to combine detailed accounts of institutional developments that strongly differentiated between men and women, with theoretical contentions that the very category of “women” was a problematically universalizing Western category that denied important differences between women (e.g., Flax 1987; Nicholson 1994) and that could be destabilized through everyday performance. The result was two parallel lines of inquiry. If, following Stacey and Thorne (1985, 310), the aim of feminist sociological theory ought to be to provide analytic insight into analyses of complex societies—that is, to aid in discerning order and pattern within the complex mess that makes up contemporary societies, then some twenty-five years on, it is safe to say that feminist postmodern theory has not fulfilled that role. Perhaps this is, in Craig Calhoun’s (1993) terms, due to postmodernist theory’s “pseudohistoricism.”8 Its questionable claims toward an epochal transformation have not stood the test of time and indeed were skeptically viewed by sociologists at the time of their production. Whereas feminist historical and political sociologists identify how the present is institutionally structured by the past and go to great pains to explain change where change has occurred (e.g., Teo 2015), postmodernist theory’s sweeping claims about transformation, categorical deconstruction, and everyday subversion were simply not convincing for scholars whose work centers on identifying the historical conditions of possibility for transformation and resistance and the salience of social and political categories. Instead, feminist sociology in the Global North has been significantly more convinced by theories of intersectionality, which also emerged in the early 1990s’ critique of white Western feminism. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s (1991) original articulation of intersectionality shed light on how

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white middle-class women’s experience of race, class, and patriarchy could not be universalized to encompass the experiences of all women in the United States. Instead, Crenshaw argued that racism and sexism within the United States are coconstitutive, positioning women of color in distinct hierarchies of domination as compared to white women and men of color (see also Collins 1990). Intersectional analysis has since traveled well beyond the United States, providing insight into feminist activism in the Global North, Global South, and across those divides (e.g., Ferree and Pudrovska 2006). Vrushali Patil (2013) has also since pointed out that feminist scholars of the Global North ought to recognize that hierarchies of domination within modern nation-states often have global, colonial origins. Thanks to the interventions made by intersectional analysts and activists, feminists today think in broad, coalitional terms, with deeper awareness of their particular positionalities as compared to earlier generations of feminists. Analyses of categorical segmentation and points of categorical intersection identify exclusions, dominations, and possible coalitions, all of which have been formative in shaping contemporary feminist activism (see Cho et al. 2013). However, intersectional analysis also tends to suffer from a limited focus on the present, without considering how categories of gender and race came to be, let alone how they have been and are mutually constitutive. With a few important exceptions (e.g., Patil 2013), as with ethnomethodological approaches, there is little sense of history, and often no reflexivity regarding the epistemological origins of the very categories of gender and race (and other categories such as ethnicity, class, sexuality, and age). While intersectionality has undoubtedly produced a rich research program, it too does not offer a satisfactory account of the mutual constitution of gender, sexuality, race, and modernity. Nor is it reflexive with regard to the modernist framework it employs. Therefore, it is worth returning to some of the questions, if not the answers, posed by postmodern feminist theory. Feminist postmodern theorists did not only propose the possibility of constant subversion, of epochal historical transformation, and of deconstruction of the category “women,” but they also asked feminist scholars to reflect upon the metaphysical underpinnings of our own corpus. In some senses, feminist sociologists in the Global North have taken the easy road, whether as historical-political sociologists, postqueer sociologists, or ethnomethodologists. We are peculiarly comfortable with teaching feminist postmodern theory in our course syllabi, while dismissing it as sociologically (and historically) flimsy. And yet,

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feminist postmodern theory intended to make Northern feminism uncomfortable. The following section is therefore aimed at pushing feminist sociological theory beyond its comfort zone. I turn to postcolonial and then postmodernist critiques in order to do so.

recovering modernities Reflecting South Modernity onto North Modernity Several scholars have recently articulated powerful arguments against the Eurocentric categories that still underpin contemporary sociology (see Connell 2007; Go in this volume; Steinmetz 2013). Gurminder K. Bhambra, for example, continues to see sociology’s distinct role as being the science of modernity, at the same time as she criticizes the silencing of the world outside of Europe and North America within foundational sociological theory’s conceptualizations of modernity. Whereas there has thus far been little transformation within sociology in response to postcolonial critiques, Bhambra argues that sociological scholarship has at least integrated more foci on women and LGBTQ persons into various modernity narratives. She is therefore slightly more optimistic about the role that feminism and LGBTQ movements have played in influencing mainstream sociological theory. At the same time, Bhambra (2007, 875) notes that while mainstream sociological theory has integrated more accounts of gender and sexuality, the essence of modernity narratives has not been transformed. Let us be more specific as to what those narratives are. They are largely about the sexual division of labor, the emergence of the private/ public distinction, individuation, women’s economic autonomy within and outside the nuclear family, and reproductive autonomy. Additionally, Bhambra (2007b) argues that although feminist critiques have been integrated more than the postcolonial critiques, the categories of gender and sexuality are treated within social theory as particulars of “the social,” as opposed to systemic universals. Connell (2014b, 2014c) further argues that the sociology of gender has maintained a Northern bias like that found in the rest of the discipline. Postcolonial critics of Northern sociological theory ask that Northern theorists recognize the partiality of their point of view so that those views can be reconstructed (Bhambra 2013). This implies that sociological theory ought to examine itself and notice what it has taken for granted and that which has remained unmarked (see also Brekhus 1998; Heath 2013). I suggest doing so by examining regimes of gender and sexuality in the

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Global South in order to note what is taken for granted in social theories of gender and sexuality in the Global North. Sociologists of gender and sexuality in the Global South who do not even see themselves as primarily engaged with the problematic of modernity are often at pains to explain that the women and men they are studying are situated at the interstices of colonial legacies, past and present modernization projects, and parallel and intersecting modernities.9 Whether one is researching domestic work in India (Qayum and Ray 2003), education in Pakistan (Khurshid 2015), citizenship regimes in South Korea (Choo 2006), skin whitening in Indonesia (Saraswati 2010), sex workers and business clients in Vietnam (Hoang 2014), or beauty pageants in Nigeria (Balogun 2012), analyses of gender relations are persistently linked to questions of what it means to be “modern.” Feminist from and of the Global South are also keenly aware that feminist movements often emerged from within national independence struggles (e.g., Heng 1997). Southern feminist scholars underscore that modernity and modernization are ideological constructs, where regimes of femininity and masculinity act as key markers of modernity.10 Where can one locate these hidden but ever-present ideological markers of gender as modernity within Northern feminist theory? Bhambra has noted that one direction is to identify the postcolonial other who is hidden from sight. That is a very good place to start. Another tactic I propose to complement Bhambra’s suggested approach is to make explicit the unmarked modernization theses that underpin Northern feminist sociology. For example, as I have already noted, Northern feminist sociology has especially presumed the category of labor as central to understanding gender inequality nationally and globally. This work has shown how gender relations and sexuality are used to discipline factory workers producing goods within global commodity chains (Lee 1998; Salzinger 2003) and in service work (Hanser 2005; Otis 2008). More scholarship than ever is now attuned to the nature of sex work within contemporary global capitalism (e.g., Bernstein 2007; Hoang 2011; Majic 2014). Scholars of gender inequality have also shown how caregiving has become increasingly commodified in the Global North, creating transnational chains of care wherein women who are relatively privileged within their countries of origin, and sometimes men, from the Global South, leave their families behind and are paid to care for the more privileged citizens of the Global North (e.g., Farris 2015 Parreñas 2005). Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum (2009), however, note in their study of domestic servitude in Kolkata that a caregiving framework is not adequate, or even appropriate, prism for making sense of the relations of domestic work they observe. Domestic service is nested within the longer history of

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domestic servitude within middle-class households they analyze, and they primarily view it as important in organizing class relations in Kolkata. Ray has asked in a subsequent article, which considers the promise of Southern theory, what happens if one uses their observations regarding relations of domestic work in India to reflect back on US society? According to Ray (2013, 155), the question that could be asked is, why is it that in the United States today, “paid domestic work is not seen as constitutive of a class culture . . . but as a market response to a new demographic and social need”? To Ray’s question I would add: why is the household more generally treated as a site of labor for feminist analysis within the Global North? Why not view the household as structuring numerous axes of gender and sexuality, including (nuclear) family systems, heterosexuality, and stages in lifecycle? Rather than view the household and families as sites of labor, scholarship on the Global South suggests that the structuring of femininity and masculinity, its ongoing doing, and occasional undoing, is fundamentally tied to the affective relations and roles organized in households and family systems.11 Furthermore, studies of relations within family and kinship in the Global South show how masculinity and femininity over the life course are produced, reproduced, and transformed in constant relation to one’s position in the family, with fluctuations in hierarchy, dominance, autonomy, and definitions of masculinity and femininity depending on generation and life stage. Work on gender and sexuality in the Global South does bring into relief how the separation between the sociology of gender and the sociology of family in Northern sociology is itself the product of twentieth-century modernization theses that siphoned off the nuclear family as a sociologically distinct and ideologically loaded entity.12 Treating the family as a site of unpaid affective and reproductive labor within Northern theory has not displaced the unmarked modernization thesis, which views the nuclear heterosexual family as having a fairly contained set of roles having to do with childrearing, socialization, and distribution of labor and wealth, and which equates Western modernization with increased individuation (cf. Giddens 1991, 1992). This is merely one example of the unmarked boundaries reproduced by North-feminist theory. Lack of self-awareness regarding the ideological projects underpinning theoretical and empirical boundaries enable this reproduction to occur. I therefore urge Northern feminist social theorists to examine the ongoing implicit modernization theses silently reproduced in feminist theorizing and research, in addition to paying more attention to the silenced colonial and imperial history implicitly delimiting Northern feminist theorists questions and objects of analysis.

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Excavating the Modernist Metaphysics Underpinning Northern Feminist Theory (Or, Why We Should All Critically Read Simone de Beauvoir and a Little Bit of Judith Butler, Too) I have argued that recovering the history that has been silenced in existing feminist social theory helps recover the place of modernity in feminist sociological theory, especially the global history of colonial modernity; and in turn, recovering the modern in feminist sociological theory can deepen and expand the ambition and scope of feminist sociological theory, enabling a North-South feminist exchange that has yet to be actualized within Northern-based feminist sociological theory. In addition to marking the colonial and imperial underpinnings of contemporary social theory, I also propose that feminist sociological theory become more acutely aware of the history of feminist sociological theory and some of its central metaphysical claims as a second strategy for pushing it out of its comfort zone. One avenue to start with is to recover Simone de Beauvoir, the curiously silenced mother of twentieth-century Northern feminist theory. Although immensely influential in the humanities, indeed immensely influential in the postmodern turn of the 1990s, and in related sister disciplines such as political theory, she is surprisingly ignored by current feminist sociological theory. Feminist sociological theory today proceeds as if it emerged whole cloth in the 1970s and 1980s. This has contributed to naturalizing its core questions. Feminist political theory, by contrast, stands as an exemplar in its self-awareness as to how it has arrived to where it is today (cf. Zerilli 2005). Northern feminist sociological theory therefore needs to recover its own history in order to understand how it has arrived at posing the questions it does, in order to identify what has been lost or silenced in the process, and in order to identify the sources of its political commitments. Recovering Beauvoir should not proceed through hagiography but through critique. This is distinct from a rich feminist sociological examination of feminist epistemology in the social sciences, which has interrogated Western and masculinist modes of knowing (e.g., Collins 1990s; Harding 1991; Hartsock 1998; Hekman 1990; Smith 1987; Stanley and Wise 1990). I am arguing that rather than interrogate how we know what we know, we need to identify what North-feminist social theory asserts (or assumes) exists as its first principles. As a foundational thinker, Beauvoir offers a convenient means for doing so. This would entail a double move of claiming Beauvoir as a central, Northern figure in theorizing about gender, sexuality, and modernity, at the same time as the centering of her work would entail a sustained critical appraisal of what she—and much Northern feminist sociological theory—asserts as

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its central metaphysical backbone. This would aid in identifying the unique contributions of social theories of gender and sexuality and would entail a critical appraisal of these contributions. Beauvoir famously opens the first chapter of The Second Sex by the apparently simple question, what makes a woman a woman? She approaches this question through an existentialist frame, which urges us to embrace freedom, action, and autonomy in order to find meaning, live authentic lives, and realize our fullest humanity. Yet, Beauvoir proposes that embodiment challenges one’s ability to do so, especially for women. Furthermore, this body we are born into is rife with ambiguities, unpredictable, and transforms over the course of our lives. Central to The Second Sex is Beauvoir’s view of bodily experience as unstable and ambiguous. In an act of epochal “inauthenticity,” men and women have tried to deny this ambiguity and to ascribe predetermined meanings onto women’s bodies. The Second Sex is a lengthy, high North-modern contemplation of how women’s bodies offer a distinct set of challenges in the path toward freedom and authenticity. Despite the body’s instability and its ceaseless tiny and large transformations throughout our life cycle, Beauvoir interrogates how this ambiguity and volatility have come to be denied throughout history, as if such ambiguities do not exist. Beauvoir’s Hegelianism expresses itself in her view that men have especially denied this ambiguity in themselves and in a defensive mechanism that has dressed itself differently over time, have structured themselves as the absolute masters over women. Women, too, are to blame, as they have taken comfort in being the enslaved dependents, rather than embracing their own bodily ambiguity, made all the more complicated due to the experiences of menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause. The book is thus an extended reflection on the meaning of the body’s volatile materiality. How much is it determined, and how much does it delimit our freedom? How are we to achieve freedom when genitalia, hormones, and reproductive organs so profoundly affect our childhood development and our later lives as lovers, parents, citizens, and workers during our reproductive years and as we age? Beauvoir never pins down a precise line between bodily determination and freedom from it. The book offers hundreds and hundreds of pages tracing the dialectic between embodiment and freedom in human history, over the individual life cycle, and from the perspective of a white bourgeois woman sitting in mid-twentieth-century Paris. Beauvoir is compelled to also review the “biological data” in order to pinpoint what is “already there,” versus the thick layers of meaning, and the construction and suppression of certain subjectivities that depart from this biological data. Is this starting to sound familiar? For is this not the central problematic

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that has animated, and continues to animate, Northern sociological theories of gender and sexuality? There is much criticism of Beauvoir’s work in the humanities and in political theory, and I will not review it here. For now, let us note how much the dialectic she constructs between self and body are still present within current Northern accounts of sex/gender. Beauvoir does not give us an explicit account of modernity, as do, for example, Durkheim and Simmel. She awkwardly pinpoints men’s domination over women in prehistory, and therefore her approach is to decenter modernity in her account of gender inequality. However, I propose that we read Beauvoir as a high North-modernist theorist of the categories and sets of problems that have preoccupied theories of gender and sexuality. Arguably, she has been a key figure in giving us those categories. The Second Sex is an account of ordering through the body, or bodyorders. Importantly, it reminds us that the centering of the body can be a metaphysical claim and provides an alternative to a Marxist metaphysics, which, I have argued, still permeates contemporary social theory (see endnote 7). Take, for example, Beauvoir’s hopeful, naïve, radical, and heterosexist ideal proposed at the end of the mammoth volume. She (Beauvoir 2009, 849) proposes that humans ought to embrace their bodily ambiguity through heterosexual sex: In fact, man is, like woman, a flesh, thus a passivity, the plaything of his hormones and the species, uneasy prey to his desire; and she, like him, in the heart of carnal fever, is consent, voluntary gift, and activity; each of them lives the strange ambiguity of existence made body in his or her own way. In these combats where they believe they are tackling each other, they are fighting their own self, projecting onto their partner the part of themselves they repudiate; instead of living the ambiguity of their condition, each one tries to make the other accept the abjection of this condition and reserves the honor of it for one’s self. If, however, both assumed it with lucid modesty, as the correlate of authentic pride, they would recognize each other as peers and live the erotic drama in harmony.

Beauvoir proposes that it is not equal voting rights or through equal wages that women and men can gain genuine equality. Rather, she pins hope on human sexuality itself as a means of mutually recognizing that we all live particular instances of the same ambiguous condition. Her view of plastic embodiment as a metaphysical state reveals a position that is still at the heart of much Northern feminist social theory and that also motivates its political commitments and visions of what is possible.

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Northern feminist social theory begins with a view of embodiment as inherently plastic and then seeks to identify the structures of authority, which give the impression that embodiment is not plastic but rather, a clear binary of heterosexuality and gender. I am not disagreeing with this metaphysical view; indeed, as a feminist trained within this tradition, I have difficulty seeing outside of it. However, I am arguing that we should recognize that the view of a dialectic between plastic sexuality and ambiguous body, versus the hardened, reified, social meanings ascribed to the body is the North-modernist backbone of much Northern feminist social theory. Northern feminist theory seeks to give an account of that space between plastic body and hardened meanings, just as Beauvoir does, and never entirely pins down, in The Second Sex. That is the problem of order Northern feminist sociologists have tried, and continue to try, to make sense of and to transform. It has also been at the heart of Northern feminists’ hopes for social and political transformation. Feminists are not uniform in how they view the dialectic between plastic body and hardened social orders of meaning ascribed to it. Debates pivot around degrees of plasticity, whether it is possible to entirely free the body from social orders, or whether we ought to aim at achieving social orders that more appropriately mirror the body’s plasticity. Interrogating modernist categories is precisely what Judith Butler did twenty-five years ago—but she did not do it as a sociologist. If feminist sociologists in the 1990s were scratching their heads as to where the postmodern critique was coming from, and what exactly was the problem that Butler and others were trying to grapple with, it was not only because of that work’s textual idealism. It was because Northern feminist sociological theory has had a weaker sense of its own history and its metaphysical categories. Through reading Beauvoir, we can come to recognize this Northern metaphysics of embodiment underpinning much modernist feminist social theory. Although it might seem that Northern-based feminist sociology has comfortably moved well beyond the postmodern moment, it is worth pausing for a moment to remind ourselves the challenge Butler presented to feminism. Drawing from Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical approach, Butler has argued that gender is constituted by its doing, that gender is cobbled together through the effects of embodied enactments. Yet, unlike Goffman, she does not see these enactments as the mirror of some preexisting metaphysical substance. Butler’s main claim is not merely that gender is performative and that heterosexuality organizes gender. She also claimed to have identified “the metaphysics of substance” reaching back from Aristotle to

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Foucault. This metaphysics of substance, according to Butler (1990, 22–33), is the view of the body as having a preexisting ontological status—that it is experientially and physiologically fixed and that gender identity is the outward expression of this fixity. Instead, she proposes that the doing of gender reveals that “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender,” and hence, there is no metaphysics of substance (Butler 1990, 25). Sociological theorists of gender and sexuality have largely rejected the claim that gender is an open-ended “doing” and by quietly returning to ethnomethodology and to historical accounts of the institutional reproduction of gender ideologies, assert the hard realities of the social order. Yet, this rejection has ignored whether there is a metaphysics of embodiment at the heart of feminist sociological theory that continues to operate at least from Beauvoir through to contemporary feminist sociological theory. Like Butler, sociological theorists of gender and sexuality reject the metaphysics of substance. But unlike Butler who goes one step further by rejecting any idea of metaphysics, sociological theorists of gender and sexuality implicitly embrace a different metaphysics, that of plastic embodiment. I therefore propose moving from a pseudohistory of gender and sexuality to a more truly historicized, contextualized account of what I have termed the dialectic between plastic embodiment and the social ordering, which hardens this plasticity. Beauvoir (2009, 96–100) gives us such a pseudohistory in trying to locate the time, if not exactly the place, when the meaning of the body and sexuality rigidified with the prehistoric “nomads.” Inasmuch as she deserves greater recognition as a founding mother who helped give Northern feminist theory its basic categories of analysis, hers is precisely the kind of North-modernist theorizing later criticized by postcolonial and postmodern scholars due to her tendency to universalize the experience of women’s embodiment across epochs, geographies, and cultures. By contrast, María Lugones has argued that we must recognize the coloniality of gender (see also Chatterjee 2002; Oyeˇwùmí 1997; Spurlin 2006). Pointing to the multiplicity and specificity of how embodied experience and sexuality were organized in precolonial societies and the global history of European colonial conquests, which through law and sheer violence created a world in its gendered, sexualized, and racialized image, Lugones (2007, 202) has vividly articulated the view that “the imposition of this gender system was as constitutive of the coloniality of power as the coloniality of power was constitutive of it.” Lugones (2007, 192–93) offers a historically oriented approach, where she productively points out, for example, that there is a structural-historical relationship between race and gender sourced in the coloniality of gender and that is not adequately grasped by the snapshot

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analysis of intersectionality. However, Lugones, too, is not a sociologist. Feminist sociological theory can start giving more substance to these claims, keeping in its line of sight the interwoven histories of the Global South and North. The task at hand does not require that sociologists become historians. However, it does require, to return to Bhambra’s (2011, 662) critique of Eurocentric sociology, that we “develop paradigms adequate for a global age in which the global is now understood as the condition of the modern, not its consequence.” I will finish by proposing two concrete agendas that could enable excavating the global, modernist metaphysics at the heart of feminist sociological theory. First, I propose a historical self-reflection and contextualization of Northern feminist sociological theory. What is to be found in the shadowy dark ages between de Beauvoir’s work in post–World War II Europe and late 1970s Marxist feminism, and what preceded Beauvoir, too? When, where, and how did Northern feminist sociological theory start to embrace, even take for granted, its view of the dialectic between plastic body/sexuality versus hardened social order? To what effect? What has been enabled by this view, and which lines of interrogation have been foreclosed? Who, in turn, has been included, and who has been excluded? As a second agenda, I propose that in moving from theoretical selfreflection to theory building, we must pay attention to the global history of parallel and intersecting modernities, to the coconstitution of race, gender, and sexuality, which have led to the “facticity” of the fixed body. Which expert knowledge(s) and authorities have played, and continue(s) to play today, fundamental roles in this conceptualization and deeply experienced sense of self, body, and desire? What is, for example, the long global and modern history that helps us situate Agnes—who, after all, turned to medical pharmacology, psychiatric expertise, and “corrective” surgery, to align her body with her “true” self and sexuality? Who were the racialized others, the sexualized others, the global objects of medical experiments,13 the differently organized societies whose destruction and reorganization refracted back onto the consolidation of a Northern technology of the self, all of which continue to silently structure how we manage interactions, make sense of ourselves, “do” gender, and organize our affect and desire? As I pose these questions, there are new lines of investigation emerging within the humanities about “the human” and “the posthuman.” This is another round of self-examination, inquiring into the epistemological origins of “the human,” asking how conceptualization of the human has worked in relation to conceptualization of other forms of life (e.g., Braidotti 2013). Once again, such interrogations are motivated by trying to uncover the mod-

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ernist roots of Western epistemology, including those underpinning feminist theory. And once again, feminist sociologists might not wish to set sail with that ship. However, in order to push onward sociology’s own feminist revolution, feminist sociological theory would greatly benefit from greater recognition of its accounts of modernity, its own silenced global history, the global histories it has silenced, and the Northern modernist metaphysics at the heart of its work.

notes 1. See also Acker 1992. 2. Ralph Miliband’s (1987) essay on “Class Analysis” in Social Theory Today is the only chapter in the generation-defining book to make any mention of feminism. While arguing for an antireductionist account of class, the otherwise brilliantly nuanced Miliband (1987, 344) claimed that sexism, violence against women, and racism are “perfectly susceptible to class analysis.” 3. See Bhambra (2007a) on the importance of the idea of epochal and geographic “ruptures” to sociology’s self-identity as the science of modernity. 4. See Collins (2013) on the pedagogical challenges she has encountered when trying to rectify this state of affairs. 5. Westbrook and Schilt (2009), for example, follow how cisgender people, or individuals whom Harold Garfinkel called “gender normals,” respond to transgender people. They find that transgender individuals do not only pose a threat to the naturalized gender binary but furthermore pose a threat to heterosexuality. The gender binary, and heterosexuality, are therefore far from a playful performance but are rather protected as carefully guarded privileges. 6. This work is so prolific that I cannot possibly do it justice in one short chapter. See Orloff (2009) and Geva (2014, 2015) for recent reviews. 7. See especially Marx (1978b, 70–81) on “estranged labor” in “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” I will not enter here into debates as to whether the “young Marx” ought to be ignored in light of his later work. I will note, however, that Capital— the late, great, and final Marx—begins with an analysis of the commodity form, where the mystifying peculiarity of the commodity form, according to Marx (1978a, 302–29), inheres in the peculiarity of the labor relationship and “abstract labor” underpinning the commodity form. Marx’s concept of abstract labor is the analytic basis for his account of capitalism in Capital, and hence of modernity. Labor, for the mature Marx, is not a metaphysical category, but a historically specific category. Nonetheless, I maintain that laboras-metaphysics and labor-as-historical-category implicitly underpin much feminist historical and political sociology. 8. Although there is no mention of feminist postmodern theory in Calhoun’s review of postmodernist theory. 9. As Gurminder Bhambra has pointed out, the “multiple modernities,” and I would

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add, “countermodernities” theses, still presume the European West as the center from which a singular, globalizing modernity emerged. See Bhambra 2007a, 2007b. I am therefore employing the idea of “parallel” and “intersecting” modernities. 10. Scholars of gender and immigration politics in Western Europe are often more attuned to the ideologically loaded test of measuring immigrant groups’ modernity based on marriage traditions, women’s autonomy from putatively patriarchal family structures, and women’s clothing, especially the Muslim “headscarf.” For example, Korteweg and Yurdakul 2014; Parvez 2011. 11. Discomfort with viewing the family as not just a site of labor might also account for feminist social theory’s discomfort with psychoanalysis. Feminist psychoanalytic theories view the family as the center of psychodynamic dramas. Nancy Chodorow, for example, views the family as the product of “cultural gender” but also as a unique site for producing “personal gender.” See Chodorow 1995, 1999. 12. To some degree I have made a similar move in my historical-sociological work (e.g., Geva 2011b). Inspired by the work of scholars such as Mounira M. Charrad, who has shown how kinship shapes contemporary states in postcolonial North Africa, I have used such work to reflect back on the place of family and kinship in French and American state development. See Charrad 2001. But note that for the sociologist, the very word kinship can evoke an anthropological aura, that is, a sense of the Global Southern other whose analysis is best left to another discipline. 13. See, for example, Laura Briggs’s (2002) Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico on estrogen experiments in 1950s and 1960s Puerto Rico for the purposes of population control.

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chapter four

World Capitalism, World Hegemony, World Empires ho - fung hung

Since the stagflation crisis of advanced capitalist economies, US defeat in Vietnam, and the Iranian Revolution in the 1970s that shattered postwar stability, the world economic and political order has been in flux. The collapse of the Soviet empire at the turn of the 1990s, the rise of global terrorism, the rise of China and other emerging powers, and the global financial crisis starting in 2008 all urge us to look for theories that could help us make sense of the changing world order and get a sense of where we are heading. Since the 1970s, a myriad of grand theories of world politics have developed to understand our changing world. The key line of contention among these theories concerns whether the center of global capitalism has shifted away from the West in general and the US in particular, and relatedly, whether US global power has declined. For example, Paul Kennedy’s (1989) Rise and Fall of Great Power compared US decline to earlier declining great powers and reiterated the time-honored wisdom of “all go up, must come down.” In the 1990s, upon the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the rise of the doctrine of “humanitarian interventionism” under Clinton, the imaginary of a unipolar world dominated by a global American empire took shape. This empire imaginary was epitomized first in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s (2000) Empire. It did not go away with the 9/11 terrorist attack and the subsequent War on Terror. In fact, the talk about American empire reached its height in the middle of the Iraq War (e.g., Bacevich 2004; Johnson 2004). With the beginning of the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, and more importantly, the start of the global financial crisis in Wall Street in 2008,

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the empire talk was replaced by a renewed talk about the fall of American power. In conjunction with the global financial crisis was the apparent robust growth in economic and geopolitical power of a group of emerging countries, most notably China. In this context, the rise of China and other emerging powers from the developing world such as Brazil and India as new power blocs rivaling or even surpassing the United States becomes a popular projection of the future, so much so that former British Marxist Martin Jacques (2012) wrote the bestseller When China Rules the World and journalist Fareed Zakaria declared that the world has been entering a Post-American World. Many of the above writings, although they may be authored by scholars, are descriptive and atheoretical. One of the few social scientific attempts to theorize the shifting contour of global political economy in a long-term historical perspective is the world-system school, which combines Marxian and Weberian political economy with Gramscian theory of hegemony to account for the pattern and dynamics of successive rise and fall of world hegemonies since the early modern times, including the rise and fall of US hegemony. According to the world-system school, the international order of the world capitalist system, since its inception in sixteenth-century Europe, has operated under the rule and example set up by different hegemonic powers, ranging from the Dutch, the British, and the American. Building on this perspective and overcoming some of its gaps, I argue that the world capitalist system has entered a period of uncertainty with contradictory processes that cannot be easily captured by simply referring to previous hegemonic transitions. In particular, the world-system school needs to develop a more in-depth understanding of world dominant currency and how it is related to world military power to explain the staying world power of the United States that was not enjoyed by earlier declining hegemonies, namely early twentieth-century British and eighteenth-century Dutch. We also need to theorize the impacts and limits of the rise of emerging powers. In what follows, I will first outline the conception of capitalism according to the worldsystem school. Then I will discuss the theory of world hegemony of the school, followed by an introduction to the theory of world money and an exposition of how it could shed light on the unique trajectory of US hegemonic decline or nondecline in the early twenty-first century. At the end, I will address how the rise of “the rest” in the developing world is reshaping world order.

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genesis of capitalism and inter state system Immanuel Wallerstein, who pioneered the world-system school in the 1970s, departs from the orthodox Marxist definition of capitalism as a production system grounded on the waged laborer as the predominant mode of surplus expropriation. He instead defines capitalism as an economic system driven by the logic of “ceaseless accumulation of capital.” To Wallerstein, what fomented the genesis of an international division of labor in the “long sixteenth century” is the rise of such logic under an interstate system. This logic creates and sustains the exploitative unequal exchanges among core, periphery, and semiperiphery regions of the system, which respectively specialized in high value-added, low value-added, and mix of high and low value-added activities. The urge to accumulate will inevitably drive this system to expand geographically to incorporate new periphery zones into the division of labor (Chase-Dunn 1998; Wallerstein 1974, 1979). Wallerstein’s use of the imperative of “ceaseless accumulation of capital” as the defining characteristics of capitalism is in fact very close to Weber’s conception of capitalism. To Weber, what is characteristic of a capitalist economic system is the domination of the capitalist spirit, under which the urge to accumulate money for the sake of accumulating more money overrides all other imperatives. This spirit was represented by Benjamin Franklin’s saying that “[r]emember, that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six, turned again it is seven and three pence, and so on, till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker” (cited in Weber 1992 [1930], 50). This logic is contrary to most if not all religious-moral systems preceding, and outside of, capitalism: In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, . . . is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence. (Weber 1992 [1930], 53)

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This very unusual capitalist logic could not emerge by itself because of the widespread hostility of preexisting moral norms. Its emergence in certain parts of early modern Europe was aided by certain extraeconomic forces that happened to dominate and help clear its way. According to Weber, the extraeconomic force in question is the Calvinist conception of predestination, under which the anxiety to have a glimpse of God’s grace urged Calvinist merchants to see the wealth they accumulated as an indicator of such grace. Weber’s cultural explanation of the rise of capitalism in certain parts of Europe is based on an orientalist conception of cultures outside Europe that presupposes an essential difference between Eastern and Western cultures. This essentialist cultural perspective has long been discredited (see Hung 2003). On the other hand, Weber’s works on medieval city-states, in which he contends that the autonomy and mutual competition of these city-states were the impetus of the rise of capitalism (Weber 1958 [1921]), inspire Giovanni Arrighi to address how and why the logic of ceaseless accumulation of capital through an international division of labor is necessarily linked to an interstate system, and why such logic could hardly prevail in unified empire. Marx’s Capital vol. 1 starts with a discussion of “generalized commodity exchange,” or the economic activity characterized by C-M-C, in which two commodity producers exchange their goods with money as a medium. In this situation, money is a tool of exchange, and the acquisition of commodity’s use value is the end. The rise of such generalized commodity exchange, as discussed in formal theoretical term in the Capital, is outlined as a historical process attributable to the European discovery of the Americas and massive inflow of American silver as the new universal means of exchange in the beginning of The Communist Manifesto: The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. (Marx and Engels 1964 [1848])

When Marx moves on to part two of Capital, he starts to discuss the rise of capitalist activity as characterized by M-C-M′, in which M′ equals M plus an increment, or M + ∆M. In such activity, the commodity involved is just a means in the pursuit of increase in monetary wealth, or capital. Marx then sets out to exposit the secret origin of the increment to M by looking into

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the labor process, from where all the increment of M allegedly originates as surplus value extracted from wage labor (Marx 1992 [1867]). Whether ∆M originates from surplus value in the labor process is debatable. What is more important but is neglected by Marx and many of his followers is how exactly the C-M-C process and the M-C-M′ process are related. Are they linked logically and the latter is a natural, spontaneous outcome of the former? Marx seems to suppose so in Capital. But if we look back to history across civilizations, we will readily find a lot of cases in which C-M-C prevailed but did not lead to M-C-M′. The question is therefore how and why the transition from C-M-C to M-C-M′ happened in early modern Europe but not in other times and places. The merging of Braudel’s and Marx’s insights in Arrighi’s Long Twentieth Century (1994) and Adam Smith in Beijing (2007) offers us hints to the answer. For Braudel, market and capitalism are not to be confounded and should be examined empirically as two distinct patterns of economic activities. While market economy is grounded on exchange and competition among small producers, concerning more about livelihood than profit, capitalism is driven by profit maximization and wealth accumulation that historically required state support and monopolistic economic organizations, as exemplified by chartered companies in early modern Europe. Braudel sees that market is anti-capitalist and vice versa, as the logic of the two types of economic activities are not only incompatible but also contradictory. It is the logic of the farmer’s market vis-à-vis the logic of the large grocery chain. Arrighi sees Braudel’s distinction between market and capitalism as the same as the distinction between C-M-C and M-C-M′ as captured by Marx. He argues that the dominance of the capitalist logic and the subjugation of the market logic should not be seen as natural outgrowth of market development, as he, resonating with a new historiography of the early modern world economy, finds ample evidence of advanced market system without capitalism in the early modern world, with Qing China in the seventeenth and eighteenth century as the most cited example (e.g., Pomeranz 2001). Arrighi makes use of Charles Tilly’s theory of state formation to argue that the very unusual interstate system, which was created and shaped by Europe’s special geographical configuration, and the consequent incessant international conflict in early modern Europe urged state makers to compete for internationally mobile capital to finance war, forging a state-capital alliance that is unseen anywhere else and enabled the rise of M-C-M′ to dominance. Under this capital-state alliance, Western European states became well known in their one-sided support of merchants amid the latter’s conflict with lower classes pauperized by profit-making activities. A case in point is the suppres-

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sion of food riots by the English and French states, which had eschewed authorities’ medieval pledge to protect subjects’ subsistence right and become steadfast defenders of capital’s profitability (Tilly 1975, 1992). While Europe witnessed the rise of a state-capital alliance fostering the rise of capital accumulation to dominance, early modern China, which also witnessed market expansion resulting from the influx of American silver as a much more stable and valuable medium of exchanges than preceding mediums like paper money and copper coins, also saw the emergence of entrepreneurs engaged in M-C-M′ activities. The Confucianist state of the time was supportive to these entrepreneurs’ role in facilitating the growth of the market economy, but it was also anxious to prevent the social dislocation that unchecked profit-making activities would entail. Consequently, despite the many favorable policies to mercantile activities in general (such as low commercial taxes and government loans to merchants), the imperial state never hesitated to side with the laboring classes whenever those entrepreneurial activities went too far and disrupted local livelihoods, as shown in many cases when the authorities penalized grain merchants for invoking food riots. The mercantile elite and profit-making activities in China, therefore, never grew as strong as their counterparts in Western Europe, hence giving rise to the “advanced market without capitalism” in Qing China (Hung 2008). Transcending the labor theory of value, Arrighi sees capitalism as not necessarily tied to waged labor but to diverse forms of economic processes, so far as the pursuit of profit remains central to the economic system. In other words, as far as the profit motivation is concerned, there is only one variety of capitalism, echoing the “Regulation School’s” contention that there has been historically one single type of capitalism under different regimes of capitalist regulations, challenging the “varieties of capitalisms” mirage (see Boyer 2005). What varies is the actual activities that are involved to create ∆M. It can be through commerce, wage labor–based manufacturing, slavebased plantations, or even financial speculation without any material mediation, hence compressing the M-C-M′s into M-M.′ Wherever the surplus is generated, the capital accumulation process needs to be embedded in an interstate system to remain viable. The interstate system and the chronic international conflict within them urged the revenue-hungry state builders and war makers to foster statecapital alliances and facilitate the capital accumulation process. But such a system, if trapped in perpetual chaos, would also destroy capital being accumulated and hence hindered the ceaseless accumulation of capital. Both Arrighi and Wallerstein point out that historically, such chaotic and destruc-

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tive periods occurred only periodically. Amid that chaos, there was always a leading core country that managed to build its world hegemonic power to lay out the ground rules and provide security, stability, and order to the interstate system (Arrighi and Silver 1999). As such, the world-system theory of capitalism leads to its theory of hegemony.

hegemonic cycle and crisis of us hegemony World system’s theory of hegemony is an extension of the Gramscian theory of class hegemony, which addresses how a leading faction of the ruling classes created moral leadership among all factions of the ruling classes and subordinate classes to form a historical bloc. According to the world hegemony theory, a centralized bureaucratic imperial state became impossible in a capitalist international division of labor, and the pattern of interaction among multiple strong core states had to be governed by the cycle of hegemony. Core states always compete with one another for domination over trade routes and territory. This competition usually spiraled out of control into full-scale war and would not end until a core power with supreme military, commercial, and productive advantage won over others and established a ground rule of international order that ensured peace, and other core states would follow voluntarily. Such a rule-drawing core power became a hegemonic power. A world hegemony differs from world empire in that its domination is grounded less on military coercion than on economic supremacy and consensual moral leadership in the interstate system. Over time, the military, productive, and commercial advantage of the hegemonic power dwindled, and the hegemonic state would be challenged by new powers that aspired to break out of the hegemonic rule laid down by the incumbent hegemon. A new round of intercore rivalry and warfare ensued until a new hegemony is established, postulating a new set of rules governing the system. Historically, the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) marked a prolonged period of rivalry between the declining Spanish empire and a group of rising capitalist states that resulted in the rise of the Dutch hegemony, under which the consensual principle of sovereignty as dictated by the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) became the ground rule of international politics until today. The hegemonic rivalry between France and Britain escalated in the long eighteenth century after Dutch power declined. This ended with the defeat of Napoleon’s ambition for a European empire, as well as the establishment of the Pax Britannica in the nineteenth century under the ideology of free

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trade globalism. When British hegemony dissipated in the early twentieth century, rising Germany became a new hegemonic contender that helped precipitate two world wars, which ultimately brought the establishment of the United States as a new hegemonic power. The United States fostered the new consensus of regulated capitalism, managed trade, welfare state, and a global liberal regime based on such international institutions as the United Nations and the Bretton Woods financial institutions. While most writings on hegemony in the world-system literature concerns hegemony among core powers, this theoretical tradition also hints at a hegemony theory in a second sense that has not been explored adequately until recently. For Wallerstein, capitalism is a civilization that originated in Europe. When the capitalist world system expanded through imperial expansion of core powers, other civilizations embedded in different politicaleconomic systems were incorporated into the capitalist system, which dissolved the indigenous systems and turned the regions concerned into a periphery zone of the world system. The process of incorporating and peripherizing non-Western regions is not only a process of domination but also one of extending Western hegemony to the non-Western world. While Western imperial powers often needed to resort to naked military force to subjugate non-Western civilizations, as shown in the Battle of Plassey in India in 1757 and the Opium War in China in 1839– 1842, those subjugated civilizations always turned to the Western ideology of modernity and development and tried to emulate the Western model of industrial growth as a universal yardstick of progress. This “developmentalist illusion” among the colonized and formerly colonized peoples throughout the twentieth century amounts to an acceptance of the core-periphery division of labor in the world system, as well as the justification of their periphery status at the bottom of the world-system hierarchy (Arrighi 1990). Into the late 1960s, the United States’ military impasse in Indochina and its worsening fiscal and economic crises signaled the starting of US hegemonic decline. It induced world-system theorists to see the period from the 1970s onward as one of hegemonic transition resembling the Dutch-British hegemonic transition in the eighteenth century and British-US transition in the early twentieth century. This view is far from restricted to worldsystem theorists but is shared by many authors with varying intellectual dispositions. Many see the new dynamic capitalist economies of Germany and Japan as the up and coming hegemonic contenders capable of challenging US leadership (e.g., Stallings 1995; Vogel 1979). In the 1980s and 1990s, with European integration advanced, some saw a unifying Europe as a new hegemon and new model of capitalism (e.g., Held 2000).

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But this round of hegemonic transition differs significantly from previous transitions. The logic of induction, therefore, no longer works. In the first two transitions, challengers to the incumbent hegemon were independent political powers and the hegemon’s military edge over other core states declined with its economic edge. However, in the current hegemonic crisis, the United States as an incumbent hegemon continued to enjoy unparalleled military prowess over all other core states. In fact, all core capitalist states, such as (West) Germany and Japan, were stripped of their independent military capability and relied one-sidedly on the United States for protection of their national security. This skewed distribution of military power among cores states remains unchanged until today. The economic weight of the United States vis-à-vis other core capitalist powers also stabilized and ceased falling after the 1980s (for more discussion, see Hung 2015, chapter 5). At the same time, in the first two transitions (Dutch to British and British to US), all the incumbent hegemons and contenders were among Western core states. The two transitions occurred at a time when Western hegemony was on the rise, coinciding with the expansion of Western formal and informal empires that culminated in the Pax Americana in the 1950s. In contrast, the 1960s not only saw the decline of one particular Western hegemonic power but also the decline of Western hegemony at large. The decolonization process and revolutionary movements in the periphery posed a challenge to all Western powers collectively. The US defeat in Vietnam in 1975, the French losing in the Algerian War, and the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 are also manifestations of this trend. Even though none of these periphery powers could challenge US military prowess globally or even regionally, the disaster of the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan show that the United States could no longer enforce its will unfettered in the periphery. The increasing economic dynamism in the postrevolution third world continued to tilt the balance of global power from the Global North to the Global South. This observation is shared by conservative authors like Huntington (1996), who foresees that the West is going to be overshadowed by “the rest” demographically, politically, militarily, and economically, and it will no longer dominate “the rest” in global affairs. Undoubtedly, the apex of this “rise of the rest” in recent years is the rise of Asia and China as an economic and geopolitical heavyweight, as marked by China’s becoming the second largest economy, surpassing the United States in multiple economic indicators, and turning increasingly proactive in employing its economic might to buy influence in Africa and Latin America in recent years (Hung 2015, chapters 4 and 5). These two anomalies in the decline of US hegemony, that is, the con-

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tinuous military supremacy of the United States among other capitalist core powers and the “rise of the rest,” as well as the uncertainties that these two anomalies bring to the future of the world system, challenge us to advance traditional world-system theory to (1) explain US continuous military supremacy and its capability in fending off economic challenges from other core states and (2) to envision the prospective scenarios of world order given by the rise of periphery and semiperiphery states unprecedented in capitalism’s five-hundred-year history. In the following two sections, I argue that world-system theory’s difficulty in coming to terms with the staying hard power of the United States stems from its negligence of the role of world money in reproducing world power. I also argue that the “rise of the rest” pose less challenge to the staying power of the United States than it appears. Such rise could either reproduce, ironically, the US staying power, fostering a US global empire, or it could bring the world into a division of regional empires competing with one another and with the US empire.

world money and world power In 1971, amid the dissolution of the Bretton Woods monetary system following US abolition of the gold standard, British political scientist Susan Strange (1971) published Sterling and British Policy. She drew on the rise and fall of the sterling hegemony in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to devise a theory on world currency. To Strange, a currency could become hegemonic in the global economy by attaining one or more of these statuses: the status as a top currency, the status as a master currency, and the status as a negotiated currency. A top currency is grounded on the economic viability and competitiveness of the issuing country, as reflected by a strong currency and healthy current account balance of the issuing country. Other countries adopt the top currency because of the reliability of its value. A master currency refers to currency issued by a colonial power and widely and involuntarily adopted in its colonies. Its wide usage in the world economy is politically rather than economically determined, depending on the size of the colonial empire that the issuing country controlled. A negotiated currency is one whose wide usage was grounded on bargaining and consensus between the issuing country and its trading partners. The hegemonic status of a currency usually stems from a combination of the three statuses, and the relative significance of each status could change from time to time. Viewed in this light, the US dollar was a top currency at the height of

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postwar US hegemony, as its dominant position was a function of the United States’ economic strength that allowed it to have a persistent current account surplus and maintain the one ounce of gold to thirty-five-dollar exchange rate. After Nixon abolished the gold standard in 1971 and during the United States’ recurrent economic troubles amid its hegemonic decline in the 1970s, some argue major capitalist powers were free to use other currencies in trade and reserve buildup, and their continued preference of the dollar was no longer grounded on economic reason but on voluntary agreement among these powers. In other words, the US dollar has turned from a top currency to a negotiated currency (Helleiner 2008; see also Eichengreen 2011, 124–49). The dollar’s negotiated currency status after 1971 is indisputable, as time and again its dominant position was questioned or even challenged (particularly after the launch of the euro as a plausible alternative). Its wide usage depended, at least in part, on the good will of governments of major capitalist economies. The trans-Atlantic as well as trans-Pacific alliances that the United States constructed during the cold war and struggled to maintain after the end of cold war were key platforms where the United States negotiated with its allies over a wide range of political and economic issues, including the use of the dollar. But it is not the whole story. Besides its negotiated currency status, the top currency, and more importantly the master currency status of the dollar, should not be ignored in explaining the staying power of the dollar standard. To ensure that enterprises continued to use dollars in their invoices and governments continued to maintain a substantial portion of foreign exchange reserves in dollars after the abolition of its gold convertibility, Washington still has to guarantee that its currency meets a minimum standard of stability and reliability. Ideally, the US government has to make sure that the value of the dollar remains strong all the time, warranting its short-term attractiveness to investors. In the meantime, the current account balance of the United States needs to stay in good shape so as to warrant the stability of the dollar’s value over the long run, ensuring the long-term attractiveness of the dollar. These have been daunting tasks, provided that the US current account balance and prospect of economic growth have been deteriorating ever since the 1970s. Moreover, the goals of maintaining the dollar’s long-term and short-term attractiveness were contradictory. In the heyday of the postwar Bretton Woods system from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, the strength of the US dollar, given by its gold convertibility, did not hurt the US current account balance, as US productive competitiveness was unmatched in the capitalist

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world. But since the 1970s, when US manufacturing began to be under increasing threat from European and Asian competitors (Brenner 2003), the US current account balance has been ever more sensitive to the movement of the dollar. While a strong dollar could hurt US export competitiveness and hence worsen its current account deficit (therefore damaging the dollar’s long-term attractiveness), improving the current account balance often requires a depreciation of the dollar (hence hurting the dollar’s short-term attractiveness). What US policymakers have been doing is to maintain the dollar’s precarious top currency status by alternately defending the longterm and short-term attractiveness of the dollar by swinging back and forth between a weak and a strong dollar (Milesi-Ferretti 2008). The negotiated currency and top currency statuses of the dollar could not be easily maintained without its master currency status. To be sure, the United States has never been a colonial empire as Britain used to be, and the United States could rarely force other countries to privilege the dollar as the British used to force its colonies to use sterling. But the unparalleled political and military muscle of the United States does enable it to prevent the rise of currencies potentially threatening to the dollar, hence keeping the dollar safe from the challenge of viable alternative currencies. It makes the “negotiation” that renders the US dollar a negotiated currency status much easier from the vantage point of Washington, as the lack of alternatives induces other capitalist economies to increase their tolerance of US current account deficit and the weakness of dollars. This toleration also gave Washington great freedom of action to manipulate the value of the dollar, at times ignoring its current account deficit for an extended period amid its pursuit of a strong dollar, and at times reviving economic growth from a crisis by depreciating the dollar. This helps the United States maintain its economic viability and therefore the top currency status of the dollar. Ever since the beginning of the cold war in the late 1940s, the United States has been providing military protection to its allies around the world, including not only core capitalist countries in Europe and Japan but also key oil producers and other developing countries on its side. Economies covered by this military umbrella outsourced their national security against communist threat to the US war machine, and they could survive with a defense budget much smaller than it would have been needed if there had been no military protection from the United States. The role of the US global war machine in supporting the hegemonic status of the dollar was well illustrated by numerous episodes at the height of the cold war, when governments of America’s European allies, West Germany in particular, had to increase purchase of dollar instruments and US

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military supplies, paid in dollars, under the explicit threat of reduction of US troops stationed in their countries (Gavin 2004: 20). Such reduction could have immediately generated a security crisis, forcing those governments to increase military spending to pick up the slack (Eichengreen 2011, 71; Strange 1980). Regarding other countries dependent on US military protection, some even find a positive correlation that extends far into the post–cold war era, between the number of US troops deployed in a country and the country’s use of dollars (Posen 2008). This dollar-security nexus ensured that the dollar would remain the dominant foreign reserve currency in Western Europe and Japan even after the cold war was over and the US hegemony ended. It also warranted that the monarchial and authoritarian oil-producing states, which were always vulnerable to internal rebellion and needed US protection even more, to invoice their oil exports in dollars (Posen 2008). Large-scale governmental purchases of dollar instruments among key capitalist powers and the use of dollars in oil trades contributed to the persistent global liquidity of the dollar, and it created what economists call network externality or a bandwagon effect, motivating private enterprises and governments around the world to use the dollar for their reserve and invoices. This geopolitical support of dollar hegemony remained unchallenged until the end of the cold war in the 1990s. With the Soviet bloc as a common security threat gone, regional powers used to being held hostage by the US security umbrella tried to break free of the US dollar–security nexus. Europe and Iraq were such powers. These attempts to break free were best characterized by two events in the early 1990s: the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 that presaged the euro and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 that opened Iraq’s decade-long gamble to unlock the United States’ grip on oil-producing states in the Middle East. In response to these serious geopolitical-monetary challenges, United States strived to reinstate its military supremacy and safeguard the dollar through war making in the long 1990s, either in the name of “humanitarian intervention” or “preemptive strike.” The containment of Iraq’s ambition in the First Gulf War of 1991 and the trade embargo thereafter, the Kosovo War in 1999, and the Second Iraq War in 2003 were exemplars of such war-making efforts. Confronting the emergent challenge of the euro, the United States’ strategy of creating obstacles to Europe’s integration and expansion by seeking allegiance with Eastern European countries and exploiting cleavages between France, Germany, and other European countries, reinstating the United States as an indispensable power in Europe, has been well documented (Gowan 1999, 2004). The Second Iraq War in 2003 was particu-

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larly devastating to the future of the new currency. On the eve and amid the launch of the euro, Saddam Hussein’s regime was reportedly making a backroom deal with France and Germany that Iraq would denominate its oil exports in euro in exchange for France and Germany’s support of the lifting of United Nations embargo on Iraq. The shift to euro by Iraq, which possessed huge oil reserves and could become the second largest oil exporter only after Saudi Arabia, could induce other oil producers to shift at least some of their oil export invoices to euro, and this would be a blow to the dollar (Gulick 2005; Posen 2008; cf. Krishner 2008). Viewed in this light, one consequence, intended or unintended, of the toppling of Saddam Hussein in the Second Iraq War was that the nascent euro had lost a golden opening to dominate a substantial portion of the oil market. With the United States’ global war machine remaining unchallenged and the euro’s capability in displacing the dollar neutralized, the dollar managed to continue its global dominance after the cold war. The United States’ geopolitical supremacy during and after the cold war gave Washington unparalleled leeway to adjust the value of the dollar, either unilaterally or through twisting the arms of its geopolitical clients, to meet the needs of the US domestic economy, hence helping maintain the long-term and short-term attractiveness of the dollar as well as its top currency status. The rise of Japan in the 1980s and China in the 2000s as the biggest creditors to the United States invoked a lot of discussion about the United States’ indebtedness to these two, to other Asian countries and the imminent collapse of the US dollar if Asia lost confidence in the US dollar and stopped lending to the United States through their purchase of US Treasury bonds. This vulnerability of the dollar is greatly exaggerated. The underlying force that made Japan, China, and other Asian countries lend to the United States is the export-driven economies that render them dependent on the US consumption market. Their massive purchase of US Treasury bonds amounts to a subsidy to US consumers to help them buy their products, as well as a store of value with liquidity so big that the Asian exporters have little choice other than parking their hard-earned foreign reserves, mostly in the form of US dollars, there. US indebtedness to Asian exporters is in fact an indicator of the strength, rather than the weakness, of the global dollar standard (Hung 2015, chapter 5; see also Prasad 2014). In other words, ever since the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system in 1971, Washington had enjoyed vast freedom of action to swing the dollar up and down to alternately defend the short-term attractiveness of the dollar (by boosting its value at the cost of a deteriorating current account deficit) and its long-term stability (through pushing down its value to

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improve the current account balance) when it saw fit. Washington’s power in unilaterally determining the value of the dollar vis-à-vis other major currencies at different times brought improvement in current account balance or strengthening of the dollar at any given moment in prolonging the dollar’s top currency status. As we have seen earlier, Washington’s freedom of action in manipulating the dollar’s value would not have been possible if the United States had not precluded the rise of potentially competing currencies through its political-military supremacy. The dollar standard, stemming from its master currency, negotiated currency, and top currency statuses, is ultimately grounded on the political-military supremacy of the United States that continued into the post–cold war world. Needless to say, such political-military supremacy was in turn supported by the persistent dollar standard, which enabled the United States to maintain its military spending through massive borrowing, even though the United States has lost its competitive edge in material production to Asia. The staying political-military domination and the US dollar as the world currency are mutually constitutive and explain why the US hegemony did not decline the way that early twentieth-century Britain and eighteenthcentury Netherlands did. While the seventeenth-century Dutch hegemony and nineteenth-century British hegemony were grounded on their overwhelming advantage in production and trade, as well as on consensual, moral leadership among other core powers through constructing and maintaining a stable international order, their declines led to protracted chaos and conflict brought by futile attempts of rising powers to build core-wide empires (e.g., the Napoleon empire and the Nazi empires) and destroy the Westphalia system of sovereign states. Such attempts were ultimately defeated by another rising power (early nineteenth-century Britain and early twentieth-century United States) seeking to rebuild the international order and uphold the Westphalia system (Arrighi and Silver 1999). As such, US transformation into a globally reaching power transgressing the Westphalia system is a transformation from a declining hegemon into a world empire that grounds its global domination on coercive leadership, deviating from previous instances of hegemonic decline (Negri and Hardt 2000; cf. Panitch and Gindin 2012).

rise of the rest and the world of empires Arrighi (1994, 2007) contends that out of the declining US hegemony and the rise of Asia as the new center of capital accumulation, the world would

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head to three possible scenarios. The first scenario is that East Asia, and China in particular with its new productive capability, would extend its economic leadership into an alternative political leadership to the world, challenging the military and coercive monopoly of the United States. In this scenario, the competition between Asia and the United States would create a balance of power, heralding a more egalitarian world order. In the second scenario, the US global monopoly of the means of violence enables the rise of a US-centered, tribute-extracting global empire. In the third scenario, the US monopoly of means of violence could not securely dominate the world, while Asia’s economic prowess fails to translate into an alternative world leadership, dragging the world into leaderless chaos with conflicts and violence spinning out of control. As seen in the discussion above, the United States has relied on its currency’s global domination to perpetuate its staying global power, effectively building an American global empire of capital. Even though capitalist elites in the emerging world have been playing the game and helping to uphold the US empire through Treasury bonds purchase and export-oriented growth, many of the emerging powers are starting to develop their own regional ambition, attempting to revive their domination in the region they are embedded in at the expense of US influence. This ambition is driven not by the capitalist imperative but by nationalist impulses. Russia’s attempts to subjugate newly independent states in Europe that used to be part of Russia’s Soviet empire is a case in point. The ambition of China to rebuild its regional leadership in East Asia that it had lost in the nineteenth century is another example. Some predict that we are heading toward a “world of regions” in which regional power blocs coexist with the American imperium (Katzenstein 2005). To Arrighi’s formulation as well as many others’ that explore the possibility of the future world order, the trajectory of China’s development is one of the most important factors in reshaping the global political configuration. So far, the explorations of China’s rising global political influence focus mainly on diplomatic and strategic issues that tend to be atheoretical. In the following, I discuss this issue with theoretical and long-term historical perspectives. As in the realm of economic dynamism, the “rise of China” in Asia’s regional politics is likewise a “resurgence,” to be more exact. Although China has never been a political power with global reach, the Chinese empire did exercise hegemony in Asia until the coming of Western imperial powers that shattered the premodern Asian international order. Some do see the trajectory of China’s rising power in Asia and beyond in a post–US hegemonic

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world is at least partially a revival of a Sinocentric regional order, which follows a very different logic as compared to the Westphalia system emerging out of Europe. To understand how the political rise of China is contributing to the reshaping of the world order, we need to take a historical perspective on China’s relations with the world since premodern times. According to Japanese historian Takeshi Hamashita (2008), premodern China’s view of the world was dominated by a universalism in which the distinction between entities “inside” the empire and those “outside” the empire was not clear cut. The Chinese worldview was constituted by a concentric circle centered at the emperor, with directly governed provinces located at the immediate outer circle, and tribute vassals located at the circle further out. This world order, diverging from the Western model of empire that originated in Roman times, was not grounded on the logic of tributary extractions from the center. Instead, its operation rested upon the principle of benevolence of the center and reciprocal loyalty from the periphery. Tribute vassals of the Chinese empire would send envoy and gifts to the imperial capital in tribute missions, and in return, these missions usually obtained gifts of higher value from the emperor. Under this system, rulers in the tribute states derived their legitimacy from the endorsement of the Chinese emperor, and the loyalty of the tribute states was instrumental to the border security of the Chinese emperor. This Sinocentric tributary system consolidated at the height of the Tang dynasty (618–907), with Chang’an (today’s Xi’an) as the imperial capital that periodically received tribute missions from Central Asia. Into the Song dynasty, when nomadic invasions from the north pushed the center of gravity of the Chinese empire to the south, official and unofficial Chinese activities in maritime Asia started to grow and peaked in the Ming dynasty (1368– 1644), when the Sinocentric tributary system expanded into Southeast Asia and Japan. With the growth of private maritime trade in Asia, tribute missions gained not only from the reciprocal gifts from the Chinese emperor but also from the trading activities conducted by merchants who accompanied the tribute mission to travel to China. This early modern Sinocentric international order, under which tribute vassals’ loyalty was secured by generous gifts and trading opportunities from China, was designated as a Sinocentric tribute-trade system by Hamashita (2008). The nineteenth-century disintegration of the Sinocentric tribute-trade system upon Western colonization of China’s tribute vassals—such as Burma and Vietnam—opened up space for Japan, which successfully industrialized and constructed a modern centralized state after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, to develop its ambition of usurping China’s centrality in Asia. At the

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turn of the twentieth century, Japan tried to build a Great Asia Co-Prosperity Circle that began with Japan’s colonization of Taiwan and Korea in 1895 and 1905, respectively, establishment of a puppet state in Manchuria in 1931, followed by outright invasion of China in 1937 and brief colonization of a number of Southeast Asian states during World War II. After the collapse of the Japanese empire upon the end of World War II, the East Asian international order was replaced with a cold war order. Under this order, the United States became the hegemon that took the place of wartime Japan to dominate maritime Asia, providing economic and military security to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and much of Southeast Asia. China, turning Communist in 1949, was at first a part of the Soviet bloc. But this cold war order in Asia has been complicated by China’s increasing cleavage with the Soviet Union that made it an increasingly autonomous power in the region independent from both the United States and the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, China, though still formally a keen ally of the Soviet, already started to become a key perpetuator of the nonaligned movement that sought to carve an autonomous political space for newly independent and developing countries. After the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, China’s revolutionary diplomacy became totally independent of the Soviet Union, and China’s financial and military support of revolutionary regimes and movements, including those in North Korea, Cambodia, and other Southeast Asia, resembled the patronizing relationship between imperial China and the mini-dynasties in its neighboring vassal states. At the times of the cold war, such revival of a Sinocentric tributary order was very limited. China’s influence over its neighbors was restricted as many of them, like North Korea, also succumbed to the Soviet Union, and political forces patronized by China were mostly guerrilla movements not in power, like the communist parties in the Philippines and Malaysia. With the end of cold war and the economic revival of China, the revival of such order became more full-fledged. As China became the biggest exporter of finished manufactured products in Asia, a regional division of labor emerged in which China’s neighbors became specialized in exporting machines and sophisticated components (e.g., Japan and Korea) and raw materials (Myanmar and Malaysia) to China. On top of its neighbors’ increasing economic dependence on China through trade, China has been also active in providing its poorer neighbors with investment, loans, and other economic assistance as represented by infrastructure projects in Cambodia and Myanmar financed by concession loan from Chinese state banks. When these Asian countries’ economic dependence on China deepens,

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China becomes increasingly prone to take advantage of this dependence to put pressure on the former’s government regarding different political issues, such as those over Taiwan and territorial dispute with China (Hung 2015, chapter 5). In terms of intellectual and policy discourses, Beijing has become increasingly outspoken about its desire to reconstruct a China-centered tributary order from premodern times (see Callahan 2008). To be sure, the rise of this new Asian order with China’s increasing weight and centrality is far from a simple replication of the premodern Sinocentric tribute-trade order. For one thing, the premodern Sinocentric tribute-trade order was grounded on Confucianism as a cultural foundation, which justified the practices of reciprocity between the center and periphery. Today, China’s increasing centrality in Asia’s international order, on the contrary, was not supported by any cultural ground but was based little more than realpolitik. For another, China was the only one dominating power in the premodern Sinocentric system, while China’s rising centrality today is met by the residual hegemony of the United States in the region. The lack of cultural foundation and competition from the United States are the major hindrance to the continuous rise of China’s geopolitical influence. Motivated only by economic interests and regional military might and in lack of cultural admiration of China, the allegiance of Asian states to China was at best contingent. The continuous presence of the United States also provided an opportunity for these Asian states to play the two superpowers in the region against each other. In the end, East Asian politics developed into competition between two empires—a Sinocentric regional empire and the American global empire. This bipolar imperial structure is not restricted to Asia but is also emerging in Europe, with its eastern part becoming a contested zone between an increasingly assertive Russia and Western Europe as an Atlantic front of the American empire. In the 2000s, China started to expand its investment, aid, and loans to Africa aggressively, replicating its strategy to turn economic prowess into geopolitical influence. Many African states were reciprocal in their relation with China, returning China’s economic favors with their support of Beijing over sensitive political and sovereignty issues. China’s increasing presence also offered these states new opportunities and autonomy to resist political demand from the United States and other Western powers. But just as many of China’s neighbors are feeling insecure with their increasing dependence on China, some African leaders have started to voice their concern about “Chinese colonialism” (Sanusi 2013). The inroads of China stimulated other emerging powers to shore up their presence in the continent to secure the supply of raw materials originally

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from there. In the run-up to the Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) meeting in Durban in March 2013, social movement organizations and opposition parties in Africa organized a countersummit and coined the concept of “subimperialism” to make sense of the rise of political and economic influence of China and other emerging big countries in the continent. Some go as far as claiming the BRICS enthusiasm in expanding their presence in Africa resembles the “scramble for Africa” among European imperial powers after the Berlin Conference in 1885 (Bond 2013). Some of the emerging powers that had a long history of imperial domination in their regions, such as Russia and Turkey, are becoming more explicit in their ambition to revive their past glories of the Russian (Soviet) empire and the Ottoman empire (Gocek 2011; Kalb 2015; Taspinar 2008). As such, though China and many other emerging capitalist powers contribute to the sustenance of the American empire through their massive purchase of US Treasury bonds and hence their support of the US dollar hegemony, they also carved out their own spheres of influence in their own regions or in strategically resource-rich areas like sub-Saharan Africa, turning themselves into lesser empires. What we see is a global structure of nested empire—with the US empire as an overarching, globally reaching empire under which emerging regional empires contest with one another or resist the United States. Whether it is a transitory stage of world order leading us to a more stable form of global power configuration or it constitutes the initial stage of a global new order remains to be seen and demands further theorization.

conclusion To recapitulate, world capitalism, as a historical system grounded on the imperative of ceaseless accumulation of capital, required an interstate system as its container at its inception in sixteenth-century Europe. The statecapital alliance in a condition of incessant state making and war making is the necessary condition for capital accumulation to develop freely from an advanced market economy by breaking through the straitjacket of traditional cultural and social sanctions. The powerful union of capital and the interstate system dissolved any attempt to rebuild empire in Europe from the Spaniards to Napoleon to the Nazis. The capitalist interstate system periodically stabilized under the leadership of a world hegemonic state. The seventeenth-century Dutch, early nineteenth-century Britain, and mid-twentieth-century America as world

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hegemons depart drastically from traditional world empire in that their power was based more on global rule-making leadership, production and commercial supremacy, and the consensus among other core states than raw military power. In between the periods of systemic stability under the leadership of definite world hegemony are periods of systemic chaos when core states go into conflicts with one another, vying to become the next hegemonic power. This theory of hegemonic cycle is a powerful framework that helps us make sense of the cycle of war and peace up to the late twentieth century, when the productive and commercial superiority of the United States waned with its moral leadership amid the economic crisis and the United States’ humiliating defeat in the Vietnam War in the 1970s. What happened after the 1970s, however, moves beyond the imagination of the existing theory of hegemonic cycles. Forty years after the seeming inauguration of US hegemonic decline, the United States continues to be the single most powerful military power in the world, with all other significant military powers trailing far behind. US protective and commercial supremacy, though it never attained its 1950s and 1960s level, ceased to decline. Moreover, the US dollar continues to be the dominant measurement of value in the world economy, even though its own value has been dislodged from gold under the pressure of domestic fiscal and economic crises in the United States in the 1970s. At the same time, there have been no contending powers in sight that appear to have the capability to become the new world hegemon. In this context, the United States continues to provide minimal and barely effective security and stability to the world system through its monopoly of military power. The United States has transformed itself from a world hegemon to a world empire. This recent development in global politics requests new theorization of international relations that could explain US staying power, and even its transformation into a world empire, despite its hegemonic decline. I argue that such theorization hinges on a deeper understanding of how the continuing global dollar standard and the continuing domination of US military support each other as two pillars of the US global empire. A new theory of world money and world empire is wanting, and this chapter is an initial attempt to that end. At the same time, we also see that emerging powers in the semiperiphery and periphery of the world system, which was integrated with the US capitalist system, supporting and benefiting from the global dollar standard, are ironically developing their nationalistic ambition so much so that they start to become regional imperial powers, challenging the reach of the US

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global empire in their own regions. In this development, we start to see an incipient transformation of the interstate system based on the principle of sovereignty into an interempire system under an overarching and contested US-centered global empire. More theorization of historical and emergent empires is needed for a better understanding of this new global configurations of powers, superseding traditional theories mostly developed in the age of the nation-state. World-system analysts have emphasized since its inception that it transgressed the nation-state as a unit of analysis in all other branches of social sciences, with the modernization theory that sees development as an autonomous process contained within individual nation-states as the prime example. Instead, world-system researchers employed “methodological holism” to look at development of the world system as a whole and analyze each nation’s development in terms of their location within the system. But when it comes to the political order of the system, they are still very much focused on nation-states as actors, looking at how individual states conflict with one another and seek to become hegemons. Such an approach to international order is losing its currency when the freedom of action of sovereign states is increasingly eroded by subnational, transnational, and supranational forces. While a cacophony of works has emerged to deal with the relation between the changing global political economy and different kinds of such rising units—such as global cities, diasporic networks, and supranational governing structures like the World Trade Organization—little has been done so far to theorize the relation between the economic foundation of these new formations and the incipient new order manifested by the rivalry between a US-centered global empire and other regional empires. Given the above considerations, it is time for us to build bridges between the world-system analysis, which provides effective and holistic perspective linking global politics to global economy, with the rising, more recent theoretical adventure in the world of empires and global money (Dodd 2014; Ferguson 2009; Go 2011; Ingham 2004; Johnson 2004; Steinmetz 2013). It is a challenging and exciting time for theorists of the global.

references Arrighi, Giovanni. 1990. “The Developmentalist Illusion: A Reconceptualization of the Semiperiphery.” In Semiperipheral States in the World-Economy, edited by W. G. Martin, 11–42. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

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———. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. New York: Verso. ———. 2007. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso. Arrighi, Giovanni, and Beverly Silver. 1999. Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bacevich, Andrew J. 2004. American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bond, Patrick 2013. “Sub-imperialism as Lubricant of Neoliberalism: South African ‘Deputy Sherriff ’ Duty within BRICS.” Third World Quarterly 34 (2): 251–70. Boyer, Robert. 2005. “How and Why Capitalisms Differ.” Economy and Society 34 (4): 509–57. Brenner, Robert. 2003. The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy. London: Verso. Callahan, William. 2008. “Chinese Visions of World Order: Post-Hegemonic or a New Hegemony?” International Studies Review 10 (4): 749–61. Chase-Dunn, Christopher. 1998. Global Formation: Structures of the World-Economy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Dodd, Nigel. 2014. The Social Life of Money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eichengreen, Barry 2011. Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Ferguson, Naill. 2009. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. New York: Penguin Books. Gavin, Francis J. 2004. Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958–1971. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Go, Julian. 2011. Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gocek, Fatma M. 2011. The Transformation of Turkey: Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era. New York: I. B. Tauris. Gowan, Peter. 1999. Contemporary Intra-Core Relation and World System Theory. London: Verso. ———. 2004. “Contemporary Intra-Core Relations and World Systems Theory.” Journal of World-Systems Research 10 (2): 471–500. Gulick, John. 2005. “Rising Intra-Core Rivalry and the US Turn toward East Asia.” In Allies as Rivals: The US, Europe, and Japan in a Changing World-System, edited by Faruk Tabak, 127–48. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Hamashita, Takeshi. 2008. China, East Asia and the Global Economy: Regional and Historical Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Held, David. 2000. “Regulating Globalization: The Reinvention of Politics.” International Sociology 27 (1): 21–50. Helleiner, Eric. 2008. “Political Determinants of International Currencies: What Future for the US Dollar?” Review of International Political Economy 15 (3): 354–78. Huntington, Samuel. 1996. Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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Hung, Ho-fung. 2003. “Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories: China and the European Conceptions of East-West Differences from 1600 to 1900.” Sociological Theory 21 (3): 254–80. ———. 2008. “Rise of China and the Global Overaccumulation Crisis.” Review of International Political Economy 15 (2): 149–79. ———. 2009. “America’s Head Servant? PRC’s Dilemma in the Global Crisis.” New Left Review 60: 5–25. ———. 2008. “Agricultural Revolution and Elite Reproduction: Transition to Capitalism Debate Revisited.” American Sociological Review 73 (4): 569–88. ———. 2015. The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World. New York: Columbia University Press. Ingham, Geoffrey. 2004. The Nature of Money. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Jacques, Martin. 2012. When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. London: Penguin. Johnson, Chalmers. 2004. The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Henry Holt. Kalb, Marvin. 2015. Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Katzenstein, Peter J. 2005. A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kennedy, Paul. 1989. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York: Vintage. Krishner, Jonathan. 2008. “Dollar Primacy and American Power: What’s at Stake?” Review of International Political Economy 15 (3): 418–38. Marx, Karl. 1992 [1867]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. New York: Penguin. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1964 [1848]. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Simon & Schuster. Milesi-Ferretti, Gian Maria. 2008. “Fundamentals at Odds? The U.S. Current Account Deficit and the Dollar.” IMF Working Paper, Washington, DC. https://www.imf.org /external/pubs/ft/wp/2008/wp08260.pdf. Negri, Antonia, and Michael Hardt. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leo, Panitch, and Sam Gindin. 2013. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. New York: Verso. Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. 2012. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. New York: Verso. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2001. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Posen, Adam S. 2008. “Why the Euro Will Not Rival the Dollar.” International Finance 11 (1): 75–100. Prasad, Eswar. 2014. The Dollar Trap: How the U.S. Dollar Tightened Its Grip on Global Finance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sanusi, Lamido. 2013. “Africa Must Get Real about Chinese Ties: The Relationship Carries with It a Whiff of Colonialism.” Financial Times, March 11.

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Stallings, Barbara, ed. 1995. Global Change, Regional Response: The New International Context of Development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Steinmetz, George, ed. 2013. Sociology and Empire: The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Strange, Susan. 1971. Sterling and British Policy: A Political Study of an International Currency in Decline. New York: Oxford University Press. Strange, Susan. 1980. “Germany and the World Monetary System.” In West Germany: A European and Global Power, edited by Wilfrid Kohl and Giorgio Basevi, 45–62. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Taspinar, Omar. 2008. “Turkey’s Middle East Policies: Between Neo- Ottomanism and Kemalism.” Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. http:// carnegieendowment.org/2008/10/07/turkey-s-middle-east-policies-between-neo -ottomanism-and-kemalism. Tilly, Charles. 1975. “Food Supply and Public Order in Modern Europe.” In Formation of National States in Western Europe, edited by Charles Tilly, 380–455. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1992. Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 99 –1992. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Vogel, Erza. 1979. Japan as Number One: Lesson for America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press. ———. 1979. The Capitalist World-Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. 1958 [1921]. The City. New York: Simon & Schuster. ———. 1992 [1930]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge.

chapter five

Postcolonial Thought as Social Theory julian go

Social theory has long been concerned with the social relations, forms, and meanings of modernity. It was born of this concern (Adams, Clemens, and Orloff 2005). But if this is true, social theory should also be concerned with empire. Empire and related processes of colonialism and imperialism have been central to the making of modern societies. By the early twentieth century, nine-tenths of the globe had been occupied by imperial powers and their colonies (Young 2001, 2). Nearly every society in the world today is either a former colony of another society or a former imperial power. And modernity itself is the product of imperial relations. It is not only that the industrial wealth of Anglo-European societies was made possible through imperial expansion and accumulation overseas; it is also the case that other crucial aspects of the “modern”—techniques of value extraction, labor control, discipline, policing and surveillance, modern systems of sanitation, health and imprisonment, and the very idea of the “modern” itself—were initially deployed and developed (if not invented) in overseas colonies or through imperial relations.1 Social theory should also be concerned with empire because of the present as well as the past. While the modern empires were finally dismantled by the 1960s, their legacies remain. Global inequalities reflect the inequalities first forged by colonialism: the countries that were comparably the wealthiest two hundred years ago are still at the top, while those that were colonized remain at the bottom.2 And in metropoles around the world, from the sunny streets of Los Angeles to the arid lands of central Spain or the damp recesses of London, immigrants from the metropole’s former colonies remain in

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abject subjection. Full citizenship rights remain out of their reach just as it had been for many of their great-grandparents when they were subjects, not citizens, of empire. Meanwhile, other legacies persist. Separatist movements from the southern Philippines to Quebec, calls for regional autonomy from Hawaii or Catalonia, and antiracist struggles in Copenhagen and Brooklyn continue, all fighting the remains of prior colonial divisions. And everywhere, indigenous peoples proclaim rights upon postcolonial states, sharing an identity of prior colonization and dispossession, even as the nativist stances they adopt are partly legacies of colonial discourse. In any case, imperialistic aggression has not subsided; neo-imperial formations are forged and reproduced in the present moment. Our postcolonial era is rife with colonial hauntings, even as former imperial states struggle to exorcise them and rising states summon them. Postcolonial theory is a body of thought that attempts to take these imperial processes and patterns into account: to recognize their importance, examine their making and unmaking, and uncover their legacies. Much in the same way that capitalism is the condition of existence for Marxist theory, or patriarchy for feminist theory, so too is empire and its legacies the object and concern of postcolonial theory. But postcolonial theory is much more than simply “bringing colonialism (or empire) in.” It is also a critique of knowledge, including social science knowledge and certain strands of social theory. Related to its premise that empire is constitutive of modernity is its recognition that empire is also constitutive of knowledge. This lends postcolonial theory an epistemic and theoretical dimension rather than only an empirical one. As chronicler of postcolonial thought Robert Young (2001, 60) puts it, postcolonial theory is not only about understanding the material effects of empire upon the present, it also mounts a “radical challenge to the political and conceptual structures of the systems on which [imperial] domination had been based.” The scholarly work in North America that goes under the sign “postcolonial theory” (a.k.a. “postcolonial studies” or “postcolonial thought”) originates in the humanities. It has been a major intellectual trend in English departments, adjacent disciplines, and political philosophy and history. Led by writers such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, the Subaltern Studies school, and proponents like Dipesh Chakrabarty, among many others, it started as an “oppositional stance against the traditional humanities”—a bubbling movement challenging Eurocentric intellectual conventions (Darian-Smith 1996; Gandhi 1998, 42; Loomba 1998). But if it began as heterodoxy, by the 1990s, postcolonial studies had become renowned.

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By that time, postcolonial theories had “taken its place with theories such as poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and feminism as a major critical discourse in the humanities” (Gandhi 1998, viii). But what, then, is postcolonial social theory? It is difficult to pin down what exactly is “postcolonial social theory.” Unlike “social theory” on the one hand and “postcolonial theory” on the other hand, postcolonial social theory is not (yet) a recognized and accepted area of thinking and research. There is no American Sociological Association section, for instance, on postcolonial theory, the way there is for, say, world-systems analysis. Nor do social theory textbooks devote space to postcolonial theory or postcolonial theorists. Postcolonialism is yet another one of sociology’s “missing revolutions” (Bhambra 2007b). Still, recently, some sociologists have been on the lookout for postcolonial sociologies (Boatcâ and Costa 2010; Go 2013b; Kempel and Mawani 2009). And there are diverse strands of writing and thought, both within sociology and without, that might be readily put under its sign. Such work would include critiques of sociology’s Eurocentrism, related calls for “indigenous sociologies” or “Southern theory,” critical race studies in the social sciences, and historical sociologies of empire and colonialism.3 It would also include work by sociologists who have begun to ponder the potential of postcolonial theory for disciplinary sociology in different national contexts, such as the European and UK contexts.4 So what might postcolonial social theory actually be? Of what might a postcolonial social theory consist? What would be its main tenets and insights? Its problems and problematics? And how would it deal with conventional themes of social theory, such as modernity or social order? To address these questions, it is necessary first to discuss postcolonial theory as it emerged in the humanities, including its genealogy back to the early twentieth century (which includes, perhaps ironically, the sociologist W. E. B. DuBois). This overview of postcolonial theory will then enable us to consider its implications for social theory and sketch the contours of what a postcolonial social theory might look like.

postcolonial theory and the episteme of empire We can trace postcolonial theory to two main stages or waves. While the humanities trend of postcolonial studies emerged in the 1980s and rose to dominance in the 1990s, an earlier incarnation lies in the anticolonial thought of the early to midtwentieth century. This “first wave” includes thinkers such as Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), Amilcar Cabral

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(1924–1973), C. L. R. James (1901–1989), and W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963), among others. This wave set the basis for the later second wave of postcolonial theory in the humanities that emerged in the North Academy; the second wave drew from it directly. First-wave postcolonial theory is different from the second wave in several respects. The main difference is that the first-wave writers were mostly anticolonial activists who moved in and out of the academy (or did not enter the academy at all). They were part of the rising anticolonial nationalist movements of the twentieth century. Some took leading roles in the anticolonial movements (e.g., Amilcar Cabral, until his assassination in 1973, led the guerilla movement in Portuguese Guinea against Portuguese rule in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Frantz Fanon was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front). By stark contrast, the second wave was mostly academic. It was inspired by first-wave thinkers, but it was confined to battles in universities. Whereas the first wave’s immediate goal was political overthrow, the second wave’s immediate goal was academic overthrow. Despite these differences, there are common themes, underlying concerns, and shared coordinates across the two waves. The very term postcolonial is suggestive of some of these similarities. The word postcolonial does not only refer to the historical phase or period after decolonization. It refers instead to a relational position or stance against colonialism and beyond it.5 Leela Gandhi (1998, 4) characterizes postcolonial studies as “a disciplinary project devoted to the academic task of revising, remembering and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past” in order to transcend its legacies. In “its therapeutic retrieval of the colonial past, postcolonialism needs to define itself as an area of study which is willing not only to make, but also to gain, theoretical sense out of that past” (Gandhi 1998, 5). This is what the first and second waves share, despite their other differences. Postcolonial theory in all of its different guises shares a critique of empire, a critical recognition of colonialism’s legacies, and tries to imagine possibilities that transcend those legacies. But surely, other intellectual traditions besides postcolonial theory have been critical of empire and colonialism? Marxist thought extending back to Lenin’s theory of imperialism and carrying through into the Latin American dependency school or Wallerstein’s (1974, 1980, 2004) world-systems theory immediately come to mind. Postcolonial theory shares their ground. However, postcolonial theory also has a different focus that puts it in tension with Marxist thought. The focus, broadly speaking, is upon the “culture” of empire: the discursive, ideological, epistemic, and psychological processes and forms associated with imperialism. For instance, while Frantz Fanon

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wrote of colonialism’s economic exploitation, he also uniquely highlighted the role of racial ideology and racial knowledge in shaping French colonialism. He also theorized the psychological impact of colonialism upon both colonizer and colonized (Fanon 1967 [1952], 1968 [1961]). Second-wave postcolonial theorists took up similar interests. Edward Said’s Orientalism, one of the founding texts of the second wave of postcolonial theory, manifests this. Said (1993, 5) argued that Marxist stories of imperialism overlooked “the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience.” Orientalism accordingly unearthed how epistemic structures representing the Orient (as regressive, static, singular) served to support Western imperialism (Said 1979). Rather than epiphenomenal or a sideshow to imperialism, such Orientalist knowledge facilitated and enabled it in the first place. Other lines of second-wave theory continued along the same vein, yielding a subfield of study known as “colonial discourse analysis.” This subfield extended Said’s initial interest in representation and meaning, cataloging how colonizers or imperialists constructed and classified colonized groups, identifying the multiple tropes involved in such representations, and theorizing colonial discourse’s “ambivalent” or “hybrid” character, and their multifarious effects (Bhabha 1994, 82; Parry 1987; Williams and Chrisman 1994). Postcolonial theory, in sum, inaugurates the analysis of empire and colonialism as multifaceted projects involving discursive, ideological, and epistemic processes as well as economic exploitation—a matter of meanings, identities, and symbols or signs as well as logics of primitive accumulation or direct political domination. This focus on the episteme forms or culture of empire thus marks postcolonial theory’s special domain. It is exactly such a focus that Marxist thought would be reluctant to countenance, as evident in Marxist criticisms of postcolonial theory (Ahmad 1994; Chibber 2013). In any case, postcolonial theory’s critical focus upon culture is imperative to understand, for it means that the analytic and critical target of postcolonial theory is wider than Orientalist representations or racialized discourses. Not only does it include official imperial discourses or knowledge, but it also includes novels or art forms wherein the imperial unconscious is inscribed almost imperceptibly. It includes all types of discourses, cultural schemas, representations, and ideologies that are part and parcel of Western imperialism—whether embodied in everyday discourse, novels, works of art, scientific tracts, or ethnographies.6 This includes “knowledge” itself. For, from the perspective of postcolonial theory, the culture of empire penetrates deep, constituting an entire imperial episteme. As Robert Young (1990, 11) puts it, postcolonial studies here joins in the postmodern claim

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“that all knowledge may be variously contaminated, implicated in its very formal or ‘objective’ structures.” First-wave postcolonial writers like W. E. B. DuBois and Amilcar Cabral were the first to point out this contamination, long before Edward Said (or Michel Foucault before him). They highlighted that social scientific knowledge and various streams of European philosophy had been essential for imperial domination (Cabral 1974, 58–59; DuBois 1944). But what exactly characterizes this imperial episteme? This is where postcolonial theory digs deep. On the one hand, postcolonial writers target racialized and “Orientalist” modes of thought or representations that aided and authorized imperial domination. These, which often had to do with race or cultural essentialization, are the obvious elements of the culture of empire targeted by postcolonial theory. However, there are other elements and epistemic operations that have attracted attention, too. One is what Said calls the “law of division,” a form of binary thought that effaces the role of the margins in constituting the core, that is, overlooks the relationality of social objects, identities, and social processes. This is part of Orientalist discourse, but its more specific operation—in Said’s (1979, xxviii) words—is to construct “an ‘us’ and a ‘them’” whereby each side is presumably “settled, clear, unassailably self-evident.” In other words, the law of division occludes rather than admits of mutual constitution. First-wave writers like Césaire noticed this, too, criticizing Europe’s self-conception as a self-contained agent untouched by its imperial peripheries. Instead, Césaire (2000) traced how colonizer and colonized, East and West, metropole and periphery were mutually implicated and socially constituted in relation to each other. Fanon thus theorized colonialism as a mutually constitutive social force that shaped the identities and self-understandings of the colonizer as well as the colonized—including their very notion of racial difference. Blackness is only the product of whiteness and vice versa (Fanon 1967 [1952], 110; 1968 [1961]). Later, Said argued similarly that it was through Orientalist discourses that “Europe” or the “West” was also invented. “The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (Said 1979, 2). The problem is that the culture of empire denies these mutually constitutive relationships. It instead inscribes and naturalizes social divisions between us and them, colonizer and colonized, East and West. The “law of division,” Said (1993, xxviii, 36) laments, “has become the hallmark of imperialist cultures” and, more disturbingly, has even penetrated the colonized’s consciousness, too.

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Another aspect of the imperial episteme pinpointed by postcolonial studies is the occlusion of subaltern agency. DuBois (1915) criticized mainstream historiography for writing Africa out of world history. C. L. R. James opined the way in which Africans were mischaracterized in conventional historical texts. “The only place where Negroes did not revolt,” he wrote, “is in the pages of capitalist historians” (James 1989, 77). First-wave writers thus sought to remedy this by capturing the colonized people’s own voice, disclosing how colonialism—with all of its brutality, racism, and exploitation—was actually experienced by those subjected to its palpable and pernicious power (Young 2001, 274). As DuBois (1994 [1903]) queried in The Souls of Black Folk, “How does it feel to be a problem?” Similarly, Fanon bore witness to the racial experiences of imperial subjecthood Fanon’s first major and largely autobiographical work, Black Skin, White Masks offered up the standpoint of a Caribbean colonial subject traveling to France and his experience of racism (Fanon 1965, 1967 [1952], 1968 [1961]). The Subaltern Studies variant of postcolonial theory also addressed the problem of agency, challenging conventional histories of India for effacing the role of peasants and other marginalized groups from their narratives. The very rationale of the Subaltern Studies project was to overcome this problem. “We are indeed opposed,” wrote Ranajit Guha (1984, vii), “to much of the prevailing academic practice in historiography . . . for its failure to acknowledge the subaltern as the maker of his own destiny. This critique lies at the very heart of our project.” Just as first-wave writers sought to capture the colonized’s experiences, so did Subaltern Studies seek to recapture the agency of the repressed.7 Related to this occlusion of subaltern agency is a third aspect of imperial culture targeted by postcolonial theory: Eurocentric universalism or metrocentrism, which can be defined as the transposition of narratives and categories derived from the standpoint of Anglo-European metropoles to the rest of the world. Dipesh Chakrabarty questions “historicism” in the dominant historiography of India by which historical narratives based upon European modernity are universalized to other places like India. By this operation, India figures as lacking, as inferior, mired in “tradition” and “superstition” as opposed to European reason and progress: a “backward” culture and “incomplete” modernity (Chakrabarty 2000, 8). In this way, historical narratives are not only homologous to but also complicit with imperial power, occluding Indians’ agency and experiences and instead inviting imperialism—or least intervention, improvement, or the intercession of the modern while heralding moderns and metropolitans (read “Westerners”) as superior (Chakrabarty 2002, 24). Notably, in this critique of historicism and its Eurocentric universalism,

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Chakrabarty does not excuse Marxist thought. Here, we see again where postcolonial theory diverges from Marxism. Starting out as a labor historian, Chakrabarty (2002, 14–15) came to see that transposing Marx’s categories to India was problematic because, just like standard historiographies of India, they rely upon categories like “premodern” and “modern” or “precapitalist” and “capitalist,” which inserts Indian history into a presumed universal template of European history. Similarly, first-wave thinkers drew from Marxist thought but consistently challenged its limits. Prefiguring Chakrabarty’s critique of Eurocentric historicism, Amilcar Cabral opined that the unproblematic imposition of European-based Marxist categories has the effect of denying the history and agency of colonized peoples entirely. “[D]oes history begin only with the development of the phenomenon of ‘class,’ and consequently of class struggle? To reply in the affirmative would be to . . . consider—and this we refuse to accept—that various human groups in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were living without history, or outside history, at the time when they were subjected to the yoke of imperialism” (Cabral 1969, 83). Other postcolonial thinkers likewise critiqued Marxism’s Eurocentric valorization of the working class and its elision of racial or cultural difference. Precisely because Marxist thought transposes European categories to the rest of the world, it cannot seriously engage with difference. Analytically, it assesses colonized groups or other subalterns for how they compare to prototypical European workers—all other social identities besides class are treated as irrelevant (Chakrabarty, 2000; Gandhi, 1998, 23–26). Aimé Césaire disavowed his membership from the French Communist Party in 1956 exactly on these grounds. Because he was “a man of color,” he wrote to party leaders in his resignation letter, he occupied a particular subject position reflecting a “situation in the world that cannot be confused with any other” and that was part “of a history constructed out of terrible misadventures that belong to no other” (Césaire 2010 [1956], 147). Rather than treating “the colonial question” as simply “a subsidiary part of some more important global matter,” he insisted that we must recognize that “our colonialism, the struggle of coloured people against racism, is much more complex, indeed, it is of a totally different nature than the struggle of the French workers against French capitalism, and cannot in any case be considered a part, as a fragment, of that struggle” (Césaire 2010 [1956], 147). This critique of Eurocentric universalism relates to one other aspect of imperial culture that postcolonial theory has targeted: the Enlightenment itself. In this most extreme or radical version of postcolonial theory, the Enlightenment is not just complicit with the culture of empire; it is the culture of em-

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pire. This critique, which emerges partly from postcolonial theory’s dissatisfaction with Marxism, is especially evident in the second wave of postcolonial theory (Gandhi 1998, 25). Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, for instance, drew heavily from postmodernism and poststucturalism in the 1980s. Accordingly, as Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of grand narratives pinpoints Western knowledge’s exclusionary universalism, so does this more radical version of postcolonial theory “join postmodernism in an attempt to analyse and to resist this dépassement” (Gandhi, 1998, 41; Lyotard 1984). Humanism and its belief in the human subject, reason and ideals of progress—these are all seen as so many instances of epistemic violence and Eurocentrism, precluding the possibility, as Leela Gandhi (1998, 31–32) puts it, “of dialogue with other ways of being human” while establishing an “imperialist hierarchy between European adulthood and its childish, colonised Other.”8 In sum, whether questioning Orientalism, Eurocentrism, binary thinking, or the Enlightenment, postcolonial theory aims to interrogate all the “impressive ideological formations” and “forms of knowledge affiliated with [colonial domination]” (Said 1993, 9).9 Still, the point of critiquing the imperial episteme is not to just denounce past wrongs. Postcolonial theory examines colonialism’s multifaceted character—its epistemic bases, discursive operations, and cultural effects—“only to the extent that [colonial] history has determined the configurations and power structures of the present” (Young 2001, 4). The premise is this: while political decolonization indeed happened, it did not bring equality between metropolitan and ex-colonial countries, nor did it bring a decolonization of consciousness or culture. The culture of imperialism persists; its key elements remain pervasive. Hence, postcolonial theory’s overriding and pressing charge: to seek out, if not produce, new and different sorts of knowledge to help decolonize consciousness. Postcolonial theory grapples with colonialism’s legacies and seeks alternative representations or knowledge that do not fall prey to colonialist knowledge’s misrepresentations and epistemic violence. This is why it is labeled postcolonial theory: it seeks theories (knowledges), ways of representing the world, and histories that critique rather than authorize or sustain imperialistic ways of knowing. Postcolonial theory seeks to elaborate “theoretical structures that contest the previous dominant western ways of seeing things” (Young 2003, 4). The question is what this implies for social theory. How might a “postcolonial social theory” be configured and deployed? And how might the conventional concerns or objects of social theory—whether they be “modernity” or “social order”—be reconsidered in light of the postcolonial critique of the imperial episteme.

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postcolonial theory and sociology My wager is that a postcolonial social theory would not be a “theory” in the sense of a set of ordered hypotheses about the social world or in the sense of a “singular logically integrated causal explanation” (Calhoun 1995, 5). It would not worry about Homans’s (1964) requirement that theory must involve a particular “causal explanation.” It might include certain causal statements, such as the statement that “metropolitan imperial powers accumulated wealth through colonialism,” but postcolonial social theory would not be restricted to such assertions. Instead, postcolonial social theory at its broadest would be a perspective or worldview: a “Weltanschauung, that is, an overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world” (Abend 2008, 179). From this perspective, one might derive hypothetical causal statements. However, postcolonial social theory is more akin to Marxist theory, feminist theory, poststructuralism, or queer theory: a particular way among others of looking at the social world. This way of looking is one that sees the world in terms of colonial and imperial relations and their legacies, much in the same way that Marxist theory sees the world in terms of capitalism, feminist theory in terms of gender, or queer theory in terms of sexuality. But more specifically, postcolonial social theory is a way of looking at the world that recognizes that social forms, relations, social knowledge, and culture generally—as well the social sciences themselves—are embedded within a history and structure of global hierarchy and relations of power. Empire, both in the past and in the current moment, has a social presence. Postcolonial social theory recognizes this presence and seeks to dislodge social knowledge from it. Accordingly, a postcolonial social theory would proceed in at least two main steps: critique and reconstruction. The first step is about interrogating extant sociological theory and research that reproduces rather than contests the imperial episteme. The second is about offering lenses, concepts, or categories for developing postcolonial sociological accounts of society, rather than accounts that reproduce the imperial episteme. First, critique.10 Just as Said’s Orientalism unpacked the stereotypes of backwardness and stagnation produced by the West of the East, so would postcolonial social theory question sociological theory for similar stereotypes. By now, it is well known that the canonical sociological theorists of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim operated from Orientalist assumptions. They portrayed non-Western societies as static and backward, hence reserving dynamism, social creativity and energy, and enlightenment for European societies alone—for example, the common term Weber used to describe India is “absence” (Magubane 2005: 94).11 Said (1979, 153–56, 259) himself dis-

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cussed these strands of thought in Marx’s and Weber’s work (see also Howe 2007). The postcolonial critique of sociology has already begun. On the other hand, recent readings of Marx’s journalistic writings argue that he was less of an Orientalist than such critiques would suggest (Anderson 2010).12 Such ardent defenses of the venerated Marx have merit, but they do not resolve the other problem with much of classical sociology that a postcolonial critique would highlight: metrocentrism, or Eurocentric universalism. Early theories posited a presumably universal template of development and theoretical categories based upon the experience of European metropoles; these templates and categories in turn reduced cultural difference to temporal difference and presupposed the superiority of the metropolitan experience (Bhambra 2007a; Connell 2007). The metropolitan West becomes the dominant “model system” for the entire world (Krause 2016). And sociology achieves this while implying that the particular European experience upon which it is based is not in fact particular (Alatas 2006a; Bhambra 2007b). Marx’s theory of capitalism is exemplary. As first-wave postcolonial thinkers highlighted, Marx’s theory of capitalism was based upon the European experience, and while Marx discusses imperialism and colonialism as part of “primitive accumulation,” these are not theorized as constitutive of capitalism. Primitive accumulation is a precondition for capitalism, not a necessary component in its continual operations. In Marx’s actual theory of capitalism, imperialism disappears from view, and the system is modeled on a presumably isolated Europe.13 Weber’s work is similar. His declaration that only cultural developments in the “West” have achieved “universal significance and value” is telling enough (Weber 1992, xxix). The related objection is that classical sociological works were founded upon attempts to theorize modernity but occluded colonialism or imperialism’s potential role in constituting modernity in the first place (Amin 1989). As Boatcâ and Costa (2010, 16) puts it, “key moments of Western modernity, for which the sociological approach was supposed to offer an explanation, were considered to be the French Revolution and the English-led Industrial Revolution, but not Western colonial politics or the accumulation of capital through the Atlantic Slave Trade and the overseas plantation economy.” Sociological knowledge thus depended upon a “suppression of the colonial and imperial dynamics from the terminological toolkit of classical sociology” (Boatcâ and Costa 2010, 16). This suppression served to abstract social relations from their wider relations, creating the same “law of division” that Said lamented. Exceptions prove the rule. Although some early sociologist in the United States discussed colonialism and imperialism, it was only in support of it or as part of an evolutionary theory of racial expansion—in

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other words, as an outgrowth of modernity rather than constitutive of it (Go 2013c). Such occlusions betray a deeper problem: the erasure of postcolonial thinkers from sociology’s own canon. The very fact that we speak of “classic theorists” in terms of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim rather than DuBois—who indeed theorized race, illuminated racial experiences, and saw imperialism at the heart of modernity—is indicative of this occlusion (Bhambra 2014). What about more recent social theory and related sociological research? Connell (2006) shows how the theories of James Coleman, Pierre Bourdieu, and Anthony Giddens reproduce Orientalist characterizations. We could also notice the continuation of the “law of division” in sociology: an analytic bifurcation of metropole from colony, the “East” from the “West,” the “domestic” from the “foreign,” the inside from the outside, and so on. Part of this is seen in the elision of colonial history: Europe and its modernity is bifurcated, separated, cordoned off, from imperial realities. Note, for instance, that Durkheim’s (1984) theory of social solidarity was dependent upon colonialism: it was through data on so-called “primitive peoples” that he differentiated between organic and mechanical solidarity. However, he never incorporated colonial societies as social types into his analysis, even though, in his time, most of the world’s societies were either imperial societies or colonized societies. Nor did he recognize how those very societies were interconnected: how, for instance, those societies that he called “organic” were actually industrial imperial societies whose very existence was shaped by if not dependent upon the colonial societies they ruled and whose so-called “mechanical” solidarity was kept intact deliberately for the purposes of colonial rule. Durkheim instead sees “mechanical” societies as isolated spatially from colonialism, and temporally relegates them to the past. He bifurcates into two societies that were inextricably connected—hence, cutting off vital social relations across space. Besides analytic bifurcation, Eurocentric universalism or metrocentrism persists, too. This is akin to what Connell (2007) calls the “Northern-ness” of social theory. Connell (2007, vii–viii) argues that sociology is “Northern” in that it “embeds the viewpoints, perspectives and problems of metropolitan society, while presenting itself as universal knowledge.” This universal pretension comes in the form of social theory’s abstraction or “contextfree generalization” (Connell 2007, 196). The problem is not that Northern theory seeks generalizability. It is, rather, that the source of generalization is provincial while Northern theory claims universality. Northern theory, Connell stresses, is generated within and for the metropole. It reflects the concerns and categories of a particular type of society: a metropolitan imperial society that has repeatedly ruled weaker societies. The so-called

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“structure-agency” problem is a useful example. From where does not this peculiar concern about the social world arise, except from within metropolitan societies? Metropolitan societies have special privilege. They are not exploited from the outside or politically managed as colonies. The standpoint is one of power. And bourgeois individualism is the norm and the value. The “structure-agency” debate thus emerges from this particular context. So, too, do other theoretical categories that emphasize individual agency, such as “rational choice,” “the toolkit,” or “social skill” (Fligstein 2001; Swidler 1986). The fatal flaw of Northern theory comes when it transposes these concerns and categories—developed in this specific context of intellectual norms and formulated from the standpoint of power—to the peripheral world, where the local experience and context is different. After all, peripheral societies do not occupy the seat of power. They have been subjected to foreign imposition or colonization. They have been and are constrained. To transpose the categories and concerns of metropolitan sociology (including, say, questions of “agency” or theories of rational choice) is the analytic version of imperial imposition. This is exactly the problem of metrocentrism that first-wave thinkers identified in Marxist theory. And it persists in various forms, in diverse types of theory and research. It emerges whenever we automatically transpose concerns and concepts from the North to everywhere else, without recognizing and questioning the situatedness of knowledge.14 It emerges as the “God trick,” a presumed view from nowhere that is in fact from somewhere: the metropole.

social theory beyond empire Postcolonial social theory cannot be only a critique. It must also offer distinct approaches for theorization and research on the social world. So how to proceed? There are different possibilities. Each would involve distinct concepts, lens, and methodological strategies, and they are not necessarily aligned comfortably. Here I discuss two: postcolonial relationalism and the subaltern standpoint.

Postcolonial Relationalism The idea here is straightforward enough: if one of the limits of conventional sociology is that it analytically bifurcates social relations and reproduces the imperial “law of division,” a postcolonial sociology should seek to better conceptualize and analytically reconnect those relations, which have been

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covered up in standard sociological accounts. Edward Said’s insistence that postcolonial studies should attend to “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories” offers initial insight into this strategy. Rather than assuming separation as the “law of division” does, Said suggests that we should construct narratives that are “common to men and women, whites and nonwhites, dwellers in the metropolis and the peripheries, past as well as present and future.” It means recognizing that the “experiences of ruler and ruled [colonizer and colonized] were not so easily disentangled” (Said 1993, 20; 2003)..15 This strategy also relates partly to the idea of “contrapuntal” analysis, which goes back to the Cuban writer Fernando Ortiz. For Ortiz (1995), cultures are connected through mutually constitutive interactions rather than autonomous and separated. Bhambra (2007b) also suggests something similar. She enlists Said’s notion of “interdependent histories” and the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s concept of “connected histories” to suggest that historical sociology should analyze the making of modernity not in terms of isolated nation-states but in terms of connections and links between diverse events. But is this approach really different from already-existing sociology? For instance, how does it differ from existing theories that already insist upon transcending methodological nationalism to trace transnational or global connections? Both world-systems and dependency theory are good examples. Frank’s (1967) dependency theory critiqued development studies and offered a notion of the social as a chain of metropole-satellite relations (where metropoles and satellites were social places not necessarily nationstates). Wallerstein’s (1974, 1980, 2004) world-systems approach also theorized connections across spaces on a global scale. So why not just enlist these theories for reconnecting relations? Part of the issue, of course, is that postcolonial theory is more interested in culture and knowledge than these Marxist approaches. The other issue is how even some of these approaches remain limited. Wallerstein’s world-systems theory (1974), for instance, does not overcome the problem of metrocentrism. In his theory, the “capitalist world-economy” originated first in Europe and then spread to the rest of the world: it does not theorize how capitalism in Europe was itself dependent upon relations with other parts of the world from the outset, even through imperialism.16 Questions thus remain. If we are to ground a postcolonial sociology in “connected histories” or “connected sociologies,” we must ask, what exactly counts as a “connection”? Does a linkage have to make a causal impact to constitute a “connection” or does any linkage count? And by what categories do we analyze these “connections”? Transnational historians, for instance,

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have long traced out “connected histories,” so why is not transnational history just another name for postcolonial sociology (Zimmerman 2013)? A different way to formulate this strategy of reconnection is to conceive of it as a variant of relational theory; that is, as postcolonial relationalism (Go 2013a). Relational approaches to sociology are by now advanced (Emirbayer 1997; Erikson 2013; Fuchs 2001; Mische 2011). Relationality can be understood most easily in its opposition to substantialism. On the one hand, substantialism insists that the basic units and actors of sociological inquiry are substances or essences: as in things, beings, or even “systems.” These substances are treated as static agents; they do the acting and reacting and retain their identity throughout (Emirbayer 1997, 283–86). The starting point for substantialism is to posit durable and coherent entities that “possess emergent properties” such as “groups, nations, cultures, and other reified substances (Emirbayer 1997, 285). In this sense, world-systems theory, which posits a single global structure, would be considered substantialist. So, too, would classical sociological theories that posit a unified “culture” or single “society” containing intrinsic properties to which any analysis must reduce. Methodological nationalism as well as methodological individualism could also be considered two variants of substantialist methodology (Chernilo 2006). In contrast, a relational ontology does not posit essences but relations that constitute the ostensible essences in the first place. Things “are not assumed as independent existences present anterior to any relation, but . . . again their whole being . . . first in and with the relations which are predicated of them” (Cassirer 1953, 36; Emirbayer 1997, 287). Anything that appears as an essential trait is seen only as “a relational property existing only in and through its relation with other properties” (Bourdieu 1998, 6). The relevance for postcolonial theory might already be evident. Said’s Orientalism and analyses of colonial discourse are implicit critiques of substantialist ontologies from the perspective of relationalism. Discourses that essentialize and homogenize the Other—as in Orientalist and related colonial discourses—are forms of substantialist thinking. Alternatively, Said’s counterclaim that the Orient is constructed through discourse in opposition to the Occident (and attendant poststructuralist claims about the resulting instability of identity) is a relationalist claim. So, too, is the recognition that metropole and colony are mutually constituted, or that the identities of the colonizer and colonized are mutually constituted. In short, while the “law of division” so integral to the imperial episteme rests upon substantialist social thought, the approach to the world that seeks to reconnect relations inscribes relational social thought. What would this postcolonial relationalism look like, more precisely, as

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an analytic approach? I have already mentioned Said’s Orientalism: as it traces how the Orient is constructed in opposition to the Occident, this would be one example of a postcolonial relationalism. But moving beyond this sort of analysis, consider one of the classic objects and concerns of conventional social theory: social order, or in its earlier meaning, simply “society.” On the one hand, we can catalog all of the different ways that social theory has conceptualized or explained social order. We might summon the tradition of Hobbes and Locke and theorize social order as the effect of social contract. Or we might turn to the Chicago school and think of social order as an instance of “human association” which, according to Small (1905, 480), is “the resultant of all the efforts of all the personal units to reach its own peculiar sort of satisfaction.” Or we might follow the Parsonian tradition and think of social order in terms of its functionality and dysfunctionality; or the rational choice tradition and wonder about social order as a collective action problem; or the Marxist tradition and theorize it as an effect of the coercive power of the capitalist state or of hegemony. A postcolonial approach seeking to reconnect relations would conceptualize the matter differently. It would think of social order as made possible by relations ostensibly external to it but actually constitutive of it. Rather than the effect social contractors or rational choicers pursuing their interests, social order is facilitated by global power relations. It is not accidental that what we call modern “society” emerged in eighteenth-century Europe and that the concept of “the social” emerged in the mid- to late nineteenth century (Collini 1980; Heilbron 1995). This was when European states were cultivating power and accumulating capital overseas. It was partly through these imperial extensions abroad that European states were able to accrue resources to maintain their police forces and that metropolitan citizens were able to amass wealth that provided the material infrastructure for metropolitan “society” (or, with coffee from abroad to supply public coffee houses, “civil society”). Meanwhile, it was in the overseas colonies or in reference to them that new forms of social discipline, techniques of social regulation, racial knowledge, or health and sanitation policies were developed and deployed—if not invented entirely—to then feedback to metropolitan societies (Rabinow 1989; Stoler 1995). It is also the case, as Magubane (2004) shows, that the very question of social order in metropolitan countries like Europe was facilitated and shaped by imperial relations. It was through “images, stories, and rhetoric from the colonies about colonized people—particularly Africans—that conceptual boundaries were drawn between “the social” and “the economic” (Magubane 2004, 3). Just as the material infrastructure for civil society in the metropole was made possible through empire, so too were

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the knowledge, techniques, and practices of modern governmentality that contributed to social order in Europe and that helped conceptually bind it in the first place. Thus, from the postcolonial perspective, one of the pressing questions is not about the determinants of social order but how social order has appeared for so long to be separate from these imperial relations. The same relational postcolonial approach could be mobilized to apprehend other key concerns of social theory—those variegated events or processes that constituted European modernity. Historical sociologists informed by postcolonial thought, for instance, have highlighted how British industrialization must not be seen as a process internal to England but occurred because of its protocolonial relations with India and subsequent circulations of knowledge, materials, and violence (Bhambra 2007a). Similarly, C. L. R. James offers a reinterpretation of the French Revolution that exemplifies a relational postcolonial approach (even though he did not name it as such). Rather than treating the French Revolution as the originator of liberal political modernity (such that it is the source of “diffusion”), James (1963, 31–61, 119–21) considers France’s relations with its colonies that facilitated and enabled the French revolution—and its pretensions to universality—in the first place (see also Magubane 2005, 107). In this way, a postcolonial relationalism can also help recover the agency of subalterns— such as, in James’ example, the Haitian revolutionaries whose revolt against slavery made the French revolutionaries reconsider the universality of their proclamations (Go 2013a). These examples exemplify postcolonial relationalism as it might serve the urgent task of reinterpreting the making and remaking of modernity. But postcolonial relationalism would also offer a distinct lens on more recent or contemporary social forms, relations, practices and processes. How, for instance, were recent neoliberal policies in the United States or Europe facilitated or informed by initial neoliberal experiments in the Global South, in places like Chile or poorer countries subjected to structural adjustment policies? Or how have the conditions in the Global South that contribute to the influx of labor-seeking migrants to the United States, Europe, or Japan been produced by the economic or neoimperial policies or programs of those very countries? Is not the medical or pharmaceutical knowledge produced by the medical-industrial complex in the Global North dependent upon or linked to biopiracy by transnational pharmaceutical companies preying upon postcolonial countries in the South? How does the security apparatus in the United States or urban police forces draw upon and reinscribe policing practices or military interventions deployed overseas, and even deploy the same military infrastructure and equipment? In short, postcolonial relationalism

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inspired by postcolonial theory asks us to recover and analyze these sorts of relations. It invites us to reconnect rather than divide and bifurcate into false dichotomies the very social relations that sociological theory purports to illuminate.

The Subaltern Standpoint If postcolonial relationalism offers one way to craft a postcolonial sociology, a different approach would question its utility. For the very concept “relationalism”—along with the opposition and debate between “substantialism”—remains embedded within the metropolitan sociological tradition. It emerges from conventional and long-standing debates and dichotomies in the European intellectual context, reaching back to the subject-object dualism and the very structure-agency debate that Connell (2006) specifies as so integral to “Northern theory.” Put simply, relationalism carries the imprint of the metropolitan worldview.17 Even with postcolonial relationalism, in short, what remains is the problem of metrocentrism, the unquestioned adoption of the imperial standpoint. Does not an analysis of expansive geographic social connections require a problematic and presumptuous view from the top that occludes the view from below? Does it not depend upon deploying an Archimedean high point that adopts and reproduces the imperial gaze? At best, postcolonial relationalism reinscribes positivism’s “view from nowhere” (Shapin 1998). At worst, it is but a neoimperial cartography of the social— a subtle reinscription of Eurocentrism. A different postcolonial approach that does not fall prey to such limitations is one that starts with the subaltern standpoint. This approach harkens back to one of the first wave’s key innovations of attending to the subjectivity of the colonized and the subaltern studies’ project of capturing the agency of the colonized. Something similar can also be seen in more recent calls for “indigenous” or “Southern” theories within sociology itself. This “indigenous sociology” movement aims to globalize sociology by mining currents of thought from outside the metropole. If, for too long, sociologists have relied upon theories constructed from and directed at the concerns and categories of Euro-American contexts, this movement proposes to shift or even unseat the canon entirely.18 Early attempts in this direction were made by Akiwowo in the 1990s who suggested that Yoruba oral poetry offered a better basis for conceptualizing Yoruban society than European concepts (Akiwowo 1986, 1999). Founded in “the intellectual soil of a non-western society” (Akiwowo 1999, 119–20), the concepts drawn from oral poetry could serve for crafting a non-Eurocentric sociology more adequate to the local

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experience. Syed F. Alatas’s (2006a, 2006b) project of summoning “alternative discourses” in Asia is another example. To escape “the captive mind” and “academic dependency” of postcolonial sociologists first pinpointed by his father, Syed Hussein Alatas (1974), he suggests that thinkers indigenous to colonial and postcolonial societies offer a way out. For instance, Alatas unearths Ibn Khaldu ¯n’s theory of state formation that was first formulated in reference to the history of North African Arab and Berber groups (Alatas 2006b, 2010). Connell’s injunction to attend to “Southern theory” constitutes the most recent and arguably most comprehensive articulation of this indigenous sociology movement. To overcome social theory’s “Northernness,” she calls upon subjugated knowledges of the South. These knowledges offer “dirty” theory—that is, concepts rooted in the experiences and interests of the postcolonial world rather than the confines of North American or European terrain (Connell 2007). It would appear as if indigenous sociology helps overcome metrocentrism. Rather than relying on Max Weber for insights on the societies of the Middle East, we should instead turn to Abd al-Rahma¯n Ibn Khaldu ¯n. Or rather than just Karl Marx to think about Latin America, we might instead look at Simon Bolívar, Jose Martí, Octavio Paz, or more recent thinkers like Nestor García Canclini (Kozlarek 2013). Or rather than using Foucault to examine Indian society, we should heed the insights of Ashis Nandy or Benoy Kumar Sarkar (Goswami 2013). This would also overcome the metrocentrism of postcolonial relationalism. Yet, criticisms of this sort of approach stand in the way. Bhambra (2007a, 60) worries that sociology rooted in individual experiences might fail to “provide an account of the systematic relations of domination.” How do Yoruban concepts unearthed from deep oral traditions help us grasp the global logics of capitalist domination? Another concern is that indigenous sociology might upon up as a useless particularism, crafting social knowledge that is only relevant for starkly delimited contexts and hence not generalizable.19 Finally, what counts as “indigenous” or “subaltern”? Are the Bengali elites discussed by Chakrabarty actually “subaltern”? Are the views of Abd alRahma¯n Ibn Khaldu ¯n to be privileged just because they come from a Middle Eastern thinker as opposed to a metropolitan Anglo-Saxon? The danger is a reverse essentialism, replacing Eurocentrism with Afro- or Asian-centrism.20 This issue is also crucial because it relates to the final problem: subjectivism. If we no longer pull the “God trick,” and if we only justify our claims based upon essential (racial or cultural or geographical) characteristics of those making the claims, objectivity is impossible; indeed, “truth” is impossible. All is not lost, however. One way to meet these challenges while retain-

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ing the benefits of Southern sociology is to draw upon feminist standpoint theory and root postcolonial social theory in the subaltern standpoint.21 By subaltern standpoint, I mean a social position of knowing akin to a feminist standpoint, just that it is not rooted solely in gender but in geopolitics and global social hierarchy. It captures the position and hence, the activities, experiences, concerns, and perspectives of globally peripheral (e.g., colonized and postcolonized) populations. This is a geopolitical and social position, constituted historically within broader relations of power, that embeds the viewpoint of peripheral groups. This position therefore offers an alternative perspective to the dominant metrocentric standpoint of conventional social theory. Rather than grounded in the particular concerns, categories, and context of imperial metropoles, it is grounded in the concerns, categories, and contexts of subjugated postcolonial groups. Thinking of Southern theory as a standpoint is helpful because to refer to standpoint is not to refer to an essential identity. A standpoint is a relational position. Standpoints are not a matter of race or culture but of differential social position. Different social positions mean that different groups of individuals have different experiences, and different experiences contribute to different perspectives. There is, as Patricia Hill Collins (1997) stresses, a “commonality of experiences and perspectives that emerge for groups differentially arrayed within hierarchical power relations.” This implies that “groups who share common placement in hierarchical power relations also share common experiences in such power relations. Such shared angles of vision lead those in similar social locations to be predisposed to interpret these experiences in comparable fashion” (Hill Collins 1997, 377). Whereas “Northern” theory refers to theory that adopts the standpoint of the metropolitan power based upon its experiences and position, a subaltern standpoint embeds the experiences and position of the marginalized. It thereby offers the potential for alternative knowledges—knowledges that are not mere reproductions or extensions of the imperial gaze. If conceiving of a subaltern standpoint in this way helps to reject reverse essentialisms, it is also to denounce any charge that Southern theory is merely subjectivist, with no capability for “objectivity” or “truth.” A subaltern standpoint epistemology relies upon what post-positivist, post-Kuhnian social scientists already reckon: knowledge is socially situated (Longino 2006). What we know about objective reality is partially dependent upon our social position—hence, our location, history, experiences, and perspective. Where you stand influences what you see (Harding 1993, 61–62; 1997, 384; 1998, 162–63). The premise is simple enough: all knowledge is socially positioned. So-called objective reality can be differentially perceived—or “known”—in

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the sense that different aspects of the same thing might be viewed or discovered as opposed to others. It is not that truth is unattainable; it is that there are multiple aspects of the same truth. All knowledge is at least partial and incomplete rather than total (Wylie 2003, 31–39). Nor, finally, does a subaltern standpoint preclude an analysis of wider, even global relations, processes, or structures. It just means that we do not start the analysis of those relations from the top or from a supposed asocial position. We start it from the views and experiences of those subjugated groups who experience those relations, processes, or structures from below. This is akin to what Connell (2007, 207) calls “dirty theory”: theorizing from the ground up. As noted, this sort of standpoint approach is immanent to the first-wave theorists, so we can turn to them for examples. Consider the innovations of Frantz Fanon. One of them was to critically assess colonialism as a social system of racial exploitation and violence that impacted colonizer and colonized (Fanon 1968 [1961]). This was an innovation indeed: at the time of his writing, “colonialism” was not seen as an internal system in its own right; it had not been fully theorized as an object of social analysis. Understandings of colonialism had been mired in colonial ethnologies and administrative discourse that either occluded colonialism as a social object or only thought of it as a neutral expression of governance. But Fanon innovated. He theorized colonialism as a system in its own right that directly impacted social identities. This, in turn, enabled him to see the relational constructedness of racial categories and the colonizer and colonized’s own racial identities (Gilroy 2010, 157). But how did Fanon begin? What was Fanon’s analytic entry? Fanon did not begin by transposing categories like “structure agency” onto the colonial site. Nor did he begin by starting with the category of “the proletariat” based upon European experience. Fanon first drew from his own experiences and observations as a black subject of the French colonial empire. He famously describes his experience as a young man in France from Martinique when, on the train, a white boy looks at him and says to mother, “Look, a Negro!” Throughout, Fanon indeed engaged with Marxist categories as well as those of Freud. He also referred to Sartre and other Parisian writers. But he did not begin analytically with these categories. He instead started from the standpoint of the racialized colonial subject: their activities, experiences, and perceptions: “What does the black man want?” (Fanon 1967 [1952], xii). Just as feminist standpoint ethnographers, such as Dorothy Smith (1997, 32, 129), begin with “people’s experience” and the “issues, concerns, or problems that are real for [them],” so does Fanon start with the lives of colonized subjects.22 The early work of DuBois is another example. As Morris (2015) shows,

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DuBois was a clear innovator in sociology, even though his influence has been marginalized. And one of his many innovations was to theorize American society as structured by racial domination and to theorize racial domination as itself socially constructed. How did he begin? Again, he began by probing the experiences of marginalized subjects—in this case, African Americans classified as a “problem” to be governed: “the Negro Problem.” DuBois (1994 [1903]) reframes the matter, asking: “How does it feel to be a problem?” DuBois’s writings thereby broke from the conventional “white perspective” on African Americans, as Morris (2007) shows, and instead sought to “escort the reader inside the world of Black people, revealing their cultural formations, their organizational and institutional dynamics, and their tears, triumphs, and inner conflicts.” He “opened the door on the real Black world” (Morris 2007, 516). DuBois thereby circumvented the dominant standpoint of the time, intimately bound with the nascent biopower of the postbellum American state and protoeugenicist thought, and he bracketed sociological categories associated with social evolutionism. Instead, he began with the perceptions and experiences of subalterns, and from this starting point he was able to theorize “double consciousness,” the “veil,” and the “global color line” without falling into the dominant categories of the time (Morris 2015; see also England and Warner 2013). How might this approach be deployed to address conventional concerns of social theory, like “social order”? Foremost, a subaltern standpoint approach would question the “Northern-ness” of the category itself and thereby question whether it is a relevant category for all societies. First, it would highlight that sociology’s interest in social order is contextual and specific—that it is situated, that it did not emerge from thin air. To be sure, the concept “social order” came from the distinct standpoint of European metropoles at a specific historical moment. It emerged in connection with “the social” problem: a matter of concern for late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century European elites confronting the frightful specter of the French Revolution, the looming threat of labor unrest amid the spread of capitalism, and potentially recalcitrant women and natives (Owens 2015). “The social question,” wrote one astute observer, “is always the question of the many against the few . . . that is to say, a class struggle” (Howerth 1906, 257). In this sense, the so-called problem of social order is Northern at worst, parochial at best. From the standpoint of colonized subjects, the category “social order” might appear irrelevant and limiting in terms of capturing social experience. For instance, as the concept was later elaborated, “social order” also became related to the idea of a “civil society,” one consisting of ostensibly rational sovereign individuals. But how could this be relevant for colonized subjects liv-

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ing under foreign rule, whereby civil society is absent and wherein colonial peoples are not formally free? Instead of social order, the standpoint of colonized subjects would likely lead us to entirely other dimensions of social life, hence other categories—for example, repression, violence, or dispossession. Even if there was “order” in colonized societies such that it would be a useful object of analysis, surely the metropolitan-based theories for explaining it would warrant critical reconsideration. In a context of colonial repression, for example, social order would hardly be explained as the result of individuals freely pursuing their interests or as the result of individuals spontaneously seeking out, in Albion Small’s (1990) theory, “mutual association” based upon social resemblances. In short, even if we agree on the relevance of the category “social order,” we would need different theories to explain it, and a subaltern standpoint would be a fruitful entry way toward crafting such theories. Admittedly, in itself, a subaltern standpoint approach does not automatically offer a different theory of social order or even of other social objects. What it does do is provincialize such objects, thereby clearing the ground for other localized concerns and categories to be explored, researched, and theorized. In other words, such an approach can help us reorient our concerns and categories away from those metrocentrically imposed from above and afar and open up the door to entirely new ones, cultivated from the ground up rather than the top down. Are theoretical barbarians from the South knocking at the gates? Let the invasion begin.

postcolonial social theory as the third wave Each of the two approaches noted above—postcolonial relationalism and the subaltern standpoint—have their respective advantages and disadvantages. They do not exhaust the possibilities for postcolonial social studies either. An entirely different approach, derived from the poststructuralist variant of postcolonial theory and Chakrabarty’s (2000) concept of “provincialization,” would not bother at all with a positivist attempt to accrue knowledge. It would instead repeatedly demonstrate its limits. Rather than laboring to construct an alternative theoretical armature for research, this approach would chip away at its foundations. It would disclose neither the connectedness of the social nor the Southern ground for alternative theories but instead the interminable ambivalences of all knowledge.23 Bracketing this strategy of deconstruction, however, we still have postcolonial relationalism and the subaltern standpoint as possible examples of

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postcolonial social theory. Inspired by first-wave and second-wave postcolonial studies, both offer a distinct perspective on the world: a view on the social world that recognizes and problematizes empire’s enduring legacies and its social presence. Together, they contribute to a postcolonial social theory that acknowledges the imperial constitution of societies while aiming for alternative social knowledge that unsettles rather than reproduces the imperial episteme. Thus, by tracing relational connections or starting our sociologies from a subaltern standpoint, postcolonial social theory may constitute a “third wave” of postcolonial studies that grounds postcolonial studies firmly in sociology, not the humanities. This would be a welcome wave, for it would bring postcolonial theory back to the disciplinary home of one of postcolonial theory’s founders, W. E. B. DuBois.

notes 1. The literature on this is large, but early insights came from Rabinow (1989) and Mintz (1986). 2. The rising wealth of India is an exception that proves the rule. 3. On “indigenous” or “Southern” sociologies, see Akiwowo (1986), Alatas (2006a), Connell (2007), Keim (2011), and Patel (2010b); on historical sociologies of empire and colonialism, see Go (2009) and Steinmetz (2013); on global critical race studies, see Weiner (2012) for a recent review. 4. Postcolonial theory has recently had some influence on sociology in Europe and elsewhere in the world; see especially Boatcâ, Costa, and Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2010) and Bhambra (2007a). But North American sociology has yet to directly engage the sort of postcolonial theory that has had such a profound influence in humanities. 5. Lazarus (2011, 11). For debates about the term postcolonial in the humanities, see Shohat (1992). 6. In Said’s (1993, xii) words, Orientalism includes “all those practices, like the arts of description, communication and representation” that are relatively autonomous from the “economic, social and political realms” and which thereby include “the popular stock of lore about distant part so the world and specialized knowledge available in such learned disciplines as ethnography, historiography, philology, sociology, and literary history” and with it cultural forms like the novel. 7. Similarly, though Said’s work started out as an analysis of Orientalist discourse, his later work (like Culture and Imperialism) examined anti-imperial resistance (Said 1993). 8. Hence Bhabha (1994, 175) urges us to “rename the postmodern from the position of the postcolonial.” But it could be said that first-wave theorists initiated the critique of Western universalism before postmodern theory did—prefiguring the second wave’s postmodern variant of postcolonialism’s critique of the Enlightenment and its corollaries of humanism and positivism. Fanon (1968 [1961], 311–12) famously pointed out how hu-

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manism had been used ideologically, and hypocritically, by ardent European imperialists. Césaire extended the critique to point out that humanism was not only the handmaiden of colonialism but also, by the same token, of European fascism: “At the end of formal humanism . . . there is Hitler” (Césaire 2000, 6). See also Ciccariello-Maher (2008, 145–47). 9. Postcolonial theory’s emphasis upon culture, knowledge, and representation partially explains postcolonial theory’s growth within the humanities. If imperialism is also about culture, then cultural expertise is necessary for critiquing it. 10. The first wave directly implicated sociology as part of the imperial episteme. Secondwave writers have been more opaque. Edward Said (1989) levels a criticism of Bourdieu, but beyond that, most postcolonial scholars have discussed social science at a more general level (Chakrabarty 1997; Seth 2009). Others have leveled criticisms of sociology that align with the postcolonial critique, even as this scholarship might not always go under the label of postcolonial theory. Some of it, for example, takes aim at Eurocentrism (Amin 1989; Connell 2006; Wallerstein 1997). 11. There is a large literature on classical theories’ Orientalism. See especially Boatcâ and Costa (2010), Chua (2008), Kurasawa (2013), Thapar (1980), Turner (1978), and Zimmerman (2006). 12. Anderson (2010) is persuasive when showing us that Marx’s journalism and other scattered pieces referred to ethnic divisions and racial subjugation, but this otherwise comforting revelation does not say anything about Marx’s theory of capitalism (as laid out in Das Kapital) and its key categories, all of which remain rooted in European workers’ experiences and the European template. When Marx does speak of racial or ethnic difference, as in his journalistic writings, he reduces them to class experiences. When Marx discusses slaves in North America, the Irish, or Indians, they are only relevant in as much as they are slotted into the category of “proletariat” (Anderson 2010, 83, 187–90, 195; cf. Robinson 2000). Marxist universalism thus subsumes difference into its own totalizing schema rather than being open to how it might make a “difference” to social theory. 13. Some scholars have tried to reread a less externalist role for primitive accumulation in Marxist theory. See Perelman (2000) and Harvey (2003). 14. There are other names for this, such as “conceptual stretching.” Steinmetz (2004, 387–89) identifies it as “incommensurability.” Steinmetz claims that such “incommensurability” is not problematic because there is no intrinsic connection between the “violence of abstraction” and real violence. This defense, however, will not appease skeptics. It is true that “epistemic violence” does not necessarily lead to “real” violence. The postcolonial critique is not that epistemic violence is only problematic if and when it contributes to “real” violence. It is that epistemic violence is problematic because it is epistemic violence; in other words, it leads to insufficient accounts. For a recent analysis of the possible connections epistemic and “real” violence, see Guhin and Wyrtzen (2013). 15. Said (2003) noted that Fanon’s and Césaire’s work set the groundwork for this strategy. 16. For instance, in Wallerstein’s analysis, the role India played in England’s industrialization is not recognized because Wallerstein defines India as “outside” the world system, which for Wallerstein (1980, 137) was initially created as a “European world economy” and then spread outward (see Go 2013 for more on this).

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17. For insights on the lineage of relationalism, see Mohr (2013). 18. For recent overviews or examples of what I am covering under the term indigenous sociology, besides those discussed below, include Chilisa (2012), Connell (2006, 2007), Keim (2008, 2011), and Patel (2006, 2010a). 19. For these sorts of criticisms against Akiwowo’s sociology, see Albrow and King (1990) and Patel (2010b). Reed (2013) makes the important point that Southern theory has yet to generate transportable middle-range concepts and theories. 20. “Our concern should not be with the ethnic identity and geographical location of social scientists and public intellectuals, but with comparisons of the concepts used to understand the phenomena and developmental patterns of the metropolitan and peripheral regions of the world” (Arjomand 2008, 549). Bhambra (2007a, 60–62) also registers this criticism in regard to the epistemic privilege thereby claimed. 21. The literature on standpoint theory as it emerged first in Marxism and then feminism is massive, and extends back to the 1980s, for example, Hartsock (1983) and Smith (1997). However, for more recent representative work, see Harding (2004a, 2004b). 22. As Young (2001, 274) notes, Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and race from the subjective standpoint can be thought of as a larger movement in the colonial world of anticolonial thinkers to represent the colonized’s experiences. But note that Fanon’s standpoint approach does not relegate Fanon’s analysis to the realm of subjectivism. Starting with local experiences, Fanon worked analytically upward to theorize larger institutions and systems of colonial power, to theorize colonialism as a whole system. 23. Alternatively, Ray (2013) suggests that conventional comparisons can help to provincialize North American social science by revealing the limits of certain social science categories when used in other contexts (see also Ray and Qayum 2009). As opposed to Chakrabarty’s provincialization, which is deconstructive, I think of such an approach as “positive provincialization”: rather than showing the limits of categories to do them away, positive provincialization shows the limits of certain categories to highlight the need for better ones.

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scher und lateinamerikanischer Soziologien. Univ. diss., Freiburg. Bielefeld: transcriptVerl. Keim, Wiebke. 2011. “Counterhegemonic Currents and Internationalization of Sociology.” International Sociology 26 (1): 123–45. Kempel, Thomas, and Renisa Mawani. 2009. “The Sociological Imagination and Its Imperial Shadows.” Theory, Culture, and Society 26 (7–8): 340–55. Kozlarek, Oliver. 2013. “Toward a Postcolonial Sociology in the Work of Octavio Paz.” Political Power and Social Theory 24: 177–95. Krause, M. 2016. “Western Hegemony” in the Social Sciences: Fields and Model Systems.” Sociological Review 64: 194–211. Kurasawa, Fuyuki. 2013. “The Durkheimian School and Colonialism: Exploring the Constitutive Paradox.” In Sociology and Empire, edited by George Steinmetz, 188–209. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lazarus, Neil. 2011. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Longino, Helen. 2006. “Philosophy of Science after the Social Turn.” Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 12: 167–77. Loomba, Ania. 1998. Colonialism/Postcolonialism: the New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Conditions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Magubane, Zine. 2004. Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. “Overlapping Territories and Intertwined Histories: Historical Sociology’s Global Imagination.” In Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, Sociology, edited by Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens, and Ann S. Orloff, 92–108. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mintz, Sidney. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin. Mische, Ann. 2011. “Relational Sociology, Culture and Agency.” In Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis, edited by John Scott and Peter Carrington, 80–97. London: Sage. Mohr, John. 2013. “Bourdieu’s Relational Method in Theory and in Practice: From Fields and Capitals to Networks and Institutions (and Back Again).” In Applying Relational Sociology, edited by François Dépelteau and Christopher Powell, 101–36. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Morris, Aldon. 2007. “Sociology of Race and W.E.B. DuBois: The Path Not Taken.” In Sociology in America: A History, edited by Craig Calhoun, 503–34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2015. The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. DuBois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ortiz, Fernando. 1995. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Owens, Patricia. 2015. Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Parry, Benita. 1987. “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” Oxford Literary Review 9: 27–58. Patel, Sujata. 2006. “Beyond Binaries: A Case for Self-Reflexive Sociologies.” Current Sociology 54 (3): 381–95. ———. 2010a. The ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions. Los Angeles: Sage. ———. 2010b. “Sociology’s ‘Other’: The Debates on European Universals.” In Historical Developments and Theoretical Approaches in Sociology Volume II, edited by Charles Crothers, 99–122. Oxford, UK: EOLSS. Perelman, Michael. 2000. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rabinow, Paul. 1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ray, Raka. 2013. “Connell and Postcolonial Sociology.” Political Power and Social Theory 25: 147–56. Ray, Raka, and Seemin Qayum. 2009. Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Reed, Isaac A. 2013. “Theoretical Labors Necessary for a Global Sociology: Critique of Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory.” Political Power and Social Theory 25: 157–71. Robinson, Cedric. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1993. Culture and imperialism. New York: Knopf. ———. 2003. “Always on Top.” London Review of Books 25 (6): 3–6. Seth, Sanjay. 2009. “Historical Sociology and Postcolonial Theory: Two Strategies for Challenging Eurocentrism.” International Political Sociology 3 (3): 334–38. Shapin, Steven. 1998. “Placing the View from Nowhere: Historical and Sociological Problems and the Location of Science.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23 (1): 5–12. Shohat, Ella. 1992. “Notes on the Post-Colonial.” Social Text 31 (32): 99–113. Small, Albion W. 1900. “The Scope of Sociology. VI. Some Incidents of Association.” American Journal of Sociology 6 (3): 324–80. ———. 1905. General Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Dorothy E. 1997. “From the Margins: Women’s Standpoint as a Method of Inquiry in the Social Sciences.” Gender, Technology and Development 1 (1): 113–35. Steinmetz, George. 2004. “Odious Comparisons: Incommensurability, the Case Study, and ‘Small N’s’ in Sociology.” Sociological Theory 22 (3): 371–400. ———. 2013. “Major Contributions to Sociological Theory and Research on Empire, 1830s–Present.” In Sociology and Empire, edited by George Steinmetz, 1–50. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51 (2): 273–86. Thapar, Romila. 1980. “Durkheim and Weber on Theories of Society and Race Relat-

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chapter six

On the Frontiers of Rational Choice ivan ermakoff

As early as 1990, a prominent proponent of Rational Choice Theory acknowledged that the theory “ha[d] come under severe attack.” The offensive, launched by “experimental economic methods, research by psychologists, and other empirical work, . . . ha[d] revealed major empirical anomalies associated with this approach” (North 1990, 18). A key turning point in the elaboration of this critical diagnosis was the conference held at the University of Chicago in October 1985 (Hogarth and Reder 1987). Thus, for more than two decades, Rational Choice Theory has been under fire in the very discipline that had elevated it to the rank of referential framework. Since then, sociologists and political scientists have relayed, refined, and expanded rebuttals (e.g., Green and Shapiro 1994; Somers 1998). Usually, frameworks that undergo a barrage of criticisms from multiple quarters and for a sustained period of time quietly leave the scene after a while. Witness the fate of functionalism in social-scientific academic circles. Rational Choice, by contrast, has proved remarkably resilient.1 It has remained a source of analytical inspiration grounded in empirical research in a wide range of fields in sociology. Suffice to mention collective action (Ermakoff 2008; Oliver and Myers 2003; Opp, Voss, and Gern 1995), crime (Gambetta 1993; Matsueda, Kreager, and Huizinga 2006; Pezzin 1995), education (Breen and Goldthorpe 1997; Gambetta 2000 [1987]), exchange and transaction (Buskens and Raub 2013; Kollock 1994; Yamagishi and Cook 1993), fertility (Wu 1996; Yamaguchi and Ferguson 1995), migration (Jasso and Rosenzweig 1990), norms (Ermakoff 1997, 2010; Horne 2001), religion (Chaves and Cann 1992; Finke and Stark 1988; Iannaccone 1991, 1992, 1994), revolutions (Lindenberg 1989; Opp 1994; Pfaff 2006), state struc-

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tures and formation (Adams 1996; Kiser 1994; Kiser and Schneider 1995), stratification (Brinton 1989; Goldthorpe 1996, 2007b; Gould 2002; Logan 1996; Manzo 2007), violence (Gould 1999), and voting patterns (Brustein 1996; Weakliem and Heath 1994). Taking stock of the critiques leveled at the standard model of rational choice, the responses that these critiques elicited and the empirical work deployed in the wake of these controversies, this essay sets forth three claims. The first one states the need to conceptualize rational choice as a mode of action identifiable in terms of specific subjective orientations. The second claim is that we cannot appraise the resilience of a framework centered on rational choice, that is, its ability to sustain fire in the face of systematic empirical objections, unless we acknowledge its contributions as a method of inquiry grounded in a coherent conception of action under constraints. Third, a modal understanding of rational action calls for a systematic analysis of processes of belief formation. This claim redraws the research program usually identified with the theory of rational action. Let me briefly expound each claim before I outline the argumentative logic. The first claim acknowledges the problems encountered by the theory of rational choice whether we are considering the standard model, grounded in the axiomatic theory of preference consistency, or the less specific versions. An axiomatic and purely deductive approach does not account for a wide range of behaviors that a priori fit the scope conditions of the theory (DellaVigna 2009, 347–54). Conversely, versions of the theory that relax core assumptions runs the risk of falling into tautological or “Panglossian” assertions (Bohman 1992, 212). A modal understanding addresses the problem of empirical significance by theorizing rational choice as the mode of action geared to optimization. We can trace empirically this mode in light of specific subjective orientations. Recast in these terms, rational choice claims avoid the trap of ad hocness or tautology. Second, the contributions of Rational Choice to both empirical and theoretical explorations owe much to its method. Here, the main claim is that “social phenomena can and should be explained as resulting from the action and interaction of individuals” (Goldthorpe 1996, 485). This “methodological individualism” has the value of a test: it requests that any explanatory argument clearly specify, or be able to specify, its microfoundations in terms of the rationale underlying strategies of action (Wittek, Snijders, and Nee 2013, 5). The test helps identify claims that remain incomplete or unaccounted for (“black boxes”) (Hedström and Swedberg 1998, 78). By way of consequence, it helps identify analytical sleights of hand. Importantly, as I shall argue when theorizing the emergence of self-limiting norms, it

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also helps probe further the soundness of explanations that wear a Rational Choice label. Third, a modal understanding of rational choice calls for a systematic analysis of how individual actors forge, and relate to, their beliefs. This line of inquiry takes stock of the brunt of the criticisms underscoring the standard Rational Choice model’s inability, or unwillingness, to theorize belief formation (Boudon 1996, 123; Montgomery 1996, 443). I tackle this issue by examining how to make sense of the empirical evidence showing that in numerous instances, individuals willfully ignore information directly relevant to the prospect of making the best decision. This essay elaborates these three claims by examining how much explanatory power we gain when we adopt a rational choice focus to tackle hard cases, that is, research problems that pose prima facie challenges for the standard model. The argumentative strategy thus amounts to submitting the approach, redefined along modal lines, to multiple trials by fire. (1) What leads agents to endorse norms that curtail their ability to realize their interests? (2) Which strategies of action do agents elaborate when they face situations that defy understanding and predictability? (3) How can agents deceive themselves, that is, give credence to beliefs that they know to be mistaken? (1) The puzzle of self-constraining norms challenges the standard claim that agents seek to optimize their choice. Substantively, this puzzle invites us to investigate the connections between individual strategies and collective outcomes. Lurking in the background is this research agenda is the problem of order. (2) The focus on problematic situations calls into question the claim that the theory of rational choice has no relevance beyond the narrow confines of the “small world” of decisional routines (Gintis 2009, 236; Savage 1972 [1954], 16). (3) As for self-deception, it brings us right to the heart of irrational beliefs. Here, the challenge is directed at the notion that agents have an interest in forming accurate beliefs and in getting the information most relevant to their choice. Before we tackle these three research problems, we need to clarify what we mean by “Rational Choice.” This will be the subject of the first three sections. The first section, “The Model and Its Critics,” delineates the standard model grounded in microeconomics. In “Elaborations,” I examine how the criticisms leveled at this standard model have been coupled with different theoretical stances and counterstances. Given this background of critical exchanges, defining Rational Choice amounts to specifying which dividing lines we draw among the theoretical arguments that have been part of these exchanges. The demarcation should be precise enough to clearly delimit a

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set of theoretical stances that share a common denominator and have empirical relevance. In this essay, I characterize as “Rational Choice” the family of arguments that hypothesize a mode of action geared to optimization (section “Which Demarcation Line?”). Given this definition, the fourth to sixth sections tackle the three research problems laid out above: self-limiting norms, rules of decision in problematic situations, and self-deception. “Self-Limiting Norms” explores the paradox of self-limiting norms by probing the soundness of a Rational Choice account in terms of resource asymmetries and transfers of right. This discussion illustrates the critical clout of a method of investigation centered on the micro-underpinnings of collective processes. It shows how the method can be used to challenge the very content of Rational Choice claims. In the section “Problematic Situations,” I discuss the possibility of drawing on Rational Choice to explore decision-making in situations that a priori fall outside of the approach’s domain assumptions: situations agents experience as problematic. “Self-Deception” shifts the focus to one of the dimensions of action left out by the standard Rational Choice model: the ways in which actors relate to their beliefs. I do so by addressing the challenge of self-deception. A word on terminology: these introductory remarks have referred to “frameworks, research programs, theories, models, and method.” These are terms often used and, quite often, used in a loose fashion. To avoid any confusion, let me state their meaning right away. By “framework,” I mean a more or less tightly organized collection of ideas and hypotheses that orient explanations. A research program is grounded in a set of core claims that practitioners view as axiomatic—which Lakatos (1978) characterizes as “hard core”—and that have generated a stream of empirical studies. A research program achieves paradigmatic status when it dominates and regulates research in a given field (Kuhn 1996). A “theory” designates a claim or a set of interconnected claims about a class of empirical objects that can be tested in light of traceable indicators or observable implications. A “model” is a theory that has been formalized, that is, translated into a set of propositions couched in symbolic language. A method simply describes a way of investigating an empirical referent.2

the model and its critics Let us first clarify “Rational Choice.” What do analysts usually mean by the term? There is actually no straightforward answer. As several reviewers have noted (Boudon 2007, 71; Goldthorpe 2007a, 140, 163; Hechter and Kana-

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zawa 1997, 194), multiple theoretical stances on rational action have emerged over the years. Assessing how these relate to one another—which ones are congruent, which ones are incompatible—is far from obvious: whereas some protagonists of the field emphasize a lack of congruence, others stress complementarity.3 As a propaedeutic step, I trace the development of these stances. The perspective is genealogical. It outlines a pattern of development fueled by objections, counterobjections and theoretical elaborations.

Consistency Axioms In its “most general form,” Rational Choice Theory simply states “that people act so as to get the greatest possible utility available to them” (Palmer 1982, 185). “We can then say that the person acts so as to maximize utility, as long as we keep in mind that this is nothing but a convenient way of saying that she does what she most prefers” (Elster 1989, 23). Being rational in terms of choices means first and foremost being consistent with regard to one’s preferences. Stated in these terms, the theory actually is nothing more than a “framework for specific explanations” (Palmer 1982, 185). The crux of the matter resides in the formal specifications of preference consistency that undergird optimization. The model thus elaborated rests on three core assumptions (Gächter 2013, 35; Gintis 2009, 4–5): completeness, transitivity, and the independence of irrelevant alternatives. “Completeness” means that the individual decision maker—let us call this individual decision maker “the actor”—can rank all the options that constitute her choice set. Transitivity states that if the actor prefers a to b and b to c, she also prefers a to c. As for the independence of irrelevant alternatives, the claim is that “the relevant attractiveness of two choices does not depend upon the other choices available to the individual” (Gintis 2009, 5). Any breach of these core assumptions makes the notion of preference consistency logically irrelevant. An agent who satisfies these consistency requirements chooses optimally. In other words, “no other action exists whose consequences [this agent] prefers to the chosen action” (Abell 1992, 191). In this conception, utility maximization is not so much a postulate than a derivation of its core consistency requirements (Gilboa 2010, 17; Manzo 2013, 371). “To say that someone maximizes a utility function is merely to say that she is coherent in her choices” (Gilboa 2010, 17). This model of rational choice, which I will henceforth designate as “standard” because it has “served, even in default, as a benchmark” (Abell 1992, 197), often is presented as if it assumed perfect information and self-regarding

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preferences: the actor would be omniscient and egoistic.4 Strangely enough, at times both critics and proponents of the model have presented the model in this light (e.g., Boudon 2007, 76; Sen 1977, 321; Taylor 1988, 66). The presentation, however, is mistaken. The standard model “requires only preference consistency” (Binmore 2009, 9; Gilboa 2010, 4; Gintis 2009, 1). It does not assume that agents are egoistic (Abell 1992, 199; Hechter and Kanazawa 1997, 194).5 Nor does it assume perfect information. The standard model, on the other hand, does assume that the actor has a clear understanding of (1) the alternatives that constitute her choice set, (2) the different contextual scenarios (“states of the world” in the language of decision theory) that will condition the consequences of her choice, and (3) the outcomes of her action in light of these contextual scenarios. In formal terms, the standard model conceptualizes a decision problem D as a function relating a consequence (C) to the choice of an act A given a state of the world S (Binmore 2009, 2–3; Savage 1972 [1954], 13–15). “In deciding on an act, account must be taken of the possible states of the world, and also of the consequences implicit in each act for each possible state of the world” (Savage 1972 [1954], 13). Figure 1 represents for each act {ai} the consequence of this act {cij} depending on the state of the world {si} (Binmore 2009: 3). D: A × S → C

Objections, Refutations The standard model has encountered three classes of objections. The first one draws on experimental and empirical observations at odds with its core claims. At issue is the empirical validity of the model. A second class of objections addresses assumptions regarding cognitive processes and computational abilities. Here, the gist of the critique is that the model is wanting because it lacks a realist understanding of belief formation. The third class

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of objections addresses the issue of scope. Consistency and optimality requirements cannot be confined to preferences and decisions: they have to be extended to other components of action such as beliefs, desires, and the search for relevant information.

deviations The most formidable criticisms have been empirical. Objections along these lines cover a wide gamut of claims regarding preferences, beliefs, and decision-making (Chaves and Montgomery 1996, 141; DellaVigna 2009). Experimental and observational data have shown that decision-makers violate consistency requirements (Allais 1953, 527–30), hold time-inconsistent preferences (Ainslie 1992; Thaler 1981), and make contradictory choices depending on how the decision problem is framed (Tversky and Kahneman 1986, S254–56). Similarly, in contradistinction with the assumption that agents correctly gauge the states of the world conditioning outcomes, experimental and field evidence underscore systematic inference and overconfidence biases even among agents with economic expertise (Alpert and Raiffa 1982; Tversky and Kahneman 1974). Because “deviations from the standard model are not confined to laboratory decisions” but describe decisions in a wide range of settings (DellaVigna 2009, 365), these observations have particular force. They raise doubt on the validity of the model. From this perspective, the axiomatic conception of rational choice should be interpreted as a “normative model of choice,” which cannot be reconciled with a descriptive theory: these deviations are “too widespread to be ignored, too systematic to be dismissed as random error, and too fundamental to be accommodated by relaxing the normative system” (Tversky and Kahneman 1986, S252).

lack of realism Resonant with arguments addressing issues of empirical validity is the claim that the standard model fails to capture the essentials of choice involving risk (Allais 1953, 504). In particular, it assumes unrealistic computational and attention abilities and, in so doing, misrepresents cognitive processes. The human mind cannot process highly complex information in a synchronic fashion. Attention is selective and computational power limited. Yet, the standard model disregards these internal limitations, portraying actors as if they mastered the successful application of probability laws to decision problems (Simon 1955, 101; 1985, 302; Tversky and Kahneman 1986, S252). By conflating cognition with the requirements of formal logic,

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Rational Choice analysts make knowledge and belief formation a black box (Gigerenzer 2008, 8). The critique directed at the model’s lack of cognitive realism has a farreaching implication regarding another of its trademarks: optimization. If the ability to process multiple pieces of information at once is limited, then we should expect agents not to systematically engage in the types of cognitive investments that would allow them to optimize. Instead, we can expect them to contend themselves with selecting a line of conduct that satisfies them, without inquiring further about the information available or the payoffs of other options. It follows from this line of argument that satisfaction, not optimization, should be conceptualized as the standard decision rule in the case of agents who appraise the possible consequences of their choice (Selten 2001, 15; Simon 1985, 295).

what does it take to be rational? The third class of objections leveled at the standard model pertains to its scope. We usually do not view an individual as rational only with regard to the course of action she opts for. We also take into account whether she adequately searched for the information relevant to her choice, whether the beliefs she formed regarding the different dimensions constitutive of her decision matrix are sound, and whether her desires reflect her “independence of will” (Schumpeter 1942, 253). In light of these criteria, the standard model appears too narrow. It fails to integrate an assessment of information searches, judgments and volitions (Elster 1989, 20–35; Goldthorpe 2000, 116). Information gathering in fact should be analyzed as a second-order maximization problem related to the time and resources required to collect the relevant information when it is not available and the search is costly. The challenge for the actor is to figure out how far she wants to pursue this search (Elster 1989, 35; 2007, 205; Simon 1955, 106). Based on this information gathering process, we can appraise the actor’s beliefs to be “rational” if these beliefs are “optimally related to the evidence available” (Elster 1990, 20).6 As for desires, the issue is whether they are manufactured and determined by forces that escape the actor’s control. “One cannot be rational if one is the plaything of psychic processes that, unbeknownst to oneself, shape one’s desires and values” (Elster 1990, 22).

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elaborations Empirical and analytical objections have not been the sole challenge confronting Rational Choice pundits. In addition, critics have developed theoretical frameworks—Prospect Theory, Bounded Rationality, Cognitive Rationality—that they portray as alternatives to the standard model. The pundits’ responses to this multifaceted offensive have been of two kinds. Endorsing the adage that the best defense is a good offense, the first response refutes the validity of the objections. The second response takes the opposite stance: instead of rejecting criticisms, it incorporates them by amending claims and derivations. In either case, both responses are intended to demonstrate that these various criticisms have not struck a crucial blow at the fundamentals of the model.

Theoretical Developments Experimental findings documenting nonstandard preferences underlie the elaboration of what Tversky and Kahneman (1986) have termed Prospect Theory. The thrust of the theory rests on the claim that choice making is a two-stage process: agents first frame the decision problem and then evaluate the framed prospects. The framing stage pertains to the terms used to describe the choice problem.7 The evaluation stage pertains to the assessment of losses relatively to gains, value differences, and probabilities. On this score, Prospect Theory sets forth several claims: agents grant more importance to losses than to gains; the value they impute to differences decreases as the absolute value becomes greater; and they overweigh low probabilities as well as probability differences involving certainty and impossibility (Tversky and Kahneman 1986, S257–58). Less formal than Prospect Theory are arguments that point to the empirical significance of “good reasons” to account for anomalies (Boudon 1996, 124; 2007, 93–97; Lupia, McCubbins, and Popkin 2000, 7). We can construe a choice as rational when the actor has good reasons for making the choice she is making even though this choice does not satisfy the requirements of the standard model. “[In this conception] beliefs . . . are assumed to be derived from reasons, though reasons which cannot be reduced to mere considerations of costs and benefits” (Boudon 1996, 124). Accordingly, “a rational choice is one that is based on reasons, irrespective of what these reasons may be” (Lupia et al. 2000, 7). Boudon (1996, 124; 2007, 92) labels this approach “Cognitive Rationality.” Furthermore, the charge that the standard model lacks realism has been a

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major thread of the Bounded Rationality approach (Simon 1985). Bounded Rationality draws attention to the ways in which agents process information given the limitations of their computational power and the structure of their environment (Simon 1955, 101; 1956, 129). Analysts have pursued further this line of research by documenting and theorizing the heuristics on which agents rely as they search for cues, decide to stop the search, and make up their mind (Gigerenzer 2001, 43–46; Gigerenzer and Selten 2001, 8).

Responses Faced with this assault on multiple fronts, Rational Choice analysts have adopted two contrasted lines of defense. One dismisses the validity of empirical refutations by invoking the corrective effects of different mechanisms and the robustness of Rational Choice deductions at the macrolevel. (1) As the size of the groups increases, deviations cancel out (Becker 1976; Goldthorpe 1998, 43–44). Aggregation combined with the law of large numbers does the trick (Goldthorpe 2007, 141). (2) From an evolutionary standpoint, only optimal, that is, best-adapted strategies are bound to prevail. Time thus operates as a natural selection mechanism (Tsebelis 1990, 35–36). (3) Furthermore, since beliefs approximate reality in equilibrium situations—that is, situations in which no one has an incentive to deviate given mutual expectations—accurate beliefs inform optimizing choices in these situations (Tsebelis 1990, 28–30). Whichever rationale is being considered, it should be noted that this line of defense is off the mark: it opposes theoretical justifications to empirical arguments. Ultimately, empirical validity is the issue at stake and the matter can only be decided in light of the evidence available. Furthermore, empirical studies cast at the aggregate level, even when they focus on the behaviors of actors trained to be strategic (e.g., investors) do not support the “correction” contention (DellaVigna 2009, 360–66), either because the deviations are systematic—“the tend to be in the same direction” (Thaler 1994, 5)— or because agents experience no incentive to correct mistaken beliefs (Opp 1999, 190).8 A second line of defense consists in absorbing criticisms by redefining the terms of the theoretical entity labeled Rational Choice. This strategy has two variants. (1) Analysts who take the axiomatic theory of preference consistency as their compass draw on formal specifications to accommodate timedependent preferences (Ainslie 1992), the lack of independence between feasibility and desirability (Gilboa 2010, 8), limited information processing, and variable reference points for assessing prospects (Gintis 2009, 1, 246).

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“While in some important areas, human decision makers appear to violate the consistency condition for rational choice, in virtually all such cases . . . consistency can be restored by assuming that the current state of the agent is an argument of the preference structure” (Gintis 2009, 237). Accordingly, “contradictions are progressively ingurgitated and the basic framework is saved” (Manzo 2013, 367).9 (2) A different strategy of absorption relaxes core assumptions and moves away from the stringent constraints of an axiomatic model. Reconfigured as a “wide” theory of rational choice, this conception asserts the centrality of preferences, constraints, and maximization without assuming axiomatic criteria of consistency (Boudon 2003, 3–4; Opp 1999, 173).10 Agents appraise the constraints they face in a way that is primarily subjective. Assessments may be detached from objective conditions. Rational choice gets redefined in a way that sets the agents’ reasons at the center of the analytical stage (Boudon 2007, 90) provided that their actions are geared to optimization (Hechter 1987, 30; Opp 1999, 175–76). 11

which demarcation line? This plurality of views and theoretical stances raises a challenge. To what extent, and in which respects, can these theories of rational choice be said to belong to the same “family” as some have presumed (e.g., Hechter and Kanazawa 1997, 194)? What do they have in common and, if not, where shall we draw the dividing line? The following remarks contrast three different ways of conceiving a common denominator by assessing their merits and drawbacks. In light of this assessment, I specify a definition of Rational Choice as the set of approaches assuming a mode of action geared to optimization.

Rationality The first lead is the reference to rationality. Consider Wittek, Snijders, and Nee’s (2013) definition drawing explicitly on Goldthorpe (2007, 163): Rational Choice designates a “family of theories explaining social phenomena as outcomes of individual action that can—in some way—be construed as rational” (p. 5; my emphasis). This view of the demarcation line is broadly inclusive: for a theory to qualify as “Rational Choice” it is enough to portray individual actions as rational in some way. The practitioners have full leeway in filling up the category as they wish. Defining rational action is left

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to their discretion. By this criterion, Bounded Rationality, Prospect Theory, and Cognitive Rationality can be subsumed under the same rubric. However plausible this view may seem at first, it creates more problems than it solves. Not only is the notion of rationality vague. It is also semantically fluctuant (Opp forthcoming-a). It lacks the specificity require to set definite demarcation criteria. Wittek, Sniders, and Nee’s (2013) implicitly acknowledge this indeterminacy by leaving specifications open (“in some way”). Whichever demarcation lines may be invoked in the name of rationality, these will turn out to be blurry and fluctuant.12 Even more troubling, precisely because this understanding of the dividing line has no precise content, “rational” becomes a residual category of “irrational.” This problem is most acute in the case of “Cognitive Rationality.” Boudon (1996, 2007) never properly specifies how we might differentiate “good” reasons from “bad” ones. Nor does he indicate which validation criteria we should take into account to assess his post hoc interpretations of some mistaken probabilistic judgments (e.g., Boudon 1996, 131–35).13

preference consistency At the opposite end in terms of analytical specificity is the reference to an axiomatic conception of preference consistency. According to this yardstick, only theories that can be subsumed to the standard model deserve the “Rational Choice” label. Those that cannot be reconciled with the axiomatic model, or lack the specificity required for this purpose, cannot join the band. This view of the common denominator is as exclusive as it is stringent. By this standard, Bounded Rationality and Prospect Theory fall under the sway of the Rational Choice label (Gintis 2009, 246; Manzo 2013, 366, 369; Opp forthcoming-b). By contrast, Boudon’s “Cognitive Rationality” and the heuristics approach do not. In setting preference consistency as the dividing line, however, analysts leave out a huge swath of preferences, beliefs, and decisions that are not standard by the criteria of the axiomatic theory, yet fulfill the scope conditions of the model: decision-makers face a limited number of options, incentives are clearly defined and agents can draw the consequences of their choice for their own welfare. Remarkably, this observation applies to choices that take place in market or incentive-driven settings: choices by investors (Barberis, Schleifer, and Vishny 1998; Odean 1998), consumers (Cronqvist and Thaler 2004; Madrian and Shea 2001) and employees at work (Camerer et al. 1997). Given the interests at stake (e.g., retirement savings, stocks, paychecks), it would be preposterous to assert that these economic agents do

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not seek to maximize somehow. Yet, from the standpoint of the standard model their choices are not rational.

optimization This last point brings us to a third conception, more specific than the reference to rationality and less stringent than the axiomatic theory of preference consistency. According to this third conception, Rational Choice theories are theories that postulate optimization. This view of the demarcation line needs not refer to any optimization rule in particular (e.g., minimax, maximin, expected utility, risk dominance) because rules vary in relevance depending on the decision problem agents face. Nor does this definition of Rational Choice make any assumption regarding the agents’ cognitive abilities and the ways in which they process information. It only makes the claim that the reference to optimization under constraints is the distinctive feature of a Rational Choice theory (Hechter 1987, 30; Opp 1999, 173). This conception faces three challenges. First, as several analysts have observed (Gambetta 2000 [1987], 18; Goldthorpe 2007, 146; Hollis 1994, 185–86), claims inferring choices from preferences and constraints bracket agents as loci of decision-making. They paradoxically describe choices that elude choice-makers. Second, and related, as long as we do not specify goals, preferences, and constraints, equating rational choice with an optimization criterion amounts to an empty claim (Blossfeld and Prein 1998, 8). The notion has “no empirical content” (Kelle and Lüdemann 1998, 114). We get out of this emptiness if we develop auxiliary assumptions that bridge the gap between abstract subjective variables and the characteristics of social situations (Esser 1998, 94; Lindenberg 1992, 6; 1996, 129). Third, unless we spell out the theoretical content of these bridge assumptions, we run the risk of ad hoc arguments (Lindenberg 1996, 130–1).

a modal approach The analytical stance adopted in this essay draws on these critical remarks. We restore the sense of individual agency inherent to the very process of making a choice if, instead of presuming optimal choices codetermined by preferences and constraints, we conceptualize rational choice as the mode of action geared to optimization. This mode of action is necessarily “incentivedriven and goal-directed” (Raub, Buskens, and van Assen 2011, 14). It requires that the agent reflect upon alternative courses of action, assess likelihoods, and compare consequences with a rule of optimization in mind. Thus, from a modal standpoint, rational choice implies a reflexive engagement with the future (Ermakoff 2010, 541–43; 2013, 91–94, 100–1).14

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Two consequences follow. First, conceptualizing rational choice as a mode of action makes it empirically traceable in light of the phenomenological markers I have just outlined: the agent projects herself into the future of possible consequences for the purpose of acting on this assessment. By the same token, these markers differentiate rational choice from other modes of action: for example, the explicit endorsement of a normatively loaded call for action (ideological mode), the tacit adoption of a script collectively shared (cultural mode), or the reliance on a routine for its own sake (habitual mode).15 Second, a modal understanding of rational choice calls for an analysis of the situational factors that are propitious to its emergence. For instance, it is plausible to argue that the rational choice mode becomes likely when agents: experience their relational environment as increasingly competitive (see “Self-Limiting Norms” section), are bereft of a clearly defined behavioral script (Ermakoff 2008, xxv, 316; 2013, 97; Kronenberg, Yaish, and Stocké 2010, 10), or are unexpectedly confronted with the prospect of costs to their welfare (Ermakoff 2010, 541; 2013, 96; Lindenberg 1989, 55). This line of research is consistent with a problematic centered on the analytical specification of different “logics of situation” (Hedström and Swedberg 1998: 72; Popper 1994, 164–68) provided that we understand “situations” as dynamic configurations of relations shaping incentives and informing actors’ understanding of their options.16 Accordingly, I define an argument as “Rational Choice” if this argument either postulates, documents or implies a mode of action geared to optimization. Given this definition, I now examine three research problems that at face value challenge the explanatory clout of Rational Choice arguments. What explains actors’ willfully endorsing norms limiting their capacity to realize their interests? How do agents cope with situations that, because of their disruptive character, defy the scope conditions of rational choice? Can we account for the possibility of self-deception? These three research problems speak to the core issues of order, disruption, and belief formation.

self- limiting norms If we assume gain-maximizing behaviors, then the case of agents’ endorsing normative regulations that constrain their ability to maximize—let us call this class of norms “self-limiting”—cannot but appear perplexing. From a heuristic standpoint though, normative endorsements of that kind should retain our attention. First, their stringent character makes them norms par excel-

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lence, that is, “prescriptions about what behaviors (or states of the world) are required, prohibited, or permitted” (Ostrom 1985, 465). Second, they speak to the broader issue of social order. The processes whereby such norms get implemented provide us a clue to the emergence of self-regulation.

Conjoint, Disjoint Following Coleman (1990, chapters 10 and 11), let us first distinguish between “conjoint” versus “disjoint” norms. Conjoint norms are norms for which the “set of persons who impose the norm, the beneficiaries, is the same as the set of persons to whose action the norm is directed [the target actors]” (Coleman 1990, 250). Disjoint norms are norms for which these two categories of actors are separate. Those who set forth the rules are not the primary targets of their jurisdiction. Their claims are exercised against others. Regarding the emergence of conjoint norms, the thrust of Rational Choice accounts has been evolutionary game theory (Voss 2001, 114–19). Actors interact with one another and modify their behavior as a result of the payoffs of their encounters. The structure of the game may revolve upon a coordination (Young 1998) or a prisoner’s dilemma (Hill 1997). At any point in time, interactions reflect the history of previous states. The norm emerging as dominant is the convention that prevails at the equilibrium (Hill 1997 198–200; Young 1998, 145). In this conceptualization, the evolutionary path is sensitive to the initial distribution of types of players and to the accumulation of random deviations. While considerable attention through formalization and simulation has been paid to the emergence of conjoint norms and the possibility of suboptimal outcomes (e.g., Centola, Willer, and Macy 2005), much less analysis has been devoted to disjoint norms. Yet, in numerous instances, demands for norms emerge in situations in which one group engages in activities that have negative consequences (“externalities”) for another group. As a consequence, the latter seeks to curb the activities of the former through the imposition of norms. How, then, can we explain that target actors might “accept the legitimacy of others’ claim to a right to control their action when this acceptance constitutes an immediate disadvantage” (Coleman 1990, 287)? A case in point is aristocrats’ shift in attitude toward the matrimonial norms defined by the church’s canon law in the central Middle Ages (Ermakoff 1997). Until the end of the eleventh century, European male nobles disregarded church rules that forbade them to repudiate their wives and marry their cousins. Repudiation and endogamy were critical to strategies of political and military aggrandizement. A century later, ecclesiastical pre-

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cepts were gaining precedence over such practices. Aristocrats no longer considered their matrimonial practices outside the normative bearings set by the church. This does not mean that they never breached these prohibitions. This means, on the other hand, that any breach had a cost, psychological and social, which is another way of saying that the norm had become effective.

The Asymmetry Thesis To account for the process whereby disjoint norms get effectively implemented, Coleman (1990) outlines a two-pronged explanatory model cast in terms of sanctioning asymmetries and transfers of rights. The argument about sanctioning asymmetries states that beneficiary actors are in a position to impose their norm when they control resources on which target actors depend for their welfare (Coleman 1990, 262). If the latter do not comply with the normative request, beneficiary actors can retaliate by restricting or barring access to the resources that they control. However, a norm does not effectively regulate behaviors if it does not entail the target actors’ consent. This basic point motivates the second prong of the argument about a transfer of rights from the target actors to the beneficiary actors. The beneficiary actors’ normative request works effectively as normative restraint if target actors endorse it as such. The asymmetry in sanctioning capacities needs to translate into a transfer of right (Coleman 1990, 266). Target actors recognize the claimants’ right to regulate their own behavior. The problem with this explanation is that it fails to explain the central piece of the transformative process: the emergence of consent. It is one thing to trace shifts in the beneficiary actors’ sanctioning capacity and their ability to have target actors toe the line in exchange for access to resources that these actors value. It is another thing to claim that target actors toe the line because they endorse the norm. While publicly conforming to an official normative demand, actors targeted by the request may actually resist it in private. Thus, an explanatory model cast in terms of differentials in sanctioning capacities does not tell us why target actors initially opposing a normative regulation ultimately accommodate themselves with it. Endorsement appears all the more puzzling when the norm crucially undercuts the target actors’ ability to optimize their interests. This critique can be reformulated with regard to the issue of right. The claimant’s right to control a focal action presumes the target actors’ consensus that indeed the claimant is entitled to

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such a control. The key issue in the process of norm implementation therefore concerns the emergence of such a consensus.

Checking Competitors Accounting for this transfer of right from target to beneficiary actors requires shifting the focus from the dynamics of inter-group relations to the dynamics of intra-group relations (Ermakoff 1997, 407). This shift in focus, fully consistent with the methodological inspiration of a Rational Choice approach, highlights the conditions under which target actors develop a “regulatory interest” (Heckathorn 1989, 78), that is, an interest in sanctioning deviants. For instance, in situations when competitive relationships intensify, it is in the interest of target actors to invoke the norm as a strategic resource to check the expanding power or encroachments of their competitors. In so doing—and this consequence is unintended on their part—they contribute to the plausibility and regulatory scope of the norm while, by the same token, making it more difficult for themselves to elude its behavioral grip (Ermakoff 1997, 416). A Rational Choice approach thus contributes to the study of normative orders in two respects. First, this approach invites us to identify and investigate relational configurations conducive to the emergence of an interest in normative regulation among target actors. The shift in focus, from intergroup confrontations to intragroup processes, draws on a key tenet of Rational Choice as a method of investigation: the need to lay bare the etiology of social phenomena in terms of the rationales motivating individual agents’ strategies of action. Interestingly, this methodological requirement helps identify gaps in the analytical architecture of arguments that have a Rational Choice label, such as Coleman’s (1990) account of norm emergence in terms of transfer of right. This fact alone testifies to the heuristic payoff of the method. Second, a Rational Choice account highlights the effective implementation of a norm as the unintended consequence of its strategic usage. This observation, it should be noted, has broad relevance for our understanding of the problem of order.

problematic situations Formal theorists of rational action emphasize that the standard model only applies under certain conditions (Binmore 2009, 117; Gintis 2009, 236; Sav-

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age 1972 [1954], 16, 83). Savage (1972 [1954], 16) characterizes the model’s scope conditions as distinctive of “small-world” decisions. The world to which the standard model applies is “small” with regard to the terms and consequences of the decision. The decisional situation is “relatively simple” and “isolated” (Savage 1972 [1954], 83). The actor has no difficulty assessing probabilities, making deductions, and determining her preferences with respect to outcomes. Buying a car is a typical example (Elster 1990, 47). Why so small a world? The answer lies with the consistency requirements of the model. The actor cannot reasonably be expected to rank alternatives in a systematic and coherent fashion if she has to contemplate a high number of them. Goal ambiguity is more than likely when the decision problem involves multiple types of outcomes and when the actor views these types as incommensurable (Elster 1989, 32). Similarly, mapping out the consequences of one’s choice becomes a dubious matter if the ramifications are far-reaching in addition to being multidimensional. The world of rational choice in its standard version needs to be small so that it be cognitively tractable and devoid of goal ambiguity. By way of consequence, in the case of small-world decisions, incentives are well defined (Taylor 1988, 90). The actor is dealing with a “well-structured situation” in which “the actors’ identity and goals are established and the rules of their interaction are precise and known to the interacting agents” (Tsebelis 1990, 32–33), and in which she can gauge how mistakes on her part will affect her welfare (Schumpeter 1942, 253). The decision, repeated over time (Tsebelis 1990, 38), makes learning from one’s mistakes possible (Lucas 1987, 218). In sum, the standard model is predicated on a world that is small in the sense of being “routine” (lack of ambiguities, clearly delineated choice set, unmediated payoffs) (Gintis 2009, 237) and familiar (Binmore 2009, 23–24).17 In contradistinction with these disclaimers, I argue that the theory of rational choice redefined as a mode of action is of considerable analytical relevance for understanding situations of disruption and crisis. First, the microanalytical focus induced by the theory allows us to ground empirically a class of conjunctures characterized by the breakdown of institutional or habitual routines. Second, a Rational Choice understanding invites us to pay attention to the significance of decisional moments in these conjunctures, and to specify in which sense a decisional context can be said to the problematic from the actor’s standpoint. Third, depending on the type of uncertainty at play, we can expect agents to engage in different strategies of uncertainty resolution. I elaborate each point in turn.

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Disruptions Times of disruption are notoriously difficult to grasp. Habitual or institutional patterns either crumble or are in jeopardy (Ermakoff 2010, 539; 2013, 93). A priori, they defy systematic understanding. From a microanalytical standpoint, though, we can discern two contrasted types of subjective experience. One is characterized by a sense of opportunity. The actor reads the situation as enhancing her capacity for action. The other is marked by the perception of a challenge however objectified this challenge might be. The actor may be at a loss to figure out how to interpret the situation. Or she may know how to interpret it but is unable to draw clear-cut implications in terms of actions (Ermakoff 2009, 8). These two subjective orientations—opportunity, challenge—vary across groups—formally constituted or not—and across time. Individuals who believe that their time has come are not immune to the experience of a sudden challenge if subsequently the disruption brings with it abrupt and unexpected developments. Conversely, groups initially at a loss may benefit from circumstances that lead them to believe that they can have the upper hand. In either case, whether the sense of opportunity or challenge prevails, the conjuncture compels actors to think about the situation, ongoing developments, and options they might be facing (Ermakoff 2010, 541).18 The more they realize the extent to which they might expose themselves to future costs, the greater the incentive to assess risks and consequences, that is, the greater the likelihood of the rational choice mode (Ermakoff 2010, 541). One example helps flesh this claim out. The context is the summer of 1940 in France. The rout inflicted by German armies upon the French ones in June led to the formation of a new government headed by Marshall Pétain (June 16) and to the signature of an armistice with Germany (June 22). Right afterward, Pétain appointed Pierre Laval as vice-premier. Laval did not lose time in persuading his colleagues in the government that a meeting of the National Assembly (the Chamber of the Deputies and the Senate convening together) was necessary for the purpose of a constitutional revision. As deputies and senators started to meet in the spa town of Vichy where the government had settled, Laval was actively laying the groundwork of his plan for action (Blum 1955, 65–72). Clearly, for Laval the situation created by the military defeat—a situation characterized by dramatic disruption—provided him with the opportunity for a major “political gamble” (Ermakoff 2008, 175). He had a card to play, and he intended to play it to the best of his advantage. For those politicians who were not part of his clique or who were not willing to jump onto the

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wagon, Laval’s gamble was a major challenge, which they experienced as such, because the constitutional revision was to be the prelude of an alignment with Nazi Germany’s political institutions and foreign policy (Ermakoff 2008, 125–28). In more analytical terms, one set of actors (Laval and his allies) was making a power bid while another was on the defensive. Both were actively engaged in assessing risks and consequences.

Types of Uncertainty To investigate the collective dynamics emerging in such conjunctures, it is necessary to understand in which respects actors experience the situation as problematic and how this experience evolves across time. The matrix representation of the decision function (Figure 1) is analytically helpful to advance this research agenda. It sheds light on two broad classes of problematic conditions. The first one reflects an indeterminate ranking of preferences over outcomes, which translates into unstable preferences over actions. The actor’s uncertainty in this case is behavioral. The second class of problematic conditions is cognitive. The actor has a hard time ascertaining knowledge regarding one or several dimensions of the decisional matrix.

behavioral uncertainty In contrast to routine, low-stake, and “isolated” decisions, “grand-world” decisions are likely to be loaded with multidimensional stakes overflowing the immediate context of the choice. In formal terms, assume a binary decision {a1, a2} with two types of outcomes at stake: {cij} and {dij} (Figure 2). The actor does not view these two types of outcomes as commensurate. That is, she does not subsume them to a single utility function. She is considering

States of the world

a1

Acts

a2

s1

s1

s1

c11 ,

c12 ,

c13 ,

d11

d12

d13

c21 ,

c22 ,

c23 ,

d21

d22

d23

figure 2. The decision matrix with incommensurate outcomes

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the consequences of her acts either in the terms of one or the other of these two types. Assume moreover that c1j > c2j and d1j < d2j. When the actor is considering the payoff matrix in light of {cij} her preference goes to a1. When, on the contrary, she is considering the {dij} outcomes, her preference is a2. Her ranking of the alternatives is inconsistent and she is unable to opt for a course of action. Her uncertainty is behavioral. Here, the problematic character of the decisional situation stems from the fact that the actor is considering different types of outcomes and depending on the type she is considering, she is shifting back and forth between action preferences that contradict one another. The problem is one of valuation. The actor has to determine which type of outcomes she values most. To illustrate this oscillation and the ambivalence that goes along, let us examine again the case of politicians facing an authoritarian challenge such as French parliamentarians in July 1940. Politicians by definition are dealing with multiple sets of interests: their individual fate, the standing of their affiliation group if they have one, their normative ideals, and their constituents’ welfare. High-stake decisions bring to the fore these different dimensions. In July 1940, four types of outcomes were at stake: exposure to sanctions in case of noncompliance, the preservation of parliamentary mandates, the regime issue, and status among political affiliates (Ermakoff 2008, 184–85). For most politicians, preference rankings across these different types of outcomes implied noncongruent action preferences. The commitment to democratic values and the desire to preserve a parliamentary mandate motivated opposition to a constitutional blank check. Risks of reprisals motivated acquiescence. Considerations of status among political affiliates for their part motivated alignment with the majority. The behavioral oscillation that many observed in Vichy reflected these shifts from one action preference to the other depending on the type of outcome taken into consideration (Ermakoff 2008, 315–16). It would be mistaken to suggest that dilemma of this kind are confined to political actors. The possibility of behavioral uncertainty is inherent to decisions that the decision-maker knows might negatively affect other people’s welfare (negative externalities). That is why members of any group are not immune to such dilemma when they are requested to perform actions at odds with the moral representation they have of themselves (their moral selves), or with their public image among those whose social judgment they value (their significant others). A case in point is the French police officers being asked by their hierarchy to massively arrest Jewish families in the summer of 1942 (Ermakoff 2012, 225–27).

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cognitive uncertainties The second type of problematic condition stems from cognitive uncertainty (Ermakoff 2008, 367). Models of rational choice under risk (expected utility models) also take into account the inability to assert knowledge. However, this uncertainty of knowledge is confined to the “S” (states of the world) element of the A×S→C decisional matrix while the “A” (acts) and “C” (consequences) elements are clearly defined. Furthermore, the uncertainty about S is limited in scope. It simply means that the actor cannot view any state of the world as either certain or impossible. This lack of information does not prevent her from assessing likelihoods. The focus of the standard model is therefore on a bounded form of cognitive uncertainty, which takes the guise of imperfect knowledge about the contextual scenarios (i.e., the “states of the world”) conditioning the outcomes of alternative courses of action. Times of rupture and disruption evoke more far-reaching types of cognitive uncertainty: first, the actor cannot determine the alternative actions {ai} that constitute her choice set; second, she is unable to assess the likelihoods of the different contextual scenarios (“states of the world”) {sj} that will condition outcomes; third, she does not know how to map out the consequences {cij} of her acts. Each problematic condition reflects the inability to assert knowledge regarding a constitutive element of the A×S→C decisional matrix: alternative actions (options), states of the world and consequences. The uncertainty about options conditions the very possibility of a decisional matrix: if the actor is uncertain about which options she should be considering, considerations about contextual scenarios and consequences lose all relevance. The reverse is not true. The actor may be uncertain about contextual scenarios and consequences while having a clear understanding of the options defining her choice set. The inability to determine alternatives is likely to emerge in situations characterized by an unprecedented and sudden challenge—one that leaves agents at a loss regarding the definition of the situation. Unable to state what exactly is going on or, to put it differently, unable to figure out the nature of the challenge, agents cannot clearly envision which courses of action they should be considering (Bunce and Csanádi 1993, 266–67).

Strategies of Resolution This microanalytical focus on sources and factors of uncertainty is of considerable relevance for understanding the dynamics of actors’ subjective experience and, because this subjective experience conditions behavioral stance, the dynamics of collective processes in problematic situations. An individual

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actor gets out of her behavioral uncertainty when she ranks outcome types and does not modify this ranking (Ermakoff 2008, 316). In some instances, the actor determines by herself which type of outcomes should have priority, and she finds the resilience to remain committed to this ranking. The stabilization of preferences over outcomes amounts to a metadecision that the actor enacts on her own in an autonomous fashion. Most often, however, strategies of uncertainty reduction draw on other agents’ efforts. Two scenarios are conceivable. Both make one class of outcomes more salient than the others. In the first scenario, some agents come up with a definition of the situation that sets one type of outcomes as referential, and this definition appears to receive wide acceptance. The individual actor aligns. In the second scenario, salience is induced by the social relations in which the individual actor is involved. Consider the behavioral oscillation that some parliamentarians report in their accounts of the Vichy 1940 events. Gradually, as they interacted with one another in the parks, the alleys, and the grand casino (transformed into a parliament), and as they shared their concerns and expressed their anxiety, status considerations among parliamentary peers gained phenomenological salience while regime and political representation issues receded to the background (Ermakoff 2008, 241). The content of their interactions— saturated with peer relations—induced the way in which they were prioritizing the types of outcomes at stake. What about cognitive uncertainty? How do actors get over it? That is, how do they figure out what are the options and which possible “states of the world” they should be considering? Again, two scenarios are possible. The first one describes an individual actor observing how people react to the disruption and then assessing options and possible consequences in light of this behavioral information. The second scenario depicts actors seeking their cues from one another. Coordination is “epistemic” (Ermakoff 2010, 545–48). Regarding epistemic coordination, three points are worth underscoring. First, agents adopting a wait-and-see attitude when their routine world becomes problematic behave in a way that is strategic and rational. Their irresolution testifies to a shared sense of caution. Looking for definitional clues before opting for a behavioral stance, they signal that in their view any unconditional move on their part would unduly expose themselves. Second, the process whereby agents coordinate on a shared definition of the situation requires a great deal of assessment and inference making. For instance, agents can form a mental representation of the situation in light of the statements

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and behavioral cues provided by highly visible actors (Ermakoff 2008, chapter 6). In so doing, they demonstrate their ability to appraise the situation in interactive terms.19 Third, and this point follows from the previous one, dynamics of interaction should also be understood in cognitive terms. I now address this third point with an analysis of self-deception.

self- deception Rational action implies an active and reflexive engagement with the evidence available. We gauge the extent to which an actor’s beliefs can be deemed rational by considering whether they are grounded in the information available and in the search for additional information when required (Elster 1989, 30; 2007, 191). Approaches cast in terms of subjective rationality (Boudon 1996, 2003, 2007; Opp 2013) or heuristics (Gigerenzer 2008) expand this line of research by examining the cognitive logics underlying information processing. Inferences may be biased yet consistent with wellestablished cognitive patterns. Self-deception, however, is a radical departure from an assumption of logical or cognitive consistency because, as the actor deceives herself, she denies to herself information that she knows to be true. “If our subject persuades [herself ] to believe contrary to the evidence in order to evade, somehow, the unpleasant truth to which she has already seen that the evidence points, then and only then is she clearly a self-deceiver” (Fingarette 1969, 28; emphasis in text). Self-deception is a “hot” mistake, “hot” in the sense of “being motivated” by one’s desire (Elster 2007, 133). At issue is the capacity to ignore information directly relevant to one’s choice. Two questions come to the fore. The first concerns whether such a move can be construed as “rational.” At face value, deceiving oneself contradicts a basic premise of Rational Choice, which states that a rational individual seeks to make the best use of the information available. Is there ground to argue that the deliberate suppression of relevant information might serve a strategy consistent with a well-ordered set of preferences? The second question concerns the feasibility of willful acts of information suppression. Analysts of various stripes have pointed out the phenomenological puzzle lodged at the heart of self-deception. The actor simultaneously knows and ignores what she knows. Self-deception is a “conflict state” (Penelhum 1966, 258). How can it be possible?

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Falsifying Beliefs Is there room for self-deception in a Rational Choice framework? Two scenarios are conceivable. In the first one, the actor develops an interest in deceiving herself because she is confronted with facts that are costly to acknowledge: these facts are at odds with what she would like to believe. As a result, she experiences dissonance. In suppressing her knowledge, she suppresses the immediate source of her dissonance. The act is rational insofar as it is geared to a principle of cost minimization. A second scenario depicts the actor endorsing a belief that she knows to be false “because of the good consequences of holding it” (Elster 2007, 134). For instance, the actor seeks to shield herself from a certain kind of behavior and, for this purpose, willfully inflates the risks associated with this behavior (Elster 2007, 134). Whether we are considering cost avoidance or self-management, both readings stumble on the issue of self-persuasion. It is not enough to decide to suppress, or to invent, knowledge. Self-deception implies a genuine act of self-persuasion that remains puzzling given the actor’s initial state of knowledge. “Unless the process has a self-erasing component, by which the origin of the belief in the desire to acquire it is eliminated from the conscious mind, the desire is likely to remain a mere wish” (Elster 2007, 134; emphasis in text). The key question here pertains to the feasibility of self-deception.

“Selective Inattention” How could the actor decide no longer to know what she knows? Elster (1983, 149) mentions “massive clinical, fictional and everyday experience attesting to the reality of the phenomenon.” Numerous examples testify to its pervasiveness in the realm of politics (Schumpeter 1942, chapter XXI). The clue to the paradox, I suggest, is to be found in the interactional underpinnings of framing and belief formation. Self-deception demonstrates the extent to which the truth content that the actor imputes to a much-desired belief is a function of its framing and the credibility that this frame receives from peers and significant others. This argument applies more broadly to mistaken beliefs that, on the face of the available evidence, should objectively be hard to believe. Here are the main claims. 1. Self-deception is possible if the actor is capable of cognitively manipulating the salience of the information she has to deal with. This means, if she has the ability to foreground information that backs up the belief in

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which she has a vested interest and to background pieces of information that challenge, undermine, or contradict this belief. The structuring of information through a grid of salience is the stuff proper of frames. We process multiple bits of information by framing them, that is, by making them more or less worthy of attention. A frame, minimally defined as a schema of interpretation, organizes salience (Tversky and Kahneman 1986, S257). By the same token, it generates “selective inattention” (Sullivan 1953, 170). 2. From this perspective, we may conceive self-deception as conditional on the adoption of an interpretive frame that downplays the significance of the evidence we want to ignore or falsify. We relegate these pieces of information to the background of our awareness. Reinterpreted along these lines, self-deception is a reconfiguration of knowledge. Its cognitive tour de force implies a shift in frame and, conjointly, a shift in differential valence. In the imposition of a grid of salience lies the possibility of selfdeception. The analytical challenge is to specify the factors that make this shift possible. 3. Correlatively, this conception restates the genesis of willful ignorance. We do not “suddenly” deny and forget. Nor do we, properly speaking, “ignore” or falsify our knowledge. Such a move is bound to be self-defeating in the same way the injunction “be spontaneous!” is bound to miss the mark. Rather, we put this knowledge at bay and gradually lose sight of it (unless of course some unwanted piece of information thrusts itself in a way impossible to ignore). Simultaneously, we downgrade the value of this knowledge so that to make it less salient, less worthy of attention, less noticeable, and by way of consequence, less memorable. The downplaying of items of information is a possibility closely linked to the way in which we process information. 4. Although these few remarks identify the cognitive process whereby selfdeception becomes possible, they do not specify the conditions under which this process is likely to take effect. What makes a shift in frames possible when the actor is seeking to suppress unpleasant information? The claim here is that the actor is in a position to give credence to an interpretive frame that backgrounds the “unpleasant” information when she can assume that others among peers and significant others endorse it as well (Ermakoff 2008, 319–22). Cognitive effectiveness is indexed on social credibility (Lewin and Grabbe 1945, 57). The corollary of this hypothesis is that the actor has a hard time deceiving herself when she gets reminded of the information she wants to conceal.

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Misrepresenting the Nazi Threat Consider German politicians convincing themselves in the spring of 1933 that Hitler, at the helm of a coalition government since January 30, 1933, embodied the moderate side of Nazism and that a political modus vivendi with the Nazis was possible. The point applies in the first place to the political representatives of German Catholics. At the end of March 1933, Prelate Föhr, a parliamentary delegate of the Center Party—the political voice of German Catholics—described the cooperation of the center in the new Reich a “duty” (Evans 1981, 387; Morsey 1960, 369). In early April (April 5, 1933), the Kölnische Volkszeitung—one of the most widely read Catholic newspapers—published a long article, entitled “The Path of the Center Party” (Der Weg des Zentrums) most likely written by the party chairman, Ludwig Kaas, about the possibility of an “objective collaboration” between the Center Party and the Hitler government.20 The author explained that a “passive abstinence” toward contemporary political developments would not fulfill the “political imperative of the time.”21 Consequently, Catholics were to partake in the construction of the new state. The task was to reconstruct Germany and to put an end to its status of pariah in the realm of international relations. Tellingly, Carl Bachem, historian of the Center Party and former parliamentary delegate who remained in close contact with the party leadership, observed in his personal notes dated April 24, 1933: “from all sides we hear voices that seek an understanding with the National Socialists, in order to promote within this movement our religious ideals as much as we can.”22 Catholic leaders’ resoluteness to collaborate with the Nazis rested on several correlated premises. The first was that German Catholics shared with Hitler an interest in reviving the nation within and abroad. The second claim was that Hitler could be trusted. The third was that a modus vivendi with the Nazi leadership could be reached. And the fourth premise, capping this ideological construction, was that collaboration was possible and necessary to achieve this modus vivendi. These premises were the basic idea elements of an interpretation of the political conjuncture which I call the “frame of national collaboration.” There is no indication that the representatives calling for collaboration with Hitler were playing a cynical game. If the point was to buy time, these representatives could have adopted a cautious wait-and-see attitude without compromising themselves. The decision to ask Catholics to dutifully collaborate with the system of rule implemented by the Nazis indicated a faithful play on their part. Primary evidence testifies to this point. Significant in this

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regard was Kaas’s diary account of his exchange with von Papen, the vicechancellor, in early April on his way to Rome: Kaas’s offer of collaboration was in good faith.23 The striking fact is that this assessment of the political situation blatantly contradicted these representatives’ previous diagnoses of Nazism (Ermakoff 2008, 141–43). Numerous statements delivered until March 1933 indicate that the political representatives of German Catholics had clearly assessed the totalitarian character of the Nazis’ claim to state power. Central to this assessment of the Nazi threat before April 1933 were the beliefs that (1) Hitler’s claims to state power were exclusive ones, (2) his rule would mean the suppression of fundamental individual rights, and (3) Nazism represented a fundamental ideological challenge to Catholicism. In light of this assessment of the threat posed by the Nazis, the subsequent belief that accommodation was possible represented a significant turnaround. In assuming that it was possible to compromise with Hitler, the representatives of the Catholic parties decided to downplay what they knew about the Nazi Party and the threat it represented. In so doing, they deceived themselves. A close focus on the workings of self-deceiving beliefs invites us to investigate how agents form, and commit to, their beliefs. Given agents’ ability to misrepresent what they know, a theory of choice-making cannot make the economy of a theory of belief formation. In this respect, the argument presented in this section expands and complements claims central to the bounded rationality approach and prospect theory by underscoring the conditions under which agents can successfully shift to a frame of interpretation downplaying the pieces of information they want to suppress.24 Self-deception is a test case that lays bare a crucial underpinning of belief formation. It is heuristically fruitful because it is a test case.

conclusions While axiomatic theories of rational choice have been empirically battered, less specific versions of the theory run the risk of being “empty” or tautological. A modal approach, as I have conceptualized it, makes rational choice at once empirically traceable and realistic. Modes of action can be identified in light of specific empirical subjective orientations such as, in the case of rational choice, the reflexive effort to assess consequences in light of an optimization criterion. There is no reason to assume that optimization is the dominant mode across contexts, even when the focus is on small and routine

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worlds. There is every reason to believe, on the other hand, that this mode of action comes to the fore when both incentives and cognitive conditions intersect to make it motivationally relevant. This essay has emphasized the heuristic fruitfulness of this approach by tackling research problems that stand on the frontiers of the standard model but speak to core sociological issues. First, how can we explain actors’ endorsing norms curtailing their capacity to maximize their interests (“selflimiting norms”)? Second, how do individuals determine a line of conduct in nonroutine and disruptive situations? Third, what accounts for agents’ ability to engage in self-deception? The first question raises the problem of order. The second invites us to examine the flip side of order, disruption, and the possibility of rational action in conjunctures defying stable predictions. The third question sets the issue of belief formation at the center of the analytical stage. To explain why and how a set of actors (the “target actors”) agree to endorse a norm that limits their ability to realize their interests, it is not enough to argue that the norm becomes effective when the actors who benefit from its implementation (the “beneficiary actors”) acquire a sanctioning capacity vis-à-vis the target actors (Coleman’s bargaining model). A rational choice account brings into relief the causal significance of relational dynamics within the target group, and highlights the possibility of an endogenous shift in target actors’ propensities to invoke the norm for their own strategic purposes. The key factor in this respect is whether target actors develop an interest in sanctioning one another when they deviate from the norm. They do so when relationships among them become increasingly competitive. As they invoke the norm to check their competitors, lo and behold they set it upon themselves. Regarding problematic situations, the present essay set forth three claims. First, a modal understanding of rational choice and the microanalytical focus that this understanding induces helps pin down the types of subjective orientations emerging in these situations. Second, this approach deconstructs the broad and diffuse concept of uncertainty by considering both its mode (behavioral versus cognitive) and its referent (states of the world, options, outcomes). Third, of particular significance for our understanding of the dynamics of these situations is the question of whether, at which point, and how actors overcome the uncertainty they face. Finally, the argument about self-deception underscores the need to elaborate a phenomenology of belief formation in order to account for the subjective makeup of rational choice. The ability to manipulate our beliefs is conditional on the adoption of an interpretive frame relegating the information

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we want to ignore to the background of our awareness. Gradually, thanks to this frame, we lose sight of the “unpleasant” information. The credibility of the frame, however, rests on the shoulders of significant others and peers— those with whom we identify. Then, and contra to the standard model, we may engage in strategic action and yet be self-deceived.

notes 1. As a terminological convention, I capitalize rational choice when the term refers to the theoretical framework. 2. I would like to thank Gianluca Manzo, Karl-Dieter Opp, and the two external reviewers for their comments. The usual disqualifiers apply. 3. Contrast, for instance, Simon (1985, 294), Tversky and Kahneman (1986, S252), Gigerenzer (2008, 18–19), and Blossfeld and Prein (1998, 5) with Boudon (1996), Gintis (2009), Witter, Snijders and Nee (2013: 5), and Opp (forthcoming). The first set of authors oppose their own theoretical perspective to that of the standard Rational Choice model whereas the second set view several of these perspectives as susceptible to being subsumed to the standard model. 4. Given its referential status, we could also describe this model as the “root” model of rational choice. Neither “standard” nor “root” should be understood as evoking privileged epistemic status in contradistinction with the connotation a term such as “canonical” might suggest. 5. “Theory does not suggest that these wants are necessarily of an exclusively egotistical character. We want many things not for ourselves, but for others; and some of them, like battleships, we want for the interests of the community only” (Schumpeter 1909, 215). 6. “Rational beliefs are those that are shaped by processing the available evidence using procedures that, in the long run and on average, are most likely to yield true beliefs” (Elster 2007, 202). 7. For instance, whether the impact of a medical treatment is presented in terms of survival or death rates (Tversky and Kahneman 1986, S254–S255). 8. “In most settings, there is no plausible incentive to eliminate a bias and, hence, the effect of nonstandard behavior aggregates linearly” (DellaVigna 2009, 366). Furthermore, as Raub, Buskens and van Assen (2011, 16) remark, there is no sound theoretical ground for the claim that nonstandard deviations cancel out on the macrolevel, or the claim that macrolevel standard Rational Choice predictions are robust to various micromodels. 9. In this conception, the axiomatic model enjoys paradigmatic status: “there is no alternative to the traditional decision-theoretic model on the horizon, and there is not likely to be one, for one simple reason: the theory is mostly correct, and where it fails, the principles accounting for failure are complementary to, rather than destructive of, the standard theory” (Gintis 2009, 246). 10. “Rational-choice theory is commonly identified by the assumption that preferences

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and constraints affect behavior and, most importantly, that individuals optimize in some ways” (Opp 1999, 176). 11. “When faced with a choice among various courses of action, . . . individuals will choose the course of action that, given the information available to them, and their ability to process it, they think will produce maximum utility” (Hechter 1987, 30; my emphasis). 12. For instance, Wittek, Snijders, and Nee (2013) view Bounded Rationality as an integral part of the Rational Choice framework. They also acknowledge that not all the insights yielded by a cognitivist approach are compatible with the standard model’s core claims. “By elaborating on the cognitive foundations of human decision-making (that is, rendering assumptions about the intrapersonal antecedents of behavior more complex), research following this strategy arrives at surprising hypotheses and insights, which sometimes are at odds with the predictions of the standard model, and sometimes can be incorporated into it” (Wittek, Snijders, and Nee 2013, 5). How can the cognitivist conception of rationality be at once in and out of Rational Choice? 13. As these few remarks indicate, the major drawback of a framework cast in terms of “good reasons” is its lack of exposure to empirical refutations. Conjointly, it provides no hint of how we might derive predictive claims (Manzo 2012, 39). 14. “A conscious mode of action whereby actors intentionally select a course of action after having assessed the probable consequences of alternative options” (Ermakoff 2010, 541). 15. For an analytical description of the type of behavioral clues that can be expected when the ideological mode is at play, see Ermakoff (2008, chapter 5). 16. For concrete instances of a dynamic analysis of relational configurations and the identification of situational logics this analysis makes possible, see Ermakoff (2008, 2015). Ruling Oneself Out identifies the “logic of situations” conducive to drastic collective alignments by reference to the notions of critical decisions and mutual uncertainty (Ermakoff 2008, xxvi). Likewise, “The Structure of Contingency” identifies the situational logic of moments of indeterminacy endogenous to collective processes by theorizing these moments as instances of a “configuration of relations . . . hollowed out by the exacerbation of interdependence in the absence of a group stance” (Ermakoff 2015, 67). 17. “As long as individuals are involved in routine choice and hence have consistent preferences, they can be modeled as maximizing an objective function subject to constraints” (Gintis 2009, 236). 18. “Moments of disruption compel individuals to bring assumption about themselves and others to the fore of their consciousness” (Ermakoff 2010, 541). 19. These remarks complement arguments on the significance of “frame activation”— the so-called Model of Frame Selection formulated by Esser (2001, 2009) and formalized by Kronenberg (2005)—by focusing on the interactive underpinnings of frame emergence if by “frame” we mean how the members of a collective define the situation. 20. This article is anonymous. A short note simply indicates that the author belongs to the leading circle of the Center Party. As Becker (1961, 195) persuasively argues, there are strong reasons to believe that Ludwig Kaas is the author of this piece. 21. “Eine solche [passive Abstinenz] würde [nicht] . . . dem staatspolitischen Imperativ der Stunde entsprochen haben.” Kölnische Volkszeitung, April 5, 1933.

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22. Stadt Archiv Köln, Cologne, Nachlaß Bachem, 1006–859, handwritten notes dated April 1933. 23. Bundesarchiv, Coblence, KL. Erwerb. Nr. 190–2. 24. “The narrowness of the span of attention accounts for a great deal of human unreason that considers only one facet of a multifaceted matter before a decision is reached” (Simon 1984, 302).

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chapter seven

Systems in Social Theory dirk baecker

technical ver sus social There are no easy definitions of systems. Earlier definitions, such as “elements constituting a whole,” “structures performing functions demanded (or at least tolerated) by a whole,” or “boundaries open with respect to energy and closed with respect to information,” all involve a certain degree of ontological thinking, which suggests that systems are indeed out there. In fact, engineers may be able to build systems relying on the establishment of causal connections between parts and operations, containing these connections within some apparatus isolated from them, and describing them as logical ones (Gibson 2011). In social theory, however, dealing with systems means dealing with issues of ambiguous or equivocal communication. There are causal connections—in fact, a myriad of them—but they do not constitute systems. Causal connections happen to them, are experienced by them, are among the material a social systems theory works with, yet the emergence of a social system is a question of links established by actions considered as communication indicating the possibility of further communication. This chapter starts by looking a little closer at the difficulty involved in defining a system in social theory, briefly revisits the history of the idea of systems in sociological theory, proceeds by giving some examples of type, looks at the history of human society and at a systems theory of contemporaneous society, and concludes with some comments on a systems methodology for social research.

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unreliable communication within uncertain systems We call a system complex when it consists of so many and various elements and relations between these elements that they can be connected only selectively and not completely (Luhmann 1982; 1990a; 2012, 77–83). As soon as such selective interconnections occur, the system possesses a certain organization. It produces an order without it being apparent how it does so. The traditional methods of scientific research, the causal method and statistics, fail to explain this process (Morin 1974, 2008; Weaver 1948). Causality requires few elements (between three and four), albeit and under certain circumstances heterogeneous ones; statistics requires many elements but homogeneous ones. In both cases, it is unclear what is to be expected of relations between elements that are both cause and effect and also difficult to count and order. In the case of both complex and simple systems, we speak of system when differences, which we can also call boundaries, are apparent that mark off the system from an environment and when these distinctions play a role in the reproduction of the system. In this sense, we can distinguish systems from networks. Systems have boundaries; networks do not (White 1992). In the case of simple systems, these boundaries are exogenous and mostly technical in nature. Simple systems are machines, built and maintained by engineers, that may be highly complicated but that have no mechanisms for making and breaking selective links between their elements. As a rule, simple systems therefore know only four states: off, on, standby, and out of order. In the case of complex systems, boundaries are endogenous in nature, drawn and managed by the system itself. The observer can support, protect, or disturb these boundaries without ever knowing where the system sets them. Complex systems therefore know many states, which the observer can distinguish, classify, and categorize only with uncertainty. The definition of a system in social theory is difficult because one has to account for this observer. It is an observer in social theory who calls or does not call a phenomenon of reproduction of action and communication a system. And it is, moreover, the social situation, itself framed and designed by observers, that decides more or less spontaneously what sense to make of the situation and how to proceed or not. This gives us the following definition: systems in social theory are ideas of operations referring to further operations understood, in turn, as unreliable components of an uncertain whole, which does indicate the possibility of a certain type of operations. Those operations, in social theory, are actions

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doubling as communication, the uncertain whole going by names such as family, organization, community, or society. As in general systems theory, the components are unreliable, which means that they imply the possibility of error and thus of possible irrelevance (von Neumann 1956). Time lags, minimal as they may be, ensure that further operations may, indeed must, contain elements of a decision about whether to refer to, address, and record aspects of previous operations and, therefore, which ones to choose. Communication is not only recursive but also reflexive; in social theory, it necessarily comes with metacommunication (Ruesch and Bateson 1987). That metacommunication embeds and contextualizes any one communication within a complexity of a multiplicity of actors, of situations perceived, bodies engaged, memories discounted and recalled, and expectations confirmed and disappointed. In talking about improbable communication, social theory loses a certain amount of vividness or taken-for-granted clarity (Anschaulichkeit, in German), but it gains analytical clout. It begins to be able to look at how communication is actually fabricated, the way it occurs in families, friendships, conflicts, organizations, cities, communities, and societies. It discovers the so-called contingency of those fabrications (i.e., ways to proceed otherwise), and thereby grows into systems analysis. It begins to observe, understand, and describe what kind of energy actors are investing, institutions are supporting, and reasons, rules, norms, and values are sanctioning, and it hence emphasizes the probability of successful communication—against all odds, so to speak. Systems are not already out there waiting for actors to join them; they are the outcome of work, even though actors may be surprised how smoothly communication sometimes flows. Vividness and taken-for-grantedness are no proof that an observer has, in fact, left the realms of social construction and attained evidence of life and the world, but they are a proof that the observer is dealing with a social construction that has managed to have relevant aspects of life and the world adapted to itself. Social theory begins with taking the diversity of perspectives, opinions, and expectations into account. Systems theory within social theory begins by looking at how social situations are differentiated from and within other situations, including other social situations, and how they are set up to reproduce (or not). That is why one can only look at systems in hindsight, because without at least two or more components referring to each other, there is no differentiation and no reproduction. Systems are, at least, two-strokers. With respect to meaning, one may call differentiation the situation’s capac-

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ity for distinction in the dimension of fact, its distinction in terms of time, and its distinction in terms of its social setup, with respect to its reproduction. To be sure, all three meaning-dimensions of fact, time, and the social (Luhmann 1995, 74–82) vary widely; are dependent on ecology, history, and culture; and interweave in most complicated ways. Indeed, the idea of systems is just one version of framing what Auguste Comte (1853 vol. 2, 80) called the master thought of sociology, viz. the complexity of interconnectedness. James S. Coleman’s “action,” Pierre Bourdieu’s “fields,” or Harrison C. White’s and Bruno Latour’s “networks” are other versions of the same master thought. For all that, insisting on the uncertainty any actor experiences when dealing with a social situation is not typical of systems theory. The same goes for that, perhaps strangest, fact any sociological theory is dealing with: the fact that the scripts of social situations are produced by action and communication in turn affecting those situations as their subjects. Systems explain communication; communication explains systems; the two of them explain the social; and these three elements explain why sociologists need theory. They need theory to account for the necessity of a circular definition of systems and communication. And they need that circular definition to account for the self-reference of a social condition, which consists in being able to choose how to proceed in any situation. If there is no choice anymore, one is not dealing with communication but with causality, which is technical, not social. The social, moreover, may be a situation’s condition, without that condition being limited to human beings. As a matter of principle, there is no reason not to also look into the physical, molecular, organic, neuronal, or artificial conditions of situations possibly not only involving choice but consisting of the very conditioning governing choice. But as yet, nobody knows. As yet, it is social theory that discovered the conditioning of necessary choice as the basic element of a certain type of situation. As yet, it is social theory that is the custodian of an idea, which can only be received by accepting the paradox coming with it. Being forced to be free and compelled to be autonomous is the paradoxical fact social theory addresses. And to maintain an understanding of that paradoxical fact may well be social theory’s special function within the sciences.

a very brief history of systems in social theory Before looking at three examples of social systems in social theory, I shall briefly reprise earlier notions of social systems, introduced by Auguste

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Comte, Vilfredo Pareto, and Talcott Parsons. For the examples, I will refer to the most recent version of social systems theory, namely that by Niklas Luhmann. Comte began using the term system concurrently with introducing the name of “sociology” to denote a “positive” method to inquire into matters of society. That positive method consisted in doing away with any theological or metaphysical grounds for society. Instead, sociology’s task was defined as observing matters of fact. Unfortunately, however, those factual matters are not visible to the unaided eye. That is why sociology is, in fact, a science, in the first place. Comte started with two facts, one of which did not stand the test of time. Comte believed in a law of history defining three stages of the development of human society: theological, metaphysical, and scientific. One may note in passing that all three stages are still with us. Comte called the development of human society the “dynamic” fact of society and assumed that this fact would receive the most attention by an interested public. Yet, the more complicated fact of society is the “static,” which is not to be mistaken for an inactive or even steady one. The static fact of society consists in any one social phenomenon having to be in a certain “consensus” with all other social phenomena in order to be possible at all. To research into the system of that consensus—or even “harmony”—is the very business of sociology, and is intellectually or, in fact, scientifically more demanding than any public would be ready to accept (Comte 1853 vol. 2, 67–84). In this case, the master thought concerning the complexity of interconnectedness (Comte 1853 vol. 2, 71 and 80) consists in the idea of a system that makes sure that any one social phenomenon somehow differentiates itself from, and relates to, other social phenomena. If one drops the idea of dynamical laws in the development of human society, which even for Comte—and certainly for Harriet Martineau, his translator and editor—way too swiftly solved the riddle of the system of simultaneous coexistence with differentiated social phenomena, one still receives and retains the idea of that system as the theoretical and empirical challenge any social theory up to today is called upon to deal with. Ever since, a system in social theory has been a system of differentiation understood as a two-sided relation, defining identity on one the hand and distinguishing that identity from other identities on the other hand. Vilfred Pareto’s (1935, 1433) idea of a social system is a slightly different one. For him, the social system of a society consists first of all of “interdependent,” “reciprocally determined” elements such as the conditions of life on earth, the existence of other societies, either in time or in space, and “proclivities, interests, aptitudes for thought and observation, state of knowledge,

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and so on.” Social systems, however, gain their individual peculiarity from so-called “residues,” which are logical or nonlogical derivations from earlier situations awaiting, so to speak, their bearing on a new situation. Residues make sure that with respect to human beings’ participation, no social situation is ever in control of its own conditions. This does not just mean that psychology intervenes. Rather, it is the way social systems deal with human beings, which produces unpredictable effects in subsequent situations. Pareto (1935, 1443) emphasizes that those residues function “throughout the whole course of the conduct” and turn social systems into systems much more complicated than exclusively economic ones (1442). One may again notice that he considers a system in social theory to be a kind of boundary or limit condition, not just protecting operations of a certain kind but, in fact, observing the way they deal with perturbations that are to be expected at any time. One may note in passing how Georg Simmel (1910, 381–82) defined the being-socialized of an individual “as determined or partially determined by the sort of his not-socialized being.” Bodies and minds are not elements of society, nor of families, organizations, or intimate relationships. And because it helps in understanding the working of systems in the thinking of social theory, one may equally note in passing that for Erving Goffman (1956) the function of attributing “embarrassment” to any individual violating a rule and indeed also to those watching the violation figures among the most important functions of “systems” (not his term) of “interaction” (his term). Systems are about their environment as much as about themselves. In social theory, this means that one may analyze a phenomenon in terms as much of itself as of those it distinguishes itself from, and thus refers to. Émile Durkheim (1978), for instance, took this as the master thought of sociology when analyzing suicide in terms of society or family in terms of labor markets. In Talcott Parsons’ work, the idea of differentiation-as-integration—or of indication-as-distinction, to use Luhmann’s (1982a) terms in reading Parsons—becomes a central theme. As much as any action is analytically divided into aspects of a system, any one of those aspects makes sure that action is also linked to further systems defining the human condition (Parsons 1978). The details are well known and do not have to be repeated here. Any one action, the most inconspicuous one, such as tooth brushing, when seen as an act conditioned by society, and the most wide-ranging one, such as a government’s decision on war or peace, does have to obey four functional prerequisites to come about at all; it has to be adapted (A) to its physical and social environment; it has to have an idea about its goal (G); it has to be integrated (I) with other actions of similar or different kinds, includ-

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ing with itself (which sometimes may be rather nontrivial); and it must be able to come up with norms or values hitherto possibly latent (L) and comply with them in order to defend itself or to regulate conflicts it may provoke. Thus, the four fields of Parsons’ AGIL scheme come about, which are produced by cross-tabulating the two axes internal/external to human condition and instrumental/consummatory in orientation (Parsons 1977). Nothing about the integration of these four functional aspects of action is static, let alone conservative, as the American reception of Parsons’s theory would have it (e.g., Gouldner 1971). They just look at systems’ conditions in terms of differentiation and reintegration, as Comte already did. The highly dynamical aspect of the four-fields scheme, even if not emphasized too much by Parsons himself, becomes all the more evident if one takes into account that four fields, taken together, in turn constitute just one field related to three others on the next higher level, such that both demands and supports coming from all these fields show how action is bound by its social condition and bound also in terms of having to “voluntarily” (Parsons’s [1968, 11] term; see also Parsons 1961) select its orientations in order to fulfill its functional demands. Is it only now that sociologists are beginning to realize how stressful Parsons considers the act of action to be? Should sociologists look again at the tensions within the explicitly dilemmatic “pattern variables” he and Edward A. Shils introduced to emphasize the complexity of choices to be taken with any one action (Parsons and Shils 1951, 76–79)? Besides, by including the organic system, the personality system, the social system, and a cultural system all by itself among the systems constituting his action system, Parsons may be considered one of the first truly cognitive scientists at a time when even the term cognitive science had barely been invented.

interaction, organization, and society Our three examples are taken from Luhmann’s work and refer to interaction, organization, and society. All three are examples of how systems imply a conditioning of action beyond the motives, intentions, or interests of the actor. Or rather, they coproduce the action of the actor by framing their action by communication. While acting, an actor is also communicating. Communicating, as one knows from George Herbert Mead’s (1962, 65–74) analysis of a gesture, is the way an actor affects him-/herself while watching how s/he is affecting

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others. In interaction, for instance, an actor starts to talk and immediately may notice that s/he cannot say what s/he wants. S/he even begins to notice that s/he does not know anymore what s/he wants. If, by contrast, s/he actually does know, that shows and proves that s/he has already been taken up by his/her role and can comfort him-/herself by complying with it. The coproduction of his/her action by something social has already taken over. Or, to use another example, an actor tries to decide some issue in his/her organization and notices that s/he has to refer to previous decisions and to subsequent ones to even be heard. And s/he begins to realize that somehow s/he is starting to do things like withholding information, contradicting colleagues, waiting for career chances s/he never previously thought interesting, all the while feeling inspired, or rather worn-out, without exactly knowing why. And again, if s/he does not experience some kind of “alienation,” as Karl Marx had called it, and is still thinking that there are ways to avoid such a fate, s/he knows that s/he has already been absorbed by an elusive coproduction of his/her action via the conditioning of communication. And, considering society, one may open a newspaper, thereby taking part in societal communication, and read about one’s favorite football club having won again last Saturday. And one notices one’s mood lightening up without having done anything and without knowing anything about one’s club’s results next week. Something that happened in society changes how one goes about one’s business. Thus, Luhmann distinguishes between interaction, organization, and society to observe and describe how systems intervene to coproduce action in framing it as communication (Luhmann 1982b; see also, much more ambitious in terms of theoretical architecture, Luhmann 2015). Interaction, in Luhmann’s terms, referring to Goffman’s studies of interaction among others, is communication among people present. The social system of interaction, as Mead had previously analyzed, emerges from every single actor more or less mindfully perceiving being perceived by other actors. Luhmann says that the system structures “itself ” by conditioning what themes might be pursued in continuing communication, how swiftly themes should be changed, how quickly or slowly a mutual role-taking (between performance and audience roles; see Goffman 1959, 1983) should be expected, and who among the actors present should receive what amount of attention and demand what amount of talking time. The consciousness, or even the intentions, of any one actor would be unable to cope with the complexity of the situation and the subtlety of the implicit expectations and their relative weight. Instead, all actors more or less skillfully go with the flow, so to speak, that is, they let their body and mind, their experience and tacit knowledge,

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their unspoken fears and hopes decide how to participate and how to comply with the situation’s expectations and prospects. The social system of organization detaches itself from the condition of people having to be present. Instead, it develops and cultivates a form of communication which reaches, and is responsive to, people considered to be members of the same organization, even though most of the time they may not be present. Any one actor is forced to have the purposes of their action conditioned by purposes pursued by others in a way such that hierarchy, divisions, value-added chains, power plays, projects, strategies, and other features of organized behavior emerge as the structures of a social system, which is still dependent on individual decisions to comply, even though those decisions might be reduced to a minimal, almost automatic degree of deliberation. As organization theory has it, double interacts (between people present or not) as units of some kind of “organized anarchy” may be the best way to differentiate and reintegrate individual capacities, failures, and deviations with the uncertain whole, also known as a “garbage can,” of an organization (Cohen, March, and Olsen 1972; Weick 1979). Ironically, any attempt to set up a well-defined system might quickly be spoiled by human intelligence showing that its definitions are less well defined than some people thought, while ill-defined systems challenge human beings to show how they can successfully make those systems work against all odds (Moray 1984). Luhmann, always searching for ways to show that systems in social theory exist in a state of being unreliable, comes up with an understanding of organized systems which does not rely on means and ends, or on command and obedience, as business studies or earlier theories of “bureaucracy” (Bendix 1963; Weber 1978) would have it. Instead, his understanding relies on the criterion of membership. The system of organization emerges by deciding who is a member and who is not. This “first” decision, on your being hired, conditions all ensuing ones, including the ever-present possibility of the decision on your being fired again. To be sure, regarding “boundaryless” organizations of the network kind (Ashkenas et al. 1995), membership might be fluid and uncertain as long as the question of who is engaged with the organization to what extent and with what latitude may still sensibly be asked and answered at all, thus giving the organization an understanding of its possible direction. Organized systems are systems differentiated and reintegrated according to action communicated as decisions by people who are possibly members of that organization. A versatile and movable boundary emerges, which coproduces anything happening within the organization and to some extent, even without.

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Interaction is a social system among people present; organization, a system among people considered to be members; and society, as it turns out, a system among people absent. Luhmann (2012–13) considered his whole sociological work as an attempt to do just this, a theory of society. Sociology lacked such a theory ever since classics like Durkheim, Gabriel Tarde, Weber, or Simmel avoided developing one due to their concerns about being tempted to substantialize it. Even Parsons had only the idea of national societies. Luhmann (1990a) instead looked at world society as the horizon of possible communication and developed not a substantial but an operational notion of society, defining it as the condition of how, in any one situation, to pursue any communication whatsoever. In fact, society is defined as an indeterminate “and so forth” of communication. Society means being able to think of other situations while being in one particular situation. Whatever makes one think about other situations is part of that world, which to the extent one thinks about it, impacts on a situation. Again, it is a two-sided matter. The world impacting on a situation may let one think about leaving it or alternatively, cultivating it. In Mary Douglas’s (1982) terms, it is group versus grid, strengthening your home base of individual belonging (“group”) versus exploring further chances of action and experience (“grid”). The world contains both possibilities. And world society literally consists in, on the one hand, distributing those chances as well as their restrictions and, on the other, in providing us with certain means, called “culture,” to accept and reject, affirm and criticize those chances and their restrictions. This is a boiled-down, distant, and cool notion of society, to be sure, yet it links action with experience. It is open to all kinds of rigid structures enforced by people participating. And it is equally open to all kinds of variations brought forward by people present and absent. “People” does indeed here mean anything and everything social situations are used to receive and accept as addresses of individual attributions, beginning with individuals’ thoughts and feelings, the way they act upon the world and the way they experience it, and not ending with their partners, allies, friends, and foes. An idea of network emerges. Yet this is still about systems. And systems here mean that one has to account for attributions being the choice of those participating, as much as one does for systems consisting in trying to direct those choices, to encourage or discourage them. At the very least, any actor in any situation is able to attribute an incident to either an actor’s intentions or a situation’s conjunctures—and switch from one to the other. Systems in social theory are always also about bipolar attribution and the impossibility of predetermining it (Heider 1958). In fact, looking at how systems succeed in making

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sure they are able to reproduce, one might welcome, rather than reject, the observation that systems are able to produce their own indeterminacy, thus becoming able to feed on the problems they generate. Our three examples of social systems are examples of type, not of concrete empirical instances. They may help in calling for a certain kind of sociological imagination when looking at social phenomena. The general idea in social systems theory is always the same. Communication is improbable, understanding among actors even more so, so systems in hindsight are ideas of how orientations of actors, links between actions, and experiences exchanged may come about at all.

an equally brief media history of modern society Another example is contemporaneous society. How are sociologists going to understand and describe it when using a social theory of systems? How are they to make sense of the increasing talk about a network society ending a certain modern type of society, if that ever existed, that is, if it ever was more than an overestimation of a certain culture of humanity, reason, enlightenment, and functional differentiation as corresponding to a concurrent structure of society (Castells 1996; Latour 1993; Van Dijk 2006)? It is interesting that when doing systems theory, one does indeed have to stick with a notion of society in that strange and demanding singular which most of social studies, let alone cultural studies, so painstakingly learned to abhor. As soon as there is, in principle, no place on earth that cannot be reached by some kind of action and communication, there is only one world society. If one were to multiply the notion of society to include ethnic, religious, or national societies, one would end up with the question of what to call their relationship among themselves. If one calls it a multisystems system, that would still be a system. So what kind of society, framed as a system, are sociologists nowadays experiencing and participating in? Luhmann, I think, had his theory of modern society worked out, which enables us to describe its structural and cultural change into a next society. As the cultural history of media within human society suggests (e.g., Eisenstein 1979; Innis 1991; McLuhan 1962; Ong 1982), he maintained that there are up to now four media epochs of human society, which are the tribal, based on oral communication; the ancient, based on alphabetic writing; the modern, based on the printing press; and a next one, based on electronic and digital media (Luhmann 2012–13, chapter 2 and especially 245–50; Baecker 2006, 2011b). He did not exactly

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tell that history as a success story of the innovation of communication and information technologies invariably reducing the transaction costs of communication, as economic theory would have it. He rather called any one of those media innovations a “catastrophe” in the sense of the mathematical theory of catastrophes (Thom 1983) inundating society with new possibilities of communication, which the older structures and culture of society were not prepared for. Thus, as regard the emergence of a tribal society, beginning to talk means being expelled from social situations where everything is evident. Earlier, hordes of big apes, or of humans before the introduction of language, managed their affairs by just looking at what there is to be perceived, for example, bodies, encounters, intercourse, withdrawal, and avoidance. Beginning to talk means that human beings have to learn to cope with the difference between words and things (Deacon 1997), where the former sometimes, but not always, denotes the latter (“fallacy of misplaced concreteness”), and to cope with the possibility of explicit lies adding to deception, which, of course, had already been possible earlier on. Tribal society, therefore, might be considered a society topographically, by setting boundaries, limiting who at what time talks to whom about what issues, thereby separating women from men, children from adults, people from elders and regulating what kind of encounter on what terms is to be expected and accepted at any one moment—a society obsessed by fears of violating taboo. As regard the emergence of an ancient high culture, a literate society, to begin to be able to write and actually to be able to look at written words as immobilized spoken words (if writing is alphabetical, as in ancient Greece) (Havelock 1963), means that time horizons such as past and future begin to take shape because there now is a writing to be remembered and a future to be planned. Society becomes historical, thereby superseding the tribal society with its ever-dominant present, its distant mythical past, and its future of eternal return. Society begins to become stratified, and be it only to make sure that memory and planning can be restricted to aristocratic dynasties and other folks can stick to their shorter-term concerns about the present. I am simplifying to an almost forbidden extent, but I just want to give an idea of how one society, due to the impact of some new dominant medium for distributing communication, suffers an overflow of new meaning and learns to cope with it by following up a new way of structuring. The idea is not to give a monocausal picture of the development of society nor to buy anew into a sequential model of societal development of the kind Comte had proposed. The idea is rather to come up with an evolutionary model of so-

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ciety in which the way communication is distributed, using different media, produces a structure of differentiation, which is responsible for the positive and negative selection of the variation of communication and for the resteadying of society. Historical details are richer than this kind of evolutionary model, yet in order to be able to watch and describe what nowadays happens to modern society, if indeed it is still with us at all, not the worst idea may turn out to be looking at modern society in terms of a structure and culture brought forward by the use of the printing press, and at next society in terms of a structure and culture brought forward by the use of electronic and digital media. Modern society here is regarded to be the structural result of the invention and distribution of the printing press. People, slowly being alphabetized, started to read not just books but also leaflets, brochures, newspapers, files, certificates, bonds, and bank notes. They developed not just their own mind but indeed their own individuality to express the opinions they gained from reading, to express the criticism they come up with by looking at the distinction between world and opinion, and to feed the emerging tradition of a critical enlightenment which was, at the same time, well suited to absorb that criticism. If people in earlier times took criticism as a personal offense, they now learned to greet and handle it as “constructive.” The overflow of criticism in modern society, a catastrophe of its own, was answered, Luhmann thought, by the functional differentiation of society, which enabled the channeling of that criticism toward remorseful religion, competing markets, antagonistic politics, empirical science, ever-renewed arts, and of course, individual formation in schools and universities to both encourage and contain those subjects pursuing their deliberate reading and writing careers. Society resteadied itself dynamically. It became “modern,” assuming at any moment just one possible state, a “mode,” among similar others. Contingency abounds, and complexity increases. A belief in reason and progress, despite all historical relapses, despite cultural criticism’s talk of increasing decadence, despite the critique of ideology, and despite the revelation of a suppressed subconscious, prevailed and gained its strength from an unprecedented technological development, which seemed to prove the belief in rational distinctions between means and ends, causes and effects, and even cost and benefit. Modern society decoupled and interlinked social operations by distinguishing among “small” systems of interaction among people present, organized systems among members of that very organization, and the functional subsystems of society, such as politics, the economy, religion, law, science, education, and arts. There was a rational order to that mode of differentiation

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because functional subsystems were related to respective matters of fact, organizations such as governments, businesses, churches, courts, universities, or galleries usually had their primary reference to one of those subsystems, and interaction was left to float freely, perhaps defining what social phenomenology calls the everyday life of a society. That rational order—“rational” in terms of clear-cut dividing lines, fractions still defining a “whole”—even had a sharp sense of both ecological and social “catastrophes,” such as wars destroying the environment of social systems consisting of human being, their bodies, minds, and lives, or such as totalitarian systems subjecting all functional systems to just one of them, the political. Electronic and digital media seem to put an end to modern society’s functional structure and reasonable culture. A new “catastrophe” producing a new overflow of meaning takes hold of society. Rich data storage, fast algorithms, an unprecedented connectivity, and simultaneity of communication, not just among human beings but increasingly also among machines of data handling and information processing, overtax any belief in functional differentiation, reason, and the range and scope of criticism. Human beings in cults of the body, in performing arts, but also in the “bare life” of their precarious existence (Agamben 1998), rediscover the peculiarities of their fragile but sensitive bodies in the search for a reliable distinction from machines that seem to outpace their intelligence. The social system of society is challenged on two levels. One involves developing structures to ensure that communication with machines can indeed be distributed across the different fields, areas, professions, the daily life, and organizations of society. Call this the differentiation structure of society taking over from, first, segmentary differentiation into tribes in tribal society, stratification into social classes in ancient society, and functional subsystems in modern society. Nobody knows as yet what the differentiation of next society, already with us, will turn out to be, but “network” seems to be a promising candidate (Latour 2005; White 1992, 2008), even if, as yet, that notion has not been fleshed out in terms of a theory of society (but see Castells 1996). In fact, the notion of network readily comes with a rather polemical note to it, such as proclaiming “the end of the social” (Baudrillard 2007; Latour 2001)—meaning the end of the social as one was used to it in modern society. The other level is culture. Culture, which is a difficult term in sociology, may be considered a function balancing the demands of body, mind, communication, and environment in any one society (Baecker 1997, 2009; Malinowski 1944). Body and mind being malleable (Gehlen 1988), it is commu-

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nication, getting more complex in range, scope, and granularity, that puts pressure on a culture trying to come up with means to understand humans’ place in the world and to provide them with knowledge, skills, beliefs, orientations, and feelings indicating how to accept their world and reject what they find undue. Culture means that one must be able to have a sense of what other people are meaningfully up to while doing what one does. While the structure of differentiation separates, and links by separating, the culture of meaning connects, doing so even at the cost of some unavoidable confusion. It connects to let one meaningfully choose what to do and decline what one chooses not to do. Luhmann (2012–13, 248) was as skeptical as any sociologist, with the exception of Parsons (1972; Parsons and Kroeber 1958), about producing a theory of culture not in distinction from but in relation to society, yet he came up with a theory of “cultural forms” able to deal with the overflow of meaning in each one of the four media epochs of human society. He left open the cultural form of tribal society (Leach 1976) but ventured telos the idea of everything having its place in and in between cosmos, polis, oikos, and psyche as the cultural form in Greek terms of ancient society; and self-referential restlessness, or the very idea of an edgy equilibrium in the individual, on markets, among political forces, and so on, as the cultural form of modern society, again providing means to engage and to withdraw as needed (Luhmann 2012–13, 248–49). So the question is, what may qualify as the cultural form of next society? Which idea is able to both envision “the whole” of communication possibilities in all kinds of media, from spoken and written words to the printing press, television, computers, and computer networks, not to forget symbolically generalized media like money, power, truth, belief, or beauty (Baecker 2016a), and to make sensible choices or, better, switches within that whole (DiMaggio 1997; Fontdevila, Opazo, and White 2011)? One possible candidate to function as such a cultural form may turn out to be the idea of complexity, that is, the idea that somehow connections between body, mind, communication, and machine abound but are nonlinear and thus will never come to any rest, let alone be judged reasonable (Cilliers 1998; Morin 2008; Turner 1997). Poststructuralism is a way to undo most of modern thinking in terms of reason, efficient function, rational order, a more or less peaceful if not idyllic nature, and instrumentally controlled technology. Poststructuralism instead started to explore an altogether-different world, a culture of values, ones highly relative because reflexive.

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the system of next society A systems theory of society is a theory of a surprisingly robust or resilient, even if not necessarily sustainable, system produced by unreliable operations of action and communication with respect to an altogether uncertain whole. To show that the notion of system in social theory is able to account for a society, which is structured as network and cultivated as a complex one, one has to deal with that peculiar kind of a singular which talks about one system of one society. The singular is the indication of the pretension to produce a theory, which, of course, can only be an observer’s theory. The observer takes part in the very action and communication of the society s/he is describing. Systems theory means to insist, for just the moment of “theory,” on that peculiar singular. To talk about a society, let alone a world society, means to be able to show how that one system divides and links all its possible operations, or decouples and re-embeds anything that may claim its own identity within that society, all the while trying to ascertain what its environment consists of and how it relates to what issues of that environment. Note that modern society’s environment consisted only of the mental states of human beings, their bodies, and the whole of physicochemical nature, whereas in tribal and ancient times, that environment features spirits, devils, gods, and magical powers, all of them later dispelled by humanist thinking. The system of society this chapter is talking about is a truly fractal thing. It repeats and iterates its unit element at any possible level and for any possible unit. It is operationally closed, in Heinz von Foerster’s sense (1984, 6): the end of any one operation having to be simultaneously the beginning of a next one, thus removing even one degree of freedom, anything else being subject to variation, negotiation, and chance. Even closure is a double one, closing operations on a first level and the regulation of those operations, on a second one, such that one can only forgo a regulation by coming up with another (von Foerster 2003). Double closure adds to fractality because those regulations on any effect must be operations as well. As in all systems featuring self-reference, one ends up with “strange loops” (Hofstadter 1979), functions of operations becoming their own arguments. Parsons’s action and Luhmann’s communication qualify for that kind of unit element because they are two operations packed into one, an indication of an issue and a distinction from everything else, thus combining, if you like, focus and ambiance, affirmation and switch. Indication and distinction are George Spencer-Brown’s (2008) terms, whose calculus of indications has figured prominently in systems theory ever since Luhmann looked at Parsons’s the-

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ory for a more general way to frame it, that is, for a way to develop it further without having to stick to the perhaps altogether-too-schematic AGIL scheme (Luhmann 1982a). Now, if one calls “society” that one system which is reproduced by, and is the horizon of, action and communication interlinking in the medium of meaning, and if interaction, organization, and society itself, as shown in the previous section, are ways to reproduce action and communication competing at any instant among each other, and if social movements and publics might qualify as further ways to reproduce action and communication (Tarde 1969; Tilly 2004), then indeed sociologists have to look at just how that one system manages to let the meaning of action and communication indicate and cross accordingly. Following Luhmann, meaning is considered “sociology’s basic concept” (Luhmann 1990b). Meaning, in social theory as well (Schütz 1967), is that strange thing that is always on the go. It is characterized by overflow. Focusing on one thing, one already thinks about something else. Knowing about an issue today, one already knows that one will think differently about it tomorrow. And, most importantly perhaps, if not the very fuel of that overflow, knowing what one knows, one knows as well that others know differently. Combine that with a knowledge of ignorance, take account of implicit knowledge, of intuition, of latency, and of the emergence of further meaning in looking at anyone’s gestures, in listening to the pitch of a voice, and in reading between the lines, and one knows what a restless figure that meaning is. One may leave it at that and do social phenomenology instead of social systems theory. One may even add “structure” to describe how redundancies emerge and “form” to describe how any one structure is just an example of further structures being possible (Wittgenstein 2001, no. 2.033). The notion of system goes one step further and describes the production of any one meaning instance as the coproduction of alternative meaning instances. Buddhist teaching already insisted on that insight into “dependent arising” (Nagarjuna 1986) or conditioned coproduction. The adoption of a concept of system in social theory might even be understood as a rather ambitious attempt to describe the “logical space” (Wittgenstein 2001, no. 1.13) of those distinctions in meaning decoupling from, and referring to, each other. If there is a “logic” in society, as for Wittgenstein there is in language, it certainly is not a logic of that restrictive binary kind set up by Aristotle when having to deal with the overflow of meaning produced by the introduction of writing. It is a logic that does not necessarily insist on the values of “true” versus “false” but more properly may be understood as a logic of “yes but” assertions. It is a logic bringing in not just binary but general negation turn-

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ing meaning into a fluid resource of producing and dealing with overflows. “System” is that notion that tries to show how action and communication is “pieced together” (from Greek, sun histe¯mi) by indicating what it is about, distinguishing it from anything else, and by that very operation hinting at what it is distinguished from—such that the very next action or communication may indicate what the previous one just hinted at. Add the multiple constitution of any one action and communication among a plurality of at least two actors, and one knows why I started this chapter by talking about uncertain systems coming from unreliable operations. If the rational, or even reasonable, order of modern society took its selfserving, self-fulfilling, and certainly performative evidence from libraries and the classificatory order of their catalogs, next or network society is struggling to make sense of digital information and communication technologies that cross any factual order and reconfigure society in terms of strata and flows (Castells 1996; Drucker 2002). New kinds of “disciplines” (to borrow White’s [1992, 2008] term) struggle to make sense of what computer networks in both professional work and daily life offer them and demand from them. The terms of the functional subsystems of modern society, if they ever existed at all (Latour 1993), turn into values to be addressed seemingly ad libitum. Any functional exclusivity of orientation is looked at most skeptically, as is any justification of whatever orientation having to combine a diversity of perspectives (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Stark 2009). Disciplines or control projects emerge, which somehow have to develop their own, possibly idiosyncratic, profile in terms of a specific selection among all of the earlier perspectives, once functional and now-just-expressing values. That is, they have to come up with ideas on refinancing, political legitimation, lawful behavior, aesthetic outfit, religious or at least ideological certainty, pedagogical value, and scientific or at least technological backing. Even if one does not want to call it “empire” or some kind of new “capitalism,” let alone “aesthetic capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005; de la Fuente and Murphy 2014; Hardt and Negri 2000; Hutter 2015), one still has to come up with an idea of how any society considered a “system” may still be able to define the meaning horizon of what is going on. Sociologists would want to know about the space of possibility of next society. They would want to know what is possible, including moments and movements of fundamentalist exclusion of complexity, and what is not, for example, a society of “liberté, égalité, et fraternité,” also known as a, supposedly, truly “humane” society. Asking for the “system” of next society thus turns out to be the calculus of possibilities, that is, risks, chances, and dangers, from the perspective of a certain observer, who certainly has to account

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for other observers presenting their own picture of society. Presenting a version of the system of next society is thus an invitation to talk. It is not a definition sociology has the duty to make everybody, or just its students, comply with. There is nothing normative about that picture. It is just a picture. My picture once again takes up one of Luhmann’s ideas and adds a certain twist to it. Luhmann once wrote that there is reason to be wary of a concept of the system of society that equates that system with a kind of apparatus, regime, or complex (like the “military-industrial complex” typical of so-called “deep states” [Filiu 2015]) defining any action and communication in terms of obedience, deviation, or resistance. Critical theories of society are fond of a picture like that because it makes it easy to know which side to take. Yet at the same time, a picture like that mistakes any social reality for just another version of submission and thus deprives actors of any sagacity, or simply cunning, of their own. What about substituting the notion of some kind of a complex with the concept of just one distinction somehow supercoding any social reality without ever giving rise to any kind overarching entity (Luhmann 1989, 44–45 and 87–88)? Luhmann proposes looking at the system of society in terms of the distinction between coding and programming. And I propose to add criticism (Baecker forthcoming). Those three levels of just one system may be able to describe the ecology of next society. The idea is to describe a system of possible action and communication switching between codes, programs, and criticism in “exploring new possibilities” and “exploiting old certainties,” not just in organizations (March 1991) but also within the restless meaning horizon of world society. Codes relate to the communication media of society such as power, money, truth, belief, or beauty, which are all structured according to a binary distinction indicating a positive value, such as possession of power, property, evidence, certainty, or beauty, and a negative one, such as opposition, poverty, falseness, doubt, and ugliness. In modern society, those media gave rise to functional subsystems; nowadays, they may just answer “either/or” questions. Programs relate to disciplines and projects that were once called organizations and now move around in networks looking for decisions to relate to further decisions. In the logical space of society, they answer “both/and” questions, that is questions relating to combinations of a possibly idiosyncratic selection of values. Yet, if you have either/or and both/and judgments to be able to both decide what action and communication may be about and to combine them, there is a lack of negativity, of rejection, and thus of specific and of general reflection, both of which are only delivered by “neither/nor” judgments. That is criticism’s time. In action and communication, doing and saying “no”

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means to open the space for indeterminate alternative possibilities, which act like a mirror for actualities that are already determined. Without such a mirror, as painful as it may be when held up at any specific moment—think about the rejection of an invitation, about the blocking of a proposal for improvement, or about a terrorist act—the system of society would be unable to look at itself. That is why sociology does not think it sufficient to criticize society as if from outside but instead asks for a sociology of criticism itself (Boltanski 2011). That kind of sociology wants to know at which locations and situations criticism is to be expected, what issues there are to be addressed, and what issues rather remain in silence. A criticism from within completes coding and programming by “neither/nor” judgments drawing attention to certain issues and blinding society for possible others. The system of next society, as seen by social theory, might or might not be sufficiently understood as a calculus of meaning switches between either/or, both/and, and neither/nor judgments, frames, and references. A picture like the one given in this chapter—in the most abbreviated way—will nevertheless have to emerge from any social study of society using a systems notion. It will have to give an account of social formation in terms of both identity and peculiarity, on the one hand, and distinction from, and thus reference to, other formations, on the other hand. That is why systems in social theory define meaning by relative and reflective differences, not by essential or substantial identities.

a hint at methodology There are only a few possible rules when doing systems research within a social theory frame. First, try to be clear about the systems reference you are applying (Parsons 1951). Any social phenomenon you are going to analyze has to be taken either as the operation, structure, theme, or function of a specific system or as an object in the environment of a specific system. If it is neither/nor, you are already on your way toward some other method of social theory. Second, any system you try to observe may itself be a system able to observe its environment, itself, and you (von Foerster 1981). Note that you have to account for the possible self-reference of a social phenomenon you are addressing while knowing that self-reference by definition is elusive (Lawson 1985). Third, consider any system to be complex as soon as it defies causal and/or statistical analysis. Causal analysis works with variables no more than three

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in number, statistical analysis with any amount of elements, as long as they are taken to be homogeneous elements of a sample. Complexity begins where many heterogeneous elements or components are able to selforganize (Weaver 1948). Note that any inquiry into a complex system will have to accept it as a black box, never succeeding in actually “understanding” it but possibly succeeding in “controlling” your own stance toward it (Ashby 1958). Fourth, there is no limit to data being able to support an empirical analysis of your control of your stance toward a system, thus coming up with quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic, cartographic, narrative, hermeneutic, discursive, and mixed data as long as you are able to frame, code, script, or model them according to some metadata still able to account for a system indicating itself, distinguishing itself from its environment, and thereby being able to reproduce (Law 2004; Vogd 2005). And, fifth, be clear about the audience you are trying to address with your inquiry, be it a scientific community, the (observing) subject, a client, or the general public. Do not forget, “anything is said by an observer” (Maturana and Varela 1980, 8), and “anything said is said to an observer” (von Foerster 1979, 6).

notes English language editing by Stan Jones. I am grateful to the editors of this volume and two anonymous referees for their critical comments. All remaining lack of clarity is mine.

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Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. New York: Free Press. ———. 1961. “An Outline of the Social System.” In Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory, edited by Talcott Parsons, Edward A. Shils, Kaspar D. Naegle, and Jesse R. Pitts, 30–79. New York: Simon & Schuster. ———. 1968. The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. New York: Free Press. ———. 1972. “Culture and Social System Revisited.” Social Science Quarterly 53 (2): 253– 66. ———. 1977. “Some Problems of General Theory in Sociology.” In Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory, 229–69. New York: Free Press. ———. 1978. “A Paradigm of the Human Condition.” In Action Theory and the Human Condition, 352–433. New York: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott, and A. L. Kroeber. 1958. “The Concepts of Culture and of Social System.” American Sociological Review 23 (5): 582–83. Parsons, Talcott, and Edward A. Shils, eds. 1951. Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ruesch, Jürgen, and Gregory Bateson. 1987. Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. New York: Norton. Sacks, Harvey. 1992. ‘On Doing ‘Being Ordinary.”’ In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, edited by Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, 413–29. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schütz, Alfred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World, translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. 1963. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Simmel, Georg. 1910. “How Is Society Possible?” Translated by Albion W. Small. American Journal of Sociology 16 (4): 372–91. Spencer-Brown, George. 2008. Laws of Form, 5th international ed. Leipzig, Germany: Bohmeier. Stäheli, Urs. 1997. “Signifying Failures: A Discourse Theoretical Reading of Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory.” PhD diss., University of Essex. Stark, David. 2009. The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tarde, Gabriel. 1969. “The Public and the Crowd.” In On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers, edited by Terry N. Clark, 277–94. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thom, René. 1983. Mathematical Models of Morphogenesis, translated by W. M. Brooks and D. Rand. Chichester, UK: Ellis Horwood. Tilly, Charles. 2004. Social Movements, 1768–2004. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Turner, Frederick. 1997. “Chaos and Social Science.” In Chaos, Complexity, and Sociology: Myths, Models, and Theories, edited by Raymond A. Eve, Sara Horsfall, and Mary E. Lee, xi–xxvii. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. van Dijk, Jan. 2006. The Network Society: Social Aspects of New Media, 2nd ed. London: Sage.

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Vogd, Werner. 2005. Systemtheorie und rekonstruktive Sozialforschung: Eine empirische Versöhnung unterschiedlicher theoretischer Perspektiven. Opladen, Germany: Budrich. von Foerster, Heinz. 1979. “Cybernetics of Cybernetics.” In Communication and Control in Society, edited by Klaus Krippendorff, 5–8. New York: Gordon & Breach. ———. 1981. Observing Systems. Seaside, CA: Intersystems. ———. 1984. “Principles of Self- Organization—In a Socio-Managerial Context.” In SelfOrganization and Management of Social Systems: Insights, Promises, Doubts, and Questions, edited by Hans Ulrich and Gilbert J. B. Probst, 2–24. Berlin: Springer. ———. 2003. “On Constructing a Reality.” In Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition, 211–27. New York: Springer. von Neumann, John. 1956. “Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components.” In Automata Studies, edited by Claude E. Shannon, John McCarthy, 43–98. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weaver, Warren. 1948. “Science and Complexity.” American Scientist 36 (4): 536–44. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, translated by Ephraim Fischoff et al. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weick, Karl E. 1979. The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd ed. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. White, Harrison C. 1992. Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2008. Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2001. Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. London: Routledge.

chapter eight

The Patterns in Between: “Field” as a Conceptual Variable monika krause

Alongside debates about the question “How does the social world work?,” sociologists have also always been interested in how particular parts or areas of the social world work. Among the classical theorists, for example, Max Weber (1958 [1915]) developed a set of questions about religion, which have shaped later sociological work of other fields, such as art, law, or science: How do actors and organizations negotiate values on the one hand and instrumental concerns on the other hand? What are the respective roles of specialists and laypeople? What role do texts play in struggles over authority between different actors? How do values specific to one sphere relate to other concerns? This interest in specific areas of social life—be they called value spheres (Weber 1958 [1915]), functional subsystems (Baecker this volume; Luhmann 1995), or fields (Bourdieu 1995) can seem like a restriction of focus when compared to other approaches that talk about “social structure,” “capitalism,” “neoliberalism” or “culture” more broadly. Yet this restriction is not just owed to a lack of ambition or an emphasis on empirical specificity— because it may seem more manageable to produce and verify claims about “organized religion” than about “society,” for example. Rather, theories like field theory are based on the hunch that the differentiation into specific areas, each with their own logic, is itself an important part of the answer to the question as to how the social world works overall. Scholars in this tradition argue that approaches that talk about “society” (or about “individuals”) without attention to these specific areas miss out on something important. It is one of the promises of field-theoretical research that it allows us to bring together insight developed by researchers in the sociology of art,

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science, religion, education, medicine, and law, among other areas, inviting scholars working on one field to ask questions that draw on findings from other fields. Field theory also raises questions about the whole that emerges or does not emerge from the.co-existence of these areas. In this chapter, I will discuss some of the key sources of sociological field theory and some of its conceptual elements (see also Bourdieu, Champagne, and Wacquant 2013; Fligstein and McAdam 2012; Hilgers and Mangez 2014a; Martin 2003; Swartz 1997). I will try to convey a sense of what makes it distinctive and what its research has delivered. When I review research in the field-theoretical tradition, I will also pursue a more particular goal. I read field theory with a view to maximizing the questions that it allows us to ask of the empirical world. I call field a conceptual variable, following a move Nettl (1968) made in a paper on the state, to convey that a field may or may not be observable in a specific setting, that fields can take various forms and that fields can be situated as one pattern among others. Field theory is a theory only in some senses and not in others. It is not a coherent weltanschauung or a set of claims about causal relationships between concepts (see Abend 2008). I would call it a sensitivity toward a specific pattern of mediation that can be observed in some cases, a pattern whereby actors and practices that are not necessarily situated face-to-face or in the same space, that are not necessarily personally known to each other, share orientations either in agreement or in disagreement about the same stakes. If field theory is a sensitivity to a possible pattern, this pattern can be specified for each particular case. This means if, in a given context, field dynamics can be observed, we can ask, if it is a field, what kind of field is it? We can also position it vis-à-vis other possible patterns. How do field dynamics relate to other kinds of dynamics, such as interactions, or broader cultural patterns? In what follows, I will begin by sketching the history of field theory and distinguish between a field-theoretical approach and field-theoretical hypothesis. I will then explain the kind of hypothesis about fields we can find in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and discuss how field, as a hypothesis, relates to concrete observable settings. I will suggest two areas for further theoretical work in the field-theoretical tradition. First, I will review some findings about fields in the tradition and suggest that we might ask more systematically about the differences between fields we might observe (see Benson 2005, 2013; Gorski 2012a; Krause forthcoming). Second, as I will discuss, if any given field is one kind of pattern, this raises the question of how any one field pattern relates to other patterns. Scholars have asked how fields relate to other fields. I will suggest that we can also ask how field patterns relate

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to patterns, which have historically been emphasized by other theoretical traditions, such as interactions, organizations, or broader cultural dynamics.

empiricizing fields: approach and hypothesis Originally introduced into the social sciences by social psychologist Kurt Lewin (2014 [1951]) in the 1930s, the concept of field has a history in a number of corners of the social scientific world (see Martin 2003). It is today most prominently associated with the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1987, 1991, 1993, 1995) on the one hand and with American organizational sociology on the other hand (diMaggio and Powell 1983; Fligstein and McAdam 2012). Today, we see perhaps an unprecedented level of explicit attention to the theoretical status of the term. This attention is driven by several factors, which operate relatively independently of each other. Bourdieu’s work has traveled internationally, and it is used today by several generations of later scholars who are considering a wide range of new cases in different national or transnational contexts. Bourdieu had insisted his work is read in a holistic way, but later scholars have, to some extent, taken the concept of field out of the context provided by Bourdieu’s work as a whole and entered new theoretical dialogues. Where Bourdieu was in dialogue with structuralism and phenomenology, for example, later scholars were also in dialogue with neoinstitutionalism and organizational sociology (Benson 2006; Mudge and Vauchez 2012; Wilson 2016), actor-network theory (Dominguez-Rubio and Silva 2013; Eyal 2012; Go 2014), critical theory (Calhoun 1993; Krause 2014), or Luhmannian systems theory (Nassehi and Nollman 2004). In the neoinstitutional tradition, internal differences have come to the fore and have also led to renewed theoretical debates (see Thornton, Occasio, and Lounsbury 2012); scholars in this tradition have also become much more explicit about advancing a theoretical agenda for sociology as a whole (Fligstein and McAdam 2011, 2012). In reading any theoretical tradition, we can distinguish between elements that are part of its adopted approach and different sets of claims or hypothesis that can be examined empirically for different cases. An “approach” entails assumptions that are applied to all cases until further notice. These assumptions may be part of deeply held philosophical convictions, but they are more usually, and more usefully, advocated for pragmatic or strategic reasons. In addition to the elements of its approach that are applied to all cases, a theoretical tradition also includes hypothesis for empirical research, which suggest certain questions based on the experience of previous research in the

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tradition and based on findings about previous cases. In the interest of “progressive” development in the terms of Imre Lakatos, it is important to mind the distinction between approach and hypothesis and to minimize the approach (what is assumed) and maximize the hypothesis (what is investigated empirically) (Lakatos and Feyerabend 1999). As part of its approach, field theory tends to conceive of its objects relationally, that is, the focus is on relationships, not on entities (Emirbayer 1997; Martin 2003). On a general level, field theory shares this feature with network theory (e.g., Erikson 2013; White 1992; Erikson, this volume), actor-network theory (Latour 2005; Latour et al. 2012; Lezaun, this volume), and, in principle, with structuralist approaches. Within relational sociological approaches, field theory focuses specifically on relationships between actors—individual or corporate—that take each other into account either directly (diMaggio and Powell 1993; Fligstein 2001) or through orientation to shared stakes. Building on these features of its general approach, field theory offers a set of empirical claims, which can be examined for each case. Different variants of field theory vary in their requirements for what constitutes a field: we can in principle include all relationships where actors take each other into account, that is, speak of the field of kinship, the field of sexual relations (Martin 2006), or speak of organizations or social movements as fields (Fligstein and McAdam 2011, 2012). But I would distinguish between these phenomena and the more specific case of actors who consider each other relevant with regard to specific professional or specialized practices, which the bulk of field-theoretical research has focused on.1

a mediating pattern The classic example of a field analysis in the Bourdieusian tradition is Bourdieu’s (1995) book The Rules of Art, a study of the emergence of the French literary field in the nineteenth century. We can see from this book how the field-theoretical approach builds on moves that are foundational to sociological inquiry more generally: Bourdieu takes the philosophical questions “what is art?,” or “what is beautiful?” and rather than answer them himself turns them into empirical questions, questions that can be answered by observing practices and discourses in the world. He asks, “what is considered art?”; “what is considered beautiful?”; “what patterns can we recognize when we observe judgments about art and the invocation of aesthetic value?” Asking these questions, for Bourdieu, always means to inquire into spe-

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cific historical and institutional contexts (see Calhoun 1993). In his study of the French literary world, Bourdieu notes a shift around the middle of the nineteenth century. In the context of the economic—and to some extent the political—rise of the bourgeoisie, aesthetic value becomes the object of intense symbolic struggle. Writers like Flaubert and Baudelaire claimed it as their business not only to produce but to also define and live art, and they defined art in strong opposition to all political and economic concerns, flaunting indifference to money and power, and demanding real artists break from all official forms of consecration (Bourdieu 1995, 47–113). The assertion of independence did not fully make art independent— during the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, artists traded a direct dependency on patrons for an indirect form of dependence mediated by the expanding market for cultural goods. But as the field of art emerged, a space that was at least partly organized around its own “field-specific capital,” “art for art’s sake” became possible and sustainable as one version of artistic practice. The truth of grand claims about the power of aesthetic value is the historical reality of the field of art as a relatively autonomous field of practice. A field is constituted by a pattern among its elements, which cannot be reduced to macrocultural trends or matters of political economy. To explain what an individual artist does, for example, we should not only focus on his or her biography or his or her practices or studio spaces. Nor is it enough to look to broader cultural or economic trends; instead, field theory examines how the artist and his or her work is positioned vis-à-vis other actors within the field of art. Fields are only relatively autonomous; we do not expect them to determine practice on their own, but we do expect them to mediate or refract broader trends in some way. The field as a whole is shaped by its position within the larger architecture of fields. The logic of a field includes shared assumptions about what are appropriate objects of practice, about how things are done, and about the kinds of people who are relevant as either peers or opponents. These shared assumptions or “doxa” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992) are often tacitly accepted by participants. They form part of their “habitus,” a set of dispositions that shape practices relatively independently of specific situations. Field-specific capital is the object of struggle, fueling symbolic divisions. Positions and objects derive value from contrast with other positions and objects. The field of art is shaped by an opposition between an emphasis on “art for art’s sake” and various positions accused of “selling out” to political, economic, or other agendas. With this analysis, Bourdieu alerted us to the remarkable similarity between discussions of art, science, and religion—all

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structured by an opposition between an emphasis on values that matter for their own sake and a focus on instrumental concerns such as money and power (Bourdieu 1991, 1995). He reminded sociologists that it is not enough for them to join these discussions—by diagnosing a betrayal of ideals, for example. It is also their job to analyze them, and situate them in their social context. Bourdieu links the analysis of these symbolic patterns to the analysis of institutions, identifying the different symbolic strategies of actors associated with either what he calls the autonomous pole, rich in field-specific capital, or the heteronomous pole, rich in field-external forms. The internal structure of cultural fields of production show a pattern that Bourdieu calls the “economic world reversed,” where status is measured by distance from power and the market. The patterns associated with such fields can be pursued through different methods. Thomas Medvetz (2013), for example, examined the field of think tanks through ethnography in two different organizations as well as interviews and document analysis (see also Christin 2016). In his study of the journalistic field in France and the United States, Rodney Benson (2013)’s methods included systematic content analysis. I used interviews with people in a similar position across organization for a study of the humanitarian field (Krause 2014). Scholars use archival and historical research to investigate cases (Go 2008; Gorski 2012b; Sapiro 1999, 2003, Steinmetz 2007, 2008; Wilson 2016). Both classic and new studies use quantitative methods including multiple correspondence analysis to uncover the relationships underlying fields (Bourdieu 1990; Denord et al. 2011; Hjellbrekke et al. 2007; Lebaron 2010). For every empirical case, field theory invites us to ask not only about actors, their views, or their practices, but also about the relationships they are embedded in. Starting with any sets of observations about specific actors or settings, we can inquire. who are actors oriented towards? What are the practices that actors share with others, elsewhere? What organizations and institutions are relevant in this area? And we can ask: How are differences constructed? Is there a competition? What is the competition about? What is the history of the stakes of this competition?

fields and observable settings In some contexts and conversations, field theory presents itself as a challenger—of a sociology that relies too heavily on established categories, for example. But it is also often in the role of the challenged “establishment.”

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There is considerable skepticism vis-à-vis field theory (or differentiation theory in general) in the traditions of microsociology (Benzecry and Winchester this volume), in science and technology studies (Lezaun this volume), and among scholars in the sociology of convention (Potthast this volume). These approaches place a strong emphasis on close ethnographic or quasi-ethnographic observation and have their unique strengths. It would be instructive to compare, for example, Bourdieu’s (1995) The Rules of Art to Knorr-Cetina’s (1981) The Manufacture of Knowledge or Latour and Woolgar’s (1979) Laboratory Life with a view to what each account does and does not allow us to see. Each of these books addresses specialized practices in its own way. To the extent that authors have used ethnographic accounts to question the very possibility of field analysis, we have an opportunity to clarify what field theory does and does not imply with regard to “concrete observable settings” (Duster 1981). We can discuss how fields can be observed empirically, and we can discuss how field-theoretical claims relate to the observation of hybrid practices. Classic microsociological work has insisted that accounts of social order start in the “here and now”; it has warned of the analytical costs that arise when social scientists impose concepts and categories “from above” or “from the outside” (Garfinkel 1991; see Law 2004). In this tradition, it might be suggested that it is possible to observe someone painting a picture but that it is not possible to observe a field, like the field of art, in the same way. A classic field-theoretical tenet holds that “fields are observable by their effects” (see Martin 2003), and I would argue that a field is not only empirically observable through its effect as a pattern in abstracted forms of data but also in concrete observable settings, when we examine actors’ orientation. A field, to the extent that it matters in a specific setting, connects different observable social settings via actors’ orientation to one another—a point emphasized, for example, by Fligstein (2001) and Bottero and Crossley (2011)—or to the stakes of the field. It is only through a conflation of concrete observable setting and theoretical concepts like “interaction,” “situation,” or “actor-network” and through a very narrow notion of what is observable that it can be claimed that fields are less observable than any other pattern in the social world.2 This leads me to a related criticism of field theory that is useful to discuss here. Field theory has been challenged with reference to hybrid practices by scholars interested in conventions (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; see Potthast this volume) and by actor-network theorists (Latour and Woolgar 1986, 1988; Latour et al. 2012). Boltanski and Thévenot note that in empiri-

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cal observations, different “orders of worth” are usually invoked at the same time. People apply, for example, aesthetic and economic criteria in the same conversation. With a different theoretical agenda, Latour’s (2012 [1993] “We have never been modern” delivers an eloquent attack on the notion of “separate spheres” with specific emphasis on the relationship between science and politics. Scholars within field theory have discussed this problem of hybridity with regard to “hybrid settings”—settings, which bring together journalism and science, for example or science and politics (Eyal 2002, 2012 Medvetz 2008, 2013 2014; Panofsky 2014; Stampnitzki 2011, 2013). But we need to also engage with the observation that practices in core institutions are also hybrid. Karin Knorr-Cetina (1992) has pointed out in the context of a similar debate that science studies has shown that aesthetic, political, and economic consideration matter in settings that might be considered to be at the very center of the scientific field, in laboratories in the hard sciences, for example. These discussions remind us that field theory should not be read to imply that the world is divided neatly into a set number of fields, that each encases related practices and organizations, and that each corresponds to a distinct physical part of the directly observable world.3 Fields include settings in which actors are (partly) oriented toward its stakes. No field will be able to claim any settings, in which it matters, exclusively to itself. In any given observable setting, different field dynamics may matter. Most, if not all, situations will contain the invocation of different kinds of stakes. If a field is relatively autonomous, its relationships and its capital will play an important role in some settings and a peripheral one in others. In terms of field theory, what is fielded is an aspect of a specific practice, not the observable unit as a whole. What field theory offers—and this is a point that critics don’t always engage—are hypotheses about the patterns and distributions that become visible when we observe the sum of those aspects of practice across inevitably hybrid settings.

what kind of field? If we observe a pattern connecting actors and situations, we can seek to describe it more closely. In other words, we can ask, if we are observing a field, what kind of field is it? I will discuss three kinds of findings about fields that we can use to ask questions about other fields we observe (Benson 1999, 2005, 2013; Gorski 2012b; Krause forthcoming). These findings concern,

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first, shared practices and symbolic competition; second, the structure of symbolic divisions in a field; and third, the degree and kind of autonomy of a field.

Shared Norms and Competition within Fields Neoinstitutional approaches have emphasized the role of shared norms in organizational fields. This has to be understood partly in the context in which this approach originated. At a time when scholars of organizations explained why organizations looked the way they did mainly by pointing to technical demands and efficiency criteria, neoinstitutional scholars drew attention to the role of shared culture and norms, thereby opening up an intellectual space for cultural and sociological analysis (diMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977; Powell and diMaggio 1991). Scholars have usefully pointed at features of organizations—but one could talk generally about practices in fields—which are adopted not only as a rational response to the external environment but also for cultural reasons internal to the field. In a classic article, John Meyer and Brian Rowan argue that, for example, the rise of personnel departments and of research and development departments has to be explained by conventions internal to organizational fields. We could add to these examples today the rise of audits (Power 1997) and rankings (Espeland and Sauder 2009), among others. We can also ask about shared features and conventions specific to particular fields, such as the size of gallery doors (Becker 1982, the role of memos in think tanks (Medvetz 2012), logframes in nongovernmental organizations (Krause 2014), and the role of specific “beats” or thematic sections in journalism (Cook 1998; Fishman 1978; Fletcher 2008; Molotch and Lester 1974; Sparrow 2006). In the work of Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992), we also find an account of shared understandings in a field in the notion of “doxa”; however, he also tends to emphasize competition and symbolic divisions among actors in a field. As we consider Bourdieu’s argument here, it is worth noting the advantages of the particular ways, in which he discusses competition. Rather than just talk about competition in general, between newcomers and established actors, for example, he offers a specific theory of the diverse stakes that actors strive for and explains how they have come to be considered stakes.4 Because of this, Bourdieu’s work offers resources to go beyond economistic accounts in either rational choice theory or some versions of Marxism. When we have a difference in emphasis in two strands of work, it is tempt-

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ing to ask “who is right” about fields in general. But rather than incorporate assumptions about consensus or conflict into the chosen approach, we can bear both these findings—about shared norms and about competition for a range of stakes—in mind and rather than ask “who is right?” about fields in general, we can ask “how do different fields vary along this axis?” How much are explicit assumptions and implicit assumptions shared and how much are they contested? To the extent that assumptions are shared, how much power and coercion has been involved in arriving at a consensus (see Gorski 2012a)?

Symbolic Structures Bourdieu draws on the structuralist philosophy of language to analyze the symbolic oppositions that structure the ways positions within fields are differentiated from each other. He alerted us to the remarkable similarity between discussions of art, science, and religion, all structured around an opposition between sacred and profane, and he links this analysis to an institutional analysis. It has been common to oppose an autonomous and a heteronomous pole when analyzing a field, which leads to two-dimensional maps. But in taking this forward, we might consider that in some fields, symbolic divisions may matter relatively little. And some later studies indicate that in fields where symbolic divisions matter, the kind of oppositions that structure symbolic competition can vary, partly because the sources of heteronomy can be quite varied. I have, for example, suggested that the divisions and debates within the field of humanitarian field are structured by an opposition between a twofold autonomous pole on the one hand and various forms of heteronomy on the other hand. Resources from the religious field, from local states, social movement, and donor governments are all considered sources of symbolic pollution in different ways within this field (Krause 2014). As actors can be impure in different ways, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Doctors without Borders/Médecin Sans Frontières (MSF) occupy slightly different positions of autonomy—the former somewhat close to sovereign states, the latter slightly closer to social movements and nonstate actors. Other findings pertain to a conversation about variation in the symbolic oppositions that shape fields. In their study of the Norwegian field of power, Johs Hjellbrekke and colleagues point out that in addition to the commonly emphasized opposition between field-specific capital—in this case, political capital—and economic capital, the tension between established groups and newcomers also matter (Hjellbrekke et al. 2007; see also Denord et al. 2011).

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Stephanie Mudge and Antoine Vauchez note that “weak fields” such as the scholarly field of European studies do have symbolic competition, but one cannot observe an autonomous pole at all (Mudge and Vauchez 2012; Vauchez 2008, 2011). Recent research on global and transnational fields has highlighted another possible dimension of symbolic differentiation in fields. Relationships can be fielded on different scales, and I would suggest they can be fielded on different scales at the same time. That means national, regional, and global fields of the same kind can coexist, and we can examine how they relate to one another; we can ask of any field what role resources from fields on other scales play in the symbolic divisions of a field. There is some evidence, for example, that social scientists in European and in Latin American countries are divided among “globalizers” with ties to the United States and those who insist on national languages and means of consecration (Best 2009; Fourcade 2006).

Field Autonomy A key concept for understanding fields in the Bourdieusian tradition is the notion of relative autonomy, which suggests that fields have a logic of their own. Bourdieu notes that fields are only relatively autonomous from other fields, and they can be more or less autonomous. That autonomy varies is most often acknowledged in historical arguments: fields have developed as relatively autonomous areas of practice as contingent outcomes of processes of modernization. In his analysis, the field of art, for example, only emerges in the mid-nineteenth century (Bourdieu 1995). Actors in a relatively autonomous field are oriented toward one another and are at least to some extent guided by the norms of the field and/or the pursuit of field-specific capital. Autonomous fields have the capacity to organize field-specific practices and have a logic or law of their own. Bourdieu also diagnoses a loss of field autonomy in some of his writing. This theme is particularly strong in his late work on neoliberalism. Bourdieu (1998) argues that neoliberal reforms threaten to collapse the separation between economics and politics and between economics and science. This account echoes concerns in his earlier work about the politicization of academia associated with the movements of “1968” (Bourdieu 1990; see Calhoun 2012). Others have followed both with accounts of field emergence (e.g., Chalaby 1998; Ferguson 1998; see also Armstrong 2002, 2005) and loss of field autonomy (Maton 2005; McQuarrie 2010; Strand 2011; see also Defrance 2012).

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Bourdieu compares across different fields with regard to autonomy. He notes, for example, that the degree of autonomy from demands of elites varies across different scientific fields. He suggests that the social sciences are less autonomous than the natural sciences because the legitimate representations of the social world, which it claims to produce, are also stakes in the political field (Bourdieu 1975). He argued that both biology and sociology at the time of his writing in the 1970s were less autonomous in this regard than physics in Einstein’s time (Bourdieu 1975, 31). While scholars often discuss how fields can be more or less autonomous, scholars have only begun to analyze about how fields can be autonomous in different ways (Benson 2005, 2013; Krause forthcoming). In Bourdieusian terms, we can distinguish different forms of autonomy based on different positions a field as a whole might have in the overall architecture of fields that make up social order. Relatively autonomous fields can be closer to specific kinds of other fields such as the economic or the political field (Benson 2013). With regard to these other fields, fields can be closer to elite or to popular sources of pressure. If a field is close to the political field, for example, it can be closer to the state or closer to pressures from social movement below (Bourdieu 1994, 3). Considering fields beyond the national scale, we can distinguish the way a field on a given scale is autonomous from other fields in its context from the ways it is autonomous (or not) vis-à-vis other fields of its kind. If we take the field of art as an example, questions about the field’s autonomy have traditionally been asked as questions about, for example, the autonomy of the French field of art from the French political or economic field. But recognizing the relevance of transnational ties and acknowledging that these need not supersede national ties, we can ask about the autonomy of, for example, the French field of art from the global field of art. Larissa Buchholz (2016) has coined the term vertical autonomy to describe this aspect of field autonomy. Moving beyond the national as the only scale of analysis also allows us to ask about the relationship between different national fields of the same kind. Sociologists of science note, for example, that the American social sciences are very autonomous with regard to non-American social science—in citation and recruitment patterns, for example. US sociology is more autonomous from Argentinian and German sociology than Argentinian or German sociology from US sociology, but that does not necessarily mean that US sociology is more autonomous from political or economic forces than Argentinian or German sociology (Beigel 2014a, 2014b; Gingras 2002; Krause 2016).

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fields and other patterns If a field is a pattern that might or might not matter in a specific setting or with regard to a specific research question, the question arises how any one such pattern relates to other such patterns. One important way in which scholars are pursuing this question is to ask about the relationship between different fields. Bourdieu (1990) has addressed this to some extent, inquiring, for example, into the changing relationship between universities and the state. This is an important theme in recent field-theoretical work (Fligstein and McAdam 2012;Hess and Frickel 2014). Asking about the relationship between fields is an empirical agenda, but it is also an opportunity for conceptual development. Bourdieu’s notion of “conversion of capital” is one important starting point here: Bourdieu (1986) suggests that resources from one field can matter in another field, but because fields are relatively autonomous, there are costs for moving between currencies (see Calhoun 2012). Learning from attention to sociomaterial practices in actor-network theory and science studies, more generally, we could ask in more detail about the practices, spaces, and devices that help link different fields together. Funding proposals, for example, help link science to the state, sick notes connect medicine to the economy, and restaurant reviews link journalism and gastronomy (Ferguson 1998; Leschziner 2015). We can ask another type of question, though. We can ask how fields in the more narrow, Bourdieusian, sense of fields of specialized practice relate to patterns in the social world that are not fields in this sense, such as interactions, organizations, or cultures. There are some who discuss the concept of field as though it provided an alternative coherent approach in between “micro” and “macro,” a third option or a “compromise” or “balanced” position that again could capture all of social reality. To the extent that Bourdieu claims to have overcome all the different issues associated with the problem of “micro” and “macro” or “structure” and “agency,” he implies such a claim.5 The problem with that position would be that it would underplay the contribution of other theoretical traditions. Studies that have focused on fields, including but not limited to Pierre Bourdieu’s, have often not paid that much attention to the analysis of situational or interactional dynamics or to dynamics within one organization (Mouzelis 1992, 1998). This does not mean that these types of dynamics are not important, and it does not mean that field theory has “overcome” these dynamics by theoretical fiat. The critical debate on Bourdieu has sometimes focused on the relationship between his analysis and an essentially philosophical and normative

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notion of agency (e.g., Archer 2000). It is more useful sociologically to ask about the relationship among different kinds of relational dynamics. In exploring these questions, field theory can learn from social systems theory (see Baecker this volume), which has begun to pursue related questions some time ago. Luhmannian systems theory is perhaps best known for its account of functional subsystems, like law, art, or science, but it also has an account of organizations (Kneer 2001; Nassehi 2002; Tacke 2001) and interactions (Kieserling 1999, 2004; Luhmann 1987) as well as personalities as autopoietic systems and have asked how these dynamics interact and conflict (Kneer 2001; Nassehi 2002; Tacke 2001). Dirk Baecker (2008), for example, has produced a study of the logic of banks and banking and argued that this logic is in tension with the logic of the economic system. Any given observable setting may be shaped by interactional, organizational, and by different field dynamics at the same time. If we were to analyze a specific scene—two scientists walking into a bar after a day of conferencing, for example (see Benzecry and Winchester this volume)—field theory would alert us to the ways in which orientation to broader stakes, including capital from the scientific and maybe other fields, may make other people copresent and mediate the conversation. But the way the actors dress, the way they manage “front stage” and “backstage” (Goffman 1971, 1983; Rawls 1987), the timing of the interaction, and who else happens to walk in also matter, and there is no reason to assume that these interactional dynamics always serve a larger field dynamic and that their analysis is superseded by the analysis of field dynamics. If our two scientists walk into the cafeteria of a university that employs them both, we can add questions about the role of organizational rules and hierarchies to questions about fields and interactions. The question about how field theory relates to general discussions about culture can be clarified in this context. Different traditions in the social sciences have emphasized the impact of shared (or contested) patterns on the level of a society, a smaller or larger “culture” or the world. This line of investigation is central to the heritage of anthropology but also to sociological theories, both those labeled “conservative” (Parsons 1991) and those labeled “critical” (Althusser 1965). Attention to symbolic systems has recently been reinvigorated by the strong program in cultural sociology (Alexander 2004; Alexander and Smith 2001; see Reed this volume) and by ideas-centered approaches in political science (Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999). Field theorists would point out that they can add institutional specificity to these accounts, and that they show conflicts where others see shared logics. Field theory, as differentiation theory more broadly, raises caution about

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simple assumptions about “society” or “culture” as a whole; field-theoretical work shows how ideas are refracted through symbolic patterns and processes within fields. But rather than dismiss the concern with the overall logic of cultural representations, we can discuss how patterns in meanings that can be diagnosed to be shared or contested across social fields come to matter relative to and in conjunction with other kinds of patterns, such as those produced by fields.

conclusion I have presented field theory as an invitation to ask questions about a specific pattern, a pattern whereby actors and practices that are not necessarily situated face-to-face or in the same space and that are not necessarily personally known to each other, share orientations toward the same stakes, either in agreement or in disagreement. Starting from concrete observations or specific issues, field theory invites us to ask not only about actors, their views, or their practices but also about the relationships they are embedded in. We can ask, who are actors oriented by? What are the practices that actors share with others? What organizations and institutions are relevant in this area? How is authority constructed? How are differences constructed? Is there a competition? What is the competition about? What is the history of the stakes of this competition? We can thus describe patterns that link practices and situations and matter relatively independently of the dynamics of social dynamics on a larger scale. Field-theoretical research could be extended into thematic and geographic areas that have so far been relatively neglected. Research could address more cases from the past—although there have been landmark field-theoretical studies of historical settings after Bourdieu (Go 2008; Gorski 2012b; Steinmetz 2007, 2008, 2016; see also Dromi 2016; Petzke 2016; Wilson 2016), the past and its potential range of cases have not been fully mined for sociological analysis. Research could address more cases from smaller understudied countries and from the Global South: Mathieu Hilgers and Eric Mangez (2014b) have recently argued that facile modernization-theoretical assumptions, which oppose differentiated, Western societies with undifferentiated non-Western ones, have unjustifiably stymied empirical interest in how differentiation does or does not shape practices in non-Western settings. The world, of course, also continuously produces new potential cases as it is changing, and field theory has much to contribute to making sense of the ways in which it is changing. A growing body of work is analyzing

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transnational fields, for example. This work can make an important contribution by helping to overcome the division between an emphasis on stable nation-states on the one hand and chaotic global flows on the other hand. Consider one example: There are some excellent papers on transnational religion using a field perspective (MacKinnon, Trzebiatowska, and Brittain 2011; Petzke 2016); but in the context of contemporary transformations of organized religion across the globe, this can only begin to highlight the potential for work that would ask about how different actors with which organizational features and structures position themselves vis-à-vis each other and vis-à-vis political fields on various scales. If there is room for substantive contributions in specific areas, there is also room for conceptual development. I have suggested that we can use studies of different and new fields to develop a more systematic language for how fields are different from one another. We can then try to explain why a field has certain features in a certain context; we can also ask about outcomes associated with different kinds of fields. I have noted that scholars are inquiring into the relationships between different fields. I have also suggested that we can examine how fields relate to patterns that are not fields in the narrow differentiation-theoretical sense, such as interactions, organizations, or cultures. When we examine the relationship between fields or between fields and other patterns, we can learn from work in science and technology studies. We can ask in more depth and detail about the sociomaterial practices and devices that help link different patterns and translate between them.

notes 1. See McCall (1992) and McNay (1999) for an analysis of the association between field formation, and possibly field analysis, and the public/private division as analyzed in the feminist tradition. Field analysis tends to start from professional relationships in implicit distinction from private ones, creating difficulties for the analysis of the role of gender in fields. 2. See Campos-Castilo and Hitlin (2012) on imagined copresence. 3. In this article, Latour is right to polemicize against metaphors of whole and part (Latour et al. 2012). But his text presents us with a choice between the notion of the individual as the unit of social analysis and his particular theoretical proposals and concepts, when a strong notion of the individual as unit of analysis has been abandoned by all relational approaches in the social sciences, including network theory, field theory, and systems theory. 4. In contrast to authors in the institutional logics tradition who also discuss diversity within fields and do so describing their work as a departure from classic neoinstitutionalist

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work (Lounsbury 2001, 2008; Thornton and Ocasio 1999; Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012), these stakes, for Bourdieu, do not derive from logics outside the field but are generated internally to the field. 5. See Krause (2013).

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Poststructuralism Today claire laurier decoteau

As early as 1987, Anthony Giddens had already declared poststructuralism “dead” (195). He characterized poststructuralism as a failed philosophical revolution, which “proved incapable of handling the very issues . . . [it] brought to the fore” (221). And yet, I will argue that poststructuralism has proven important for radicalizing social theory in recent years and that it should continue to be a source of inspiration for sociologists. Therefore, this chapter seeks to clear up some misconceptions about poststructuralism that have obscured its widespread use by sociologists, provide an overview of some of the contributions and implications of poststructuralist thought, and make a case for the ways in which it might be helpful to sociologists seeking to transcend disciplinary antinomies or push past disciplinary barriers. Poststructuralism is not a coherent tradition; it has no disciplinary home and brings together an array of theorists who did not necessarily label their own work “poststructuralist.” Nonetheless, the label unites a few key French intellectuals writing predominantly in the 1960s and 1970s, who instigated an epistemic rupture with theoretical paradigms dominant in France in the postwar era. It sought to enable both radical politics and epistemological revolt. In addition, there are certain theoretical coherences that bind these thinkers together. It has been relatively common, in both American and British sociology, to conflate postmodernism1 and poststructuralism. There are many who decry such a move, for both political and intellectual reasons. Simon Choat (2010, 13), for example, suggests that because postmodernism first was popularized in architecture, it was associated with a certain kind of consumerist aesthetic. Choat’s (2010, 30) point here is that such a conflation is typical of

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poststructuralism’s critics, who read it as an epistemological movement that served, in the last instance, to justify more conservative politics by obscuring Marxism or worse, endorsing a kind of bourgeois liberalism. For Judith Butler, the conflation represents an intellectual laziness: “Is the effort to colonize and domesticate these theories under the sign of the same, to group them synthetically and masterfully under a single rubric, a simple refusal to grant the specificity of these positions, an excuse not to read, and not to read closely?” (Butler 1995, 37). And yet, there are others who represent postmodernism as a broad cultural shift that accompanied the collapse of Fordist capitalism and that spanned the fields of art, architecture, literature, and cultural theory. For these theorists, poststructuralism is a very particular theoretical movement that took place in the 1960s and 1970s in France. Poststructuralism served as both a sign and instigator of a shift in consciousness that accompanied global changes in economics (deindustrialization) and politics (the civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and anticolonialism movements). In other words, postmodernism encompasses poststructuralism (see, e.g., Best and Kellner 1991; Mirchandani 2005). Others have suggested that starkly segregating postmodernism from poststructuralism serves to overly reify poststructuralism as a coherent movement: “It obscures a great deal of the complexity and contradiction—the diversity and discontinuities—among the various thinkers that appear within it” (Bevir, Hargis, and Rushing 2007, 10). While fully recognizing the difficulties in drawing boundaries around poststructuralism, I do think the moniker unites several thinkers—because of the similarities in their intellectual training and interests and because of the ruptures they provoke with other dominant theoretical trends. Therefore, in my usage, poststructuralism describes a very specific intellectual movement and its legacy in social theorizing, whereas postmodernism designates a broader cultural, aesthetic, and political shift that occurred in the same period when poststructuralism was gaining ground. In what follows, I provide a history of the birth of poststructuralism and the ruptures it instigated with midtwentieth-century French thinking (and in particular, its relationship to structuralism and vanguard Marxism). I then outline some of the coherences that bind poststructuralism together as a loose intellectual movement. I move on to provide examples of some of the most innovative theoretical contributions made by key poststructuralists and their potential allure for sociologists. I do not cover all poststructuralist thinkers or interventions. The initial instigators of poststructuralism are Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. (Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard are arguably part of this first generation, but

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I will not be covering their work in this chapter.) I then suggest that there is a second generation of poststructuralists who emerge over time, as poststructuralism moves out of its French birthplace. For this second generation, I will cover the theories of Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, and Slavoj Žižek. Theorists who could be considered poststructuralist but who are not covered in this essay include Ernesto Laclau, Gayatri Spivak, Drucilla Cornell, Richard Rorty, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous. The public birth of poststructuralism was initiated by Jacques Derrida in 1966, when at a conference on structuralism at the Johns Hopkins University he delivered a paper entitled “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” that challenged the philosophical assumptions on which structuralism was based. Leading figures of structuralism were in attendance (including Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan).2 Poststructuralism borrows from structuralism: a challenge to the sovereignty of the subject, a focus on symbolic systems, an emphasis on historical contingency, and the idea that relations between terms in any system are more important than their relationship to some exteriorized signified. And yet, poststructuralist thinkers also sought to move beyond some of the weaknesses in structuralist thought. Structuralism is also not a coherent school or doctrine, but it usually incorporates the following thinkers: Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude LéviStrauss, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. Lévi-Strauss introduced de Saussure’s work to France setting out four basic operations of structuralist methodology: (1) a shift from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena to their unconscious infrastructures; (2) terms are not independent entities, and the basis of analysis is thus, the relations between terms; (3) the concept of the system; and (4) the discovery of general laws via either deduction or induction (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 33). The focus was on the ways in which systems of difference both constrain and enable subjects’ actions, as such it was often interpreted as antihumanist. Structuralism also inaugurated a shift from phenomenology’s approach to the body, to a focus on symbolic systems—coupled with an emphasis on synchronic as opposed to diachronic analyses. Simon Choat (2010, 13; emphasis in original) suggests that poststructuralism “takes on structuralism in both senses of the phrase—it inherits and combats structuralism.” For example, in “Structure, Sign, and Play,” published in Writing and Difference, Derrida (1978) takes seriously LéviStrauss’s attempts to decenter the relationship between nature and culture, but he suggests that Lévi-Strauss nonetheless remained nostalgic about abandoning idealism and a search for origins. Lévi-Strauss begins his work,

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Derrida suggests, with the “factum of the incest prohibition” and so even though Lévi-Strauss wishes to highlight the play between nature and culture, he finds that play erased by its situatedness within the construct of the incest taboo—it cannot escape this centering. In addition, Derrida detects a Rousseauistic desire for a community untouched by the dangers of Western logic in Lévi-Strauss’s account of the Nambikwara culture of South Africa: “the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them” (Derrida 1978, 287). When Lévi-Strauss seeks to disrupt the nature/culture binary, Derrida finds him reinscribing it through an unconscious nostalgia for primary origins. Poststructuralism sought to challenge the ahistoricism of structuralism (in its privileging of synchronic over diachronic analysis). In fact, this is somewhat ironic, as Attridge, Bennington, and Young (1987, 2) point out, given the fact that poststructuralism is often critiqued for being ahistorical, but structuralism rarely is. Poststructuralism is often described as a mode of thought that challenges the depth/surface models structuralism relied upon (i.e., seeking out a set of coherent general laws that lie underneath and therefore explain surface expressions) (Choat 2010; Steinmetz 2004, 384– 85). And yet, this is perhaps an oversimplification (or too broad a generalization). For Deleuze and Guattari (1983), the “body without organs” serves as an underlying Real; for Butler (1990), the prohibitive discourses that inscribe binary logic into gender systems are deep logics which are difficult to change despite gaps that emerge through their reiteration; and for Foucault (1982), discursive formations underlie and exercise causal force over particular articulations of truth in different historical eras. Although poststructuralists do embrace immanence and challenge all transcendent and teleological accounts of history, it is a common sociological misreading to assume that poststructuralism eschews “unobservable structures or causal entities” (Steinmetz 2004, 392). In addition to a rupture from (and yet grounding in) structuralism, poststructuralism is also inspired by a rejection of vanguardist as well as Hegelian Marxism but not a wholesale rejection of Marxism or materiality (which is often how it gets misrepresented). In the 1940s and 1950s in France, Henri Lefebvre, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were responsible for popularizing a humanist, Hegelian Marxism in France. In addition, the French Communist Party (PCF) had played a key role in wartime resistance, but its leadership was Stalinist and supportive of France’s colonial projects, making communist intellectuals ambivalent about the PCF. Poststructuralists seek to move beyond the idealism, teleology, and economic determinism characteristic of Hegelian Marxism, and they also distance them-

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selves from certain conservative tendencies of the PCF; however, they do engage directly with both Marx’s own writings and those of Louis Althusser. Althusser taught Foucault and was a close friend of Derrida. Althusser was the link between structuralism and poststructuralism and between French and international Marxism (Choat 2010, 17). Poststructuralists share with Althusser a rejection of Hegelian teleology and eschatology, that is, a dismissal of the view of history as a necessary progression of stages toward a predetermined end; a critique of idealist ontology that insists on a unifying principle (like Reason), which brings order to the world; and an attempt to explode the division between idealism and materiality. Unlike Althusser, however, poststructuralists also reject dialectical thinking (moving toward a concept of différance which I describe below); challenge the notion that class struggle has primacy over other sites of resistance; agree with Western Marxists that part of the attack needs to be against scienticism and economic determinism; and promote a new form of politics situated in immanence rather than transcendence. Although the early poststructuralists’ relationship to Marxism and communism is complex, they are not guilty of ignoring or failing to incorporate insights from Marx himself (Choat 2010). Derrida (1994) wrote a book on Marx later in his life. Foucault was in the PCF for three years, and his first book directly engaged in Marxist theory. In fact, Simon Choat (2010, chapter 4) argues that Foucault engaged with Marx’s theories throughout his career but without overtly citing them. And Deleuze presented himself as Marxist. Despite some differences, there are several core tenets of poststructuralist thought. First is an emphasis on the contingency of structural formations. Poststructuralists hold that there is no linear or determined pattern to historical development. We can only understand structures or systems of meaning by situating them historically and culturally. A second core premise is the focus on the coconstitutive nature of knowledge and power. Foucault’s (1982) work on discursive formations underlying historically situated epistemes is the perfect example of this tenet. In addition, for poststructuralists, meaning is always relative (language and culture become essential tools of social analysis). Structuralism often relied upon hierarchically arranged binary constructions to explain social phenomena. Poststructuralism rejects these hierarchies and deconstructs knowledge systems that attempt to secure singular meanings. Poststructuralism attempts to decentralize power through a shift from an emphasis on binaries/dialects to a conceptualization of multiplicities and “play.” A final core theme is to shift away from thinking about “agency” as the starting point for analyzing the subject—in fact, poststructuralists generally hold that there is no essential or natural basis to

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our identities and subjectivities. Poststructuralists, then, are often labeled antihumanists, but the focus, in this work, is less on erasing the subject or its possibilities for resistance but rather, shifting the attention to its constitutiveness and the various closures and exclusions upon which the construction and foundation of subjects rests. “The critique of the subject is not a negation or repudiation of the subject, but, rather, a way of interrogating its construction as a pregiven or foundationalist premise” (Butler 1995, 42). In the rest of this essay, I summarize some of the core interventions by key poststructuralist scholars that help us move past common misreadings of poststructuralism. I also seek to show the ways in which these theories have either already proven to be important to sociological thinking or should be taken up to deal with persistent disciplinary limitations. From Derrida, I explain the importance of différance and the supplement. From Foucault, I explore his genealogical approach to history as well as his rearticulation of power as decentered and productive. From Deleuze, I explain his concepts of assemblage, desiring machines and lines of flight. I then move to more contemporary work and explore Bhabha’s theory of hybridity and third space, Butler’s interventions on subjectivity, and Žižek’s rethinking of ideology via his use of Lacan’s objet petit a. I end the essay by offering some final thoughts on poststructuralism’s usefulness to sociologists.

the early poststructuralists Derrida on Play and Supplementarity Jacques Derrida’s work is important because it sets out the methodological approach of deconstruction, which could be helpful to sociologists seeking to contend with binary difference in new ways. Deconstruction is a mode of criticism that seeks to unravel a text or logic from within by revealing its internal inconsistencies and contradictions. Derrida’s deconstruction challenges the notion that existence is structured in hierarchical binaries with a centering logic that holds them in place. Instead of simply accepting binary oppositions or even attempting to overturn them, Derrida forces us to shift our attention to the enunciations and interpretations that enact difference. Instead of simply analyzing black/white race relations, for example, we can understand, with Derrida’s help, how these relations are constituted and situated as dependent upon one another due to the centering forces of particular systems of meaning and knowledge. Différance has two meanings, derived from its root verb, différer: to defer (to put off until later, in regard to time) and to differ (to be other or discern-

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able, which implies spacing and otherness). Différance therefore produces differences in both time and space. Derrida develops the notion, building upon yet moving beyond de Saussure’s system of differences, where meaning is always relational. With the concept of différance, Derrida means to upset both the reliance upon presence and a priori origins implied in structuralism (which he refers to as a metaphysics of presence), as well as the linearity and teleology of time (history oriented toward a future). In de Saussure’s structural linguistics (see, e.g., de Saussure 2008 [1983]), Derrida claims there is a transcendental signified: a presumption that the inflexible relationship between the signifier and the signified relies upon a concept that exists prior to language, a concept “signified in and of itself ” (Derrida 1981, 19). The “transcendental signified” is the idea that there is a Being, a presence, a consciousness before there is the ability to express it—a concept of transcendence, independent of language. Différance disrupts the very notion of presence (Derrida 1978, 292). And in fact, différance is a recognition that presence always relies upon absence, that knowledge depends on nonknowledge, and that language could not exist without silences. Therefore, these systems and their others can never be analyzed separately from each other—this is the play of différance. In his later work, where he engages directly with Marx’s eschatology, Derrida (1994) discusses the importance of hauntology, an antipositivist, antiempiricist ontology that suggests that the past and future are important to trace, alongside the present, in any analysis of events.3 One of the most important applications of his concept of différance comes in his analysis of structures and our ability to deconstruct their centers. Within any structure, there is a center that determines and limits the possibilities of play within it. And yet—and this is a paradox upon which much of Derrida’s work relies—the center is both part of the structure and outside of it. “Thus it has always been thought that the center . . . constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality . . . the center is, paradoxically within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality . . . the totality has its center elsewhere . . . the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science—is contradictorily coherent” (Derrida 1978, 279; emphases in original). Therefore, any system of knowledge seeks to quell the anxiety that comes from this central lack—a lack of a center, or a lack of a transcendental signified. The uncovering of this lack or the desire to disavow this lack is the goal of deconstruction. For example, in Derrida’s work on law, he suggests that courts must exercise a certain freedom in applying the law (judges thus reinvent the law in applying it anew to

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different empirical cases), and yet the judge must act according to the law as its primary adjudicator. In this paradox, a space of impossibility is opened up between freedom and rule. “In short, for a decision to be just and responsible, it must, in its proper moment if there is one, be both regulated and without regulation: it must conserve the law and also destroy it or suspend it enough to reinvent it in each case” (Derrida 1992, 23). Such an attempt to decenter is important to sociology because it allows us to deconstruct the very terms upon which knowledge systems rely and to unveil the ways in which they both regulate the terms of the debate and escape them. It could be a very useful tool for the analysis of power, domination, and structural constraint. Although binary oppositions are endemic to Western logos, the act of deconstruction seeks to call their necessary relationship and hierarchy into question. This is the work of supplementarity (something that is both missing as well as additional)—an attempt to deconstruct the establishment of meaning, as it relies on binaristic relations. A focus on the supplement of any binary coupling is to focus on the play of presence/absence, interiority/ exteriority. Deconstruction seeks to make sense of the ways in which binary relations both constitute and are the effect of interpretation. And yet, every attempt to break free from binaries reinscribes them. “[T]he hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself ” (Derrida 1981, 40–41). Queer theorists have found this concept helpful, in particular, for deconstructing the heterosexual/homosexual binary that pervades sociological theorizing about sexuality. “We cannot assert ourselves to be entirely outside heterosexuality, nor entirely inside, because each of these terms achieves it meaning in relation to the other. What we can do, queer theory suggests, is negotiate these limits. We can think about the how of these boundaries—not merely the fact that they exist, but also how they are created, regulated contested” (Namaste 1994, 224).

Michel Foucault on History and Power Michel Foucault’s work may be helpful to historical sociologists and sociologists of knowledge seeking to understand the establishment of particular regimes of truth—both within discursive formations and institutional settings. Perhaps less utilized by sociologists, Foucault’s theories of power are also groundbreaking, asking us to analyze the decentered nodes from which power (in both coercive and revolutionary forms) emanates and invites us to understand its productive capacities. His theories are often misinterpreted as privileging discursive power over materiality, and yet his theories consis-

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tently force us to understand the linkages between discourses, institutions, and bodies. Foucault’s work is often distinguished by two phases: his archaeological and then genealogical periods. In 1969, he published Archaeology of Knowledge (1982), a methodological treatise that formulates this historical approach, which he deployed in The History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things. The archaeologist searches for the rules that undergird any discursive formation or episteme in order to uncover the conceptual possibilities and therefore boundaries of knowledge in a particular epoch. With archaeology, Foucault seeks to understand the discursive conditions that are necessary to construct truth. The shift from archaeology to genealogy is often characterized (by Foucault’s critics) as a shift from structuralism to poststructuralism, at least in part inspired by Foucault’s engagement with Nietzsche (Choat 2010, 15, 105). Discipline and Punish (1975) marks the transition to Foucault’s genealogical period. Genealogy is about uncovering subjugated knowledges, which could include content that is buried by formal systems or knowledges that have been disqualified because dominant knowledge systems deem them below the level of acceptable scienticity or erudition (Foucault 2003, 7). “Genealogies are . . . antisciences. . . . They are about the insurrection of knowledge . . . an insurrection against the centralizing power-effects that are bound up with the institutionalization and workings of any scientific discourse organized in a society such as ours. . . . Genealogy has to fight the power-effects characteristic of any discourse that is regarded as scientific” (Foucault 2003, 9). Although these two methodologies are often described as categorizing distinct approaches to knowledge, in his 1975–1976 lectures (Society Must Be Defended), Foucault argues instead that they are complementary. Once archaeology uncovers “local discursivities,” then genealogy comes in to analyze the “desubjugated knowledges that have been released from them” (Foucault 2003, 10–11). This attempt to unlock the conditions by which thought and reason are established in a particular historical era or within a particular discipline and to question what forms of thought were erased or obscured via these formal systems has been particularly important to sociological theorists analyzing medical and/or knowledge systems. The work of Jackie Orr (2006), for example, on the construction and history of “panic” is a particularly good example of such efforts. Foucault’s real contribution to sociological thinking is his rearticulation of power. Taking issue with a more Marxist construction of power as emanating solely from particular dialectically positioned sites (the state, capital,

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class struggle), Foucault seeks to understand power as decentralized, embodied, and productive. For Foucault, the subject is constituted by historically situated discourses promoted by the disciplines of science, medicine, law, and so forth. Discourses are, in this way, productive of subjectivity, and thus power is not simply prohibitive. For Foucault, power does not emanate from the state, it is not simply instantiated in law, and it cannot be explained as group domination. These are particular “terminal points” of power, or places where power congeals, but power itself is “nominalistic.” Power is “the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable” (Foucault 1990 [1978], 93). Therefore, although there are moments in Foucault where the subject positions insisted upon by modern institutions (docile bodies, self-entrepreneurial subjects) seem functionalist, there are always possibilities for disruption and disintegration as subjects equally employ particular “technologies of the self ” to negotiate an ever-changing symbolic system. Despite the fact that Foucault is often criticized for ignoring resistance, his theory of power offers an interesting and important provocation for sociologists: “where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (Foucault 1990 [1978], 95). In other words, resistance does not somehow transcend the systems of which it is a part, nor is it somehow presumed to be a natural or inherent possession. Here is an example of the plane of immanence upon which much poststructuralist logic depends—a characteristic of its philosophy that frustrates many readers. But such an approach to power should compel sociologists because it is so fully social— why should we presume personal power (agency) as an inherent human trait or suggest that it is facilitated by outside sources (as in Bourdieu’s [1977] theory of doxic rifts), when both approaches let us off the hook theoretically? If we presume resistance to be somehow outside of the social, then we do not have contend with the complex and often contradictory collaborations and fissures that actually transpire in both the everyday world and in periods of more sustained unrest. “Are there no great radical ruptures . . . ? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shifts about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves. . . . And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes revolution possible . . .” (Foucault 1990 [1978], 96). Another concept of Foucault’s that I find particularly useful is his theory of biopower, which, he argues, was ushered in by the modern state and its

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creation of the category of the population. As knowledge about biological processes advanced, so did the techniques for controlling famine and disease as well as the state’s apparatuses for counting and being accountable to its population, new technologies of control were constructed to discipline and regulate the bodies of subjects: discipline, which produces docile bodies and is individualizing; and biopolitics, which is regulatory in nature and is concerned with the population as a whole. Thus, modern power is both individualizing and massifying (Foucault 1997, 243). The modern state also entails a shift in sovereignty and the concern for the life of the species or nation-state. “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault 1990 [1978], 138; emphases original). Death is biopower’s limit, and it is often racism that intervenes to turn biopower into thanatopower: “racism justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population” (Foucault 2003, 258). Foucault’s intervention on the shift from biopolitics to thanatopolitics is an important one for sociologists seeking to make sense of contemporary racial politics, exclusionary nationalism, and securitization. Foucault’s theories on biopower and governance have been central in certain fields of medical sociology and the sociology of knowledge. For example, Nikolas Rose (2007) traces a shift in late modernity where health is no longer a stable concept but must be the focus of tremendous selfentrepreneurialism, such that life itself is the product of (self-)optimization. Similarly, Adele Clarke and her colleagues (2010) note a shift from medicalization to biomedicalization where technoscience reconstitutes medicine in such a way that the management of illness becomes the individual’s moral responsibility, achieved through self-surveillance. Foucault’s (2007, 2008) later work on neoliberalism has also inspired a whole host of sociological theories about neoliberal subjectivities and the forms of expertise required to manage the self under late modernity (Rose 1990, 1999). A final point about Foucault is to illustrate the ways in which he always attended to the relationship between discursivity and materiality. Although poststructuralism is often critiqued and/or misread as prioritizing textuality over materiality (thus supposedly making it irrelevant to sociologists), Foucault’s theories are an excellent example of the ways in which poststructuralism attends to the constitutive relationship between materiality and ideation. For Foucault, discourses produce subjects, in part through the embodiment of norms, leading subjects to engage in particular technologies of the self that reinscribe power on a daily basis. In addition, Foucault sug-

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gested an intimate relationship between discourses and institutions, for example, in his theory of the panopticon. The panopticon is a generalizable model of disciplinary power, where those under control believe that they are under constant surveillance and thereby engage in efforts to discipline their own behavior. “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 1995 [1977], 201). Foucault’s theories should prove useful to any sociologist seeking to intertwine material and discursive scales of analysis. Deleuze’s work is similarly useful, though much less known to sociologists.

Deleuze on Materiality and Resistance Gilles Deleuze was also inspired by Nietzsche’s work, was a lifelong friend of Foucault, and was the poststructuralist who was most avowedly Marxist (but not Hegelian or dialectical). In addition, Deleuze was one of the first intellectuals to write conceptually of the May 1968 events. It is the work he copublished with Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (1983) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987) on which I will focus in this chapter. These are extremely difficult texts, largely because of their level of abstraction, so I will review a few core concepts and their importance for both contributing to our understanding of poststructuralism and possibly for use by sociologists. Deleuze and Guattari’s (D & G’s) notion of the “body without organs” is a plane of immanence, a kind of primordial soup out of which different flows and social formations arise. They use the metaphor of an egg before the organs have become organized. “This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 40). This is also a field of potentiality where flows of desire are produced. The processes by which social formations are forged is referred to as stratification: the fundamental process of organization of bodies and populations, the process through which dispersed molecules are brought together into molar structures. This takes place through coding or territorializing the body without organs. Instead of structures being imposed from without or always already existing (as in Lacan), D & G suggest that consolidation happens through the intensification and consolidation of what is already there (somewhat similar to Foucault’s theory of power), which illustrates their dedication to immanence. These consolidations are referred to as “assemblages.” There are both machinic and enunciative assemblages (material and discursive). In addition, some assemblages are phylogenetic (cutting across

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cultures or ages) and others are ontogenetic (internal to a specific era or culture) (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 407). D & G utilize the term machine to talk about the mechanisms by which desire is produced through a series of flows and interruptions of those flows. As Buchanan (1997, 88) explains, desire is intransitive—it’s not a desire for something. There needs to be something that mediates between objects and bodies—these are the desiring machines—they make it possible to desire for. D & G utilize the term machine to talk about the mechanisms by which flows and strata are selected or combined into larger concentrations or social formations. They want to break down any epistemological distinction between the production of subjectivity and the production of material objects (thus challenging the objective/subjective dichotomy). This is done through concepts like machine, assemblage, and the rearticulation of desire. Like Freud, D & G suggest that there is a kind of psychic energy out of which particular desires are forged, but unlike (and in direct critique of ) Freud, D & G conceptualize desire as production which is not necessarily aimed solely at particular objects. For D & G (1983), Freud “reterritorialized” desire within the confines of the oedipal subject and bourgeois family. D & G also do not distinguish analytically between the social production of objects and the libidinal productions that drive machines. It is capitalism and the oedipalization of desire that instantiates the objective/subjective division as well as the division between the political economy and the libidinal economy. In addition to desiring machines, there are social machines that operate on the socius. Social life takes three forms of socius (in its history); it is the site where productions are recorded and inscribed but in such a way that it seems to be the source of the production—it is a fetish (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 10). The primary function of the socius is to code desire and to create fear of decoded flows (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 141). The earth is the social body for the tribe (in the primitive territorial machine); the body of the despot is the social body for the empire (in the barbarian despotic machine) and the body of capital under capitalism (in the civilized capitalist machine). Capitalism is the first form of socius that is based on decoding and deterritorialized flows, so it substitutes coded flows for axiomatics of abstract quantities in the form of money, for example (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 139). Capitalism constantly deterritorializes and reterritorializes itself—it is constantly tending toward the limit of the bodies without organs (complete freedom of decoded flows) but always pulls itself back from that brink. The Oedipus complex is the last outpost of signification and overcoding that keeps flows of desire safely within the family, making people desire their own oppression. Capitalism’s decoded flows are thus reterritorialized on family members in

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the oedipal triangle. Under neoliberalism, capitalism is constantly territorializing and reterritorializing—think, for example, of outsourcing, financialization, but also bailouts and fixing capital in particular sites of investment. The point, for D & G, is to push capitalism to its deterritorialized limits— to the body without organs, where there is a free play of desire. Repression serves to stabilize and reterritorialize, so the revolutionary move is to create the conditions for deterritorialization without reterritorialization—these are lines of flight. Judith Butler (1987, 206) critiques Deleuze for representing desire as an “ahistorical absolute,” and D & G have also been critiqued for offering a theory of resistance that celebrates the schizophrenic subject, somehow outside of the bourgeois oedipal unit without suggesting how it is we get there (Choat 2010, 147). Certainly, it is difficult to see the relevance of such abstract theories to sociological inquiry, and yet, D & G have influenced sociology in two primary ways. First is that their conceptualization of “assemblage” and their insistence that nonhuman objects be given analytic and causal power were picked up and reconfigured by Bruno Latour and have a prominent legacy in actor-network theory. Second, D & G’s work is of primary importance to the emerging field of affect studies, which has its primary home in the humanities but makes appearances in sociology, most notably by Patricia Clough (2007). Affect can be defined as that which exceeds structures and the commodification of emotion; it is a type of ontological emergence that allows us to analyze relations and other interstices between bounded structures, discourses, and subjects (Massumi 2002). For Clough (2007) and her students, affect is a bodily response that exceeds consciousness but is not presocial. The study of affect allows for the analysis of syntheses between the body and mind, reason and passion (Clough 2007). D & G may be inviting to sociologists invested in overcoming the antinomies of objectivism/subjectivism, materiality/discursivity, and immanence/ transcendence. William Bogard (1998) makes an interesting case for sociologists to pay heed to D & G’s theories, as a means of revolutionizing our approach to meaning and structure. He explains that the stratification we witness on a daily basis is but a molar effect of a more primary segmentation of desire that happens at the level of our bodies, so the problem of the social and the self is a corporeal one. With Bogard, I would argue that the focus on desire, and the refusal to domesticate it and circumscribe it within the realm of the bedroom, home, or subject is laudatory. Sociologists would do well to incorporate desire into their theoretical concerns.

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the second generation of poststructuralism After its initial emergence out of the contingencies of French intellectual thought in the 1960s and 1970s, poststructuralism traveled out of France and inspired theorists working in the 1990s through the present, in the fields of postcolonial theory, queer theory, and cultural studies. As such, its political and epistemological agenda was expanded and pushed into new terrain, used to make sense of and deconstruct the logics of colonialism, racism, heteronormativity, and the late neoliberal era.

Homi K. Bhabha on Colonial Ambivalence, Hybridity, and Third Space Combining a Derridean framework of symbolic analysis with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Homi K. Bhabha engages in cultural analysis of British colonialism in India. In his most famous book, The Location of Culture, Bhabha (1994) argues that colonial translation necessarily enacts an alienating displacement of meaning, which gives rise to a “Third Space” of interpretation, which creates the conditions for a symbolic struggle over meaning between the colonizer and the colonized. In an interesting interview, Bhabha explains that “Third Space” challenges the sublation of the dialectic (i.e., the transcendental move that “lifts up” the two contradictory movements into a higher unity). Instead of transcendence, Bhabha seeks to open up “the supplementary or interstitial ‘conditionality’ . . . of dialectical contradiction” (Bhabha 1995, 82). He wants to be able to explore, with this concept, the effects of the dialectic that are not contained with it. Bhabha’s work is particularly relevant to sociologists because he is one of the only poststructuralists who brings race (and colonialism) into his analysis of difference and binary oppositions. In many ways, Bhabha’s work is a nice application (via historical analysis) of Derrida’s theories. In Bhabha’s work, cultures can be analyzed as “complex intersections of multiple places, historical temporalities, and subject positions” (Bhabha 1995, 80). Bhabha analyzes colonial discourse as fundamentally ambivalent. One of the most powerful discursive strategies Bhabha (1994, 86) explores is that of “mimicry,” which is replete with colonial desire for “a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” The strategic objective of mimicry is to camouflage colonial power and therefore maintain these important margins of difference. However, it is possible to unveil mimicry in the making. At this important “site of interdiction” (Bhabha 1994, 89), the authority inherent in mimicry is unmasked. “Mimicry repeats rather than re-presents”

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(Bhabha 1994, 87–88; emphases in original), but the repetition is metonymic and threatens to destabilize colonial subjectivity. As such, mimicry can act as more of a “menace” than a “resemblance” (Bhabha 1994, 86), more of a rupture than a consolidation. “[It] is a mode of contradictory utterance that ambivalently reinscribes across differential power relations, both colonizer and colonized” (Bhabha 1994, 95). When the colonized repeat, in this metonymically menacing way, they hybridize colonial identity and inscription. “Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory effects” (Bhabha 1994, 112). And in so doing, the power of colonial representation is subverted, its authority disavowed, and its rules of recognition transformed (Bhabha 1994, 113–14). Differing cultures—hybrid cultures— are the effect of colonial discrimination, but in their new articulation, they undermine the value and rules of colonial representation. “The display of hybridity—its peculiar ‘replication’—terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery” (Bhabha 1994, 115; emphasis in original). Bhabha’s discussion of the stereotype is another interesting example of the role of ambivalence in colonial discourse. In the stereotype, the colonial other is signified as essentially other and yet fully recognizable. Colonial discourse fixes the colonized (through essentialism) and yet is compelled to repeat the stereotype in a way that implies instability. For Bhabha, the stereotype cannot be debunked by unveiling its ideological nature or falseness. “In order to understand the productivity of colonial power it is crucial to construct its regime of truth, not to subject its representations to a normalizing judgment. Only then does it become possible to understand the productive ambivalence of the object of colonial discourse—that ‘otherness’ which is at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity” (Bhabha 1994, 67). Within the apparatus of colonial power, the discourses of sexuality and race relate in a process of functional overdetermination (they have structural affinity); therefore, the analysis of colonialism requires both poststructuralism and psychoanalysis in order to understand that it is both a regime of knowledge and pleasure.4 So, Bhabha then turns Freud’s account of the role of the fetish in sexual identity formation into an account of racial identity formation. Here, the colonial subject (the colonizer) wants to believe in the wholeness and purity of whiteness—the “positivity of whiteness which is at once colour and no colour. In the act of disavowal and fixation the colonial subject is returned to the narcissism of the Imaginary and its identification of an ideal ego that is white and whole” (Bhabha 1994, 76). And yet this narcissism and imagi-

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nary identification with the wholeness and originality of whiteness contains within it an essential disavowal of the recognition of difference, which accounts for both the hostile nature of the racial stereotype and the compulsion to repeat it—to constantly cover up the lack. “The fetish or stereotype gives access to an ‘identity’ which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it” (Bhabha 1994, 75). Bhabha’s point, then, is that the colonizers cannot recognize racial/ cultural difference because the whole scaffolding of their subjectivity would come tumbling down—that is the real threat that the colonial subject embodies (and not just represents). Psychoanalysis is important for poststructuralists and for the second generation of poststructuralists perhaps more than the first. I will explain below how it becomes an important tool for feminists attempting to understand the intractable and yet consistently changing nature of gender. But it is also important because it shows that simply rejecting binaries in an attempt to valorize difference is not a successful theoretical or political project because it ignores the role of desire in processes of both othering and identity formation. As Patricia Clough (1992, 550) explains, “Recognizing unconscious processes of desire then, is to struggle against domination without the fantasms of a unified authorial subject identity or the easy retreat behind borders of sexual, racial, ethnic and class differences.” Bhabha’s work illustrates this point nicely. Bhabha’s analyses have been critiqued by sociologists for failing to account for the effects of global capitalism (Dirlik 1997) and have only rarely made their way into sociological analysis (Decoteau 2013; Steinmetz 2007); however, the field of postcolonial sociology, which more broadly draws on the insights of Bhabha and his legacy, has begun to emerge as a new subfield of global and transnational sociology (Bhambra 2007; Go 2013; volume 24 of Political Power and Social Theory 2013).

Judith Butler on Subjectivity and Agency In poststructuralism, identities are not functional to a homeostatic system; they are not predetermined a priori by some natural carving up of the ontological realm, and yet certain core formations are enduring if not determined. Subject positions are produced (by social forces) and then made to seem natural through processes like reification. The tension between an effort to explain the intractability of, for example, binary gender difference, while simultaneously insisting on the discursive nature of processes of sub-

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jectivation and their historical contingency has stimulated debate and critique of poststructuralist theories of subjectivity. A core basis for much of the poststructuralist theorizing of subjectivity is Jacques Lacan’s Symbolic Order. For Lacan, any conceptualization of a pre-Symbolic sense of self is pure fantasy. Lacanian psychoanalysis allows feminists (and Butler in particular) to argue that there is “no doer behind the deed”—we are always constituted in and through our actions, but we are born into a structured system that predates and influences us. The subject comes into being through the Symbolic Order; however, there is a placeholder for the self that will be constituted,5 and one fantasizes about an essential presymbolic self (in part because the symbolic order is so terrifying and fragmentary). In addition, psychoanalysis allows for processes of identification to be reiterative. Identity formation is reiterative because the gestalt with which we identify is illusory, which forces us to repeat the process of identification again and again. “Identifications are never fully and finally made; they are incessantly reconstituted and, as such, are subject to the volatile logic of iterability” (Butler 1993, 105). For Butler, gender and sex are indistinguishable. Prohibitive discourses (like compulsory heterosexuality and the incest taboo) create a bifurcated category of sex/gender, such that sex is misrecognized as the natural cause of gender, when both are discursive effects (Butler 1990). The project of much of Butler’s early work on gender (especially in Gender Trouble) is to demonstrate that the heterosexual matrix is a literalizing fiction, and once it is unveiled as such, through a parodic performance of gender, the hegemonic binary will be revealed as false. The point for Butler (1993, 113) is to consistently stage identity incoherence. Butler explains that as a child, she was plagued by the feeling like she was always mimicking heterosexual culture— that she was, as a lesbian, an imitation. But then she came to realize that all gender is a kind of “impersonation and approximation. If this is true, it seems, there is no original or primary gender that drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself. . . . In other words, heterosexuality is always in the process of imitating and approximating its own phantasmatic idealization of itself—and failing. Precisely because it is bound to fail, and yet endeavors to succeed, the project of heterosexual identity is propelled into an endless repetition of itself ” (Butler 2008, 172; emphases in original). As such, she theorizes gender as a corporeal performance—it does not have ontological status apart from the acts that constitute it as a reality. The false sense of coherence and causality is a constructed illusion of interior

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essence, constituted through public and social discourse. “If gender is drag, and if it is an imitation that regularly produces the ideal it attempts to approximate, then gender is a performance that produces the illusion of an inner sex or essence of psychic gender core; it produces on the skin, through the gesture, the move, the gait (that array of corporeal theatrics understood as gender presentation), the illusion of an inner depth . . .” (Butler 2008, 177; emphasis in original). In a really interesting interview of Gayle Rubin by Judith Butler (Rubin 1994), the two of them discuss the use of psychoanalysis in poststructuralist thought. Rubin (1994, 68) explains that “One of the nifty things about psychoanalytic approaches is that they explain both change and intractability.” In addition, Rubin suggests that a Lacanian frame allows for something to be both socially constructed and very real and material. And yet, they both recognize that a reliance on Lacan can be somewhat totalizing and offer little room for resistance, something Butler has been critiqued for again and again. For example, Nancy Fraser (1997, 215; emphasis in original) asks of Butler: “Why, above all, use an antihumanist rhetoric when one’s aim is to explain how agency is possible given the constitution of subjects by power regimes? For this purpose, might not such rhetoric be counterproductive?” This is a point that Butler discusses explicitly in a volume coedited by Seyla Benhabib, Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser (1995). Butler argues that theories of subjective agency often begin with the presumption of agency, before accounting for the constitution of the subject. In other words, agency is presumed to be an inherent quality of the subject (even if this is not the theorist’s intention), especially in sociological accounts wherein authors seek to explain the relationship between structures and agents. Every subject, for Butler, is constituted through a series of differentiations that distinguish it from its constitutive outside, so the point of analysis should be to focus on these boundaries and their consistent reconstitutions. The subject can only retain the illusion of autonomy if she disavows the break out of which she was constituted. “My suggestion is that agency belongs to a way of thinking about persons as instrumental actors who confront an eternal political field. But if we agree that politics and power exist already that the level at which the subject and its agency are articulated and made possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire into its construction” (Butler 1995, 46; emphasis in original). Therefore, instead of presuming agency from the start, we should begin by questioning “the conditions of its possibility” and ask what the possibilities for mobilization are within the existing configurations of discourse and power (Butler 1995, 46–

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47). Agency, therefore, is immanent to power, not external to it (Butler 1993, 15). Instead of presupposing agency, we should seek to explain it. I believe this is an intervention sociologists should take seriously, as it fundamentally challenges certain formulations of reflexivity as innate (Archer 2000, 2003, 2010).

Slavoj Žižek and the Specter of Ideology Slavoj Žižek’s work is perhaps closer to the heart of sociological concern because he reformulates a theory of ideology, drawing on the work of Marx, Althusser, and Lacan. And in fact, his rearticulation allows sociologists to avoid the pitfalls of labeling people ‘falsely conscious,’ but also avoids the functionalist tinges of Althusser’s “Ideological State Apparatuses.” Žižek’s work is also a fun read, as he provides example upon example, largely taken from popular text and film, of the theories he elaborates. For Žižek, the misrecognition at the heart of ideology and identity formation is not a misrecognition of reality but of an illusion. He challenges us to cease thinking about ideology as something we can escape because it distorts our ability to see the truth. Instead, he urges us to understand that we recognize the falseness of ideology, and yet, we continue to act as if it were true. In his most iconic work on ideology, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek (1989) uses the example of money. We understand that money is simply paper and cheap metal, which changes in value over time and is subject to wear and tear, and yet we act as if money consisted of “an immutable substance” (Žižek 1989, 18). Therefore, individuals know very well what reality is and that there are constructed illusions to hide this reality, but we choose to act on the illusion anyway, so we misrecognize the illusion itself—this is the basis of ideology. “[T]he formula of cynicism is no longer the classic Marxian ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’; it is ‘they know very well what they are doing, yet they are doing it” (Žižek 1994, 8). Freud interprets the following dream: a father has just lost his son and has been sitting over the corpse in mourning. He decides to take a nap and asks another man to sit over the child’s body in his place. As the father is sleeping, he dreams that his son is before him, in flames, screaming, “Daddy, why don’t you see that I am burning?” When the father wakes up, he finds that the watchman had fallen asleep and that the child’s arm had slipped into the candle and caught on fire. Freud’s interpretation of this dream is that when there is a bothering stimulus from the real world, the dreamer will quickly fabricate a dream in order to explain the outside stimulus (like in-

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corporating the alarm clock into the dream). However, Lacan interprets this differently and much more to Žižek’s satisfaction. For Lacan, through this dream, the father has accessed his Real desire. He has glimpsed the guilt or shame or whatever desire or fear he harbors most deeply in his unconscious that affects his subjectivity the most. The dream is giving him access to this deepest and most important Real—this is so frightening and disturbing for an individual that he wakes up. Therefore, it is “reality” itself, the world of the everyday, that is, an escape from the Real. Reality is the fantasy construction we create in order to avoid and misrecognize the Real we only have access to in our dreams. This fantasy construction is ideology for Žižek.6 “The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from out reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic real kernel” (Žižek 1989, 45). In fact, Žižek proposes that it is when we think we are stepping outside of the “falseness” or “distortion” of ideology that we find ourselves most enslaved by it (Žižek 1989, 6). What really matters is not the supposed veracity of any ideology. In fact, its content is less important than the “subject position implied by its own process of enunciation” (Žižek 1989, 8). So, how do we critique ideology if we are always already trapped inside of it? By leaving the place that allows us to maintain a distance from it empty (Žižek 1989, 17). And such a formulation relies upon Žižek’s reading of Lacan’s objet petit a—an important concept that lies at the heart of a lot of poststructuralist thinking. For Lacan, we are always already subjects of a Symbolic system, which provides us with language and meaning, but we are always Other to that system and thus experience it as fragmenting. In order to avoid feelings of fragmentation and the anxiety that accompanies it, we identify with an Imaginary gestalt—an image of wholeness and totality. This occurs in the mirror stage of development when the child sees him-/herself in the mirror, and his/her mirror image appears coherent and complete, whereas the child experiences his/her own body as uncoordinated and lacking (Lacan 1977). In order to avoid feeling fragmented, the child identifies with the imaginary image in the mirror, repressing the knowledge of his/her fragmentation in the process. However, just as for Freud, Lacanian repression is never complete, and a leftover, or reminder of the fragmentation always remains. This is Lacan’s objet petit a—the rem(a)inder that haunts the subject with recognition of fragmentation, and which therefore propels identity formation. Žižek explain that the objet petit a is the leftover that sutures over our fundamental constitutive lack. When we “bump into” specters of this lack, we are

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reminded of our fragmentary nature, which propels us to identify again with the imaginary totalization. “[E]very attempt at symbolization-totalization comes afterwards: it is an attempt to suture an original cleft—an attempt which is, in the last resort, by definition doomed to failure” (Žižek, 1989, 6). Žižek suggests that structures operate in the same way. Combining Lacan and Marx, Žižek argues that capitalism itself is propelled by its own constitutive lack, the contradiction between the forces and relations of production. Because of its inherent malfunction, its surplus, capitalism will continue to revolutionize itself. This is a more psychoanalytic reading of the crisis tendencies inherent in capitalist production (the crisis of overaccumulation and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall), which requires the state to step in regulate the excesses produced by the system. “[I]t is this very immanent limit, this ‘internal contradiction,’ which drives capitalism into permanent development . . . incessant development is the only way for it to . . . come to terms with its own fundamental, constitutive imbalance, ‘contradiction.’ Far from constricting, its limit is thus the very impetus for its development” (Žižek 1989, 52).

conclusion There are several reasons why poststructuralism has attracted so much critique and controversy. Judith Butler, for example, was awarded the first prize in a “Bad Writing Competition” in 1998 (in Denis Dutton’s journal Philosophy and Literature) for writing “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles.”7 Poststructuralism is often critiqued for and completely ignored simply because of the philosophical nature of its content. However, sociology has long been influenced by philosophical traditions of all kinds (perhaps most notably phenomenology and pragmatism), and poststructuralism should hardly be discounted simply because of its complexity. Another critique that may be more pertinent to sociologists is the claim that because of its currency in literary studies and insistence on the power of discourse that it is useless for empirical application and analysis. However, there are a number of empirical projects that have been influenced by poststructuralist thought. Critics also often take aim at the supposed prioritization of symbolic structures over material ones, and yet, from Foucault and Deleuze through Butler and Žižek there has been a consistent emphasis in poststructuralist theorizing on articulating the intricate relationship and even coconstitution of material and immaterial forces. Poststructuralism has also been labeled ahistorical, largely by Marx-

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ists, because of its rejection of dialectical teleology. And yet, as Attridge et al. (1987, 7) point out: “poststructuralism facilitates the examination of differentiated and customarily marginalized histories—of phallogocentrism, of the fantasmic structures of colonialism, and of fascism”; therefore, it not only offers new lenses into the analysis of history, but it also seeks to unleash the “subjugated” knowledges therein. Another critique has been aimed at poststructuralism’s questioning of identity politics. Again, Judith Butler is perhaps the biggest target of these critiques as she has quite emphatically challenged gender theorists and activists to rethink the basis of their interventions and mobilizations by challenging them to move away from using and relying upon reified categories which presume natural distinctions. This critique comes from a misunderstanding of her argument. Butler and other poststructuralists are not attempting to deny the reality of racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, and so on. Rather, they are attempting to explain their simultaneous persistence and contingency. Without a complex understanding of this core tension, Butler would argue, how can our movements for radical change be successful? In the end, then, I think that poststructuralism may be a resource to sociologists attempting to break free from core disciplinary antinomies— between objectivity and subjectivity and between idealism and materialism. But it also offers different ways of thinking through relations of power and agency. The insistence on immanence (on not relying on externalities to the social) certainly serves as a provocation to sociologists, in thinking about crutches that have perhaps become so commonplace they cease to be questioned—for example, a reliance on inherent agency, on dialectics in order to explain struggle, or on external forces that disrupt homologies or systems of consent. In addition, poststructuralism poses a critique of positivism. As Ben Agger (1991, 114) suggests, “deconstruction can help reveal the values and interests suppressed far beneath the surface of science.” The more difficult questions to address, in terms of poststructuralism’s usefulness to sociologists, is how to engage with these theories in order to explain the empirical world. And yet, innovative sociological work in the fields of queer theory (Ferguson 2003; Namaste 1994; Seidman 1996;), postcolonial sociology (Decoteau 2013; Go 2013), science studies (Clarke et al. 2010; Decoteau 2008; Orr 2006; Rose 2007), cultural sociology (Hall 1996), and political sociology (Steinmetz 2007) has already been doing this important work, and its relevance to our field is hardly diminishing. Unlike Giddens, and writing almost thirty years later, I do not think we need to bury poststructuralism just yet.

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notes 1. The term postmodern was used as early as the 1940s and 1950s to describe new forms emerging in painting, literature, and architecture. Jenck’s influential book, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, popularized the term (Mirchandani 2005, 89). The term was first made popular in the English-speaking world by the English translation of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (Mirchandani 2005, 87). 2. Because several of Derrida’s first poststructuralist papers (including a 1959 paper and this 1966 paper) actually predate core structuralist works, several scholars have questioned whether or not poststructuralism is indeed historically subsequent to structuralism (Attridge et al. 1987, 8, 10). 3. See Decoteau (2008) for an empirical application of Derrida’s theory of hauntology. 4. Bhabha critiques Edward Said’s (1979, 72) use of Foucault in Orientalism because Said argues that the discursive formation of Orientalism is unified and instrumentalist and therefore affects a “closure and coherence to the unconscious pole of colonial discourse” and leaves the notion of the colonial subject unproblematized. This serves to negate the real ways in which power is both productive and prohibitive, pleasureful and phobic. 5. Such a formulation was also influential for Althusser’s theory of interpellation, which is employed by both Butler and Žižek. 6. Žižek explains this on pages 12–14 and 44–47 in Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). 7. Homi Bhabha was awarded second prize.

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Dutton Denis. 1998. “The Bad Writing Contest.” Philosophy and Literature. Retrieved January 28, 2015, http://denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm. Ferguson, Roderick. 2003. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. 1982. Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Vintage. ———. 1990 [1978]. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. New York: Vintage. ———. 1995 [1977]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1997. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. New York: Picador. ———. 2003. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975. New York: Picador. ———. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. New York: Picador. ———. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. New York: Routledge. Giddens, Anthony. 1987. “Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and the Production of Culture.” In Social Theory Today, edited by Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner, 195– 223. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Go, Julian. 2013. “For a Postcolonial Sociology.” Theory and Society 42 (1): 25–55. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “Who Needs Identity?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 1–17. London: Sage. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Écrits, a Selection. New York: Norton. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mirchandani, Rekha. 2005. “Postmodernism and Sociology: From the Epistemological to the Empirical.” Sociological Theory 23 (1): 86–115. Namaste, Ki. 1994. “The Politics of Inside/Out: Queer Theory, Poststructuralism, and a Sociological Approach to Sexuality.” Sociological Theory 12 (2): 220–31. Orr, Jackie. 2006. Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rose, Nikolas. 1990. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. New York: Routledge. ———. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the TwentyFirst Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rubin, Gayle, with Judith Butler. 1994. “Sexual Traffic: An Interview by Judith Butler of Gayle Rubin.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6 (2–3): 62–99. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Seidman, Steven, ed. 1996. Queer Theory Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Steinmetz, George. 2004. “Odious Comparisons: Incommensurability, the Case Study, and ‘Small N’s’ in Sociology.” Sociological Theory 22 (3): 371–400. ———. 2007. The Devil’s Handwriting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1973. Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed. New York: Pearson. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso. ———. 1994. “The Spectre of Ideology.” In Mapping Ideology, 1–33. London: Verso.

chapter ten

Networks and Network Theory: Possible Directions for Unification emily erikson Social network research has expanded and developed in a period in which Robert Merton’s project of middle-range theory was widely embraced and overarching theoretical frameworks have been treated with significant suspicion. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that network analysis has an atheoretical character to it. Theory means many things to many people (Abend 2008; Merton 1945). The strength of network research has been in developing middle-range theories that propose mechanisms to explain a wide range of empirical phenomenon, such as the strength of weak ties, small worlds, and complex contagions. Theory, however, is also used to refer to a strong, overarching theoretical framework, worldview, or paradigm that anchors explanations within a common framework and coordinates research by suggesting central problems in the field and areas of potential advancement. It is the absence of this second type of theory that has been noted as specific to social network research (Burt 1980; Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994; Granovetter 1979; Mitchell 1979; Rogers 1987). It is at least possible that this absence has also in fact been covertly seen as a strength. I believe that the absence of a general theoretical framework in social network research is a misperception. Although methodological innovation has driven a sizable portion of network research, social network analysis has been influenced and indeed driven by grand theoretical visions. Strong evidence of this lies in the career of Harrison White, who is both a theorist in the grand sense and one of the primary engines behind the growth of social networks, having produced both a large number of influential works as well as a large number of influential students. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine social network analysis without sig-

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nificant theoretical underpinnings because we cannot directly observe networks or relations. Just as in physics, where objects such as quarks have to be conceptualized then measured based on theoretical (i.e., as yet unknown but hypothesized) attributes, social network analysis reveals relations that can only be inferred through interactions or actors’ reports about their feelings toward others. Given that we lack a faculty to perceive relations directly, it seems impossible that social networks would not rely heavily on strong underlying theoretical assumptions because we can only observe the object of inquiry, networks of relations, with the assistance of theoretical constructs. I argue here, and have argued elsewhere (Erikson 2013) that social network analysis does not lack theory but instead suffers from multiple theoretical perspectives, that is, overarching theoretical frameworks, that have not been sufficiently acknowledged. Specifically, I argue that most research in social network analysis falls into one of two camps that offer coherent and grounded theoretical frameworks. I use the terms formalism and relationalism to refer to these camps, building off the work of Georg Simmel in the first case and Mustafa Emirbayer, Margaret Somers, and Harrison White in the second. These frameworks help researchers build measurement strategies, facilitate communication within the field by keying on shared assumptions, and focus efforts along the kind of directed trajectories that make collective progress in a field possible.1 One of the difficulties for network analysis, and part of why it has been perceived as atheoretical, is that these two perspectives are lumped together—despite the fact that they are based on nearly opposite grounding assumptions that lead to different measurement strategies, different modes of explanation, different causal models, and suggest different research trajectories. I believe that if we could be more explicit about the underlying theories employed in network analysis, the theories will both be more apparent and have a better chance at doing the kind of work they are supposed to do in scientific endeavors. Further, in the case of social networks research, which has combined these two streams for some decades, identifying the tensions between and within the two perspectives should indicate theoretically privileged sites where empirical research can make significant contributions to the progress of the field. In what follows, I outline these two approaches and their points of divergence. I then outline how internal developments within each line of inquiry have led to new divisions that mirror each other, producing possible points of reconciliation. Researchers within each approach have taken positions on duality that differ within subfield but converge across subfields.

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Where many relationalists and formalists agree that duality is something to be overcome, there are also relationists and formalists who rely on duality as an analytical and conceptual tool to deal for linking a plurality of social objects. The similarity between the new points of contention within formalism and relationalism indicate areas in which the streams of thought may be reconnected, potentially to produce a new theoretical whole, but at least to ignite a fruitful dialogue. In either case, discussion of these areas should advance our understanding of the effect of social networks on society as well as individuals.

relationalism The idea of a relational sociology appears to be picking up steam. In 2010, Nick Crossley’s (2010) Towards a Relational Sociology was published. A special issue of Politics & Society was devoted to relationalism in market settings in 2012 (Block 2012), and a two volume set, Conceptualizing Relational Sociology and Applying Relational Sociology, was released in 2013 (Powell and Dépelteau 2013; Dépelteau and Powell 2013). Significant discussions of the importance of relationalism have also been advanced in recent reappraisals of the career of Charles Tilly (Koller 2010). It is difficult to pin down relationalism as it has many strong-willed, independent, and articulate adherents, who have similar but unique visions, and it is perhaps better characterized as a movement rather than a theory—or even a theoretical framework. Nevertheless, there are consistencies that occur across the various strands that I will argue are most easily understood as rooted in the work of the pragmatists, although European phenomenology, Ernst Cassirer, Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, Charles Taylor, Thomas Kuhn, and Gabriel Tarde are also invoked as touchstones by the authors and contributors to the relationalist movement. The central rallying point for relationalists has been a critique of substantialism, which employs fixed and discrete entities in its descriptions of the social world and explanations of social outcomes. Relationalists instead emphasize the dynamic shifting nature of all units of observation in any social context, including the mutability of individuals and social groups over the course of a lifetime or historical epoch. And indeed, it is through relations (which may be considered interactions or transactions) that those objects of analysis that we recognize as units (be they people, organizations, or nations) take on recognizable properties. For relationalists, the causal push that transforms or changes these units is provided by the relations between

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units. Thus, the causal action does not derive from the units themselves or their internal state. For example, an appreciation of contemporary art does not derive from a uniquely cultivated sensibility but instead from a person’s position with respect to class strata and the field of cultural production. And generally, intentions and desires are not seen as fixed or solo attributes, such as Smith’s bartering instinct or the motivations that propel the nasty, brutish, and short lives of Hobbesian actors, but as dynamic and contingent on a history of interactions and their location within a larger field or network of interactions. Thus, relationalists “reject the notion that one can posit discrete pregiven units such as the individual or society as ultimate starting points of sociological research” (Emirbayer 1997, 287) and embrace the idea that entities are shaped by their relational context. In White’s (2008, 1) language, in which identities should be understood as what we might otherwise refer to as units, entities, or essences, “identities spring up out of efforts at control in turbulent contexts.” The extent to which these identities then take on a separate life as an emergent property or the extent to which they retain their dependence on or indeed are fundamentally constituted by their context is something that has not been consistently worked out in relationalism. I will return to this point when considering the intersection between relationalism and formalism. Because individuals are conceived as articulating themselves and their actions within a constant chaotic flux, there is a strong emphasis on contingency, intersubjectivity, creative engagement, and problem solving as developed by John Dewey and Charles Peirce. There is also a strong rejection of dualism as a problematic theoretical construct. The issue with dualism seems to follow from the objection to a Cartesian or Kantian essentialization of the individual as separate from and prior to their environment. For example, Cartesian or Kantian philosophy begins with the assumption of consciousness (i.e., I think, therefore I am) and then considers how that consciousness perceives its environment. This conceptual setup is a red flag for relationalists, who instead begin with the idea that consciousness and selfconsciousness emerge from and are therefore subsequent to the experience of a social environment à la Mead (1967 [1934], 186–91). Thus, many relationalists have focused on dissolving the mind/body person/environment distinction that has been part of the conceptual legacy of Descartes, Kant, and also Talcott Parsons. For example, Margaret Somers (1994, 606) has argued that identity scholars should focus on the social constitution of identity, that is, “who we are,” through external narratives, and Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische (1998, 962) have argued that agency is a “temporally

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embedded process of social engagement.” However, the way in which dualism is problematized by different relationalists varies and has a complex and interesting relationship with what occurs in formalism. I will return to these related problems after outlining the idea of formalism.

formalism Formalism is, I would argue, a particularly influential reading of Georg Simmel. It is not the only possible reading, but it is certainly a reasonable reading that focuses on his earlier writings, rather than the vitalism that infused later work (Simmel 2010). As part and parcel of the turn from grand theory, we often overlook the philosophical roots of classic sociological texts, so it is less well known than it might be that Simmel was a neo-Kantian philosopher. Indeed, his doctoral dissertation was titled “The Nature of Matter according to Kant’s Physical Monadology” (Wolff 1950, xviii). In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant lays out a singularly influential answer to the question how is nature possible. Simmel (1972, 40) explicitly refers to this in his essay “How Is Society Possible?” Kant had argued that there are certain essential aspects of reason, such as space, time, and causality, that are necessary to the act of experiencing the world that lies external to the perceiver, that is, the natural world. Following Kant’s logic, because these faculties of reason are necessary to experience of the world, they must be prior to the world. Therefore, they should be considered distinct from the natural world, that is, different in essential quality. As these faculties of reason do not depend on any empirical context but are logically prior to any observation of the physical world (according to Kant), one may also infer that they are necessarily transcendent (by definition) as well as immutable and effectively universal. Simmel’s early project for sociology was to find the social equivalent of the categories of reason that made experience of the natural world possible. In this sense, Simmel is suggesting that sociology should be the study of a priori synthetic social forms, just as Kant was (strongly) suggesting that philosophy should be the study of a priori synthetic categories of reason, or faculties of perception. As an example, it is possible to see the relationship between the Kantian faculties and the social forms in Simmel’s identification and description of the triad as a social form. According to Simmel (1950, 145), “The triad as such seems to me to result in three kinds of typical group formations. All of them are impossible if there are only two elements; and, on the other hand, if there are more than three, they are either equally

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impossible or only expand in quantity but do not change their formal type.” The triad is a structuring principle that makes certain forms of social organization possible, including “transition, conciliation, and abandonment of absolute contrast” (Simmel 1950, 145) as well as the bargaining and strategy of the tertius gaudens (Simmel 1950, 154–62). The formal properties of the triad, specifically its quantitative dimension, are necessary to and make possible the social experience of conciliation, transition, and arbitration. These phenomena depend on the form itself, thus following Kant it is natural to conclude that the social form is a priori and fixed relative to its empirical content, which is social experience or, you might say, the experience of society. Formalism then can be understood as network research that seeks to identify local configurations of relations, relational patterns, or the arithmetics of social relations that exist outside of but impact social experience (Rytina and Morgan 1982). Excellent and compelling examples include Peter Blau’s (1977) work outlining the many outcomes that follow from considering the purely quantitative aspects of social structure, such as the size and number of different subpopulations and their effect on intergroup association, Steve Rytina and David Morgan’s (1982) demonstration of the mathematical necessity of the imbalance between the rate of minority/majority interaction versus majority/minority interaction, and Scott Feld’s (1981) theorization of how the existence of focal points of activity, such as clubs or shared interests, affects personal network density and network clustering.

divergences between relationalism and formalism I have been told on numerous occasions that relationalism engenders soft network analysis of a kind that tends to draw from the conceptual content of network theory but uses the language of networks in a purely metaphorical sense; formalism lends itself to measurement, algorithms, and quantitative analysis. This, however, is just not the case. It is more than possible to frame and interpret quantitative analysis of networks within a relationalist framework, as demonstrated by Harrison White, Walter Powell, or John Padgett. It is also entirely possible to conduct formalist sociology using only qualitative methods, as best exemplified by Simmel himself. Block modeling is a sophisticated mathematical method for inducing the character of an actor from their position relative to others (Doreian, Batagelj, and Ferligoj 2005; White, Boorman, and Breiger 1976). It is both quantitative and, at heart, relationalist, whereas John Levi Martin’s (2009) book on networks and network theory, Social Structures, is a largely qualitative investigation of the

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limits and potential of a formalist approach.2 The qualitative and quantitative divide is not very useful in distinguishing formalism and relationalism; however, I hope it is clear that there are very real tensions between relationalism and formalism that can be traced largely back to the tension between pragmatist and neo-Kantian philosophy. The issue central to the conflict between formalism and relationalism is Kant’s instantiation of the distinction between the ideal and material realms via the identification and charting of the synthetic a priori. Simmel embraces this distinction and indeed replicates it, whereas the pragmatists essential to relationalist thought reject the a priori and instead insist on experience as the source of knowledge (as for example found in Peirce 1991, 34–53). This is both a deep and fundamental contradiction that has fed into serious inconsistencies in at least three different areas: the definition of a tie, the relationship between culture and networks, and approaches to what has come to be known as the micro-macro divide, including the problem of agency. These inconsistencies have serious implications for the analytical and measurement strategies employed by network analysts as well as optimal research strategies.

operationalizing ties as relations ver sus interactions Social network research is based on the analysis of social ties, but social ties are a theoretical construct. We cannot directly observe social ties; we can only infer the existence of ties from those things that are observable, such as e-mails, conversations, reported attitudes, and in some cases proximity or coaffiliation. Formalism and relationalism conceptualize ties quite differently. Simmel’s social forms encompass a wide variety of social phenomenon, including competition, domination, and subordination. One can argue that Simmel understood “the stranger” as a specific social form, and the metropolis may also be understood from this perspective. Thus social forms include different relational types and are not limited to different relational patterns. They do, and perhaps most influentially for social network research, also include local patterns of relations, most specifically the dyad and the triad and a general emphasis on the characteristics derived from different quantities of relations (Simmel 1950, 87–180).3 Within a formalist framework, therefore, it makes sense to conceive of patterns of ties (i.e., networks) as social forms. This has several implications, but here, I address the one most relevant to defining what constitutes a tie. Simmel argues that social forms are prior to interaction, like cups of dif-

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ferent size and shape, each molds social experience into bodies (e.g., bodies of water, social bodies) that would otherwise disperse over space and evaporate or else constitute unrecognizable chaos. Indeed the social forms make society possible just as the faculties of reason make nature possible. This position strongly implies that network configurations, such as the dyad, are not interactions. For Kant, experience does not create the faculties of reason because the faculties of reason are necessary to experience. So it would follow that interactions do not create social ties or patterns of ties, because those ties and patterns are necessary to social interaction. And, social ties and interactions (i.e., social experience) must be held conceptually separate, and this is the fundamental dualism that is so central to Kantian thought. Thus interactions are better understood not as ties themselves but as clues to or indirect means of observing relationships between people. If two people are in a dyadic relationship with each other, their interactions will be structured by the properties of a dyad. The most direct means of gaining access to the relationships that ties are supposed to model would be through surveying or interviewing actors in order to elicit their beliefs regarding the relationships they are engaged in. These relationships are going to be theoretically prior to and determine patterns of interactions. Relationalists have to take quite a different tack with regard to social ties given their underlying assumptions and objections to the importation of a Kantian dualism into network or sociological research. Their starting point is that there is no such thing as a priori, fixed elements that structure social experience/interactions, and thus they deny a dualism that could separate the form of a social tie from the contents of interactions or justify the analytical extraction of an abstract concept of a tie removed from or drained of its interactive contents. Instead, relationalists either dissolve or complicate (depending on your perspective) the concept of the tie by equating them with the exchange of meaning. For example, Jan Fuhse (2009, 52) argues that social networks are “intersubjective constructs of expectations and cultural forms.” And on several occasions prominent scholars affiliated with relationalism have argued that ties are in fact meaning itself (Fuhse 2009, 62; Mische 2003, 258; Stark 2011; White 1992, 67), thereby emphasizing the importance of intersubjectivity in the construction of culture and consciousness. A position consistent with these grounding assumptions implies a different approach to the definition and measurement of ties than the formalist approach. Interactions in this case are not clues or symptoms of underlying relationships, and perhaps most importantly, they do not emerge from relationships or orientations between individuals. Instead, in this approach,

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ties should be defined as meaning-laden interactions; and relationships, that is, subjective orientations between alters, are best understood as clues, traces, or remnants of the interactions. The important step is that interactions enact relationships, although relationalists would almost certainly grant that subjects then recall or recontextualize these interactions in various ways; however, these recollections are secondary to the performance of the relationship itself. Thus, ties are most directly observed via interactions.

networks and culture The difference between the conceptions of ties in formalist and relationalist frameworks also has implications for the relationship of networks to meaning and culture. Simmel’s concept of a social form gives researchers strong theoretical grounds to radically abstract out the idea of the tie from the messy complexity and contingency of everyday social experience. Indeed, Simmel’s approach does not only justify but also gives researchers a positive reason to exclude the contents of ties from analysis. This reason has to do with Simmel’s neo-Kantianism and the concept of free will. Kant was concerned that the expansion of human knowledge would reveal the laws of nature but that the existence of the laws of nature implied that humans were also bound by these laws and thus did not experience free will. The absence of free will, however, was a problematic idea. Kant (1966 [1872]) rescued the concept of free will by positing the existence of faculties of reason that existed prior to nature (making the experience of nature possible) and thus unbound by natural laws and instead part of the perceptual apparatus that produced the laws of nature. Simmel confronted the same problem, arguably on an even more difficult level, as he was advocating for a science of society, the laws of which would certainly be seen to constrain and direct the actions of individuals. Simmel’s solution was to focus on the forms themselves and argue that the contents, that is, the meanings, emotions, values, and interactions that flowed through the forms, were the realm of free will. Individuals as Simmel (1964, 142, 149, 154) conceived them may not have been able to control the larger patterns of their lives, but they could enrich specific relations and choose from between varied forms of expression without upsetting or interfering with the formal structures of life. All of which implies that formalists certainly have theoretical license and, to the extent to which they care about the concept of individual agency, even incentive, to focus on the tie as an abstract quantity and avoid too much interpretation of the contents, meanings, or relational types—such as what is

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said in an interaction or written in an email, the emotional content of an exchange, or whether the tie is between friends, enemies, or lovers. This license has been taken to uncomfortable extremes, as for example in Donald Black’s program for a “Pure Sociology” where he imagined network research could be “entirely uncontaminated by psychology or other sciences (compare Simmel 1908/1950:21; Ward 1903). It contains no assumptions, assertions, or implications about the human mind or its contents. It completely ignores human subjectivity, the conscious and unconscious meanings and feelings people experience, including their perceptions, cognitions, and attitudes” (Black 2000, 347–48). But generally, the ability to abstract out the bare bones concept of a tie has tremendously increased the power and generalizability of findings in formalist strands of social network analysis. Network research into the diffusion of innovations often ignores the type of innovation or whether it provides a benefit to adopters (Aral and Walker 2011; Coleman, Katz, and Menzel 1971; Valente 1996). Research on the benefits of discussion networks rarely considers what kind of information is exchanged in those interactions (see Bearman and Parigi 2004, 537). Network ties are treated as equivalent (Zuckerman 2010). And when contents are considered, they are portrayed as distinct from the relations that hold them, for example, pipes that carry diverse contents (Borgatti and Lopez-Kidwell 2011; Podolny 2001), or sorted into types that encompass numerous topics, such as those subject to complex contagions (Centola and Macy 2007). Relatedly, research in a formalist vein is driven to identify the impact of forms without reference to any particular social or historical context. Simmel (1972, 28–29) states, “[i]n sociology, the object abstracted from reality may be examined in regard to laws entirely inhering in the objective nature of the elements. These laws must be sharply distinguished from any spatiotemporal realizations; they are valid whether the historical actualities enforce them once or a thousand times.” This position follows from the assumption that social forms are prior to social experience and thus transcend any specific historical moment. And many network researchers have pursued the goal of identifying universal structural forms, including hierarchy formation (Chase 1980; Martin 2009), triads (Davis 1979), and structural advantage (Burt 1982). This lack of attention to the context and context of ties has been repeatedly criticized (Brint 1992; Emirbayer 1997; Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994; Fine and Kleinman 1979; Fligstein 1996; Fuhse 2009; McLean 2007; Mische 2011), but it should really be understood as part and parcel of a theoretically grounded research program into social forms, which is concerned with investigating the effects of patterns of social ties understood as impor-

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tant in and of themselves and distinct from the contents that populate them. The great advantage of this, of course, is that any effect you identify as resulting from or associated with a pattern of tie will be generalizable across vast scope conditions. Relationalists are driven in a different direction. From the position of relationalism, contents cannot be separated out from ties, and indeed, the attempt to conceive of such a split should be understood to have its basis in a wrong-headed dualistic belief in the separation of meaning and experience. Thus, the analysts are driven to consider in detail the contents of ties such as the subject of letters, the emotional valence of exchange, or the topic of discussion. Examples of exceptional work in this vein include Ann Mische (2009) on communication and consensus formation among activists, Paul McLean (1998) on the letters of Florentine favor seekers, and David Gibson (2011) on the interactional details that produced agreement in the face of the uncertainty caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis. And in close counterpoint to formalism, as ties are not prior to interaction but are performed within through the context of social experience, they cannot be considered universal or outside of social context itself. Instead, interactions are entirely situated within different social environments, and the meaning of interactions for actors depends on the social setting, for example, a kiss on both cheeks means something quite different in Italy, New York, and Boston, as does a kiss on one check. Interactions—and ties—in this sense are deeply contingent upon specific social and historical contexts. Abstracting out from an interactional context is therefore deeply problematic. The result produces richer accounts but also reduced generalizability of research results. Networks in a relationalist universe also raise the possibility for structural analyses of cultural contexts through charting the universe of symbols—the Geertzian web of meaning (Somers 1994, 616). In either case, network analysis must be embedded in, rather than extracted from, specific circumstance.

the micro- macro question The micro-macro question is of particular importance to the practice of social network research because the study of networks has been repeatedly posed as a means by which to resolve the dilemma such an understanding of society presents (Burt 1980; Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994; Granovetter 1985). This position can mean many different things however: for example, (1) networks may provide a third means by which to explain social phenomenon, a means that does not operate at the micro- or macrolevel; (2) net-

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works are the missing link between micro- and macrolevels, as in individual behavior dynamically generates macropatterns (institutions, organizations, social structure, etc.) through network interactions and institutions, organizations, and so on, act back on individuals through patterned network interactions; (3) networks help us better understand the social regularities that we conceive of in a granular way as institutions, organizations, social structure, and so forth. These possibilities imply different positions on exactly why the micro-macro divide is considered a problem in the first place. It is worth recalling that the distinction between micro- and macrolevels was not initially a problem but instead a solution. Constructing the social as a distinct object of inquiry was part and parcel of the institutionalization and defense of the emerging field of sociology, as best represented in the work of Émile Durkheim. Simmel’s invention of the concept of social forms was certainly not meant to erode the distinction between the individual and the group. The distinction and tension between the group and the individual was essential to the way in which Simmel understood social processes. In my view, the duality between the individual and group was the primary social form for Simmel, making all social forms possible by virtue of the fact that it made society itself possible. As he states, “[t]he a priori of social life consists of the fact that it is not entirely social” (Simmel 1972, 14). Indeed, for interaction to be social, one must both recognize some other as similar enough to make communication possible but different enough that communication is necessary. Similarity is predicated on groupness and difference on individuality, thus groupness and individuality are necessary to the experience of the social. This insight permeates Simmel’s (1972) sociological writings and is particularly pronounced in “The Stranger,” “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” and “Group Expansion and the Development of Individuality.” Network analysts often implicitly accept the idea of a real (not just analytical) distinction between micro- and macrolevels of analyses when individuals are seen as constrained or enabled by their network position, as in Ronald Burt’s (1982) work on structural holes, in which he charts out the structurally advantaged positions and strategies of entrepreneurial individuals. The network is the structure, and the actors are the agents. John Levi Martin (2009) also accepts the distinction between actors and structures in his book Social Structures, which is a significant contribution to both network theory and the formalist perspective. In these cases, networks are not being used to tear down the micro-macro divide as much as to do a more precise job of explaining macrostructures and how they impact individual behavior.

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Relationalists have a more radical approach. Consistent with the attack on dualism, relationalists seek to problematize and even discard the categories of individual and group by focusing on relations and interactions. For example, Harrison White (2008, 15) writes, “my theory aims not just to sidestep the ‘structure and agency’ problem, but to build on grounds of concepts that eliminate that problem.” One way to think about this is to consider that from a relationalist perspective, individuals, organizations, and groups are all at bottom different sites of multiple intersecting social ties, thus they are not all that different from one another and need not constitute separate planes of analysis. This perspective also reduces the tension otherwise located in the structure and agency dilemma. Because all social patterns and institutions are iteratively performed through interactions, they are best understood not as external facts confronting actors (i.e., structure) but as fluid outcomes created and/or re-created under certain social circumstances. In this sense, social structure is deconstructed and made malleable. It is also true that in this framework, agency resides in the relations between things; relations and interactions create the dynamics that allow for social change, not essential quantities. However, this does not mean that individuals cannot also be sources of change because they can also be defined as loci of intersecting ties. Thus, for example, in the article “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400–1434,” John Padgett and Christopher Ansell (1993) explain the emergence of centralized state power through a combination of historical contingency, intersecting network structures, and individual canniness, that is, the creative response of Cosimo de’ Medici to the shifting social-structural terrain in which he found himself. In this narrative, both individuals and structures are agentic, further eroding the difference between structure and agency or micro- and macrolevels of analysis.

dualism as a potential point of reconnection Despite the initial importance of establishing micro- and macrolevels as distinct units of analysis, we have now proceeded to the point where there is widespread consensus that social science, and in particular sociology, needs to better understand the relationship between the two. How this problem is approached, however, depends on whether researchers conceptualize microand macrolevels as different manifestations of the same underlying social material or as distinct but linked phenomena. Such conceptualizations in turn trace back to implicit and explicit assumptions about dualism. I will argue here that views on this issue do not line up neatly across formalism and

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relationalism and that there is instead a branching on this point, particularly in relationalist strands of thought, that may in fact allow for a reconnection between the two approaches. Essentially, there are sides on both formalism and relationalism that address dualism by arguing for a fundamental unity between what we conceive as micro/macro or individual/social, but there are also researchers working in both approaches who embrace a reconfigured understanding of dualism that applies broadly to many aspects and levels of social life (such as between meso- and macrolevels of analysis, for example). Thus, both the idea of unity and the idea of pluralism may serve as bridges linking formalism and relationalism, although they are also potentially new sources of division. Kantian thought is based upon a fundamental premise of Cartesian dualism between the subject and external world. Kant’s first critique provides a compelling argument in support of this division. Simmel’s formal approach to social science incorporates the idea of dualism into the study of society.4 This new version of dualism is still split at the perceptual boundary of the individual. Social forms are the external patterns and relations that compose and structure society. These are imbued with the subjective experiences, emotions, and thoughts of the individuals. In this telling, the basic dualism of subject/environment is mapped onto the content and form of social relations. The form/content division is, however, also dependent upon, and therefore coexists, with the individual/social division. The individual/social distinction essentially creates the need and acts as the basis for the form/ content divide. The social forms are probably best understood as bridges that link the individual to the group. Indeed, it is difficult to pin Simmel down on where exactly they are constituted. Are they are perceptual tools that allow us to experience society, meaning they cognitively impose ordered patterns on the social so that we may consciously process what would otherwise be chaotic noise? Or are they regularities that arise within social interactions themselves, providing order in society (which is external to our individual minds)? At different points, he seems to take different positions. He states that “[society] too, of course, remains something purely psychological” but also that the social forms are not merely “forms of cognition” as they “reside a priori in the elements themselves, thought which they combine, in reality, into the synthesis, society” (Simmel 1972, 7, 8). This indicates that Simmel’s forms may best be understood as individual/group hybrids, combining elements of both—perhaps in oscillation with each other. This position leaves us with a divide between micro- and macrolevels of analysis in which forms, and therefore networks, map interiority onto ex-

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teriority. The perceptual dichotomy between the individual and the world that surrounds them is replaced by the individual/society dichotomy. This transposition is of course widespread in sociological work and understood through the frames of structure and agency. In the same way that the dichotomy between individual and nature is a totalizing dualism, that encompasses the universe (that and that which is not that), structure and agency may also be understood as totalizing (the individual and that which is not the individual). I am going to posit that there are really two different ways to view what Simmel is doing in this very significant move. One is to read it as a reification of a problematic dualism, which is a legacy of Cartesian and Kantian thought in Western thought, projected into the social sciences. Another way is to see is as a disruption of a strict, totalizing dichotomy by way of the introduction of forms or the social (i.e., individual, group, social form, nature). Whichever way you read it, it is necessary to acknowledge that Simmel’s thought is not monistic. At the very least, the idea of the individual is fundamentally different from the idea of the group. In social network analysis, formalist works incorporate Simmel’s dualism by separating out the contents of networks from their form and by separating out the micro- from the macrolevels of analysis. Thus, for example, Thomas Schelling (1971) did groundbreaking work in this vein when he showed that the racial preferences of individuals do not account for segregation patterns, hammering home the point that analysis has to take place at the level of individuals as well as group dynamics. Another classic work that accomplishes the same task is Mark Granovetter’s (1978) “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior,” where he demonstrated that it is not sufficient to know the individual likelihood of participation in some collective act but also necessary to understand how those preferences interact. One might also think of analytical sociology as another more current variant of the formalist perspective. Analytical sociology has embraced network analysis as a core method (along with computational modeling) and has explicitly made its goal linking macro- and microlevels of analysis (Hedström 2005, 6–9; Hedström and Bearman 2009, 9–16; Hedström and Swedberg 1998, 21–23). Network analysis is of particular value in analytical sociology exactly because of its ability to link microbehaviors to macropatterns. The interest in networks implies that social relations are important to analytical sociology; however, analytical sociology is distinct from relationalism by virtue of the strong emphasis on the individual, which is manifest in the explicit commitment to methodological or structural individualism (Hedström 2005; Manzo 2014, 18). In analytical sociology, individuals are sites of desires, beliefs, and opportunities. Those desires, beliefs, and opportuni-

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ties drive individuals to take action; these actions intermesh with others and produce diverse and sometimes surprising outcomes. The commitment to individualism puts analytical sociology at odds with relationalism on two fronts, the essential difference between micro- and macrolevels of analysis and—from a relationalist perspective—the essentialization of the individual. And indeed, there are periodic dust-ups about the too narrowly individualistic assumptions of analytical sociology (Abbott 2007; Little 2012; Manzo 2014, 18; Sampson 2011; Sawyer 2011). There are, however, two different possible interpretations of the emphasis on the individual in analytical sociology. On the one hand, an embrace of methodological individualism may be interpreted to mean that individuals must form the basis of any explanation of micro-, meso-, or macrolevel processes and that causality operates exclusively at the level of the individual. The concept of supervenience, also important in analytical sociology, provides a means for thinking this through. If something supervenes upon another, those two things are linked so that there can be no change in the first without a change in the second (McLaughlin and Bennett 2014). The supervenience relationship referred to in analytical sociology is between microand macrolevels of analysis (Hedström and Bearman 2009, 10). Thus, one may very well interpret this to mean that all changes at the macrolevel can be explained by changes in the microlevel. And indeed, pushed further, that macrolevels are just a different way of observing micropatterns, that is, a different manifestation of the same phenomenon or process. This conceptualization can then imply that macrolevels of analysis are neither distinct nor essentially different from the microlevel and do not in fact constitute a fully realized and separate social phenomenon, as evidenced by the fact that causal forces do not originate in the macrolevel (only in the microlevel). However, this interpretation is not consistently embraced in analytical sociology. Gianluca Manzo, author of Analytical Sociology: Actions and Networks, strongly rejects the idea structures can be reduce to individuals and do not have causal effects of their own. As he states, “the objection that analytical sociology is based on a ‘reductionist strategy’ according to which a ‘good explanation . . . should not make reference to meso or macro level factors’ (see Little 2012a: 3) is simply factually wrong” (Manzo 2014, 18). Instead, he argues that meso- and macrolevel properties have causal properties, are distinct from microlevel processes, and in fact constitute emergent phenomena (Manzo 2014, 19). Thus, there are at least two impulses in analytical sociology with respect to the underlying duality or monism of social life. The first interpretation of analytical sociology champions the primary importance of the individual

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and considers objects at other levels of analysis to be entirely constituted and dependent on the activities of those individuals via the concept of supervenience. This position is at bottom a monistic vision of society and social phenomena as composed of the same basic element: the individual. The second position, represented here by Manzo and which depends more heavily on the idea of emergence, embraces the idea that phenomena at different levels of analysis (such as individuals, groups, and networks) are distinct from one another as well as irreducible to constituent parts without the loss of defining features. Interestingly, there is a similar split in relationalism. Analytical sociology embraces the micro-macro divide as a fundamental aporia driving research—where the idea is to understand the connection between the two levels. Relationalists instead have made the critique of dualism central to the development of their school of thought (Emirbayer 1997; Smith 2010; Somers 1998; White 1992, 2008). What I want to suggest, however, is that there is more than one way to skin a cat. On the one hand, some relationalists reject the idea of difference in the world and instead emphasize a fundamental unity. This perspective can be represented as one in which individuals, organizations, social structure, nations, and so on, are all at base social relations. They have different configurations but are composed of the same stuff and in the end, can and should be reduced to those relations. On the other hand, other relationalists embrace the idea of multiple dualisms that give rise to emergent phenomena. In this second approach, the mind/body Cartesian dualism is decentered, but dualism itself is not done away with as much as repurposed. The first monistic approach is the tack that I understand Jan Fuhse has taken in his work on relations. For him, interactions are meaning-laden social events that combine both what we might otherwise separately think of as cultural and relational elements, which are not so much intertwined as inextricably fused in the form of expectations and interpretations of social action. This fusion allows for a conceptualization of social structure located in microlevel interactions. In his words: “In a communications theoretical account, definitions of the situation simply consist of the expectations negotiated and established in the history of communicative events. Now all of this may sound as if denying the agency of human beings and claiming that social structures (here, expectations) exist independently of us. I would frame it slightly differently . . . social structures result from this doing rather than from individual dispositions and attributes” (Fuhse 2009, 187). François Dépelteau (2013) suggests a similar approach in his description of deep relationalism. As he explains, social structure is not a valid concept for deep

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relationalists because it is a transactional object. “They do not think human beings interact with social structures because, for them, this is logically and empirically impossible. Individuals simply transact with other individuals and non-human entities” (Dépelteau 2013, 179). Thus, social structure is really only a faulty or oversimplified conceptualization of what is in the end actually many different complex relations, which include communications, perceptions, and expectations, among actors. And although one may then leap to the conclusion that deep realists then realize only the existence of individuals and relations, this would be a misrepresentation. As stated by Dépelteau (2013, 180), “there is no such things as a Subject in this approach. ‘Deep’ relational sociologists see the individuals as being social even if they do not believe in the causal power of social structures.” If all things, and particularly things we recognize as micro and macro or individual and social, are in fact made of the same elementary components—relations— then they probably should not be considered as fundamentally different. Instead, a more appropriate interpretation, from this standpoint, would be to view them as different manifestations or perceptions of the same underlying essence. This unity certainly does dismantle dualism in social thought. However, as I suggest above, it may not be the only path through which to accomplish this. Nevertheless, my suggestion depends on how one interprets the concept dualism. For these purposes, I am defining dualism as a totalizing dichotomous interpretation of the world, such as good/bad, light/dark, interior/exterior, mind/matter. This follows common definitions of dualism: see, for example, the Oxford English Dictionary’s (1993) definition—“A theory or system of thought which recognizes two independent principles.” Given this definition, one way to overcome the idea of dualism is to reduce it to a unity. There is another, however, and that is to increase it to a plurality. This is the path taken by a number of other researchers who are also affiliated with the relationalist movement. I want to acknowledge that this is my interpretation, and the issue of dualism is not explicitly addressed as a problem to be resolved in these works. However, I am happy to present my case. One of the most famous and influential pieces of theory in network research is Ronald Breiger’s (1974) essay, “The Duality of Persons and Groups.” In explaining the concept of duality, Breiger (1974, 181) states: Individuals come together (or metaphorically, “intersect” one another) within groups, which are collectivities based on the shared interests, personal affinities, or ascribed status of members who participate regularly in collective activities. At the same time, the particular patterning of an individual’s affili-

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ations (or the “intersection” of groups within the person) defines his points of reference and (at least partially) determines his individuality.

In the article, Breiger is formalizing the concept and constructing a method for the empirical investigation of the property of duality—a method that allows network analysis to map the relations between individuals and groups—rather than describing the conceptual or theoretical underpinning and applications of the concept of duality, although this occurs along the way. Relations are not conceptualized as one type of “social relation” but one of at least two types of social relations: one between individuals and one between individuals and groups (Breiger 1974, 183). And the duality is not presented as a strict separation of parts such as, for example, the ideal and material planes, but instead as inextricably related, coconstituted parts that are defined as dual, not because they are distinct but instead exactly because they are so closely related. I have noted previously that this mapping process, between two distinct, yet interrelated, entities is also at the heart of John Mohr and Harrison White’s approach to modeling the emergence of institutions (Erikson 2015). Mohr and White (2012, 490) define structural duality as “a relationship that inheres within and between two classes of social phenomena such that the structural ordering of one is constituted by and through the structural ordering of the other.” They further elaborate this later by stating that their focus is on “duality as an articulation mechanism that links one order of social structure into another order (individuals and relations, individuals and roles, individuals and groups, etc.). In this sense, duality is a relational device for linking one level of social organization into another level” (Mohr and White 2012, 490). Thus, institutions themselves are sets of links binding together other bundled properties, such as thoughts and actions, rhetorics and organizations, and narratives and social relationships, and institutional durability can be modeled by measuring the cross-patterning across these subcomponents. The relationship between this notion of dualism and a Cartesian dualism is tenuous at best. The strict separation of parts, so essential to a Kantian worldview posited on a priori faculties of mind, does not exist. The components that make up these dualisms are interconnected, coconstituted, and it is not a dichotomous frame sectioning the world according to two independent principles. Instead of the either/or, there are multiple dualisms and multiple instantiations of the dualistic relation. Individuals map onto groups, groups map onto organizations, organizations map onto markets, markets map onto economies, and so on. And it turns out that the structure

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and form of these mappings produce many of the outcomes we are interested in. Thus to summarize this section, the same split seems to be occurring in formalist and relationalist veins of social network research. On the one hand, one can take the position in either relationalism or formalism that there is a primary element, that primary element is the source of all causal relations, and other phenomenon can be either reduced to or mapped in their entirety to those primary elements. The difference between the two lies in what constitutes the primary element: individuals or relations. On the other hand, there are emergent and distinct phenomena that cannot be reduced to one another. In Chaos of the Disciplines Andrew Abbott (2010) argues that social science develops over time in a fractal pattern in which primary distinctions between fields and approaches reemerge in within the subsections of those fields and theories. This pattern occurs here, producing a nested structure in which the initial dichotomy is reembedded in four subcomponents: formal unitary, formal pluralistic, relational unitary, relational pluralistic (Abbott 2010). The new symmetry created by these further internal divisions create coherent research trajectories that can recombine elements of relationalism and formalism.

research trajectories that combine elements of relationalism and formalism Unitary Approaches The difference between individuals and relations as primary elements of social life is a deep divide resting on first premises. It therefore seems unlikely that the unified strains of formalism and relationalism will eventually combine into a larger theoretical framework that retains consistency and logical coherence. Yet both can be read to suggest an empirical focus on perceptual boundary between the individual and another—often in the form of a relationship. As noted earlier, Simmel is inconsistent as to his position on whether social forms reside in the mind as psychological faculties or in society itself. From a perspective that insists on the primacy of the individual, however, relationships should be understood via their conceptualization in the minds of the individuals. Thus, social structure is not a thing that exists outside individuals but instead consists of the set of cognitive, perceptual, and emotional responses to other actors. Similarly, relationships can be conceived of

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as subjective orientations to others. Cognitive and genetic bases of relational strategies and preferences, such as homophily, are the key to embedding the somewhat rootless idea of Simmel’s social forms solidly within an individualistic frame. Although likely to be couched in different vocabularies and employ different research methods, the actual site of research is not all that different from the deep version of relationalism, which is also interested in dissolving the boundary between the individual and the social via the idea of the relationship. The relationship is not preformed and projected outward, as if from a cognitive apparatus, but it does exist at the intersubjective level of communication between individuals. Although the causal arrow and theoretical primacy is reversed between these two perspective so that individuals cause relations in formalism and relations cause individuals in relationalism, these monistic approaches suggest that advances may be made within a relatively bounded area of inquiry around how individuals process their social relationships. Because the two schools are in conflict, this self/other boundary is also the terrain on which they may criticize each other. Thus, this focus on relationships at the individual level may produce empirical research that could help adjudicate between the two approaches. Ideally, they will at least engage with each other so that the criticism of one pushes the other forward.

Pluralistic Approaches Pluralistic formalism and relationalism are not in the same kind of fundamental tension as monistic formalism and relationalism. Assuming that a reunion or convergence in network research is desirable, the combination of the two could result in a broader theoretical trajectory drawing constituents from formalism and relationalism, while still retaining logical consistency. Differentiation and indeed emergent phenomenon are important to both perspectives. Each suggest that micro- and macrolevels of analysis should be recognized as distinct and equally valid social phenomenon, rather than as instantiations of one another. However, the terms micro and macro simply do not do justice to the plurality of social phenomena that populate the social universe in these approaches, all of which may well take on emergent properties. Thus, it is not just “the social” that is emergent but a world of institutions, kin marriage patterns, cultural systems, and individual personalities that have internal properties that send them into different trajectories which bump up against one another.

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Networks are particularly important in both versions of relationalism and formalism because they serve as mapping agents, and indeed mapping is the key to the creation of this world of difference, which is probably best understood as evolving over time. Over time, different institutions, cultures, marriage patterns, discourses, and organizations map onto one another, creating new institutions, organizational structures, discourses, dating patterns, and so forth. The mapping between different phenomena is the key to the generation of difference and the source of social dynamics, which can also be understood as emergence, institutional innovation, or even history. Thus, in these approaches, networks are both technique for understanding historical processes as well as a vehicle for the process of change. Consider, for example, that institutions and closed communities self-reproduce, but weak and random encounters (i.e., social network ties) can span across such groups, creating new links that ratchet out, proliferate, and transform their surroundings. In this case, weak ties are likely to be a privileged site through which to identify the source of the generation of difference in the social world—meaning the creation of new social phenomenon. This type of approach is well fleshed out by John Padgett and Walter Powell (2012) in their recent book, The Emergence of Organizations and Markets. As they state, “our interest is in how multiple-network topologies can shape the dynamics of emergence and evolution of organizational actors over time” (Padgett and Powell 2012, 6). One significant element that is underplayed in in Padgett and Powell is the cultural or symbolic dimension. Their examples and mechanisms tend to focus on the intersection of relational patterns and the generation of new patterns. Although the research in the volume consistently places their analysis of dynamics and relations in richly described historical sites—and indeed contextualization is essential to the process by which they identify the cross-cutting patterns that generate innovations—discourse and culture is not flagged in the same way as it is, for example, in Mohr and White’s (2008) model of institutions or Bearman’s (1993) work on networks of patronage, religious discourse, and the roots of the English Civil War. This is perhaps another area for theoretical engagement and empirical research that could be furthered within the two pluralistic streams. As Pachucki and Breiger (2010) have pointed out, the intersection between culture and networks can be central to understanding the generation of new actors and institutions via the negotiation of distinct logics. Thus, more empirical work on culture and networks is likely to provide additional insight into the emergence of distinct social phenomena.

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notes The author thanks Gianluca Manzo and Isaac Reed for their assistance and insightful comments. 1. Formalism and relationalism are not the only possible partitions of the field. There are statistical, empirical, and computational subsections (examples being the work of Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Edward Laumann and Doug McAdam, and Kathleen Carley and David Krackhardt, respectively). There is also the divide between the “new” network science, which draws inspiration and practitioners from the hard sciences and social network research based more exclusively in the sociological tradition (Watts 2004), and strictly patrolled distinction between the largely North American approach and the continental version of network research, actor-network theory. I emphasize formalism and relationalism because the roots of their divergence have important implications for social theory, whereas the other divides are largely methodological or disciplinary. 2. Martin (2011) has since moved strongly toward a relational pragmatism in his more recent book, The Explanation of Social Action. 3. Simmel talks about the quantitative dimensions of group life, which can be understood as a discussion of implications of count of individuals in a group. However, I’m going to argue that this is better understood as the count of relations that compose the group, since groupness presupposes relationality. Thus, here I speak of his investigation of the impact of the quantity of relations, rather than the quantity of individuals. 4. The importance of Kant’s dualism for Simmel is documented in his philosophical and sociological work by Donald Levine (2012, 30).

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Somers, Margaret. 1994. “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach.” Theory and Society 23 (5): 605–49. ———. 1998. “We’re No Angels: Realism, Rational Choice, and Relationality in Social Science.” American Journal of Sociology 104 (3): 722–84. Stark, David. 2011. The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Valente, Thomas W. 1996. “Social Network Thresholds in the Diffusion of Innovations.” Social Networks 18: 69–89. Watts, Duncan J. 2004. “The ‘New’ Science of Networks.” Annual Review of Sociology 30: 243–70. White, Harrison. 1992. Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2008. Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. White, H. C., S. A. Boorman, and R. L. Breiger. 1976. “Social Structure from Multiple Networks. I. Blockmodels of Roles and Positions.” American Journal of Sociology 81 (4): 730–80. Wolff, Kurt H., ed. 1950. “Introduction.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, xvii–lxiv. New York: Simon & Schuster. Zuckerman, Ezra. 2010, May. “Why Social Networks Are Overrated: Downsides of the Commensuration That Underlies Social Network Analysis.” Perspectives: Newsletter of the ASA Theory Section 3–6.

chapter eleven

Actor-Network Theory javier lezaun

four nails in the coffin In a lecture delivered in 1997 Bruno Latour identified the “things that do not work with actor-network theory.” These were four: the word actor, the word network, the word theory, and, last but not least, the deceptively unobtrusive hyphen. These four inadequacies represented, Latour argued, “four nails in the coffin” of actor-network theory (ANT) and revealed the design flaws that had been built into this “careless experiment” in empirical metaphysics (Latour 1999). Latour’s diagnosis was perceptive, for those are, if not conceptual weak points, deliberately undertheorized concepts in ANT. Yet the corpse (if indeed there was a body in that box) has proved to be livelier than the image suggested. In the last two decades, ANT has traveled far and wide, insinuating itself into a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and beyond and becoming a powerful counterpoint to mainstream understandings of the nature and purposes of social theory.1 This is in fact what Latour hoped would happen. It was already too late, he suggested in 1997, to recall ANT and fix its obvious shortcomings. “The only solution,” he argued, “is to do what Victor Frankenstein did not do, that is, not to abandon the creature to its fate but continue all the way in developing its strange potential” (Latour 1999, 24). This strange potential has been developed to such an extent that today ANT no longer appears to us as a misshapen monster to be banned to the outer reaches of the sociological canon. In fact, ANT has begun to look like a companionable sort of fellow, a recognizable intellectual project sharing

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many of the features of conventional social theorizing. This is paradoxical, or at least ironic, because ANT started as an attempt to dissolve any received notion of “the social” as a distinct domain or dimension of human action. In its origins ANT embraced, admittedly tongue in cheek, the Thatcherite slogan, “Society does not exist.” Over time, however, it has drawn the positive implication of this negative statement: if society does not exist, then we need to equip ourselves with the means to bring it into being. Social theory is one of those means. This chapter will trace the emergence of ANT as an increasingly explicit, if still resolutely unorthodox, social theory. One of the most remarkable aspects of this evolution is that ANT has not acquired the status and capacities of a social theory by means of increasing abstraction upon the particulars of a multitude of empirical case studies. Rather, ANT has found its way to social theory through a series of deep and transformative immersions into the peculiarities of different “regimes of truth” or “modes of existence”— beginning with its original journey into the nitty-gritty of scientific and technological innovation. In other words, the unfolding of ANT into a fullblown social theory has involved a multipronged effort to account for what is unique, specific, and empirically striking in different orders of action, without in the process conceiving of those orders as separate “domains” or “regions” of a broader, totalizing reality. Each of its empirical engagements has transformed ANT—or has afforded ANT an opportunity to mutate and reinvent itself, which is in keeping with a theory for which every act of translation, every displacement, involves change, distortion, and ultimately betrayal. The chapter starts by discussing the origins of ANT in the field of the social studies of science (now most often known as science studies), its use of semiotics to dissolve preexistent actor categories, and its (in)famous take on the agency of nonhuman entities—the issue that came to differentiate ANT from the sociology of scientific knowledge. The chapter will then describe the forays of ANT into the realms of economics and law. This will help us understand how ANT departs from traditional forms of sociological inquiry into markets and legal institutions as separate “fields” or “domains” of social life. More importantly, it will offer us an opportunity to observe how ANT tackles two classic questions of social theory: the problem of calculation and the foundations of normativity. I will then turn to the most deliberate formulation of ANT qua social theory, what Latour has described as a “sociology of associations” in radical antithesis to the conventional “sociology of the social.” I will conclude by discussing the growing normative import of ANT and its progressive transfor-

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mation into an explicit political theory. For ANT’s success and expansion has thrown the theory into a position that would have seem implausible when this monstrous creation took its first steps: that of making discriminating value judgments on the contours of the good society. How ANT addresses and elaborates its critical mission will determine the future evolution of this ongoing experiment.

translations Before it became ANT, the work of Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, John Law, and a handful of coreligionists belonged to a broad current of research that in the late 1970s began to transform the social study of science and technology. Reviewing the origins and sources of what is now known as science studies is beyond the scope of this chapter, but key to the emergence of this field was a thoroughly empirical, often ethnographic or microsociological approximation to the activities of scientists and engineers, particularly in situations of conflict or controversy. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (1979), a close examination of the process of fact-making at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, was one of the seminal pieces of work in this tradition and showed that conventional categories of sociological explanation and contextualization did not live up to the richness, situatedness, and technical texture displayed by science in action. By all accounts, the close scrutiny of scientists at work—whether they were engaged in routine benchwork, writing and rewriting scientific papers, arguing about the meaning of experimental results, or fighting for their budgets—shook this cohort of social scientists out of received epistemological wisdoms and led them to a radical reconceptualization of the nature of scientific objectivity. ANT would emerge from this juncture as one of the most far-reaching and successful interpretations of the entanglement of technical practices and scientific knowledge-making—what Latour would characterize as the world of technoscience (Latour 1987). Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life was originally subtitled “The Social Construction of Scientific Facts.” In the second edition of the book (1986) the adjective “social” was dropped, an omission that marked a sharp turn away from the vocabulary and taken-for-granted categories of social science. “By demonstrating its pervasive applicability,” Latour and Woolgar wrote in the revised version, “the social study of science has rendered ‘social’ devoid of any meaning” (Latour and Woolgar 1986, 281). The progressive rejection of the idiom of “social constructivism” was not exclusive to ANT, but a reso-

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lute move against social-scientific modes of explanation and a distinctive reinterpretation of the modifier “social” would become trademarks of actornetwork approaches.2 The radicalness of this shift was best captured by Michel Callon in his famous article on the “Domestication of Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay,” the classic formulation of the ANT program of the 1980s (Callon 1986; although see Callon 1975, 1981, and Callon and Latour 1981 for precursors). In his account of how a handful of marine biologists were able to introduce scallop harvesting along the coast of Brittany, Callon introduced a lexicon that did away with any a priori distinction between social and natural entities. In Callon’s retelling, the success of the researchers depended on their ability to forge an alliance with the scallops, which in turn required negotiations with a multitude of intervening and interposing entities—ocean currents, parasitic visitors, the behaviorally flexible scallop larvae, dissenting scientific colleagues, and so on. Through a series of processes of interessement and enrollment, the scientists eventually succeed in becoming the “spokespersons” for a range of other actors and interests—actors and interests that, along with the scientists themselves, were thoroughly reconfigured in the course of the controversy. The result is an account that displays “the simultaneous production of knowledge and construction of a network of relationships in which social and natural entities mutually control who they are and what they want” (Callon 1986, 59). Callon describes the displacements that the different actors undergo in the course of the controversy as translations, a term he borrows from Michel Serres (1974). The term is meant to be as vague and generic as possible— somewhere else Callon (1981, 211) defines translation as the process of “creating convergences and homologies by relating things that were previously different.” A translation, in other words, is an act of invention that operates by joining previously disparate elements. The inventive step implied by each and every act of connection is the fundamental unit of analysis for ANT, and it implies movement, distortion, and metamorphosis. Serres drew on information theory to characterize translation as an act of communication that both transmits and distorts a signal, a mediation that inevitably alters the message being communicated and thus creates a new, differential relation between sender and receiver (Serres 1980; see also Brown 2002). Callon reinterprets the concept to describe the repositioning through which a certain entity emerges as a representative or spokesperson for others. “By translation,” Callon and Latour write, “we understand all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an

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actor or force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another act or force” (Callon and Latour 1981, 279).3 Negotiation, intrigue, calculation, persuasion, and so on—these modalities of action must be understood as devoid of any anthropocentric connotation. The value of a sociology of translation, the phrase use by Callon and Latour to describe this approach before the label ANT became available, lies in its ability to multiply the range of entities that can be shown to exert an active, mediating force in the transformation of a certain state of affairs. Agency, in this particular understanding, is a property of emerging associations—associations that bind human and nonhuman entities in hybrid collectives and that acquire, under certain conditions and for a specific duration, the property of actors (see also Law 1987). To avoid the anthropocentric connotations of the term actor, Callon and Latour would often use the term actant, which they borrowed from A. J. Greimas’s theory of semiotics (Greimas 1973). An actant, in the ANT interpretation, is “[w]hatever acts or shifts actions, action itself being defined by a list of performances through trials” (Akrich and Latour 1992, 259). An actant, thus, is not a type of agent or a category of being but the result of a process of acquisition and testing of competences, the gathering and concentration of capacities that results from assembling a multitude of entities and subjecting them to a test or trial of strength. In the hands of ANT, Greimasian semiotics would become a powerful tool to dissolve the nature/society dichotomy, and indeed any a priori categorization of the actors involved in a controversy. All actors are automatically placed on the same plane of signification, and their identities can be characterized by tracing the establishment of semantic relations within a discursive or narrative context—what Greimas would define as a process of interdefinition. The potential but also the limitations of this approach became evident in Latour’s famous study of the rise of Pasteur’s microbiology in nineteenthcentury France. The Pasteurization of France (published in French in 1984 under the title Les Microbes: Guerre et Paix) takes as its empirical object a corpus of texts published in three scientific journals over a period of fifty years (1870–1919). Latour then proceeds by registering the entities mentioned in these texts and tracing the connections posited between them. The analyst, Latour (1988a, 10) writes, “has only to begin at any point, by recording what each actor says of the others. He should not try to be reasonable and to impose some pre-determined sociology on the sometimes bizarre interdefinitions offered by the writers studied. The only task of the analyst

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is to follow the transformations that the actors convened in the stories are undergoing.” The result is an account that describes how Pasteur and his laboratory become central to an emerging alliance of microbes, farmers, hygienists, and politicians. This multitude of actors eventually coalesces around the central figure of “Pasteur”—not the brilliant mind canonized in hagiographic accounts of scientific discovery but a composite actor-network that interrelates and transforms the interests of an array of human and nonhuman actors. Yet Latour’s use of a semiotic analysis to redescribe a historical process gives rise to some equivocation. It is one thing to use semiotics to redescribe the interrelation of actants in a certain discursive field—the purpose for which Greimas deploys the method of interdefinition. It is a very different matter to deploy a semiotic analysis to provide an account of the rise and power of a particular historical actor—even if the account in question purports to simply emerge from a careful tracing of textual references. Latour (1988a, 12) disavows any claim to historiographical accuracy, emphasizing that “the presentation of the documentary materials does not follow the historical path but rather the network of associations that slowly make up the Pasteurian world.” Yet by the end of the book, we are left with an account that both painstakingly records the materialization of “Pasteur” the semiotic actant and appears to provide a full description of the processes by which Pasteur, the historical actor, acquired his preeminent scientific and political position in nineteenth-century France (cf. Lynch 1997, 109–10). This conflation of semiotic deconstruction and sociohistorical reconstruction would be at the root of some of the most perceptive criticisms of early ANT (Lee and Brown 1994; Pickering 1995; Schaffer 1991; Shapin 1988). What the semiotic approach allowed ANT to do, however, and this was its crucial advantage vis-à-vis accounts rooted in traditional sociological categorizations, was to multiply the range of entities that could be shown to act in a particular scientific controversy, to expand the inventory of relevant characters in the unfolding and closure of technoscientific disputes. The hollowness of its key terms—what Latour (1999, 20) has often described as “the ridiculous poverty of the ANT vocabulary”—gave the theory the freedom to register a multitude of agencies and connections without the burden of fitting them into ready-made categories, and particularly without abiding by the dichotomies of the social-scientific canon: human versus nonhuman, natural versus social, intentional versus material, factual versus fictional, signifying versus nonsignifying. The result is an account that can, when successful, represent the stabilization of these opposites, and specifically the

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emergence of “nature” and “society” as the result of processes of purification that transmute entanglements of human and nonhuman entities into distinct and segregated domains. Describing how “society” emerges as the result of controversies and as the effect of acts of purification requires, however, that the social realm be rendered “as uncertain and disputable” as the natural world (Callon 1986). This refusal to rest on the solid ground of “society” would quickly differentiate ANT not only from the sociological mainstream but also from the closely related sociology of scientific knowledge that had emerged alongside it in the 1980s.

symmetry and nonhuman agency For proponents of a sociological analysis of the production and stabilization of scientific knowledge, ANT’s attribution of agency to “nonhuman” actors was a step back into naïve scientific realism or technical determinism. As Harry Collins and Steve Yearly argued in their critique of ANT, the problem with an account that grants “full agency” to the nonhumans involved in a controversy—the scallops in Callon’s Breton fable or the microbes in Latour’s reconstruction of the rise of “Pasteur”—is that “it must rest on routine methods of scientific research for that part of its evidence concerned with the nonhuman actants” (Collins and Yearley 1992, 317). In other words, the modalities of nonhuman agency that are revealed in ANT accounts are typically those identified and characterized by the scientists who have won the argument in question. The result, as Collins and Yearley (1992, 323) put it, is “a prosaic view of science and technology,” one without the contextual richness uncovered by sociological studies of scientific practice. The dispute between ANT and the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) boils down to different understandings of the principle of “symmetry.” For SSK, symmetry expressed a commitment to subject the different claims and counterclaims of a controversy to the same sort of causal explanation. In David Bloor’s (1973, 173) classic formulation, symmetry was “a refinement of the demand for impartiality” and required that the social scientist employ the same explanatory register to account for both sides of a dispute. “Not only must true and false beliefs be explained, but the same sort of causes must generate both classes of belief ” (Bloor 1973, 173–74). In the hands of sociologists (and historians), this precept led to a “Strong Program” of socialscientific explanation, whereby the unfolding and particularly the closure of

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a scientific controversy were shown to be due to the operation of “shared understandings,” “social mores,” or “forms of life” (e.g., Collins 1985). For ANT, “symmetry” describes a rather different methodological commitment, namely, a refusal to deploy any a priori distinction between human and nonhuman entities, or between elements pertaining to Society and those pertaining to Nature. Instead, “natures” and “societies” are understood as by-products of a more elemental form of activity: the building of networks, the circulation of quasiobjects, the execution of trials of strength. These are all deliberately generic categories of action, designed to prevent any predetermination of what sort of entity might acquire agency. Thus in their response to the challenge posed by proponents of the Strong Program, Callon and Latour emphasized their refusal to resort to social factors to account for the resolution of technoscientific controversies. “We have never been interested in giving a social explanation of anything,” they wrote, “but we want to explain society, of which the things, facts and artifacts, are major components” (Callon and Latour 1992, 348). This repudiation of sociology’s “politics of explanation” (Latour 1988b) has a complex set of sources. In spirit, the ANT position is perhaps closest to the ethnomethodological injunction not to contextualize action but to explore how action produces its own set of contexts. In the particular milieu of French sociology—and it is imperative to remember that ANT was nurtured in an engineering school that was geographically near but intellectually and institutionally outside the hallowed grounds of Parisian academic sociology—the refusal to revert to a metalanguage of social causes carried a direct challenge to the then-dominant interpretive schemes and in particular to the critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.4 In practice, the ANT and the SSK versions of “symmetry” were incompatible, but it took some time for this incompatibility to fully manifest itself. As Collins and Yearley (1992, 311) argued in their critique of ANT, “[s]ymmetry of treatment between the true and the false requires a human-centered universe.” Inversely, it is only by not treating different human camps in a controversy symmetrically that early ANT accounts could fully highlight the agency of nonhuman actors. This is a point that Simon Schaffer made in his review of The Pasteurization of France (“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour”). Schaffer argued that Latour’s hylozoism—the attribution of life and agency to every element of the universe—effectively transformed “Pasteur” (the semiotic actant), and by implication Pasteur (the historical actor), into a sort of supernatural virtuoso. “Even though Latour reckons he has pulled of the trick of decomposing ‘Pasteur’ into the constituents which made him possible (hy-

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gienists, farmers, army doctors, the Imperial regime, statisticians, and microbes), he has in fact restored the great microbiologist to the status of a miracle-worker” (Schaffer 1991, 182). A key and telling element in this elevation of “Pasteur,” in Schaffer’s view, is Latour’s systematic understatement of experimental work. In The Pasteurization of France, experiments are essentially trials of strength through which the scientist attempts to enroll nonhuman entities in his endeavors; the laboratory becomes an “Archimedean point” that allows Pasteur to shift scales and become the obligatory point of passage for a new constellation of actors and interests (see particularly Latour 1983a). There is in this and other classic ANT accounts little interest in the contingency and polysemic quality of experimental results—for instance, in the fundamental ambiguity of experimental replication identified by the sociology of scientific knowledge (Collins 1985). ANT underplayed these quandaries in order to bring the enabling, agency-generating power of experiments into sharper focus. Part of the problem with this approach was the crudeness and anthropocentric connotation of the distinction between human and nonhuman, and the flattening implied by an all-encompassing notion of “agency” (Lee and Brown 1994). ANT managed to render visible a far greater variety of actors actively participating in the unfolding of technoscientific controversies, but it did so at the expense of revealing all these actors “as being the same” (Hennion 2012, 592), that is, as displaying a rather generic, monotonous modality of agency (see Sayes [2014] for a recent taxonomy of nonhuman agencies in ANT). Perhaps the most evident example of this reductionism was the treatment of nonhuman organismic and animal agencies caught up in scientific work. Remember that the title of Callon’s classic 1986 article speaks of the “domestication” of scallops, and that Latour, when he describes the role of microbial life in Pasteur’s ascendancy, often resorts to a language of mastery and domination. Over time, however, ANT would open itself to more nuanced interpretations of the capacities of living things.5 This evolution demonstrated that there was room within the theory for more discriminating understandings of action. In fact, any minimally attentive empirical investigation will quickly show that the mode of operation of any actant—the kind of force or pressure exerted by any assemblage—is in effect sui generis, and a good ANT account should give this idiosyncratic quality enough room to manifest itself. This appreciation for the distinctiveness of specific modes of being and acting would emerge more forcefully once ANT traveled beyond its original focus on technoscience and began to explore other orders of action.6

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economics and calculation In the 1990s, studies that claimed an affiliation with ANT began to proliferate across the social sciences and beyond. This expansion of ANT was facilitated by the minimalism of its theoretical elaboration, but the ease of travel sometimes resulted in a straightforward application of its lexicon to different “domains,” without in the process subjecting the mode of inquiry to any modification, qualification or enhancement. These were, in other words, displacements without friction, translations without betrayal, and as such they offered no opportunity to refine the apparatus that had proven so fruitful in the study of scientific and technical controversies. As Andrew Barry (2013, 418) has argued, ANT is best understood as “a range of pieces of theoretical equipment, which may need to be tried out, modified or abandoned, but never simply applied. Part of the difficulty of formulating actor-network theory as a set of principles or concepts is that it should be adjusted in response to the experience of empirical research” (on the lack of “applicability” of ANT, see also Latour 2005, 141–56). Two such adjustments to the experience of empirical research stand out in the history of ANT and its evolution toward an increasingly explicit social theory: the study of markets and the engagement with law. Here, I will briefly survey some of the most significant work on markets and economics before discussing in the following section ANT’s understandings of legal procedure and of the law’s normative force. Market economics presents an enticing challenge to ANT: it posits a form of agency—human, intentional, calculative, and embodying a peculiar sort of abstract rationality—that seems deeply at odds with the kinds of hybrid actants ANT highlights in the world of technoscience. “The market,” Callon (1999, 182) notes, “is a considerable challenge for ANT because it introduces a strict separation between what circulates (goods which are inert, passive and classified as non-human) and human agents who are active and capable of making complicated decisions (producers, distributors and consumers). Moreover, on the market, whether we are referring to real markets or those of economic theory, the agents involved are characterized by very specific and highly demanding competencies: they are calculating, know and pursue their own interests, and take informed decisions.” What would a theory bent on dissolving the centrality of human agencies and the role of cognitive capacities have to say about homo economicus, the mythical beast that inhabits the confines of the market? In effect, ANT would try to chart a path that rejected the solutions provided by both mainstream economics and economic sociology. “Whereas economics maintains

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the idea of a reality of ‘pure’ calculation,” Michel Callon and Fabian Muniesa (2005, 1230) write, “the other social sciences try, by contrast, to show that real practices are infinitely more complex and leave little room for calculative practices per se.” In other words, the challenge for ANT was to tackle what economics take for granted and other social sciences reduce to the status of epiphenomenon of other orders of action: the specific sort of calculative competence that characterizes economic action in a market context. The task, as Callon and Muniesa (2005, 1229) put it, is “to address empirically the calculative character of markets without dissolving it.” Markets, in the formulation advanced by Callon and Muniesa (2005, 1229), are “collective organized devices that calculate compromises on the values of goods.” Device (dispositif) is the operative term here and is to be understood, in the Deleuzian sense, as a tangle or ensemble of heterogeneous elements that creates a particular sort of order (or sedimentation) while opening up trajectories of resistance and flight (or creativity) (Deleuze 1989). Callon (1998b) would reformulate these two dimensions as framing and overflowing, using the relationship between the two to recast the crucial notion of externality. A market, in this view, is an always ongoing effort to bracket or frame certain aspects of an object or a discrete set of dimensions of a relationship. This framing creates a space or zone of calculability by demarcating a narrow range of considerations relevant to a particular transaction. Calculation is never “pure” and is resolutely not the result of a process of “abstraction.” It is rather an operation thoroughly mediated by devices, and which often includes a complex blend of qualitative judgment and quantitative computation.7 Economic actors are best understood as agencements— another Deleuzian borrowing—that is, they express the agency that pertains to a particular arrangement of tools, equipment, humans, artifacts, algorithms, texts, and so on (Callon 2007a, 2016; see also Cochoy 2014). The notion of “market device” has been used expansively by ANT scholars of economics. It refers to “the material and discursive assemblages that intervene in the construction of markets” (Muniesa, Millo, and Callon 2007, 2) and can encompass both the kinds of equipment we often associate with the term technology—machines, stock exchanges, telecommunication infrastructures—and an endless multitude of seemingly lesser entities— from routine accounting techniques to the disposition of desks in a trading room.8 Muniesa’s (2000, 2007) study of the production of prices at the Paris Bourse electronic stock exchange, for instance, focuses on an algorithm that produces a different aggregation of prices during the last minutes of trading. In Muniesa’s (2007, 390) interpretation, prices are “material entities, always tied to concrete arrangements.” Their signifying capacity (in the meaning

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of “sign” advanced by C. S. Peirce) depends on at least three interrelated aspects: “their material shape and display, the way in which they stand as a trace of something and, finally, their fit to a series of connections to other actions” (Muniesa 2007, 390). In sum, ANT understands economic action as a material achievement— homo economicus is neither the fiction many social scientists assumed it to be (a diminished, apocryphal version of homo sociologicus), nor the disembodied expression of an innate capacity to behave in a utility-maximizing manner, as implied by neoclassic economics. Homo economicus—and by implication economic action—is rather the contingent offshoot of a gathering of instrumental agencies. What emerges from these assemblies or agencements is not calculation as a human capacity but calculativeness as an emergent quality of technomaterial arrangements.9 Within the broad range of entities that can play a constitutive role in the creation of new market realities, ANT has paid particular attention to the tools devised by economists themselves. In this interpretation, economics (understood broadly to encompass marketing, accounting, and a range of other auxiliary disciplines) does not observe or analyze an external economic reality but contributes crucially to bringing a particular economy into being (Callon 2007a; Muniesa and Callon 2007). This point has crystallized in a series of arguments about the “performativity” of economics, particularly in relation to financial markets (see the contributions in MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2007). The models, theories, and intricate mathematical formulae of contemporary finance operate as “an engine, not a camera,” to use Donald MacKenzie’s (2006) pithy phrase (see also MacKenzie and Millo 2003). Even though ANT’s approach to markets and the performative effects of economics has in principle a very broad empirical remit (see Çalıs¸kan and Callon [2009, 2010] for a reconceptualization of economic sociology in terms of the study of processes of “economization”), a disproportionate amount of the scholarship produced over the last decade has focused on financial markets and financial technologies (Lépinay 2011; Preda 2009; Riles 2011). While this might reflect a certain path dependency of the field—much of the initial work took stock exchanges and financial trading platforms as its object of study—it raises an interesting question about the elective affinities between the theoretical apparatus developed by ANT for the study of economics and the specific features and capacities of financial markets. It is as if finance expressed in the purest or most easily observable form the sort of calculativeness that ANT places at the center of its understanding of economics. Or, perhaps, financial economics demonstrate most sharply the

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performative quality of economics because in the current politico-economic regime only finance seems to possess the power to create market realities de novo. The arguments, counterarguments, clarifications, and qualifications that have accompanied the development of the performativity thesis have created a productive trading zone between ANT and mainstream economic sociology (see, for instance, Fourcade 2011). Yet they have also served to delineate the main lines of opposition between ANT and its critics. In essence, those critics argue that ANT adopts uncritically the language and assumptions of economics—an argument not too dissimilar to the charge that sociologists of scientific knowledge leveled against early ANT accounts of technoscience. As Daniel Miller (2002, 219) argues, “the theory that Callon produces is in most major respects a defence of the economists’ view of the world and a rejection of the evidence of how actual economies operate as available to anthropologists and sociologists.” The discrepancy noted by Miller might be due to differences in the choice of empirical object—perhaps if anthropologists and sociologists had spent more time exploring the sort of financial and highly technologized markets ANT has opened up for scrutiny, they would have had to readjust their “social” explanations accordingly— but the broader point of the criticism stands. The performativity thesis has placed ANT on very treacherous terrain, forcing it to walk a very fine line between providing a thorough account of what Muniesa (2014) describes as “the efficacy of economics,” and taking economic theories at their word and thus legitimize “the economists’ view of the world.” When that line is walked artfully, the result is an illuminating description of the manufactured quality of economic reality, with a degree of attention to the inner workings of markets and the role of economics in their construction that is unique in the social sciences. When the balancing act fails, however, the analysis can quickly degenerate into a convoluted acceptance of the claims of economists and economics, offering a redescription of reality that merely echoes the hubristic power of market-makers. Part of the problem here is ANT’s choice of interlocutors within the discipline of economics. In addition to the attraction to financial markets discussed above, ANT has been drawn disproportionally to impeccably orthodox economic theories and theorists and it has generally neglected economists with a more expansive definition of economic rationality or a more embedded view of markets. For instance, Callon borrows his key notion of calculativeness from transaction cost economist and Nobel-laureate Oliver E. Williamson (1993), who identified it as the “general condition” of “the

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economic approach.” There is little engagement with alternative schools of economic thought or with authors who locate the study of markets within a broader consideration of political economy or the public good. For some of the harshest critics of ANT this amounts to a de facto intellectual alliance with neoclassical economics (see in particular Bryan et al. 2012; Mirowski and Nik-Khah 2007). For more sympathetic readers, the solution is to develop a more inclusive and less “economics-centric” version of ANT, whether by expanding the definition of performativity to encompass the operation of political actors (Blok and Jensen 2011), or by incorporating the question of performativity within a larger examination of the creation, stabilization, and transformation of markets (Pellandini-Simányi 2016). In any case, these debates have pushed ANT to state more clearly its position vis-à-vis the nomos in the oikonomos. The result is ambivalent. When Callon (2016, 17) argues, for instance, that “political and moral reflection is at the heart of markets and not pushed out to their fringes,” he is allowing two parallel interpretations. On the one hand, he is claiming that the organization of markets is a thoroughly political and moral matter and that as such it requires mechanisms of public scrutiny and democratic governance. At the same time, he is also making political and moral reflection internal to the constitution of markets, one of the ingredients of their articulation, and by implication calling into question the very possibility of an external position from which the market itself—as a peculiar form of exchange and social organization—could be observed or challenged. Indeed, in much of the ANT work on economic action the extension of market logics is often treated as a fait accompli. Moreover, the market itself becomes the key engine for the production of new political realities. Markets, according to Callon (2007b, 158) “are a particularly effective apparatus for spurring the proliferation of new social identities and triggering the creation of unexpected groups that, once they exist, can demand to be heard, recognized, and received in a recomposed collective.” It should by now be obvious that ANT will always resist adopting an extraneous or “critical” position from which to adjudicate matters of concern. The question is whether it can develop a more explicit and forceful normative orientation on the basis of a thoroughly internalist (or internalized) account of action. ANT’s engagements with law and legal institutions have brought this predicament into even sharper relief.

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law and normativity If ANT’s approach to economics sought to preserve the specific quality of economic action—calculativeness—while revamping how we account for its emergence and distribution, ANT journeys into the world of law have attempted a similar feat: to produce an understanding of legality that is neither internalist—law as an autonomous “domain” or “system” ruled by legal reason or autopoietic logic—nor externalist—law as an effect or symptom of realities beyond the scope of its own form of discrimination. Law, as we will see, emerges from this interrogation as a peculiar “regime of enunciation,” liberal in the range of agencies and actor-networks it deploys, yet capable of combining and refining them to produce an idiosyncratic mode of veridiction. Looking back at the controversies that surrounded the emergence of ANT in the 1980s, this project would seem unlikely: actor-network accounts were often criticized for being deeply uninterested in value judgments and averse to any notion of ethos or normative orientation in science or elsewhere. Descriptions of science in action as an agonistic practice (see in particular Latour 1987) seemed to preclude any examination of transcendental orders of action (see Schmidgen [2013] for a more nuanced interpretation). And yet there were rumblings of a legal mode of thought in classic ANT. The emphasis on the role of inscriptions and the textual fabrication of truth in early ethnographic investigations of scientific practice (i.e., Latour and Woolgar 1979) would eventually offer an obvious point of comparison with the writing protocols and paper-pushing procedures of the law. Moreover, the key ANT notion of “translation” preserved in its French version (traduire) legal resonances that have been explored at length in the work of Michel Serres. Finally, Latour has often put forward a constitutionalist understanding of modernity and its alternatives—the Modern Constitution is how Latour characterizes the schism of natural and social orders instituted by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, a settlement predicated on a clear “separation of powers” between science and politics (Latour 1993). ANT’s most sustained empirical engagement with law and legal practice is Latour’s ethnographic study of the Litigation Section of France’s Conseil d’État (published in French in 2002 under the title La Fabrique du Droit, and in English in 2010 as The Making of Law). The choice of the Conseil as an ethnographic object was exceptional (few outsiders, if any, had ever been granted the degree of access to the institution that Latour enjoyed), and deeply consequential for how ANT would come to think about legal nor-

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mativity. As McGee (2014, 126) has noted, the Conseil is probably the most “un-French” of French legal institutions, resembling in its peculiar proceduralism common-law traditions of argumentation by precedent and adversarial litigation. In The Making of Law, Latour delves deeply into the everyday routines of the Conseil. Not only does he notice, in stereotypical actor-network fashion, how assemblages of nonhuman entities (from paper clips to the layout of the hearing chamber) shape law-in-the-making even in the most rarefied realm of administrative law. He also zeroes in on the striking fact that the ultimate unit of litigation, the file or dossier, is both physical artifact (the bundle of documents and statements that demarcate the facts under consideration) and legal category (the case or specific matter of concern over which the Conseil will adjudicate). “The judges,” writes Latour (2010a, 192), “do not reason: they grapple with a file which acts upon them, which pushes and forces them, and which makes them do something.” Latour traces the meandering progression of the file through the chambers and antechambers of the Conseil. What he observes is a peculiar sort of movement: a winding, hesitant form of reason that advances bit by bit, methodically connecting textual documents with worldly facts until it reaches a final and definitive judgment. The “passage of law” (le passage du droit) is the phrase Latour (2010a, 119) uses to describe this trajectory of infinitesimal shifts and displacements—“this slow maceration which allows the connection of states of facts with the scattered pieces of text.” The discussion of the “passage of law” leads Latour to an elaboration of the question that so preoccupies the counselors and commissioners of the Conseil (and legal scholars at large): the emergence of law’s normative force, or, in Latour’s (2010a, 143) formulation, the relation “between the transfer of force and the peculiar movement of law.” As one would expect, this question is addressed without resort to any external frame of reference— without resort, that is, either to the Nature that grounds natural law theories, or to the Social Conventions and Social Facts that provide a foundation for legal positivism. The question has to be answered in legal terms. For the Conseil may marshal in its operation a multitude of agencies, but it gathers these forces through a form of association that is unique to the institution. In other words, the law is characterized by a mode of enunciation that is distinctively and irreducibly legal. This formulation does not imply a tautology; it simply describes a form of recursiveness. As Latour (2010a, 81) puts it, “There is no stronger metalanguage to explain law than the language of law itself. Or, more precisely, law is itself its own metalanguage.”

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The feature of the legal mode of veridiction that emerges most forcefully from The Making of Law is its hesitant nature. Law’s normativity, in other words, is not grounded in the alleged solidity of its foundations but in the peculiar frailty and delicacy of the operations that achieve the formal resolution of a legal dispute. This hesitation is evident in every small shift of legal reasoning, and it produces a double effect. On the one hand, it increases the room for maneuver—it “produces freedom of judgment by unlinking things before they are linked up again” (Latour 2010a, 194–95). On the other hand, the continuous opening and reopening of the matter under consideration eventually grants the concluding decision a peculiar force. The slow maceration of the dossier results in a verdict that is surprisingly hardy and cohesive, a ruling that is able to exclude any further consideration or external factor and can stand on the force of its own halting and meticulous reasoning. “Those who enunciate the law,” Latour (2010a, 193–94) writes, “seem almost to measure the realization of their performances by their capacity to have hesitated well, extensively, and sufficiently.”10 Despite Latour’s oft comparison of legal and scientific fact-making (the Conseil as a legal laboratory, etc.), it is clear that the examination of legal practice and legal procedure has inflected ANT with a new, or at least more explicit, concern for distinctions and differences, a preoccupation with what is peculiar to an institution that was not apparent in ANT’s original examinations of technoscience. Some have seen in this concern with the identification of a legal “regime of enunciation” a blunting of ANT’s critical edge. Alain Pottage (2012, 170) has criticized The Making of Law for being “too indulgent of the lawyer’s sense of law,” not least by prioritizing, to the exclusion of almost any other medium or register, textual processes of legal fabrication. Latour, Pottage (2012, 167) argues, “uncritically adopts the premise that there is an institution such as ‘law’ that has to be explained or materialized by social science, thereby diminishing the critical energy that the theory of actor-networks or of dispositifs might bring to the study of law.” This line of criticism is right in identifying a point of transition in ANT’s engagement with law, an alteration or redirection of its original critical impetus. Yet it is possible to turn the argument around and read the evolution of ANT retrospectively from the vantage point afforded by its elaboration of the legal “regime of enunciation.” Reading the theory backward (surely anathema to any ANT scholar worth her salt), one can discover, or at least intuit, a “normative pulse” in all the connections and associations that ANT has so lovingly traced since its origins as a sociology of translation (McGee 2014, xviii). In this reading, every link in a chain of translations, every bond

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in an actor-network, carries a normative force, a force that can be captured semiotically as the changing valence of a performance. As McGee (2014, 55) puts it, “alterations in the modality of doing correlate with modifications of value—for practical purposes, a change in modality of doing is indistinguishable from a change in value. This is a normative effect, then, but no normative criteria precede it: the valence of the effect is determined by the particular alteration at issue, not by any pre-given normative structure.” This normative valence was initially denied by critics and proponents of ANT alike. The former chided the theory for its perceived amoralism (the “power makes right” line of attack against the original ANT studies of science in action); the latter took great pride in not staking out any positive moral ground (viz the trademark military metaphors and Machiavellian aphorisms in Latour’s work in the 1980s). Progressively, however, the ventriloquism implied in ANT’s early claims to “speak the language of the actors themselves” has given way to more assertive value declarations. Perhaps it took the poisoned gift of comparison and a series of intense investigative journey through modes of existence beyond those of technoscience to introduce in ANT a greater willingness to make distinctions—including the distinction between right and wrong (or at least between better and worse). It is in the context that ANT has begun to formulate its own social theory, a peculiar metalanguage of the social.

the sociology of associations Despite being known early on as a “sociology of translation,” there was little in the initial ANT explorations of the world of technoscience that would have recommended them to mainstream sociology. Contrary to what some sociologists thought it was (or wished it would become), ANT was most resolutely not an elaboration or application of sociological modes of explanation to the domains of science and technology. As Latour (2005, 94) puts it: “ANT is not the branch of social science that has succeeded in extending its methods to scientific activity and then to the rest of society, but the branch (or rather the twig) made of those who have been thoroughly shaken when trying to give a social explanation of the hard facts of science.” It was in fact the fundamental inadequacy of social theory to account for anything that was specific, productive, and interesting in technoscience that prompted ANT to eschew “social” explanations in the study of scientific fact-making and search for a new, all-purpose theory of its town to replace the exhausted conceptualizations of the past. “[W]e have concluded that, overall and in

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the details, social theory has failed on science so radically that it’s safe to postulate that it had always failed elsewhere as well” (Latour 2005, 95; emphasis in original). In the book Reassembling the Social, Latour presents his alternative to the always-failing social theory through the contrast between the traditional “sociology of the social” and ANT’s own “sociology of associations.” The contrast is admittedly schematic—Latour never spends much time parsing the classics of social theory, so his broad-stroke disqualification of sociological traditions need to be taken with a grain of salt—but it indicates the main thrust of the divergence. Briefly put, the sociology of the social is in the business of finding “social explanations” or “social causes” for existing phenomena or events. It understands the social as a fairly stable set of forces or agencies, a substance that supports and stands behind a world of concrete actions and interactions. The sociology of associations, in contrast, is preoccupied with tracing the translations and mediations that give rise to collectives. The social, in this interpretation, “is the name of a type of momentary association which is characterized by the way it gathers together into new shapes” (Latour 2005, 65). It is not a level of reality or a kind of stuff but “a fluid visible only when new associations are being made.” As soon as a preexisting “society” or “social realm” is posited and deployed as an explanatory resource, this sort of association in the making becomes invisible; the purpose of the sociology of associations is to make those gatherings traceable again.11 To understand the challenge implicit in the call to a sociology of associations, we need to revert to an old distinction introduced in early actornetwork accounts, that between mediator and intermediary. A mediator is a connector that introduces a displacement in the position or valence of the newly related entities. Mediators “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry” (Latour 2005, 37). Intermediaries, in contrast, connect cause and effect seamlessly: they transport entities without distortion, exert a force without modifying its carrier or target. In the ANT imaginary, a network is always a concatenation of mediations—not, as the everyday understanding of the term often conveys, a smooth, frictionless plane on which entities are connected without undergoing change. Tracing a network thus involves describing a world in constant transformation, a sequence of connections “where each point can be said to fully act” (Latour 2005, 59). The sociology of the social relies on intermediaries: “social” positions, groups, structures, or networks are the dei ex machina that explain what actually unfolds in the world. A sociology of associations, in contrast, increases the relative proportion of mediators to intermediaries, deliberately depriv-

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ing itself of any already-existing social force or institution. It “has to pay the price, in small change, of what sociology seems to stock on its shelves in infinite supply” (Latour 2005, 35). The sociology of associations must thus proceed slowly—Latour (2003, 143) calls it a “slowciology”—meticulously describing “the fragile and temporary construction of social aggregates.” This is not to suggest that ANT concerns itself with “interaction” at the expense of “context” or that it emphasizes “agency” while understating the role of “structures.” The constant back and forth between these poles is precisely what ANT hopes to avoid, replacing it with a different sort of activity: a scrupulous attention to the distortions and dislocations each translation, each mediator, introduces in the world. “Interaction” is in this sense as much an abstraction as “structure.” Differences in scale—between, say, a “small” individual and the “larger” society—are the result of processes of association or group formation, not their precondition. As it did with technoscience, ANT introduces here a distinctively flat topography with the purpose of better registering connections and associations without the constraint of a ready-made dichotomy of the micro and the macro (see Callon and Latour [1981] for the original formulation of this program). Social collectives might extend over time, but this does not imply that they have a particular consistency due to their “social” nature. The durability of a social connection simply points to the tenacity and endurance of a certain effort to collect a collective. “An association is not a building needing maintenance and upkeep so much as a gesture needing continuation, the performance of a dance much more than a choreographic blueprint” (Latour 2005, 45; on gestures and ANT, see Hennion 2007). It should by now be apparent that this sociology of associations displays, like the rest of ANT, a peculiar understanding of the relationship between description and explanation. The purpose of the social sciences is to produce accounts, and a good account is one that describes “a string of actions where each participant is treated as a full-blown mediator” (Latour 2005, 128). There can be no explanatory forces floating behind, below or above the network being traced. “If a description remains in need of an explanation, it means that it is a bad description” (Latour 2005, 137). It means, in other words, that certain critical mediators have not yet been incorporated into the account. With Reassembling the Social, then, ANT puts forward an explicit social theory, even if, in characteristic fashion, it is a theory devoid of causeeffect relations, or even of a basic typology of relevant actors or actions. This is a weak and literally insubstantial social theory (Blok and Jensen 2011,

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110). It is, crucially, a social theory that is not meant to make theorizing any easier. And yet, the sociology of associations does represent an important turning point in the evolution of ANT. As Gad and Jensen (2010, 63) have noted, it signifies “a more offensive stance regarding the capacities of ANT,” and particularly a greater willingness to address the “social” as, if not a domain or region of reality, at least a particular kind of circulation. Remember that in 1986, Latour and Woolgar had dropped “social” from the subtitle of Laboratory Life with the argument that the adjective was now “devoid of any meaning.” Twenty years later, Latour embarks on a project to reassemble this category of being, even if it is in the form of an eccentric and willfully unsystematic proposal.12 While this brings ANT into closer alignment with other forms of social theory—to the extent that it introduces a degree of comparability with alternative sociologies—it also curbs the radical innovativeness of the original sociology of translation, the “free radical” quality of the actor-network. As López-Gómez and Tirado (2012, 5) argue, ANT has become a theory “capable of providing interesting answers to ordinary questions.” ANT’s sociology of associations is also a theory of and for a certain era— not because it is adapted to the proliferation of new communication media or to the supposed emergence of a “network society.” As we have noted, the ANT understanding of “network” differs substantially from—indeed, it is the opposite of—what is usually understood by the term in the Internet era. Rather, the sociology of associations is a contemporary theory because it addresses itself to key empirical and political questions of our time. To begin with, it is a theory appropriate for a world thoroughly shaped by technoscience, where technical controversies and reflexive capacities proliferate seemingly without limit. The ability to create and trace associations is now so vastly enhanced and so widely distributed that any pretension social theory might have had to occupy a privileged or extrinsic position vis-à-vis the actors it studies has lost much of its legitimacy. It is also a time when the question of “the social”—its nature, its quality, its very existence—reappears with a particular twist. An intensified awareness of connectivity coincides with a deep sense of ambiguity about the boundaries and consistency of our social aggregates. In what way are the constructs of electronic and digital proximity “social,” and how do the patterns of circulation that create such gatherings relate to their political quality? ANT’s flat topography resonates with a situation of “context collapse,” as new media scholars would put it, when predigital notions of social distance and social scale seem increasingly incongruent with new collective lifeworlds.

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In one of his commentaries on Gabriel Tarde’s work, Latour suggested that his precursor’s monadological sociology had arrived on the scene far too early. “It could be argued that a thinker of networks before their time could not transform his intuitions into data, because the material world he was interested in was not there yet to provide him with any empirical grasp” (Latour 2002, 118). The material world now provides ANT with plenty of empirical grasp to pursue a sociology of associations. The challenge is to make sure that this new sociology is not simply derivative of the processes that have created the conditions for its existence—that the theory can actually introduce a difference, translate the world in which it operates. That it can, in other words, become an actor in the contemporary world and perform the social in a particular way.13 This implies a capacity to differentiate and discriminate among all the possible kinds of social aggregates, and a willingness to advance a positive agenda about the sorts of collective worth gathering. Which leads us to our final question: under what conditions, and in which manner, is ANT becoming a distinctively political theory?

normative discriminations In a discussion with John Tresch of his most recent project, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME), Latour states the need to move beyond the deconstructive impetus of classic ANT in order to establish a research program capable of identifying (and possibly strengthening) the values that animate the lives of the Moderns. ANT, Latour notes, “was very good at giving freedom of movement but very bad at defining differences” (Latour, in Tresch 2013, 304). It expanded the room for maneuver by ignoring the distinction between social and natural, human and nonhuman, knowledge and action. It is now time, according to Latour, to transform the liberating power of ANT into a constructive endeavor, to build on the foundations provided by ANT—on “the firm ground of relativism,” as he puts it elsewhere (Latour 2005, 58)—and conduct a positive anthropology of the Moderns. The ultimate goal of this new intellectual project, Latour argues, is “to rebuild the institutions. To institute the values which we think it’s important to have” (Latour, in Tresch 2013, 309). The turn to “modes of existence” implies a redefinition of ANT’s normative project—or at least a greater readiness to assert such a project (see Harman 2014). Latour has offered glimpses of this enterprise throughout his writings. “[T]he potentialities of ANT,” he wrote in 1999, “are still largely

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untapped, especially the political implications of a social theory that would not claim to explain the actors’ behaviour and reasons, but only to find the procedures which render actors able to negotiate their ways through one another’s world-building activity” (Latour 1999, 21). In his 2003 article “What If We Talked Politics a Little?,” Latour advanced a restricted, more discriminating notion of the political as a peculiar “enunciation regime,” a fragile manner of speech driven by an internal criterion of truth: whether it manages to “trace a group into existence” (Latour 2003, 148), to define and materialize a collective that is always in the making, that must constantly start over. AIME takes the form of a collective inquiry—the book published in French in 2012 and in English in 2013 is only the first “draft” of an ongoing project hosted at www.modesofexistence.org/—and it centers on the identification of a series of “modes of existence” characteristic of the Moderns. In Latour’s formulation, a mode of existence is a particular form or genre of world-building that is guided by its own felicity and infelicity candidates and expresses an idiosyncratic discrimination of true and false. Scientific knowledge, now recast as “reference,” would be just one such mode (driven by an epistemological differentiation of true and false), but so would “religion,” “law,” “network,” “metamorphosis,” or “double click,” to name a handful of examples (AIME claims to have identified fifteen such modes so far). Each mode represents a specific itinerary of veridiction, oriented toward a particular, incommensurable definition of truth and thus moral in its own way (Latour 2013a, 452).14 Latour has conceded that this mapping exercise is resolutely parochial— at stake is a more rigorous reading of “the regional ontology of the Moderns,” by which Latour seems to mean the Euro-American tradition, or, in other formulations, “the West.” A significant part of this parochialism stems from AIME’s references to Christianity and Christian values. The book opens with an epigram from the Gospel of John, Si scires donum dei (If you knew God’s gift), and the religious undertones (and overtones) of the inquiry are unmistakable. Even if this is still “a religion without belief ” (Golinski 2010), Latour has been increasingly explicit about the Catholic underpinnings of his intellectual endeavor, identifying a thread that runs back to his 1975 doctoral dissertation on Charles Péguy and the relationship between biblical exegesis and philosophical ontology (Latour 2013c; see also Bordeleau 2015; Smith 2016). The provincialism of this enterprise offers obvious and clear lines of attack (see, e.g., Fischer 2014; Viveiros de Castro 2016). Yet it is posited as a sort of clarification exercise, a form of self-recognition ori-

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ented toward a better diplomacy “both among the different regimes of truth in the West and between the West and other cultures” (Latour in Tresch 2013, 303).15 AIME’s emphasis on the positive identification of values and the discriminating function of theory resonates with other recent strands of work within the ANT tradition. It is evident, for instance, in Annemarie Mol’s (2013) elaboration of the concept of the “ontonorm” in her studies of diet and eating, or in John Law and Marianne Lien’s (2013) project to make room for a notion of ontological multiplicity that would also encompass “not quite realised realities.” As ANT abandons its original antinormative prejudice and acquires a more explicit political complexion, it increasingly places its research agenda in the context of pressing contemporary crises. Latour, for instance, has framed much of his most recent work around the challenges posed by the ecological crisis and the advent of the Anthropocene (Latour 2013b, 2014a). Callon and his colleagues have formulated a program for the “democratization of democracy” (Barthe, Callon, and Lascoumes 2001), and a strand of ANT work on economics has evolved into the study of “civilized” or “concerned” markets (Callon 2009, Geiger et al. 2014). Significantly, the growing implication of ANT scholars in social movements, design work or artistic performance, part of broader orientation in science studies towards collaborative forms of practice, is pushing the theory in more experimental, less categorical directions (DiSalvo 2012; Marres 2012). Regardless of how one defines the civic mission of ANT—and whether one chooses to retain this moniker or replaces it with a new one (hopefully something more original than “post-ANT”)—it is clear that such a definition will be key to the evolution of the theory going forward. If we are to lose the freedom of movement that the original ANT program created, it must be to gain inspiring programs of action. We can perhaps reconcile ourselves to seeing politics as just one mode of existence among many, capable of achieving at best a modest sort of “mini-transcendence” (Latour 2003), but this doesn’t make political action any easier. Calls to participate in “the constitution of the collective” (Barthe et al. 2011) or to contribute to the “composition of a common world” (Latour 2014b) need to be accompanied by appealing formulations of the more-than-human telos of such an endeavor. Extracting the full potential of this reluctant social theory will require a constant effort to translate its idiosyncratic take on the world into compelling programs for change.

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notes 1. An anecdotal marker of this expansion: the 1987 edition of Social Theory Today included one single reference to work in the actor-network tradition. A footnote in John Heritage’s (1987, 265) chapter on ethnomethodology mentioned Latour and Woolgar’s (1979) Laboratory Life as an example of a study that “converges in atmosphere, though not in specific orientation, with the [ethnomethodological] ‘study of work’ programme.” 2. For a discussion of the multiple and sometimes mutually exclusive varieties of “social constructivism” that have proliferated in science studies, see Golinski (2008), Hacking (1999) and Sismondo (1993). 3. This definition brings to mind a passage in Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: “To maintain and transmit a value system,” Moore (1966, 468) writes, “human beings are punched, bullied, sent to jail, thrown into concentration camps, cajoled, bribed, made into heroes, encouraged to read newspapers, stood up against a wall and shot, and sometimes even taught sociology.” ANT can be seen as an effort to address all those modes of action (including the teaching of sociology) through an apparatus that gives full representation to the many nonhuman mediators implicated in those operations. 4. ANT’s epicenter in the 1980s and 1990s, the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, is part of the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, an elite engineering institution of higher education. Many of the leading proponents of ANT—Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich, and Antoine Hennion in particular—were alumni of this Grande École and developed their distinctive approach in interaction with engineering students. As Fabian Muniesa notes, this inflected the peculiar kind of “constructivism” that characterized early ANT. “For ANT,” he writes, “reality is constructed, but it is constructed in the engineer’s sense (solid reality as the outcome of an organized, fragile, and laborious process of material articulation) rather than in the sense usually put forward in standard social sciences (social construction considered in terms of social conventions, belief systems, mental states or collective representations)” (Muniesa 2015, 62; see also Hennion 2016). In the meantime, and in contrast, the sociology of scientific knowledge that emerged in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s endeavored to assert itself as a full-blown sociology, on equal terms with other branches of the discipline and differentiated only by its object of study. 5. Latour’s own collaboration with primatologist Shirley Strum marks a point of transition in this respect (Strum and Latour 1987). Even more significant is the influence of some of ANT’s most important interlocutors, particularly Donna Haraway, Vinciane Despret, and Isabelle Stengers. 6. Antoine Hennion’s work on music lovers and other forms of amateurism exemplified early on ANT’s ability to provide a more nuanced and variegated account of agency (Hennion 2015; see also Gomart and Hennion 1999). Hennion’s exploration of the sequencing of activity and passivity vis-à-vis technical objects echoes the idea of a “dance of agency” developed by Andrew Pickering (1995) in his studies of scientific work in particle physics and mathematics. What brings Hennion and Pickering together, despite their disparate empirical objects, is a shared attunement to the temporal dimension in the emergence of agency.

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7. Frank Cochoy (2008) has introduced a range of terms—for example, qualculation, calqulation—to capture the “impure” forms of arithmetic that characterize market behavior. 8. For extended empirical elaborations of how a market emerges from the assembling of material mediations and technical capacities, see Coray Çalıs¸kan’s (2010) sociology of the international cotton market or Vincent Antonin Lépinay’s (2011) study of equity derivatives. 9. There are resonances but also clear differences between the ANT notion of agencement and the sociological notion of embeddedness. Both characterize economic action as emerging out of complex patterns of relationality. Granovetter’s understanding of “network,” for instance, is not too dissimilar from ANT’s: he sees networks as creating new economic realities through their shape or morphology, rather than as simply connecting preexistent actors and interests (Granovetter 1983, 1985). Yet the differences are perhaps more telling. In ANT, an economic agent is not (commonly) an individual, let alone a human one: it is typically a hybrid (or cyborg) combining a multitude of human and nonhuman elements. Furthermore, in Granovetter’s work, and in economic sociology more generally, economic action tends to emerge and flourish through the multiplication of connections. ANT, in contrast, tends to dedicate greater attention to acts of disconnection and disentanglement, to how the form of calculativeness specific to a market economy emerges out of processes of severance or framing. 10. In Latour’s later work, hesitation would become one of the hallmarks of the religious “regime of enunciation,” or of religion as a “mode of existence” premised on dubitation and reprise. “The Scriptures,” Latour (2013a, 310) writes, “are only an immense hesitation about how to comprehend a message whose distinctive feature is that it transports no information and requires that it always be given a new direction in order to correct its interpretation.” 11. Latour has noted the influence of Gabriel Tarde’s (1843–1904) monadological sociology on this conceptualization of a sociology of associations. The recuperation of Tarde’s oeuvre has allowed Latour (2002) to present ANT as the alternative to a mainstream sociology founded on Émile Durkheim’s injunction to consider “social facts” as things. 12. An important precursor within ANT of this program is John Law’s (1994) book Organising Modernity. Based on an ethnography of a nuclear research center, the book addressed itself explicitly to social theory and defined the social as a materially heterogeneous ordering process. Law expands some of the methodological ramifications of this work in his book After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (Law 2004). 13. As Latour (2014a) argues elsewhere: “There is a huge difference between being ‘modern’ and being ‘contemporary.’ Actually knowing how to become a contemporary, that is, of one’s own time is the most difficult thing there is.” 14. Latour’s use of “modes of existence” in AIME resembles the category of the “metapragmatic register” in Luc Boltanski’s (2011) reformulation of the critical mission of social theory. Both authors are attempting to develop a critical apparatus that builds on the critical capacities of the actors they study but also possesses its own normative orientation, or pulse. For an analysis of the affinities between ANT and Boltanski’s sociology of critical capacities see Guggenheim and Potthast (2012).

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15. The self-avowed provincialism of AIME is best understood as analogous to the “provincialization of Europe” proposed by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), an author who shares with Latour a desire to resituate political and moral reflection in the context of the Anthropocene (see Chakrabarty 2009).

references Akrich, M., and B. Latour. 1992. “A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society Studies in Sociotechnical Change, 259–64. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Barry, A. 2013. “The Translation Zone: Between Actor-Network Theory and International Relations.” Millennium-Journal of International Studies 41 (3): 413–29. Barthe, Y., M. Callon, and P. Lascoumes. 2001. Agir dans un monde incertain. Essai sur la démocratie technique. Paris: Seuil. Blok, A., and T. E. Jensen. 2011. Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World. London: Routledge. Bloor, D. 1973. “Wittgenstein and Mannheim on the Sociology of Mathematics.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 4 (2): 173–91. Boltanski, L. 2011. On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation. London: Polity. Bordeleau, E. 2015. “Bruno Latour and the Miraculous Present of Enunciation.” In Breaking the Spell: Contemporary Realism Under Discussion, edited by A. Longo and S. de Sanctis, 155–67. Milan: Mimesis International. Brown, S. D. 2002. “Michel Serres.” Theory, Culture and Society 19 (3): 1–27. Bryan, D., R. Martin, J. Montgomerie, and K. Williams. 2012. “An Important Failure: Knowledge Limits and the Financial Crisis.” Economy and Society 41 (3): 299–315. Çalis¸kan, K. 2010. Market Threads: How Cotton Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Çalis¸kan, K., and M. Callon. 2009. “Economization, Part 1: Shifting Attention from the Economy towards Processes of Economization.” Economy and Society 38 (3): 369– 98. ———. 2010. “Economization, Part 2: A Research Programme for the Study of Markets.” Economy and Society 39 (1): 1–32. Callon, M. 1975. “L’opération de traduction comme relation symbolique.” Les incidences des rapports sociaux sur la science. Paris: Cordes. ———. 1981. “Struggles and Negotiations to Define What Is Problematic and What Is Not: The Socio-Logic of Translation.” In The Social Process of Scientific Investigation, 197– 219. New York: Springer. ———. 1986. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay.” Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge 32: 196–223. ———. 1998a.” Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics.” The Sociological Review 46 (1): 1–57.

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———. 1998b.” An Essay on Framing and Overflowing: Economic Externalities Revisited by Sociology.” The Sociological Review 46 (1): 244–S69. ———. 1999. “Actor-Network Theory—the Market Test.” The Sociological Review 47 (S1): 181–S95. ———. 2013. “Qu’est-ce qu’un agencement marchand.” In Sociologie des agencements marchands: Textes choisis, edited by M. Callon et al, 325–440. Paris: Presses des Mines. ———. 2016. “Revisiting Marketization: From Interface-Markets to Market-Agencements.” Consumption Markets and Culture 19 (1): 17–37. Callon, M., and B. Latour. 1981. “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors MacroStructure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So.” In Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies, edited by K. Knorr-Cetina and A. V. Cicourel, 277–303. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1992. “Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley.” In Science as Practice and Culture, edited by Andrew Pickering, 343–68. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Callon, M., Y. Millo, and F. Muniesa. 2007. Market Devices. Special issue of the Sociological Review 55 (1). Callon, M., and F. Muniesa. 2005. “Peripheral Vision Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices.” Organization Studies 26 (8): 1229–50. Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222. Cochoy, F. 2008. “Calculation, Qualculation, Calqulation: Shopping Cart Arithmetic, Equipped Cognition and the Clustered Consumer.” Marketing Theory 8 (1): 15–44. ———. 2014. “A Theory of ‘Agencing’: On Michel Callon’s Contribution to Organizational Knowledge and Practice.” The Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory, and Organization Studies, 106–24. New York: Oxford University Press. Collins, H. 1985. Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Collins, H. M., and S. Yearley. 1992. “Epistemological Chicken.” In Science as Practice and Culture, edited by Andrew Pickering. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deleuze, Giles. 1989. “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?” In Michel Foucault philosophe. Rencontre international, Paris, 9, 10, 11 janvier 1988. Paris: Le Seuil. DiSalvo, C. 2012. Adversarial Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fischer, M. M. 2014. “The Lightness of Existence and the Origami of ‘French’ Anthropology: Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Meillassoux, and Their So-Called Ontological Turn.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 331–55. Fourcade, M. 2011. “Cents and Sensibility: Economic Valuation and the Nature of ‘Nature.”’ American Journal of Sociology 116 (6): 1721–77. Gad, C., and C. B. Jensen. 2010. “On the Consequences of Post-ANT.” Science, Technology and Human Values 35 (1): 55–80. Geiger, S., Harrison, D., Kjellberg, H., and Mallard, A. 2014. Concerned Markets: Economic Ordering for Multiple Values. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

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———. 2004a. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–48. ———. 2004b. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social—An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010a. The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d’État. London: Polity. ———. 2010b. “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto.’” New Literary History 41 (3): 471–90. ———. 2013a. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2013b. “Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature.” Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh University. ———. 2013c. “Biography of an Inquiry: On a Book about Modes of Existence.” Social Studies of Science 43 (2): 287–301. ———. 2014a. “Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene—A Personal View of What Is To Be Studied.” Distinguished lecture delivered at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, Washington, DC, December. ———. 2014b. “Another Way to Compose the Common World.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 301–7. Latour, B., and Woolgar, S. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. ———. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Law, John. 1987. “Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion.” In The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, 13–34. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1994. Organizing Modernity. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. ———. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Law, J., and Lien, M. 2012. “Slippery: Field Notes on Empirical Ontology.” Social Studies of Science 43 (3): 363–78. Lee, N., and S. Brown. 1994. “Otherness and the Actor Network.” American Behavioral Scientist 37 (6): 772–90. Lépinay, V. A. 2011. Codes of Finance: Engineering Derivatives in a Global Bank. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. López Gómez, D., and F. J. Tirado. 2012. “Teoría del Actor-Red: Un pragmatismo contemporáneo.” In Teoría del Actor-Red: Más allá de los estudios de ciencia y tecnología, edited by D. López Gómez and F. J. Tirado, 1–16. Barcelona, Spain: Armentia Editorial. Lynch, M. 1997. Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. MacKenzie, D. 2004. “The Big, Bad Wolf and the Rational Market: Portfolio Insurance,

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chapter twelve

The Sociology of Conventions and Testing jörg potthast

How does justification work? Consider a quarrel over train seats unfolding between a father accompanied by two small children and passengers holding reservations (Thévenot 2006, 23ff.). Are they right to blame him for an act of “occupation”? Does it make a difference when one of the children is sleeping? Or is it inadequate to defend a title of reservation in the face of a sleeping baby, even if taking a double seat? Adding to the confusion, the train is operating on a day of declared strike action, and the parties disagree on whether this might affect the reservation system. How to find out, in the absence of train staff? After all, how about jointly considering the larger cause of the strike—rather than dividing up and engaging in a minor subject of quarrel? All along the episode (Thévenot 2006), people are constantly giving and receiving reasons. The abundance of justification is a dominant feature of social life, involved in shaping social relations and transforming social practices (Tilly 2006). Among the sociological approaches sharing this view, there is a blend of French sociology taking conventions particularly seriously and drawing attention to the related phenomenon of testing. In the following, this approach is referred to as the sociology of conventions and testing. The sociology of conventions and testing has been introduced by a study On Justification (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 [1991]).1 Choosing this term rather than the more commonplace notion of “legitimization,” the authors call for resituating the process of giving and receiving reasons. This is why detailed descriptions are needed, capturing how controversial situations unfold in vivo. As illustrated by the introductory example, this might involve

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following a quarrel within a mobile setting and through unpredictable shifts facing actors with various moments of uncertainty. Engaging anew and in detail in the study of justification, the authors explicitly avoid the notion of legitimization. They “are not satisfied . . . with the use of the notion of ‘legitimization,’ which, in the wake of Max Weber’s work, tends to confuse justification with deceit” (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 [1991], 37). According to this view, legitimization has been cut off from the course of action, reduced and assigned to a post hoc stage. As a result, actions are presented as determined by particular interests, then covered by some declaration presenting the action as contributing to the common good. Departing from what they consider to be a mere “relativism of values” (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 [1991], 37), the authors seek to reintegrate the process of giving and receiving reasons into the course of action. “[P]eople do not ordinarily seek to invent false pretexts after the fact so as to cover up some secret motive . . . ; rather, they seek to carry out their actions in such a way that these can withstand the test of justification” (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 [1991], 37). Therefore, if referring to “legitimization” at all, the authors claim that this term has to be regained against an influential tradition of Weberian and Nietzschean thought (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 [1991], 342; Fleischmann 1964). Centering on the “normativity of acting in public” (Breviglieri, Lafaye, and Trom 2009a), the justification approach suggests analyzing critical competences and the sense of justice (Breviglieri, Lafaye, and Trom 2009b). “On Justification is projecting a bridge between a reflection on the nature of normative orders and the operation of qualifying things and persons that accompanies the situated process of legitimating these orders” (Breviglieri et al. 2009a, 8; translations by the author). The present chapter introduces the key texts On Justification and The New Spirit of Capitalism and discusses how these projects and related research by Luc Boltanski and his associates draws on and departs from the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu on the one hand and work in science and technology studies on the other hand. In its exposition, the chapter pays particular attention to how the bridge between reflection on normative orders and situated processes of legitimation is constructed in this research tradition. It argues that the analysis of conventions cannot be reduced to the sociology of meaning if we are to grasp what makes it original and distinctive. I suggest that the sociology of conventions has gained by incorporating a concern with sociomaterial practices and concrete instances of testing from science and technology studies both with regard to empirical findings and conceptual refinement. It is by drawing together the seminal traditions of analyzing conventions and the ques-

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tion of testing that has emerged more recently, the sociology of conventions and testing satisfies the criteria of both conformism and originality. The title of the chapter reflects this theoretical agenda through an intervention also into the naming of the tradition: the justification approach is often associated with the name of a single author (Luc Boltanski).2 Crafted in a number of laboratories and drafted by an outstanding contributor, it did not originally come with a proper name. It has since then been presented under various labels. I would argue that the label of a “sociology of conventions” (see, e.g., Diaz-Bone 2011) presents a partial portrait of previous research and that presenting On Justification as a conventionalist (and internalist) objection to of the oeuvre of Pierre Bourdieu (Honneth 2010, 376) misses what is original to the approach.3 I suggest that by referring to the approach as the sociology and conventions and testing, we can better capture what the approach developed in the classic works On Justification and The New Spirit of Capitalism and related research uniquely makes possible. To better understand “the nature of normative orders” (Breviglieri et al. 2009a, 8), it has to be related to sociomaterial practices of testing; to study “the operation of qualifying things and persons” (Breviglieri et al. 2009a, 8), it has to be related to conventions.

on justification: analyzing controversy through modeling a plurality of conventions As a basic step of preparing its subject of inquiry, the sociology of conventions and testing centers on controversial situations. Borrowing from studies on scientific controversy (Collins 1981; Latour 1987; see section “Sociomaterial Practices of Testing”), these are thought of as short sequences ready to identify and easy to isolate, cutting through the abundance of justification and offering an opportunity to observe regularities in social life. In this respect, if filtered through Latour (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 [1991], 146), the sociology of conventions and testing has close affinities to ethnomethodological approaches (Dodier 1995). Rather than belonging to a sphere of words and ideas, repertoires of justification are regarded to be reflexive qualities of mundane reasoning, inseparable from a situated and sequenced course of action. Adopting this perspective, On Justification (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 [1991]) has captured a number of repertoires of justification frequently referred to in controversial situations. Punctuated by moments of controversy, the course of everyday life is found to relate to a “grammar of the political order.” Therefore, repertoires of justification can be traced back

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to orders of worth as clarified through the scholarly work of political philosophy. This is how On Justification proceeds. On the one hand, it engages with major contributions to political philosophy that have clarified “grammars” of the political order. On the other hand, it demonstrates that nonphilosophers, if oblivious of its formal rules, dispose of moral competences and keep enacting these grammars (as elaborated by authors such as Saint Augustine, Bossuet, Rousseau, Hobbes, Adam Smith, or Saint-Simon) in the course of ordinary controversies. Treating accounts by experts and laypeople in a symmetrical way, the justification approach refrains from a critique of ideology debunking some forms of knowledge while giving privilege to others. Furthermore, stressing controversy, uncertainty and conflict, the sociology of conventions and testing demarcates itself from both holistic and atomist positions. On Justification is introduced with a radical gesture. “Readers of this book might find it somewhat discomfiting not to encounter a familiar cast of characters: none of the groups—social classes, blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, youth, women, voters. . . . Short on groups, individuals, and persons, our book nevertheless abounds in beings, some of them human, some of them things. Whenever these beings appear, the state in which they operate is always qualified at the same time. The relation between these person-states and thing-states (which constitutes what we define as a situation) is the object of our study” (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 [1991], 1). Exploring patterns and regularities in social life, the justification approach has sidestepped the usual research strategies presupposing either macroinstitutions or other “well-known characters” at the microlevel. Instead, the object of its study is deliberately rendered an exotic species, calling for fieldwork sociology. Elaborating on political philosophy, the sociology of conventions and testing has been embedded in empirical research. Observing train passengers disputing over seat reservations (Thévenot 2006, 23ff.), for instance, is not merely a pretext for raising a theoretical question. Nor does the author, given his choice of a mobile setting, follow a research interest limited to the field of transportation. Rather than merely relating to physical spaces, he conceives of mobility as shifting between different modes of engaging with both persons and things. Neither reducing the episode to an exercise in political philosophy nor to a matter of naturalistic description, the quarrel over train seats is brought to a sequential analysis. As noted by the author, a train journey usually involves requalifying and transforming a standard cabin type of space into a personalized place of work, of reading, sleeping, conversation, or family life (and back). His attention is on conversions with regard

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to the ways in which persons interact and relate to their physical environment. Pointing to these shifts between what he calls “pragmatic regimes” (Thévenot 2001) or “modes of engagement” (Thévenot 2006), Thévenot questions assumptions of stability as held by either atomist or holistic approaches. Rather than presupposing individuals acting in isolation or a holism of collective rules, the plurality of acting (Thévenot 2006) is thought of as a starting point of sociological inquiry. Even within a setting that is highly standardized, tightly controlled, and rigidly organized, social order is not a given but a subject of conversions and collisions between pragmatic regimes and different modes of engagement. This way of analyzing controversial situations has led to reconceptualizing critique as an operation internal to social order. In looking at how critique operates in practice, On Justification has aimed at reconstructing a common sense of justice in terms of a plurality of shared grammars. Studying social order by looking at the way it is repaired, the sociology of conventions and testing uses a research strategy similar to other microscopic branches of sociological thought. Notably, however, among those approaches viewing social order as a permanent achievement and seeking to avoid assumptions about macroscopic order, the justification approach has opted for an exception. Given a high level of uncertainty and given that social order is about tensions and frictions, it claims that actors dispose of a critical capacity, ready to engage with social order as a reality to be criticized. Exempting critique from the rule of microscopic abstention from macroscopic elements, the research program under consideration has developed tools for analyzing critical operations as acts of “public denunciation” (Boltanski, Darré, and Schiltz 1984).4 Pioneering in this vein, Boltanski and his collaborators have analyzed a corpus of letters sent to the editors of the French newspaper Le monde (Boltanski, Darré, and Schiltz 1984), raising the following question: what are the constraints imposed on formulating a complaint that prompts further investigations by journalists? According to the analysis of the emerging approach, successfully presenting a cause involves dealing with two opposing requirements. To be perceived as a truly public concern, these letters have to perform a practical activity similar to a juggling act. On the one hand, the letters have to depict an act of outrageously immoral behavior defying the sense of the normal. On the other hand, while taking the victim’s perspective, these accounts have to be presented in a way that does not leave its readers in doubt of the state of mind of the actual witness. Considering this double constraint of scandalizing and normalizing, relating the victim, the aggressor, and the witness within a plausible “actantial system” (Boltanski et al. 1984, 6ff.), turns out to be a

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demanding task. As documented by the letters of complaint, their authors have often failed to voice their cause when presenting it to prior instances, turning to Le Monde as some kind of last resort. How, then, not to be caught by the accumulating burden of a history of failed calls for justice? Looking at this early contribution on how victims are struggling to give voice to suffering and injustice, one might have expected the approach to pursue questions on how these (negative) careers contribute to maintaining social order. In the following, however, staying highly sensitive to the problem of constructing a claim for justice, it has taken a different direction, engaging in modeling a plurality of conventions. In choosing this way, the justification approach has stayed at arm’s length from depicting social order either as a necessary good or as an object of critique in terms of stratification and domination. Extending on the study of claims for justice, this alternative conception has been applied to analyzing protest movements and the formation of collectives (see section “After On Justification: Contours of a Body of Work”). It is built on postulating symmetry: On Justification introduces a plurality of conventions to be considered on equal grounds. Far from applying to some abstract sphere, this claim of plurality has emerged from empirical investigations. Even in organizations, often portrayed as confined environments, there is a plurality of interfering orders of worth. Opting for organizations as subjects of research has been a strategic choice (Jagd 2011). In addition, studying management literature in depth, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006 [1991]) conclude that contemporary ways of organizing are bound to a limited plurality of conventions. Justification follows the guiding principles of inspiration, the domestic order, fame, the civic, the market, or the industrial order. Studying industrial organizations, one is not only to encounter the industrial order of worth as laid out by SaintSimon; analyzing organizations operating under market conditions, one is not only to encounter the market order of worth as laid out by Adam Smith. Opposing this view, On Justification has argued that in current ways of organizing all of those orders of worth coincide and combine with each other. Justifications can call for long-term industrial efficiency or short-term market success; they can invoke seniority and denounce kinship favors in the name of the domestic order of worth (Bossuet). With regard to the often controversial subject of working time models, for example, arrangements may be reached in combining several forms of justification: standardizing working hours in the name of industrial efficiency and a civic equality (Rousseau), adjusting working time to the family life cycle, allocating working time on the basis of customer satisfaction (fame; Hobbes), or deliberately blurring the boundaries of working time in order to allow creative processes

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to unfold (drawing on a principle of inspiration, formulated as an order of worth in Augustine’s City of God). If, following On Justification, the number of legitimate orders of worth is limited, this is not a matter of treatises on the political order as available in the literature but of their empirical occurrence in contemporary organizational settings: enacted grammars of the political link, conventions in action.

after on justification: contour s of a body of work Taking uncertainty as a condition of contemporary societies, the research program on conventions and testing has insisted on following the actors’ permanent quest for certainty, from the microscopic study of situations to macrolevel studies, analyzing large-scale collisions between conventions and long-term processes of emerging and changing conventions. Capitalist organizations, residing at the mesolevel of this spectrum have been a privileged site for empirical inquiry. Both On Justification and The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2004 [1999]) have used corpora of books offering “tools” and advices for reflecting and training management practice. Targeting the level of organizations, the research program under scrutiny has proved to be neither inclined toward explaining the reproduction nor the transformation of social order. There is, however, a remarkable shift between the two books mentioned. On Justification, insisting on a symmetrical treatment of orders of worth, is not so much interested in the macrohistorical process of their emergence but centers on the microhistorical consequences of constant tensions between them. The New Spirit of Capitalism uses the model of normative orders in seeking to understand a large-scale diachronic change. Throughout this shift, organizations have provided a common empirical reference. Rather than treating repertoires of justification in a merely ahistorical way, the tableau listing six cités (inspiration, domestic, fame, civic, market, industrial) as presented by On Justification is related to contemporary forms of organization. Depicting organizations as compromising devices and sites of multiple tensions, this study has prompted contributions addressing questions of long-term and macro-scale change and offered a recipe on how to frame the question of transformation. For a still-growing body of work, this question has been ready at hand and easy to spell out: what is going to be the seventh cité?5 In this sense, the research program on conventions and testing, if emanating from mesolevel empirical inquiries, has prepared for studying macroscopic change. In order to account for social change, try to establish the emergence of a new “order of worth.”

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Coining this almost formula-like research question, the sociology of conventions and testing has offered a heuristic for identifying hot spots of uncertainty and prepared for observing how uncertainty is framed and managed. It is led by the assumption that there is a capacity to come to terms with uncertainty, embracing practices, devices, and categories reducing uncertainty to discernible “economies of worth” (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 [1991]). Even before the voluminous study on The New Spirit of Capitalism, the fields of work and the economy have been very prominent. To begin with, the domain of work has been brought to attention anew, launched by a collection on Justesse et justice dans le travail (Boltanski and Thévenot 1989) and pursued, among others, by studies on the practice of health and safety inspections (Dodier 1994) or on recruitment trials (Marchal 2013). In this domain, the sociology of conventions and testing has evolved jointly with a sibling approach, called the economics of conventions (Eymard-Duvernay 2006; Favereau, Biencourt, and Eymard-Duvernay 2003; Jagd 2007). Spreading beyond a surprisingly heterogeneous group of founding members and their doctoral students (Didier 2016), the sociology of conventions and testing has been adopted and adapted to study critical tensions nested in workplace settings (Dubet 2009; Potthast 2011) or organizations (Knoll 2015). Next to economic organizations, the justification approach has also been forged through studies on state formation and the fabrication of political machines that do not correspond to nation-states, including studies on statistics and nation-building (Desrosières 2002 [1993], 2014; Desrosières and Thévenot 1988; Diaz-Bone and Didier 2016; Didier 2009) or on public denunciations, mysteries, and conspiracies related to the “making of modern societies” (Boltanski et al. 1984; Boltanski 2014 [2012]). The research program on conventions and testing has frequently returned to the subject of state authorities involved in scandals (de Blic and Lemieux 2005) or tested on the grounds of the legitimate use of violence (Linhardt 2006; Linhardt and Moreau de Bellaing 2005). Adding to this line of inquiry, the justification approach has been brought to analyzing terrorist prevention at airports (Linhardt 2001). Besides these (two) clusters, the sociology of conventions and testing has been rather unpredictable in its choice of sites for ethnographic and historical fieldwork (see Barthe et al. 2013) and also returned to more traditional subjects of ethnographic fieldwork. Linking up with the Chicago school, it has taken a strong focus on urban spaces (Stavo-Debauge 2009), on housing (Breviglieri 1999), and on the public quality of public space (Gayet-Viaud 2008).6

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Despite the effort of creating a vocabulary of its own, the sociology of conventions and testing has shown close affinities to basic axioms of the sociology of meaning. Seeking to conceptualize a plurality of conventions, for example, it is obviously linked to and inspired by the seminal outline of Max Weber. To readers in the English- or German-speaking world, this affiliation has been particularly evident as The New Spirit of Capitalism, reconnecting to a Weberian tradition, has been translated a few years before On Justification.7 At this point, the anti-Weberian impulse characteristic of the earlier work (see introductory section) did no longer seem to matter. Once it was perceived as a contribution to the sociology of meaning, the justification approach ran the typical risk of belonging to a larger family: somehow relating interpretative schemes to normative orders, it appeared to be just another edifice on a vast construction site. Instead of working out and further developing on its specificities, such as, for example, Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006 [1991], 65–82) efforts of erecting a model common to all orders of worth (pluralized yet limited in number), the discussion has shied away from supposedly “technical” questions of a more “formal” approach. If, however, the emphasis is no longer exclusively on conventions but rather on conventions and testing, the research program under scrutiny can no longer been “dissolved” in a sociology of meaning. Together with the sociology of meaning, it underlines the fundamental uncertainty of social interaction. Having adopted and readapted the concept of “testing,” the sociology of conventions has left the “empire (of approaches relating to the sociology) of meaning” (Dosse 1998 [1995]). The following section offers an introduction to this less familiar and neglected element, pointing to the ambiguous role of Pierre Bourdieu as a source of the preoccupation with testing.

the influence of bourdieu The practice of social science research has been entangled with the formation of state agencies. In crafting professional categories or social and economic indicators, the social sciences have contributed to creating fields in which public authorities intervene. To some extent, this has resulted in a shared use of categories by both social scientists and state agencies. Both Boltanski and Thévenot have been involved in reflecting on the practice of creating and transforming social categories, prompted by reconstructing the notion of “cadres” (Boltanski 1987 [1983]) and by revising professional categories (Desrosières, Goy, and Thévenot 1983; Desrosières and Thévenot

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1988), respectively. Taking moments in the coevolution of state agencies and social science as a point of departure, the sociology of conventions and testing has followed a path prepared by Pierre Bourdieu. The impact of the sociology of Bourdieu on the justification approach has been enormous. It is worth noting that we find the basis for a preoccupation with testing also in Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s interest in testing emerges in his early studies on higher education entrance competitions (Bourdieu and Passeron 1964). Analyzing this case of a declaredly neutral mode of testing, imposed by a state-run reform program against reproducing social inequality through heritage, his findings do not support the political ambition. The logic of cultural reproduction has not been interrupted by means of testing. To the contrary, it has been reinforced by creating an illusion of neutrality and continues operating in a more subtle way. Taking a critical attitude toward testing and its egalitarian promise, Bourdieu (together with various collaborators) has moved on to other fields and has repeatedly denounced the powerful illusions of techniques of representation presumed to be neutral. These studies include analyses of the academic system itself (Bourdieu 1990 [1984], 1996 [1989]). Following once and again the same blueprint, excavating once and again the “practical logic” operating in systems of representing the social world, Bourdieu’s research program has moved from a sociology of higher education to generalizing a “logic of practice” (Bourdieu 1990 [1980]). From the outset, Bourdieu was interested in how testing contributes to masking and reproducing social inequality. Generalizing his point to a constitutional argument on how social fields reproduce themselves by means of self-representation and the underlying logic of dispositions (habitus), his theoretical project has elevated practices of testing to the status of a general category. The sociology of conventions and testing has inherited Bourdieu’s preoccupation with testing but taken a different stance on its pragmatic dimensions. This has led to demarcating a “sociology of critique [and testing]” from a “critical sociology [of testing]” (Boltanski 1990b). This maneuver amounts to contrasting two versions of “practice theory.” Bourdieu engages in revealing the illusion of testing, again and again, to be a dominant force of social practice. The justification approach continues presenting testing as a key element to understanding social life but chooses a different take on its subject of predilection. It differs in extending the postulate of symmetry as formulated with regard to conventions to the case of testing. As illustrated by studies on coding practices by professionals (Desrosières et al. 1983) and laypeople (Boltanski and Thévenot 1983), both report on uncertainties and critical tensions. The lesson derived from this observation has been influen-

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tial in shaping the approach. Instead of separating coding as practiced in a scientific and professional context from acts of classification by laypeople, both are called to be analyzed within a common framework. Whether carried out behind the doors of experts or in ordinary circumstances, coding is thought of as an operation that is inherently moral and political. Social order, if portrayed from these moments of uncertainty has irreducible critical tensions. Therefore, trying to establish “critique” as a task of sociological research comes to adding a well-known operation to the field of inquiry rather than defining a mission for a scientific project (Boltanski 1990b). In institutional terms, Bourdieu, when teaching in a training program for statisticians (at ENSAE), has prepared for the creation of the sociology of conventions and testing, too. It is thanks to his initiative that cooperation between the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) has emerged in the 1980s. In its foundational moment, the sociology of conventions and testing has added a further institutional link, spanning to an elite engineering school (École des Mines).

sociomaterial practices of testing “Why taking so much effort in criticizing and justifying if, as a final note, all the work is carried out by forces operating at an unconscious level?” (Boltanski 2002, 280; see Lemieux 2014; translation by the author). Among those approaches considering justification anew, the research program under scrutiny is unique in explicitly relating justification to testing. As outlined in the previous section, the focus on testing is partly indebted to Bourdieu. It takes on a specific emphasis with the encounter with the then-emerging approach on science and technology. According to Boltanski (2002, 184), this encounter has resulted in a rather ad hoc act of “borrowing” the concept of “testing” (épreuve) which has then become “more and more important” in shaping the justification approach. According to later accounts, a dialogue ensued (Latour 2009), which has hugely influenced the course of the research program on conventions and testing (Bogusz 2010, 71ff.; Guggenheim and Potthast 2012). If depicted as a matter of personal acquaintance, this may add to understanding the intellectual biography of Luc Boltanski as a key figure in the sociology of conventions and testing. To put it simply, having split up with his long-term mentor and collaborator (Pierre Bourdieu), Boltanski happened to meet a new colleague (Bruno Latour) and shifted to using one of his concepts.

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As suggested by this biographical portrayal, the emergence of the justification approach has resulted from a clear cut. This account, however, is too narrow. The preoccupation of testing as inherited from Bourdieu has come to be combined with a new understanding drawn from Latour. Indicating both a striking continuity and a decisive shift with regard to the question of testing, there is a more comprehensive account. Also, together with Bourdieu and Latour, the sociology of conventions and testing adheres to a mode of theorizing embedded in fieldwork. Rather than developing on it, an internalist (or even personalized) reading (of Boltanski moving from the Bourdieu school to the Latour school) contributes to obscuring this communality.8 The emergence of the sociology of conventions and testing owes both to apprehending society as shaped by contemporary forms of testing (Bourdieu) and social change related to a shift in the nature of testing (Latour). The present section turns to the latter. Both paths of inquiry have been explored elsewhere, too. While the wealth and breadth of the respective bodies of literature add to the relevance of it, the justification approach is distinctive in suggesting a junction.9 Together with a number of prior contributions introducing the approach to the French and international audience, this chapter postulates that “justification” translates by two elements. On the one hand, it relates to conventions (see first section). Analyzing conventions is key to understanding the coordination of action. According to On Justification, there is a limited number of conventions that conform to the exigencies of a common good. The second key owing to Latour and other work in the history and sociology of science and technology, lies in analyzing practices of testing. In this respect, “justification” also translates by probing reality. Following On Justification, any situation can amount to a reality test. Empirically occurring at different scales and reaching different levels of institutionalization, moments of testing are not thought of as a matter of jurisdictional claims. Hence, rather than presupposing circumscribed areas of expertise or highlighting issues of status and domination, the emphasis is on situated practices of testing including their material and corporeal qualities. Contemporary societies can be described as obsessed with testing, ceaselessly inventive of new forms of trials, evaluations, and audits. All domains of social life are affected by means of testing. To some extent, the spread of testing may be accounted for in terms of bringing “mechanical objectivity” (Daston 1992; Daston and Galison 1992) to social worlds that have practiced other forms of valuation and evaluation before. Following this account, the spread of testing has resulted from the mechanical production of images (Daston 1992; Daston and Galison 1992). Whether occurring as a long-

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term development or as a sudden and dramatic reversal, mechanizing proof (MacKenzie 2001) brings impersonal forms of knowledge and technically codified devices and metrologies to sites that have relied on personal knowledge before. The locus classicus of this process is a controversy accompanying the foundation of a society for experimental research, no longer opposing Hobbes and Boyle in person but two artefacts, the Leviathan and the air pump (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). This account, further popularized in the wake of Latour’s (1993 [1991], 17) reading, has drawn attention to the extrasomatic forces involved in the practice of testing. A more recent showcase example for mechanical objectivity is offered by the invention of crash testing for improving car safety. Once introduced, these devices for testing have contributed to an understanding of passive safety difficult to reconcile with a notion of active safety prevalent so far (Leonardi 2010; Potthast 2012; Wetmore 2004). The history and sociology of technology has more examples, but it has never drawn a sweeping conclusion, generalizing for an “age of mechanical objectivity.” Refraining from a straightforward tale of the “mechanization of testing,” it has shown that the introduction of testing devices has often encountered resistance or failed. Rather than “replacing” other practices of “giving reasons,” the rise of (mechanical) testing has added to the heterogeneous layout of evidentiary practices. Therefore, instead of thinking of testing as occurring in a confined domain of technical artefacts and networks disposing of a unified metrology, it has to be explored without presupposing a “great divide,” on a case-by-case basis and by comparative analyses (see, e.g., Mallard 1998). Incorporating both the rise and the significance of “mechanical testing” and the reservations with regard to a sweeping historical claim, the justification approach has postulated that conventions and testing are connected in two ways. It is either that invoking conventions prompts practices of testing. In this case, testing bound to conventions is brought to a controversial situation and may serve as a means of ending a conflict, closing a state of uncertainty and reaching agreement. A second type of linkage is found in situations exposed to a higher level of complexity. Contrasting the first case, these situations already involve practices of testing, which then, fueled by critique, become a subject of testing themselves. In this case, one is to observe a second-order encounter of testing and conventions. Second-order testing does not only impose a convention for reaching agreement. It also sets out mobilizing conventions for challenging and revising conventions in place but judged inappropriate or insufficient. Claiming that testing occurs in two guises, the justification approach is (particularly) far from subscribing to a one-off and clear-cut shift in the practice of testing. Rather than

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presuming a permanent fix, it embraces the dynamics of evolving devices and arrangements of testing. By contrast to the version of practice theory advocated by Bourdieu, the sociology of conventions and testing has introduced, via Latour and actornetwork theory, an element of materiality. Testing, as conceived of in On Justification, does not take place in an empty world but is equipped with objects that both facilitate operations of justification and put limits to it. As compared to actor-network theory’s devotion to following objects through society, the sociology of conventions and testing has taken a different stance in appreciating the role of the material in social life. This is, by and large, reflected in methodological choices. While continuously following objects (actor-network theory) requires ethnographic fieldwork, studying the role of objects in controversial situations (justification approach) allows for a more focused observation. Reintroducing objects into sociological inquiry, the research program on conventions and testing is aligned to a broader movement of practice theory, suggesting a distinct way of doing ethnography (Baszanger and Dodier 2004). It is by observing how objects are brought to controversial situations that different configurations of testing may be distinguished. Notably, objects take part in operations of testing at different levels: They may be referred to as a subject of testing, examined for being a legitimate piece of or alien to an established conventional order. Simultaneously, but on a different level, objects may serve as an infrastructure for testing a justice claim. Finally, they may be contested in serving as an infrastructure for testing. This, again, may be illustrated by a shift in the quarrel over train seats. Initially brought in as an unquestionable infrastructure of testing in support of a claim, it is then treated as a subject of testing itself. Why count on the reservation system in a situation of service disruption? Would it be even foolish to validate one’s ticket on a day of strike action (Thévenot 2006, 32)? As illustrated by this example, turning from first- to second-order testing (and back) is not to be depicted as a discursive operation. By implication, in considering objects with regard to different pragmatic regimes, the sociology of conventions and testing has contributed to the emerging field of practice theory. Devices of testing devised for absorbing uncertainty are vulnerable to uncertainty themselves. On the one hand, testing put on trial may result in tightening testing procedures. On the other hand, if put on trial, testing procedures may be undermined and weakened. The justification approach is particularly well prepared for capturing this ambiguity with regard to the practice of testing. This may be further illustrated by Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2004 [1999]) study on the evolution of capitalism even though this

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study has not explicitly assigned itself to the development of practice theory. Engaging in the debate on a contemporary transformation of capitalism, the authors do not link up with an explanatory scheme opposing “productive forces” versus “labor.” As outlined before, they are taking into account the role of material objects, but these are not considered to matter by the force of “brute” materiality. Instead of reintroducing a materialist argument, The New Spirit of Capitalism has drawn a distinction between “trials of worth” and “trials of strength.” Again, this is not about opposing symbolic orders to material forces but about two sets of practices related to each other. On the one hand, the practice of specifying forces through trials of worth is presented as a localizing regime. On the other hand, the practice referred to as trials of strength is depicted as a regime of displacement. While the former comes with regulation and investments in local devices, the disruptive power of the latter resides in a creative practice of sidestepping and circumventing trials of worth put in place. Epitomizing the opposing dynamics of localizing and delocalizing, Boltanski and Chiapello (2004 [1999]) have pointed at the ambiguous role of second-order testing. Responding to sustained “social critique” in the 1970s, capitalism has adapted through creating and strengthening devices for testing social justice; embracing forms of “artistic critique” in the 1990s, it has adapted through destabilizing these devices. If broadly, this account invites to distinguish between two stages. In a first stage, conventions are brought to particular sites of testing and find themselves reinforced. In a second stage, however, by the fact of materializing and localizing, devices of testing may turn into points of vulnerability. Apart from attracting critique, conventions inscribed into local devices of testing can be sidestepped (Boltanski and Chiapello 2004 [1999]). As a result, there is a permanent back and forth between the institutionalization of testing and new maneuvers of displacement and circumvention. Capturing “movements of the critical sense” (Dodier 2005) beyond these two stages is an enduring task for social science research. Regardless of their subject and scope, the justification approach proceeds by analyzing controversies in terms of conventions, testing, and secondorder testing. While, at a basic level, uncertainty is about a simple problem of coordination (who is to take this seat?), second-order uncertainty is about troubles in justifying a guiding principle of coordination (“first come, first served” vs. “as indicated by the reservation system”). This way of approaching the question of testing sheds new light on the quarrel over train seats, too. As long as devoted to the stability of individual actors and collectives, opposing particular interests to general rules, the analysis is unable to account for how this episode unfolds. Why is it that within a short time, pas-

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sengers find themselves reassuring of being “regular clients” and then “concerned citizens”? If regarded in terms of situated action, “moving between the familiar and the public” mode of engagement (Thévenot 2007), analyzing conflicts includes analyzing situations of testing: individuals ascertaining themselves through practices constituting and dissolving collectives in unexpected ways. Faced with various kinds of uncertainties, passengers are depicted as repeatedly recurring to some way of testing. To turn the situation to probing reality, the conflicting parties draw on various sources for evidence: a reservation ticket, information provided by a member of staff (encountered earlier), a quote from the radio program of the same morning, newspaper reports investigating the issues of strike action (Thévenot 2006, 23ff.). Engaging in the search for evidence, the parties involved are faced with an experience familiar to members of contemporary societies: even if there is a device that has served for probing reality earlier, this way of testing may be submitted to testing itself. We might live in societies invaded by trials, audits, ratings, and rankings (Power 1997). The remarkable density of testing devices, however, is accompanied by second-order testing: trials put on trial, audits requiring certification, ratings and rankings brought to comparative ratings and rankings. Pointing to the rise of mechanical objectivity, science and technology studies have contributed to raising the question of testing beyond the reach of its field. At the same time, however, some currents within this field have refrained from inquiring into the plurality of testing. The social construction of technology (SCOT) approach, for example, has taken a programmatic orientation that is directed at deconstructing mechanical objectivity (Pinch 1993). Corresponding to this orientation and similar to the position held by Bourdieu (see section “The Influence of Bourdieu”), it is unable to address the question of second-order testing. Against the assumption of a generalized illusion fostered by testing (Bourdieu), the justification approach has called for empirically following relevant sets of testing by means of historical and comparative analysis (Lamont and Thévenot 2000). This is how the sociology of conventions and testing has come to distinguish itself from currents within science and technology studies as mentioned above. “It is thus no exaggeration to think that a society (or the state of a society) may be defined by the character of the tests it sets itself, through which the social selection of people is conducted, and by conflicts over the more or less just nature of those tests” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2004 [1999], 32). Let me analyze the way you proceed with testing, and I tell you in which society you live in. Faced with the current wave of “stress testing,” in what kind of society do

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we live in? Having emerged simultaneously and independently in various domains, including the safety of nuclear power stations, the regulation of banking services, or the management of large projects and infrastructures, this phenomenon cannot be relegated to a mere buzzword. Deserving more scrutiny as a recent mode of institutional change of considerable scale and scope, testing submitted to testing is a vast and ambiguous phenomenon. The sociology of convention and testing should be well prepared to analytically capturing this phenomenon. As outlined in this chapter, it engages in formulating research questions beyond stating another wave of mechanical objectivity or another round of staging testing as a matter of symbolic policy.

conclusion Pioneering in a reflection on the practice of testing, the research program initiated by Boltanski, Thévenot, and others has not been built on a founding piece of ethnographic research. Furthermore, having been introduced as a “sociology of critique,” attention was drawn away from its contribution to the study of practice. Due to this label and without a showcase ethnography, its interest in practice appeared to be confined to areas where practice is rather discursive. Also, while demarcating itself from “critical sociology” has been an important step in launching the sociology of conventions and testing, it has often been reduced to a conventionalist reaction to it. When it gained more attention as a pointed critique of Bourdieu’s version of practice theory, it was hardly received as a contribution to practice theory itself.10 In part, the problem of being perceived as a critique to Bourdieu, leaving the camp of practice theory rather than bringing a renewed approach to it, is caused by denomination. “Sociology of critique” was meant to include the second key (the practice of testing), but its reception did not care about this intention. In an attempt for clarification, it was, by and then, accompanied with a further qualification and coined “pragmatic sociology of critique.” More recently, the much broader notion of “pragmatic sociology” has entered common parlance, referring to a larger set of approaches focusing on situated action and including various interactionist streams, if not the whole bunch of what is referred to as “qualitative sociology.” Still more recently, a research program has been launched devoted to “valuation” (Antal, Hutter, and Stark 2015; Doganova et al. 2014; Lamont 2012; Stark 2009). While absorbing concepts and tools from the justification approach and the “economics of conventions,” the notion of testing is, once again, invisible.

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Accepting “sociology of conventions and testing” as a new denomination, a number of misrepresentations would be a thing of the past, and more efforts could be directed at responding to a more comprehensive criticism. En attendant, the justification approach will continue to be criticized for being either idealistic or structuralist. As outlined before, these criticisms target the notion of convention (taken in isolation), either for neglecting structural forces or for projecting macro-orders of worth as entities beyond analytical scrutiny. Relating the coordination of action to conventions of “the common good” and to the practice of testing, the justification approach escapes these criticisms. It is by articulating conventions (repertoires of justification in action) and testing (reflexive accounts as structured by a sense of justice) that the sociology of conventions and testing has gained a unique stance. Like many others, it has rejected positions postulating a preestablished harmony between actors’ orientations (structuralist approaches) or an invisible mechanism of coordination (individualist approaches presupposing rational choices). Responding to these flaws, it has offered a genuinely new way of closing the gap between micro- and macroanalytical approaches. Drawing on Michel Callon and Bruno Latour (1981), the sociology of conventions and testing has endowed the actors themselves with a capacity to macrostructuring reality. Going beyond this neighboring approach, it has further specified this capacity as one of enacting moral repertoires and engaging (in) situated practices of testing. This is where a more severe criticism comes in: what if the linkage bridging both elements (conventions; testing) turns out to be too narrow? Deliberately choosing controversial situations as a point of departure, the approach taken by On Justification focuses on the absence of stability and a permanent question for order through testing. It might even be said to dramatize a condition of both moral and cognitive uncertainty. Putting moments of controversy first, does the approach celebrate the condition of uncertainty for its own sake? Are claims for justice to be conceived of in terms of “investments in form” (Thévenot 1984), or is the “investment formula” to be criticized for presupposing equivalence between principles of justice and devices of testing, rather than observing how equivalence is established (Fuller 2014)? Depicting contemporary societies as characterized by testing and facing secondary layers of uncertainty, the justification approach is rather close to the diagnosis of a “second(ary)” or “reflexive modernization” (Ulrich Beck), a vision of society that is declaredly individualistic. Related, if broadly, to how the recent proliferation of digital technologies and media has affected practices of testing, this, however, may be a doubtful conclusion. Arguably, these transformations are not limited to redistributing means of

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testing through a “digital revolution,” preparing for a “virtual society” whose members are not just occasional voters but permanent testers. Conventions in conjunction with testing have been effective as a generative formula of a research program that has run for almost three decades and mobilized a large number of contributors. The sociology of conventions and testing can be read as an invitation to a practice of social science research reflexive of itself. It is to be maintained that provided its conceptual layout, the sociology of conventions and testing is holding a privileged position to observing institutional boundaries, fields, and the way they emerge and restructure.

notes 1. In terms of journal articles, its introduction to the English-speaking world took place in 1999 by a number of contributions to the European Journal of Social Theory (Bénatouïl 1999; Boltanski and Thévenot 2004 [1999]; Wagner 1999). The same journal has further appreciated and accompanied its development. See, among others, Silber (2003), Jagd (2011), and Guggenheim and Potthast (2012). Contributions to the French-speaking community are rather dispersed over a number of younger periodicals including Réseaux (1983–), Politix (1987–), Raisons pratiques (1990–), Genèses (1991–), Tracés (2002–). 2. See, for example, The Spirit of Luc Boltanski (Susen and Turner 2014), presented as a voluminous piece of homage. 3. Sometimes, if rarely, the justification approach has been discussed under the label of a “sociology of testing.” In 2004 and 2005, Cyril Lemieux launched a seminar on Critical Societies—the Sociology of Testing. In a series of invited talks, Nathalie Heinich, François Eymard-Duvernay, Alain Desrosières, Isabelle Thireau, Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thévenot, Michel Callon, and Bruno Latour have been explicitly encouraged to return to early contributions to a sociology of testing. Talks and discussions have been video recorded (http:// www.archivesaudiovisuelles.fr/343/; accessed May 14, 2016). More recently, the same term (sociologie des épreuves) has featured prominently in a paper reflecting on the increasing range of pragmatic sociology (Barthe et al. 2013). Outside France, however, this term has remained invisible so far. 4. This study has been re-edited (Boltanski 1990a, 255–366) and then translated (Boltanski 2012 [1990], 169ff.). 5. Among the candidates discussed, a “green” or ecological order of worth has captured particular attention. See Lafaye and Thévenot (1993), Latour (1995), Blok (2013), and Pettenkofer (2014). 6. As a rule, doctoral theses related to the sociology of conventions and testing (including those by Breviglieri, Gayet-Viaud, and Stavo-Debauge) are based on ethnographic fieldwork. Many of them are still waiting to be published. Most of them have been supervised and defended at EHESS. Given this concentration, they are easy to retrieve (https:// tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/EHESS-THESE).

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7. Suffering from a complex outline, De la justification (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 [1991]) has been extremely difficult to translate, prompting long time lags for the English (2006) and for the German version (2007). In the meantime, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Boltanski and Chiapello 2004 [1999]) has been available to the German-speaking (2003) and to the English-speaking audience (2004). Due to this inverted reception, the sociology of conventions and testing has been constricted to the French-speaking community. On the other hand, the huge success of The New Spirit of Capitalism has been a major argument in pursuing the challenge of translating On Justification. 8. Even the internalist version was difficult to decipher outside France. As noted earlier, On Justification has been translated with a delay of fifteen years, leaving invisible to the Anglo-Saxon audience that On Justification (2006 [1991]) and We Have Never Been Modern (Latour 1993 [1991]) have been published in the same year. They are contemporary books in the strong sense of drawing from each other without being able to quote from each other. 9. The topic of societies shaped by testing is dealt with by a vast literature ranging from Weberian approaches to neoinstitutionalism. The arrival of new regimes of testing has been studied by Michel Foucault. 10. Despite of Laurent Thévenot’s (2001) contribution to promoting a practice turn (Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, and von Savigny 2001) by developing on “pragmatic regimes governing the engagement with the world.” In the case of his early collaborator (Luc Boltanski), a sustained interest in practice theory is more difficult to establish. See Thévenot (2014) for an account on the directions taken by Boltanski and himself after On Justification.

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chapter thirteen

Norms and Mental Imagery neil gross and zachary hyde

I believe that the image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it. —John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed 1929 [1897], 14–15

In Discovering the News, his sweeping account of the history of American journalism, Michael Schudson (1978) traces the rise of the norm of objectivity among newspaper reporters. Although in our politically polarized age the insistence of many American journalists that they are doing their best to present readers with the facts, untarnished by bias, may strain credibility, evidence suggests that journalists in the United States cling to notions of objectivity more than their counterparts elsewhere. Schudson argues that the idea reporters should disentangle their personal views of a subject from their reporting was built into the foundations of American journalism in the 1920s. As early as the 1880s, newspapermen had come to see realism— sticking to observed facts—as important. They were moved to do so, he says, by their admiration for science and for a realist aesthetic in art—and by the demands of editors, concerned to avoid lawsuits for libel. After World War I, the belief that facts could “speak for themselves” (Schudson 1978, 149) and that there was a rational public waiting to receive them was called into question by the rise of fascism, the growth of mass advertising, and government efforts even in democratic nations to influence the press. And yet, in Schudson’s telling, this context was also conducive to the articulation of more coherent conceptions of objectivity. Journalism was then undergoing a transition from occupation to profession, and needed an ideology to justify

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the social standing it sought. Journalistic theorists of objectivity like Walter Lippmann provided one by arguing that in a complex world where apparent facts could be deceptive, journalists, who could be trained to probe beneath the smokescreen of governmental and corporate statements and to avoid bias, prejudice, and sensationalism, served a crucial democratic function. Lippmann himself did not eschew partisanship. Except for a brief period of his life, he was a committed liberal and supporter of the Democratic Party. But he distinguished sharply between the news and editorial functions of newspapers, and he urged a reform of newsroom practices to remedy what he saw as the early twentieth-century “loss of contact with objective information” (Lippmann 1920, 57). Schudson indicates that most reporters at the time recognized the impossibility of fully achieving the ideals Lippmann laid out. But those ideals were influential nevertheless and left their mark on the field. In a chapter for a more recent edited volume on social norms, Schudson revisits this historical account to reflect on the social conditions leading to norm emergence. Defining norms as “moral prescriptions for social behavior” (Schudson 2001, 166), Schudson argues it is not possible, given the heterogeneity of norms, to develop a credible comprehensive theory of how they come into being. Yet Schudson thinks it possible to identify some general conditions that often lead to the development of norms. Two of these he describes as “Durkheimian”: the newfound salience of settings involving “ritual solidarity,” and “cultural contact and conflict [that] . . . provoke the articulation of norms inside the group” (Schudson 2001, 167). The other two conditions are “Weberian”: norms may arise from the growth of large organizations that need to socialize new members and from the concern of supervisors in such settings to control subordinates. Schudson shows how his earlier narrative of professionalization set against the backdrop of a perceived crisis of democracy can be fitted into this framework. Schudson’s work is exemplary. But in our view his case lends itself equally well to another theoretical story about norms—a story that has yet to be told and has roots in the philosophy of American pragmatism. In his beautifully rendered biography of Lippmann, Ronald Steel describes a profound change Lippmann underwent in the space of just a few years in the 1920s. At the start of the decade, the Harvard graduate once described by Theodore Roosevelt as “the most brilliant young man of his age in all the United States” (Steel 1980, xiii) held out hope that a professionalized press corps could provide people with the objective facts necessary to make sound decisions as citizens. Already by 1922, however, he was expressing skepticism that a reform of journalism would have any such salutary effect. The world

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coming into being, he now thought, was so complicated that even with the best reporting the average man on the street could make little sense of it. Newspapers should continue to reach for objectivity and avoid yellow journalism, but the best hope for democracy, Lippmann argued, was for people to put their trust in the growing ranks of experts who possessed the specialized knowledge necessary to distinguish fact from fiction in foreign affairs, economic life, and social policy. The experts Lippmann praised in Public Opinion, his book from 1922, were not always right. But if they embraced the same ethic as the objectively minded journalist or scientist, they would push collectively toward the truth. The ethic Lippmann advised for experts, as well as for the layperson, was one of disinterestedness. Like H. L. Menken, whom Lippmann admired, but very much unlike Sinclair Lewis, whose work he detested, the person fully prepared to face the realities of the day would display “toughness” and “abhorrence of cant, sentimentality, and selfpity” (Steel 1980, 259) and would use these qualities to get to the bottom of things: “Since modern man could not find security in institutions, he would have to look to himself—to adapt to the world as it was, and to find in his own resources the means for dealing with it” (Steele 1980, 262). This was “not so much a philosophy as a mode of conduct. It rested on detachment . . . [Lippmann’s] mature man would . . . be above emotion” (Steel 1980, 263). What Lippmann offered his readers above all was a striking masculinist image of a truth seeker—an image that Lippmann as journalist attempted to embody. Steel calls this the image of the “disinterested man.” To the extent that Lippmann’s calls were effective in refashioning social norms, it was this image, more than any specific exhortation, that spurred the change. Schudson’s hesitancy to make blanket statements about norms aside, we think there is nothing unusual about the Lippmann case. Very often, social norms, whether morally charged or merely regulative as concerns behavior, arise, diffuse, and are internalized and institutionalized as images of persons engaged in socially approved or disapproved conduct. Commonly, in fact, it is by comparing their own behavior to such images and by working through internal as well as intersubjective narratives of selfhood also tied to imagery, that actors bring their actions in line with norms—fundamentally aesthetic processes. Actors’ assessments of the conformity of their action with propositionally stated, socially sanctioned rules—the conventional sociological understanding of norms—may not be the linchpin of norm-induced social order. We describe this as an idea with roots in pragmatism because, almost alone among classical theories of social action, pragmatism accorded centrality to imagery and the aesthetic. John Dewey’s Art as Experience (2005 [1934]) comes immediately to mind in this regard, though as the epigraph

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to this chapter indicates imagery figured elsewhere in his writing, too. As important is the work of George Herbert Mead, who authored an important essay on “The Function of Imagery in Conduct,” and whose account of normative regulation by the generalized other might be read as turning on imagery in key respects. We build our argument in three steps. First, after briefly charting the historical arc of the norm concept in sociology, we review several recent sociological approaches to norms, noting that they, like their predecessors, characterize norms in terms of rules, and fail to resolve long-standing theoretical conundrums. Second, we delve into pragmatism to sketch an alternative understanding. Finally, we point to three pieces of empirical research that— while not drawing on pragmatism—seem to us to showcase the explanatory potential of our approach. Our chapter does not present a fully fleshed-out theory of norms; that project awaits further development. The aim instead is simply to give some sense for what an image-based account of norms entails and to suggest its plausibility and promise. In our view, making further analytic headway with norms is a vital—if sometimes underappreciated—task for contemporary sociological theory.

the sociology of social norms Right from the start, sociology and social norms have gone hand in hand. Although recent decades have yielded revisionist histories of the field that stress its diverse intellectual and institutional origins, Talcott Parsons’s claim in The Structure of Social Action that what bound together writers as different as Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, and Weber was a common focus on norms and values as a solution to the Hobbesian problem of order has proven to be an interpretation of enduring power. It is not clear that Durkheim and Weber, for their part, would have agreed with Parsons’s (1937, 75) definition of a norm as “a verbal description of . . . [a] concrete course of action . . . regarded as desirable, combined with an injunction to make certain future actions conform to this course.” Durkheim might have objected that a norm is not a verbal description but a socially sanctioned pattern of behavior that may be represented verbally. Weber, whose “preferred term in his general sociology . . . is not ‘norm’ but convention” (Swedberg 2005, 176; emphasis in original), would likely have resisted Parsons’s accompanying statement that action schemes that do not include a normative component are “much less adequate as tools for statement and analysis of the facts of human behavior” (Parsons 1937, 76), because Weber believed norm-regulated action to

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be more common in some historical circumstances than others. But Parsons was correct that a defining feature of these thinkers’ projects was that they paid close attention to behavioral regularities beyond those rooted in economic self-interest or biological necessity: regularities that attach to and help mark off the boundaries of social groups and that may come to be invested with meaning and moral force. A similar idea animated other prominent approaches to sociology during the classical and immediate postclassical periods, in both Europe and the United States. During the heyday of Parsons’s own structural functionalism, norms— coupled with roles and values and understood as integrative elements in social subsystems—were seen as so central to sociological inquiry as to motivate careful stocktaking of the different versions of the concept in circulation. In an article from 1965, Jack Gibbs sidestepped Parsons’s theorization and reviewed seven other definitions. Although these definitions, such as Homans’s that “a norm is a statement made by a number of members of a group, not necessarily by all of them, that the members ought to behave in a certain way in certain circumstances” (quoted in Gibbs 1965, 586), had features in common, Gibbs found them to differ in significant respects and not necessarily in ways that mirrored the broader commitments of their authors. Taken as a whole, the definitions were seen to lump together diverse types of norms—for example, mores, conventions, and laws—and failed furthermore to provide a framework for distinguishing among subtypes. Gibbs offered an alternative conceptualization. For him, a norm is “(1) a collective evaluation of behavior in terms of what it ought to be; (2) a collective expectation as to what behavior will be; and/or (3) particular reactions to behavior, including attempts to apply sanctions or otherwise induce a particular kind of conduct” (Gibbs 1965, 589; emphasis in original). Gibbs argued that types and subtypes of norms reflect variation on these dimensions. For example, what he called “collective conventions” involve collective evaluation of and expectations concerning an act but a low probability of sanctioning. Just as these definitional exercises were accumulating, however, critiques of functionalism appeared that began to shift the conversation. One set of critiques bearing on norms came from theorists of social conflict.1 Most conflict theorists continued to recognize a place for norms. Ralf Dahrendorf (1959, 163), for instance, insisted that “categories like role, institution, norm, structure, even function are as useful in terms of the coercion model as they are for the analysis of social integration.” Likewise, Alvin Gouldner, who sought (initially) to bring conflict elements into a broadly functionalist frame, argued in a 1960 paper that there exists a universal norm of reciprocity in human societies to the effect that “(1) people should help those who

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have helped them; and (2) people should not injure those who have helped them” (Gouldner 1960, 171)—a norm he saw as essential to social interaction at multiple levels. But rather than search out the origin of norms in systemic demands for equilibrium, theorists like Dahrendorf and Gouldner sought them in power. Thus it was that Dahrendorf (1959, 96) rebuked the Austrian sociologist Karl Renner for failing to “ask which particular norms and laws are prevalent in a given society and which groups or aggregates of people either tend to enjoy privileges or suffer deprivations by virtue of the prevalent norms.” In a similar fashion, Gouldner (1960, 174) looked for the origins of the reciprocity norm in power differentials between actors, which if unchecked might lead to downward spirals of exploitation that would threaten to “undermine . . . the very power arrangements which had made exploitation possible.” With these concerns in the foreground, the attempt to theorize normative emergence and the manipulation of norms by elites came to supplant the earlier, more straightforward claim that norms do matter for social action, as well as comprehensive definitional and typological efforts. A second prong in attacks on structural functionalism came from microsociologists. For them, the problem was not simply that functionalism could not explain where norms come from but also that norms and values could not account for much observable social behavior. This was so, in their view, because norms and values are typically abstract, general, and slow to change, whereas most of the action situations people encounter are filled with concrete exigencies and rapidly shifting interactional content to which actors must quickly adjust. Homans, as we have seen, offered a definition of norms. But the main point of his exchange theory was to provide explanatory leverage in the many cases where norms do not apply. In a different vein, while on one reading Goffman built norms into his account of the interaction order, depicted as replete with deeply internalized behavioral rules (cf. Fine 2001, 144), his focus was on norms operating at a much smaller scale than those identified by structural functionalists. Goffman also paid close attention to the improvisations actors carry out when different norms and interactional imperatives come into conflict or when norms or roles are inadequately enacted, and situational repair work is required. Garfinkel and his followers pushed this critique farther, arguing that to stress the normative aspect of social behavior is to portray actors as unthinking rule followers. Instead, ethnomethodologists described interaction as contingent. Amid this contingency, actors work hard to create a sense of orderliness and intersubjectivity; norms are among the devices they use to convince themselves they share a lifeworld. Finally, Blumer’s symbolic interactionism, inspired by Mead,

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looked to how actors jointly move in and through the distinctive worlds of meaning they inhabit. To the extent that actors follow norms in doing so, these are not “generalized social norms” (Fine 2001, 144) but those attaching to smaller groupings or locales; and as much analytic attention must be paid to their flexible interpretation, seen as a source of continuous cultural innovation, as to normativity itself. These earlier moves set the stage for current theoretical writing on social norms. We see four major developments here. First, sociologists in the rational choice tradition have built sophisticated theories of norm emergence, following the lead of Gouldner (though departing from him in actiontheoretical terms). Where Homans, a predecessor to rational choice theory, saw norms to have limited explanatory utility, Coleman (1990, 242), a key figure in the revival of rational choice theorizing, takes the view that to ignore norms is to “ignore important processes in the functioning of social systems.” Seeking to understand how “norms can emerge and be maintained among a set of rational individuals,” Coleman (1990, 241, 242) argues that “two simple conditions, taken together, are sufficient for the emergence of norms.” For Coleman (1990, 244), norms matter in social action because “once in existence, they lead, under certain conditions, to actions of individuals (that is, sanctions or threat of sanctions) which affect the utilities and thus the actions of the individuals to whom the sanctions have been or might be applied.” Their distinctive feature is that they reflect a “consensus” that with regard to the type of action that is the object of the norm, control should be vested neither in the individuals who enact it nor in the state but in a social group that is effectively granted “an informal or socially defined right” (Coleman 1990, 243). Distinguishing those individuals and groups who are the “target” of the norm and those who are its “beneficiaries”—these may or may not be the same empirically—Coleman argues that demand for a norm arises when positive or negative externalities attach to an action for beneficiaries, and there is no more effective means of inducing the targets to act so as to reduce (or increase) the externalities. This demand can only be met and norms put in place when a second condition is also present: a social network structure exhibiting closure that allows informal sanctions to be applied. Coleman’s is not the only rational choice theory of norms currently on offer. Hechter and Opp (2001) have worked along broadly similar lines, while Horne (2001) has built on Coleman’s interest in networks to develop an integrated theory of norm emergence, one that attends especially to the diffusion of norms across networks and to the selection of nascent norms for institutionalization and enforcement. These efforts are linked to a recent

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spate of writing on norms by political scientists and those in the law and economics tradition, all concerned with how norms might help solve the problem of free-riding (see Ellickson 1998). Rational choice theories of norms generally avoid the “norm-bound actors as social dopes” critique by going lightly in their treatment of internalization. For the most part, they leave the situational underdetermination problem unaddressed. A second contemporary approach to norms, by contrast, builds directly on the earlier microcritique. While ethnomethodology’s influence on sociology has been limited, symbolic interactionism—though not in its doctrinaire form—has achieved lasting success, particularly among ethnographers. True, most ethnographers today narrate the close descriptions they offer of the social world against a backdrop of larger social forces and politicaleconomic structures of the sort that Blumer thematized in some of his substantive writings but made little space for theoretically. However, in their accounts of the day-to-day unfolding of interaction—for example, of “codeswitching” between black and white vernaculars among middle-class African Americans in Pattillo-McCoy’s (1999) study of “Groveland”—ethnographers frequently make recourse to interactionist ideas about the specificities of local circumstance and ongoing negotiations and constructions of meaning. To the extent that norms factor into these accounts, they are the norms of small groups, like those of the “Black Mobsters,” a Groveland gang that Pattillo-McCoy examined. Gary Fine has done the most to extract theoretical lessons about norms from interactionist ethnography. In a chapter for the same edited volume on norms in which Schudson’s piece appeared, Fine argues there are three important aspects to the unfolding of interaction in contexts where smallgroup norms hold. First, Fine claims that even with respect to fine-grained local norms, the problem of underdetermination arises. It can only be solved on a regular basis if actors become habituated to schemes of typification (here Fine integrates Schutz and phenomenology) that allow them to rapidly understand “the type of situation [they are] confront[ing] and what standards of action are appropriate” (Fine 2001, 149). Yet this process is subject to manipulation. Fine (2001, 149) gives the example of mushroom collectors “framing” their activities in different ways in order to avoid being subject to the norm that “the woods should be protected from human intrusion.” Next, because—contra Coleman—norms are not usually understood in the same way by everyone, even in a small group, there are always “negotiations” over the meaning of norms. Finally, Fine notes that “narrating” norms, and transmitting those narratives, is an important part of small-group life. Fine suggests an approach that would put these processes—and the constant be-

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havioral flux that results from them—front and center, though norms are just one of several strands of local “idiocultures” to which Fine would direct attention. At odds with the idea of local contingency, a third recent perspective on norms highlights their potential for wide dispersal. That perspective is new institutionalism, as developed by John Meyer and others who focus primarily on formal organizations. New institutionalism began as a critique of the normative and valuational emphasis of the “old institutionalism”—that of the early twentieth-century institutional economists and of scholars like Selznick—which was faulted for its inattention to cognition and to the phenomenological aspects of organizational emergence and boundary maintenance. Nevertheless, new institutionalists do not discard norms, which they see as mattering for organizations in two ways. On the one hand, norms are among the elements of culture that may come to be taken for granted by organizational actors. As such, they shape how actors perceive themselves, their interests, and the world around them and its operative forces. The mid-twentieth-century norm that firms should maintain internal labor markets, for example, served both a cognitive-identity and regulative function— it helped to define what a firm was and how it should behave. On the other hand, norms play a role in dynamics of isomorphism specifically. Norms are not central to coercive isomorphism, as DiMaggio and Powell (1983) conceived of it in their classic article, but they are obviously key to isomorphism in its normative variety and in its mimetic form as well. The former is a mechanism leading to organizational similarity in a field via professionalization, as professionals with common educational experiences bring to the organizations that employ them a sense of appropriate standards and procedures as well as cognitive models of what organizations should (and should not) look like. Mimetic isomorphism—a change toward similarity brought about by the desire to copy successful, legitimate organizational models in the context of uncertainty—also has a normative component inasmuch as organizations that deviate from established models may be sanctioned for violating cognitive templates. Field-wide organizational norms must be adapted to local circumstance, but as new institutionalists see it, more commonly norms are a vehicle by which local circumstance comes to be adapted to the practices of an organizational field, whether national or transnational in scope. Finally, in several recent influential approaches to theory, norms represent a vanishing point. We are thinking here of work in the practice theory tradition, as exemplified by Bourdieu. Norms do not figure in Bourdieu’s theoretical vocabulary, and the rationale for this is one that was also en-

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dorsed by ethnomethodologists: to observe a behavior and attribute it to actors following a rule that has become normative is to ignore the fact that in many cases actors, if asked, would not be aware of any such rule, or would state it differently than it would be formulated by the social scientist, or would insist that it has exceptions and should be applied flexibly. These arguments were originally formulated by Wittgenstein—whom Bourdieu quotes at length in The Logic of Practice—in the context of linguistic rule following. As Crispin Wright (2007, 482) notes, philosophers and social theorists writing in the wake of Wittgenstein raised three key questions about rule following for which no completely satisfactory answer was available: (1) rules “have to issue their requirements independently and in advance of our appreciation of them. . . . But what kind of fact could it be that, in a context which no one has yet been placed in or considered, suchand-such a response, or course of action, is already what will be required by a particular rule?”; (2) “if a rule is to lead us, it has to be that rule rather than any other rule whose guidance we are accepting. . . . But . . . how and when can it have been settled that it is one specific rule in particular which we are following when everything we may so far have said, or explicitly thought, or done would be consistent with its being any of an indefinite number of potentially extensionally divergent rules?”; (3) “how can we account for our ability—in very many normal cases effortlessly, even thoughtlessly—to be appropriately sensitive to the specific requirements, case by case, of just that rule?” For Bourdieu, these concerns proved fatal to the concept of social norms, which he saw as part and parcel of an objectivist approach to social science he aimed to transcend. It was in no small part the weakness of the idea of norms that led Bourdieu (1990, 53) to his signature concept of habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions. . . . Objectively “regulated” and “regular” without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor.

With the idea of habitus, Bourdieu was attempting to move beyond not just Parsonsian functionalism but also aspects of the French structuralist tradition with roots in Durkheim. While drawing on structuralist notions of a division between the sacred and profane that works to demarcate boundaries between social groups, he also sought the displacement of norms with the notion of “generative principles.” These he conceived of as “contingent actualizations,” arbitrary but nonetheless structured sets of “limen” or

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“magical limits” between fundamental oppositions—as opposed to logical operations—which hold across contexts, and could be traced by the analyst. Critics of Bourdieu, and of practice theory generally, have raised concerns about the habitus concept (and its cognates) that are no less philosophically astute than those raised about the concept of rules (Alexander 1995; Turner 1994, 2002). Bourdieu’s defenders have responded on various grounds, including with arguments that recent developments in cognitive science lend credence to the conceptualization of action in terms of habitus. These debates remain unsettled, but the clear thrust of Bourdieu’s effort is against norms. Other work at the intersection of sociological practice theory and cultural sociology—for example, Swidler’s (1986, 2001) toolkit model—pushes in the same direction. This research argues that norms are not usually the main determinants of action because norms are among the diverse elements of culture actors have been found to carry around in their heads; elements so diverse that no one strand is likely to serve as the key “switchman” deciding down which track action should go. Bourdieu and Swidler make reasonable claims, but it remains the case that in any community or social setting, some behaviors will be seen to fall within a range of social acceptability, while others will be seen as strange, odd, inappropriate, or deserving of moral condemnation. This cannot be easily accounted for with notions like habitus or toolkit—as presently understood—because often the behaviors in question are not so much strategies for accruing capital or achieving short- or long-term pragmatic aims but basic prerequisites for community membership and intersubjectivity. What general points can be drawn from this discussion of the theoretical literature on norms? We would highlight two. First, despite the misgivings of scholars like Bourdieu, norms are often invoked by sociologists—but there are many unanswered questions about the concept. What are the different types of norms? Are the most causally significant norms in the modern world, for the behavior of individual or collective actors, those that circulate within and attach to a nation-state or those attaching to smaller (or larger) scale groupings, from class fractions to religious communities to families to the “world polity”? How are norms at different scales nested together? What is the relationship between normativity and rationality? Can the postulation of norms at any scale deal with the problem of situational underdetermination, or can that problem only be solved in practice through actors’ employment of ad hocing procedures, the contingency of which vitiates the explanatory power of norms? Sociology’s inability to reach anything approaching consensus on these and other questions, after decades of inquiry, is a serious theoretical failing. Second, in almost every approach to norms that we

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are aware of, norms are conceived of as rules: as “cultural phenomena that prescribe and proscribe behavior in specific circumstances” (Hechter and Opp 2001, xi), or as “statements that regulate behavior” (Horne 2001, 4). These two observations together generate a question—two questions, actually: (1) would any of the theoretical problems with norms be solved if they were conceived of as something other than rules? And (2) if not rules, what might they be? We are not prepared to argue that the alternative conceptualization we develop answers all, or even most, of the lingering theoretical concerns about norms, but we believe it offers a productive reorientation.

pragmatism and norms as mental images We noted earlier that our approach should be seen as part of a recent revival of interest in pragmatism in American sociology. Andrew Abbott has remarked that it is inapt to speak in these terms as pragmatism was cemented into the intellectual structure of the field early in the twentieth century, in the work of sociologists at the University of Chicago, and never went away, despite surface-level shifts in theoretical fads and fashions. Although there is truth in Abbott’s remark, self-conscious reference to the key figures in classical pragmatism—to Charles S. Peirce, William James, Mead, and Dewey—is clearly on the rise. This is partly a spillover from renewed interest in pragmatism elsewhere on the academic landscape, partly attributable to a decline in the production of new social theories that could stand as competitors and partly a function of a remarkable interdisciplinary convergence in understandings of human social action around the notion of habit—a notion central to pragmatism. Beyond its focus on habit—and the alternation between habit and creativity that pragmatists see at the base of all action— pragmatism has been appreciated by contemporary sociologists for its attention to the self and intersubjectivity, for its relational and transactional orientation, for its understanding of meaning and meaning-making, for its focus on the emergence and transience of ends, and for its rejection of philosophical dualisms viewed as impediments to the development of social theory, such as that between facts and values or mind and body. This latter, corporeal aspect of pragmatism has been taken up by a number of scholars, who argue that if we are to approach social actors nonreductively—as human beings subject to a wide range of drives, interests, emotions, cognitive processes, and biological pressures that channel, impinge upon, and shape behavior, and that are consequential at higher levels of aggregation—then we need a theory of action that can accommodate the

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richness of human existence without relegating it to residual categories of analysis. Pragmatism, they argue, offers such a theory, and as such can serve as a bridge between intellectual concerns as different as the sociology of emotions, sociobiology, feminist theory, cognitive sociology, and phenomenology. This is a turn we applaud, but an aspect of corporeality that the classical pragmatists commented upon has been given short shrift in recent sociological appropriations. This is the idea that central to the cognitive, emotional, and intersubjective life of human beings, as embodied actors, is imagery: “pictures in the mind,” available to consciousness to a greater or lesser degree and more or less animated and attached to other sensory qualities and emotions, of physical objects, persons, and social scenes past, present, or future. Mead ruminated on imagery in the essay referred to above, published as a supplementary piece in Mind, Self, and Society. “The Function of Imagery in Conduct” opens with a discussion of attention. Mead rehearses the idea— crucial to James’s philosophy of consciousness and to Dewey’s functional psychology—that attention is active rather than passive. In what way is it active? Mead answers that when a human being has an impulse to act and finds herself in the presence of situational stimuli, action will only be forthcoming when certain of those stimuli are focused upon. This happens, he claims, as the stimuli are grasped by the mind and processed as meaningful in terms of images with which the actor is familiar. The images Mead means to flag here are composite pictures drawn from the memory of prior experience and modified by subsequent ideation. With regard to a few sensations— those vivid enough and present to consciousness with sufficient immediacy that they provoke an automatic nervous system response—imagery may not be an important mediator, as in the case of sharp physical pain that prompts bodily withdrawal. But the bulk of sensation, Mead suggests, is experienced via images, either because the sensation involves elements of the perceptual field that cannot be experienced directly, such as a train about to appear out of a tunnel—which requires that we rely on imagery to fill in missing perceptual pieces—or because experience has so habituated us to our dealings with the world that it proves impossible to have sensations de novo, unframed cognitively. In one sense, Mead says, mental imagery obviously exists in the mind. Images “can be studied only in man, since the image as a stimulus or a part of the stimulus can only be identified by the individual, or through his account of it given in social conduct” (Mead 1934, 338). In another sense, however, imagery has a more objective existence. Not only may images that anchor sensation circulate among members of a collectiv-

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ity. In addition, their objectivity may be secured by their utility in properly orienting actors toward the world, and in fact, Mead argues, we constantly (though imperfectly) update our mental imagery as we judge the success or failure of our actions, and in light of other new information. On this logic, “imagery . . . no more exists in a mind than do the objects of external sense perception. It constitutes a part of the field of stimulation to which our attitudes or impulses seeking expression sensitize us” (Mead 1934, 342). This is why imagery is key to the active nature of attention: it is through images that salient features of the world stand out to us as actionable—that objects acquire their pragmatic significance for us.2 Mead was by no means the first philosopher to write about mental imagery. Every undergraduate philosophy major learns Aristotle’s dictum that “the soul never thinks without an image.” Mental imagery was of great importance to the British empiricists and to Descartes—their epistemology hinged on the notion that true ideas are faithful pictorial copies of the world, as Richard Rorty showed in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, a book often credited with bringing about the pragmatist revival. Wilhelm Wundt, one of the German founders of experimental psychology and a major influence on Mead, attended closely to mental imagery, as did James. “[I]mages or ideas,” James (1963 [1890], 27) wrote in his Principles of Psychology— equating the two—picture “objects merely thought of, recollected, or imagined,” which are “relatively faint and devoid of [the] pungency, or tang” that accompanies the “real presence” of “objects of sensation.” Mead’s contribution was not simply to render the mental imagery idea safe for pragmatism, by depicting it as serving a nonrepresentational function, but also to point the way toward its integration with a theory of self and self-formation. In the “Function” piece, Mead comments that mental imagery is both backward and forward looking: it is rooted in the memory of prior experience, yet plays a role that goes beyond reminiscence because it orients us toward experience still to come. As imagery reaches back into the past, however, it encounters the self. “The location of imagery in a psychical field implies the self as existent,” Mead (1934, 344) notes, elsewhere observing that “we normally organize” various “memories”—including, presumably, those that give rise to our orienting mental images—“upon the string of the self ” (Mead 1934, 135). These statements suggest a close relationship between self and imagery: our images of trains about to come out of tunnels, or of landscapes, or of people familiar to us, are images deriving from our experience as a self. But the relationship is actually closer than this, for we might only be said to have a self to the extent that we (and others) possess a mental picture of ourselves as beings with some behavioral and attitudinal coher-

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ence over time. As we think back on our lives, we picture ourselves in various situations, recalling our actions there, and that picturing—more dynamic than the picturing of other objects, to be sure, and integrated with memories of conversational elements, emotions, and other sensations, and tied to narratives of our experience (Bruner 1986)—is constitutive of selfhood. Self and self-image are not entirely the same for Mead (1934, 174), as the former includes the spontaneous “I” as well as the “historical figure” of the “me.” But just as we cannot experience external objects save for the mediation of imagery, so can we not experience ourselves as object unless we are able to grasp our self-image. Therein lies a difficulty for theories of self-emergence. When Mead (1934, 138) asks, “How can an individual get outside himself (experientially) in such a way as to become an object to himself?,” we can read this as asking, how does the individual acquire an image of himself as an object? For, though we know what we look like from viewing our bodies from the angle of our eyes (Mead 1934, 136) and from looking at our face in photographs or mirrors, and though we can fuse these elements together with memory to form a retrospective portrait of our bodies in action, in point of fact, we rarely see ourselves act. The only way a person can truly become an object to himself, Mead (1934, 138) argues, is indirectly, “by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself within a social environment or context of experience and behavior in which both he and they are involved.” Envisioning would seem to be an essential aspect of role taking. It was, of course, not Mead but Charles Horton Cooley who made this point most memorably with his metaphor of the looking-glass self, intended not just as an account of how we are influenced by those around us, but of how seeing ourselves through the eyes of others is what enables us to have a “social self ” in the first place. A potential difficulty with this interpretation of Mead—beyond the fact that his comments on selfhood and imagery are thin—is that Mead often describes the self in linguistic rather than pictorial terms. In much of his lecturing and writing the self figures as a linguistic object, while thinking and social interaction are depicted as a “conversation of gestures.” But there is no fundamental incompatibility between the two positions. A symbol, for Mead, is both linguistic and pictorial. Mead makes this clear in the “Mind” portion of Mind, Self, and Society when he gives the example of a man who, while out walking, comes to a “chasm which he cannot jump.” Mead (1934, 122) says it is man’s possession of “a set of symbols as arise in our social conduct, in the conversation of gestures—in a word, in terms of language” that allows the man to cross the chasm where a dog could not. By this he means that the man can take stock, with symbols, of elements of the situation the

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dog may not attend to, such as the presence of a tree that could be used to make a bridge, and combine those symbols in different ways to fashion possible solutions. This is a linguistic enterprise inasmuch as the man thinks about the situation to himself in inner dialogue or talks it through out loud, but it is also pictorial because the symbols are simultaneously “images” of things in the environment, like the tree, that come to stand out for their manipulability. So it is with the self, an object that exists for us as both image and linguistic reference. It is not far from this view of Mead to a new conception of norms. But did Mead even care about norms? In Blumer’s (1969) influential interpretation of his teacher, norms have a less important role to play in social interaction than they do in structural functionalist accounts not only because there is a gulf between normative prescriptions or proscriptions and the demands of concrete situations, but also because the self—once it is recognized to be an object for the actor—is now seen to be the site for all manner of “selfindication.” As actors think to themselves, by virtue of taking themselves as objects, about their next interactional moves, they may attend to normative constraints, but these will hardly be their only concern. In contemplating behavior to come, the actor considers “his wants, his feelings, his goals, the actions of others, the rules of his group, his situation, his conceptions of himself, his recollections, and his images of prospective lines of conduct” (Blumer 1969, 537). The ensuing act involves an effort at bringing all these things together, and because this is true, argues Blumer, Meadian interactionism is uniquely poised to recognize the inherent plurality of action. Rather than forcing us to assume that one among the list of “physiological stimulations, organic drives, needs, feelings, unconscious motives, sentiments, ideas, attitudes, norms, values, role requirements, status demands, cultural prescriptions, institutional pressures, or social-system requirements” is the main determinant of action, Mead’s framework allows us to see all as potentially significant, not as direct causes of action but as things actors turn over in their minds. It seems to us, however—as it has seemed to so-called structural interactionists—that Mead put rather more emphasis on norms than Blumer allowed, at least if norms are understood in the broad sense of charged societal expectations. What Mead says about the relationship between the self and the generalized other is that we have a fully formed social self only when we see things from the standpoint of the various social groupings to which we belong. Mead (1934, 157–58) discusses several categories of groupings: “concrete social classes or subgroups, such as political parties, clubs, corporations”; “abstract social classes or subgroups, such as the class of debtors

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and the class of creditors”; and as a subcategory of the latter, the abstract class “defined by the logical universe of discourse (or system of universally significant symbols) determined by the participation and communicative interaction of individuals.” To fold the perspectives of these groups into our self means that when we approach a social situation, we do so in a manner similar to that by which other group members would approach it, if the group were more or less unified in its attitudes. This comes from long exposure to the practices of the group, which may lead us either to integrate its perspective into our consciousness such that the perspective operates more or less automatically as an angle of interactional vision; or to be able to imagine in deliberative thought how other group members would likely feel about a given line of conduct, and adjust our actions accordingly. One element of this anticipation is foreknowledge of whether our actions would be consistent with or violate group expectations, and Mead’s assumption is that group life is maintained in part by the often-conforming action to which this foreknowledge gives rise. For Mead (1934, 155) then, the self-generalized other relation is not only about agency: “It is in the form of the generalized other that the social process influences the behavior of the individuals involved in it and carrying it on, i.e., that the community exercises control over the conduct of its individual members; for it is in this form that the social process or community enters as a determining factor into the individual’s thinking.” A determining factor but not the determining factor, as people belong to multiple groups, the expectations of which may conflict, and as they often behave in spontaneous, creative, and unpredictable ways—the I— that exceed the bounds of group control. Even with these caveats, however, it would seem that Mead saw norms to be an indispensable factor in social behavior. But what, for Mead, is a norm, beyond a societal expectation? He did not offer a definition, and few contemporary pragmatists have either—except for Fine—hindering pragmatism’s ability to theorize social order.3 In light of our discussion above of imagery, however, we think he might have understood norms as the behavioral regularities one observes in groups of persons and the social sanctions associated with departures from these regularities— regularities that are enacted by individuals who see, in imagination, their own potential lines of conduct, the possible reactions of others, and images of still other persons engaged in positively or negatively sanctioned behavior to whom they compare themselves. Norm-enacting persons also think about their potential lines of conduct in terms of culturally available narratives of selfhood in which the idea of being (and remaining) a person of such and such type—also linked to imagery—factors heavily. On this understanding,

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a norm is not a rule, but the “joint action” (to now cite Blumer approvingly) that comes about when members of a group mutually adjust their behavior in line with images of proper conduct they hold as collective representations—an adjustment that serves to reinforce the imagery. To be sure, actors often verbalize norms as rules, and such verbalization may be taught as part of the enculturation process, enshrined in legal and religious principles, built into widely circulating social narratives, and so on. But because actors engage the world and treat themselves as objects by means of images as much as through language (if not more), it stands to reason that imagery would be vital to the operation of norms. Let us flesh this out more with an example. A young scientist joins a research lab. Members of the lab are meticulous with their use of instruments and specimens. While they are under pressure to run experiments quickly and efficiently, the lab is well funded and the director insists that scientific corners not be cut. The new lab member spends time with her coworkers and sees them place more emphasis on technique and accountability than on spinning out hypothesized results. She develops a set of images in her mind of their behavior, and images of coworkers carefully and dutifully producing science—images that also draw from larger cultural repertoires— become imbued with positive emotions. At the same time, whether because of stories circulating in the lab of deviant coworkers who were expelled for failure to adhere to expectations, or simply as a consequence of imagining a negative case, the young scientist forms mental images of people who are not behaving properly, and these become anchored to negative emotions of shame, guilt, and even disgust. As she goes about the business of day-today life in the lab, she holds these images in mind, and in developing her lines of conduct, she takes the images into account by comparing her prospective behavior to them (usually in automatic cognition) and anticipating whether they would likely meet with social approval or disapproval. This is not a question primarily of following a rule—“behave in a scientifically forthright manner!”—but of building up a stock of images, manipulating them in thought so that they might be rendered relevant for contemplating concrete situations, and then acting so as to affirm one’s membership in a group. Images of this sort constrain behavior, though not in a mechanical fashion. They also stimulate behavior by providing a set of frames through which the social environment may be understood and acted upon. The behavioral pattern coordinated by the set of images collectively held by lab members— perhaps verbalized, perhaps not—is a norm. This conception of norms, incipient in Mead, also finds expression in Dewey’s writings, where the aesthetic dimension is foregrounded. Although

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it has not been of central importance in how previous generations of sociologists used pragmatism, pragmatism’s interest in aesthetics has found its way into recent sociological uses (see Martin 2011; Sennett 2008). In The Creativity of Action, Joas (1996) proceeds in this vein by showing how Dewey’s theory of art connects up to both his understanding of creativity and his ethics. On Joas’s reading, Dewey’s Art as Experience is concerned to displace the view that art is to be found only in museums, and to “recover” instead “the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living” (Dewey 2005 [1934], 9), because Dewey wants to flag that there is aesthetic dimension to all experience. This dimension concerns experience’s felt “roundness”—whether it strikes us as “an experience” or not, which Joas sees as a matter of the extent to which an action performed consists of “partial actions . . . imbued with the meaning of the overall action and where the individual action is experienced as part of a supra-individual action” (Joas 1996, 140). At its best, says Dewey, art gives us such an experience, but it may be had in other forms of experience as well; and art’s aesthetic value should be measured against the yardstick provided by these other forms—for example, “that storm one went through in crossing the Atlantic—the storm that seemed in its fury, as it was experienced, to sum up in itself all that a storm can be, complete in itself, standing out because marked out from what went before and what came after” (Dewey 2005 [1934], 37)—just as works of art judged beautiful can provide hints into what the roundness of nonartistic experience might mean. On Joas’s account, Dewey sees humans as vested with the capacity not only to have rounded experiences—which Dewey sees as the summum bonum, entailing a range of social preconditions—but also to potentially remake their worlds so that they are filled with such experiences. The aesthetic roundness of experience thus becomes a pivot point for Dewey’s ethics, and art comes to stand as a model for human creativity more generally: “the creative process brings out new aspects of reality, explores new avenues of experience which then gel to a new totality of meaning” (Joas 1996, 142). Given these commitments, it is not surprising to find aesthetics carrying through into other aspects of Dewey’s thought. Steven Fesmire (2003) has shown that aesthetics was important to Dewey’s ethics in a way that ties in even more directly to the view of norms we are developing. In his ethical writing, Fesmire reminds us, Dewey inveighed against the idea that when humans face moral quandaries, they resolve them simply by applying ethical rules, whether of a utilitarian or deontological nature, or some other. Instead, Dewey proposed that in morally problematic situations when we are not sure how to act, we try out in our mind various possible solutions, draw-

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ing on social experiential knowledge of how our potential behavior might be seen by others, and making assessments of how it would be viewed by our past or future selves. This is what Dewey called “dramatic rehearsal,” and two key elements of it are that it is imaginative and centered around imagery. It is imaginative because whether it is entirely introspective or carried out in dialogue with others or through social interaction that stretches across time and place, it involves creatively exploring solutions to problems and dilemmas. Were stock solutions available to the ethical situations before us, we would have already employed them, and the situation would not be experienced as problematic. In the moments of greatest interest to Dewey, new ways of doing things are required, and though it may be the spontaneous, irrepressible Meadian I that comes up with an unexpected path forward— just as happens in scientific reasoning in Peirce’s account of abduction—the typical, prudent social actor does not spring immediately into action but mulls over possibilities. Rehearsal is not a calculative affair in the standard, economistic understanding of that term. Of deliberation in general, Dewey (1922, 190) wrote that it is “a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action,” and that in it, “each conflicting habit and impulse takes its turn in projecting itself upon the screen of imagination. It unrolls a picture of its future history, of the career it would have if it were given head.” What is more, argues Dewey, we are moved to action only when these visualizations have reached a point that they have a certain aesthetic quality to them—when they present a harmony that we feel to be pleasing. As Fesmire (2003, 70) puts it, “In deliberation . . . we singly or collectively hunt for ways to settle difficulties and ambiguities by scoping out alternatives and picturing ourselves taking part in them. Imagination continues until we are stimulated to act by a course that appears to harmonize pressing interests, needs, and other factors of the situation. . . . The point is to look and evaluate before leaping.” Dramatic rehearsal is all about looking with the mind’s eye, and if the harmony that a possible solution brings about bears certain similarities to Dewey’s description of the roundness of properly aesthetic experience, this testifies only to what Fesmire (2003, 70) calls “the organic unity of his philosophy.” These ideas extend to an understanding of norms: in problematic action situations, we contemplate possible solutions by picturing ourselves engaging in them and imagining likely outcomes, short- and long term, including the social sanctions we might be subject to by others for our actions. This picturing, though it may be more or less strategic in the sense of trying to anticipate several steps into the future, is an aesthetic exercise: it revolves around imagery, and we are cued that a solution represents a viable path forward when the mental picture forms a

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pleasing and realistic gestalt in which our membership in some social community is affirmed. In nonproblematic action situations, we apply habits built up out of previous moments of dramatic rehearsal, thereby integrating norms (among other practices) into our habit sets. This is why Dewey, in My Pedagogic Creed, stressed the importance of developing for students “proper images”: these would serve as ready-made, though easily adaptable, guides to effective and morally sound behavior.4 There is another line of thought in contemporary sociological theory that has followed Dewey in this direction—toward a focus on the imaginative aspects of rehearsal—and a few words about it will help us clarify why we see special application to norms. That line of thought is Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) work on agency and projectivity. Emirbayer and Mische draw on Alexander (1988), who sought to revitalize Parsonsian functionalism by bringing out elements of Parsons’s approach that he himself had neglected—a neglect his critics seized upon. Alexander did this by arguing that there are two dimensions to action in the Parsonsian model: “strategization” and “interpretation.” Where the former involves the selection of means suitable to ends, the latter involves interpreting the meaning of a situation against the backdrop of sedimented understandings. The interpretive dimension is precisely what microcritics found lacking in Parsons’s theory of norms, and Emirbayer and Mische note that it is also lacking in the contributions of rational choice theorists like Coleman, who fail to attend to “the interpretive processes whereby choices are imagined, evaluated, and contingently reconstructed by actors in ongoing dialogue with unfolding situations” (Emirbayer and Mische 1998, 966). But Emirbayer and Mische claim that Alexander’s dimensionalization of action, which highlights not simply the differences between strategization and interpretation but also their connection, does not go far enough toward solving one of the enduring problems of sociological theory: that of the relationship between structure and agency. To this end, they synthesize ideas from diverse intellectual traditions, including pragmatism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. They proceed by dimensionalizing agency, which they see as having three elements: iteration (“the selective reactivation by actors of past patterns of thought of action”); projectivity (“the imaginative generation by actors of possible future trajectories of action”); and what they call the “practical-evaluative element” (“the capacity of actors to make practical and normative judgments among alternative possible trajectories of action”) (Emirbayer and Mische 1998, 971). Their main use of pragmatism, to help them theorize these elements, is to invoke Mead’s theory of temporality, discussed in The Philosophy of the Present. This theory stresses “the situatedness of actors in multiple tempo-

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rally evolving relational contexts” (Emirbayer and Mische 1998, 969) and highlights the fact that actors gain reflexive distance from any moment of action to the extent they are oriented, as they may be, toward their past or future—a claim that dovetails with Schutz’s account of actors’ different biographical “projects.” If actors understand their present action in terms of past or future projects, claim Emirbayer and Mische, this means it is possible in principle for them to sidestep the demands that social structures make of them in the present, and work toward altered collective arrangements. Emirbayer and Mische also weave in Dewey’s account of dramatic rehearsal here, claiming that pragmatism sheds particular light on the projective element of action, because “the pragmatists, in addition to their concern with routine, are deeply attuned to the imaginative flexibility of actors’ deliberations about the future” (Emirbayer and Mische 1998, 988). Interestingly, when Emirbayer and Mische further consider projectivity, its imagebased and aesthetic components fade from view, replaced with imagined narratives that stretch into the future—something we also consider important, alongside imagery. Still, their study raises the question of whether dramatic rehearsal, with or without imagery, is best suited for making sense of normativity or agency—or simply social action in general. Our view, in line with Joas (1996), is that pragmatism offers a general perspective on action, and has consequences for how we think about any of its components. The dramatic rehearsal idea seems particularly apposite for understanding norms, however. While instrumental rationality also requires a kind of dramatic rehearsal, as when we imagine several steps ahead in a business transaction or in political maneuvering, we take there to be a difference between strategic foresight, where one is anticipating the likely moves of an interaction partner so as to increase the odds of the interaction turning out favorably for one’s interests, and normative anticipation, where one is suffused by the anxiety of being seen as violating a moral order, or drawn by the idea of conforming to it. Where anticipation of the former sort is colorless and requires relatively little imagery beyond that implied by a payoff table or a game plan, anticipation of the latter sort would seem to be heavily dependent on images in the sense that fear of deviance or the expectation of pleasurable conformity is usually tied, phenomenologically speaking, to vivid pictorial representations of future states in which such sanctioning does or does not occur: it is a psychological truism that affectivity bound up with future expectations (or with memory) is typically image based, which is one of the reasons art and aesthetics have been of such concern in the psychoanalytic tradition and why work with guided imagery is an important component of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy. The horrors we fear and

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the pleasures we look forward to exist for us as concrete imaginings; and this is no less true when those pleasures and horrors are of a social nature. To be sure, the desired ends of strategic deliberation are often pictured and anticipated in similar fashion—wealth, fame, esteem, power. But here, imagery need not enter into the consideration of means except insofar as one acts on the basis of less emotionally charged action sequence prototypes rooted in interactional experience. What would a pragmatist-inspired, image-based approach to norms entail for social research? And how might it help overcome theoretical challenges to conventional understandings of norms? We begin to address these questions in the final section of our chapter.

imagery, norms, and social research Although we are not aware of any empirical research building from the assumption that normative behavioral patterns are grounded in shared imagery per se, the perspective we have being trying to develop is in dialogue with recent strains of work in sociology that take culture and action seriously. A brief discussion of several studies broadly consistent with our approach can serve a useful illustrative purpose. In the first such work, Margaret Frye and Jenny Trinitapoli (2015) examine how conformity between actors’ culturally derived ideals about sexual relationships and the actual course of their experiences affect perceptions of well-being. Adapting for Malawi a series of picture-based cards originally developed by Peter Bearman to study ideals of relationship sequences in the American context, Frye and Trinitapoli find that study participants fall into five main clusters in a card-sorting exercise. One group, for example, imagines that the best relationship sequence is one in which partners “chat in private,” “decide to get married,” “tell close friends,” and then “have sex,” while another group sees as ideal a longer sequence that begins with the decision to marry, is followed by each partner meeting the other’s parents, payment to a tribal chief, a wedding, living together, and then consummation. All else being equal, participants were more satisfied the more their own relationship experiences squared with the ideals they held dear. As a second relevant study, consider Elijah Anderson’s (1999) book, Code of the Street. Building on William Julius Wilson’s (1996) argument in When Work Disappears that the decline of urban manufacturing in the United States has been highly consequential for African American life, Anderson makes a case—as had Wilson—that role models are a key mechanism con-

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necting political-economic and cultural change in central cities. As manufacturing jobs moved out in the 1970s and 1980s, older, stably employed men who previously served for adolescents and young adults as neighborhood figures to emulate became scarce. In their place, committed participants in the illicit economy were thrust into the limelight as role models. The result, says Anderson (1990), was the intensification of cultural and behavioral patterns stressing the virtues, for young men, of being tough and “streetwise,” and of being able to eke out a living from criminal activity— patterns in tension with those exhibited by other neighborhood residents who remained committed to more mainstream ideals. In a similar vein, Mario Small’s (2004) study of a Boston neighborhood, Villa Victoria, argues that there is a strong aesthetic component to the decisions of residents as to whether they should actively participate in the life of their community. Suggesting that social capital is linked to cognitive frames, Small shows how narratives and cultural categories shape residents’ ability to perceive of the neighborhood in particular ways, as either a beautiful community built through struggle (demands participation) or alternatively a run-down ghetto (does not). What these studies have in common is a more or less well-acknowledged image component. In all of them, people are seen to act at least partially on the basis of images they have in their heads of what proper behavior entails in a given context. In the Frye and Trinitapoli study, these are images of ideal relationship sequences. In the Anderson study, they are images of how a respectable man is supposed to conduct himself—images formed by emulating role models. In the Small study, the images in question concern appropriate levels of involvement in a community of such and such type. Our view is that all these studies could easily be reconceptualized in terms of the pragmatist approach to normativity we have been trying to lay out, despite the fact that at least one of them—Small’s—is overtly hostile to the idea of norms. On this reconceptualization, the behavioral patterns observed in the groups under study—relationship patterns among Malawians, patterns of participation in the legal versus illicit economies for residents of an American central city, patterns of social engagement in Villa Victoria—reflect norms in the sense that the individuals involved would face social sanctions if they did not behave as expected by their peers who held similar mental images; sanctions the anticipation of which, via dramatic rehearsal, encourages conformity. That these studies might be reconceptualized along these lines suggests three things. First, a good deal more theoretical work needs to be done to distinguish among the types of images that may underlie normative behavior. Ideals, personal models of action to be emulated, and images of neigh-

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borhoods are very different things, and no doubt actors have a far wider variety of imagery than this at their disposal when they consider courses of action and their social appropriateness and desirability. Rather than attempt to identify all the types in advance, our view is that here theory should proceed inductively. Researchers should use a range of qualitative techniques— interviews, ethnographic observation in which people are asked during the course of action to describe the imagery before their mind’s eye, and visual methods like Frye and Trinitapoli’s card sort—to get a better sense for phenomenological reality and its operative categories. In this respect, our approach agrees with recent calls from Howard Becker (2007) and Terrence McDonnell (2014) to broaden the methodological toolkit of sociology. If norms are thought of in terms of mental imagery, this opens up whole new avenues for empirical research, from photo elicitation to observing reactions to videos of simulated behavior to forms of embodied ethnography and performance-based research. These and other methods could be used to get a better handle on the kinds of imagery implicated in social action— and on the content of that imagery and its function in dramatic rehearsal.5 Second, that in each of these three empirical studies actors are seen to act in a more or less predictable fashion on the basis of imagery suggests there may be something uniquely valuable about an imaged-based approach to norms. Where a traditional conception of norms could easily trigger a critique from the standpoint of underdetermination—for example, a critique saying that a norm specifying that young Malawians should generally marry before having sex would fail to provide meaningful behavioral guidance in many circumstances—in none of the three studies is the underdetermination problem flagged as significant. This could be because the authors are interested in other things, or in a view more skeptical toward our argument, it could reflect the fact that the authors are generally more cognitively than normatively oriented. But it could also be that rethinking norms in terms of images—which blurs the distinction between a cognitive and normative orientation—effectively solves the underdetermination problem. On the pragmatist approach we are championing, images of proper conduct are collective representations.6 Although such images may be situation specific, depicting a certain type of actor engaged in a certain type of socially sanctioned behavior under specific circumstances, dramatic rehearsal—the faculty that engages the representation—is generally able to place the actor in different imagined scenarios based on imagery in order to generate insight into how projected action will be viewed by others—that is, to abstract away from whatever specificities may inhere in imagery so as to facilitate anticipation of community reaction. This process, rooted in routine (although perhaps

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unevenly distributed) social-psychological competencies, allows for flexibility, but the flexibility is not limitless. While in principle dramatic rehearsal could do similar work around norms as propositionally stated rules— Alexander, Joas, and Emirbayer and Mische suggest as much—our view is that this requires prior translation of such rules into imagery, for rehearsal, as Mead and especially Dewey stressed, is, again, image based. Finally, the diversity of social circumstances behind the cultural models in these three studies underscores the difficulty and complexity of developing a unitary theory of norm emergence. On the question of where norms come from, our approach does not provide a straightforward answer. On the one side, starting as we do from pragmatist premises, we do not feel compelled to explain the conditions under which it would be rational for social actors to permit themselves to be guided by norms. We do not see how there could be competent social actors who were not always already guided by norms to at least some degree, as norms are essential to selfhood. On the other side, the question—posed in general terms—of how norms arise and spread in a community and then become subject to change seems to us unanswerable, for any one type of norm, such as a moral norm, has so many diverse instantiations in human history as to make it extremely unlikely that any single theory could capture all the relevant dynamics. In this we agree with Schudson. At the same time, our idea that norms work primarily through imagery is not a modest proposal. It is worth considering, therefore, whether that idea has any global implications, even if those implications amount to less than a unified theory. What we would stress is that focusing on the imagery behind norms calls attention to the aesthetic work required in order for a norm to take hold in a community. Whether a norm has roots in the maneuverings of religious sects, in the efforts of subcultural groups to distinguish themselves from the mainstream, in efforts by organizational leaders to instill discipline in their workers, in community adaptations to environmental circumstances that become enshrined as virtues, or in the concerted activities of social movement actors, it will only function to guide behavior over the long haul to the extent that images of conformity and deviance circulate that are aesthetically resonant. Sometimes this resonance is assured by continuities between the norm and the quotidian gestalt of community life, as seems to be the case for the normative relationship sequences involving tribal approval for some of Frye and Trinitapoli’s research subjects; but where this is not the case, labor is required. This might take the form of direct ideological work to craft appealing imagery around the norm—of the sort that Walter Lippmann carried out per our opening dis-

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cussion. It might involve the selection for special social sanctioning of community members laden with symbolic qualities whose images can then enter the space of collective representation, as when examples are made of those who deviate from expectations. Or it might entail the voluntary stepping into the spotlight of still others who translate a global norm into the practices of a local group, in so doing becoming emblematic of it, as in the case of the “old heads” in the African American community Anderson highlights, who, before their significance dwindled, carried messages of respectability through employment. We would expect the availability of individuals and groups to conduct such work, and the aesthetic potential of the images associated with any would-be norm, to be important constraints on its diffusion and efficacy—aspects of the life of norms to which sociology has been generally inattentive. As a structural corollary, the larger the number of groups in a society that are separated by categorical boundaries—which are often also social-aesthetic boundaries—the more difficult it should be for norms to spread across the society as a whole, as the more translation work will be required. Normative orders are also practical-aesthetic orders; to understand the former, we must grasp the social logic of the latter. These are preliminary claims, all in need of further development and refinement, as is the general idea of norms as mental imagery. Our goal has been only to lay the groundwork for a new approach by highlighting unsolved problems in current conceptions of social norms and the possibilities inherent in a pragmatist-inspired reconstruction. The irony of using the Lippmann case, at the beginning of the chapter, to help call attention to unrealized theoretical potentials in pragmatism is not lost on us. Lippmann and Dewey are often presented as antagonists locked in a fierce debate over the role of experts in American public life, despite the fact that, as Schudson (2008) points out in a different article, Lippmann nowhere responded to the criticisms Dewey lodged against him in his 1927 book, The Public and Its Problems. Whatever the disagreements between the two men, however, both wrote at a time when social inquiry seemed rich with promise. Our turn back to pragmatism is motivated not just by our sense that there is much of intellectual use in the pragmatist tradition but also by a belief that there is value in tapping once again into the ethos of an early twentieth-century moment when clear-headed, multidimensional thinking about human beings and their experience seemed to offer so much hope for social understanding and reform. Norms were a crucial part of that moment. Despite massive social change over the ensuing hundred years, we see no reason why, reconceptualized, they might not be part of a new intellectual moment as well.

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notes 1. We draw here on the discussion in Alexander (1987). 2. Mead’s ideas anticipate recent work in cognitive science on mental modeling. See, for example, Nersessian (2008). Beyond this, there exists a substantial cognitive science literature on mental imagery. For review, see Waller et al. (2012). We leave discussion of this literature and its sociological implications for a subsequent paper. 3. The statement that contemporary pragmatists have done little to theorize norms requires qualification. In The Creativity of Action, Joas (1996) shows how action guided by norms involves the same alternation between creativity and habituality that the pragmatists saw to be a feature of action generally. Joas (2000) also demonstrates, in The Genesis of Values, that the classical pragmatists took norms seriously, identifying them with moral prescriptions and proscriptions and thus distinguishing norms from values, understood to have a more of an appreciative character—a distinction that Joas thinks complicates the treatment of normativity given by Habermas (1998) in Between Facts and Norms. (Also see Joas 2001). These are valuable contributions, and we draw on the norm/habit/creativity point below, but they do not amount to a new statement as to what norms are or how explanation-minded sociologists might better integrate norms into their accounts. One reason for this is that norms and normativity are major topics of discussion in philosophy and political theory—areas in which Joas and Habermas travel—but have a very different meaning and significance there than in sociology. For an analysis that considers normativity in both the philosophical and social scientific realms, see Turner (2010). 4. In his 2014 book, Morality for Humans, Johnson also develops a Deweyian approach to morality, centered on dramatic rehearsal. Note that Dewey thought imagery important pedagogically not just for morality but for other subjects as well, including history, geography, arithmetic, and logic. 5. There are also possibilities for connection to research in the humanities, where influential scholars of culture have taken a “pictorial turn.” See Curtis (2010) and Mitchell (1994). Of course, sociologists have not entirely ignored visual representation; for example, there is a small but rich literature at the intersection of political sociology and the sociology of culture on political iconography, as in Bonnell (1997). But this literature has not established the microfoundations for the influence of imagery on political action. 6. This is not to say, of course, that every member of a collectivity will hold exactly the same images in mind. What matters for norms is that actors act on the basis of broadly similar imagery.

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Anderson, Elijah. 1990. Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York: Norton. Becker, Howard. 2007. Telling about Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bonnell, Victoria. 1997. Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bruner, Jerome. 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coleman, James. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Curtis, Neal, ed. 2010. The Pictorial Turn. New York: Routledge. Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1959. Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dewey, John. 1922. Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology. New York: Henry Holt. ———.1929 [1897]. “My Pedagogic Creed.” Teacher’s Manuals (E. L. Kellogg and Company) 25: 3–18. ———. 2005 [1934]. Art as Experience. New York: Penguin. DiMaggio, Paul, and Walter Powell. 1983. “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Institutional Fields.” American Sociological Review 48: 147–160. Ellickson, Robert. 1998. “Law and Economics Discovers Social Norms.” Faculty Scholarship Series, Yale Law School, Paper 407. Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Ann Mische. 1998. “What Is Agency?” American Journal of Sociology 103: 962–1023. Fesmire, Steven. 2003. John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fine, Gary Alan. 2001. “Enacting Norms: Mushrooming and the Culture of Expectations and Explanations.” In Social Norms, edited by Michael Hechter and Karl-Dieter Opp, 139–64. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Frye, Margaret, and Jenny Trinitapoli. 2015. “Ideals as Anchors for Relationship Experiences.” American Sociological Review 80: 496–525. Gibbs, Jack. 1965. “Norms: The Problem of Definition and Classification.” American Journal of Sociology 70: 586–94. Gouldner, Alvin. 1960. “The Norm of Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement.” American Sociological Review 25: 161–78. Habermas, Jürgen. 1998. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hechter, Michael, and Karl-Dieter Opp, eds. 2001. Social Norms. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Horne, Christine. 2001. “Sociological Perspectives on the Emergence of Norms.” In Social

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Norms, edited by Michael Hechter and Karl-Dieter Opp, 3–34. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. James, William. 1963 [1890]. Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. New York: Dover. Joas, Hans. 1996. The Creativity of Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2000. The Genesis of Values. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2001. “Values versus Norms: A Pragmatist Account of Moral Objectivity.” Hedgehog Review 3: 42–56. Johnson, Mark. 2014. Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lippmann, Walter. 1920. Liberty and the News. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe. Martin, John Levi. 2011. The Explanation of Social Action. New York: Oxford University Press. McDonnell, Terrence. 2014. “Drawing Out Culture: Productive Methods to Measure Cognition and Resonance.” Theory & Society 43: 247–74. Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nersessian, Nancy. 2008. “Mental Modeling in Conceptual Change.” In International Handbook of Research on Conceptual Change, edited by S. Vosniadou, 391–416. London: Routledge. Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. New York: McGraw Hill. Pattillo-McCoy, Mary. 1999. Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schudson, Michael. 1978. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books. ———. 2001. “The Emergence of the Objectivity Norm in American Journalism.” In Social Norms, edited by Michael Hechter and Karl-Dieter Opp, 165–85. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ———. 2008. “The ‘Lippmann-Dewey Debate’ and the Invention of Walter Lippmann as an Anti-Democrat 1986–1996.” International Journal of Communication 2: 1–20. Sennett, Richard. 2008. The Craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Small, Mario Luis. 2004. Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Steel, Ronald. 1980. Walter Lippmann and the American Century. Boston: Little, Brown. Swedberg, Richard. 2005. The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51: 273–86. ———. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Stephen. 1994. The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2002. Brains/Practices/Relativism: Social Theory after Cognitive Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Contributors

dirk baecker is chair for cultural theory and management the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany. He is the author of, most recently, Beobachter unter sich. Eine Kulturtheorie [Observers amongst themselves: A theory of culture] (Suhrkamp 2013) and Neurosoziologie. Ein Versuch [Neurosociology: An essay] (Edition Unseld 2014). claudio e. benzecry is associate professor of communication studies and sociology (by courtesy) at Northwestern University and a sociologist interested in culture, arts, knowledge, and globalization. He is the author of The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2011). claire laurier decoteau is associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2013). emily erikson is associate professor of sociology at Yale University. She is the author of Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company (Princeton University Press, 2014). ivan ermakoff is professor of sociology at University of Wisconsin and the EHESS (Paris). He is the author of Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdication (Duke University Press, 2008). dorit geva is associate professor of sociology and anthropology at the Central European University. She is the author of Conscription, Family, and the Modern State (Cambridge University Press, 2013). julian go is professor of sociology at Boston University. His most recent books include Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (Oxford Univer-

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sity Press, 2016) and Fielding Transnationalism, coedited with Monika Krause (Wiley, 2016). He is also the editor of Political Power and Social Theory. neil gross is Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Colby College. From 2009 to 2015, he was the editor of Sociological Theory. He is the author of Richard Rorty: The Making of An American Philosopher (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? (Harvard University Press, 2013) ho- fung hung is associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty (Columbia University Press, 2011). zachary hyde is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia–Vancouver. He specializes in urban sociology. monika krause teaches sociology at the London School of Economics. She is the author of The Good Project: Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and an editor of Fielding Transnationalism (Wiley, 2016), with Julian Go. javier lezaun teaches science studies and anthropology at the University of Oxford. jörg potthast is professor of sociology and workplace studies at the University of Siegen. He has written on security, technology, and social theory. isaac ariail reed is associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2011), as well as several journal articles in historical and cultural sociology and the philosophy of social science. daniel winchester is assistant professor of sociology and religious studies at Purdue University. He has written on religion, cultural sociology, and social theory.

Index

Abbott, Andrew, 297, 372 actants, 23, 309–14, 341. See also actornetwork theory (ANT); actors action: dimensionalization of, 381; and interpretation, 381; and pragmatism, 382; and strategization, 381 actor-network theory (ANT), 2, 16, 229–30, 233, 264, 305–7, 308, 309, 323, 328, 329n3, 329n4, 329n5, 329n6, 330n11, 350; actantial system, 341–42; and actants, 314; agencement, and embeddedness, 330n9; agency, nonhuman attribution of, 311–14; critics of, 317; legal mode of thought in, 318–19, 321; market device, 315; market economics, 314–18; mediator, and intermediary, 323; metalanguage of, 322; as political theory, 326; social theory of, as insubstantial, 324–25; sociology of associations, 323–26; sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), dispute between, 311; and symmetry, 311–12; technoscience, shaped by, 325; vocabulary of, 310. See also actors actors, 14, 18, 24, 44–45, 47–50, 59, 61, 63, 67, 164–71, 175, 179, 181, 183–84, 203–4, 209–11, 218–19, 227–28, 230–37, 240– 42, 269, 279, 281, 283, 285, 288–90, 295, 297, 299, 306, 308, 310–13, 315, 318, 322, 324–27, 337–38, 341, 343, 351, 354, 371–74, 376, 380; and actions, 180; beneficiary actors, 177, 190; as communicating, 207–8; and conformity,

363, 383, 386; and culture, 22–23, 27–29, 32, 35; “doing gender,” 56; and imagery, 384–85; imaginaries of, 31, 81; and meaning, 366–67; as objects, 376, 378; as rule followers, 366–67, 369–70; and self, 46, 51–53; and signification, 309; situatedness of, 381–82; social norms, 367–68, 386; target actors, 176–78, 190; and valuation, 182; as word, 305, 309. See also actants; actornetwork theory (ANT) Adams, Julia, 80 Adam Smith in Beijing (Arrighi), 109 affect, 264; affect studies, 264 Afghanistan, 105, 113 Africa, 113, 123, 136–37; “scramble for Africa,” 124 African Americans, 151, 383–84, 387; codeswitching among, 368 After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (Law), 330n12 agency, 67, 142, 146, 174–75, 239–40, 255– 56, 286, 377, 382; actor-network theory (ANT), 311–14; landscape of meaning, 27; poststructural thought, 255–56; and power, 269–70, 273; social engagement, 281–82; and structure, 27, 381 Agger, Ben, 273 Agnes (patient), 79–82, 96 Akiwowo, Akinsola, 147 Akrich, Madeleine, 329n4 Alatas, Syed F., 148 Alatas, Syed Hussein, 148

396 Alexander, Jeffrey, 1, 381, 386 Algerian National Liberation Front, 133 Algerian War, 113 Althusser, Louis, 253, 255, 270; theory of interpellation, 274n5 Alway, Joan, 75 analytical sociology: individualism, commitment to, 292–94; micro-macro divide, embracing of, 294; network analysis, embracing of, 292; objects, and supervenience, 293–94. See also sociology Anderson, Elijah, 383–84, 387 Anderson, Kevin B., 154n12 Ansell, Christopher, 290 Anthropocene, 328, 331n15 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 262 Applying Relational Sociology (Powell and Dépelteau), 280 appresentation, 61 Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault), 259 Aristotle, 22, 94–95, 217, 374 Arrighi, Giovanni, 108–11, 119–20 Art as Experience (Dewey), 363–64, 379 Asia, 118–23, 137, 148; rise of, 113 assemblages, 256, 263–64; immanence, plane of, 262; potentiality, field of, 262; and stratification, 262 Atlantic Slave Trade, 140 Attridge, Derek, 254, 273 Augustine, 340, 343 Bachem, Carl, 188 Baecker, Dirk, 240 Barry, Andrew, 314 Barthes, Roland, 253 Battle of Plassey, 112 Baudelaire, Charles, 231 Baudrillard, Jean, 252, 253 Bearman, Peter, 299, 383 Beauvoir, Simone de, 79, 91, 95–96; and embodiment, 92; gender inequality, 93; plastic embodiment, 93–94 Beck, Ulrich, 354 Becker, Howard, 54–55, 68n3, 69n5, 192n20, 385 Beijing (China), 123 Benford, Robert D., 69n10 Benhabib, Seyla, 39n25, 269 Bennington, Geoff, 254 Benson, Rodney, 228, 232, 238 Bhabha, Homi, 12, 131, 138, 153–54n8, 253, 274n4, 274n7; and colonialism,

index 265–67; functional overdetermination, 266; hybridity, theory of, 256, 266; and mimicry, 265–66; racial identity formation, 266; third space, 256, 265 Bhambra, Gurminder K., 88–89, 96, 97– 98n9, 143, 148, 155n20 Biernacki, Richard, 25, 41n38 biopiracy, 146 biopolitics, 261 Birth of the Clinic, The (Foucault), 259 Black, Donald, 287 blackness, 135 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 136 Blau, Peter, 283 Bloor, David, 311 Blumer, Herbert, 44–45, 51, 68n3, 366–68, 377–78; and norms, 376 Boatcâ, Manuela, 140 Bogard, William, 264 Bolívar, Simon, 148 Boltanski, Luc, 16, 233–34, 330n14, 338– 39, 341–42, 345, 347–48, 350–51, 353, 355n3, 356n10 Bonnell, Victoria, 388n5 Borges, Jorge Luis, 68 Bossuet, Jacques, 340, 342 Boston (Massachusetts), 30, 384 Bottero, Wendy, 233 Boudon, Raymond, 170, 173 boundary objects, 60 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 9, 13, 25, 141, 154n10, 204, 228–33, 235–38, 241, 242–43n4, 280, 312, 338–39, 345, 347–48, 350, 352–53; conversion of capital, 239; doxic rifts, theory of, 260; generative principles, 370–71; habitus, concept of, 370–71; justification approach, 346; logic of practice, 346; practice theory of, 369, 371; testing, preoccupation with, 346 Boyle, Robert, 349 Brattle, Thomas, 29–31, 34 Braudel, Fernand, 109 Brazil, 106, 124 Breiger, Ronald, 295–96, 299 Brekhus, Wayne, 63 Bretton Woods, 112, 114–15, 118 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), 124 Brooklyn (New York), 131 Buchanan, Ian, 263 Buchholz, Larissa, 238 Burma, 121

index Burt, Ronald, 289 Butler, Judith, 37–38n10, 86, 91, 94–95, 252–54, 264, 272–73, 274n5; and agency, 269–70; gender and sex, as indistinguishable, 268; subjectivity, theories of, 256, 269 Cabral, Amilcar, 132–33, 135, 137 Calef, Robert, 34 Calhoun, Craig, 5, 86, 139, 229 Callon, Michel, 307, 311–13, 317–18, 328, 329n4, 354, 355n3; and actant, 309; and enrollment, 308; and framing, 315; and interessement, 308; and overflowing, 315; and translations, 308–9 Cambodia, 122 Campos-Castillo, Celeste, 69n9 Capital (Marx), 97n7, 108–9, 154n12 capitalism, 38n17, 109, 112, 131, 137, 140, 218, 227, 350–51; and contradiction, 272; Fordist capitalism, 252; global capitalism, 267; global financial crisis (2008), 105–6; Marxist definition of, 107, 140; and modernity, 84–85; Oedipus complex, 263–64; primitive accumulation, as precondition for, 140; regulation school, 110; rise of, cultural explanation, 108; socius, as first form of, 263; stagflation crisis, 105; state-capital alliance, 110; world-system school definition of, 107, 111 Carley, Kathleen, 300n1 Cassirer, Ernst, 280 Catalonia, 131 causality, 65, 202, 204, 268–69, 282, 293 Césaire, Aimé, 132, 135, 137, 153–54n8 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 136–37, 148, 155n23; provincialization, concept of, 152, 331n15 Chaos of the Disciplines (Abbott), 297 Charmaz, Kathy, 68n3 Charrad, Mounira M., 98n12 Chiapello, Eve, 350–51 Chicago school, 68, 145, 344, 372 Chile, 146 China, 105, 110, 112–13, 118, 124; nonaligned movement, 122; rise of, 106, 113, 120–23; Sinocentric tributary system, 121–23 Choat, Simon, 251–53, 255 Chodorow, Nancy, 98n11 Christianity, 327 Cicourel, Aaron, 1, 48

397 cisgender people: transgender people, 97n5 City of God (Augustine), 343 Cixous, Hélène, 253 Clarke, Adele, 68n3, 261 Clemens, Elisabeth, 80 Clinton, Bill, 105 Clough, Patricia, 69n5, 264, 267 Cochoy, Frank, 330n7 coconstitution, 87; fixed body, facticity of, 96 Code of the Street (Anderson), 383 cognition, 63 cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy: guided imagery, 382 cognitive science, 207 cognitive sociology, 62, 373 cold war, 115–18, 122 Coleman, James S., 141, 176–77, 190, 204, 367–68, 381 collective effervescence, 58 Collins, Harry, 311–12 Collins, Patricia Hill, 87, 91, 97n4, 149 Collins, Randall, 57–59 colonialism, 130–31, 133–34, 136–39, 150, 155n22, 265, 267, 273; and ambivalence, 266; anticolonialism movements, 252; as constitutive social force, 135; and fascism, 153–54n8; and humanism, 153–54n8; poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis, 266; primitive accumulation, 140; social solidarity, 141 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx), 108 Comte, Auguste, 204–5, 207, 212 conceptualization, 10 Conceptualizing Relational Sociology (Powell and Dépelteau), 280 Confucianism, 123 Congregationalism, 34 Connell, Raewyn W., 83, 88; dirty theory, 148, 150; Northern theory, 141, 147; Southern theory, 148; structure-agency debate, 147 contingency, 281 Cooley, Charles Horton, 375 cooperation networks, 54–55 Copenhagen (Denmark), 131 Cornell, Drucilla, 253, 269 Costa, Sérgio, 140 Creativity of Action, The (Joas), 379, 388n3 Crenshaw, Kimberlè Williams, 86–87 critical race theory, 13 critical theory, 229 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 282 Crossley, Nick, 233, 280

398 Cuban Missile Crisis, 33, 64, 288 cultural sociology, 18–19, 21–24, 31, 33, 35, 37n6, 240, 273, 371; landscapes of meaning, 28–29; meaning, differences in, 36; professed allegiance, and accrued benefit, 20; semiotic currents, different scopes of, 36 cultural studies, 265 culture, 37n9, 37–38n10, 227; causes, as subset of, 35; and consciousness, 285; cultural forms, theory of, 215; cultural turn, 9; culture of empire, 135, 137; economy, difference between, 19–21, 23–27, 29, 35; evidence, misreading of, 34; evidence, reading of, 33; field theory, 240–41; hypergeneral theory, 32; and imperialism, 154n9; and institutions, 22; and intention, 26–28; as internal, 25; and interpretation, 28–32, 34–35; invisible meanings, inference to, 32; mediation, notion of, 21–22; and method, 35; and nature, 254; and networks, 286, 299; and persons, 21–23, 26–29, 32, 35, 38–39n18; postcolonial theory, 134, 143; sharing of, as unequal, 25–26; and signification, 28–29; and society, 214–15; study of, 18–19; as subjective, 25; as system, 23–24; as term, 19; time-space scope, 35–36; tribal society, 215 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 365–66 decision theory, 167 decolonization, 113, 133, 138 deconstruction, 152–53, 155n23, 256–58 deep relationalism, 294–95, 298 DeGloma, Tom, 63 deindustrialization, 252 Deleuze, Gilles, 252–55, 272, 315; and assemblages, 256, 262–64; machine, as term, 263 Denzin, Norman, 69n5 Dépelteau, François: deep relationalism, and social structure, 294–95 dependency theory, 133, 143 Derrida, Jacques, 86, 252–55, 265, 274n2; center, lack of, 257–58; deconstruction, approach of, 256–58; and différance, 256–57; hauntology, importance of, 257; and presence, 257; structures, analysis of, 257; and supplementarity, 258; transcendental signified, 257

index Descartes, René, 21, 281, 291–92, 294, 374 Despret, Vinciane, 329n5 Desrosières, Alain, 355n3 DeVault, Marjorie, 69n5 development studies, 143 Dewey, John, 44, 281, 361, 363–64, 372– 73, 387, 388n4; and action, 380–81; and aesthetics, 379; on deliberation, 380; dramatic rehearsal, 380–82, 386; and norms, 378, 380; theory of art, 379 differentiation theory, 232–33, 240–41. See also field theory DiMaggio, Paul, 369 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 259 discourse: and persons, 22 Discovering the News (Schudson), 361 distinction, 216–17 distributed cognition, 60 “Doing Gender” (West and Zimmerman), 79 Douglas, Mary, 210 dramaturgy, 46; face work, 53; and idealization, 52; impression management, 51 dualism, 281–82, 290; concept of, 295–96; and interactions, 285; macro-micro divide, 291–92, 294 Du Bois, W. E. B., 132–33, 135–36, 141, 153; double consciousness, 151; as innovator, 150–51; “Negro Problem,” 151 Durkheim, Émile, 48, 58, 76, 93, 139, 206, 210, 289, 330n11, 362, 364, 370; “mechanical” societies, 141 Dutton, Denis, 272 economics: performativity of, 316–18 economic sociology, 314, 316 economy: culture, difference between, 19– 21, 23–27, 29, 35; as system, 23–24 Effler, Erika Summers, 59 Einstein, Albert, 238 Elias, Norbert, 280 Eliasoph, Nina, 64, 68n4 Elster, Jon, 186 embodiment, 61, 66, 81, 92, 94, 261. See also plastic embodiment Emergence of Organizations and Markets, The (Padgett and Powell), 299 Emirbayer, Mustafa, 279, 281–82, 381–82, 386 Empire (Negri and Hardt), 105 empires, 15, 105–6, 108, 114, 116, 119–26, 130–34, 145–46, 150, 153, 218, 263,

index 345; culture of, 135, 137–38; Pax Americana, 113; Pax Britannica, 111–12; social presence of, 139; world hegemony, 111 empiricism, 5, 10 Engels, Friedrich, 19 Enlightenment, 30, 39n25, 137–38, 153– 54n8, 319 epistemic culture, 61 epistemics, 2 epistemology, 43, 83, 96–97 Epstein, Steven, 83 essentialism, 148 Esser, Hartmut, 192n19 ethnocentrism, 254 ethnomethodology, 76, 87, 339, 368–70; ethnomethodological indifference, 59; micro-order, 51; social practices, 48–50; taken-for-granted social reality, 48–50, 62 Eurocentrism, 136–38, 147–48, 154n10; Eurocentric universalism, 141. See also metrocentrism Europe, 76, 88, 96, 98n10, 106, 108–10, 112, 116, 120, 123–24, 135, 140–41, 143, 145–46, 237, 331n15, 365; European integration, 117 exchange theory, 366 Eymard-Duvernay, François, 355n3 face work, 53, 62 Fanon, Frantz, 132–36, 150, 153–54n8, 155n22 fascism, 273; and colonialism, 153–54n8 Faulkner, Rob, 55 Faust, Katherine, 300n1 Feld, Scott, 283 feminism, 2, 4, 55–56, 94, 97n2, 132, 242n1; feminist activism, 87; feminist ethnomethodology, 84; feminist historical and political sociology, 84–86; feminist movements, and national independence struggles, 89; feminist postmodern theory, 87–88; feminist revolution, 75; feminist standpoint theory, 148–49; and Marxism, 77 feminist sociological theory, 77–79, 88, 94, 97, 242n1; and intersectionality, 86–87, 95–96; and modernity, 91 feminist theory, 14, 78, 86, 96–97, 131, 139, 373; Northern-centric view of, 76 Fenstermaker, Sarah, 69n6

399 Fesmire, Steven, 379–80 field autonomy, 237 field emergence, 237 field theory, 13, 22, 27, 227, 242; approach of, 229–30; art for art’s sake, 231; as challenger, 232; and culture, 240– 41; and doxa, 231, 235; field-specific capital, 231, 236; field-theoretical approach, 230; field-theoretical approach vs. field-theoretical hypothesis, 228; field-theoretical research, 15, 239, 241; habitus of, 231; hybridity, problem of, 234; hypothesis of, 229–30; network theory, 230; observable settings, 233; relational dynamics, different kinds of, 240; relative autonomy, 237–39; symbolic competition, 235; symbolic division, 235; symbolic structures, 236–37, 240–41; vertical autonomy, 238. See also differentiation theory Fine, Gary, 55, 69n5, 368–69 First Gulf War, 117 Flaubert, Gustave, 231 Fligstein, Neil, 233 Föhr, Prelate, 188 formalism, 16, 279–80, 282, 286, 288, 297, 300n1; block modeling, 283; networks, importance to, 299; patterns of ties, as social forms, 284–85; and relationalism, 281, 283–84, 290–91 Foucault, Michel, 22, 37–38n10, 76–77, 83, 94–95, 135, 148, 252–56, 272, 274n4, 356n9; archaeological phase of, 259; and biopolitics, 261; biopower, theory of, 260–61; and discipline, 261–62; discursivity, and materiality, 261; genealogical phase of, 259; governance, theory of, 261; and neoliberalism, 261; panopticon, theory of, 262; power, theories of, 258–60, 262 frame analysis, 62, 69n10; frame, idea of, 63; frame activation, 192n19 France, 25, 111, 117–18, 136, 146, 150, 180, 232, 251–54, 265, 309, 355n3, 356n8 Frank, Andre Gunder, 143 Franklin, Benjamin, 107 Fraser, Nancy, 269 French Communist Party (PCF), 254–55 French Revolution, 140, 146, 151 Freud, Sigmund, 150, 263, 266, 270–71 Friedman, Asia, 63 Frye, Margaret, 383–86

400 Fuhse, Jan, 285, 294 functionalism, 162, 370, 381; critiques of, 365 functional psychology, 373 Gad, C., 325 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 33 Galison, Peter, 3, 7 Gandhi, Leela, 133, 138 García Canclini, Nestor, 148 Garfinkel, Harold, 8, 48–51, 59, 79–82, 97n5, 366 Geertz, Clifford, 10, 19, 25, 288 gender, 7, 14, 55–56, 78, 91, 98n11, 267; coconstitution of, 96; coloniality of, 95–96; construction of, 81; as corporeal performance, 268–69; determining of, 80–81; embodied enactments, cobbling together of, 94; ethnomethodological approach to, 79, 94–95; gender binaries, 80–82; gender inequality, 89; gender systems theory, and time lags, 203; and heterosexuality, 93–94; and history, 87; labor, sexual division of, 85, 89–90; metaphysics of substance, 94–95; and modernity, 75–77, 81, 89; as performative, 94; sex, as indistinguishable, 268; and sexuality, 81–82, 84, 88–89, 92–93, 95; sociology, Northern bias of, 88–90; the state, 84–86; as subversive performance, 86; symbolic interactionism (SI), 80–81; theorizing about, 81; transgender children, 84; transgender passing, 80; women, as category, 86–87 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Butler), 86, 268 German Ideology, The (Marx and Engels), 19 Germany, 112, 117–18. See also West Germany Gibbs, Jack, 365 Gibson, David, 64, 288 Giddens, Anthony, 1–2, 4, 10, 43, 141, 251, 273 Glaser, Barney, 65 global and transnational sociology, 267 globalization, 8, 10; global microstructure, 61 Global North, 76–78, 86–90, 96, 113, 146 Global South, 77–78, 87–90, 96, 98n12, 113, 146, 241 Goffman, Erving, 51–53, 57, 59, 62–63, 68n3, 69n11, 94, 206, 208, 366

index Goldthorpe, John H., 172 Gouldner, Alvin, 365–67 Gramsci, Antonio, 106; Gramscian theory, 111 grand theory, 282 Granovetter, Mark, 292, 330n9 Great Asia Co-Prosperity Circle, 122 Great Britain, 27–28, 106, 111, 116, 119, 124, 329n4 Greece, 212 Green, Adam Isaiah, 82–83 Greimas, A. J.: interdefinition, process of, 309–10 grounded theory, 64–65 Guattari, Félix, 254, 262; and assemblage, 263–64 Guha, Ranajit, 136 Habermas, Jürgen, 388n3 habitus, 231, 346, 370–71 Haiti, 146 Halley’s Comet, 29–31 Hamashita, Takeshi, 121 Haraway, Donna, 329n5 Hardt, Michael, 105 Hartmann, Heidi, 85 Hawaii, 131 Hechter, Michael, 367 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 9, 92 hegemony, 106, 145; hegemonic cycle, 125; non-Western world, extension to, 112; as term, 26 hegemony theory, 111–12; “rise of the rest,” 113–14 Heidegger, Martin, 33 Heinich, Nathalie, 355n3 Heisenberg, Werner, 67 Hennion, Antoine, 329n4, 329n6 hermeneutics, 33–34 heteronormativity, 22, 80, 82, 265 Hilgers, Mathieu, 241 historicism, 136–37 history, 2–3, 7, 34, 76–77, 91–92, 96–97, 131, 137, 139, 143–44, 204–5, 254, 256–57, 259, 263, 273, 299, 386; gender and race, 87; and modernity, 84–85; and pseudohistory, 95 History of Madness, The (Foucault), 259 Hitler, Adolf, 153–54n8, 188–89 Hitlin, Steven, 69n9 Hjellbrekke, Johs, 236 Hobbes, Thomas, 145, 281, 340, 342, 349, 364

index Homans, George C., 139, 365–67 Honneth, Axel, 1 Hong Kong (China), 122 hooks, bell, 78 Horne, Christine, 367 Hughes, Everett, 54, 60, 68, 68n3 humanism: and colonialism, 153–54n8 humanitarian intervention, 105, 117 Huntington, Samuel, 113 Hussein, Saddam, 118 Husserl, Edmund, 68n2 hybridity, 256 Ibn Khaldu ¯n, Abd al-Rahma¯n, 148 idealism, 21, 253, 255, 273 idealization, 52 ideation, 373 identity, 60, 63, 67, 131, 144, 149, 179, 205, 216, 220, 266–67, 281–82; gender identity, 83–84, 95; identity formation, 268, 270–71; identity incoherence, 268; identity politics, 273 idiocultures, 55, 368–69 imagery, 375; as actionable, 374; dramatic rehearsal, 385–86; embodied actors, 373–74; and norms, 378, 384, 386–87; and pragmatism, 363–64, 373–74, 382–83 immanence, 254, 260, 262, 273 imperialism, 130–31, 133–34, 136–38, 143; and culture, 154n9; law of division, 135; modernity, at heart of, 141; primitive accumulation, 140 impression management, 51 India, 89–90, 106, 112, 124, 136–37, 139, 146, 153n2, 154n16, 265 indication, 216–17 indigenous peoples, 131 indigenous sociology, 147–48 Indochina, 112 Indonesia, 89 Industrial Revolution, 140 initiation, 54 Inquiry into Modes of Existence, An (Latour), 326–28, 330n14, 331n15 institutional ethnography (IE), 56–57 instrumental rationality, 382 Interaction Ritual (Goffman), 57 interaction ritual chains, 57, 59; bodily copresence, 58; dimensions of, 58 interactions, 324, 366, 376; and communication, 208; and dualism, 285; as meaning-laden, 286, 288, 294; relation-

401 ships, enacting of, 286; social forms, 284–85; social system, 210 interdefinition, 309, 310 interpretivism, 10 intersectionality, 79; feminist sociology, 86–87; gender, coloniality of, 95–96 intersubjectivity, 46, 48, 281, 285, 366, 371; and pragmatism, 372 Iranian hostage crisis, 113 Iranian Revolution, 105 Iraq, 113, 117–18 Iraq War, 105 Irigaray, Luce, 86 Islam Observed (Geertz), 10 Isocrates, 37n5 isomorphism, 369 Jacques, Martin, 106 James, C. L. R., 133, 136, 146 James, William, 44, 372–74 Japan, 112–13, 116–18, 121–22, 146 Jensen, C. B., 325 Joas, Hans, 1, 43, 379, 382, 386, 388n3 Johnson, Mark, 388n4 justification approach, 337–41, 344–45, 351, 354; Bourdieu, effect on, 346; conventions, invoking of, 348–49; domestic order of worth, 342–43; industrial efficiency, 342; market success, 342; mechanical testing, 349; testing, concept of, 347–50 Kaas, Ludwig, 188–89, 192n20 Kahneman, Daniel, 170 Kant, Immanuel, 7, 281–84, 292, 296, 300n4; and dualism, 285, 291; free will, 286 Katz, Jack, 62–66 Kennedy, Paul, 105 kinship, 98n12 Kleinman, Sherryl, 69n5 Knorr-Cetina, Karin, 1, 10, 60–61, 233–34 knowledge, 60, 64, 134–35, 138, 143, 152; situatedness of, 142; as socially situated, 149; sociology of, 261 Kolkata (India), 89–90 Kometographia (Mather), 30, 33 Korea, 122 Kosovo War, 117 Krackhardt, David, 300n1 Kristeva, Julia, 253 Kronenberg, Clemens, 192n19 Kuhn, Thomas, 31, 36, 149, 280

402 Kusenbach, Maggie: go-along ethnography of, 66 Kuwait, 117 Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar), 233, 307, 325, 329n1 laboratory studies, 54–55, 61; work, study of, 59; working, and knowing, 60 Lacan, Jacques, 86, 253, 256, 269–70, 272; objet petit a, theory of, 271; Symbolic Order of, 268 Laclau, Ernesto, 253 Lakatos, Imre, 165, 230 Latin America, 113, 137, 148, 237 Latour, Bruno, 9–10, 12, 28, 204, 233– 34, 242n3, 264, 307–8, 325, 327–28, 329n1, 329n5, 330n10, 330n11, 330n13, 330n14, 331n15, 339, 347–48, 350, 354, 355n3; and actant, 309; actor-network theory (ANT), 305–6, 309, 322–23, 326; experimental work, 313; and hylozoism, 312–13; microbiology, rise of, 309–11, 313; modernity, constitutional understanding of, 319–21; and “slowciology,” 324 Laumann, Edward, 300n1 Laval, Pierre, 180–81 law, 319; as metalanguage, 320; normativity of, 321–22 Law, John, 307, 328, 330n12 law of division, 141–42, 144 learning theory, 12 Lefebvre, Henri, 254 legitimization, 337–38 Lemieux, Cyril, 355n3 Lenin, Vladimir, 133 Lepenies, Wolf, 6 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBTQ) theory, 76, 88 Levine, Donald, 300n4 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 253–54 Lewin, Kurt, 229 Lewis, Sinclair, 363 Lichterman, Paul, 68n4 Lien, Marianne, 328 Lippmann, Walter, 362–63, 386–87 Location of Culture, The (Bhabha), 265 Locke, John, 145 Logic of Practice, The (Bourdieu), 370 Long Twentieth Century (Arrighi), 109 López-Gómez, D., 325 Luckmann, Thomas, 61

index Lugones, Maria, 95–96 Luhmann, Niklas, 9, 204–7, 210, 213, 215–17, 229, 240; and catastrophe, 212; communication, among people present, 208; criterion of membership, 209; modern society, theory of, 211–12; and organization, 209; system of society, 219 Lukacs, Georg, 27 Lynch, Michael, 59–60 Lyotard, Jean-François, 138, 252–53 Maastricht Treaty, 117 MacKenzie, Donald, 316 Magubane, Zine, 145 Making of Law, The (Latour), 320–21 Malawi, 383–85 Malaysia, 122 Manchuria, 122 Mangez, Eric, 241 Manufacture of Knowledge, The (KnorrCetina), 60–61, 233 Manzo, Gianluca, 293, 294 Marshall, Alfred, 364 Martí, Jose, 148 Martin, John Levi, 283–84, 289 Martineau, Harriet, 205 Martinique, 150 Marx, Karl, 8–9, 19, 76, 97n7, 108–9, 137, 139, 141, 148, 208, 255, 257, 270, 272; primitive accumulation, 140; theory of capitalism, 140, 154n12 Marxism, 13, 37n6, 56, 76, 93, 107, 131, 133–34, 136–39, 150, 235, 252, 254–55, 272–73; and feminism, 77, 84–85, 96; metrocentrism in, 142; and power, 259–60 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 29 materialism, 8–9, 16, 34, 273 materiality, 2, 13, 20, 23, 85, 92, 110, 122, 131, 145–46, 239, 255, 261, 284, 310, 315–16, 321, 326, 338, 347, 350; boundary objects, 60; social theory, 8 Mather, Increase, 30–31 May 1968, 262 McAdam, Doug, 300n1 McDonnell, Terrence, 385 McGee, K., 320, 322 McLean, Paul, 288 Mead, George Herbert, 44–45, 51, 63, 207– 8, 281, 364, 366–67, 372, 380, 388n2; and agency, 377; and interactionism, 376–77; mental imagery, 373–77,

403

index 386; and norms, 376–78; self, and generalized other, 376–77; symbols, as linguistic and pictorial, 375–76; theory of temporality, 381–82 Meadows, Tey, 84 mechanical objectivity, 352–53 media epochs: as ancient (alphabetic writing), 211–12; and catastrophe, 214; as modern (printing press), 211–13; as next one (digital), 211, 213–15; as tribal (oral communication), 211–12. See also society Medici, Cosimo de’, 290 Medvetz, Thomas, 232 Meiji Restoration, 121 Mencken, H. L., 363 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 63, 254 Merton, Robert, 16, 278 methodological individualism, 144, 292–93 metrocentrism, 136, 140–43, 147–48. See also Eurocentrism metropoles, 145–46, 151; and colony, 144; God trick, 142, 148 Meyer, John, 235, 369 micro, 53, 62, 64; micro-macro divide, 284, 291–93; micro-macro question, 1, 288–90, 298 micro-order, 55–57; as moral order, 51 microsocial world, 53–54 microsociology, 42–43, 56, 63–64, 66–67, 233, 366; phenomenological approach to, 45–46; symbolic interactionism (SI), 44–45 Middle East, 117 Miliband, Ralph, 1, 97n2 Miller, Daniel, 317 mimetic isomorphism, 369 Mind, Self, and Society (Mead), 373, 375 Ming dynasty, 121 Mische, Anne, 64, 281–82, 288, 381–82, 386 modernity, 14, 26, 30, 80, 87, 93, 97, 97– 98n9, 98n10, 136, 138, 140, 143, 175, 261, 320–21, 326–27; and capitalism, 84–85; constitutionalist understanding of, 319; feminist sociological theory, 91; and gender, 75–77, 81, 89; and history, 84–85; and imperialism, 141; postcolonial relationism, 146; and sexuality, 82–84; social theory, 130; and sociology, 75, 88 Mohr, John, 296, 299

Mol, Annemarie: and ontonorm, 328 Moore, Barrington, 329n3 morality: urban codes of, 62 Morgan, David, 283 Morris, Aldon, 150–51 motivation, 66 Mudge, Stephanie, 237 Muniesa, Fabian, 315 mutual association theory, 152 Myanmar, 122 My Pedagogic Creed (Dewey), 361, 381 Nandy, Ashis, 148 Napoleon, 111–12, 119, 124 National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), 347 nation-states, 18, 22, 87, 126, 143, 242, 261, 371 Nazism, 181, 188–89 Negri, Antonio, 105 neoinstitutionalism, 229, 235 neoliberalism, 146, 227, 237, 261, 265 Netherlands, 119 Nettl, John P., 228 network theory, 230, 283 network ties, 287–88 New England, 32 new institutionalism, 369 New Spirit of Capitalism, The (Boltanski), 338–39, 344–45, 351, 356n7; normative orders, 343 Newton, Isaac, 18, 30 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 259, 262, 338 Nigeria, 89 Nixon, Richard M., 115 normativity, 306, 321, 338, 367, 371, 382, 384, 388n3 North Africa, 98n12 North America, 88, 131 Northern feminist sociological theory, 78–79, 89–92, 95–96, 149, 151; plastic embodiment, 93–94; structure-agency problem of, 141–42, 147 North Korea, 122 objectivity, 148, 273, 374; and journalism, 361–63; norms, development of, 362–63 On Justification (Boltanski and Thévenot), 337–41, 343, 345, 348, 350, 354, 356n7, 356n8; plurality, claim of, 342 ontology, 40n32

404 Opium War, 112 Opp, Karl-Dieter, 367 order, 8, 43, 46–48, 50, 79, 82–84, 94, 105– 6, 121, 132, 145, 151–52, 164, 178, 202, 218, 234, 238, 255, 291, 296, 315, 319, 338, 341–42, 363–64, 377 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 259 Organising Modernity (Law), 330n12 organization, 207–10 organizational sociology, 229 Orientalism, 138, 153n6, 274n4; Orientalist discourse, 135 Orientalism (Said), 134, 139, 144–45, 274n4 Orloff, Ann, 80 Orr, Jackie, 259 Ortiz, Fernando: contrapuntal analysis, 143 Ottoman empire, 124 Outsiders (Becker), 54–55 Pachucki, Mark A., 299 Padgett, John, 283, 290, 299 Pakistan, 89 panopticon, 262 Pareto, Vilfred, 205–6, 364 Park, Robert, 44 Parsons, Talcott, 145, 205, 210, 215, 281, 364, 370, 381; AGIL scheme of, 206–7, 216–17; differentiation-as-integration, 206; structural formalism of, 365 Pasteur, Louis, 309–11, 312–13 Pasteurization of France, The (Latour), 309, 312–13 Patil, Vrushali, 87 Patterson, Orlando, 39n19 Pattilo-McCoy, Mary, 368 Pax Americana, 113 Pax Britannica, 111–12 Paz, Octavio, 148 Péguy, Charles, 327 Peirce, Charles S., 36n2, 65, 281, 284, 316, 372, 380 Pétain, Marshall, 180 phenomenology, 63, 229, 253, 368, 373, 381; of body, 64; first-person perspective, importance of, 46; taken-forgranted structure, 45–49, 62; symbolic interactionism (SI), intersection between, 62 Philippines, 122, 131 Philosophy and Literature (journal), 272 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty), 374

index Philosophy of the Present, The (Mead), 381–82 Pickering, Andrew, 329n6 plastic embodiment, 79, 84, 93–94; social ordering, dialectic between, 95. See also embodiment Plato, 37n5 pluralistic formalism: and relationalism, 298 Polanyi, Karl, 25 political sociology, 273 Politics and Society (journal), 280 Pollner, Melvin, 59 positivism, 31, 273 Post-American World, The (Zakaria), 106 postcolonialism, 132 postcolonial relationalism, 15, 142, 144–45, 147, 152–53; metrocentrism of, 148; and modernity, 146; subalterns, agency of, 146 postcolonial social theory, 132, 138, 142, 146–47; critique of, 139–40; postcolonial relationalism, 152–53; and reconstruction, 139; subaltern standpoint, 149, 152–53 postcolonial sociology, 147, 273; connected histories, 143–44 postcolonial studies, 131–35, 143, 152–53; subaltern agency, 136 postcolonial theory, 2, 4, 7, 13, 79, 88, 95, 141, 152, 265; colonial discourse analysis, 134; and colonialism, 133–34, 138; culture, focus on, 134, 143, 154n9; discursive process, 134; empire, critique of, 133–35; Enlightenment, critique of, 137–38; epistemic process, 134; first wave of, 132–33, 135–37, 142, 147, 150, 153, 153–54n8, 154n10; ideological process, 134; and knowledge, 134–35, 138, 143; knowledge, critique of, 131; Marxist thought, in tension with, 133– 34; and metrocentrism, 136, 140, 142; postcolonial thought, 131; relevance for, 144; second wave of, 133–34, 138, 153, 154n10; as term, 133; third wave, 153 posthuman, 96 postmodern feminist theory, 78–79, 87 postmodernism, 138; as cultural shift, 252; poststructuralism, conflation of, 251– 52; as term, 274n1 postmodern theory, 79, 82, 91, 94–95, 132; pseudohistoricism of, 86

index poststructuralism, 16, 82, 132, 138–39, 215, 259–60, 262, 265, 274n2; agency, shift away from, 255–56; as ahistorical, 254, 272–73; as antihumanists, 256; binaries, emphasis on, 255; as coherent movement, 252; critique of, 251–52, 261, 272–73; “death” of, 251; dialectical thinking, rejection of, 255; and identity, 267–68; knowledge and power, coconstitutive nature of, 255; meaning as relative, 255; positivism, critique of, 273; postmodernism, conflation with, 251–52; and psychoanalysis, 266–69; public birth of, 253; structuralism, borrowing from, 253–55; and subjectivity, 268; tenets of, 255; as theoretical movement, 252 Pottage, Alain, 321 Powell, Walter, 283, 299, 369 practice theory, 346, 350–51, 353, 356n10, 369, 371 pragmatic sociology, 355n3; pragmatic sociology of critique, 353 pragmatism, 10, 62, 362, 381; action, perspective on, 382; aesthetics, interest in, 379; corporeal aspects of, 372–73; experts, in American public life, 387; imagery, centrality of, 363–64, 373–74, 382–83; intersubjectivity, 372; and meaning-making, 372; norms, as crucial part of, 387; and self, 372, 375; theory of action, 372–73 Principia Mathematica (Newton), 30 Principles of Psychology (James), 374 projectivity, 381–82 Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Skocpol), 85–86 protoeugenicist thought, 151 provincialization, 152, 155n23 psychoanalysis, 132, 381; and poststructuralism, 266–69 Public and Its Problems, The (Dewey), 387 Public Opinion (Lippmann), 363 Puritanism, 29–30, 32–33 Qayum, Seemin, 89 Qing China, 109–10 qualitative sociology, 353 Quebec, 131 queer theory, 80, 139, 258, 265, 273; oppositional subjectivity, identification with, 82–83

405 race, 141, 267; and history, 87; and sexuality, 266 racism, 97n2, 136, 137, 265, 273; sexism, as coconstitutive, 87, 96 Rational Choice Theory, 15, 142, 145, 162, 164, 191–92n10, 367, 368; asymmetry thesis, 177–78; axiomatic model, 191n9; behavioral uncertainty, 181–82; beliefs, falsifying of, 186; Bounded Rationality, 170–71, 173, 192n12; Cognitive Rationality, 170, 173; cognitive uncertainties, 183; competitors, checking of, 178; and completeness, 166; conjoint norms, 176; defense, lines of, 171–72; as defined, 165; and deviations, 168; disjoint norms, 176–77; and disruption, 180–81, 183, 190; emergence of consent, 177–78; irreverent alternatives, independence of, 166; methodological individualism, 163; modal approach, 174–75; objections of, 167–70; and optimization, 172, 174, 189–90; preference consistency, 173–74; Prospect Theory, 170, 173; and rationality, 172–73; realism, lack of, 168–71; selective inattention, 187; selfdeception, 185–87, 189–90; self-erasing component, 186; self-limiting norms, 175–76; standard model of, 166–70, 173, 178–79, 183, 190–91; and transitivity, 166; uncertainty, types of, 181, 184–85 Ray, Raka, 89–90, 155n23 reason, 39n25, 255, 282 Reassembling the Social (Latour), 323–24 Reed, Isaac A., 155n19 relationalism, 16, 147, 279, 286, 288, 293, 297, 300n1; dualism, attack on, 290, 294; dualism, and social ties, 285; and formalism, 281, 283–84, 290–91; networks, importance to, 299; network theory, 283; pluralistic formalism, 298; split in, 294; substantialism, critique of, 280 relationality, 144 relational sociology, 280 relational theory, 19 relativism, 21, 33, 326 Renner, Karl, 366 Ricoeur, Paul: hermeneutics of suspicion, 37–38n10 Rise and Fall of Great Power (Kennedy), 105 Roosevelt, Theodore, 362 Rorty, Richard, 253, 374

406 Rose, Nikolas, 261 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 254, 340, 342 Rowan, Brian, 235 Rubin, Gayle, 269 rule following, 370 Rules of Art, The (Bourdieu), 230, 233 Russia, 120, 123–24. See also Soviet Union Russian empire, 124 Rytina, Steve, 283 Sacks, Harvey, 48 Said, Edward, 131, 134, 139, 144–45, 153n6, 153n7, 154n10, 274n4; interdependent histories, 143; law of division, 135, 140, 143 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 340, 342 Salem Witch Trials, 30–31, 34 Sarkar, Benoy Kumar, 148 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 7, 150, 254 Saudi Arabia, 118 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 19, 36n2, 253, 257 Schaffer, Simon, 312–13 Schelling, Thomas, 292 Schilt, Kristen, 80 Schippers, Mimi, 82 School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), 347 Schudson, Michael, 361–63, 368, 386–87 Schutz, Alfred, 45–47, 61, 63–64, 68n2, 368, 382 science studies, 59–60, 273 Scientific Revolution, 319 scientism, 4, 6 second Chicago school, 68n3 Second Iraq War, 117–18 Second Sex, The (Beauvoir), 79, 94; bodyorders, as account of, 93; materiality, reflection on, 92; women’s bodies and authenticity, 92 Seductions of Crime (Katz), 62 self, 46, 51–52, 261, 268, 298, 363, 365, 374; as corporeal, 264; generalized other, 376–77; and norms, 386; selfdeception, 164–65, 175, 185–87, 189–91; self-image, 375; self-imagination, 17; self-indication, 376; self-limiting norms, 163–65, 175–76, 190; selfpersuasion, 186; self-reference, 215–16, 220, 372 semiotics, 9, 19, 21, 36, 309; and actants, 310 separatist movements, 131 Serres, Michel, 308, 319

index sexism, 97n2, 273; racism, as coconstitutive, 87 sexuality, 14, 75–78, 87, 91, 258; coconstitution of, 96; collective social organization, as principle of, 83; as construct, 80; embodied experiences, 95; embodiment, and social order, 84; ethnomethodological approach to, 79; and gender, 81–82, 84, 88–89, 92–93, 95; and modernity, 82–84; plastic sexuality, 94; and race, 266; sexed body, 84; social structuring of, 82–83 Shils, Edward A., 207 signification, 25; and culture, 28–29; Oedipus complex, 263; and trade, 21, 315–16 signs, 9, 41n41, 59–60; exchange of, 38– 39n18 Simmel, Georg, 62–63, 76, 93, 206, 210, 279, 282–83, 287, 300n3, 300n4; dualism of, 292; social forms, 284–86, 289, 291, 297–98 Simonson, Peter, 37n5 Singapore, 122 Skocpol, Theda, 85–86 Small, Albion, 145; mutual association, 152 Small, Mario, 384 Smith, Adam, 340, 342 Smith, Christian, 281 Smith, Dorothy, 12, 56 Snow, David A., 69n10 social conflict, 365–66 social construction of technology (SCOT) approach, 352 social constructivism, 307–8 social forms, 284–88; group and individual, 289, 291; micro-macro divide, 291–92 socialization, 54 social network research, 278–80, 292, 300n1; and dyads, 284–85; micromacro question, 288–90; patterns of ties, as social forms, 284–85; social norms, 367; and triads, 284, 287 social norms, 376, 380–81; actions of individuals, 367; and conformity, 384; emergence of, 367, 386; generative principles, 370; image-based approach to, 385; and imagery, 378, 384–85, 386– 87; and isomorphism, 369; narrating of, 368; negotiations, over meaning, 368; new institutionalism, 369; and pragmatism, 387; as rules, 371–72; and selfhood, 386; social acceptability, 371;

index social network structure, 367; sociology of, 364–72; symbolic interactionism, 368; types of, 365–66; unanswered questions about, 371; underdetermination problem, 368, 385; vanishing point of, 369 social order, 146, 341–42, 347; social theory, 145, 151–52 Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship (Moore), 329n3 social sciences, 10, 21, 238, 290; patterns of, 297; pluralistic approaches to, 298–99; unitary approaches to, 297–98 social solidarity: and colonialism, 141 social structures, 27, 83, 227, 283, 289–90, 296–97, 382; deep relationalism, 294–95 Social Structures (Martin), 283–84, 289 social systems, 205; and residues, 206 social theory, 5–7, 15, 19, 28, 132, 211, 217, 300n1, 322–23, 328; actor-network theory (ANT), as insubstantial, 324–25; and communication, 203; context-free generalization of, 141; as dialogue, 2–3; and empire, 130–31; innovation in, 11; logical space, 217; and materiality, 8; meaning in, 217; meaning-making, 9; and modernity, 130; “Northern-ness” of, 141, 148; practice turn in, 9–10; social order, 145, 151–52; standpoint, existence of, 4; systems in, 201–2, 204–7, 216–17, 220–21; systems theory within, 203; taken-for-grantedness, 203; variations of, 23 Social Theory Today (Giddens and Turner), 1–2, 43, 329n1 society, 218, 227; and codes, 219; and criticism, 219; and culture, 214–15; deep states, 219; differentiation of, 213–14; interaction, systems of, 213; logic in, 217; media epochs of, 211–15; network, notion of, 214; and programs, 219; social system of, 205; static fact of, 205; as system among people absent, 210; systems theory of, 216 Society Must Be Defended (Foucault), 259 sociobiology, 373 sociological theory, 2–3, 6–7, 15, 43, 75–76, 139, 147, 204; structure and agency, relationship between, 381; systems in, 201 sociology, 2, 10, 14, 16, 23, 27, 31, 35, 77, 79–80, 83, 140, 143, 148, 153, 162, 206,

407 220, 229, 272, 287, 290, 368, 383, 385; analytic bifurcation of, 141; and assemblages, 264; culture, study of, 18, 214; and decentering, 258; double ordeal of, 6; as Eurocentric, 88, 96, 132; gender in, 7; interstitial character of, 6; knowledge, production of, 4; law of division, 141; and meaning, 217; modernity, as study of, 75, 88; politics of explanation, 312; practice, question of, 9; pragmatism in, 372; relational approaches to, 144; as science, 205; of social norms, 364–72; Southern theories within, 147; system, as term, 205; trading zone of, 7; triad, as structuring principle in, 282–83 sociology of associations, 323–26 sociology of conventions and testing, 337–39, 343–47, 352–53, 355, 355n3, 355n6, 356n7; convention, notion of, 354; empirical research, 340; objects, role of, 350 sociology of critique, 346, 353 sociology of the future, 62, 64 sociology of meaning, 345 sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK): actor-network theory (ANT), dispute between, 311; and symmetry, 311 sociology of the social, 323 sociology of translation, 309, 322, 325–26 socius, 263 Somers, Margaret, 279, 281 Song dynasty, 121 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), 136 South Africa, 124; Nambikwara culture of, 254 Southern theory, 78, 155n19; as standpoint, 149 South Korea, 89 Soviet Union, 105, 122. See also Russia Spencer-Brown, George, 216 Spivak, Gayatri, 131, 138, 253 Stacey, Judith, 75, 86 Stalinism, 254 standpoint theory, 5, 10, 142 Star, Susan Leigh, 60, 68n3, 69n5 statistics, 202 Steel, Ronald, 362–63 Steinmetz, George, 88, 153n3, 154n14, 254, 267, 273 Stengers, Isabelle, 329n5 Sterling and British Policy (Strange), 114 Strange, Susan, 114

408 stratification, 262, 264, 342 Strauss, Anselm, 55, 60, 68n3 structural formalism: attacks on, 365–66 structuralism, 229, 252, 255, 259, 274n2, 370; methodology of, 253; and poststructuralism, 253–54; structural duality, 296 structure: and agency, 150, 381 Structure of Social Action, The (Parsons), 364 Strum, Shirley, 329n5 Studies in Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel), 81 subaltern agency, 136, 146 subaltern standpoint, 15, 142, 147, 150, 152– 53; and marginalized, 149; Northernness, questioning of, 151 Subaltern Studies school, 131, 136 subimperialism, 124 subjectivism, 148, 155n22 subjectivity, 21, 256, 268, 273 Sublime Object of Ideology, The (Žižek), 270 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 143 substantialism, 147, 280; and the Other, 144; substantialist methodology, 144 supplementarity, 258 Swedberg, Richard, 11–12 Swidler, Ann, 371 symbolic interactionism (SI), 46, 51, 54, 63, 65, 366–68; of “doing gender,” 76; and gender, 80–81; meanings of, 44–45; phenomenology, intersection between, 62; premises of, 44 symmetry, 346; actor-network theory (ANT), 311–12; sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), 311 systems: action and communication, 218– 20; and boundaries, 202, 206; causal connections, 201–2, 204; and communication, 207–8; as complex, 202; and environment, 206; and interaction, 207–8, 210; interconnectedness, complexity of, 204–5; and meaning, 203–4; vs. networks, 202; and organization, 207–10; as simple, 202; and society, 207–8, 210 systems of relevance, 47–48 systems theory, 229, 240; of society, 216 Taiwan, 122–23 Tang dynasty, 121 Tarde, Gabriel, 210, 280, 326, 330n11 Tavory, Iddo, 64–65

index Taylor, Charles, 280 Taylor, Victoria Pitts, 69n5 teaching theory, 11–12 technoscience, 307 telos, 215 temporality, 63–64 terrorism, 105 testing, 351; active safety, 349; images, mechanical production of, 348; mechanizing proofs, 349; and objects, 350; passive safety, 349; situated action, 352; stress testing, 352–53 thanatopolitics, 261 theory: abductive vs. inductive approach, 64–65; and data, 64–65 theory of art, 379 theory development, 1 theory handbooks, 1 theory of norms, 381 theory of temporality: situatedness of actors, 381–82 theory textbooks, 1 Thévenot, Laurent, 16, 233–34, 341–42, 345, 353, 355n3, 356n10 third space, 256 Thireau, Isabelle, 355n3 Thirty Years War, 111 Thomas, W. I., 44 Thorne, Barrie, 75, 86 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari), 262 Tilly, Charles, 109, 280 Timmermans, Stefan, 65, 69n5 Tirado, F. J., 325 Towards a Relational Sociology (Crossley), 280 Treaty of Westphalia, 111 Tresch, John, 326 Trinitapoli, Jenny, 383–86 Turkey, 124 Turner, Jonathan, 1–2, 4, 10, 43 Tversky, Amos, 170 typification, 46–48 United Kingdom. See Great Britain United Nations, 112, 118 United States, 6–7, 15, 38–39n18, 80–81, 86–87, 90, 119–20, 123, 140, 146, 232, 237, 361, 365, 383; global war machine, role of, 116–18; hegemonic decline of, 105–6, 112–15; as world empire, 122, 125–26

409

index valuation, 353 Vauchez, Antoine, 237 Vietnam, 89, 105, 113, 121 Vietnam War, 125 von Foerster, Heinz, 216 von Papen, Franz, 188–89 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1, 107, 110–12, 133, 143, 154n16 War on Terror, 105 Wasserman, Stanley, 300n1 Weber, Max, 9, 31, 76, 107–8, 139–41, 148, 210, 227, 338, 345, 362; and convention, 364–65 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour), 356n8 West, Candace, 48, 56, 69n6, 76, 79–81 Westbrook, Laurel, 80 West Germany, 113, 116–17. See also Germany Westphalia system, 119, 121 When China Rules the World (Jacques), 106 When Work Disappears (Wilson), 383 White, Harrison C., 204, 218, 278–79, 281, 283, 290, 296, 299 whiteness, 135, 266–67 Williamson, Oliver E., 317–18 Wilson, William Julius, 383 Winchester, Daniel, 64 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 217, 370

Woolgar, Steve, 233, 307, 325, 329n1 world hegemony theory, 106 world money: currency, as hegemonic, 114; gold standard, abolishing of, 114–15; master currency, 114–15, 119; negotiated currency, 114–16, 119; sterling, rise and fall of, 114, 116; top currency, 114–16, 119; US dollar, status of, 114–19, 124; world money theory, 106 world-systems theory, 14–15, 106, 114, 133, 143; core-periphery division of labor, 112; definition of, 107, 111; hegemony, theory of, 111–12; methodological holism, 126 World Trade Organization (WTO), 126 World War II, 122 Wright, Crispin, 370 Wundt, William, 374 Yearley, Steve, 311–12 Yoruba, 147 Young, Peyton H., 254 Young, Robert, 134–35, 155n22 Zakaria, Fareed, 106 Zald, Mayer, 6–7 Zelizer, Viviana, 25 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 62–63 Zimmerman, Don, 56, 76, 79–81 Žižek, Slavoj, 253, 272, 274n5; ideology, rethinking of, 256, 270–71